Louis XVI had some progressive velleities, but lacked political acumen (though he wasn't as stupid as he is often portrayed - by today's standards, he was a huge nerd).
La Fayette initially came to the help of the newborn USA by his own decision and with his own means, when France was reluctant to confront the English. Later, he convinced Louis XVI to help. I won't go into details but a lot of occult funding was involved, with the implication of the famous playwright Beaumarchais at a point.
Actually, the Declaration of the Right of Man and of the Citizen, the first French constitutional text, was drafted by La Fayette when he came back from the USA, and heavily borrowed from the constitution of Virginia IIRC.
We can talk about a lot of cross-pollinisation instead of making it one-way.
I was wondering something, actually: last year I had a tetanus shot (well, a diphteria-tetanus-poliomyelitis shot), and it was intramuscular, not intraveinous (my shoulder ended up a bit sensitive for a few days). So I'm a bit puzzled by people systematically speaking of IV when it comes to vaccination.
Bad example, this calendar stuff. I totally agree the gain in that case wouldn't be significant enough to justify using such a trick. I was more thinking of tight optimisation for handling huge datasets. My point still is: if you think of using this at some point, don't think twice, think thrice or more. There's almost always a less witchy solution. Almost.
Never say never. This still can be useful in marginal cases (never happened to me, and pretty unlikely to ever happen). However, this must be done within a limited scope by using the local operator, and with thorough documentation. These advices apply everytime you have to modify a "magic variable" (the most often modified variable is the record separator $/).
You know, a programmer rereading the code may need to know the kind of a variable, too. Yeah, I know, naming conventions, yadda, yadda. But it's also useful for managing contexts.
Yeah, seriously, it makes me wince each time it happens. Most of the time I'm too lazy to edit Wikipedia pages, but when it comes to parentheses, I feel utterly compelled to.
And I even changed the title of this answer so that there isn't an excess closing parenthesis.
Perl objects aren't great (it isn't really and OO language)
Efforts are being made to improve them. Have a looke at Modern Perl and what it proposes about objects.
Good stuff on other matters too. I even discovered there a very interesting use of goto to make a tail call elimination, something that's still unavailable in Java. Of course, this being goto, I have a psychological blockade to actually use it, even though I know that Perl's goto is far more sane than BASIC's.
Yeah, I have a background in C and C++, and I taught myself Perl with the Llama Book. While the book is pretty good at pointing the differences between Perl and C, it took me some practice to get rid of some basic C reflexes.
Case in point, the ternary "C style" for syntax. You can guess a beginner (or a codemonkey) in Perl to the number of occurrences of it. Experienced Perl programmer only use it when there's no other convenient (and more legible) solution - i.e. almost never.
While the absence of punctuation is condemnable (and you're guilty of it too), that sentence doesn't qualify as a run-on, since it doesn't contain two independant clauses, but one main clause and a chain of subordinate clauses.<\pedantrysquared>.
On the other hand, they'd only have to lose one or two of their cases to get the other targets to fight, and bleed them to oblivion with all the legal expenses that would be put on their tab. If it wasn't the USA, that is.
The reste of the legal world mocks the American Rule, that is the main reason why patent trolls exist in the USA and almost nowhere else.
Ah, it brings out another approach to fight patent trolls: making it illegal for practicing lawyers to represent any entity in which they have stakes (including themselves, for completeness). Not that it's got a chance to happen in the USA, but, well, it's the case in many countries already.
And this is why, if they drop the lawsuit, they should have to pay all the legal expenses. Yes, including the lawyer bills of the defendant. And possibly moral damage on top of that. In short, what happens in any sane legal system, in which the initiator of a bogus lawsuit can suffer a significant net loss.
There's more money spent on lobbyism in Brussels than in the U.S.
Lobbying is sooo 20th century in the USA. Why bother with uncertain lobbying when unlimited private and corporate fundings allows you to buy politicians even before they are elected?
Democracy is dead in the USA. The SCOTUS killed it. But apparently few noticed.
Welcome to your new, offical plutocracy, US "citizens". As a French citizen, I'll mourn your humanist values, which were so close to ours. Our republic is your's little sister. They had fights, like all siblings, but ultimately had more in common than they'd let out. Both had their neuroses. Our's ran away several times, but ultimately came back. And now yours got downright psychotic.
Chicken and egg question here. I don't know much about Japan, but from my French perspective German unions do an awesome job, and are probably one of the reasons (though not the sole) why Germany still does pretty well economically compared to other EU countries.
By contrast, the situation is pretty shitty in France. Polls have shown that among the OECD, French people put a higher value to work than most, but also that they tend to hate their workplace. Interestingly, French workers show less insatisfaction when they work for foreign companies. Some economists pin this on the fact that French economy is largely based on inheritance, and it results in a fundamental lack of trust between the various strates of workplace hierarchies. The workers, the middle management, the bosses, no one trusts another.
