That means that 80% of the people actually going to elections don't want the communist dictatorship back.
The "people actually going to elections" part ist not to be underestimated - in the states of former eastern Germany voter turnout is hovering at about 50%, sometimes even lower. So 80% of the voting people are actually 40% of the people giving their vote - and therefore the minority:)
I also doubt that people want the "communist dictatorship" back, what they probably do want are things like not having to fear about their economic future, no fear of not being able to afford healthcare for their kids, not being discriminated as a woman, being able to sleep without worries about their idiot boss, not having to work their asses off for an oligarchy of multi millionaires etc. I assume they would be pretty happy to archive that without the dictatorship part.
To put it differently: people voting for the center-right parties (Greens, SPD, CDU) sure as hell are not happy with "capitalist democracy" along with the accompanying ills like the economic crisis, dwindling retirement pensions etc.
It sure is easy to write off the fond memories of people from Eastern Germany as results of brainwashing. But first, the same argument works for western Germany, too, and second do platitudes like this seldom help to get nearer to the true nature of things.
That certainly makes sense. OTOH, a good educational system alone may not be enough, as participation in the higher levels of that system usually involves quite a bit of money - even when access is formally free of charge. Es an example, my wife (with a working class background) certainly would not have been able go to university without financial support through the welfare system.
One probably needs both a high quality and formally open educational system _and_ the financial means to support people to access those institutions. This seems to be supported by the fact that U.S. spending on tertiary education is pretty high, while still not producing said vertical social mobility.
Well, the higher vertical mobility in Europe is an observable (and observed) fact. If you don't think the welfare system is the cause of this, them I am open for your alternative suggestion.
I can confirm that for Germany, too. While some retailers try to persuade customers to send it to the manufacturer directly, legally they are the party whom the customer made the deal with.
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it.
I think it would be really interesting to research whether that financial incentive is actually real (i.e. actually working as an incentive). According to a study I recently read, vertical mobility in the U.S. is quite low, especially compared to other industrialized countries with a more functional welfare system.
No more of this stupid 125 watt and 95 watt nonsense. I'm stuck with exactly 4 systems in a 42U rack because the datacenter is not capable of providing more than one 15A circuit per rack. If I want to make that 8, I need sub-50watt parts.
Have a look at the Opteron 4256 EE - 8 x 1.6GHz, 35W TDP. I don't know what you do with with your servers, but for a threaded web server like Apache that is a very viable option me thinks.
For me HD resolution doesn't work, but I have a relatively slow CPU, a slow radeon card and open source drivers under linux. I guess using closed source drivers would speed that up significantly (because they support the hardware decoding capabilities of the card). So: not for me, but most probably for others:)
For videos it's quite fine (I tested youtube and vimeo), but most interactive stuff doesn't work, e.g. games or interactive charts etc.
The really nice thing about gnash ist the platform independence. No problem to watch a video on an old iBook with a Power CPU running Linux. Try that with the adobe player:)
In the past I needed flash for two things: Piwik and (to a lesser extend) youtube. Piwik switched to HTML5 graphs about half a year ago IIRC , and youtube appears to play every video with a HTML5 player for a while now. Same goes for vimeo.
I have uninstalled flash in the moment Piwik made the switch (gnash did not work with Piwik btw). Being on AMD64 flash was a chore anyway, so since then browsing was suddenly faster and more stable.
I can only imagine people playing these advergames would miss flash, but it will probably only be a few months until these sites adapt and offer HTML5 versions.
Yeah, it was about 100% for quite some time, but they at least could keep that number stable. Have a look at this graph, the rise in dept started in 2007:
Fun Fact BTW: Currently Greek dept in absolute numbers is about 170 billion Euros. Germany still ows Greece WW II reparation payments (we wrecked that country and its people pretty bad), which are (inflation adjusted but without interest counted in) about 80 billion Euros. And our Chancellor has the fucking nerve to tell the Greek they fucked up their economy by themselves.
I agree with your statement but wanted to add that that pretty much all of the struggling european governments do so because they saved their speculating banks - which speculated with risky US housing loans. Greece and Ireland for example did not have unusually high dept pre 2007.
In comparison it does not seem to matter: Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity - according to the first diagram the productivity in the US and Germany is quite comparable despite the much stricter data protection laws.
These privacy laws define constitutional rights in Germany, so the interests of the corporations to maximize profit are lower ranked (as they are not on constitutional level).
Yes, the electricity costs my well play a role in adoption, but it is also the amount of electricity used per month that has to be considered. Example: We are on an eco plan (100% renewables) and pay EUR 0.26 per KWh, but on the other hand we only pay about 15 Euros per person per month for our household (and 2 servers). We most probably are below average, but the overall consumption per capita is not that high in Germany.
I think what's more important than the subsidies (AFAIK currently about EUR 0.24 per KWh for PV systems, they lower the subsidies every year in correlation to the sunken costs of new PV systems) is the fact that they are combined with forcing the utilities to "buy" the generated energy. You save the battery array and the inverter, which together can amount to up to one third of the price of a PV system last I looked. And you lay the foundation for a decentralized smart grid.
