Would you seriously suggest that any Chinese made vehicle is anywhere close to the quality of those ? I bought a BMW specifically because they are so damn reliable, me previous car was an Audi. They only cost more up-front, in saved time, hassle and repairs they end up a lot cheaper.
>Yes they were. The immense boycott pressure probably did more than any amount of violence.
Typical rightwing American arrogant fuck. Now you're telling a South African what happened in my own country. The boycotts and sanctioned did fuckall to end apartheid. It didn't affect the white population at all. You sanctioned our oil - we invented making oil from coal and said "fuck you". The ONLY people who actually suffered because of sanctions were the very black people they were meant to help. The whites were fine. Hell we were even importing and running the latest software on our computers - the only thing the sanctions did was to make sure we all pirated everything since there WERE no legal purchases available.
Most Merc and BMW workers are in Germany where unionization is de facto legally mandated as you cannot comply with the legal requirement that 50% of board seats go to union reps without having a union. I case you were wondering German workers live way better than Americans do. Germany understands what American companies dont: its impossible to compete on price against a country that had 2 billion desperate poor people and a government that works with businesses to keep it that way. So do not try. Compete on quality - by paying more.
>How does anti-immigrant rhetoric make you a NAZI? Because NAZIs were anti-immigrant... doh, hell that was their cornerstone policy - opposition to a group of immigrants.
>How does anti-feminist rhetoric make you a NAZI? It doesn't... by itself (though it DOES by itself make you evil) - but when combined with the rest it sure contributes. And we didn't even get to the abundance of flagrant white supremacist statements he has made, and massive racial stereotypes (which is, also, a form of white supremacist since somehow... they never include negative stereotypes about white people)
> What defined the Nazis was rounding up Jews and exterminating them, No, that's what their ideas LED to, not where it BEGAN. They were NAZIs many decades before they did that. And while it was Jews that particular time, it doesn't HAVE to be - it just needs to be "people".
>Aryan supremacy, Milo: CHECK.
> and aggressive, expansionist warfare Another case of mistaking the end-result for the ideology. That was where it ended up, not where it started. Hitler was not LESS of a NAZI in the 6 years he governed without starting a war.
>. Wanting to control your borders NOT what anti-immigrant rhetoric actually says, and sure as HELL not what Milo says. I'll be willing to believe you when America considers it equally vital to build a wall on the NORTHERN border and keep Canadian immigrants out (by something other than your culture I mean).
> That's the story you don't want to hear or acknowledge. I've heard it, it's even somewhat true. It doesn't make the other side any LESS true.
>In reality, it's the Muslim countries with authoritarian regimes Plenty do, What is the relevance of that to the desire, and right, of Palestinians for democracy ? Oh right- NADA.
> but you just ignore those and make an absurd claim about Israel. The claim is true. The policy however is, indeed, quite absurd.
>Which would destroy their country How ? How does SHARING a country equal DESTROYING a country ? Only racist, nazi fucks think that. And don't underestimate how racist Israeli's are - hell the reason the Yemeni Babies Affair was so massive was because their extreme racism even extended to fellow Jews if those Jews came from the wrong places.
>after having defended it against attack from five Arab countries. What's the relevance of THAT to the plight of Palestinians ? Palestinians aren't even Arabs!
>When Sharon unilaterally pulled out of Gaza it was used as a new area to stage attacks by Hamas. So ? What does THAT have to do with "if you don't give people equal rights they have a right to fight you for them" ? You think M.L.K would have achieved ANYTHING AT ALL if the Black Panthers didn't exist ? M.L.K. Was ABLE to achieve things with peaceful protest because the politicians KNEW if they did NOT negotiate with him they'd end up having to negotiate with Malcolm X instead.
>Why indeed? Mandela shouldn't have been treated as a saint, Except that he WAS, in fact, as close to a saint as any human in centuries have been. Including, going to extreme lengths to avert a war which would have been utterly justified.
> the tactics of the ANC were unjust And also, utterly, unavoidable - the government was not willing to negotiate, they wouldn't consider it. There was no OTHER choice. So no, not unjust. It was a fight FOR justice. You can't fight for justice without fighting.
>and the country has turned to shit since the ANC came to power. What the fuck does THAT have to do with anything even if it's true ? People have a right to a say in their government. If denied it, they have a right to claim it- by force if needed. Your country only EXISTS because of people who did exactly THAT. Every criticism you raise about Mandela is doubly true of George Washington. Hell Washington didn't go after the revolution and negotiate with Britain and give them a seat in the new government - so he was WORSE than Mandela. Ap
>So what has Milo said or done that makes him a NAZI? I'll wait. Anti-Immigrant rhetoric, anti-feminist rhetoric. Cornerstones of Nazism and non-existent in anything else.
>That's because you're ignorant [youtube.com] and prone to hyperbole. Actually... it's because I'm far better informed than you. That means I don't just read what Israelis write, I read what Palestinians experience - I read THEIR side of the story. And theirs is the side of the people who were invaded, and has been oppressed ever since. If Israel wanted my sympathy they would grant all the stateless Palestinians an unlimited right of return and then either 1) Give all Palestinians full and complete citizenship with complete equal rights and no restrictions or 2) Give Palestinians a state and respect it's borders absolutely. The Israeli prime minister has made it very clear that he has absolutely no willingness to allow Palestinians their own state - thus forcing them to remain vassals of a state that does not recognize or acknowledge their humanity. You could argue that the means by which Palestinians have protested is wrong, but they are the SAME means by which the ANC protested - and for that the ANC became international heroes and Nelson Mandela is treated like a Saint. Why the difference? Why was bombing Afrikaner civilians understandable but bombing Israeli's is terrorism ? But all that aside - ultimately the key is in the REASON Israel won't give full and equal rights to Palestinians as citizens which have nothing to do with that. They want to preserve "Israel as a Jewish state" and are afraid of being outnumbered. That is the very definition of Nazism. When you want to preserve an area for a specific ethnic group - even at the price of slaughtering and oppressing another, that's Nazism in a nutshell - and the former INEVITABLY MUST lead to the latter. The Israeli approach is no different from Hitler's Lebensraum.
>People were afraid that Bush would become a dictator. And then Obama. And now, of course, Trump [wordpress.com]. He'll be gone in four or eight years, just like those who came before him, even Andrew Jackson [history.com].
And you think any of those were in any way like Trump ? If you can't tell the difference between exaggerated fears of a politician based on bullshit - and legitimate fears of a demagogue based on what he has actually said and done, then your ignorance is beyond the pale. I didn't say "people" - I said "historians" as in people who make it their lives work to know the difference. When Hitler got elected president nobody thought HE could become a dictator either. Weimar had checks and balances, a constitution and a parliament. Hell the Weimar president had far less power than the US president - most of the power was in the hands of the chancellor (much like modern Germany - do you even know the name of the German president ? He is so unimportant he never makes news outside their borders), they'd given him the appointment as a way to shut up the crazy guy who had somehow gotten 30% of the vote.... from that springboard (much weaker than Trump's) he dismantled every single one of the checks and balances and was an absolute dictator within a year. The real difference is this: neither Obama nor Bush were authoritarians. Obama was too moderate for his own good, and Bush was a greedy bugger who used his office to make his friends rich - but neither were authoritarian. Trump has never been anything else.
