>Palestinians are a made up people with a made up agenda from Arab states that simply wish for Jews to be eradicated
The country of Palestine had existed for centuries when Israel was founded in 1948. Blatant lie.
>Despite all of that - when Arabs were encouraged to leave the land of Israel in 1948 Palestinians are not Arabs. They are semites, - ethnically they are exactly the same race as Israelis, they just have a different religion. This was proven by numerous genetic studies. You want to know who Palestinians really are ? They are the Jews who did NOT emigrate to Europe. The Jews that stayed behind. They just changed religion over the years.
>Jews BOUGHT the land from Arabs And nobody in the international community has a problem with them living in the land they bought. It's all those settlements in land that aren't theirs that's pissing people off. Not to mention that terrible treatment of civilians in places like Gaza which includes killing them en masse.
The rest of your racist tripe is filled with equally blatant lies, misrepresentations and flat out fabrications. Israel is far from an innocent party in the problems in the area. Their actions left millions of people stateless and, as in history has so often happened, the oppressed has become the oppressor.
By the way EVERYTHING you just said about Israel was said about the appartheid government in South Africa - who were great friends with Israel. Yet South Africa manage to end the appartheid system, the unequal laws, unequal representation, illegal occupations - all of it, around negotiating table while averting another war. It required the minority to give up sole political power - to be prepared to live as mere equals and not get special treatment, and negotiate a constitution to protect everybody. It was something that looked impossible even while it was busy happening, yet it happened. It can be done. If Israel wants a future, that future MUST be a system that gives full and equal rights to paletinians in the region as well as the descendents of palestinian refugees who wants to return. Anything else is a recipe for perpetual bloodshed. That is simply a fact - nowhere in history has any other outcome ever occurred - and none ever can. You can NEVER quell uprising by getting more violent, it only makes the uprisers get more violent in return. You shoot a thousand palestinians because they launched a misile at you ? It will NOT prevent the next misile, it will cause ten new ones to be launched.
It won't be easy, but it's the ONLY thing that can work - getting around a table to negotiate with a genuine desire for success. In South Africa negotiations broke down the first time - and the people had to have the grit to get back around the table and start over, that may happen, it won't be easy. But there are some things that any successfull negotiation (whether that's a one-state or a two-state solution) inevitably MUST do to succeed: and number one is full and equal rights for palestinians. You cannot have a peaceful society if a people are being denied equal rights, it's never worked in history and it never will.
It's funny how those that attack the UN constantly overlook it's actual flaws and keep attacking the things that actually WORK about it. We HAD an organisation like they want after World War 1, the bond of nations, and it was a complete and unmitigated disaster.
Ultimately both the BoN and the UN were created with the same purpose: to prevent another world war. Thus far the UN has succeeded where the BoN did not.
China is actually a perfect example of late-stage communism. Most people don't know this but Eastern Europe in 1985 and China today are virtually indistinguishable and they took identical paths about 20 years apart. Communist countries (and here I am using the term as it was used of the soviet union and such - more correctly called Bolshevism, none of the other versions) were fantastically productive economies, in fact they are wonderful at making things - much better than capitalist countries actually. They make things - and they make them cheaply. But when your focus is on making things cheaply, and you don't pay people well - you end up having trouble selling what you made. Whether your businesses is state-owned (as in Russia) or owned by private and mixed-state-and-private consortiums like in China, either way your local market does not have the demand to buy what your industries produce. So you become a major exporter. Eastern Europe did it in the 1970's and 1980's and China did it in the late 1990's.
You start exporting and because you can make things very cheaply you soon rule the market for consumer goods in other countries. China was better at this than Eastern Europe since they didn't have a cold war and sanctions limiting their destinations but that just meant they could export to countries like the USA as well (and get US companies to move factories there) while Eastern Europe was mostly limited to exporting to places like Africa and South America.
Either way - this works really well, you get very rich and very profitable businesses follow, but your own people mostly stay fairly poor. You may uplift them a little but you can't do it very much, if you do then they start demanding decent pay - and you lose the reason people are buying your goods in the first place. For a long time, this works - but eventually the supply starts to exceed demands. A recession in your customer countries can hasten this of course but sooner or later you are simply exporting more stuff than the world wants to buy. Your economy starts to contract, you are too good at making things and you've yet again run out of customers to buy them. Now you desperately try to turn yourself into a consumer-society, you try to uplift your own people rapidly so they can branch into new types of industries and become buyers of your own goods. China is busy doing that now, Eastern Europe was trying the same in the 1980s.
In Eastern Europe it didn't work - they could not change their economies and societies fast enough, and their economies ultimately collapsed, which precipitated the end of the cold war. China has better odds of success, they don't have the trade barriers that made it harder for Eastern Europe to change their economies and they have a lot more people - so they can afford to lose a lot more in the transition before facing a collapse or insurrection.