In the light of what you say about post-WWII, I wonder if Germany didn't ultimately benefit from getting rid of their higher ups, most of which having been in bed with the Third Reich.
Yup. The French Revolution abolished slavery out of principles. Then Napoleon reinstated it because he could, it seemed convenient at the time, and you don't become a controversial history figure without doing, well, controversial stuff.
Then in 1948 it was abolished again, in a move still driven by principled people (like Victor Schoelcher), but the reason it stuck that time is that it had become pretty clear that slavery was inefficient as an economic model (as had been stated by many eighteenth century philosophers). And colonialism was the big craze at the time anyway, which is another matter entirely.
There's a Wealth Tax in France, and for a long time I've had qualms about it, because I perceived it as more complicated than it's worth collecting. I don't think I'll ever hit the amount in assets needed to trigger it, so no, it's not my being deluded in the idea that I'll be someday rich enough that it hits me.
Recenly, I read an economist's point of view on the matter that turned my opinion. Taxing assets can be an incentive to make use of them instead of just sitting of them, which benefits society as a whole, with carefully designed incentives.
I have one example in mind that translates poorly in the USA, but still. Imagine the owner of a medieval castle. Owning it makes him somehow happy (I fail to understand why). It also makes him a target of the Wealth Tax. Unless he makes it open to visits, even partilally, Even for a fee. Even if it's limited to some times of the year. Even if it's limited to institutional visits (which can equally cover school trips and historians). If he makes some of the things listed above, his castle can be excluded from his tax base. The money he spends to keep it in shape can even be deductible to his income tax.
In the end, it's an incentive to DO something with your assets instead of just owning them.
While the rich have a positive total balance the rest of the system develops a negative balance.
Not necessarily, since the investments are supposed to drive the economy forward and generate growth. It's supposed to be a positive sum game, after all.
I'd rather say that past a certain level of inequality, the generated growth is superseded by the effect you describe. Even in a positive sum game, the majority can be in the negatives if a minority is sufficiently high in the positives.
Slashdot Mirror
Louis XVI had some progressive velleities, but lacked political acumen (though he wasn't as stupid as he is often portrayed - by today's standards, he was a huge nerd).
La Fayette initially came to the help of the newborn USA by his own decision and with his own means, when France was reluctant to confront the English. Later, he convinced Louis XVI to help. I won't go into details but a lot of occult funding was involved, with the implication of the famous playwright Beaumarchais at a point.
Actually, the Declaration of the Right of Man and of the Citizen, the first French constitutional text, was drafted by La Fayette when he came back from the USA, and heavily borrowed from the constitution of Virginia IIRC.
We can talk about a lot of cross-pollinisation instead of making it one-way.
I was wondering something, actually: last year I had a tetanus shot (well, a diphteria-tetanus-poliomyelitis shot), and it was intramuscular, not intraveinous (my shoulder ended up a bit sensitive for a few days). So I'm a bit puzzled by people systematically speaking of IV when it comes to vaccination.
Bad example, this calendar stuff. I totally agree the gain in that case wouldn't be significant enough to justify using such a trick. I was more thinking of tight optimisation for handling huge datasets. My point still is: if you think of using this at some point, don't think twice, think thrice or more. There's almost always a less witchy solution. Almost.
Never say never. This still can be useful in marginal cases (never happened to me, and pretty unlikely to ever happen). However, this must be done within a limited scope by using the local operator, and with thorough documentation. These advices apply everytime you have to modify a "magic variable" (the most often modified variable is the record separator $/).
Yes, you can override the index from which arrays are numbered.
And this kind of practice is nicknamed Black Magic, for good reasons. Not to be done unless you really need to.
You know, a programmer rereading the code may need to know the kind of a variable, too. Yeah, I know, naming conventions, yadda, yadda. But it's also useful for managing contexts.
Yeah, seriously, it makes me wince each time it happens. Most of the time I'm too lazy to edit Wikipedia pages, but when it comes to parentheses, I feel utterly compelled to.
And I even changed the title of this answer so that there isn't an excess closing parenthesis.
Perl objects aren't great (it isn't really and OO language)
Efforts are being made to improve them. Have a looke at Modern Perl and what it proposes about objects.
Good stuff on other matters too. I even discovered there a very interesting use of goto to make a tail call elimination, something that's still unavailable in Java. Of course, this being goto, I have a psychological blockade to actually use it, even though I know that Perl's goto is far more sane than BASIC's.
Yeah, I have a background in C and C++, and I taught myself Perl with the Llama Book. While the book is pretty good at pointing the differences between Perl and C, it took me some practice to get rid of some basic C reflexes.
Case in point, the ternary "C style" for syntax. You can guess a beginner (or a codemonkey) in Perl to the number of occurrences of it. Experienced Perl programmer only use it when there's no other convenient (and more legible) solution - i.e. almost never.