And he gave a senior position to a man who believes that the next world war happening now is inevitable and that the only way for the US to come out on top is for them to START that war. Steve Bannon really believes that - and he has said so, publicly, hundreds of times. He wants a war with China - because he believes one is going ot happen no matter what the US does so the US may as well start it and get first-strike advantage. Funny how the champion of the working class has filled his cabinet with the very elites the working class STILL think they voted AGAINST. He
>I'm 100% sure the gay jewish guy is not the Nazi in this picture And the SMART people in the room know that whether you are a NAZI is defined by what you say and do, not by who you are. Hell, I would argue that Israel has become a NAZI state ! And this too, is not unusual - history is full of oppressed people turning around to commit those exact same atrocities against somebody else. My own ancestors were the first people ever to experience concentration camps and the victims of the 20th century's very first genocide (and one of the only white-on-white genocides). 50 years later they invented apartheid.
And in your little fantasy version of history Fash-Bashing was never a thing ? Throughout the history of the world for every fascist breaking shop windows... there were anti-fascists punching the fascists. https://mic.com/articles/16020...
The REAL question is - is it worth it ? The standard answer is "no" because it never stopped any NAZI or other fascist movements. In fact they tended to take getting punched as an excuse for greater atrocities. But I think that answer doesn't apply - because this is a unique situation. These fascists have not yet secured their positions of power. The checks and balances are still in place. They haven't had their Reichstag moment yet, their hold on society is not yet absolute. We can still PREVENT them getting there. Fash-bashing has never ended their reigns of terror - but perhaps it can prevent it. I hope so - because it's the only chance America (and the world) has. Perhaps this unending, unyielding resistance from day one - can keep Fuhrer Trump in check... or at least, in check enough for us to survive the next 4 years.
No other time in history has somebody like him failed to become a dictator, authoritarians NEVER have ENOUGH power, they will always try to grab more. The only reason we have to hope it won't happen this time... is all those people out in the streets, and the fact that they were there right from the start. For once, the anti-fascist resistance may not come too little too late. Either that or, for the first time in their history, America will actually show up on time for a world war.
>the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves No, it merely acknowledges that nothing ELSE has any chance at all. That said, every empirical study ever done confirms the hypotheses anyway.
> seen examples of when that doesn't work (the Weimar Republic comes to mind.) Yeah... rightwingers always give the SAME examples - Weimer, Nero's Rome and Zimbabwe... and ignore thousands of times when the EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR had radically different outcomes, In Weimar's case they EVEN ignore that the plan was working fantastically well - and it was only upset when the great depression happened- and that happened in America nothing the Weimar government could have done could have forseen or prevented that. But as with Rome and Zimbabwe - that was a special case anyway. Hyperinflation is IMPOSSIBLE in a recession - the reason it happened there was because there was not, in fact, a real recession. A recession is defined as the money supply being insufficient for the productive capacity of the economy. Printing more money in a recession CANNOT cause hyperinflation - at best it can prevent catastrophic deflation (as happened in the US where they refused to print money and turned a fairly minor stock market crash into the great depression). Those were not recessions - they look like it if you only say "growth declined" - but as a matter of fact what happened was that the productive CAPACITY was destroyed. There wasn't too little money to finance production - the ability to produce was lost. In Weimar's case it was destroyed by a war, in Nero's Rome by both a war and a plague and in Zimbabwe's case by a major civil rebellion. Printing money when the money supply already EXCEEDS productive capacity - now THAT causes hyperinflation. By the way - at no time did Weimar practise anything like UBI and the world sure didn't give the country money, in fact they were extracting most of it's production in the form of exorbitant war reparations. Weimar on every level is the exact OPPOSITE of the example you think it is -it's a great example of how you can make people poor by taking all their money away.
>Wealth comes from material goods, not from money, and increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to create more material goods, instead it just increases the amount you pay for those goods. Let me guess... everything you know about economics come from the Austrian school ? That school which is the ONLY group of so-called economists who cult-like refuses to consider empirical evidence and data ? Or, to put it in the vernacular the school of economic bullshit, the homeopathy of economics. What you just said is flagrantly false, but a typical supply side argument. No that's not the only way to get rich and, in fact, throughout history the richest people are the rent-seeking financiers - they will outearn the product-creators every day (on account of not having to spend money making products). And real economies have demand side's too - all the products in the world won't produce a single penny of wealth if you don't have somebody who can afford to buy them.
Nobody was protesting working class people. It's NAZIs being protested. And the ONLY place for NAZIs in the political arena is at the end of a fist.
No, it does NOT get to be tolerated. Karl Poppler proved that extending tolerance to intolerant beliefs is a logical fallacy. Tolerance only goes to those that return the favour.
Oh, and I'm a 37 year old professional programmer. I also happen to be a bit of a history geek - and more importantly - to pay attention to what historians are saying right now... and that;'s why I'm saying this is the start of a second civil war and possibly a world war. The president has managed to provoke insane international diplomatic incidents with no less than 3 American allies and he's only been on the job a couple of weeks ! Oh and Steve Bannon would agree with me. He has been saying, publicly, that he believes world war 3 is imminent and will be center around a China/America conflict. He is one of those morons who believes in cyclic history. I am merely saying "don't repeat patterns that have always led to war" - HE is saying "It is the time when war must happen, so I will actually try to help it along so I can steer HOW it starts to benefit myself". This guy now chairs the national security commission. Bannon calls it "The fourth turning". The first turning was the civil war. Each world war was another - and he believes it's time for a fourth. You know all that S.F. about should we go back and kill Hitler ? There's all sorts of paradoxes there - but... should we kill somebody who wants to BE Hitler and now has the power to act on it ? Damn right we should. Meanwhile I've read dozens of extremely respected historians who are saying Trump is indistinguishable from the worst fascists of the 20th century, in policy, in temperament and in likelihood of causing wars. People who make it their lives work to know how those people came to power, and turned great nations into warring hellholes - are saying "Look at Trump THAT is how they did it".
> Well guess what, the pendulum is swinging the other way Yeah - now it's liberal's turn to make the presidents life hell and make sure he achieves none of his agenda. But we'll be better than you were. We'll only resist the crazy parts, we'll only resist the bad ideas. There are some things in Trump's platform that were also in Bernie Sander's platform. If he does those - and he does them right 'tax breaks for construction companies' doesn't count - then we'll support him. We won't oppose him when he's implementing OUR ideas - like the GOP did to Obama.
Oh right, like the teaparty protests didn't get violent at times ?
Hell the left boasts having quite recently held the largest protest in human history without a single arrest.
And now I'll really blow your mind - it's not because the women were well behaved. They behaved no differently than protestors of all stripes always do. It's because the cops don't like to pick fights with a bunch of white women - so they didn't go and find flimsy excuses to arrest protestors and thus provoke a clash. The same reason there weren't many arrests during the teaparty protests - because cops don't like to pick fights with a lot of white people. Only an idiot thinks the teaparty protestors were any better behaved than say BLM protestors.
Anyway, they ARE justified to use violence. This is the outbreak of the second civil war at the very least, world war 3 most likely. They are literally fighting for their lives, to protect themselves and their loved ones. They are as justified in their actions as the Jewish resistance fighter were in the German ghettos when they fought back against the NAZI's - with guns.