China may well succeed where Eastern Europe failed. What you would call the end result of that is anybodies guess. You would still have a Bolshevist totalitarian state with a planned economy, but now it's a consumer society - so it's not really ANY kind of communism anymore (even though THEY are likely to keep calling it that). I suppose if it goes far enough - you could actually end up with a China that resembles the Pinochet regime, hardcore free-market-fundamentalist economies with a dictatorship in charge...
If gold's value was based on it's actual usefulness it would have crashed decades ago. The total gold used for industrial and jewelry purposes is less than 1 thousandth of a percent of the gold we've mined. Nearly all of it was mined as currency and despite not having been used as such for decades it keeps being traded by people who treat it as such (and this even now when 2/3rds of the gold trade is flagrant fraud - same ounce gold owned by 3 different people).
All currency is just a collective agreement to pretend something is valuable, frankly since none of that value is EVER actually *real* (money is never valuable - it merely represents things which could possibly have value) - it makes perfect sense to use the cheapest possible thing to represent it with. Why use something that has to be mined at great expense in incredibly dangerous conditions when you can do the same job with a sheet of paper ?
At least in theory a fiat currency is tied to the productive labour of the people of the country - which is why hyperinflation only ever really happens in countries that first had some other kind of social unrest or plague or war destroy their productive capacity (look it up - every example of hyperinflation* in history was first preceded by an unrelated and massive problem that destroyed the productive capacity - printing money only *really* becomes a problem when there isn't any production for it to represent). Bitcoin isn't even tied to that. It's, at best, tied to the energy it costs to mine - which you need to buy, for a fiat currency... which makes it nothing but a substitute for fiat currencies without any official recognition or supply controls or consumer protections or... well any of the things we added to money over the centuries to solve the many problems we encountered over the past ten thousand or so years. Which pretty much leaves it vulnerable to every single one of those long-solved problems, problems we solved so successfully and so long ago that most people have forgotten they ever existed.
*Well, all but one but the one time that it actually WAS the money supply in isolation is never mentioned by the goldbugs. That was the Spanish hyper-inflation problem which ultimately led to the collapse of the Spanish empire. The reason they don't mention that one is that goldbugs are mostly also free market fundamentalists who think inequality, no matter how severe, is the proper state of the world - so they don't want to mention that one because the key driving force of it was extreme inequality. The money supply was massively increased (by conquistadors coming back with gold and silver mined in the new world by slaves), but this increase went entirely to a tiny elite (the conquistadors). So businesses raised prices massively to get at that new money from the conquistadors who had it to spend. Of course this meant the money was worth a lot less than when they arrived - so their brutality in the mines got worse and worse because no matter how much they mined they never got much richer back home. Meantime every merchant's prices had gone through the roof selling at a fortune to the conquistadors, so the suppliers raised their prices to cash in on the newly-moneyed merchants... etc. etc. and the average workers (mostly farm-workers then but others like bricklayers and the like too) did not see their incomes increase. While the prices of food and clothing were set at the rates only the super-rich could afford, the country starved... until civil war followed.... so basically the end result is the same as every extreme inequality in history, just with a side-trip into hyperinflation that aggravated the problem.
Wait... you think that "solved" something ? Only if you ignore the whole host of problems it caused. Number one: massive fraud. The total amount of gold bullion in the world ever mined is about a cube the size of a tennis court. The total gold bullion that there are gold certificates for ? Is roughly 3 times that vollume.
In other words - every bar of gold in the world has been sold to at least 3 different people who can all legally prove they own it ! Every gold certificate in existence has been fraudulently copied and sold to somebody else at least twice.
Gold was never a very secure kind of currency to begin with, it was always too easy to commit fraud with (history is rife with leaders who replaced their gold with gold-plated lead and defiled the currency for self enrichment) but since we stopped selling the physical item that problem has gotten far worse. At least in the old days if somebody sold you painted lead you had a chance of finding out, and maybe prosecuting them. Today - two thirds of the gold owners in the world are fraud victims and we have absolutely no way of even telling the fraud victims apart from the legitimate owners since the fraud was mostly committed by the same banks that issued the real certificates using the same official mechanisms. A good counterfeiter can be hard to detect, a good counterfeiter who works for the mint is impossible to detect, and that's effectively the state of the gold trade. A trade in counterfeit paper issued by the same institutions that issue the real thing.
That would be because the two lists are fundamentally different things. The first is things they are required to do by law. The second is something they do, on their property, based on their own policies.
The former is an unnacceptable intrusion on liberty. The latter IS liberty at work.
You may not like their policies, that's your right - and there are many other code hosts with different policies, but they have every right to have those policies. And not wanting to host content for mysoginistic dickbags on their property is really a freedom that everybody has and with damn good reason. You don't get to complain about them removing gamergate unless you are personally happy to let feminists spraypaint slogans on your living room wall. Even then you just removed the hypocricy - you didn't gain any legal right to tell others what to allow on THEIR property.
