Nice. This mother has a dead child and you're sneering at her. Whether it was her fault or not (and if you actually read to the end of the article, you'll see the police say they are taking the possibility of third party involvement seriously), you might consider not using a dead baby to make a rhetorical point of no particular significance in a debate of no particular significance on Slashdot.
Five year old? Pah! My three-year old has been able to flick through photos etc for a year, and he's a slowcoach -- there are videos on YouTube of a *10-month* baby able doing this... a clear sign of how intuitive the interaction mechanism is
He was arguing that designing a shuttle was *hard* despite the underlying concepts being well-understood, not that the job was done well. It's not about imagination -- it's about day-to-day engineering to make it work well together and be a consistent whole. The shuttle precisely exemplifies why that is a hard thing to do. Saying that the iPhone OS and UI are not an improvement on what we had before is silly -- there was no device previously available that successfully combined a phone / web-browser / media-player and general-purpose computer. Phone OSes were (and mostly remain) notoriously clunky. The breakthrough was about real-world usability, and they did it with small steps and attention to detail. Apple are not in love with novelty for the sake of novelty and will happily re-use older ideas if that makes sense for the user.
I don't think this is quite true. Most people run their apps maximised to be full-screen because
1)they are concentrating on one thing at a time. Having other windows around is distracting. 2)they need the real estate. When I'm editing a slide, I want the slide to be just about life size (most of the time) and to have a decent palette of tools readily to hand. And Excel users in particular will typically want to as much screen real-estate as possible, because they want to see as many rows and columns as possible -- and they'll still find they're unable to see everything they want to at once.
It might be different for coders, but that's how it is for business users.
You know, the urge to keep primary and secondary sexual characteristics private is not wholly driven by religion. There are lots of people who may have hangups for reasons other than religion about being obliged to show their bodies to strangers via a scanner: survivors of breast cancer who've had a mastectomy; those with a physical disability; people with particularly large or small genitalia; and those who just think that they should be able to choose for themselves who they show their body to. While there are some nude cultures around the world, the majority of human cultures value some level of body privacy -- including culture that predate Christianity. Just because it's not important to you, doesn't mean it's not important to anyone.
I'm tempted to agree with you... really strongly tempted.
But but but: 1) Your argument relies on the countermeasures (the government's reaction) having no impact, ie absent the countermeasures, terrorism would not be substantively more prevalent than today. You have only to look at Israel to see that countermeasures are able to have a discernible positive impact in reducing terrorism. If there were no countermeasures, then it is likely that there would be substantially more terrorism, and the chances of being harmed in a terrorist incident would increase accordingly. 2) Your argument also assumes that terrorists will never gain the means or the opportunity to carry out attacks that harm very large numbers of citizens (I presume you will agree that they have the motivation). I'm in no position to carry out a realistic threat assessment, but I'd be surprised if that were the case. All that said, I still agree that these scanners are a ridiculous intrusion and will not help solve the problem. I'd far rather see more behaviour-based profiling.
The idea that the Israelis really fall back on racial profiling rather than behavioural profiling just isn't true. It wouldn't be practical given that many Arabs can pass for Israelis.... and when it would risk giving a free pass to eg Caucasians.
Only someone outside the UK could write such a comment. People who work for the NHS do *not* regard themselves as working for the government, despite that being factually accurate -- it is just not the mindset. And while nurses, AHPs etc have substantial job security to the point where they can be crap at their jobs and get away with it, that was never so true for the lowest paid workers, such as cleaners and porters, who have always been at-risk of losing their job.
The main challenge -- whether public or private sector -- is that the job *is* low paid and low status -- it just discourages cleaners from pride in their work. In that sense, the challenge for the hospital is similar to the challenge for airport operators -- the economics don't make it easy to pay the cleaners / baggage screeners well, the job is inherently tedious and unpleasant which increases error rates, and the cost of an error can be very high. Maybe a Toyota-style Lean approach where cleaners are encouraged and rewarded for innovations in their methods would go some way to counteracting this problem.
I think you're assuming your experience is routinely the experience of your compatriots. I'm sure it's typical for many, but there's a large minority of uninsured and underinsured people, predominantly poor, who have a much worse experience: they may not be able to afford to see a primary physician at all, or if they do it may be an emergency clinic or a doc-in-a-box. If you work for a low-end retailer, your employer is quite likely to require a note for every visit to a doctor, and may not pay you to visit. Etc etc.