And the right doesn't get to complain. We've had 8 years of a moderate president being obstructed and protested against at every turn on the most ridiculous basis - flagrantly made up bullshit most of the time. Hell, how many people protested because they thought he was going to take their guns ? He never took anybody's guns and, in fact, gun laws are actually became MORE lax under Obama - but gun companies profited from telling people that, and politicians played along opportunistically and a bunch of rightwing nutjobs fell for the scam. 8 years of bullshit protests and obstruction over the most innocuous of things. The army does excercises in Texas like they've done every year since 2003- and suddenly the whole state is protesting and even sending the state guard to keep an eye on them out of some bizarre fear that this was "the start of martial law".
Even if the republicans had elected a sane and moderate president it would be fucking payback time. They didn't, they elected an autocratic demagogue who thinks he is a dictator, lies every time he opens his mouth, signs insane executive orders he has neither read nor attempted to understand, appointed an attorney general who was denied a judgeship by a republican senate for being insanely racist... it would be payback time even if it had been John Kasich... But for Trump. This will NEVER stop. He will be facing constant protest right until his 4 years are up - and the only president in history who had LESS chance of re-election than Donald Trump was William Henry Harrison - and he died in his first month in office.That is, of course, assuming you get to have another election. Trump is actively looking for his Reichstag fire. He's already claimed that the next terrorist attack will be fault of the courts. He can't wait for one to happen - it will be the excuse he wants. You were so afraid that Obama would declare martial law - with no reason to ever think he might. Then you elected a president who is determined to do so at the first excuse no matter how flimsy. Hell he tried to justify his ban by referring to the people who died in the attack on the Louvre... too bad the Louvre was never attacked, a soldier in a shopping mall was attacked (the Mall does have Louvre in it's name somewhere but it's not the museum), and the attacker was instantly arrested - nobody died. Oh, and he is from Egypt - NOT one of the countries Trump tried to ban.
>The only attacks I've seen are the Berkeley protestors beating people with clubs. So... somehow you saw THAT but not the Milo supporter SHOOTING at them five minutes earlier and critically injuring one ?
You know... when people are shooting at you, attacking them with clubs is probably a justified response. If anything, it shows remarkable restraint.
Except that his government didn't nominate him. He was nominated by Swedish M.P. E.G.C. Brandt. and Brandt seriously did not want him to win. Brandt believed that the Nobel nomination process was way too open, allowing people to win who did not live up to Alfred Nobel's wishes for what the peace prize is meant to achieve. The science prizes make more sense. He nominated Hitler to showcase how ridiculous the system was - even the "most obviously worst possible person to consider giving it to" has to be considered if somebody who works for a government says so.
What you just said cannot possibly be true of anybody over the age of about 2. If you can speak, you can do something about peace. Not everybody DOES - but everybody CAN.
You don't need to be in a position of power to have achieved something remarkable just by the way you sought power.
They are, if you actually consider what the standard is: a consensus view among editors that the articles are unreliable and not representing accurate facts. That doesn't happen lightly - the debate took weeks before the vote, and the vote requirement to actually ban a source is extremely high - you need over 80% of editors to agree. That's some ten-thousand people from around the world, with different biases, ideas, philosophies and beliefs - and you need to get 80% of them to agree before any publication can be banned. It requires a CONSENSUS view - not just a majority view.
The D.M. ban came after years and years of having article based on DM sources that had to be rewritten, replaced and even deleted entirely as they turned out to be pure fabrications. That's a crapload of extra work for editors - who are, remember, volunteers.
It is not censorship - they can't stop anybody reading the dailymail, but they ahve every right to decide that the frequency with which dailymail reports force them to have to do extra work due to blatantly false claims makes it not worth the effort of allowing as a source, since after all, the mission of the organisation is dependent on reliable sources.
There are different ideas on how an encyclopaedia should strive for accuracy. The traditional view is by hiring a host of experts, one on every topic you have an entry on, and have them write the topics for you. Then edit and prettify and have them fact-check the result. This is how things like Encyclopaedia Britanica for example is done. That, however, is not viable for a crowd-sourced one... so how do you fact check ? They had to find a new way, that way is to demand reliable, outside, expert sources that agree with the statements of fact made on the pages. This reduces the workload from an unmangeable "find a verified expert on every topic and resolve disputes whenever a topic has two experts who don't agree" to a much more manageable "select which sources we trust". A process which, in another contradiction of typical encyclopaedic standards actually is based on "benefit of the doubt" - any published source starts out as "acceptable". Even your personal blog can be a source - though if you fail fact-checking (consistently) you will eventually cease to be one. If it can be backed up by multiple sources this is deemed even better. A scientists' blog about his current research is a fantastic thing to have as a source - it means wikipedia can have up to date information (far moreso than the competition), but having a link to the published paper when it comes out is even more important - because that will include the corrections made over the course of the research and not reflected in the earlier running-commentary posts.
>WoW is slowly but steadily losing players and Blizzard knows this ride will end someda
It has to really - you can only get so far with gradual improvement of a base that is now 13 years old. In the meantime the tech has advanced. A lot of the assumptions about MMO's that were true then aren't anymore. Look at what ESO is doing now. No realms, everybody who plays share the same gamespace - no prevention of cross-faction play. You can group, quest and trade with anybody - even if their faction is at war with yours. So many restrictions that are common in MMOs that they got rid of... because they aren't needed anymore. ESO's Megaservers weren't possible to build in 2014 and you probably can't modify WoW's code to be able to make use of them without rewriting almost all of it. Blizzard has been trying to get close that, for example by merging low-population zones from multiple realms - but it's a haphazard process and it introduced it's own issues because it's really a hack, the better solution is to not have realms at all. But that's not an option for them.
Blizzard was planning a new MMO long ago, since back during the Wrath days (Arguably WoW's peak time - it had over 12-million active players, and was the best and most advanced MMO game available) but, I think for fear of alienating their lucrative subscriber base (why invest more time in this game if everybody will be playing the new one in a year ? Even if it's still up... you'd be all alone)... it kept getting postponed and apparently got forgotten.
It is also, now, a world where PC's are no longer the dominant platform - other MMOs widely support consoles, a few even have mobile versions - WoW remains limited to PC and Mac (at least it works well in wine). I think WoW is dying a slow death, not least because they ran out of warcraft stories to tell and the lore they came up with post-cataclysm was frankly... horrible. A lot of WoW's appeal was it's deep and very well written lore, and your character participating in that history. But since the pandas, it felt like a different world, your character didn't feel like it was the same one who had wept over Pamela Redpath and swore to avenge her killing Arthas and years later finally succeeded. I guess I can't blame blizzard for trying to keep the death as slow as possible though. It's still a cash-cow after all.
>Your home-made PV panels manufactured by 3 people, aren't nearly as efficient as the factory-made ones that you can bu The 3 people were the ones doing the installing. I wasn't counting the manufacturers - because I BET when you calculate labour for building a coal plant you don't count all the people working in the cement factory or the brickyards or the steelmills but I promise you, you will not manage to build the thing without a lot of concrete, bricks and steel. The comparison to "people working on building the plant" is "people needed to install the solar panels on your roof" - which is the vast majority of solar in the world. Part of solar's superiority is that you actually CAN economically do it on small scales, there is no economic way to do coal to power your house, even if you could - your neighbours would sue the hell out of you for destroying the neighbourhood. Solar has none of those issues.
