>> Point well made. Not that I would consider China "freer", but they haven't waged war with just about everything like the US.
> They haven't had the power. And the US doesn't wage wars all that often even as the global policeman.
Sorry.. what ? The US has had less than one complete year of peace (e.g. not at war with anybody at all) since the end of World War 2. In the same period there has been only 22 days of world peace - and the USA were in fact involved in more wars with more nations than any other country on the planet ! In fact, 75% of all the other wars since then were civil wars (of which the vast majority happened in African countries). The country that since the last world war has made war on more nations, more of the time than any other is still the USA. Global policeman is the least of it. In a far greater number of those wars you deposed democratically elected leaders who thought their own people's welfare should be rather more important than the profits of American corporations in order to replace them with puppet dictators who weren't so stubborn. Brazil, Nicaragua... the list is endless, hell in Panama you actually made a CIA spy the president of the country !
I despise what China is, if I had to choose I'd live in the US over China for sure - but you're both near the BOTTOM of my list of places I would most like to live. China for how it treats it's own people, the USA for how you treat everybody else. You survived the great depression thanks to a war economy and you've kept that war economy going ever since by basically being at war non-stop.
"There was an obligation for the bottom to respect the top, and also for the top to respect the bottom."
In practice - identical to the way class-society worked in Victorian (and earlier) England. The upper classes were meant to have a duty of protection, charity and upliftment toward the lower-classes who did all the work and got none of the benefits of education, wealth or power.
The difference is- the West actually learned that this doesn't work. It was in the context of a country not very long *out* of a full class system (the Victorian "democracy" was starting out at best with almost all the power at that stage in the House of Lords - which was decidedly undemocratic), that Churchill made his famous dictum about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others.
But mind you - Britain didn't really shed the class system as a cornerstone of their society until the 70's. The great class war was fought to the music of the sex pistols ! It took a good hundred years to get to that far and even today British royalty and upper classes are still privileged (though their say in the day-to-day running of the country has been largely destroyed)...
China however, hasn't even made the slightest start.
The entire world has been the kind of complete statist that China is now. We all did it. All our ancestors tried it, practically every Western nation was once an absolute monarchy. The reality is- we changed it because it doesn't work. China hasn't learned that yet, but if history is anything to go by - they will. The real question is - will China fall (like most of those monarchies) in bloody revolution ? Or will they have the sense (like a few of them) to recognize the inevitability of the fall of statism- and implement reforms themselves before it comes to that ? The current Chines politburo's approach and statements (especially the rather telling ones on this peace prize) suggest that we shouldn't bet on it...
>April 18th 1930 was the day noted at the time as so boring they cancelled the evening news.
In Britain - there are plenty of other countries, where many interesting things may well have happened that simply didn't reach British news services in time.
More-over the software also considers events that NEVER make the news on the same day - things like famous people born that day and such. It took me about 30 seconds to learn that at least one celebrity (Actor Clive Revil) was born on that day.
The day identified here had only one birth that comes close being noteworthy, that of a phycicist.
I had mod points but since there's no way to do it, consider this post to be a mode for: -1 Doesn't know a thing about statistics.
Anyway, the identification of the most boring day was a sideline, the actual project is researching better ways of doing web searches, so your concerns about the "cost" is irrelevent, if you have a project with one notable and worthwhile goal - and one way to test it gives you an interesting bit of sideline knowledge, I consider that a nett gain for science.
Remember -the first pulsar's were discovered by accident by radio astronomers who were actually looking for SETI like signals.
>Ya stuff like a thumb print at 500 meters is just insane and impossible. That was a direct quote from my great-grandfather, it was probably exaggerated but close enough for government work. He did on multiple occasions sit on his front porch and shoot Kudu running up a nearby hill which was further than that away though, I know because my family still owned that farm until not long ago (we donated it to the Thabazimbi nature reserve in my generation - there was never an official will so it got subdivided among descendants to the point where now we each owned about 5 square meters of a piece of land the size of a small town - it made more sense to donate it than to try and combine ownership again, and we thought great granddad would have been happy to see his land become a nature reserve) but I've sat on that porch and seen the distance to the Thabazimbi mountain. That is not a shot I would have attempted with a modern rifle - but for him it had been survival. Need breeds skill.
>A modern standard military sniper rifle is around 1 minute of angle(MOA) accuracy. So roughly, at 500 yards (close enough to meters), groups will be shot within a 5 inch circle. The chance of you hitting a thumb print is fairly small. Like I said, it was probably somewhat exagerated - and of course he had said 500-steps, which is around 500m but could have been in practice closer to 300m or so. Still no mean feat but we didn't learn to shoot with constant drive for survival excellence from literally as soon as we were strong enough to hold a gun.
>The ballistics and metallurgy of the time obviously would not even allow for a fraction of this accuracy, never mind actually holding the gun while taking a shot. And the above post mentioned Muskets, which obviously would be hard pressed to hit something the size of a human at 500 yards, nevermind a thumb print.
