On a "Student Visa"; WTF is he studying? Economics? Sounds too good at already to need any further study.
Why the hell do these people get given student visas anyway? It's time the West dropped its patronising attitude and put down its supposed "white man's burden".
you are....... certainly gullible enough to think yourself the arbiter.
Looks like most people here are arbitrating, including yourself. Why pick on ruir particularly? It was his spelling rather than his logic that immediately struck me as a problem.
And as a side note, if I just want to purchase something directly from you, say a cord of firewood that fell in a storm in your backyard, do you then need to have a card reader and a deal with a credit card company, and do they get a cut of our private transaction?
an explanation by Bjorn who mentioned his son's apartment being robbed and how the burglars made away with some cash. So... "ban all cash" because my kid left some in his apartment and it got burgled.
Who TF is this idiot Bjorn?
I would have thought that a burglar breaking into a flat would cause far more cost in damage (new front door - $1000?) than any cash that a sane person would leave lying around. That was certainly the case with my car being broken into - new door: $500, value stolen from inside: $4.
I think it's incredibly myopic to think any privacy already exists for your payments.
.......
3) Once the money hits your bank account, your bank already knows where it goes. If you withdraw cash, they may even know the serial numbers (and can track to some extent from that).
Yes, I'm sure that Miss Whiplash phones the bank with the serial numbers of my payment as soon as I leave her flat each time.
Typically, a cash society has a lot of hidden overheads......... All of this costs money, and is much cheaper and mostly eliminated if you use electronic transactions.
It is a truism to say that eliminating cash eliminates the costs of dealing with cash. I think most of us can agree that both methods (cash and plastic) cost money. Which costs most depends on the nature of the business. What is clear is that the credit card companies and banks charge far too much commission on transactions - 2% I am told on top of standing charges for equipment. 2% the cost of a TV or car for about a microsecond of computer time?
There is clearly so much easy profit in plastic cards that (in the UK) everyone and his dog has got into issuing them - my old Uni, the National Trust, every chain store, the AA (Automobile Assn) - there are hundreds of them. I would be more positive about them if they became just a functional tool like cheque-books were rather than a bankers' money-making scam.
even when they have a checkbox option saying "don't spam me" or similar, some arsehole in their marketing department will take it upon themselves to decide that i didn't really mean that
Stores prefer less cash, because handling cash is expensive. Money cost money.
Credit cards cost money too - I was in a small shop (in the UK) just before Xmas and overheard the owner complaining to a credit card customer that they had to pay a 2% fee for every transaction. She was relieved when I paid cash.
Moreover my wife is a bookeeper for a small business selling plastic containers mostly to industry. They looked into installing the facility for credit cards and the cost was shocking. Most of their customers are account customers and they prefer to turn away those others that only want to pay with credit cards.
There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars
That depends on the rules. It is illegal for a bus to pass a car where you are?! As for buses, there is a fortunate tendency in the UK to give way to them; otherwise they would never be able to pull away from any bus stop in cities. Perhaps that is what you mean by "breaking the rules"?
My experience is the opposite. Every day I am in a long traffic jam of cars waiting to pull out at a "T" junction onto another road which has priority. This is all in a city suburb with 30mph speed limit. The traffic on the through road is fairly light and the cars on my road could easily pull out into its gaps if only the through traffic were keeping to 30mph. In fact the through traffic is mostly doing 40-45 mph and at that speed there is not enough space between those cars to pull out without making them slow considerably. Hence a long and unneccesary traffic queue with several man-hours wasted each day there in total bacause drivers do not keep to the speed limit.
In fact when I get to the front of the queue I do often pull out, against the "Give Way" sign, in a way that does make the through traffic slow a bit. Who is breaking the rules then, me or them?
Without working through their figures, I have no doubt that they get to their staggering $190 billion "boost" by adding up the current tariffs around the world.
But that tariff money does not evaporate after payment, it goes into the economy of where it was paid. If you transfer money from Peter to Paul, there is no direct loss to any economy which includes them both - and in this case it does include both as it is the global economy they are claiming for.