P.S. the subsidies you mentioned sounded interesting, so I looked for a moment for the German numbers. According to [1] total subsidies/governmental costs for nuclear power in Germany starting in 1950 until now were 165 billion Euros in total, which means about 2.7 billion Euros per year, plus about 95 billion for the future (there are still plants running and the old ones have to be deconstructed. [2] cites a similar amount for PV subsidies: 2.9 billion per year for 2009.
That is a reasonable argument. I would assume much of the energy needs come from industry consumption and not from the people themselves, though, but the proportions would likely be similar, as there is not much heavy industry in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania either.
Still, one has to take into account that the 55% in this region are not a result of guided action of any kind. One very often sees south-facing roofs without any photovoltaic modules, for example.
I didn't say anything about Germany as a whole, but only about one state in Germany. The 55% stems from print publication of an employer organisation. They state to have it online here:
http://www.rostock.ihk24.de/share/flip/Oktober2011/index.html
But it's flash, which I don't have installed here, so I can only guess. Look for the editorial, second page IIRC.
I assume you are not from Europe? In the state in Germany where I live (Germany is a federation like the US), the percentage of renewable energy in the mix already is at 55%, and that happened without any coordinated strategy by the state. It is assumed that the percentage will rise to 65% in the next few years. Belgium is geographically quite similiar to Northern Germany, so I assume completly going renewable really is a viable option for them.
I was expecting a scientific source, not some journalist writing about the source, but ok.
Your cbs article states that according to the NASA 2010 was the warmest year on record. Have a look here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
Why should WE be restricting ourselves to "save the planet", when the Chinese are brutally raping their own landscape and polluting everything in sight to serve their rampant industrial conquest of the world...
Check your numbers, your average Chinese produces about 1/6 of the CO2 you produce (assuming you are from the UK).
So, Verizon makes profit during a strike. That perfectly explains why they have all those employees in the first place. After all, they are all just money sinks.
Slashdot Mirror
That means that 80% of the people actually going to elections don't want the communist dictatorship back.
The "people actually going to elections" part ist not to be underestimated - in the states of former eastern Germany voter turnout is hovering at about 50%, sometimes even lower. So 80% of the voting people are actually 40% of the people giving their vote - and therefore the minority :)
I also doubt that people want the "communist dictatorship" back, what they probably do want are things like not having to fear about their economic future, no fear of not being able to afford healthcare for their kids, not being discriminated as a woman, being able to sleep without worries about their idiot boss, not having to work their asses off for an oligarchy of multi millionaires etc. I assume they would be pretty happy to archive that without the dictatorship part.
To put it differently: people voting for the center-right parties (Greens, SPD, CDU) sure as hell are not happy with "capitalist democracy" along with the accompanying ills like the economic crisis, dwindling retirement pensions etc.
It sure is easy to write off the fond memories of people from Eastern Germany as results of brainwashing. But first, the same argument works for western Germany, too, and second do platitudes like this seldom help to get nearer to the true nature of things.
So how do you increase income? US tried to. See what happened in the long run.
Actually, the U.S. income hasn't really increased for forty years now. That's the main reason for the high number of mortgages (which led to the ongoing crisis) - a phenomenon not observable in wide parts of Europe.
And as population increases, income goes lower to everyone as there are more services available.
AFAIK those two do not correlate. Do you have some source for that?
That certainly makes sense. OTOH, a good educational system alone may not be enough, as participation in the higher levels of that system usually involves quite a bit of money - even when access is formally free of charge. Es an example, my wife (with a working class background) certainly would not have been able go to university without financial support through the welfare system.
One probably needs both a high quality and formally open educational system _and_ the financial means to support people to access those institutions. This seems to be supported by the fact that U.S. spending on tertiary education is pretty high, while still not producing said vertical social mobility.
Well, the higher vertical mobility in Europe is an observable (and observed) fact. If you don't think the welfare system is the cause of this, them I am open for your alternative suggestion.
I can confirm that for Germany, too. While some retailers try to persuade customers to send it to the manufacturer directly, legally they are the party whom the customer made the deal with.
Were the financial incentive missing and nothing there to replace it, American society would lose many bright minds from some of its most economically productive workforces. We'd probably also get rid of 10 times as many greedy turds who ride the best and brightest. So the hard question is whether or not it's worth it.
I think it would be really interesting to research whether that financial incentive is actually real (i.e. actually working as an incentive). According to a study I recently read, vertical mobility in the U.S. is quite low, especially compared to other industrialized countries with a more functional welfare system.
No more of this stupid 125 watt and 95 watt nonsense. I'm stuck with exactly 4 systems in a 42U rack because the datacenter is not capable of providing more than one 15A circuit per rack. If I want to make that 8, I need sub-50watt parts.
Have a look at the Opteron 4256 EE - 8 x 1.6GHz, 35W TDP. I don't know what you do with with your servers, but for a threaded web server like Apache that is a very viable option me thinks.
For me HD resolution doesn't work, but I have a relatively slow CPU, a slow radeon card and open source drivers under linux. I guess using closed source drivers would speed that up significantly (because they support the hardware decoding capabilities of the card). So: not for me, but most probably for others :)
For videos it's quite fine (I tested youtube and vimeo), but most interactive stuff doesn't work, e.g. games or interactive charts etc.
