There are 81 BWR plants in operation around the world. Of a total of 434 plants. Of those 81 over half are Gen 3 or later designs which do not have the same failure method as the Gen 2 Fukushima design.
That does not however change the fact that the Tsunami and earth quake destroyed the emergency response capability. Remove those issues and taking out the generator and outside power will not cause the plant to meltdown because the plant isn't operating inside a bubble. A new generator will arrive on the back of a truck in a couple of hours and that is it.
Don't forget these plants also have battery backup. This covers an extended period of time for a replacement generator to be brought to site.
Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled. You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and people on site within hours in any other circumstance outside of a massive earthquake and a killer Tsunami.
Also you share a really big land border with the biggest consumer nation in the world. If you build something good in Canada you can be selling it in the US for the price of a truck shipment.
If you build something good in Australia it has a really really really long way to go before it can be consumed in the US.
There is a reason why we produce large quantities or iron ore, copper, bauxite, coal, uranium, lead, zinc, and gold. It is because the primary consumers of those are close by (China and India). Brazil is Australia's biggest competitor in the floating traded iron space and Australia wins a lot of the time because we are physically closer to China.
You know that it is those miners that allow you to have the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed? Like it or hate it without mining the Australian economy is in trouble in a big way. We have always been a primary industry economy, we either farm it or we dig it up. That is not going to change any time soon, we are in a shitty location to be a manufacturer, too far from anywhere. We do not have the capital or employment structures to be an effective IT startup area (see employee share scheme laws). Our population is too small to be the critical mass needed for some other type of business that I can't think of.
We are however very very good at mining, oil & gas extraction and processing. You may disagree with doing it. You may think it is raping the planet. But you reap the rewards of that industry living here.
Ah no. I have to say citation needed. Coal demand is increasing not decreasing.
1990 coal production - 4677mt 2013 Coal production - 7823mt.
Coal mines are only shutting if they were borderline operations. Do not confuse closing a mine that is uneconomical at the current price, a price that is the result of a world wide economic down turn, with a longer term move away from coal.
But you have to get close with a hand grenade. You can probably do a lot of damage with a hand gun if you can get into the right place. Or even a crow bar.
However there tends to be a pretty big fence around these sorts of places and has the kind of people who wouldn't take too kindly to you trying to lob a grenade from a carpark.
Working on the premise that you can only get access to light munitions (ie a predator drone with a load off hellfires is off the cards) you are probably looking at commercial quad rotor type drones. You may be able to get 2kgs of c4 into a kind of close location but it won't be shaped and you will be very unlikely to be able to have it effectively placed. (these things are hard as hell to fly close to solid objects)
So you would likely get surface blasting with limited compression to cause structural damage. You might, if you were particularly lucky, manage to get it into a cooling tower and fracture the concrete but much more than that is unlikely. You could take out the grid ties fairly easily, and maybe get key personnel. but I would suggest melt down risk is basically zero.
Compare that to a crew with an m224 mortar system. A well trained crew (3 people) can launch 20 shells per minute of 60mm HE shells from up to 3+ kms away.
If that doesn't pack enough punch the m252 pushes you out to 5km away and lands 81mm shells. You can't fire as quick but you would have some serious penetration power before they were able to triangulate your position and come get you. 5 minutes with that and you are looking at 30 - 50 rounds on the target, could the super structure withstand that?
Overall I think the risk of a drone attack is almost zero as there are much cheaper, easier and more effective options.
My first thought is it is probably some anti-nuclear group hoping to get scary pictures and data to skew horribly to terrorise the public. They probably had some cheap and nasty Geiger counter on them and we will get something like - DID YOU KNOW THE AIR ABOVE A NUCLEAR POWERPLANT IS 10,000,000,000,000,00000000 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE THEN NORMAL?!?!?! YOU ARE BREATHING THIS IN!!!!!!!!!