There are some other flaws with your arguments as well: the challenge of providing adequate health in Norway is not really inherently easier than doing the same in the US. Yes, there's extra wealth, but there's also a lower population density (access to rural GPs has long been a problem in Norway), and the smaller population could be argued to create a diseconomy of scale compared to the US.
Of course, KP is great. But KP is rather different from most care providers in the US, and in many ways is more similar to European models (although its integration of care (IT, panels etc) is distinctively homegrown and outstandingly good) -- it's a single provider, and a not-for-profit, for starters.
Erm, you didn't read the article. The article says, if you had bothered to read it: "The "Emergency War Orders" (EWO) safe, for example, which contains the launch keys and codes, is locked not just by a single combination, but also by two padlocks, one belonging to each launch officer."
Just in case you have difficulty reading, I'll make that clear: - 1 combination lock AND - 2 keys locks, with each key held by a different person.
I don't know about you, but I happen to think that the people who were so terrifyingly clever as to know how to build an ICBM were also capable of building a safe that requires three locks to undo without worrying about The Hinge Problem, by using such fiendish ingenuity as, oh I don't know, using a file-container (slide-out drawer), not a hinged door. As it says in the very next paragraph of the same story you chose to take someone else to task for, because you thought they'd not read it. And guess what, if you have difficulty with words, the nice man even took some pretty pictures where you could actually see that it wasn't a hinged door.
You honestly believe that the minute the spunk hits the egg, it's a murder, do you? I hope you don't believe in God, then, cos you're going to have to think he's quite the callous cunt given how many early miscarriages happen (oh, sorry, murders of defenceless little baby humans by a God with the power and intelligence to know better). And then you're going to be terrified he's going to send you to hell for thinking he's a callous cunt (even if he is, I guess)
Talk about selective quotation!! I just read the article you linked to, and who would have known it from what you've written, but the Booz report's conclusion was a glowingly *positive* reference to Apple's ability to spend its R&D on creating great products -- what the report calls "an innovation machine". This is the very same paragraph from which you quoted that Apple's R&D:sales ratio was below that of its competitors. By the way, that report was from 2005 -- the numbers may have changed since.
I also want to point out the spectacular idiocy of assessing the value of a *commercial* organisation's R&D in terms of research papers published. Has it not occurred to you that Apple may be -- like all its competitors -- doing some work that it chooses not to publish?
Finally, to claim that Apple does effectively no original research and is only about development is just mindbogglingly silly and at variance with the facts. Apple's products of course draw on ideas and developments elsewhere in the industry, but the truth is, whether patent lawyers like it or not, there is nothing new under the sun and any idea you can conceive of has almost certainly been thought of by someone else. What makes the difference is making the ideas into something meaningful -- your moral universe in which "research is praiseworthy, development is to be sneered at" is both silly and draws far too sharp a distinction between the concepts. Why should it detract from Apple's achievement if some other organisation or academic had some kind of implementation of multitouch running? Self-evidently, Apple's was the first implementation that was well-thought-through enough to work for a typical consumer: the adoption curve for multitouch devices would show effectively none in use prior to the iPhone and many millions in use afterwards.
Your first sentence is a non-sequitur -- the fact that many non-geeks buy Nokias doesn't mean that the iPhone isn't tremendously appealing to many non-geeks. It just means that it's not appealing to *every* non-geek.
Your second assertion is overblown. Just because a judgement is subjective doesn't mean it should be ignored. Lots of people agree that the iphone is more usable than other phones. They even give clear reasons for it. Personally, I think it's pretty friggin clear -- for example, my three-year old son can happily open the photo app and flick through photos on my iPhone, having been shown once how to do it. He can't do it on my BlackBerry despite having been shown multiple times.
And finally, here in the UK, most iPhone users I know are evangelical about their phones and I'm the only geek among them.
Apple revenues for FY06, 07 and 08 were 19.3, 24 and 32.5bn USD respectively -- as reported on their website. Woolworths revenues for FY08 and 09 were 47 and 49.6bn AUS $ respectively -- as reported on their website. That is equivalent to 43.4bn USD in FY09 at today's exchange rate of 1:1.14. However, exchange rate volatility is very significant -- Reuters reported Woolworths' FY09 revenues as 37bn USD on the 24th August of this year. So it's difficult to do a meaningful comparison of the two sets of sales figures very closely. However, it's clear that Woolworth's Australian sales were not double Apple's global sales.