> The key is to "simply"(*) add them. A sum that coal cannot possibly win, just the constant labour, every day, to keep it running will exceed the combined total for solar - probably by several orders of magnitude.
I looked it up a few months ago, because I was trying to do comparison of the KSP tech tree with how space technology developed in our world. One of the inaccuracies is how very late in the tree solar panels become available. The date I found was 1955. I didn't read anything about selenium cells that existed prior to that. Have you got a source ? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not an American, I knew the Hoover wasn't first, but I hadn't realized we'd been doing it quite that long. And I honestly wouldn't have considered a generator at a private house to be comparable to hydropower for cities.
True, but you stopped too soon. Lots of that rain water ends up in rivers, running down to the sea. Humans have been using that water to turn turbines for many centuries (there are pictures of water-wheel powered metal presses dating back to the middle ages - it was a major tool in the production of early chain mail, and water-wheel mills are even older), and for almost a century now we've been using it to produce electricity.
So the Hoover damn's hydro-power... counts as solar !
These things have been in WoW for the better part of 2 years. They are far too expensive to really affect much, simply put to farm enough gold to buy the token takes a very long time. It's a way to spend when you got loads built up over years, but actually playing by buying tokens with gold would mean never doing anything but gold farming... boring as hell.
I stopped playing WoW a long time ago, but I don't see it as much of a gamechanger, certainly not enough to have lured me back. Giving it another use won't impact it that much either. At most it can be thought of as a loyalty reward for people who have been playing for years and are gold-capped - hey now you can turn some of that gold into other blizzard games.
Actually it does because it means your not comparing the same thing. This is comparing labour costs for installation versus labour costs for running an already-set-up system. That's idiotic.
If you compare legitimately you find that adding a solar deployment typically takes about 3 people. You can't DO coal that small, to add that you need a whole new plant - needing thousands of workers to complete over a period that can span decades. Similarly you can compare post-install labour costs. For coal - well you still need prospectors to find fuel, miners to dig it up, truckers to deliver them and hundreds of workers to operate the plant. After installing solar you need an average of ZERO labour for it's entire lifetime.
Comparing installation labour to running labour is fallacious at best.
Define solar. Because photovoltaics have only been around since 1955. If you define solar so broadly as to include "boiling water with a lens" then why not count "making a fire with refracted sunlight" and say it goes back thousands ?
Word meanings rely on context, and in this context we are talking about the solar that is used to produce electricity, today. The tech before 1955 was frankly grossly inefficient. I suppose you could argue that tower-solar is a direct evolution of the same technology but that is also by far the smallest part of solar in the world because it's so costly to build. Equivalent-output PV's can be done for a fraction of the price.
Above all, solar though has one major economic advantage: it scales DOWNWARD as well. You can do a small-scale installation (i.e. power-one-home) and not pay much more per unit than the guy building a giant solar farm (indeed, he will likely consider it beneficial to buy more advanced units with things like solar tracking, will need additional security and constant maintenance staff to maximize his investment - and may actually end up paying more per unit). That matters for several important reasons. Firstly - the massive infrastructure costs involved in rolling out an energy supply is a lot less prohibitive when it can be spread across thousands of volunteers who only pay for a small part each, secondly it means that this market is ripe for entrepeneurship. Coal and nuclear, on the other hand, are natural monopolies due to their prohibitively high upfront costs (which is why the vast majority of the world's coal power plants are built with taxpayer money - and even in the US the only way to convince anybody to invest in it was to offer them protected monopoly status).
Firstly, Wegener's work hasn't been the norm for a very, very long time - it was roundly rejected in his lifetime, and only came back into vogue in the 1960s when computer simulations made a much stronger argument for the closeness of the fit. It really got going later on when, thanks to modern diving technology, we were able to go dive down where the predicted seams were - and indeed find the magma welling up through the cracks.
Secondly - this does not, in any way, contradict that theory. It merely suggests that there is an extra piece to the puzzle that's been lost. It doesn't change how the other pieces moved.
That seems unlikely though. Firstly, the areas where humans lived that way were not really wolf territory. The majority of our hunter/gatherer existence we would be more worried about lions, hyenas and leopards. And there is strong evidence that hunter/gatherers were quite adept at defending against those (not least that surviving hunter/gatherers are), indeed the evidence suggest that during the hunter/gatherer phase - humans were already the top predator. There is also other things to consider, like the strong scientific evidence for the night-owl gene, which suggest that humans had evolved other defenses against predation of their nests even before the hunter/gatherer phase. Much as you'll find that predation of chimp young is extremely rare and for bonobos it's virtually non-existent. The only things that hunt bonobos successfully are humans. But the whole argument makes no sense anyway. The child mortality rate among chimps and bonobos is nowhere near 90%, it's around 30%. So why on earth would the chimp-family member with the worst child-survival rates have been the one to become the world's apex predator ? It seems extremely unlikely an outcome. The only time human child-mortality WAS at 90% was during the industrial revolution - and natural causes had nothing to do with that.
Well then, you're going to have to spell out what the hell you are talking about.
My only theory is that you are referring to the last part of the text I quoted "for you were a foreigner in Egypt" and saying that didn't work out so well for them,. Which is true - but it actually proves my point. They had experienced, in Egypt (at least according to the book) many years as honored guests, and years of oppression - and the message is - do the honored guests thing because you know from personal experience how much better that is.
Either way, the point stands. The idea that you should treat all people -even foreigners with dignity and respect, as equals, is not a modern idea - it was being written down in books at least 5500 years ago, and I'm willing to bet there are even older books that mentioned it, that particular one just happened to survive into the modern age and be well known. Because it's such an obvious idea, there is no way Moses was the first person to think of it. Every person who thinks for 5 seconds will conclude it. Too bad America seems to have a rather significant portion of voters who have never done that. What's doubly ironic is that, overwhelmingly, they identify as Christian - yet this particular command given to them by their God... gets routinely ignored. Out of all of leviticus in fact, the only command they take seriously is about homosexuals - the stupidest one in the whole book, but the few sensible ones, those they ignore. My ancestors are as fundamentalist as the worst bible-belters. Hell they are fellow Calvinists who, much like the puritans, had fled persecution in Europe. Yet my ancestors took that commandment extremely literally and seriously - they would consider it an unbreakable law. They did the same with the "right to eat" commandments as well - another one American Christians like to conveniently forget. If you take Christianity, and strip out all the commandments about treating other people decently, with dignity and respect as equals, and keep only the hateful bits, the evil bits, the slavery and subjugation bits... what you have left is a bad religion at is worst. What you have left, is why a christian fundamentalist just blew up a mosque in quebec and a couple of the same were trying to do that in South Carolina in October.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you seriously suggest that any Chinese made vehicle is anywhere close to the quality of those ? I bought a BMW specifically because they are so damn reliable, me previous car was an Audi. They only cost more up-front, in saved time, hassle and repairs they end up a lot cheaper.