Drones have a fairly low weight limit and are not hard to spot. In order to flood the area with enough drones to do significant damage you would absolutely know you were under attack.
If you could stage an attack of 100 remotely operator drones with enough HE to do serious damage you could probably do a lot more damage putting the same effort into a battery of mortars.
There is also more to calculating economic costs then just what the public is willing to spend to save a single life. When a government body is considering upgrades to roads or traffic intersections accident data contributes a large amount to the economic modelling around which area gets the upgrade first.
I work in a related field and what I have been told is that in Australia a police call out accident is priced at $1 million, and then a fatality as priced at $15 million. That way they are able to economically model which upgrades will give the best results. Of course if there is a particular black spot it get priority outside of this model. (please don't quote me on those figures as it was a while ago and I didn't write them down)
So when it comes to things like AEDs there will be a cost of install and maintain and it will be offset against a modelled cost for fatality, emergency callout and then longer term health impacts.
Absolutely. It is called the good samaritan law and protects people from liability if they are attempting to help in good faith. There are some variations between the states with NSW law being the least protective (you are liable if you are the CAUSE of the problem), through to Victoria's blanket protection of no liability even if you were causing the problem if you were acting in good faith.
Germany goes one step further and it is a criminal offence to not to provide first aid. And if you screw it up you are protected.
Are they really that rare? Every shopping mall has them here (Queensland - Australia). They seem to locate them where the toilets are. Every major office I have ever worked in had them on each floor as well.
Once you are in the 'burbs though they do become a lot rarer and if there was a way to have one delivered very quickly that would be awesome.
Maybe where you are. For me registration cost is exactly the same for the 1st or the 100th car. Insurance as well seems to make no difference. You get usage discounts definitely but the insurance cost on a car always has a base line minimum and that amount is higher than the discount for low usage, by an order of magnitude.
Depreciation is more dependent on age than anything else, of course if your car is already old then you have worn most of the depreciation already. But you don't see huge cost differences between a 3 year old car with 30,0000 and one with 50,000 and, maybe wrongly, but I would prefer a newer car for safety, especially for long trips. Finally servicing is done on both mileage and age. You don't want to leave oil sitting in your engine for long periods of time as it turns acidic. Also fuel goes off and can gum things like injectors, plugs, filters and pumps. Which means no matter what you will be increasing your servicing costs.
Where as I live in a semi-rural area on acreage. It is 7km to my local store and I have two young kids. This means that I do lots of middle distance drives - 20-30km multiple times a day and then longer ones multiple times a week. It's the price of where I live, but you make those decisions. Also I am on the road a lot for work so the drive to the office, plug in, drive home, plug in model doesn't work.
I would happily (well kinda happily anyway) sit at a charging station for 10 minutes if that gave me half decent range. But that said, when deciding on which particular model car I was going to buy recently the range of 1100km on a tank was a HUGE selling point.
Unfortunately I have to agree with you at this stage. I have done enough super high mileage trips that it would require a second car permanently on stand by. That means double insurance, tax, storage and depreciation.
An average year sees our main car do c45,000km the trips are often 200km+ and to be skirting that close to the range limit that often puts me off.
From your list there, I have more issues with windows than I do Linux Mint for drivers, I have tv tuners, printers, SLI Nvidia cards all working fine, just plug and go (tv tuner is a huappage (sp?) 500 dual digital and a hauppage (sp?) analogue). For example I have a lexmark multi-function and it works fine with linux but causes the print spooler to crash in windows. As for media center I can't get past XBMC as the best one I have used and it's OS agnostic. (I will say if you have an optimus chipset or a random USB 3g dongle you can run in to issues)
What software are you installing were you get dependency errors? Either I install from the package manager, or all the dependencies come bundled.
I don't use creative suit or autodesk so that could be a show stopper there.
Gaming is the one place where I do stumble, but I have a new setup now where I have a windows machine in a rack that has wake-on-lan and boots to steam. I then stream the games across my network (house is all wired) and there are enough linux games now if I am out and about on my laptop.
