I know it's not easy. But dammit, you've got to try. It's going to sound really fscking dumb to our grandchildren that the hardships they endure were caused because we couldn't be bothered to find a job that allowed us to walk to work.
And more generally, how many peasants' children in the developing world do you think really have any sort of chance of earning £200k pa as a consultant?
As for your anecdote, I'll counter it with mine: I work for a well-known top-flight management consultancy. My colleagues almost universally went to private school for an expensive education -- as did I. Wealth begets opportunity.
Another poster has dealt with the spectacular economic idiocy that is a flat or consumption tax. But perhaps you'd like to share how you think it's morally justifiable to take the same 15% of a person's earnings whether they're earning £20k a year or £200k. As you damn well know, someone on £20k can ill afford to lose £3k in tax, whereas someone on £200k will barely notice losing £30k. You just want to be richer, that's all, and you're gussying it up with other motives.
Although to be fair, if your stock market widget is going to start pulling down 14,000 datapoints and assembling them into a graph, or your weather widget is going to start displaying complex radar images, then it's quite likely that retrieval times are going to be substantively worse. The key word that you're ignoring is "relevant". I doubt many people will find all 14,000 datapoints of relevance when looking up a stock price on their iPhone. They're probably only interested in a general sense of the trend. Kind of like asking how old someone is and getting a reply accurate to the number of days, it's not clear that more information is always more clarity, despite what Mr Tufte says -- at least for me.
What a pile of twat. The rich, for the most part, are rich because their parents were rich. Their parents bought them their valuable skills. Some people may be poor because they're dumb, but most suffer simply because their parents did as well. This is true from country to country and within countries as well.
Your arguments sound like schoolboy debating -- clever theory that ignores the real world, and ends up venal as a consequence.
I think you're right. Lazy right-wing mean-minded tossers like Clarkson repeatedly claim that organisations they don't like are using the Data Protection Act as an excuse for not doing their job properly. They thus beat up the organisations and the Act, when of course they should be beating up themselves. I'd particularly like to see Clarkson give himself a good kicking.
You've not read the tech spec. There's bugger all point in having someone trained in sailing to run this system. It's not a sail, it's a computer-controlled kite. It doesn't depend on human input for use. If you're an officer on a cargo ship, you might like to spend some time looking at the actual details of the system before dismissing it so lightly.
Your calculations and your "refinements" aren't properly thought out.
1) $1,600 / day *per ship* savings on fuel costs sounds pretty good to me -- nearly 600k a year. Of course that's a significant saving for a shipping company, look how they've borne down on crew costs to save relatively smaller sums. Assuming an installed cost of $750k, there's a payback time of just a year and a quarter, and that's conservative: fuel prices are heading up which increases the savings, the costs of production will head down due to economies of scale if the tech takes off, and the article notes that larger kites would -- in principle -- deliver larger savings.
2) Why on earth would you make the kite the bridge of the ship? The tether is about 300m long, what's the point of it being 240m instead? When you pull objects along, you attach the tether to the front of them, not the middle -- it's more efficient and it's more stable. Watch a child pull a toy dog along to see this principle in action.
3) They have their own solution to rough weather, and it's simpler than a frigging autonomous flight capability.
4) Lifting a fifty thousand ton ship bodily out of the water with kites doesn't sound like a terribly feasible solution. The hydrofoil idea might possibly be worth pursuing, but I suspect there are good technical engineering reasons for why large freight ships don't currently use this design that would preclude its use even with a kite.
Could any of the OR techs / surgeons who are here explain whether it would be possible to just have a securely fastened piece of high-vis string attached to each item used in surgery, which would trail outside the body and potentially would attach to a fixed object? How often would the string get in the way?
I can't speak for all juries, but I can say that I felt privileged to serve as a juror, took my responsibilities seriously, and shared that in common with my fellow jurors.
I think your side note is the main question. See, I think the answer to "who's wrong in this context" is "they both are wrong". As the old cliche goes, two wrongs don't make a right...I don't think the answer to "what do we do about the US's evil empire" is satisfactorily answered by saying "Russia" (or "China").
Both the Russian and the US governments act abroad for their own interests and against the interests of others. The Russians' actions in this respect are worse than the Americans', in my view, just less effective.
It's quite a semantic stretch to say "there's no such thing as a muslim court". Sharia courts operate in Muslim communities all around the world, where they may be part of the state apparatus (eg Saudia Arabia) or not (eg the UK).
You see, the trouble with you right-wing fellers is that you don't seem to understand what's meant by facts. When you make a testable assertion such as "The BBC is admittedly leftist, by its own owners" -- well, normal human beings would be interested in understanding what facts you have to back that assertion up. Assuming they can make their way through the thickets of godawful syntax on display, that it.