>Yes they were. The immense boycott pressure probably did more than any amount of violence.
Typical rightwing American arrogant fuck. Now you're telling a South African what happened in my own country. The boycotts and sanctioned did fuckall to end apartheid. It didn't affect the white population at all. You sanctioned our oil - we invented making oil from coal and said "fuck you". The ONLY people who actually suffered because of sanctions were the very black people they were meant to help. The whites were fine. Hell we were even importing and running the latest software on our computers - the only thing the sanctions did was to make sure we all pirated everything since there WERE no legal purchases available.
Most Merc and BMW workers are in Germany where unionization is de facto legally mandated as you cannot comply with the legal requirement that 50% of board seats go to union reps without having a union.
I case you were wondering German workers live way better than Americans do. Germany understands what American companies dont: its impossible to compete on price against a country that had 2 billion desperate poor people and a government that works with businesses to keep it that way. So do not try. Compete on quality - by paying more.
>How does anti-immigrant rhetoric make you a NAZI?
Because NAZIs were anti-immigrant... doh, hell that was their cornerstone policy - opposition to a group of immigrants.
>How does anti-feminist rhetoric make you a NAZI?
It doesn't... by itself (though it DOES by itself make you evil) - but when combined with the rest it sure contributes. And we didn't even get to the abundance of flagrant white supremacist statements he has made, and massive racial stereotypes (which is, also, a form of white supremacist since somehow... they never include negative stereotypes about white people)
> What defined the Nazis was rounding up Jews and exterminating them,
No, that's what their ideas LED to, not where it BEGAN. They were NAZIs many decades before they did that. And while it was Jews that particular time, it doesn't HAVE to be - it just needs to be "people".
>Aryan supremacy,
Milo: CHECK.
> and aggressive, expansionist warfare
Another case of mistaking the end-result for the ideology. That was where it ended up, not where it started. Hitler was not LESS of a NAZI in the 6 years he governed without starting a war.
>. Wanting to control your borders
NOT what anti-immigrant rhetoric actually says, and sure as HELL not what Milo says. I'll be willing to believe you when America considers it equally vital to build a wall on the NORTHERN border and keep Canadian immigrants out (by something other than your culture I mean).
> That's the story you don't want to hear or acknowledge.
I've heard it, it's even somewhat true. It doesn't make the other side any LESS true.
>In reality, it's the Muslim countries with authoritarian regimes
Plenty do, What is the relevance of that to the desire, and right, of Palestinians for democracy ? Oh right- NADA.
> but you just ignore those and make an absurd claim about Israel.
The claim is true. The policy however is, indeed, quite absurd.
>Which would destroy their country
How ? How does SHARING a country equal DESTROYING a country ? Only racist, nazi fucks think that. And don't underestimate how racist Israeli's are - hell the reason the Yemeni Babies Affair was so massive was because their extreme racism even extended to fellow Jews if those Jews came from the wrong places.
>after having defended it against attack from five Arab countries.
What's the relevance of THAT to the plight of Palestinians ? Palestinians aren't even Arabs!
>When Sharon unilaterally pulled out of Gaza it was used as a new area to stage attacks by Hamas.
So ? What does THAT have to do with "if you don't give people equal rights they have a right to fight you for them" ? You think M.L.K would have achieved ANYTHING AT ALL if the Black Panthers didn't exist ? M.L.K. Was ABLE to achieve things with peaceful protest because the politicians KNEW if they did NOT negotiate with him they'd end up having to negotiate with Malcolm X instead.
>Why indeed? Mandela shouldn't have been treated as a saint,
Except that he WAS, in fact, as close to a saint as any human in centuries have been. Including, going to extreme lengths to avert a war which would have been utterly justified.
> the tactics of the ANC were unjust
And also, utterly, unavoidable - the government was not willing to negotiate, they wouldn't consider it. There was no OTHER choice. So no, not unjust. It was a fight FOR justice. You can't fight for justice without fighting.
>and the country has turned to shit since the ANC came to power.
What the fuck does THAT have to do with anything even if it's true ? People have a right to a say in their government. If denied it, they have a right to claim it- by force if needed. Your country only EXISTS because of people who did exactly THAT. Every criticism you raise about Mandela is doubly true of George Washington. Hell Washington didn't go after the revolution and negotiate with Britain and give them a seat in the new government - so he was WORSE than Mandela. Ap
>So what has Milo said or done that makes him a NAZI? I'll wait.
Anti-Immigrant rhetoric, anti-feminist rhetoric. Cornerstones of Nazism and non-existent in anything else.
>That's because you're ignorant [youtube.com] and prone to hyperbole.
Actually... it's because I'm far better informed than you. That means I don't just read what Israelis write, I read what Palestinians experience - I read THEIR side of the story. And theirs is the side of the people who were invaded, and has been oppressed ever since. If Israel wanted my sympathy they would grant all the stateless Palestinians an unlimited right of return and then either
1) Give all Palestinians full and complete citizenship with complete equal rights and no restrictions or
2) Give Palestinians a state and respect it's borders absolutely.
The Israeli prime minister has made it very clear that he has absolutely no willingness to allow Palestinians their own state - thus forcing them to remain vassals of a state that does not recognize or acknowledge their humanity. You could argue that the means by which Palestinians have protested is wrong, but they are the SAME means by which the ANC protested - and for that the ANC became international heroes and Nelson Mandela is treated like a Saint. Why the difference? Why was bombing Afrikaner civilians understandable but bombing Israeli's is terrorism ?
But all that aside - ultimately the key is in the REASON Israel won't give full and equal rights to Palestinians as citizens which have nothing to do with that. They want to preserve "Israel as a Jewish state" and are afraid of being outnumbered. That is the very definition of Nazism. When you want to preserve an area for a specific ethnic group - even at the price of slaughtering and oppressing another, that's Nazism in a nutshell - and the former INEVITABLY MUST lead to the latter. The Israeli approach is no different from Hitler's Lebensraum.
>People were afraid that Bush would become a dictator. And then Obama. And now, of course, Trump [wordpress.com]. He'll be gone in four or eight years, just like those who came before him, even Andrew Jackson [history.com].
And you think any of those were in any way like Trump ? If you can't tell the difference between exaggerated fears of a politician based on bullshit - and legitimate fears of a demagogue based on what he has actually said and done, then your ignorance is beyond the pale. I didn't say "people" - I said "historians" as in people who make it their lives work to know the difference. When Hitler got elected president nobody thought HE could become a dictator either. Weimar had checks and balances, a constitution and a parliament. Hell the Weimar president had far less power than the US president - most of the power was in the hands of the chancellor (much like modern Germany - do you even know the name of the German president ? He is so unimportant he never makes news outside their borders), they'd given him the appointment as a way to shut up the crazy guy who had somehow gotten 30% of the vote.... from that springboard (much weaker than Trump's) he dismantled every single one of the checks and balances and was an absolute dictator within a year.
The real difference is this: neither Obama nor Bush were authoritarians. Obama was too moderate for his own good, and Bush was a greedy bugger who used his office to make his friends rich - but neither were authoritarian. Trump has never been anything else.