Well paleontology is a difficult science requiring a lot of inference from limited evidence. Most things do not leave fossils when they die. When Jurassic Park came out the worlds scientists had between them 3 Tyranosaur fossils - not one of them complete. Since then the number has grown well over a dozen - largely attributable to the movie. The renewed interest in dinosaurs equalled grant money so scientists could actually afford to go look for more. At that time the dinosaur-bird link was a hugely controversial theory. Now it is consensus. We still cannot agree on whether dinosaurs were cold or hot blooded (the birds threw a spanner in the wrench too) or perhaps the lizard-hipped dinosaurs were coldblooded and the bird-hipped ones warmblooded (it would fit the model that bird-hipped dinos were built for speed). But all this adds up a to a science where every theory could be displaced in just a few years. When your evidence is such a small sample size you simply cannot ever be sure what the next fragment will tell you.
I looked it up - there seems to be some evidence that contradicts the science I'd been taught which put grass as something that only evolved after Dinosaurs were already gone. Specifically phyoliths found in Dinosaur dung from 67 million yeas ago suggests there was at least some grasses that existed, and were eaten by, dinosaurs since phyoliths are fairly unique to grass.
Horseshoe crabs have blue blood because their blood oxygen chemistry is based on copper (most living animals use iron for that purpose) - but it's unique in other ways too. The Horseshoe crab has one of the most powerful and unique immune systems in the world. Whenever any foreign body enters their bloodstream the blood just clots around it. This would kill a mammal but since they have an exoskeleton floating blood clots are no major issue. However it makes their blood the most powerful parasite and bacteria detector known to man. Every year we draw blood from thousands of them and then release them again - and that blood is used to test medicines and vaccines to ensure that the stuff we inject into humans aren't carrying pathogens. Without them we would have no test nearly as reliable to detect tainted medicines before they are used - and the death rate from tainted medicines (notably vaccines) would be huge, like it was before we discovered this.
And the aftermath of a massive asteroid crash that eradicated almost all plantlife definitely is not an ordinary situation. Its entirely feasible that in many regions only one plant would have survived. Keep in mind also that plants themselves were different. Shrubs and ferns mostly. Large landcoverers didnt exist. Hell grass only evolved about 15 to 20 million years ago.
It is, also, an official dictionary meaning. If you're going to get pedantic about what words can and cannot mean then you have to have some sort of neutal way to arbitrate or anybody could pedantically insist on any meaning as the only meaning and we would be left with all the pedants arranging a deathmatch among themselves to select the wordmaster - whoever is still standing at the end. Alternatively we can use the dictionary, a work compiled by expert lexicographers as the measure by which we can arbitrate such disputes.
The choice is yours. I rather hope you choose the deathmatch. I'll buy a ticket to see that.
It took me all of 5 seconds on dictionary.com to confirm that both meanings are valid and, in fact, the meaning as used in the summary is the primary definition - and thus the MORE correct one.
Words change meanings over time, and get new meanings added. It is not WRONG to use these new meanings - by that logic we all need to go back to whatever proto-language homo erectus spoke - because pretty much every language on earth exists because of new words that were invented and old words that had their meanings altered and expanded over time.
It's really rather annoying when grammar and vocabulary nazis don't actually know grammar and vocabulary.
Omnivores often have an advantage in that they can survive in more habitats and handle habitat changes more readily. The price they pay for it is the jack-of-all-trades price. Omnivores generally aren't as good as specialists at getting any particular kind of food. So if a change leaves only one good food source available, and a specialist is available then the omnivores lose out.
So to say they had the advantage would be an excessive generalization. They probably had an advantage in many places - and were the first to go in others.
>What about creatures like crocodiles, alligators, and the Komodo dragon which all could pass for dinosaurs?
Could pass for - but aren't. They are different families in the reptile kingdom entirely. Many of whom predated the dinosaurs. Even when dinosaurs were around they were not the *only* large reptilian family - they were in fact just one of four (that we know off). They were, however, the largest LANDLIVING reptiles at the time. The number two spot goes to the Pterosaurs, even though most people only know Pterodactyl who wasn't even the most impressive of that family, and which are constantly filed in with dinosaurs (in every dino movie for one) even though they were not dinosaurs (and very, very distant relatives). There were hardly any aquatic dinosaurs - the oceans then belonged to the Mosasaurs and Icthyosaurs -two families that were both just as diverse as dinosaurs. The ichthyosaurs were essentially reptilian dolphins and whales but they eventually went extinct after being outcompeted by the plesiosaurs - the third major aquatic reptile family. And all this is still just the highlights package - I mean in the late triassic there were already turtles in the oceans - among them two whale-sized giants that could swallow a modern leatherback without chewing. Imagine a two-tonne turtle. And their descendents are also still with us.
Horse-shoe crabs are the last surviving member of a family that ruled the the oceans some 350-million years ago - long before any of these reptiles. The rise of the reptile predators probably helped along the extinction of every single species in that family - but the horse-shoes survived (and are not crabs), then outlived the great reptiles and continued right into present day - where they now hold the record as the animal that has directly saved more human lives than any other.