So, what facts are you going to provide to back up your assertion? Are you able to provide a link to any BBC document that says "We are left-wing"? How can you possibly describe the BBC as "*admittedly* leftist" [my emphasis] when it makes statements like "Impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC's commitment to its audiences"?
I really can't understand why you don't see that making wild, unfounded and unreferenced statements that fly in the face of the obvious just makes you sound like a demented cretin. It's pretty obvious why you'll fail to convince other people of your views; I just can't really understand how you even convince yourself.
The US governmentt may be pretty nasty in certain respects, but the Russian government is on a different level entirely. As is the Chinese. As are the Saudis etc etc.
The Russian state represses its own people far more extensively and viciously than the US government. It also has fewer compunctions about stepping outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour: witness Chechnya, the killing of journalists, the use of thugs to barrack the UK's ambassador(which would be *unthinkable* in the US), the cutting off of energy supplies to regimes who would not kowtow to the Kremlin and much, much more.
Not to mention selling WMD technology to theocratic lunatics. The US has also engaged in this particular idiocy, but that's no excuse.
You know, what I really don't get about Christians who spout on about creationism and "you're not reading the Bible right", is why they spend so much time piddling about with literalist interpretations of the beginning of the book, all the while completely failing to treat the story as the symbolic tale it so obviously is, and thus remaining blind to the subtleties that exist.
Jewish commentators have for centuries started from the point-of-view that literalist intepretations are pointless (eg the Rambam, the Ralbag, Rav Kook, Rashi -- "[the verses that begin the Torah] tell us nothing at all about the chronological sequence of creation]", and that understanding the implied meanings of the text and what it's trying to say about how we should live our lives, is more important.
For example, I think the various interpretations of why the account should begin with the word "Bereshit" -- and the letter "Bet" -- are more endlessly fascinating and rewarding than any amount of footling about with trying to demonstrate that the account can be reconciled with physical evidence. At least they say something about what we should do differently as a result of having read the damned thing -- eg it begins with the letter bet and not aleph to remind us that our view of what comes first is unsophisticated -- so we should be open to questioning our priorities. Always a good thing to do.
Yes, well, bringing up the concept of Original Sin is interesting. Original Sin is not a general religious concept, it's specific to Christianity. Jews don't believe in it, for example, and reject the idea that it accurately reflects the human condition. You seek to demonstrate the existence of Original Sin by asserting that "violence propagates [I've spelled this properly] itself through generations...".
This is problematic in any number of ways: the assertion is vague (violence propagates itself -- what, like a flower does? What does it mean?), and untestable, even if it were true it could be explained by plenty of other reasons than "humans are born sinners", and even if humans were born sinners, it doesn't follow that this would manifest itself in violence propagating through the generations.
Based on your post, I'm perfectly willing to believe that your life is filled with actions and belief not based on evidence or logic.
No, the end is slowing or stopping environmental degradation. They don't want the money merely for the sake of it. If you want to be rich, you don't work for Greenpeace, you work for Exxon.
I don't find this very convincing. Dresden, nukes and firebombing Japanese cities are all acts that have contested status -- they are not nearly as obviously crimes against humanity or war crimes as, to take a pretty obvious example from WWII, the Shoah.
The fact that both sides may do bad things in a war shouldn't make it impossible for us to say that one side is worse. And in this case, it's pretty clear that one side was worse.
RyanAir seem to do more than that: they appear to revel in news stories that make them appear to be as hard-nosed about cost-cutting as possible, eg charging for wheelchairs, for checking bags etc etc. I think they want to use that image to promote the idea that they are as cheap as possible. If the experience were pleasant, it would imply there are costs that haven't yet been taken out.
I would bet that either a large minority or even a majority of flight passenger movements in the US are on journeys that could, in principle, be replaced by a high-speed rail service -- eg up to 5 hours travel time from the centre of one city to the centre of another: there's an awful lot of plane movements up and down the coasts.
And there'll be another chunk that could be replaced very effectively by high-availability express coach services too.
RyanAir's business model was built to replicate some of the key features of SWA. The mainstream carriers know about it, and have done for years. But they are in a quandary about whether to try to outcompete on price or find another way. The trouble is, "value plays" destroy margins for incumbents (and in the end, risk doing so for the value challengers as well), no matter which competitive route they choose.
Armin, if this is how your God behaves, then I say to you frankly, if he exists, he's a twat. There's no other word for it. This being has omnipotence, creates in the foreknowledge that we're going to fail against his standards and then judges us as having failed and punishes us? If a human did that, we'd call them an evil twat, and the same goes for your God too. It's not graceful behaviour, it's graceless behaviour. It's setting the hamsters running in the cage and it's just plain mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I know it's not easy. But dammit, you've got to try. It's going to sound really fscking dumb to our grandchildren that the hardships they endure were caused because we couldn't be bothered to find a job that allowed us to walk to work.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm
And more generally, how many peasants' children in the developing world do you think really have any sort of chance of earning £200k pa as a consultant?