Yes, the original post was wrong. The last war the boers used muskets in was blood river. And I was not exaggerating that one - on the contrary, the folk tale version was significantly bigger. The numbers I gave are the conservative numbers of modern historians. By the time of the English war their weapon of choice was this one: http://www.mauserwaffen.de/index.php?id=195&L=1 The Mauser '98 model single-shot rifle. The British favored the Lee-Enfield. The L-E was one of the first guns with a magazine, this meant they could shoot faster and many times between reloads. The boers could only possibly compete with that if they could (as they did) make every shot count. They literally worked on the assumption that every bullet fired should equal a fallen enemy. Now in practice this was probably not an ideal they reached every time -but while the British went for assaults the boers preferred... well to be campers. They'd find camouflaged hidey-holes, take their time and hit headshots very nearly every time they pulled a trigger while using their cannons to prevent from being charged.
That was a tactic that worked because they new the veld so well, they basically lived in it their entire lives. Of course during the war many of the Boers acquired Lee-Enfields from fallen enemies, using the same tactic without reload times made them a massive force to be reckoned with. It also didn't help the English that they had no skill at all for concealment - hitting a human-sized target even at a few hundred meters with a German-engineering weapon (it's magazined descendant the '89 model was the primary weapon of German soldiers in World War 1) from a good sniper spot when the target is extremely easy to see and you're used to shooting at animals which are very good at hiding themselves is really not so far-fetched.
Nonetheless, the irony is that the point I was making is that my ancestors were very skilled at living in the veld, one of those skills was marksmanship - instilled from a very young age, but that skill doesn't exist today. The world changed, and we changed with it
>Those two statements are contradictory. Being a good shot requires lots of practice. If bullets are scarce and expensive, you won't get lots of practice. Ergo, one of the two statements are false.
Only if you're an idiot. They made their own bullets - and it was cheap and easy to practice at home, which they did - all the time. Out in the field however, bullets were scarce and hard to come by - making a fire is one thing, making bullets out in the veld is a completely different thing. Bullets were scarce and expensive when hunting (hunting trips typically took 3 months or more) or during the war, not when you were a child growing up. It was tradition among my people to receive your first rifle as a birthday present at the age of 7.
My own grandfather was taken out of school aged 13, from then on his job was caring for the cattle. This means that on Sunday night great gran packed his saddlebag with some rusks and coffee beans and 6 bullets. He set out before sunrise monday morning to the grazing grounds (about a day's ride away), by sunset he shot a duiker for dinner. He would make a fire, cook and eat the two shoulderblade and leave the rest of the jackals (in a South African summer without refrigeration it would be inedible by the next morning). This he repeated each night - if he missed a shot, he had no dinner (the rusks were breakfast). For 6 days, on Saturday he went home for church on Sunday. This is how he spent the next 5 years - it only changed when he was 18 years old when and his older brother both got pneumonia. At the time the traditional cure was feeding people who got it fresh goat dung. His uncle argued that this was folk-myth and suggested simply heat and rest, great granddad listened and kept listening right until his brother died (I was named after that brother). At this stage great granddad said "I've lost one of my sons, I'm going to feed the other one the goat dung - maybe we'll get lucky". My granddad survived. It would take about 3 more decades before science figured out why it worked. Goat-dung is filled with the same fungus that we find on mouldy bread. Although they had no idea why it worked -it did work, because it was basically a primitive way to administer penicillin.
But that was their life. Doctors were few and far between, you saw your neighbours once every 3 months when everybody went to town (usually a 3 day trip) for communion. They had to be self-sufficient and self-reliant because that's what life required -and part of that was being an excellent shot.
I'm a descendant of those boers. Trust me - it's not like that anymore. Very much like the average person living in Lincoln County today cannot draw, fire and actually hit a target in under 4 seconds anymore. It was a survival skill for my ancestors a hundred years ago, that skill was why roughly 500 men could defeat a conservatively estimated 10000 men at the battle of blood river (granted there were several other force multipliers that they used - their enemies had short-range spears [Assegai is really a sort of intermediary design between a spear and a sword] rather than guns, they had an excellent location that prevented all the enemy forces from striking at once, the weather was hugely in their favor), some 70 years after that their grandchildren gave Britain hell in a war for 3 years that was ultimately only won by ultimately killing 27 thousand women and children. After the war though, the vast majority of their children moved to cities and towns, the great shooting skill of my ancestors died out within two generations. My great-grandfather could hit a thumbprint at 500m through open-sights in real-world conditions (so could just about everybody he knew of course), my grandfather could just about hit a beer can at that range, my dad will probably hit somewhere in target (but he is an ex-cop). Most of the generation of us today have fathers who still go hunting now and then - but the vast majority of us have never actually fired a gun. I don't own one, and feel no need to - and I am actually a good shot. My sister and I both won colors doing sport-shooting in school. She was the rifle expert, I preferred pistols. Neither of us have ever shot a weapon at any living thing however, neither of us have fired a gun in at least 10 years, we've never done so without supervision. As adults, once we no longer did the sport - our interest waned. And most of our schoolmates didn't do the same sport, many of them own pistols but most of them have never even touched a rifle.