>I would be quite interested in finding out if there are any fossil remains of mammals and how they fit into the ecosystem with dinosaurs before the big one hit
There are, plenty. The oldest mammal fossils are between 150 and 200 millions years old. Mammals and Dinosaurs coexisted for a very long time. We identify early mammals by their teeth. Mammals alone have precisely interlocking teeth. This came at a price. Sharks and crocodiles can replace lost teeth indefinitely - but when you have precisely interlocking teeth every tooth is a snowflake, and so you can't just sausage-factory out infinite replacements. Mammals therefore only have two sets of teeth - one smaller set that sees them through childhood and a larger set through adulthood. All our dental issues and root cannals began with that.
But it has a catch - to make the first set last through childhood, it had to be bigger than what can fit infancy - so for the first part of their lives mammal babies have no teeth at all. So they needed a new food source for babies. Thus was evolved: milk.
So the teeth are a key clue to whether or not a creature was milk-producing, and it's how we differentiate early mammals from their reptilian contemporaries and close ancestors. The reason the date-span is so long (150-200 million) is that the oldest likely mammal fossil we have is 200-million years old, but many paleontologists believe it should be considered a reptile ancestor of mammals and not a true mammal yet. By 150-milliion years ago though, there were plenty of mammals and they were definitely mammals. These first definite mammals were morganucodontids which were tiny creatures that looked rather like shrews. They probably at seeds and the occasional dinosaur egg and were likely eaten by the smaller predatory dinosaurs in turn. They were however, brainy little guys. Their skull cavity for body mass ratio was far higher than any known dinosaur. They were our ancestors - and the mammalian trait of intelligence was already established.
By the time of the K/T event they had diversified significantly into a number of species. What the study now actually says is that most of those species did not survive K/T - only a small number here and there made it through. And then, as plantlife recovered, there were these massive ecosystem niches ready to be taken advantage off - and no big creatures in the way, and those mammals were perfectly poised to take advantage. You often find the greatest diversity right after mass extinctions. With so many creatures gone, for a while almost any body plan can offer a workable survival advantage - and then as they start to compet with each other, it narrows down again into the winning categories.
Yes, I know. That's the case in France - like I said - I specifically pointed out that this was a pretty unique thing. I was also saying it's a very good thing.
>"I'm greedy, so I'll look the other way and give hints that this bad thing should be done, and wave money to get greedy people to do bad things" is malice.
No it isn't. Malice has a rather specific definition. Malice is causing pain or damage for the pleasure of doing so. It's doing harm because you enjoy the harm itself. Greed is not malice, it's no less bad - but it is very different. A greedy person won't harm you unless there is profit for them in it. A malicious person will harm you if they think they can get away with it.
>I suggest the executives didn't know what was going on, Well at this stage we don't have conclusive evidence either way, but I suspect differently. Hopefully over the course of these court cases we'll get a definitive answer. History suggests you're wrong though - it's ALWAYS argued that the executives didn't know and it almost never turns out to be true.
> and the engineers didn't think it was a big deal because the car actually has emissions like other cars Actually the difference was significant - but even if you believe it's small (I'm not disputing your numbers I dissagree with your claim that they represent a small difference but that's a subjective thing) - the car was marketted based on the test figures. VW ran massive ads about how clean their diesel cars were - even one with the cast from Mythbusters. It was a key selling point, so they were flagrantly deceiving consumers. That alone is a crime worthy of this punishment. Selling things to people by flat out lying about what they are buying is the very definition of fraud.
Which is only a problem if the meat packer does not wash the place every other day. Thats why meat inspectors show up unannounced. So its more like somebody who bribed the meat inspector's secretary to warn him if the ibspector is coming and never bothers to clean otherwise.
That said. I never assumed mallice. In fact I rejected mallice as extremely unlikely. I suspect greed and even then only indirectly. I suspect that greedy executives promissed a nice bonus to the engineers if they ensure the car will pass the test regardless of how it actually runs. Executives who saw that warning from Bosch and new exactly what they wanted to happen even if they were likely too smart to ever say it outright. Nlt doing the dirty work yourself may keep mob bosses from convictions but it does not make them any less guilty.
Nice theory but its disproven by the known evidence. Specifically that we know the origin of the code and its original purpose. It was written by Bosch as a debugging tool and there is documentation proving that Bosch had specifically warned VW not to enable it for anything else. So the engineers who did this did it despite being fully aware of the risks. It wasnt an oversight. It was deliberaty ignoring the warning that the code would be fraudulent to use in production.
Every programmer has written code like that. Code which feeds something preset values so you can check that codes which consumes those values give the known right answers. Its the way unit testing works. But an accountant who sends unit test results to the IRS instead of using customer's actual books to their tax returns will go to jail for fraud. That is about the same levelof fraud as this - provided the real tax return would have had a billion dollar bill and the one he filed got a 500 million dollar rebate.
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>Palestinians are a made up people with a made up agenda from Arab states that simply wish for Jews to be eradicated
The country of Palestine had existed for centuries when Israel was founded in 1948. Blatant lie.