While the absence of punctuation is condemnable (and you're guilty of it too), that sentence doesn't qualify as a run-on, since it doesn't contain two independant clauses, but one main clause and a chain of subordinate clauses.<\pedantrysquared>.
On the other hand, they'd only have to lose one or two of their cases to get the other targets to fight, and bleed them to oblivion with all the legal expenses that would be put on their tab. If it wasn't the USA, that is.
The reste of the legal world mocks the American Rule, that is the main reason why patent trolls exist in the USA and almost nowhere else.
Ah, it brings out another approach to fight patent trolls: making it illegal for practicing lawyers to represent any entity in which they have stakes (including themselves, for completeness). Not that it's got a chance to happen in the USA, but, well, it's the case in many countries already.
And this is why, if they drop the lawsuit, they should have to pay all the legal expenses. Yes, including the lawyer bills of the defendant. And possibly moral damage on top of that. In short, what happens in any sane legal system, in which the initiator of a bogus lawsuit can suffer a significant net loss.
The American Rule is crap. Get rid of it.
There's more money spent on lobbyism in Brussels than in the U.S.
Lobbying is sooo 20th century in the USA. Why bother with uncertain lobbying when unlimited private and corporate fundings allows you to buy politicians even before they are elected?
Democracy is dead in the USA. The SCOTUS killed it. But apparently few noticed.
Welcome to your new, offical plutocracy, US "citizens". As a French citizen, I'll mourn your humanist values, which were so close to ours. Our republic is your's little sister. They had fights, like all siblings, but ultimately had more in common than they'd let out. Both had their neuroses. Our's ran away several times, but ultimately came back. And now yours got downright psychotic.
So long.
Interestingly, like Hamas, Hezbollah is Sunni, not Shia.
Chicken and egg question here. I don't know much about Japan, but from my French perspective German unions do an awesome job, and are probably one of the reasons (though not the sole) why Germany still does pretty well economically compared to other EU countries.
By contrast, the situation is pretty shitty in France. Polls have shown that among the OECD, French people put a higher value to work than most, but also that they tend to hate their workplace. Interestingly, French workers show less insatisfaction when they work for foreign companies. Some economists pin this on the fact that French economy is largely based on inheritance, and it results in a fundamental lack of trust between the various strates of workplace hierarchies. The workers, the middle management, the bosses, no one trusts another.
In the light of what you say about post-WWII, I wonder if Germany didn't ultimately benefit from getting rid of their higher ups, most of which having been in bed with the Third Reich.
Yup. The French Revolution abolished slavery out of principles. Then Napoleon reinstated it because he could, it seemed convenient at the time, and you don't become a controversial history figure without doing, well, controversial stuff.
Then in 1948 it was abolished again, in a move still driven by principled people (like Victor Schoelcher), but the reason it stuck that time is that it had become pretty clear that slavery was inefficient as an economic model (as had been stated by many eighteenth century philosophers). And colonialism was the big craze at the time anyway, which is another matter entirely.
Interestingly, this definition of "lower class" coincides perfectly with the Marxist definition of proletariat.
My, I wish France had unions like that.
There's a Wealth Tax in France, and for a long time I've had qualms about it, because I perceived it as more complicated than it's worth collecting. I don't think I'll ever hit the amount in assets needed to trigger it, so no, it's not my being deluded in the idea that I'll be someday rich enough that it hits me.
Recenly, I read an economist's point of view on the matter that turned my opinion. Taxing assets can be an incentive to make use of them instead of just sitting of them, which benefits society as a whole, with carefully designed incentives.
I have one example in mind that translates poorly in the USA, but still. Imagine the owner of a medieval castle. Owning it makes him somehow happy (I fail to understand why). It also makes him a target of the Wealth Tax. Unless he makes it open to visits, even partilally, Even for a fee. Even if it's limited to some times of the year. Even if it's limited to institutional visits (which can equally cover school trips and historians). If he makes some of the things listed above, his castle can be excluded from his tax base. The money he spends to keep it in shape can even be deductible to his income tax.
In the end, it's an incentive to DO something with your assets instead of just owning them.
I suspect something like "work ethics".
While the rich have a positive total balance the rest of the system develops a negative balance.
Not necessarily, since the investments are supposed to drive the economy forward and generate growth. It's supposed to be a positive sum game, after all.
I'd rather say that past a certain level of inequality, the generated growth is superseded by the effect you describe. Even in a positive sum game, the majority can be in the negatives if a minority is sufficiently high in the positives.
http://xkcd.com/1022/
I thought T-Rex was downgraded from a hunter/killer to a carcass plundering carrion eater, like a buzzard.
Yeah, heard of that too. Something about their body structure being inappropriate for actual fighting. Their wee upper limbs, in particular.