As for your anecdote, I'll counter it with mine: I work for a well-known top-flight management consultancy. My colleagues almost universally went to private school for an expensive education -- as did I. Wealth begets opportunity.
Another poster has dealt with the spectacular economic idiocy that is a flat or consumption tax. But perhaps you'd like to share how you think it's morally justifiable to take the same 15% of a person's earnings whether they're earning £20k a year or £200k. As you damn well know, someone on £20k can ill afford to lose £3k in tax, whereas someone on £200k will barely notice losing £30k. You just want to be richer, that's all, and you're gussying it up with other motives.
Although to be fair, if your stock market widget is going to start pulling down 14,000 datapoints and assembling them into a graph, or your weather widget is going to start displaying complex radar images, then it's quite likely that retrieval times are going to be substantively worse. The key word that you're ignoring is "relevant". I doubt many people will find all 14,000 datapoints of relevance when looking up a stock price on their iPhone. They're probably only interested in a general sense of the trend. Kind of like asking how old someone is and getting a reply accurate to the number of days, it's not clear that more information is always more clarity, despite what Mr Tufte says -- at least for me.
You could always:
1) Move to a place where public transport links are better
2) Vote for politicians who will fund public transport
What a pile of twat. The rich, for the most part, are rich because their parents were rich. Their parents bought them their valuable skills. Some people may be poor because they're dumb, but most suffer simply because their parents did as well. This is true from country to country and within countries as well.
Your arguments sound like schoolboy debating -- clever theory that ignores the real world, and ends up venal as a consequence.
I think you're right. Lazy right-wing mean-minded tossers like Clarkson repeatedly claim that organisations they don't like are using the Data Protection Act as an excuse for not doing their job properly. They thus beat up the organisations and the Act, when of course they should be beating up themselves. I'd particularly like to see Clarkson give himself a good kicking.
You've not read the tech spec. There's bugger all point in having someone trained in sailing to run this system. It's not a sail, it's a computer-controlled kite. It doesn't depend on human input for use. If you're an officer on a cargo ship, you might like to spend some time looking at the actual details of the system before dismissing it so lightly.
Are you sure that the principles that applying to sails apply to kites of this type? They appear to be quite different tech.
Your calculations and your "refinements" aren't properly thought out.
1) $1,600 / day *per ship* savings on fuel costs sounds pretty good to me -- nearly 600k a year. Of course that's a significant saving for a shipping company, look how they've borne down on crew costs to save relatively smaller sums. Assuming an installed cost of $750k, there's a payback time of just a year and a quarter, and that's conservative: fuel prices are heading up which increases the savings, the costs of production will head down due to economies of scale if the tech takes off, and the article notes that larger kites would -- in principle -- deliver larger savings.
2) Why on earth would you make the kite the bridge of the ship? The tether is about 300m long, what's the point of it being 240m instead? When you pull objects along, you attach the tether to the front of them, not the middle -- it's more efficient and it's more stable. Watch a child pull a toy dog along to see this principle in action.
3) They have their own solution to rough weather, and it's simpler than a frigging autonomous flight capability.
4) Lifting a fifty thousand ton ship bodily out of the water with kites doesn't sound like a terribly feasible solution. The hydrofoil idea might possibly be worth pursuing, but I suspect there are good technical engineering reasons for why large freight ships don't currently use this design that would preclude its use even with a kite.
Could any of the OR techs / surgeons who are here explain whether it would be possible to just have a securely fastened piece of high-vis string attached to each item used in surgery, which would trail outside the body and potentially would attach to a fixed object? How often would the string get in the way?
I can't speak for all juries, but I can say that I felt privileged to serve as a juror, took my responsibilities seriously, and shared that in common with my fellow jurors.
I think your side note is the main question. See, I think the answer to "who's wrong in this context" is "they both are wrong". As the old cliche goes, two wrongs don't make a right...I don't think the answer to "what do we do about the US's evil empire" is satisfactorily answered by saying "Russia" (or "China").
Both the Russian and the US governments act abroad for their own interests and against the interests of others. The Russians' actions in this respect are worse than the Americans', in my view, just less effective.
It's quite a semantic stretch to say "there's no such thing as a muslim court". Sharia courts operate in Muslim communities all around the world, where they may be part of the state apparatus (eg Saudia Arabia) or not (eg the UK).
You see, the trouble with you right-wing fellers is that you don't seem to understand what's meant by facts. When you make a testable assertion such as "The BBC is admittedly leftist, by its own owners" -- well, normal human beings would be interested in understanding what facts you have to back that assertion up. Assuming they can make their way through the thickets of godawful syntax on display, that it.