We're still a gun-crazy country (almost as bad as America really) - in part because of that history and the fact that our parents were still draughted in the bush-war - but the fact is, the old Boers who could live off the land for weeks at a time, never-ever missed a shot (because bullets were expensive and scarce), and could hit a moving the size of a rabit from a horse in gallop just don't exist anymore. Our field-rangers in the parks are probably the closest to that which still survives - and it's clearly not enough or we wouldn't be looking at this sort of technology. Those of us who still farm are the last ones you should look at, they are by-and-large the most obese population group in the country.
Sadly, your documentary sounds fairly accurate - but it's about as applicable to modern-day industrialized Afrikaans culture as a documentary on Billie the Kid is to the typical modern American.
>1) Things people didn't already know. People knew there was torture and civilian deaths in Iraq, prior to the lead nobody had any idea of the true scale of it. Iraq Bodycount added more than 15000 to their number based on that particular leak. There had been isolated reports (Abu Ghraib) and such - but the reality of torture as a near-daily occurrence by the Iraq Army and the regular and frequent deaths of civilians at road-stops was not truly known before.
>2) Things they really needed to know. I'm sorry but last I checked the military was funded by the civilian taxpayer and accountable to the civilian authority and thus indirectly to the civilian public. It's sort of a cornerstone of republican systems of government. If the military is condoning torture by their allies, and killing civilians without provocation at roadblocks, executing targets AFTER they surrender - then those are things the public indeed DOES need to know. It's the public's money that pays for those bullets, the public needs to know what those bullets are hitting.
>3) Things that didn't have the potential to cause harm to innocents if released. Wikileaks spent several months working over the documents and released them in a heavily censored format. The censoring was done deliberately to ensure it could not be used to harm or locate any particular individual within the armed forces. That sounds like due diligence to me. In fact, I daresay that bringing the realities in those documents to light did not endanger innocents - but offered a significant increase in the safety of thousands of innocent civilians who have never been guilty of anything except an accident of geography - they happened to be born in a country that America is now at war with, one that never even represented a credible threat to America in the first place.
>4) Things where the public's need outweighed the government's right to keep things secret. The government has no such right, they do however have such a need - so we occasionally and with a very limited sphere allow them, under the understanding that it must not be abused and that some sort of watchdog system must be in place. I know Bush tried to convince you all otherwise but that's how a republic is supposed to do it. The governments *need* to keep a secret must outweigh the publics RIGHT to know, and this can only ever held to be possible in a specific circumstance over a short period of time. Any other conclusion and you have absolutely no discernible, practical difference between a republic and a dictatorship. Furthermore, I would say that any information which meets your first three metrics must by definition meet the 4th.
Funny -we could solve that easily using tiered laws. For example the employment equity act doesn't apply at all if you have less than 50 employees, some of the others only kick in if you have over 100 etc.
>Except that the clones typically don't have the best genetic benefits of both parents, at least based on what we've seen. A genus with 10 sexual species probably has better odds of surviving than one with 5 sexual and 5 asexual species.
There is certainly some variation in this - the article even mentions the classic example - mules are hardier than either horses or donkeys despite being sterile.
The desire has the same cable -the you can easily plug the big USB end into any other USB power source, at work I just charge it from my laptop if I need to give it a boost. The charger has no need to ever replace (because very PC can charge it too) and the cable is cheap... brilliant.
On deciding to become a drummer as my friends and I decided to start a band - I signed up for lessons etc. and then considered buying the WII rockband drumset as a way to get to practise the basics in a fun way before investing in a full drumkit... when I realized that the rockband drumkit would cost me as much as a pretty decent second hand drumkit, I decided to rather save up a bit and invest in a really good drumkit.
Right now I'm tempted to go for an electric drumkit however, if only because being able to play with headphones will be very useful for practicing in an apartment building without pissing of the neighbours, will ask my teacher whether he agrees it's a good idea.
> Interestingly, the U.S., European, and now these Vietnamese species all look quite similar - don't know what that means.
First guess- their probably all the same genus, and it's likely a genus that is particularly suited to such asexually reproducing hybrids ? That in itself could be a survival trait on the level of the genus as a whole. If one or both of the parent species died out the clones may still survive as it has the best genetic benefits of both.
The good news is - that seems to be happening (though very slowly). You have to consider the ANC/COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) alliance goes back nearly 50 years, that cooperation was key to the appartheid struggle so their close relationship doesn't end easily. However COSATU has been ever more critical of the government in recent years and it's really spiked up in the last few months, their leader Zwelinzina Vavi has become extremely outspoken about the so-called tenderpreneur problem - this chafing is good, it may just reign the ANC in, or better yet, force a shift in power if it keeps going (I wouldn't hold my breath on that- the ANC has a nasty habit of giving cabinet posts to people who shake the cage in order to shut them up).