Of course there can be secondary effects such as encouraging or discouraging manufacture here or there. In this case though it will only further discourage manufacture in the West and encourage it where wages are cheap, but that trend does not look to me like it needs any more encouragement.
>There are already nearly 3 million Muslims in America, anything that makes them feel more discriminated against.... is very likely more dangerous than the risk that immigration poses.
Immigrants I have known have actually been uneasy about further immigration, and don't hesitate to say so. They can express this view because they do not need to fear being thrown in jail for "racism". Some reasons:-
1) They, the sane ones anyway, are generally trying to integrate themselves. The arrival of fresh immigrants sets back their agenda because it keeps alive the idea that immigrants are a bunch of intruding newcomers. More bluntly, they want to pull up the drawbridge.
2) They know that continued immigration only raises the native people's resentment and anger against them, if not today then possibly reaching exploding point at some time in the future. We in the west tend to assume everlasting political stability; they have probably seen otherwise.
3) The further immigrants are importing a way of life, rules and culture that the original ones were trying to escape from. There are now large parts of cities (here in the UK) that look like you are in an Asian or African country, where a dark-skinned woman without a burka gets hard looks from the people there. I expect we shall soon see the laws permitting bigamy to satisfy the hard-line Muslims. [I once had a Muslim GF who wanted to escape from having to wear a burka]
4) They recognise that the country (the UK anyway) is already desparately overcrowded.
5) They are not blinded by "white guilt",
6) They can see straight away that the majority of immigrants are not political refugees (the usual "reason" for admitting them to the UK) but are adventurers, skivers, petty crooks for whom things have got too hot at home, jocks escaping from getting a girl pregrant back home, men escaping the draft, and are looking for easy money, easy women, and streets "paved with gold". They get disappointed.
You're talking about them like they're ticking time bombs. Where did you get that idea?
That junction looks complicated, but results in traffic passing through the junction faster than the alternatives and with fewer accidents.
The 4-way stop, on the other hand,
It's a 5-way junction actually, which makes me wonder about the reliability of your other assertions and whether you could call up citations. But do go on.......
...... look[s] simple but is inefficient and dangerous in comparison to the alternatives.
You seem to be talking about a 4-way crossroads (as we'd call it in the UK, and ignoring the 5-way issue FTTB) - ie a plain simple orthogonal 4-directions junction, with or without traffic lights. But the sensible alternative to the Swindon Magic Roundabout (in my link) would be a plain roundabout, not a "4 [or 5]-way stop". I'm not sure they have roundabouts in the USA, so if you are there you might not have come across them. They work fine for situations like Swindon and are very common in the UK - too common in fact.
That you view the safe, efficient alternative as lunacy speaks volumes.
Britain's manufacturing is all but non-existent vs pre-Thatcher. The US is still one of the world manufacturing powerhouses.
Oh come off it. I am in the UK and must admit I do have an American car, but earlier this week I bought a box of Xmas crackers and was a very proud Englishman to see that they were "Made in Britain". Who said Britain could not make anything any more? Oh, and Scotch whisky (until Scotland breaks away). Let me find some other examples......... er.......... I'll get back later.
Of-course, USA used to be the country with the least regulations, taxes and generally government oppression and millions came over.
That worked when it consisted of lots of little self-regulating high-minded communities like the Pilgrim Fathers and the present-day surviving Amish. Breaks down soon after that. Good job the government does not leave it to individuals to decide which side of the road to drive on.
That migration was not a coincidence, people move to where they imagine there is more economic activity, not where the economy is oppressed, [blah blah blah etc]
Could you find some way to turn this into a pro-feminism argument?
You usually manage it.
Try this:- The removal of the steering wheel and other controls is to be celebrated as it removes any indication of relative status among male and female passengers, the bias of which is usually to the male.