And he gave a senior position to a man who believes that the next world war happening now is inevitable and that the only way for the US to come out on top is for them to START that war. Steve Bannon really believes that - and he has said so, publicly, hundreds of times. He wants a war with China - because he believes one is going ot happen no matter what the US does so the US may as well start it and get first-strike advantage.
Funny how the champion of the working class has filled his cabinet with the very elites the working class STILL think they voted AGAINST. He
>Putting this together with your last post, I can see you want a Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Why am I not surprised.
Not at all, I have no idea how you got THAT from me opposing the final solution to the Palestinian problem.
>I'm 100% sure the gay jewish guy is not the Nazi in this picture
And the SMART people in the room know that whether you are a NAZI is defined by what you say and do, not by who you are. Hell, I would argue that Israel has become a NAZI state ! And this too, is not unusual - history is full of oppressed people turning around to commit those exact same atrocities against somebody else. My own ancestors were the first people ever to experience concentration camps and the victims of the 20th century's very first genocide (and one of the only white-on-white genocides). 50 years later they invented apartheid.
And in your little fantasy version of history Fash-Bashing was never a thing ?
Throughout the history of the world for every fascist breaking shop windows... there were anti-fascists punching the fascists.
https://mic.com/articles/16020...
The REAL question is - is it worth it ? The standard answer is "no" because it never stopped any NAZI or other fascist movements. In fact they tended to take getting punched as an excuse for greater atrocities.
But I think that answer doesn't apply - because this is a unique situation. These fascists have not yet secured their positions of power. The checks and balances are still in place. They haven't had their Reichstag moment yet, their hold on society is not yet absolute. We can still PREVENT them getting there. Fash-bashing has never ended their reigns of terror - but perhaps it can prevent it. I hope so - because it's the only chance America (and the world) has. Perhaps this unending, unyielding resistance from day one - can keep Fuhrer Trump in check... or at least, in check enough for us to survive the next 4 years.
No other time in history has somebody like him failed to become a dictator, authoritarians NEVER have ENOUGH power, they will always try to grab more. The only reason we have to hope it won't happen this time... is all those people out in the streets, and the fact that they were there right from the start. For once, the anti-fascist resistance may not come too little too late. Either that or, for the first time in their history, America will actually show up on time for a world war.
>the fundamental problem with the concept of UBI is that it assumes money can always turn have-nots into haves
No, it merely acknowledges that nothing ELSE has any chance at all. That said, every empirical study ever done confirms the hypotheses anyway.
> seen examples of when that doesn't work (the Weimar Republic comes to mind.)
Yeah... rightwingers always give the SAME examples - Weimer, Nero's Rome and Zimbabwe... and ignore thousands of times when the EXACT SAME BEHAVIOR had radically different outcomes, In Weimar's case they EVEN ignore that the plan was working fantastically well - and it was only upset when the great depression happened- and that happened in America nothing the Weimar government could have done could have forseen or prevented that. But as with Rome and Zimbabwe - that was a special case anyway. Hyperinflation is IMPOSSIBLE in a recession - the reason it happened there was because there was not, in fact, a real recession. A recession is defined as the money supply being insufficient for the productive capacity of the economy. Printing more money in a recession CANNOT cause hyperinflation - at best it can prevent catastrophic deflation (as happened in the US where they refused to print money and turned a fairly minor stock market crash into the great depression). Those were not recessions - they look like it if you only say "growth declined" - but as a matter of fact what happened was that the productive CAPACITY was destroyed. There wasn't too little money to finance production - the ability to produce was lost. In Weimar's case it was destroyed by a war, in Nero's Rome by both a war and a plague and in Zimbabwe's case by a major civil rebellion. Printing money when the money supply already EXCEEDS productive capacity - now THAT causes hyperinflation. By the way - at no time did Weimar practise anything like UBI and the world sure didn't give the country money, in fact they were extracting most of it's production in the form of exorbitant war reparations. Weimar on every level is the exact OPPOSITE of the example you think it is -it's a great example of how you can make people poor by taking all their money away.
>Wealth comes from material goods, not from money, and increasing the money supply doesn't do anything to create more material goods, instead it just increases the amount you pay for those goods.
Let me guess... everything you know about economics come from the Austrian school ? That school which is the ONLY group of so-called economists who cult-like refuses to consider empirical evidence and data ? Or, to put it in the vernacular the school of economic bullshit, the homeopathy of economics. What you just said is flagrantly false, but a typical supply side argument.
No that's not the only way to get rich and, in fact, throughout history the richest people are the rent-seeking financiers - they will outearn the product-creators every day (on account of not having to spend money making products).
And real economies have demand side's too - all the products in the world won't produce a single penny of wealth if you don't have somebody who can afford to buy them.
Nobody was protesting working class people. It's NAZIs being protested.
And the ONLY place for NAZIs in the political arena is at the end of a fist.
No, it does NOT get to be tolerated. Karl Poppler proved that extending tolerance to intolerant beliefs is a logical fallacy. Tolerance only goes to those that return the favour.
Oh, and I'm a 37 year old professional programmer. I also happen to be a bit of a history geek - and more importantly - to pay attention to what historians are saying right now... and that;'s why I'm saying this is the start of a second civil war and possibly a world war. The president has managed to provoke insane international diplomatic incidents with no less than 3 American allies and he's only been on the job a couple of weeks ! Oh and Steve Bannon would agree with me. He has been saying, publicly, that he believes world war 3 is imminent and will be center around a China/America conflict. He is one of those morons who believes in cyclic history. I am merely saying "don't repeat patterns that have always led to war" - HE is saying "It is the time when war must happen, so I will actually try to help it along so I can steer HOW it starts to benefit myself". This guy now chairs the national security commission. Bannon calls it "The fourth turning". The first turning was the civil war. Each world war was another - and he believes it's time for a fourth. You know all that S.F. about should we go back and kill Hitler ? There's all sorts of paradoxes there - but... should we kill somebody who wants to BE Hitler and now has the power to act on it ? Damn right we should.
Meanwhile I've read dozens of extremely respected historians who are saying Trump is indistinguishable from the worst fascists of the 20th century, in policy, in temperament and in likelihood of causing wars. People who make it their lives work to know how those people came to power, and turned great nations into warring hellholes - are saying "Look at Trump THAT is how they did it".
> Well guess what, the pendulum is swinging the other way
Yeah - now it's liberal's turn to make the presidents life hell and make sure he achieves none of his agenda. But we'll be better than you were. We'll only resist the crazy parts, we'll only resist the bad ideas. There are some things in Trump's platform that were also in Bernie Sander's platform. If he does those - and he does them right 'tax breaks for construction companies' doesn't count - then we'll support him.
We won't oppose him when he's implementing OUR ideas - like the GOP did to Obama.
Oh right, like the teaparty protests didn't get violent at times ?
Hell the left boasts having quite recently held the largest protest in human history without a single arrest.
And now I'll really blow your mind - it's not because the women were well behaved. They behaved no differently than protestors of all stripes always do. It's because the cops don't like to pick fights with a bunch of white women - so they didn't go and find flimsy excuses to arrest protestors and thus provoke a clash. The same reason there weren't many arrests during the teaparty protests - because cops don't like to pick fights with a lot of white people. Only an idiot thinks the teaparty protestors were any better behaved than say BLM protestors.