:)
The really nice thing about gnash ist the platform independence. No problem to watch a video on an old iBook with a Power CPU running Linux. Try that with the adobe player
In the past I needed flash for two things: Piwik and (to a lesser extend) youtube. Piwik switched to HTML5 graphs about half a year ago IIRC , and youtube appears to play every video with a HTML5 player for a while now. Same goes for vimeo.
I have uninstalled flash in the moment Piwik made the switch (gnash did not work with Piwik btw). Being on AMD64 flash was a chore anyway, so since then browsing was suddenly faster and more stable.
I can only imagine people playing these advergames would miss flash, but it will probably only be a few months until these sites adapt and offer HTML5 versions.
If you would have read the least bit about game design or video game theory you would have recognized that name.
Yeah, it was about 100% for quite some time, but they at least could keep that number stable. Have a look at this graph, the rise in dept started in 2007:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Greece_public_debt_1999-2010.svg
Compare that with e.g. Japan here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Dept.svg
Fun Fact BTW: Currently Greek dept in absolute numbers is about 170 billion Euros. Germany still ows Greece WW II reparation payments (we wrecked that country and its people pretty bad), which are (inflation adjusted but without interest counted in) about 80 billion Euros. And our Chancellor has the fucking nerve to tell the Greek they fucked up their economy by themselves.
I agree with your statement but wanted to add that that pretty much all of the struggling european governments do so because they saved their speculating banks - which speculated with risky US housing loans. Greece and Ireland for example did not have unusually high dept pre 2007.
In comparison it does not seem to matter: Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity - according to the first diagram the productivity in the US and Germany is quite comparable despite the much stricter data protection laws.
These privacy laws define constitutional rights in Germany, so the interests of the corporations to maximize profit are lower ranked (as they are not on constitutional level).
Yes, the electricity costs my well play a role in adoption, but it is also the amount of electricity used per month that has to be considered. Example: We are on an eco plan (100% renewables) and pay EUR 0.26 per KWh, but on the other hand we only pay about 15 Euros per person per month for our household (and 2 servers). We most probably are below average, but the overall consumption per capita is not that high in Germany.
I think what's more important than the subsidies (AFAIK currently about EUR 0.24 per KWh for PV systems, they lower the subsidies every year in correlation to the sunken costs of new PV systems) is the fact that they are combined with forcing the utilities to "buy" the generated energy. You save the battery array and the inverter, which together can amount to up to one third of the price of a PV system last I looked. And you lay the foundation for a decentralized smart grid.
P.S. the subsidies you mentioned sounded interesting, so I looked for a moment for the German numbers. According to [1] total subsidies/governmental costs for nuclear power in Germany starting in 1950 until now were 165 billion Euros in total, which means about 2.7 billion Euros per year, plus about 95 billion for the future (there are still plants running and the old ones have to be deconstructed. [2] cites a similar amount for PV subsidies: 2.9 billion per year for 2009.
[1] = http://www.wiwo.de/politik-weltwirtschaft/solarwirtschaft-gegen-kernkraft-421838/
[2] = http://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/wirtschaftspolitik/16-prozent-ab-1-juli-kuerzung-der-solar-subventionen-steht-1937301.html
That is a reasonable argument. I would assume much of the energy needs come from industry consumption and not from the people themselves, though, but the proportions would likely be similar, as there is not much heavy industry in Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania either.
Still, one has to take into account that the 55% in this region are not a result of guided action of any kind. One very often sees south-facing roofs without any photovoltaic modules, for example.
Of course not. But when you look at a map and compare Belgium with Northern Germany, the similarities will be pretty obvious.
I didn't say anything about Germany as a whole, but only about one state in Germany. The 55% stems from print publication of an employer organisation. They state to have it online here: http://www.rostock.ihk24.de/share/flip/Oktober2011/index.html But it's flash, which I don't have installed here, so I can only guess. Look for the editorial, second page IIRC.
I assume you are not from Europe? In the state in Germany where I live (Germany is a federation like the US), the percentage of renewable energy in the mix already is at 55%, and that happened without any coordinated strategy by the state. It is assumed that the percentage will rise to 65% in the next few years. Belgium is geographically quite similiar to Northern Germany, so I assume completly going renewable really is a viable option for them.
Of course not, with "average" I meant total CO2 released / population.
I was expecting a scientific source, not some journalist writing about the source, but ok. Your cbs article states that according to the NASA 2010 was the warmest year on record. Have a look here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
So, the last 15 years were non-warming? That's news to me. Any source for that?
Why should WE be restricting ourselves to "save the planet", when the Chinese are brutally raping their own landscape and polluting everything in sight to serve their rampant industrial conquest of the world...
Check your numbers, your average Chinese produces about 1/6 of the CO2 you produce (assuming you are from the UK).
Are you sure you can speak for 82 million?
So, Verizon makes profit during a strike. That perfectly explains why they have all those employees in the first place. After all, they are all just money sinks.