I realise some of these are a work around but there are things that bug me about windows, such as why does it not let me easily have more than one instance of calculator or picture viewer open? The multi-desktops is another, multi-panes in windows explorer, seamless NFS, bash scripts!, a nice ssh client, Meld.
Of course you use what you want to use. I just like Mint.
The force was enough to write the mini off when it was 3 months old, and had caused ripples in the body work right through the roof section back to the rear pillars.
Unfortunately that one was not my only, or even worst accident. Just over 12 months ago we were hit from behind by a full size semi trailer while travelling on the motorway. We had had to do an emergency stop due to debris all over the road causing every one to stop. The truck was following to closely and impacted us at over 70kph, picking us up and slamming us into the car in front. I had my wife, my 3 year old and my 3 month old in the car with me. We all managed to walk away but our car was totalled and the truck had to be towed from the scene.
The car was a 2012 E-class Mercedes and the scariest thing for me was my daughters pram had punched through the rear of the boot and into the front of the truck by close to 15 cm. Fortunately the way it folds and the way we put it in the boot meant the wheels were against the back of the seat and the tubing faced backwards. I know those seat backs are reinforced but the thought of the pram coming into the passenger area still gives me nightmares. The wheels on the pram were significantly deformed.
In that instance the baby capsule and toddler seat meant my girls were pretty much un-injured (the 3 yr old had some leg bruising). My wife though is still suffering from the after effects of that crash with compression fractures in her back.
I don't get people who don't wear seat belts in their car or ride their motorbike without a helmet (I ride as well). The force of car crashes is terrifying and sometimes there is nothing you can do to avoid one.
I can only comment from personal experience. Seat belt wearing rates are very high in Australia (to the point where I don't know ANYONE who doesn't) and I always wear a seat belt.
I lost control of a mini cooper S at approx 80 kph. The car spun, then righted it self before driving off the road directly into a very large tree that didn't move a mm. I ended up with severe bruising from the seatbelt, eggs on my shins where I had kicked the underside of the dash, a burn on the inside of my right wrist from the air bag deploying and a fairly significant abrasion mark on my forehead. Apparently the burn on the inside of the wrist is common as people are death gripping the steering wheel when the air bag deploys and the mark on my head is a tell tale that I hit the airbag.
Now I don't really remember the details of where my limbs went, but my head hit something. And it may have been that without the airbag being there I wouldn't have hit anything at all but I'd rather not try again to find out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... shows a video of an unrestrained and then seat belts with airbag. You see the dummy hit the airbag pretty solidly.
I agree that the woman who was raped is the true victim. I also am not commenting on the suitability of the punishments, either for the rapist or what is being proposed as punishment for comments posted on social media.
My initial point is that according to the guidance the law applies only in the cases where "communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted" (taken directly from the guidance).
Being a Troll in and of itself is not something you will be prosecuted from. This is no different to if you were texting the person or posting letters to their house. If what you were doing there was a crime it is also one to perform it on social media. So if you Troll go for it, if you want to threaten a specific person with harm you are going to get caught in these laws.
These are an excerpt from the guidance. It covers the part about a joke and in essence shows it is restricted to credible threats of violence, harassment or stalking. Like every other law whether you are guilty or not will be decided after you are charged and put before a jury.
In 19 December 2012, to strike a balance between freedom of speech and criminality, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued interim guidelines, clarifying when social messaging is eligible for criminal prosecution under UK law. Only communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted. Communications that express an "unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humor, even if distasteful to some and painful to those subjected to it" will not. Communications that are merely "grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false" will be prosecuted only when it can be shown to be necessary and proportionate. People who pass on malicious messages, such as by retweeting, can also be prosecuted when the original message is subject to prosecution. Individuals who post messages as part of a separate crime, such as a plan to import drugs, would face prosecution for that offence, as is currently the case.[11][12][13]
You know it only applies to specific types of comments right?. ie "I'm going to kill you" "I'm going to rape you" type comments. You are free to be as much of a troll-tard as you like as long as you are not threatening someone.