Additionally, the number of employees simply reflects the different nature of the businesses. Supermarket chains are always people-intensive. I don't think it tells you much about the "weightiness" of the operation.
Those are not the only three options. You could do what my relative does and spend time working to build civil infrastructure (in his case, mentoring civil servants). You could give aid (it may not be a good option, but it's still an option). You could pay reparations for colonial misadventures (again, I'm not advocating, I'm simply noting it as an option). Most importantly, in relation to your options, you can choose to trade with ethically-directed buyer-imposed conditions. Every corporate buyer will impose conditions of various stringency in relation to every trade. Supermarkets are an excellent example of this, with their extensive trade terms, QC requirements, and supply chain audits -- and they have now moved in exactly this direction, by starting to impose additional terms of trade on suppliers in relation to goods supplied that relate to the environmental, social and ethical conditions of production. The tea industry has set up the Tea Sourcing Partnership to do the same. There are plenty more options too.
And you're making a fundamental error in distinguishing between "trade with market prices" and "trade with 'fair' prices". If fairtrade manufacturers can persuade consumers to purchase goods at a premium price, because consumers like the idea of seeing more money go to developing world producers, then *that is* the invisible hand of the market. A cup of coffee in Per Se costs more than a similar cup in Starbucks, because consumers value more than just the product -- they value all sorts of things around the product. Saying that one choice is valid (pay more for a coffee in a posh restaurant) and the other is not (pay more for a coffee that pays on a premium to producers) is very anti-democratic and anti-capitalist of you.
Finally, to decide that resource extraction has nothing to do with state failure or even simply disarray in Africa is just ludicrous. From slavery to minerals to oil, resource extraction at the expense of local people has been a main cause of state failure for well over a hundred years. It's hardly the only cause, but it's clearly an important one.
Bollocks. You are wrong about the ethnic makeup. The East End is considerably more ethnically diverse than NE London, and the white indigenous population is still well above 1/3. The number of non-English speakers is ~10%, most immigrants work (predominantly doing either the shitty jobs the indigenous population spurn or high-status, high-value add jobs) as well as drawing on the country's resources, and our own culture is *enriched* by being surrounded by immigrants. And people get thrown out of the country regularly including for not having papers and passports -- an abhorrent policy which ignores the fact that refugees can be *expected* not to have passports ("Oh hello Herr Hitler, I'm a Jew who'd like to flee your SS goons, can I have a passport please? What do you mean, no?").
Britain has been a country of immigrants and emigrants forever. It's one of the main reasons why English was such a successful language (in terms of numbers speaking it as a first or second language). Immigrants have given the UK lots of the symbols we hold most dear: our royals and fish and chips, to name just two.
Grow up and get used to it. And stop imagining that the situation is uniquely terrifying today -- just look at what was said in the 1890s about immigrants fleeing pogroms or the 1940s about war refugees etc. We survived then -- indeed thrived, and will do so now.
"Trade benefits both parties" is not a very clever statement to make in describing a relationship involving more than two parties, eg the commodity trading you cite. It is perfectly possible for Western consumers and a small elite of African robber barons to make money while the poor of Africa suffer the negative consequences of the resource extraction. And indeed, that's what happens.
1) As a geek, you might enjoy Robert Heinlein's suggestions in Time Enough for Love ("the Notebooks of Lazarus Long") for their practicality (plus, he trained as an engineer). Things like "budget the luxuries first"; "rub her feet". 2) Some years ago, I was at a conference with my wife -- we had just recently married, and we thought one session looked particularly interesting. It was called "Making long term relationships work" or something similar. The course began with the leader asking who in the room was in a long term relationship. Nearly every hand went up. He then asked us to go round the room and each say who we were and how long we'd been in our relationship. We were par for the course in saying we'd been together for five years and had just got married. The final person in the room answered by saying she wasn't sure if she could really claim to be in a long-term relationship... her husband had died last year after 54 years of marriage. At which point, the course leader turned to the rest of us and said "*That* is a long-term relationship. *That* is the timescale on which you should be looking to make things work. It requires a completely different perspective from how you would normally tend to think about things. How will you survive tragedy? How will you be a parent to your thirty-year old child? What will tie you together with your partner on a permanent basis, no matter the insults flung at it?" It goes beyond learning how to get along, or manage money, or put the lid on the toothpaste -- it's about finding a way to get to 80 together. It's tough, but one of the most worthwhile things you could ever do. Good luck!