>Despite all of that - when Arabs were encouraged to leave the land of Israel in 1948
Palestinians are not Arabs. They are semites, - ethnically they are exactly the same race as Israelis, they just have a different religion. This was proven by numerous genetic studies. You want to know who Palestinians really are ? They are the Jews who did NOT emigrate to Europe. The Jews that stayed behind. They just changed religion over the years.
>Jews BOUGHT the land from Arabs
And nobody in the international community has a problem with them living in the land they bought. It's all those settlements in land that aren't theirs that's pissing people off. Not to mention that terrible treatment of civilians in places like Gaza which includes killing them en masse.
The rest of your racist tripe is filled with equally blatant lies, misrepresentations and flat out fabrications. Israel is far from an innocent party in the problems in the area. Their actions left millions of people stateless and, as in history has so often happened, the oppressed has become the oppressor.
By the way EVERYTHING you just said about Israel was said about the appartheid government in South Africa - who were great friends with Israel. Yet South Africa manage to end the appartheid system, the unequal laws, unequal representation, illegal occupations - all of it, around negotiating table while averting another war.
It required the minority to give up sole political power - to be prepared to live as mere equals and not get special treatment, and negotiate a constitution to protect everybody. It was something that looked impossible even while it was busy happening, yet it happened. It can be done. If Israel wants a future, that future MUST be a system that gives full and equal rights to paletinians in the region as well as the descendents of palestinian refugees who wants to return. Anything else is a recipe for perpetual bloodshed. That is simply a fact - nowhere in history has any other outcome ever occurred - and none ever can. You can NEVER quell uprising by getting more violent, it only makes the uprisers get more violent in return. You shoot a thousand palestinians because they launched a misile at you ? It will NOT prevent the next misile, it will cause ten new ones to be launched.
It won't be easy, but it's the ONLY thing that can work - getting around a table to negotiate with a genuine desire for success. In South Africa negotiations broke down the first time - and the people had to have the grit to get back around the table and start over, that may happen, it won't be easy. But there are some things that any successfull negotiation (whether that's a one-state or a two-state solution) inevitably MUST do to succeed: and number one is full and equal rights for palestinians. You cannot have a peaceful society if a people are being denied equal rights, it's never worked in history and it never will.
It's funny how those that attack the UN constantly overlook it's actual flaws and keep attacking the things that actually WORK about it. We HAD an organisation like they want after World War 1, the bond of nations, and it was a complete and unmitigated disaster.
Ultimately both the BoN and the UN were created with the same purpose: to prevent another world war. Thus far the UN has succeeded where the BoN did not.
China is actually a perfect example of late-stage communism. Most people don't know this but Eastern Europe in 1985 and China today are virtually indistinguishable and they took identical paths about 20 years apart.
Communist countries (and here I am using the term as it was used of the soviet union and such - more correctly called Bolshevism, none of the other versions) were fantastically productive economies, in fact they are wonderful at making things - much better than capitalist countries actually. They make things - and they make them cheaply.
But when your focus is on making things cheaply, and you don't pay people well - you end up having trouble selling what you made. Whether your businesses is state-owned (as in Russia) or owned by private and mixed-state-and-private consortiums like in China, either way your local market does not have the demand to buy what your industries produce. So you become a major exporter. Eastern Europe did it in the 1970's and 1980's and China did it in the late 1990's.
You start exporting and because you can make things very cheaply you soon rule the market for consumer goods in other countries. China was better at this than Eastern Europe since they didn't have a cold war and sanctions limiting their destinations but that just meant they could export to countries like the USA as well (and get US companies to move factories there) while Eastern Europe was mostly limited to exporting to places like Africa and South America.
Either way - this works really well, you get very rich and very profitable businesses follow, but your own people mostly stay fairly poor. You may uplift them a little but you can't do it very much, if you do then they start demanding decent pay - and you lose the reason people are buying your goods in the first place.
For a long time, this works - but eventually the supply starts to exceed demands. A recession in your customer countries can hasten this of course but sooner or later you are simply exporting more stuff than the world wants to buy. Your economy starts to contract, you are too good at making things and you've yet again run out of customers to buy them.
Now you desperately try to turn yourself into a consumer-society, you try to uplift your own people rapidly so they can branch into new types of industries and become buyers of your own goods. China is busy doing that now, Eastern Europe was trying the same in the 1980s.
In Eastern Europe it didn't work - they could not change their economies and societies fast enough, and their economies ultimately collapsed, which precipitated the end of the cold war. China has better odds of success, they don't have the trade barriers that made it harder for Eastern Europe to change their economies and they have a lot more people - so they can afford to lose a lot more in the transition before facing a collapse or insurrection.
China may well succeed where Eastern Europe failed. What you would call the end result of that is anybodies guess. You would still have a Bolshevist totalitarian state with a planned economy, but now it's a consumer society - so it's not really ANY kind of communism anymore (even though THEY are likely to keep calling it that). I suppose if it goes far enough - you could actually end up with a China that resembles the Pinochet regime, hardcore free-market-fundamentalist economies with a dictatorship in charge...