Anyway, they ARE justified to use violence. This is the outbreak of the second civil war at the very least, world war 3 most likely. They are literally fighting for their lives, to protect themselves and their loved ones. They are as justified in their actions as the Jewish resistance fighter were in the German ghettos when they fought back against the NAZI's - with guns.
And the right doesn't get to complain. We've had 8 years of a moderate president being obstructed and protested against at every turn on the most ridiculous basis - flagrantly made up bullshit most of the time. Hell, how many people protested because they thought he was going to take their guns ? He never took anybody's guns and, in fact, gun laws are actually became MORE lax under Obama - but gun companies profited from telling people that, and politicians played along opportunistically and a bunch of rightwing nutjobs fell for the scam.
8 years of bullshit protests and obstruction over the most innocuous of things. The army does excercises in Texas like they've done every year since 2003- and suddenly the whole state is protesting and even sending the state guard to keep an eye on them out of some bizarre fear that this was "the start of martial law".
Even if the republicans had elected a sane and moderate president it would be fucking payback time. They didn't, they elected an autocratic demagogue who thinks he is a dictator, lies every time he opens his mouth, signs insane executive orders he has neither read nor attempted to understand, appointed an attorney general who was denied a judgeship by a republican senate for being insanely racist... it would be payback time even if it had been John Kasich... But for Trump.
This will NEVER stop. He will be facing constant protest right until his 4 years are up - and the only president in history who had LESS chance of re-election than Donald Trump was William Henry Harrison - and he died in his first month in office.That is, of course, assuming you get to have another election. Trump is actively looking for his Reichstag fire. He's already claimed that the next terrorist attack will be fault of the courts. He can't wait for one to happen - it will be the excuse he wants.
You were so afraid that Obama would declare martial law - with no reason to ever think he might. Then you elected a president who is determined to do so at the first excuse no matter how flimsy.
Hell he tried to justify his ban by referring to the people who died in the attack on the Louvre... too bad the Louvre was never attacked, a soldier in a shopping mall was attacked (the Mall does have Louvre in it's name somewhere but it's not the museum), and the attacker was instantly arrested - nobody died. Oh, and he is from Egypt - NOT one of the countries Trump tried to ban.
>The only attacks I've seen are the Berkeley protestors beating people with clubs.
So... somehow you saw THAT but not the Milo supporter SHOOTING at them five minutes earlier and critically injuring one ?
You know... when people are shooting at you, attacking them with clubs is probably a justified response. If anything, it shows remarkable restraint.
Except that his government didn't nominate him. He was nominated by Swedish M.P. E.G.C. Brandt. and Brandt seriously did not want him to win. Brandt believed that the Nobel nomination process was way too open, allowing people to win who did not live up to Alfred Nobel's wishes for what the peace prize is meant to achieve. The science prizes make more sense. He nominated Hitler to showcase how ridiculous the system was - even the "most obviously worst possible person to consider giving it to" has to be considered if somebody who works for a government says so.
>Literally. Because he couldn't have yet.
What you just said cannot possibly be true of anybody over the age of about 2. If you can speak, you can do something about peace. Not everybody DOES - but everybody CAN.
You don't need to be in a position of power to have achieved something remarkable just by the way you sought power.
They are, if you actually consider what the standard is: a consensus view among editors that the articles are unreliable and not representing accurate facts.
That doesn't happen lightly - the debate took weeks before the vote, and the vote requirement to actually ban a source is extremely high - you need over 80% of editors to agree. That's some ten-thousand people from around the world, with different biases, ideas, philosophies and beliefs - and you need to get 80% of them to agree before any publication can be banned. It requires a CONSENSUS view - not just a majority view.
The D.M. ban came after years and years of having article based on DM sources that had to be rewritten, replaced and even deleted entirely as they turned out to be pure fabrications. That's a crapload of extra work for editors - who are, remember, volunteers.
It is not censorship - they can't stop anybody reading the dailymail, but they ahve every right to decide that the frequency with which dailymail reports force them to have to do extra work due to blatantly false claims makes it not worth the effort of allowing as a source, since after all, the mission of the organisation is dependent on reliable sources.
There are different ideas on how an encyclopaedia should strive for accuracy. The traditional view is by hiring a host of experts, one on every topic you have an entry on, and have them write the topics for you. Then edit and prettify and have them fact-check the result. This is how things like Encyclopaedia Britanica for example is done.
That, however, is not viable for a crowd-sourced one... so how do you fact check ? They had to find a new way, that way is to demand reliable, outside, expert sources that agree with the statements of fact made on the pages. This reduces the workload from an unmangeable "find a verified expert on every topic and resolve disputes whenever a topic has two experts who don't agree" to a much more manageable "select which sources we trust". A process which, in another contradiction of typical encyclopaedic standards actually is based on "benefit of the doubt" - any published source starts out as "acceptable". Even your personal blog can be a source - though if you fail fact-checking (consistently) you will eventually cease to be one. If it can be backed up by multiple sources this is deemed even better. A scientists' blog about his current research is a fantastic thing to have as a source - it means wikipedia can have up to date information (far moreso than the competition), but having a link to the published paper when it comes out is even more important - because that will include the corrections made over the course of the research and not reflected in the earlier running-commentary posts.
>WoW is slowly but steadily losing players and Blizzard knows this ride will end someda
It has to really - you can only get so far with gradual improvement of a base that is now 13 years old. In the meantime the tech has advanced. A lot of the assumptions about MMO's that were true then aren't anymore. Look at what ESO is doing now. No realms, everybody who plays share the same gamespace - no prevention of cross-faction play. You can group, quest and trade with anybody - even if their faction is at war with yours. So many restrictions that are common in MMOs that they got rid of ... because they aren't needed anymore. ESO's Megaservers weren't possible to build in 2014 and you probably can't modify WoW's code to be able to make use of them without rewriting almost all of it.
Blizzard has been trying to get close that, for example by merging low-population zones from multiple realms - but it's a haphazard process and it introduced it's own issues because it's really a hack, the better solution is to not have realms at all. But that's not an option for them.
Blizzard was planning a new MMO long ago, since back during the Wrath days (Arguably WoW's peak time - it had over 12-million active players, and was the best and most advanced MMO game available) but, I think for fear of alienating their lucrative subscriber base (why invest more time in this game if everybody will be playing the new one in a year ? Even if it's still up... you'd be all alone) ... it kept getting postponed and apparently got forgotten.
It is also, now, a world where PC's are no longer the dominant platform - other MMOs widely support consoles, a few even have mobile versions - WoW remains limited to PC and Mac (at least it works well in wine).
I think WoW is dying a slow death, not least because they ran out of warcraft stories to tell and the lore they came up with post-cataclysm was frankly... horrible. A lot of WoW's appeal was it's deep and very well written lore, and your character participating in that history. But since the pandas, it felt like a different world, your character didn't feel like it was the same one who had wept over Pamela Redpath and swore to avenge her killing Arthas and years later finally succeeded. I guess I can't blame blizzard for trying to keep the death as slow as possible though. It's still a cash-cow after all.