From TFA one particular example was a girl who came out not supporting a return to professional football of a convicted rapist. She had extensive death and rape threats sent to her via social media. If you were to have written the same comments on a letter and posted it to her it would also have been a crime.
These laws are separated to libel or defamation laws.
Flat tax rate is easier. Not easy. I run my own business with multiple entities. There are different taxes applied to different items at different rates. Where I live I pay payroll tax, that is a tax equal to 4.75% of my employees salaries must be paid to the state. This is separate to the income tax which is with held from their earnings. On top of that if I decide to give a meal voucher or some other incentive to an employee as a reward it attracts Fringe Benefit Tax, this is calculated at 48.5%. So if I give you a $100 restaurant voucher I have a $48.50 tax liability.
Then there is GST. I sell something for $1000 I have collected $90.91 in GST which is to be remitted to the tax office monthly. Except I have to subtract from that the GST I have already paid - So if I bought that item for 900, I have already paid $81.81 in tax so I have to remit $10.09 to the tax office. And when do you calculate this on? When the invoice is raised or when you actually receive the cash?
Then there is the difference in capital gains tax. Ie I bought a capital item for $100,000 and sold it for $150,000. I get taxed on the 50k difference. But if that asset is owned in a trust I pay tax on 50% of the capital gain, so only $25k.
Tax law is fiendishly complicated. And part of what makes it complicated is that different things are taxed at different rates. If there was simply 1 or 2 taxes and they were flat it would be brilliant. But before we look at a flat tax rate we need to dump the millions of tiny taxes.
The problem is that different asset classes generate different types of income and these are defined differently between countries.
Did you make your profit as a capital gain or as a income from normal business operations? If it is capital gain it faces tax structure A in Country 1, B in Country 2 and 3 in Country 3. If it is income from normal business operations it face tax structure C in County 1, A in Country 2 and something else entirely in Country 3.
So what is done is you structure your business for the type of revenue you will generate and locate it where ever it is most favourable. There is nothing saying that your company is not made up of multiple entities (in fact it really really should be) which allows you to book different income streams in different countries.
For example. In Australia corporations tax is 30%. Google creates "Google Australia pty ltd" to operate in Australia. That is who invoices people. In a year it makes $100 million profit internally in Australia from Australian customers. So that should be $30 million in tax please. Except that Google Australia has to by its "Google Name License" from Google Ireland and that cost in this financial year was $115 million. So actually Google Australia pty ltd lost $15 million. So no tax is due.
That $115 million lands in Ireland and is classified as income generated from licensing, that is treated differently to income generated from normal business and is subject to a lower tax band of 2%. Bang tax bill is down to $2 million and no laws have been broken.
* Note examples used are not representative of tax laws in the respective countries and are meant as an indication of possible methods for minimising tax.
For me it takes out all bar one "valid" reason for downloading. And that is it is streamed. I can't get a broadband connection here fast enough to stream effectively and streaming requires some awful in a browser spawn of satan thing where as I have XBMCbuntu and a backend server. My front ends use a remote control and no keyboard so trying to pop into a browser to watch something is actually quite painful.
Actually I think there is one more logical step next. First we will see a Balkanization, but then I think we will see a Steamization. There will come a platform with better technology that will sell content from multiple sources. Initially the content providers will resist this but when an independent has enough content and they are missing out because their choice was 3rd on peoples list and so people refused to pay we will see a by episode / season purchasing option with someone else covering costs of things like bandwidth.
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There are 81 BWR plants in operation around the world. Of a total of 434 plants. Of those 81 over half are Gen 3 or later designs which do not have the same failure method as the Gen 2 Fukushima design.