If gold's value was based on it's actual usefulness it would have crashed decades ago. The total gold used for industrial and jewelry purposes is less than 1 thousandth of a percent of the gold we've mined. Nearly all of it was mined as currency and despite not having been used as such for decades it keeps being traded by people who treat it as such (and this even now when 2/3rds of the gold trade is flagrant fraud - same ounce gold owned by 3 different people).
All currency is just a collective agreement to pretend something is valuable, frankly since none of that value is EVER actually *real* (money is never valuable - it merely represents things which could possibly have value) - it makes perfect sense to use the cheapest possible thing to represent it with. Why use something that has to be mined at great expense in incredibly dangerous conditions when you can do the same job with a sheet of paper ?
At least in theory a fiat currency is tied to the productive labour of the people of the country - which is why hyperinflation only ever really happens in countries that first had some other kind of social unrest or plague or war destroy their productive capacity (look it up - every example of hyperinflation* in history was first preceded by an unrelated and massive problem that destroyed the productive capacity - printing money only *really* becomes a problem when there isn't any production for it to represent). Bitcoin isn't even tied to that. ... well any of the things we added to money over the centuries to solve the many problems we encountered over the past ten thousand or so years. Which pretty much leaves it vulnerable to every single one of those long-solved problems, problems we solved so successfully and so long ago that most people have forgotten they ever existed.
It's, at best, tied to the energy it costs to mine - which you need to buy, for a fiat currency... which makes it nothing but a substitute for fiat currencies without any official recognition or supply controls or consumer protections or
*Well, all but one but the one time that it actually WAS the money supply in isolation is never mentioned by the goldbugs. That was the Spanish hyper-inflation problem which ultimately led to the collapse of the Spanish empire. The reason they don't mention that one is that goldbugs are mostly also free market fundamentalists who think inequality, no matter how severe, is the proper state of the world - so they don't want to mention that one because the key driving force of it was extreme inequality. The money supply was massively increased (by conquistadors coming back with gold and silver mined in the new world by slaves), but this increase went entirely to a tiny elite (the conquistadors). So businesses raised prices massively to get at that new money from the conquistadors who had it to spend. Of course this meant the money was worth a lot less than when they arrived - so their brutality in the mines got worse and worse because no matter how much they mined they never got much richer back home. Meantime every merchant's prices had gone through the roof selling at a fortune to the conquistadors, so the suppliers raised their prices to cash in on the newly-moneyed merchants... etc. etc. and the average workers (mostly farm-workers then but others like bricklayers and the like too) did not see their incomes increase. While the prices of food and clothing were set at the rates only the super-rich could afford, the country starved... until civil war followed.... so basically the end result is the same as every extreme inequality in history, just with a side-trip into hyperinflation that aggravated the problem.
Wait... you think that "solved" something ? Only if you ignore the whole host of problems it caused.
Number one: massive fraud. The total amount of gold bullion in the world ever mined is about a cube the size of a tennis court.
The total gold bullion that there are gold certificates for ? Is roughly 3 times that vollume.
In other words - every bar of gold in the world has been sold to at least 3 different people who can all legally prove they own it ! Every gold certificate in existence has been fraudulently copied and sold to somebody else at least twice.
Gold was never a very secure kind of currency to begin with, it was always too easy to commit fraud with (history is rife with leaders who replaced their gold with gold-plated lead and defiled the currency for self enrichment) but since we stopped selling the physical item that problem has gotten far worse. At least in the old days if somebody sold you painted lead you had a chance of finding out, and maybe prosecuting them. Today - two thirds of the gold owners in the world are fraud victims and we have absolutely no way of even telling the fraud victims apart from the legitimate owners since the fraud was mostly committed by the same banks that issued the real certificates using the same official mechanisms.
A good counterfeiter can be hard to detect, a good counterfeiter who works for the mint is impossible to detect, and that's effectively the state of the gold trade. A trade in counterfeit paper issued by the same institutions that issue the real thing.
>When Americans think of "libertarian"
So what do you want them to think then ? Classic-libertarian ? That would be anti-government, anti-business socialist anarchism !
That would be because the two lists are fundamentally different things. The first is things they are required to do by law. The second is something they do, on their property, based on their own policies.
The former is an unnacceptable intrusion on liberty. The latter IS liberty at work.
You may not like their policies, that's your right - and there are many other code hosts with different policies, but they have every right to have those policies. And not wanting to host content for mysoginistic dickbags on their property is really a freedom that everybody has and with damn good reason. You don't get to complain about them removing gamergate unless you are personally happy to let feminists spraypaint slogans on your living room wall. Even then you just removed the hypocricy - you didn't gain any legal right to tell others what to allow on THEIR property.
Well paleontology is a difficult science requiring a lot of inference from limited evidence. Most things do not leave fossils when they die.
When Jurassic Park came out the worlds scientists had between them 3 Tyranosaur fossils - not one of them complete. Since then the number has grown well over a dozen - largely attributable to the movie. The renewed interest in dinosaurs equalled grant money so scientists could actually afford to go look for more.