The first example is a really bad reason for doing EMR -- it's the one cited by NPfIT and misses the point that for most trauma, there's neither the time nor the added value to make it worth knowing your medical history at the point of administration of emergency care.
The promise of EMR is in providing more proactive and integrated care of people with long-term conditions such as diabetes or congestive heart disease, where there are multiple health professionals involved who would benefit from each knowing the full picture of what the other one is doing in relation to a patient. That is a non-trivial problem to solve.
Don't be a dumbass. If you are already suffering from age-related macular degeneration, then insurers would be mad to agree to take on that risk. They would instead write it in as an exclusion, or raise the premium to the point that it's as high as the costs of treatment. And if you don't have AMD, then you're not going to know in advance whether or not you should buy insurance that excludes the condition.
But who *knows* they are going to win an election, except for those who fix the results? Ahmedinajad is undoubtedly popular, but he'd have to have been wildly optimistic and very badly advised to consider the election to be even in the rough vicinity of a shoo-in for him. I readily concede the possibility that Ahmedinajad won the election fair and square. But you originally asked why anyone would think that the possibility he cheated was even more likely, and I gave you the obvious reasons. I don't know why you assume I'm angry about possibility of his cheating. I just said that bad men are known to cheat to stay in power, and I implied that Ahmedinajad is a bad man.
Why? Because many men like power, and bad men who lead their country have a track record around the world of cheating in order to hang on to it. Which bit of this observation of human nature is unfamiliar to you? Or would you like to argue that Ahmadinejad and those who share power with him are not bad men?
Interesting -- the Protestant work ethic and related concepts of personal responsibility is of course not particularly American. It characterises the history of Northern Europe, for example, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. In each of these countries, a state that provided for the poor has been allowed to grow.
You posit that the presence of personal responsibility advocates, whose beliefs likely stem from their cultural and religious roots of Protestant beliefs in hard work for just reward etc, "just might do a better job than a socialist government [of eradicating poverty]". Throughout the C19 and the early part of the C20, a muscular interpretation of Protestant Christianity absolutely dominated British thought. Advocates of personal responsibility were everywhere -- but they had a different take from you on what that meant. They thought that most poor people were feckless and irresponsible and deserved little or no help. To the extent they provided help, they typically attached onerous / appalling conditions to the support they gave. Charitable institutions for the poor were awful, awful places where the poor were blamed for being poor. And millions of people lived in the most dreadful squalour.
You may assert that things would be different this time, because it's America and not the UK, because it's now and not then, etc. But I just do not buy any such assertions. Here's just one reason why: America has considerably more people who are poor as a % of its population than high-tax economies such as the Scandinavians. In fact, there's a recent book on this phenomenon. You won't like it, but it's built on a foundation of facts. It's called "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better".
By the way, I've gone back and checked the thread carefully -- and as I seemed to recall, I did not in fact ask "for proof that the American government gives less to charity than European nations, but American citizens give more". Here is what happened: 1) I contended (and still do) that any tax rebate would reduce total funding for the poor dramatically due to people refusing to put their hands in their pockets. 2) You responded by asserting that, while US government contributions to world charity are low, US private contributions are "head and shoulders above the rest of the world" (which sounds like an assertion of American exceptionalism from where I'm sitting) 3) I then asked for you to demonstrate that per-capita income-weighted private charitable contributions were head-and-shoulders above the rest of the world. 4) You provided some stats about relative rates of international aid as a % of GDP and GNI for different countries. By the way, you should note that you're assuming that what is true for the relatively tiny matter of international aid will be true for the enormously larger matter of provision for the poor (10% or more of GDP). 5) I said that this had turned into a discussion on American exceptionalism. 6) You said that was because of me.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. This mother has a dead child and you're sneering at her. Whether it was her fault or not (and if you actually read to the end of the article, you'll see the police say they are taking the possibility of third party involvement seriously), you might consider not using a dead baby to make a rhetorical point of no particular significance in a debate of no particular significance on Slashdot.