That does not however change the fact that the Tsunami and earth quake destroyed the emergency response capability. Remove those issues and taking out the generator and outside power will not cause the plant to meltdown because the plant isn't operating inside a bubble. A new generator will arrive on the back of a truck in a couple of hours and that is it.
Don't forget these plants also have battery backup. This covers an extended period of time for a replacement generator to be brought to site.
I WANT your electricity bill... Mine is like $1000 a quarter.
Or perhaps there was this MASSIVE fucking Tsunami that killed 10,000+ people and a massive earthquake.
I think you might have forgotten about having a massive amount of sea water pouring into the facility. Roads into and out of the area destroyed. Emergency services essentially crippled. You take out the generators and the grid tie and even IF that could melt down the facility (note it would be unlikely as you would have to have the same era and plant design as Fukushima) there would be 100 generators and people on site within hours in any other circumstance outside of a massive earthquake and a killer Tsunami.
Also you share a really big land border with the biggest consumer nation in the world. If you build something good in Canada you can be selling it in the US for the price of a truck shipment.
If you build something good in Australia it has a really really really long way to go before it can be consumed in the US.
There is a reason why we produce large quantities or iron ore, copper, bauxite, coal, uranium, lead, zinc, and gold. It is because the primary consumers of those are close by (China and India). Brazil is Australia's biggest competitor in the floating traded iron space and Australia wins a lot of the time because we are physically closer to China.
You know that it is those miners that allow you to have the lifestyle to which you have become accustomed? Like it or hate it without mining the Australian economy is in trouble in a big way. We have always been a primary industry economy, we either farm it or we dig it up. That is not going to change any time soon, we are in a shitty location to be a manufacturer, too far from anywhere. We do not have the capital or employment structures to be an effective IT startup area (see employee share scheme laws). Our population is too small to be the critical mass needed for some other type of business that I can't think of.
We are however very very good at mining, oil & gas extraction and processing. You may disagree with doing it. You may think it is raping the planet. But you reap the rewards of that industry living here.
Ah no. I have to say citation needed. Coal demand is increasing not decreasing.
1990 coal production - 4677mt
2013 Coal production - 7823mt.
Coal mines are only shutting if they were borderline operations. Do not confuse closing a mine that is uneconomical at the current price, a price that is the result of a world wide economic down turn, with a longer term move away from coal.
ref - http://www.smh.com.au/environm...
But you have to get close with a hand grenade. You can probably do a lot of damage with a hand gun if you can get into the right place. Or even a crow bar.
However there tends to be a pretty big fence around these sorts of places and has the kind of people who wouldn't take too kindly to you trying to lob a grenade from a carpark.
Working on the premise that you can only get access to light munitions (ie a predator drone with a load off hellfires is off the cards) you are probably looking at commercial quad rotor type drones. You may be able to get 2kgs of c4 into a kind of close location but it won't be shaped and you will be very unlikely to be able to have it effectively placed. (these things are hard as hell to fly close to solid objects)
So you would likely get surface blasting with limited compression to cause structural damage. You might, if you were particularly lucky, manage to get it into a cooling tower and fracture the concrete but much more than that is unlikely. You could take out the grid ties fairly easily, and maybe get key personnel. but I would suggest melt down risk is basically zero.
Compare that to a crew with an m224 mortar system. A well trained crew (3 people) can launch 20 shells per minute of 60mm HE shells from up to 3+ kms away.
If that doesn't pack enough punch the m252 pushes you out to 5km away and lands 81mm shells. You can't fire as quick but you would have some serious penetration power before they were able to triangulate your position and come get you. 5 minutes with that and you are looking at 30 - 50 rounds on the target, could the super structure withstand that?
Overall I think the risk of a drone attack is almost zero as there are much cheaper, easier and more effective options.
My first thought is it is probably some anti-nuclear group hoping to get scary pictures and data to skew horribly to terrorise the public. They probably had some cheap and nasty Geiger counter on them and we will get something like - DID YOU KNOW THE AIR ABOVE A NUCLEAR POWERPLANT IS 10,000,000,000,000,00000000 TIMES MORE RADIOACTIVE THEN NORMAL?!?!?! YOU ARE BREATHING THIS IN!!!!!!!!!