At that time the dinosaur-bird link was a hugely controversial theory. Now it is consensus. We still cannot agree on whether dinosaurs were cold or hot blooded (the birds threw a spanner in the wrench too) or perhaps the lizard-hipped dinosaurs were coldblooded and the bird-hipped ones warmblooded (it would fit the model that bird-hipped dinos were built for speed).
But all this adds up a to a science where every theory could be displaced in just a few years. When your evidence is such a small sample size you simply cannot ever be sure what the next fragment will tell you.
I looked it up - there seems to be some evidence that contradicts the science I'd been taught which put grass as something that only evolved after Dinosaurs were already gone. Specifically phyoliths found in Dinosaur dung from 67 million yeas ago suggests there was at least some grasses that existed, and were eaten by, dinosaurs since phyoliths are fairly unique to grass.
Horseshoe crabs have blue blood because their blood oxygen chemistry is based on copper (most living animals use iron for that purpose) - but it's unique in other ways too. The Horseshoe crab has one of the most powerful and unique immune systems in the world. Whenever any foreign body enters their bloodstream the blood just clots around it. This would kill a mammal but since they have an exoskeleton floating blood clots are no major issue. However it makes their blood the most powerful parasite and bacteria detector known to man. Every year we draw blood from thousands of them and then release them again - and that blood is used to test medicines and vaccines to ensure that the stuff we inject into humans aren't carrying pathogens.
Without them we would have no test nearly as reliable to detect tainted medicines before they are used - and the death rate from tainted medicines (notably vaccines) would be huge, like it was before we discovered this.
In my case it was a cow - I know what happens when a car hits a full grown cow... it is probably less risky to hit a tree.
And the aftermath of a massive asteroid crash that eradicated almost all plantlife definitely is not an ordinary situation. Its entirely feasible that in many regions only one plant would have survived.
Keep in mind also that plants themselves were different. Shrubs and ferns mostly. Large landcoverers didnt exist. Hell grass only evolved about 15 to 20 million years ago.
Yeah... we all look forward to the publication of "Sexconker's dictionary of 'because I fucking said so'".
Will you be finishing that in parallel with your current project "10001 cures for wanker's cramp" or will you be starting it after that's published ?
It is, also, an official dictionary meaning.
If you're going to get pedantic about what words can and cannot mean then you have to have some sort of neutal way to arbitrate or anybody could pedantically insist on any meaning as the only meaning and we would be left with all the pedants arranging a deathmatch among themselves to select the wordmaster - whoever is still standing at the end.
Alternatively we can use the dictionary, a work compiled by expert lexicographers as the measure by which we can arbitrate such disputes.
The choice is yours. I rather hope you choose the deathmatch. I'll buy a ticket to see that.
It took me all of 5 seconds on dictionary.com to confirm that both meanings are valid and, in fact, the meaning as used in the summary is the primary definition - and thus the MORE correct one.
Words change meanings over time, and get new meanings added. It is not WRONG to use these new meanings - by that logic we all need to go back to whatever proto-language homo erectus spoke - because pretty much every language on earth exists because of new words that were invented and old words that had their meanings altered and expanded over time.
It's really rather annoying when grammar and vocabulary nazis don't actually know grammar and vocabulary.
Omnivores often have an advantage in that they can survive in more habitats and handle habitat changes more readily. The price they pay for it is the jack-of-all-trades price. Omnivores generally aren't as good as specialists at getting any particular kind of food. So if a change leaves only one good food source available, and a specialist is available then the omnivores lose out.
So to say they had the advantage would be an excessive generalization. They probably had an advantage in many places - and were the first to go in others.
>What about creatures like crocodiles, alligators, and the Komodo dragon which all could pass for dinosaurs?
Could pass for - but aren't. They are different families in the reptile kingdom entirely. Many of whom predated the dinosaurs. Even when dinosaurs were around they were not the *only* large reptilian family - they were in fact just one of four (that we know off). They were, however, the largest LANDLIVING reptiles at the time. The number two spot goes to the Pterosaurs, even though most people only know Pterodactyl who wasn't even the most impressive of that family, and which are constantly filed in with dinosaurs (in every dino movie for one) even though they were not dinosaurs (and very, very distant relatives). There were hardly any aquatic dinosaurs - the oceans then belonged to the Mosasaurs and Icthyosaurs -two families that were both just as diverse as dinosaurs. The ichthyosaurs were essentially reptilian dolphins and whales but they eventually went extinct after being outcompeted by the plesiosaurs - the third major aquatic reptile family.
And all this is still just the highlights package - I mean in the late triassic there were already turtles in the oceans - among them two whale-sized giants that could swallow a modern leatherback without chewing. Imagine a two-tonne turtle. And their descendents are also still with us.
Horse-shoe crabs are the last surviving member of a family that ruled the the oceans some 350-million years ago - long before any of these reptiles. The rise of the reptile predators probably helped along the extinction of every single species in that family - but the horse-shoes survived (and are not crabs), then outlived the great reptiles and continued right into present day - where they now hold the record as the animal that has directly saved more human lives than any other.