Five year old? Pah! My three-year old has been able to flick through photos etc for a year, and he's a slowcoach -- there are videos on YouTube of a *10-month* baby able doing this... a clear sign of how intuitive the interaction mechanism is
He was arguing that designing a shuttle was *hard* despite the underlying concepts being well-understood, not that the job was done well. It's not about imagination -- it's about day-to-day engineering to make it work well together and be a consistent whole. The shuttle precisely exemplifies why that is a hard thing to do. Saying that the iPhone OS and UI are not an improvement on what we had before is silly -- there was no device previously available that successfully combined a phone / web-browser / media-player and general-purpose computer. Phone OSes were (and mostly remain) notoriously clunky. The breakthrough was about real-world usability, and they did it with small steps and attention to detail. Apple are not in love with novelty for the sake of novelty and will happily re-use older ideas if that makes sense for the user.
I don't think this is quite true. Most people run their apps maximised to be full-screen because
1)they are concentrating on one thing at a time. Having other windows around is distracting.
2)they need the real estate. When I'm editing a slide, I want the slide to be just about life size (most of the time) and to have a decent palette of tools readily to hand. And Excel users in particular will typically want to as much screen real-estate as possible, because they want to see as many rows and columns as possible -- and they'll still find they're unable to see everything they want to at once.
It might be different for coders, but that's how it is for business users.
You know, the urge to keep primary and secondary sexual characteristics private is not wholly driven by religion. There are lots of people who may have hangups for reasons other than religion about being obliged to show their bodies to strangers via a scanner: survivors of breast cancer who've had a mastectomy; those with a physical disability; people with particularly large or small genitalia; and those who just think that they should be able to choose for themselves who they show their body to. While there are some nude cultures around the world, the majority of human cultures value some level of body privacy -- including culture that predate Christianity. Just because it's not important to you, doesn't mean it's not important to anyone.
I'm tempted to agree with you... really strongly tempted.
But but but:
1) Your argument relies on the countermeasures (the government's reaction) having no impact, ie absent the countermeasures, terrorism would not be substantively more prevalent than today. You have only to look at Israel to see that countermeasures are able to have a discernible positive impact in reducing terrorism. If there were no countermeasures, then it is likely that there would be substantially more terrorism, and the chances of being harmed in a terrorist incident would increase accordingly.
2) Your argument also assumes that terrorists will never gain the means or the opportunity to carry out attacks that harm very large numbers of citizens (I presume you will agree that they have the motivation). I'm in no position to carry out a realistic threat assessment, but I'd be surprised if that were the case.
All that said, I still agree that these scanners are a ridiculous intrusion and will not help solve the problem. I'd far rather see more behaviour-based profiling.
The idea that the Israelis really fall back on racial profiling rather than behavioural profiling just isn't true. It wouldn't be practical given that many Arabs can pass for Israelis .... and when it would risk giving a free pass to eg Caucasians.
Look at this comment by Philip Baum and you will see what behavioural profiling involves:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6973408.ece
It's not all about looking shifty, although that is part of it.
Only someone outside the UK could write such a comment. People who work for the NHS do *not* regard themselves as working for the government, despite that being factually accurate -- it is just not the mindset. And while nurses, AHPs etc have substantial job security to the point where they can be crap at their jobs and get away with it, that was never so true for the lowest paid workers, such as cleaners and porters, who have always been at-risk of losing their job.
The main challenge -- whether public or private sector -- is that the job *is* low paid and low status -- it just discourages cleaners from pride in their work. In that sense, the challenge for the hospital is similar to the challenge for airport operators -- the economics don't make it easy to pay the cleaners / baggage screeners well, the job is inherently tedious and unpleasant which increases error rates, and the cost of an error can be very high. Maybe a Toyota-style Lean approach where cleaners are encouraged and rewarded for innovations in their methods would go some way to counteracting this problem.
I think you're assuming your experience is routinely the experience of your compatriots. I'm sure it's typical for many, but there's a large minority of uninsured and underinsured people, predominantly poor, who have a much worse experience: they may not be able to afford to see a primary physician at all, or if they do it may be an emergency clinic or a doc-in-a-box. If you work for a low-end retailer, your employer is quite likely to require a note for every visit to a doctor, and may not pay you to visit. Etc etc.