Drones have a fairly low weight limit and are not hard to spot. In order to flood the area with enough drones to do significant damage you would absolutely know you were under attack.
If you could stage an attack of 100 remotely operator drones with enough HE to do serious damage you could probably do a lot more damage putting the same effort into a battery of mortars.
There is also more to calculating economic costs then just what the public is willing to spend to save a single life. When a government body is considering upgrades to roads or traffic intersections accident data contributes a large amount to the economic modelling around which area gets the upgrade first.
I work in a related field and what I have been told is that in Australia a police call out accident is priced at $1 million, and then a fatality as priced at $15 million. That way they are able to economically model which upgrades will give the best results. Of course if there is a particular black spot it get priority outside of this model. (please don't quote me on those figures as it was a while ago and I didn't write them down)
So when it comes to things like AEDs there will be a cost of install and maintain and it will be offset against a modelled cost for fatality, emergency callout and then longer term health impacts.
Absolutely. It is called the good samaritan law and protects people from liability if they are attempting to help in good faith. There are some variations between the states with NSW law being the least protective (you are liable if you are the CAUSE of the problem), through to Victoria's blanket protection of no liability even if you were causing the problem if you were acting in good faith.
Germany goes one step further and it is a criminal offence to not to provide first aid. And if you screw it up you are protected.
Are they really that rare? Every shopping mall has them here (Queensland - Australia). They seem to locate them where the toilets are. Every major office I have ever worked in had them on each floor as well.
Once you are in the 'burbs though they do become a lot rarer and if there was a way to have one delivered very quickly that would be awesome.
Maybe where you are. For me registration cost is exactly the same for the 1st or the 100th car. Insurance as well seems to make no difference. You get usage discounts definitely but the insurance cost on a car always has a base line minimum and that amount is higher than the discount for low usage, by an order of magnitude.
Depreciation is more dependent on age than anything else, of course if your car is already old then you have worn most of the depreciation already. But you don't see huge cost differences between a 3 year old car with 30,0000 and one with 50,000 and, maybe wrongly, but I would prefer a newer car for safety, especially for long trips. Finally servicing is done on both mileage and age. You don't want to leave oil sitting in your engine for long periods of time as it turns acidic. Also fuel goes off and can gum things like injectors, plugs, filters and pumps. Which means no matter what you will be increasing your servicing costs.
Where as I live in a semi-rural area on acreage. It is 7km to my local store and I have two young kids. This means that I do lots of middle distance drives - 20-30km multiple times a day and then longer ones multiple times a week. It's the price of where I live, but you make those decisions. Also I am on the road a lot for work so the drive to the office, plug in, drive home, plug in model doesn't work.
I would happily (well kinda happily anyway) sit at a charging station for 10 minutes if that gave me half decent range. But that said, when deciding on which particular model car I was going to buy recently the range of 1100km on a tank was a HUGE selling point.
Unfortunately I have to agree with you at this stage. I have done enough super high mileage trips that it would require a second car permanently on stand by. That means double insurance, tax, storage and depreciation.
An average year sees our main car do c45,000km the trips are often 200km+ and to be skirting that close to the range limit that often puts me off.
From your list there, I have more issues with windows than I do Linux Mint for drivers, I have tv tuners, printers, SLI Nvidia cards all working fine, just plug and go (tv tuner is a huappage (sp?) 500 dual digital and a hauppage (sp?) analogue). For example I have a lexmark multi-function and it works fine with linux but causes the print spooler to crash in windows. As for media center I can't get past XBMC as the best one I have used and it's OS agnostic. (I will say if you have an optimus chipset or a random USB 3g dongle you can run in to issues)
What software are you installing were you get dependency errors? Either I install from the package manager, or all the dependencies come bundled.