I didn't say we're not trying to *fix* the problem - the reality is though that you're looking at the federal budget but you're not seeing the ground level. Very little of that money ever gets where it is intended to go (corruption, mismanagement of funds etc. is rife), the vast majority of teachers are not just lazy but incredibly incompetent and a politicized curiculum doesn't help either. It's not unusual to find people who should be finishing high-school yet can't spell their own names right ! There are schools where the pass rate is literally ZERO.
LOL I think the last thing anybody in this country gives a damn about is police officers earnings. They are more than good enough to supplement those with bribes already...
Mmm, shall we make a law to improve the life of a few rare edge cases (and we have even fewer) or to protect the massive amount of other people who would basically be slaves otherwise...
Funny these laws were demanded by unions - in other words, it's the most democratic laws in our country, made because the voters insisted they should be made. Clearly most of our people think it's YOUR country that blows. Sorry pal, but that's how democracy works - majority rules. It sucks when you're the minority, but there you have it.
This ! I said it more detailed in a previous post but exactly: healthy, happy, rested workers are significantly more productive, ultimately you make MORE money when all your employees take vacations. Not to mention on vacations people spend more money - which is good for your other industries. The government isn't just concerned with employing people - it needs those people to be customers - so OTHER people can have jobs.
My ex girlfriend was a CPA - here they work around that. Don't even go there, if you have so much work that you need 60 man hours per person per week you can damn well afford to hire more people. One more with the same skill and 3 people are back to 40 hours a week.
>Great Labor Laws and 43% unemployment... coincidence? Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face.
Yeah if you're an oversimplifying idiot. South Africa has a massive worker shortage. Our problem isn't the labor laws - it's education levels. The real answer staring you in the face was 72% illiteracy ! We have a massive oversupply of unschooled labor - three as much as our industries can employ. So About 30% of our people work in them. 20% Do school labour - the remainder are indirect employment they work as housekeepers and gardeners for the 20% of schooled workers.
In the schooled sectors of our economy there are massive shortages. By next year it's expected that more than 80% of all civil engineers in the country will be over 60 years old (that's 5 years from retirement) - we don't have people to replace them. The jobs section for IT is always filled with huge amounts of ads, the longest period I ever spent jobhunting was 1 week - and 4 days of that was spent comparing offers and deciding which company I liked best !
There is no problem finding work if you're educated, there are big problems if you can't read and write - we only have so much manual labor available. Yet oddly - the companies that work in those sectors also do well and we have many (mining is still among our top industries) - the labor laws clearly didn't put them out of business either - if anything politicians complain because they are still making huge profits and not treating workers well ENOUGH !
This false idea has been addressed in numerous posts. We do allow a grace period where a 24-hour notice period without need for reason apply, it's as much to allow an employee to get out if he hates the job without a massive notice period while those other offers still exist as to allow an employer to get rid of a bad hire before he costs them a fortune.
A person who goes through 3 to 6 months without job security and does his job clearly *can* do the job. There is also allowance for summary dismissal in exceptional cases (e.g. where a person broke the law or showed truly fragrant disregard for the rules to the point where further employment wouldn't be possible) so it's not that big a deal (though those require a single hearing at least)
What it does do is mean that you can't frivolously make up an excuse to fire somebody just because you don't like his hairstyle. The paid notice period means if you're letting somebody go because of redundancy issues or because the market has shrunk... well at least he has a chance to find another job before his income disapears.
It's all about balance. You are so entirely on one-side of the scale in the US that you assume anybody who is in the middle must be on the other extreme - in fact the other extreme doesn't actually exist anywhere in the world because even politicians are never THAT stupid.
Yes - there is nothing stopping that. The rules do allow for those cases - all you have to do is give them the time they worked over back again as time off, when it's quiet again in a few days time.
Besides that, do you really want to be operated on by a doctor who hasn't slept in 36 hours ? Do you really want to go to jail because the lawyer defending you was working of a deposition by a paralegal who had been suffering from sleep deprivation ?
These rules are to prevent continuous 80-hour weeks, not to make it impossible to do business - and acting like they are is thinking we're a lot more stupid than you imagine.
There's even a specific case exception that the maximum hours law doesn't apply to people in management positions. It's understood that A) Managers are in a position to negotiate their own terms B) Sometimes the owner of the company may have to work an 80 hour week if he's to keep the rest of the staff employed.
And South Africa allows trial employment periods during which you only need to give 24 hour notice, I think those are limited to six months or less, but enough time to check.
Anyway - South Africa's problem isn't labour laws, our problem is we have a massive overabundance of unschooled labour and a massive shortage of schooled labour. Part of why we get such good salaries for educated jobs is because we have a massive shortage of educated workers.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Point well made. Not that I would consider China "freer", but they haven't waged war with just about everything like the US.
> They haven't had the power. And the US doesn't wage wars all that often even as the global policeman.