There are some other flaws with your arguments as well: the challenge of providing adequate health in Norway is not really inherently easier than doing the same in the US. Yes, there's extra wealth, but there's also a lower population density (access to rural GPs has long been a problem in Norway), and the smaller population could be argued to create a diseconomy of scale compared to the US.
Of course, KP is great. But KP is rather different from most care providers in the US, and in many ways is more similar to European models (although its integration of care (IT, panels etc) is distinctively homegrown and outstandingly good) -- it's a single provider, and a not-for-profit, for starters.
Erm, you didn't read the article. The article says, if you had bothered to read it:
"The "Emergency War Orders" (EWO) safe, for example, which contains the launch keys and codes, is locked not just by a single combination, but also by two padlocks, one belonging to each launch officer."
Just in case you have difficulty reading, I'll make that clear:
- 1 combination lock AND
- 2 keys locks, with each key held by a different person.
I don't know about you, but I happen to think that the people who were so terrifyingly clever as to know how to build an ICBM were also capable of building a safe that requires three locks to undo without worrying about The Hinge Problem, by using such fiendish ingenuity as, oh I don't know, using a file-container (slide-out drawer), not a hinged door. As it says in the very next paragraph of the same story you chose to take someone else to task for, because you thought they'd not read it. And guess what, if you have difficulty with words, the nice man even took some pretty pictures where you could actually see that it wasn't a hinged door.
Numpty.
You honestly believe that the minute the spunk hits the egg, it's a murder, do you? I hope you don't believe in God, then, cos you're going to have to think he's quite the callous cunt given how many early miscarriages happen (oh, sorry, murders of defenceless little baby humans by a God with the power and intelligence to know better). And then you're going to be terrified he's going to send you to hell for thinking he's a callous cunt (even if he is, I guess)
Talk about selective quotation!! I just read the article you linked to, and who would have known it from what you've written, but the Booz report's conclusion was a glowingly *positive* reference to Apple's ability to spend its R&D on creating great products -- what the report calls "an innovation machine". This is the very same paragraph from which you quoted that Apple's R&D:sales ratio was below that of its competitors. By the way, that report was from 2005 -- the numbers may have changed since.
I also want to point out the spectacular idiocy of assessing the value of a *commercial* organisation's R&D in terms of research papers published. Has it not occurred to you that Apple may be -- like all its competitors -- doing some work that it chooses not to publish?
Finally, to claim that Apple does effectively no original research and is only about development is just mindbogglingly silly and at variance with the facts. Apple's products of course draw on ideas and developments elsewhere in the industry, but the truth is, whether patent lawyers like it or not, there is nothing new under the sun and any idea you can conceive of has almost certainly been thought of by someone else. What makes the difference is making the ideas into something meaningful -- your moral universe in which "research is praiseworthy, development is to be sneered at" is both silly and draws far too sharp a distinction between the concepts. Why should it detract from Apple's achievement if some other organisation or academic had some kind of implementation of multitouch running? Self-evidently, Apple's was the first implementation that was well-thought-through enough to work for a typical consumer: the adoption curve for multitouch devices would show effectively none in use prior to the iPhone and many millions in use afterwards.
Your first sentence is a non-sequitur -- the fact that many non-geeks buy Nokias doesn't mean that the iPhone isn't tremendously appealing to many non-geeks. It just means that it's not appealing to *every* non-geek.
Your second assertion is overblown. Just because a judgement is subjective doesn't mean it should be ignored. Lots of people agree that the iphone is more usable than other phones. They even give clear reasons for it. Personally, I think it's pretty friggin clear -- for example, my three-year old son can happily open the photo app and flick through photos on my iPhone, having been shown once how to do it. He can't do it on my BlackBerry despite having been shown multiple times.
And finally, here in the UK, most iPhone users I know are evangelical about their phones and I'm the only geek among them.
If you want to know, go read the original article. Do your own research.
Hmm.
Apple revenues for FY06, 07 and 08 were 19.3, 24 and 32.5bn USD respectively -- as reported on their website.