I don't use creative suit or autodesk so that could be a show stopper there.
Gaming is the one place where I do stumble, but I have a new setup now where I have a windows machine in a rack that has wake-on-lan and boots to steam. I then stream the games across my network (house is all wired) and there are enough linux games now if I am out and about on my laptop.
I realise some of these are a work around but there are things that bug me about windows, such as why does it not let me easily have more than one instance of calculator or picture viewer open? The multi-desktops is another, multi-panes in windows explorer, seamless NFS, bash scripts!, a nice ssh client, Meld.
Of course you use what you want to use. I just like Mint.
The force was enough to write the mini off when it was 3 months old, and had caused ripples in the body work right through the roof section back to the rear pillars.
Unfortunately that one was not my only, or even worst accident. Just over 12 months ago we were hit from behind by a full size semi trailer while travelling on the motorway. We had had to do an emergency stop due to debris all over the road causing every one to stop. The truck was following to closely and impacted us at over 70kph, picking us up and slamming us into the car in front. I had my wife, my 3 year old and my 3 month old in the car with me. We all managed to walk away but our car was totalled and the truck had to be towed from the scene.
The car was a 2012 E-class Mercedes and the scariest thing for me was my daughters pram had punched through the rear of the boot and into the front of the truck by close to 15 cm. Fortunately the way it folds and the way we put it in the boot meant the wheels were against the back of the seat and the tubing faced backwards. I know those seat backs are reinforced but the thought of the pram coming into the passenger area still gives me nightmares. The wheels on the pram were significantly deformed.
In that instance the baby capsule and toddler seat meant my girls were pretty much un-injured (the 3 yr old had some leg bruising). My wife though is still suffering from the after effects of that crash with compression fractures in her back.
I don't get people who don't wear seat belts in their car or ride their motorbike without a helmet (I ride as well). The force of car crashes is terrifying and sometimes there is nothing you can do to avoid one.
I can only comment from personal experience. Seat belt wearing rates are very high in Australia (to the point where I don't know ANYONE who doesn't) and I always wear a seat belt.
I lost control of a mini cooper S at approx 80 kph. The car spun, then righted it self before driving off the road directly into a very large tree that didn't move a mm. I ended up with severe bruising from the seatbelt, eggs on my shins where I had kicked the underside of the dash, a burn on the inside of my right wrist from the air bag deploying and a fairly significant abrasion mark on my forehead. Apparently the burn on the inside of the wrist is common as people are death gripping the steering wheel when the air bag deploys and the mark on my head is a tell tale that I hit the airbag.
Now I don't really remember the details of where my limbs went, but my head hit something. And it may have been that without the airbag being there I wouldn't have hit anything at all but I'd rather not try again to find out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... shows a video of an unrestrained and then seat belts with airbag. You see the dummy hit the airbag pretty solidly.
I agree that the woman who was raped is the true victim. I also am not commenting on the suitability of the punishments, either for the rapist or what is being proposed as punishment for comments posted on social media.
My initial point is that according to the guidance the law applies only in the cases where "communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted" (taken directly from the guidance).
Being a Troll in and of itself is not something you will be prosecuted from. This is no different to if you were texting the person or posting letters to their house. If what you were doing there was a crime it is also one to perform it on social media. So if you Troll go for it, if you want to threaten a specific person with harm you are going to get caught in these laws.
These are an excerpt from the guidance. It covers the part about a joke and in essence shows it is restricted to credible threats of violence, harassment or stalking. Like every other law whether you are guilty or not will be decided after you are charged and put before a jury.