>I would be quite interested in finding out if there are any fossil remains of mammals and how they fit into the ecosystem with dinosaurs before the big one hit
There are, plenty. The oldest mammal fossils are between 150 and 200 millions years old. Mammals and Dinosaurs coexisted for a very long time. We identify early mammals by their teeth. Mammals alone have precisely interlocking teeth. This came at a price. Sharks and crocodiles can replace lost teeth indefinitely - but when you have precisely interlocking teeth every tooth is a snowflake, and so you can't just sausage-factory out infinite replacements. Mammals therefore only have two sets of teeth - one smaller set that sees them through childhood and a larger set through adulthood. All our dental issues and root cannals began with that.
But it has a catch - to make the first set last through childhood, it had to be bigger than what can fit infancy - so for the first part of their lives mammal babies have no teeth at all. So they needed a new food source for babies. Thus was evolved: milk.
So the teeth are a key clue to whether or not a creature was milk-producing, and it's how we differentiate early mammals from their reptilian contemporaries and close ancestors. The reason the date-span is so long (150-200 million) is that the oldest likely mammal fossil we have is 200-million years old, but many paleontologists believe it should be considered a reptile ancestor of mammals and not a true mammal yet. By 150-milliion years ago though, there were plenty of mammals and they were definitely mammals. These first definite mammals were morganucodontids which were tiny creatures that looked rather like shrews. They probably at seeds and the occasional dinosaur egg and were likely eaten by the smaller predatory dinosaurs in turn. They were however, brainy little guys. Their skull cavity for body mass ratio was far higher than any known dinosaur. They were our ancestors - and the mammalian trait of intelligence was already established.
By the time of the K/T event they had diversified significantly into a number of species. What the study now actually says is that most of those species did not survive K/T - only a small number here and there made it through. And then, as plantlife recovered, there were these massive ecosystem niches ready to be taken advantage off - and no big creatures in the way, and those mammals were perfectly poised to take advantage. You often find the greatest diversity right after mass extinctions. With so many creatures gone, for a while almost any body plan can offer a workable survival advantage - and then as they start to compet with each other, it narrows down again into the winning categories.
Google it. National geographic reported the ski resorts back in 2007 already. I imagine it is worse now.
Yes, I know. That's the case in France - like I said - I specifically pointed out that this was a pretty unique thing. I was also saying it's a very good thing.
>"I'm greedy, so I'll look the other way and give hints that this bad thing should be done, and wave money to get greedy people to do bad things" is malice.
No it isn't. Malice has a rather specific definition. Malice is causing pain or damage for the pleasure of doing so. It's doing harm because you enjoy the harm itself. Greed is not malice, it's no less bad - but it is very different. A greedy person won't harm you unless there is profit for them in it. A malicious person will harm you if they think they can get away with it.
>I suggest the executives didn't know what was going on,
Well at this stage we don't have conclusive evidence either way, but I suspect differently. Hopefully over the course of these court cases we'll get a definitive answer. History suggests you're wrong though - it's ALWAYS argued that the executives didn't know and it almost never turns out to be true.
> and the engineers didn't think it was a big deal because the car actually has emissions like other cars
Actually the difference was significant - but even if you believe it's small (I'm not disputing your numbers I dissagree with your claim that they represent a small difference but that's a subjective thing) - the car was marketted based on the test figures. VW ran massive ads about how clean their diesel cars were - even one with the cast from Mythbusters. It was a key selling point, so they were flagrantly deceiving consumers. That alone is a crime worthy of this punishment. Selling things to people by flat out lying about what they are buying is the very definition of fraud.
Which is only a problem if the meat packer does not wash the place every other day. Thats why meat inspectors show up unannounced.
So its more like somebody who bribed the meat inspector's secretary to warn him if the ibspector is coming and never bothers to clean otherwise.
That said. I never assumed mallice. In fact I rejected mallice as extremely unlikely. I suspect greed and even then only indirectly. I suspect that greedy executives promissed a nice bonus to the engineers if they ensure the car will pass the test regardless of how it actually runs. Executives who saw that warning from Bosch and new exactly what they wanted to happen even if they were likely too smart to ever say it outright. Nlt doing the dirty work yourself may keep mob bosses from convictions but it does not make them any less guilty.
Nice theory but its disproven by the known evidence. Specifically that we know the origin of the code and its original purpose. It was written by Bosch as a debugging tool and there is documentation proving that Bosch had specifically warned VW not to enable it for anything else.
So the engineers who did this did it despite being fully aware of the risks. It wasnt an oversight. It was deliberaty ignoring the warning that the code would be fraudulent to use in production.
Every programmer has written code like that. Code which feeds something preset values so you can check that codes which consumes those values give the known right answers. Its the way unit testing works. But an accountant who sends unit test results to the IRS instead of using customer's actual books to their tax returns will go to jail for fraud. That is about the same levelof fraud as this - provided the real tax return would have had a billion dollar bill and the one he filed got a 500 million dollar rebate.
Except of course it's half a million in the US alone - and that's the LOWEST number in the world.