Sorry.. what ?
The US has had less than one complete year of peace (e.g. not at war with anybody at all) since the end of World War 2. In the same period there has been only 22 days of world peace - and the USA were in fact involved in more wars with more nations than any other country on the planet ! In fact, 75% of all the other wars since then were civil wars (of which the vast majority happened in African countries). The country that since the last world war has made war on more nations, more of the time than any other is still the USA.
Global policeman is the least of it. In a far greater number of those wars you deposed democratically elected leaders who thought their own people's welfare should be rather more important than the profits of American corporations in order to replace them with puppet dictators who weren't so stubborn. Brazil, Nicaragua... the list is endless, hell in Panama you actually made a CIA spy the president of the country !
I despise what China is, if I had to choose I'd live in the US over China for sure - but you're both near the BOTTOM of my list of places I would most like to live. China for how it treats it's own people, the USA for how you treat everybody else. You survived the great depression thanks to a war economy and you've kept that war economy going ever since by basically being at war non-stop.
"There was an obligation for the bottom to respect the top, and also for the top to respect the bottom."
In practice - identical to the way class-society worked in Victorian (and earlier) England. The upper classes were meant to have a duty of protection, charity and upliftment toward the lower-classes who did all the work and got none of the benefits of education, wealth or power.
The difference is- the West actually learned that this doesn't work. It was in the context of a country not very long *out* of a full class system (the Victorian "democracy" was starting out at best with almost all the power at that stage in the House of Lords - which was decidedly undemocratic), that Churchill made his famous dictum about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others.
But mind you - Britain didn't really shed the class system as a cornerstone of their society until the 70's. The great class war was fought to the music of the sex pistols !
It took a good hundred years to get to that far and even today British royalty and upper classes are still privileged (though their say in the day-to-day running of the country has been largely destroyed)...
China however, hasn't even made the slightest start.
The entire world has been the kind of complete statist that China is now. We all did it. All our ancestors tried it, practically every Western nation was once an absolute monarchy. The reality is- we changed it because it doesn't work. China hasn't learned that yet, but if history is anything to go by - they will.
The real question is - will China fall (like most of those monarchies) in bloody revolution ? Or will they have the sense (like a few of them) to recognize the inevitability of the fall of statism- and implement reforms themselves before it comes to that ? The current Chines politburo's approach and statements (especially the rather telling ones on this peace prize) suggest that we shouldn't bet on it...
>April 18th 1930 was the day noted at the time as so boring they cancelled the evening news.
In Britain - there are plenty of other countries, where many interesting things may well have happened that simply didn't reach British news services in time.
More-over the software also considers events that NEVER make the news on the same day - things like famous people born that day and such. It took me about 30 seconds to learn that at least one celebrity (Actor Clive Revil) was born on that day.
The day identified here had only one birth that comes close being noteworthy, that of a phycicist.
Sincerely
The guy who actually RTFA'd.
I had mod points but since there's no way to do it, consider this post to be a mode for:
-1 Doesn't know a thing about statistics.
Anyway, the identification of the most boring day was a sideline, the actual project is researching better ways of doing web searches, so your concerns about the "cost" is irrelevent, if you have a project with one notable and worthwhile goal - and one way to test it gives you an interesting bit of sideline knowledge, I consider that a nett gain for science.
Remember -the first pulsar's were discovered by accident by radio astronomers who were actually looking for SETI like signals.
>Ya stuff like a thumb print at 500 meters is just insane and impossible.
That was a direct quote from my great-grandfather, it was probably exaggerated but close enough for government work. He did on multiple occasions sit on his front porch and shoot Kudu running up a nearby hill which was further than that away though, I know because my family still owned that farm until not long ago (we donated it to the Thabazimbi nature reserve in my generation - there was never an official will so it got subdivided among descendants to the point where now we each owned about 5 square meters of a piece of land the size of a small town - it made more sense to donate it than to try and combine ownership again, and we thought great granddad would have been happy to see his land become a nature reserve) but I've sat on that porch and seen the distance to the Thabazimbi mountain. That is not a shot I would have attempted with a modern rifle - but for him it had been survival. Need breeds skill.
>A modern standard military sniper rifle is around 1 minute of angle(MOA) accuracy. So roughly, at 500 yards (close enough to meters), groups will be shot within a 5 inch circle. The chance of you hitting a thumb print is fairly small.
Like I said, it was probably somewhat exagerated - and of course he had said 500-steps, which is around 500m but could have been in practice closer to 300m or so. Still no mean feat but we didn't learn to shoot with constant drive for survival excellence from literally as soon as we were strong enough to hold a gun.
>The ballistics and metallurgy of the time obviously would not even allow for a fraction of this accuracy, never mind actually holding the gun while taking a shot. And the above post mentioned Muskets, which obviously would be hard pressed to hit something the size of a human at 500 yards, nevermind a thumb print.