So, what facts are you going to provide to back up your assertion? Are you able to provide a link to any BBC document that says "We are left-wing"? How can you possibly describe the BBC as "*admittedly* leftist" [my emphasis] when it makes statements like "Impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC's commitment to its audiences"?
I really can't understand why you don't see that making wild, unfounded and unreferenced statements that fly in the face of the obvious just makes you sound like a demented cretin. It's pretty obvious why you'll fail to convince other people of your views; I just can't really understand how you even convince yourself.
Bollocks.
The US governmentt may be pretty nasty in certain respects, but the Russian government is on a different level entirely. As is the Chinese. As are the Saudis etc etc.
The Russian state represses its own people far more extensively and viciously than the US government. It also has fewer compunctions about stepping outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour: witness Chechnya, the killing of journalists, the use of thugs to barrack the UK's ambassador(which would be *unthinkable* in the US), the cutting off of energy supplies to regimes who would not kowtow to the Kremlin and much, much more.
Not to mention selling WMD technology to theocratic lunatics. The US has also engaged in this particular idiocy, but that's no excuse.
You know, what I really don't get about Christians who spout on about creationism and "you're not reading the Bible right", is why they spend so much time piddling about with literalist interpretations of the beginning of the book, all the while completely failing to treat the story as the symbolic tale it so obviously is, and thus remaining blind to the subtleties that exist.
Jewish commentators have for centuries started from the point-of-view that literalist intepretations are pointless (eg the Rambam, the Ralbag, Rav Kook, Rashi -- "[the verses that begin the Torah] tell us nothing at all about the chronological sequence of creation]", and that understanding the implied meanings of the text and what it's trying to say about how we should live our lives, is more important.
For example, I think the various interpretations of why the account should begin with the word "Bereshit" -- and the letter "Bet" -- are more endlessly fascinating and rewarding than any amount of footling about with trying to demonstrate that the account can be reconciled with physical evidence. At least they say something about what we should do differently as a result of having read the damned thing -- eg it begins with the letter bet and not aleph to remind us that our view of what comes first is unsophisticated -- so we should be open to questioning our priorities. Always a good thing to do.
Yes, well, bringing up the concept of Original Sin is interesting. Original Sin is not a general religious concept, it's specific to Christianity. Jews don't believe in it, for example, and reject the idea that it accurately reflects the human condition. You seek to demonstrate the existence of Original Sin by asserting that "violence propagates [I've spelled this properly] itself through generations...".
This is problematic in any number of ways: the assertion is vague (violence propagates itself -- what, like a flower does? What does it mean?), and untestable, even if it were true it could be explained by plenty of other reasons than "humans are born sinners", and even if humans were born sinners, it doesn't follow that this would manifest itself in violence propagating through the generations.
Based on your post, I'm perfectly willing to believe that your life is filled with actions and belief not based on evidence or logic.
No, the end is slowing or stopping environmental degradation. They don't want the money merely for the sake of it. If you want to be rich, you don't work for Greenpeace, you work for Exxon.
I don't find this very convincing. Dresden, nukes and firebombing Japanese cities are all acts that have contested status -- they are not nearly as obviously crimes against humanity or war crimes as, to take a pretty obvious example from WWII, the Shoah.
The fact that both sides may do bad things in a war shouldn't make it impossible for us to say that one side is worse. And in this case, it's pretty clear that one side was worse.
RyanAir seem to do more than that: they appear to revel in news stories that make them appear to be as hard-nosed about cost-cutting as possible, eg charging for wheelchairs, for checking bags etc etc. I think they want to use that image to promote the idea that they are as cheap as possible. If the experience were pleasant, it would imply there are costs that haven't yet been taken out.
I would bet that either a large minority or even a majority of flight passenger movements in the US are on journeys that could, in principle, be replaced by a high-speed rail service -- eg up to 5 hours travel time from the centre of one city to the centre of another: there's an awful lot of plane movements up and down the coasts.
And there'll be another chunk that could be replaced very effectively by high-availability express coach services too.
RyanAir's business model was built to replicate some of the key features of SWA. The mainstream carriers know about it, and have done for years. But they are in a quandary about whether to try to outcompete on price or find another way. The trouble is, "value plays" destroy margins for incumbents (and in the end, risk doing so for the value challengers as well), no matter which competitive route they choose.
I've read it once, I've read it twice, and I'm still inescapably drawn to the conclusion....it's gibberish.
Armin, if this is how your God behaves, then I say to you frankly, if he exists, he's a twat. There's no other word for it. This being has omnipotence, creates in the foreknowledge that we're going to fail against his standards and then judges us as having failed and punishes us? If a human did that, we'd call them an evil twat, and the same goes for your God too. It's not graceful behaviour, it's graceless behaviour. It's setting the hamsters running in the cage and it's just plain mean.