>Your home-made PV panels manufactured by 3 people, aren't nearly as efficient as the factory-made ones that you can bu
The 3 people were the ones doing the installing. I wasn't counting the manufacturers - because I BET when you calculate labour for building a coal plant you don't count all the people working in the cement factory or the brickyards or the steelmills but I promise you, you will not manage to build the thing without a lot of concrete, bricks and steel. The comparison to "people working on building the plant" is "people needed to install the solar panels on your roof" - which is the vast majority of solar in the world. Part of solar's superiority is that you actually CAN economically do it on small scales, there is no economic way to do coal to power your house, even if you could - your neighbours would sue the hell out of you for destroying the neighbourhood. Solar has none of those issues.
> The key is to "simply"(*) add them.
A sum that coal cannot possibly win, just the constant labour, every day, to keep it running will exceed the combined total for solar - probably by several orders of magnitude.
I looked it up a few months ago, because I was trying to do comparison of the KSP tech tree with how space technology developed in our world. One of the inaccuracies is how very late in the tree solar panels become available. The date I found was 1955. I didn't read anything about selenium cells that existed prior to that. Have you got a source ? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm not an American, I knew the Hoover wasn't first, but I hadn't realized we'd been doing it quite that long. And I honestly wouldn't have considered a generator at a private house to be comparable to hydropower for cities.
True, but you stopped too soon. Lots of that rain water ends up in rivers, running down to the sea. Humans have been using that water to turn turbines for many centuries (there are pictures of water-wheel powered metal presses dating back to the middle ages - it was a major tool in the production of early chain mail, and water-wheel mills are even older), and for almost a century now we've been using it to produce electricity.
So the Hoover damn's hydro-power... counts as solar !
These things have been in WoW for the better part of 2 years. They are far too expensive to really affect much, simply put to farm enough gold to buy the token takes a very long time. It's a way to spend when you got loads built up over years, but actually playing by buying tokens with gold would mean never doing anything but gold farming... boring as hell.
I stopped playing WoW a long time ago, but I don't see it as much of a gamechanger, certainly not enough to have lured me back. Giving it another use won't impact it that much either. At most it can be thought of as a loyalty reward for people who have been playing for years and are gold-capped - hey now you can turn some of that gold into other blizzard games.
Actually it does because it means your not comparing the same thing. This is comparing labour costs for installation versus labour costs for running an already-set-up system. That's idiotic.
If you compare legitimately you find that adding a solar deployment typically takes about 3 people. You can't DO coal that small, to add that you need a whole new plant - needing thousands of workers to complete over a period that can span decades.
Similarly you can compare post-install labour costs. For coal - well you still need prospectors to find fuel, miners to dig it up, truckers to deliver them and hundreds of workers to operate the plant.
After installing solar you need an average of ZERO labour for it's entire lifetime.
Comparing installation labour to running labour is fallacious at best.
Define solar. Because photovoltaics have only been around since 1955.
If you define solar so broadly as to include "boiling water with a lens" then why not count "making a fire with refracted sunlight" and say it goes back thousands ?
Word meanings rely on context, and in this context we are talking about the solar that is used to produce electricity, today. The tech before 1955 was frankly grossly inefficient. I suppose you could argue that tower-solar is a direct evolution of the same technology but that is also by far the smallest part of solar in the world because it's so costly to build. Equivalent-output PV's can be done for a fraction of the price.
Above all, solar though has one major economic advantage: it scales DOWNWARD as well. You can do a small-scale installation (i.e. power-one-home) and not pay much more per unit than the guy building a giant solar farm (indeed, he will likely consider it beneficial to buy more advanced units with things like solar tracking, will need additional security and constant maintenance staff to maximize his investment - and may actually end up paying more per unit). That matters for several important reasons. Firstly - the massive infrastructure costs involved in rolling out an energy supply is a lot less prohibitive when it can be spread across thousands of volunteers who only pay for a small part each, secondly it means that this market is ripe for entrepeneurship. Coal and nuclear, on the other hand, are natural monopolies due to their prohibitively high upfront costs (which is why the vast majority of the world's coal power plants are built with taxpayer money - and even in the US the only way to convince anybody to invest in it was to offer them protected monopoly status).
Firstly, Wegener's work hasn't been the norm for a very, very long time - it was roundly rejected in his lifetime, and only came back into vogue in the 1960s when computer simulations made a much stronger argument for the closeness of the fit. It really got going later on when, thanks to modern diving technology, we were able to go dive down where the predicted seams were - and indeed find the magma welling up through the cracks.
Secondly - this does not, in any way, contradict that theory. It merely suggests that there is an extra piece to the puzzle that's been lost. It doesn't change how the other pieces moved.
That seems unlikely though. Firstly, the areas where humans lived that way were not really wolf territory. The majority of our hunter/gatherer existence we would be more worried about lions, hyenas and leopards. And there is strong evidence that hunter/gatherers were quite adept at defending against those (not least that surviving hunter/gatherers are), indeed the evidence suggest that during the hunter/gatherer phase - humans were already the top predator.
There is also other things to consider, like the strong scientific evidence for the night-owl gene, which suggest that humans had evolved other defenses against predation of their nests even before the hunter/gatherer phase. Much as you'll find that predation of chimp young is extremely rare and for bonobos it's virtually non-existent.
The only things that hunt bonobos successfully are humans.
But the whole argument makes no sense anyway. The child mortality rate among chimps and bonobos is nowhere near 90%, it's around 30%. So why on earth would the chimp-family member with the worst child-survival rates have been the one to become the world's apex predator ? It seems extremely unlikely an outcome.
The only time human child-mortality WAS at 90% was during the industrial revolution - and natural causes had nothing to do with that.
Well then, you're going to have to spell out what the hell you are talking about.
My only theory is that you are referring to the last part of the text I quoted "for you were a foreigner in Egypt" and saying that didn't work out so well for them,. Which is true - but it actually proves my point. They had experienced, in Egypt (at least according to the book) many years as honored guests, and years of oppression - and the message is - do the honored guests thing because you know from personal experience how much better that is.
Either way, the point stands. The idea that you should treat all people -even foreigners with dignity and respect, as equals, is not a modern idea - it was being written down in books at least 5500 years ago, and I'm willing to bet there are even older books that mentioned it, that particular one just happened to survive into the modern age and be well known. Because it's such an obvious idea, there is no way Moses was the first person to think of it. Every person who thinks for 5 seconds will conclude it. Too bad America seems to have a rather significant portion of voters who have never done that.
What's doubly ironic is that, overwhelmingly, they identify as Christian - yet this particular command given to them by their God... gets routinely ignored. Out of all of leviticus in fact, the only command they take seriously is about homosexuals - the stupidest one in the whole book, but the few sensible ones, those they ignore.
My ancestors are as fundamentalist as the worst bible-belters. Hell they are fellow Calvinists who, much like the puritans, had fled persecution in Europe. Yet my ancestors took that commandment extremely literally and seriously - they would consider it an unbreakable law. They did the same with the "right to eat" commandments as well - another one American Christians like to conveniently forget.
If you take Christianity, and strip out all the commandments about treating other people decently, with dignity and respect as equals, and keep only the hateful bits, the evil bits, the slavery and subjugation bits... what you have left is a bad religion at is worst. What you have left, is why a christian fundamentalist just blew up a mosque in quebec and a couple of the same were trying to do that in South Carolina in October.