Woolworths revenues for FY08 and 09 were 47 and 49.6bn AUS $ respectively -- as reported on their website. That is equivalent to 43.4bn USD in FY09 at today's exchange rate of 1:1.14. However, exchange rate volatility is very significant -- Reuters reported Woolworths' FY09 revenues as 37bn USD on the 24th August of this year. So it's difficult to do a meaningful comparison of the two sets of sales figures very closely. However, it's clear that Woolworth's Australian sales were not double Apple's global sales.
Additionally, the number of employees simply reflects the different nature of the businesses. Supermarket chains are always people-intensive. I don't think it tells you much about the "weightiness" of the operation.
Those are not the only three options. You could do what my relative does and spend time working to build civil infrastructure (in his case, mentoring civil servants). You could give aid (it may not be a good option, but it's still an option). You could pay reparations for colonial misadventures (again, I'm not advocating, I'm simply noting it as an option). Most importantly, in relation to your options, you can choose to trade with ethically-directed buyer-imposed conditions. Every corporate buyer will impose conditions of various stringency in relation to every trade. Supermarkets are an excellent example of this, with their extensive trade terms, QC requirements, and supply chain audits -- and they have now moved in exactly this direction, by starting to impose additional terms of trade on suppliers in relation to goods supplied that relate to the environmental, social and ethical conditions of production. The tea industry has set up the Tea Sourcing Partnership to do the same. There are plenty more options too.
And you're making a fundamental error in distinguishing between "trade with market prices" and "trade with 'fair' prices". If fairtrade manufacturers can persuade consumers to purchase goods at a premium price, because consumers like the idea of seeing more money go to developing world producers, then *that is* the invisible hand of the market. A cup of coffee in Per Se costs more than a similar cup in Starbucks, because consumers value more than just the product -- they value all sorts of things around the product. Saying that one choice is valid (pay more for a coffee in a posh restaurant) and the other is not (pay more for a coffee that pays on a premium to producers) is very anti-democratic and anti-capitalist of you.
Finally, to decide that resource extraction has nothing to do with state failure or even simply disarray in Africa is just ludicrous. From slavery to minerals to oil, resource extraction at the expense of local people has been a main cause of state failure for well over a hundred years. It's hardly the only cause, but it's clearly an important one.
Bollocks. You are wrong about the ethnic makeup. The East End is considerably more ethnically diverse than NE London, and the white indigenous population is still well above 1/3. The number of non-English speakers is ~10%, most immigrants work (predominantly doing either the shitty jobs the indigenous population spurn or high-status, high-value add jobs) as well as drawing on the country's resources, and our own culture is *enriched* by being surrounded by immigrants. And people get thrown out of the country regularly including for not having papers and passports -- an abhorrent policy which ignores the fact that refugees can be *expected* not to have passports ("Oh hello Herr Hitler, I'm a Jew who'd like to flee your SS goons, can I have a passport please? What do you mean, no?").
Britain has been a country of immigrants and emigrants forever. It's one of the main reasons why English was such a successful language (in terms of numbers speaking it as a first or second language). Immigrants have given the UK lots of the symbols we hold most dear: our royals and fish and chips, to name just two.
Grow up and get used to it. And stop imagining that the situation is uniquely terrifying today -- just look at what was said in the 1890s about immigrants fleeing pogroms or the 1940s about war refugees etc. We survived then -- indeed thrived, and will do so now.
"Trade benefits both parties" is not a very clever statement to make in describing a relationship involving more than two parties, eg the commodity trading you cite. It is perfectly possible for Western consumers and a small elite of African robber barons to make money while the poor of Africa suffer the negative consequences of the resource extraction. And indeed, that's what happens.
What, your grandfather read Robert Heinlein?
"In a family argument, if it turns out you are right--apologize at once!"
Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973
1) As a geek, you might enjoy Robert Heinlein's suggestions in Time Enough for Love ("the Notebooks of Lazarus Long") for their practicality (plus, he trained as an engineer). Things like "budget the luxuries first"; "rub her feet".