Yes, the original post was wrong. The last war the boers used muskets in was blood river. And I was not exaggerating that one - on the contrary, the folk tale version was significantly bigger. The numbers I gave are the conservative numbers of modern historians. By the time of the English war their weapon of choice was this one: http://www.mauserwaffen.de/index.php?id=195&L=1 ... well to be campers. They'd find camouflaged hidey-holes, take their time and hit headshots very nearly every time they pulled a trigger while using their cannons to prevent from being charged.
The Mauser '98 model single-shot rifle. The British favored the Lee-Enfield. The L-E was one of the first guns with a magazine, this meant they could shoot faster and many times between reloads. The boers could only possibly compete with that if they could (as they did) make every shot count. They literally worked on the assumption that every bullet fired should equal a fallen enemy. Now in practice this was probably not an ideal they reached every time -but while the British went for assaults the boers preferred
That was a tactic that worked because they new the veld so well, they basically lived in it their entire lives. Of course during the war many of the Boers acquired Lee-Enfields from fallen enemies, using the same tactic without reload times made them a massive force to be reckoned with. It also didn't help the English that they had no skill at all for concealment - hitting a human-sized target even at a few hundred meters with a German-engineering weapon (it's magazined descendant the '89 model was the primary weapon of German soldiers in World War 1) from a good sniper spot when the target is extremely easy to see and you're used to shooting at animals which are very good at hiding themselves is really not so far-fetched.
Nonetheless, the irony is that the point I was making is that my ancestors were very skilled at living in the veld, one of those skills was marksmanship - instilled from a very young age, but that skill doesn't exist today. The world changed, and we changed with it
>Those two statements are contradictory. Being a good shot requires lots of practice. If bullets are scarce and expensive, you won't get lots of practice. Ergo, one of the two statements are false.
Only if you're an idiot. They made their own bullets - and it was cheap and easy to practice at home, which they did - all the time.
Out in the field however, bullets were scarce and hard to come by - making a fire is one thing, making bullets out in the veld is a completely different thing. Bullets were scarce and expensive when hunting (hunting trips typically took 3 months or more) or during the war, not when you were a child growing up. It was tradition among my people to receive your first rifle as a birthday present at the age of 7.
My own grandfather was taken out of school aged 13, from then on his job was caring for the cattle. This means that on Sunday night great gran packed his saddlebag with some rusks and coffee beans and 6 bullets. He set out before sunrise monday morning to the grazing grounds (about a day's ride away), by sunset he shot a duiker for dinner. He would make a fire, cook and eat the two shoulderblade and leave the rest of the jackals (in a South African summer without refrigeration it would be inedible by the next morning). This he repeated each night - if he missed a shot, he had no dinner (the rusks were breakfast). For 6 days, on Saturday he went home for church on Sunday. This is how he spent the next 5 years - it only changed when he was 18 years old when and his older brother both got pneumonia.
At the time the traditional cure was feeding people who got it fresh goat dung. His uncle argued that this was folk-myth and suggested simply heat and rest, great granddad listened and kept listening right until his brother died (I was named after that brother). At this stage great granddad said "I've lost one of my sons, I'm going to feed the other one the goat dung - maybe we'll get lucky".
My granddad survived. It would take about 3 more decades before science figured out why it worked. Goat-dung is filled with the same fungus that we find on mouldy bread. Although they had no idea why it worked -it did work, because it was basically a primitive way to administer penicillin.
But that was their life. Doctors were few and far between, you saw your neighbours once every 3 months when everybody went to town (usually a 3 day trip) for communion. They had to be self-sufficient and self-reliant because that's what life required -and part of that was being an excellent shot.
I'm a descendant of those boers. Trust me - it's not like that anymore.
Very much like the average person living in Lincoln County today cannot draw, fire and actually hit a target in under 4 seconds anymore. It was a survival skill for my ancestors a hundred years ago, that skill was why roughly 500 men could defeat a conservatively estimated 10000 men at the battle of blood river (granted there were several other force multipliers that they used - their enemies had short-range spears [Assegai is really a sort of intermediary design between a spear and a sword] rather than guns, they had an excellent location that prevented all the enemy forces from striking at once, the weather was hugely in their favor), some 70 years after that their grandchildren gave Britain hell in a war for 3 years that was ultimately only won by ultimately killing 27 thousand women and children.
After the war though, the vast majority of their children moved to cities and towns, the great shooting skill of my ancestors died out within two generations.
My great-grandfather could hit a thumbprint at 500m through open-sights in real-world conditions (so could just about everybody he knew of course), my grandfather could just about hit a beer can at that range, my dad will probably hit somewhere in target (but he is an ex-cop).
Most of the generation of us today have fathers who still go hunting now and then - but the vast majority of us have never actually fired a gun. I don't own one, and feel no need to - and I am actually a good shot. My sister and I both won colors doing sport-shooting in school. She was the rifle expert, I preferred pistols.