In 19 December 2012, to strike a balance between freedom of speech and criminality, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued interim guidelines, clarifying when social messaging is eligible for criminal prosecution under UK law. Only communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted. Communications that express an "unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, or banter or humor, even if distasteful to some and painful to those subjected to it" will not. Communications that are merely "grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false" will be prosecuted only when it can be shown to be necessary and proportionate. People who pass on malicious messages, such as by retweeting, can also be prosecuted when the original message is subject to prosecution. Individuals who post messages as part of a separate crime, such as a plan to import drugs, would face prosecution for that offence, as is currently the case.[11][12][13]
You know it only applies to specific types of comments right?. ie "I'm going to kill you" "I'm going to rape you" type comments. You are free to be as much of a troll-tard as you like as long as you are not threatening someone.
From TFA one particular example was a girl who came out not supporting a return to professional football of a convicted rapist. She had extensive death and rape threats sent to her via social media. If you were to have written the same comments on a letter and posted it to her it would also have been a crime.
These laws are separated to libel or defamation laws.
Flat tax rate is easier. Not easy. I run my own business with multiple entities. There are different taxes applied to different items at different rates. Where I live I pay payroll tax, that is a tax equal to 4.75% of my employees salaries must be paid to the state. This is separate to the income tax which is with held from their earnings. On top of that if I decide to give a meal voucher or some other incentive to an employee as a reward it attracts Fringe Benefit Tax, this is calculated at 48.5%. So if I give you a $100 restaurant voucher I have a $48.50 tax liability.
Then there is GST. I sell something for $1000 I have collected $90.91 in GST which is to be remitted to the tax office monthly. Except I have to subtract from that the GST I have already paid - So if I bought that item for 900, I have already paid $81.81 in tax so I have to remit $10.09 to the tax office. And when do you calculate this on? When the invoice is raised or when you actually receive the cash?
Then there is the difference in capital gains tax. Ie I bought a capital item for $100,000 and sold it for $150,000. I get taxed on the 50k difference. But if that asset is owned in a trust I pay tax on 50% of the capital gain, so only $25k.
Tax law is fiendishly complicated. And part of what makes it complicated is that different things are taxed at different rates. If there was simply 1 or 2 taxes and they were flat it would be brilliant. But before we look at a flat tax rate we need to dump the millions of tiny taxes.
The problem is that different asset classes generate different types of income and these are defined differently between countries.
Did you make your profit as a capital gain or as a income from normal business operations? If it is capital gain it faces tax structure A in Country 1, B in Country 2 and 3 in Country 3. If it is income from normal business operations it face tax structure C in County 1, A in Country 2 and something else entirely in Country 3.
So what is done is you structure your business for the type of revenue you will generate and locate it where ever it is most favourable. There is nothing saying that your company is not made up of multiple entities (in fact it really really should be) which allows you to book different income streams in different countries.
For example. In Australia corporations tax is 30%. Google creates "Google Australia pty ltd" to operate in Australia. That is who invoices people. In a year it makes $100 million profit internally in Australia from Australian customers. So that should be $30 million in tax please. Except that Google Australia has to by its "Google Name License" from Google Ireland and that cost in this financial year was $115 million. So actually Google Australia pty ltd lost $15 million. So no tax is due.
That $115 million lands in Ireland and is classified as income generated from licensing, that is treated differently to income generated from normal business and is subject to a lower tax band of 2%. Bang tax bill is down to $2 million and no laws have been broken.
* Note examples used are not representative of tax laws in the respective countries and are meant as an indication of possible methods for minimising tax.
For me it takes out all bar one "valid" reason for downloading. And that is it is streamed. I can't get a broadband connection here fast enough to stream effectively and streaming requires some awful in a browser spawn of satan thing where as I have XBMCbuntu and a backend server. My front ends use a remote control and no keyboard so trying to pop into a browser to watch something is actually quite painful.
Actually I think there is one more logical step next. First we will see a Balkanization, but then I think we will see a Steamization. There will come a platform with better technology that will sell content from multiple sources. Initially the content providers will resist this but when an independent has enough content and they are missing out because their choice was 3rd on peoples list and so people refused to pay we will see a by episode / season purchasing option with someone else covering costs of things like bandwidth.