2) Some years ago, I was at a conference with my wife -- we had just recently married, and we thought one session looked particularly interesting. It was called "Making long term relationships work" or something similar. The course began with the leader asking who in the room was in a long term relationship. Nearly every hand went up. He then asked us to go round the room and each say who we were and how long we'd been in our relationship. We were par for the course in saying we'd been together for five years and had just got married. The final person in the room answered by saying she wasn't sure if she could really claim to be in a long-term relationship... her husband had died last year after 54 years of marriage. At which point, the course leader turned to the rest of us and said "*That* is a long-term relationship. *That* is the timescale on which you should be looking to make things work. It requires a completely different perspective from how you would normally tend to think about things. How will you survive tragedy? How will you be a parent to your thirty-year old child? What will tie you together with your partner on a permanent basis, no matter the insults flung at it?" It goes beyond learning how to get along, or manage money, or put the lid on the toothpaste -- it's about finding a way to get to 80 together. It's tough, but one of the most worthwhile things you could ever do. Good luck!
The first example is a really bad reason for doing EMR -- it's the one cited by NPfIT and misses the point that for most trauma, there's neither the time nor the added value to make it worth knowing your medical history at the point of administration of emergency care.
The promise of EMR is in providing more proactive and integrated care of people with long-term conditions such as diabetes or congestive heart disease, where there are multiple health professionals involved who would benefit from each knowing the full picture of what the other one is doing in relation to a patient. That is a non-trivial problem to solve.
Don't be a dumbass. If you are already suffering from age-related macular degeneration, then insurers would be mad to agree to take on that risk. They would instead write it in as an exclusion, or raise the premium to the point that it's as high as the costs of treatment. And if you don't have AMD, then you're not going to know in advance whether or not you should buy insurance that excludes the condition.
But who *knows* they are going to win an election, except for those who fix the results? Ahmedinajad is undoubtedly popular, but he'd have to have been wildly optimistic and very badly advised to consider the election to be even in the rough vicinity of a shoo-in for him. I readily concede the possibility that Ahmedinajad won the election fair and square. But you originally asked why anyone would think that the possibility he cheated was even more likely, and I gave you the obvious reasons. I don't know why you assume I'm angry about possibility of his cheating. I just said that bad men are known to cheat to stay in power, and I implied that Ahmedinajad is a bad man.
Why? Because many men like power, and bad men who lead their country have a track record around the world of cheating in order to hang on to it. Which bit of this observation of human nature is unfamiliar to you? Or would you like to argue that Ahmadinejad and those who share power with him are not bad men?
Interesting -- the Protestant work ethic and related concepts of personal responsibility is of course not particularly American. It characterises the history of Northern Europe, for example, including the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. In each of these countries, a state that provided for the poor has been allowed to grow.
You posit that the presence of personal responsibility advocates, whose beliefs likely stem from their cultural and religious roots of Protestant beliefs in hard work for just reward etc, "just might do a better job than a socialist government [of eradicating poverty]". Throughout the C19 and the early part of the C20, a muscular interpretation of Protestant Christianity absolutely dominated British thought. Advocates of personal responsibility were everywhere -- but they had a different take from you on what that meant. They thought that most poor people were feckless and irresponsible and deserved little or no help. To the extent they provided help, they typically attached onerous / appalling conditions to the support they gave. Charitable institutions for the poor were awful, awful places where the poor were blamed for being poor. And millions of people lived in the most dreadful squalour.
You may assert that things would be different this time, because it's America and not the UK, because it's now and not then, etc. But I just do not buy any such assertions. Here's just one reason why: America has considerably more people who are poor as a % of its population than high-tax economies such as the Scandinavians. In fact, there's a recent book on this phenomenon. You won't like it, but it's built on a foundation of facts. It's called "The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better".
By the way, I've gone back and checked the thread carefully -- and as I seemed to recall, I did not in fact ask "for proof that the American government gives less to charity than European nations, but American citizens give more". Here is what happened:
1) I contended (and still do) that any tax rebate would reduce total funding for the poor dramatically due to people refusing to put their hands in their pockets.
2) You responded by asserting that, while US government contributions to world charity are low, US private contributions are "head and shoulders above the rest of the world" (which sounds like an assertion of American exceptionalism from where I'm sitting)
3) I then asked for you to demonstrate that per-capita income-weighted private charitable contributions were head-and-shoulders above the rest of the world.
4) You provided some stats about relative rates of international aid as a % of GDP and GNI for different countries. By the way, you should note that you're assuming that what is true for the relatively tiny matter of international aid will be true for the enormously larger matter of provision for the poor (10% or more of GDP).
5) I said that this had turned into a discussion on American exceptionalism.
6) You said that was because of me.