Neither of us have ever shot a weapon at any living thing however, neither of us have fired a gun in at least 10 years, we've never done so without supervision. As adults, once we no longer did the sport - our interest waned. And most of our schoolmates didn't do the same sport, many of them own pistols but most of them have never even touched a rifle.
We're still a gun-crazy country (almost as bad as America really) - in part because of that history and the fact that our parents were still draughted in the bush-war - but the fact is, the old Boers who could live off the land for weeks at a time, never-ever missed a shot (because bullets were expensive and scarce), and could hit a moving the size of a rabit from a horse in gallop just don't exist anymore. Our field-rangers in the parks are probably the closest to that which still survives - and it's clearly not enough or we wouldn't be looking at this sort of technology. Those of us who still farm are the last ones you should look at, they are by-and-large the most obese population group in the country.
Sadly, your documentary sounds fairly accurate - but it's about as applicable to modern-day industrialized Afrikaans culture as a documentary on Billie the Kid is to the typical modern American.
Is this the best or worst idea my government has ever had ?
I disagree. By your own metrics:
>1) Things people didn't already know.
People knew there was torture and civilian deaths in Iraq, prior to the lead nobody had any idea of the true scale of it. Iraq Bodycount added more than 15000 to their number based on that particular leak. There had been isolated reports (Abu Ghraib) and such - but the reality of torture as a near-daily occurrence by the Iraq Army and the regular and frequent deaths of civilians at road-stops was not truly known before.
>2) Things they really needed to know.
I'm sorry but last I checked the military was funded by the civilian taxpayer and accountable to the civilian authority and thus indirectly to the civilian public. It's sort of a cornerstone of republican systems of government. If the military is condoning torture by their allies, and killing civilians without provocation at roadblocks, executing targets AFTER they surrender - then those are things the public indeed DOES need to know. It's the public's money that pays for those bullets, the public needs to know what those bullets are hitting.
>3) Things that didn't have the potential to cause harm to innocents if released.
Wikileaks spent several months working over the documents and released them in a heavily censored format. The censoring was done deliberately to ensure it could not be used to harm or locate any particular individual within the armed forces. That sounds like due diligence to me. In fact, I daresay that bringing the realities in those documents to light did not endanger innocents - but offered a significant increase in the safety of thousands of innocent civilians who have never been guilty of anything except an accident of geography - they happened to be born in a country that America is now at war with, one that never even represented a credible threat to America in the first place.
>4) Things where the public's need outweighed the government's right to keep things secret.
The government has no such right, they do however have such a need - so we occasionally and with a very limited sphere allow them, under the understanding that it must not be abused and that some sort of watchdog system must be in place. I know Bush tried to convince you all otherwise but that's how a republic is supposed to do it. The governments *need* to keep a secret must outweigh the publics RIGHT to know, and this can only ever held to be possible in a specific circumstance over a short period of time. Any other conclusion and you have absolutely no discernible, practical difference between a republic and a dictatorship.
Furthermore, I would say that any information which meets your first three metrics must by definition meet the 4th.
Funny -we could solve that easily using tiered laws. For example the employment equity act doesn't apply at all if you have less than 50 employees, some of the others only kick in if you have over 100 etc.
>Except that the clones typically don't have the best genetic benefits of both parents, at least based on what we've seen. A genus with 10 sexual species probably has better odds of surviving than one with 5 sexual and 5 asexual species.
There is certainly some variation in this - the article even mentions the classic example - mules are hardier than either horses or donkeys despite being sterile.
The desire has the same cable -the you can easily plug the big USB end into any other USB power source, at work I just charge it from my laptop if I need to give it a boost. The charger has no need to ever replace (because very PC can charge it too) and the cable is cheap... brilliant.
On deciding to become a drummer as my friends and I decided to start a band - I signed up for lessons etc. and then considered buying the WII rockband drumset as a way to get to practise the basics in a fun way before investing in a full drumkit... when I realized that the rockband drumkit would cost me as much as a pretty decent second hand drumkit, I decided to rather save up a bit and invest in a really good drumkit.
Right now I'm tempted to go for an electric drumkit however, if only because being able to play with headphones will be very useful for practicing in an apartment building without pissing of the neighbours, will ask my teacher whether he agrees it's a good idea.
> Interestingly, the U.S., European, and now these Vietnamese species all look quite similar - don't know what that means.
First guess- their probably all the same genus, and it's likely a genus that is particularly suited to such asexually reproducing hybrids ? That in itself could be a survival trait on the level of the genus as a whole. If one or both of the parent species died out the clones may still survive as it has the best genetic benefits of both.
>I looked around, and there's not a single semi-mainstream vendor which sells those -- and I'm not going to order stuff from overseas.
IBM isn't mainstream enough ?
The good news is - that seems to be happening (though very slowly). You have to consider the ANC/COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions) alliance goes back nearly 50 years, that cooperation was key to the appartheid struggle so their close relationship doesn't end easily. However COSATU has been ever more critical of the government in recent years and it's really spiked up in the last few months, their leader Zwelinzina Vavi has become extremely outspoken about the so-called tenderpreneur problem - this chafing is good, it may just reign the ANC in, or better yet, force a shift in power if it keeps going (I wouldn't hold my breath on that- the ANC has a nasty habit of giving cabinet posts to people who shake the cage in order to shut them up).
I didn't say we're not trying to *fix* the problem - the reality is though that you're looking at the federal budget but you're not seeing the ground level. Very little of that money ever gets where it is intended to go (corruption, mismanagement of funds etc. is rife), the vast majority of teachers are not just lazy but incredibly incompetent and a politicized curiculum doesn't help either. It's not unusual to find people who should be finishing high-school yet can't spell their own names right !
There are schools where the pass rate is literally ZERO.
LOL I think the last thing anybody in this country gives a damn about is police officers earnings. They are more than good enough to supplement those with bribes already...
Mmm, shall we make a law to improve the life of a few rare edge cases (and we have even fewer) or to protect the massive amount of other people who would basically be slaves otherwise...
Funny these laws were demanded by unions - in other words, it's the most democratic laws in our country, made because the voters insisted they should be made. Clearly most of our people think it's YOUR country that blows. Sorry pal, but that's how democracy works - majority rules. It sucks when you're the minority, but there you have it.
This !
I said it more detailed in a previous post but exactly: healthy, happy, rested workers are significantly more productive, ultimately you make MORE money when all your employees take vacations.
Not to mention on vacations people spend more money - which is good for your other industries. The government isn't just concerned with employing people - it needs those people to be customers - so OTHER people can have jobs.
My ex girlfriend was a CPA - here they work around that.
Don't even go there, if you have so much work that you need 60 man hours per person per week you can damn well afford to hire more people. One more with the same skill and 3 people are back to 40 hours a week.
>Great Labor Laws and 43% unemployment ... coincidence? Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face.
Yeah if you're an oversimplifying idiot. South Africa has a massive worker shortage. Our problem isn't the labor laws - it's education levels. The real answer staring you in the face was 72% illiteracy ! We have a massive oversupply of unschooled labor - three as much as our industries can employ. So About 30% of our people work in them. 20% Do school labour - the remainder are indirect employment they work as housekeepers and gardeners for the 20% of schooled workers.
In the schooled sectors of our economy there are massive shortages. By next year it's expected that more than 80% of all civil engineers in the country will be over 60 years old (that's 5 years from retirement) - we don't have people to replace them. The jobs section for IT is always filled with huge amounts of ads, the longest period I ever spent jobhunting was 1 week - and 4 days of that was spent comparing offers and deciding which company I liked best !
There is no problem finding work if you're educated, there are big problems if you can't read and write - we only have so much manual labor available. Yet oddly - the companies that work in those sectors also do well and we have many (mining is still among our top industries) - the labor laws clearly didn't put them out of business either - if anything politicians complain because they are still making huge profits and not treating workers well ENOUGH !
This false idea has been addressed in numerous posts. We do allow a grace period where a 24-hour notice period without need for reason apply, it's as much to allow an employee to get out if he hates the job without a massive notice period while those other offers still exist as to allow an employer to get rid of a bad hire before he costs them a fortune.
A person who goes through 3 to 6 months without job security and does his job clearly *can* do the job. There is also allowance for summary dismissal in exceptional cases (e.g. where a person broke the law or showed truly fragrant disregard for the rules to the point where further employment wouldn't be possible) so it's not that big a deal (though those require a single hearing at least)
What it does do is mean that you can't frivolously make up an excuse to fire somebody just because you don't like his hairstyle. The paid notice period means if you're letting somebody go because of redundancy issues or because the market has shrunk... well at least he has a chance to find another job before his income disapears.
It's all about balance. You are so entirely on one-side of the scale in the US that you assume anybody who is in the middle must be on the other extreme - in fact the other extreme doesn't actually exist anywhere in the world because even politicians are never THAT stupid.
Yes - there is nothing stopping that. The rules do allow for those cases - all you have to do is give them the time they worked over back again as time off, when it's quiet again in a few days time.
Besides that, do you really want to be operated on by a doctor who hasn't slept in 36 hours ? Do you really want to go to jail because the lawyer defending you was working of a deposition by a paralegal who had been suffering from sleep deprivation ?
These rules are to prevent continuous 80-hour weeks, not to make it impossible to do business - and acting like they are is thinking we're a lot more stupid than you imagine.
There's even a specific case exception that the maximum hours law doesn't apply to people in management positions. It's understood that
A) Managers are in a position to negotiate their own terms
B) Sometimes the owner of the company may have to work an 80 hour week if he's to keep the rest of the staff employed.
And South Africa allows trial employment periods during which you only need to give 24 hour notice, I think those are limited to six months or less, but enough time to check.
Anyway - South Africa's problem isn't labour laws, our problem is we have a massive overabundance of unschooled labour and a massive shortage of schooled labour. Part of why we get such good salaries for educated jobs is because we have a massive shortage of educated workers.