I think Google do not understand how the UK legal system works. It is negative rather than positive in that it says what is not allowed rather than what is allowed. On the face of it this is less restrictive (temporarily) because there are no laws against anything that did not occur to the original lawmakers. In fact there are a lot of laws about what is not allowed in driving, but driverless cars were never imagined by the lawmakers, so no particular restrictions currently apply to them. Nevertheless there would soon be a whole raft of new laws about driverless cars,
Reminds me of a UK TV sitcom called "Yes Minister" about a ficticious government minister and the convolutions involved. His aide tells him about a possible new development which the minister does not like the sound of:-
Minister: I shall stop this happening before it starts! Aide: Sorry minister, but you cannot stop something before it starts. You will have to let it start first, and stop it after that.
If your not passing port to port, your doing it wrong;)
All European nations drove vehicles on the left until the French Revolution. The practical reason was that, as most carriage drivers held their whip in their right hand, it made the whip less likely to get tangled in the hedge or hit pedestrians.
OTOH pedestrians walked on the right, a rule that still applies in the UK to roads without pavements (=US sidewalks). This was so that they could see carriages approaching them on their own side and could jump into the hedge or ditch if the driver did not look like he was going to avoid them (behaviour like that caused the French Revolution).
Obviously, people in carriages were toffs, and pedestrians were peasants.
Come the French Revolution, everyone desparately wanted to show they were a peasant, not a toff, even if they were in a carriage. Officials of the Revolution did use carriages. So carriages started driving on the right to show solidarity with the peasants. It was the wrong side, but the idea contaminated all nations that found themselves co-lateral to the revolution, or who admired it.
Not sure how the USA came to drive on the right. It was an admirer of the Revolution (as was possible from a distance), or perhaps it is because America has no hedges.
There is also the extremely poor state of UK roads, basically third world quality for the most part.
Also the fact that UK roads (like the country as a whole) are desparately overcrowded, narrow, traffic jams everywhere, traffic lights and roundabouts (often combined these days) everywhere, anomalous speed restriction policies, and local council traffic officers' crackpot scheme pet ideas*. I am often confused myself at unfamiliar junctions which traffic light head applies to which lane. I would have though a nation of more wide-open roads would be a better starting ground.
There's a ton of AC posts, and most of them never get modded up even if they're of good quality.
I make a point of modding up AC posts if they are good to compensate for their one point handicap. IMHO, unless you register with your real name, a/. persona is no better than AC.
I have sometimes modded as AC to given an inside view of my own industry and would rather my bosses did not identify me, which perhaps they could if they delved deeper into my past posts if I gave my "real" false name. Those AC posts of mine have often contained more insightful and expert information than if I were to comment on, say, an article on meat labelling which I really know FA about but I can rant away with my real false name because I have no connection with the business.
I've had an account for months that has excellent karma but for some reason doesn't get to metamoderate and has never gotten mod points....... I can't figure out what criteria are used to determine who gets to moderate
Don't know, but you won't collect karma by posting AC, as now
...... Fuck you moderators!
Thanks, but I only mod. I don't get to choose who else moderates.
1) The British High Speed Train (HST) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., mainstay of UK non-electrified Inter-City services for the last 40 years.
2) London Underground "1938 Tube Stock". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Having spent decades as the workhorse of the extremely heavily used London Northern Line, six of them are still at work on the Isle of Wight line today. This is an ordinary work-a-day line, not a preserved heritage one, and ex-London tube stock was chosen to solve the problem of its close clearances. "1938" is when they were built, so over 75 years old and going strong.
Slashdot Mirror
The bbc is very quickly becoming an obsolete white elephant that produces 95% crap.
Better than the 100 % crap produced by the other channels.
On a "Student Visa"; WTF is he studying? Economics? Sounds too good at already to need any further study.
Why the hell do these people get given student visas anyway? It's time the West dropped its patronising attitude and put down its supposed "white man's burden".
you are ....... certainly gullible enough to think yourself the arbiter.
Looks like most people here are arbitrating, including yourself. Why pick on ruir particularly? It was his spelling rather than his logic that immediately struck me as a problem.
And as a side note, if I just want to purchase something directly from you, say a cord of firewood that fell in a storm in your backyard, do you then need to have a card reader and a deal with a credit card company, and do they get a cut of our private transaction?
To answer your question : Yes.
an explanation by Bjorn who mentioned his son's apartment being robbed and how the burglars made away with some cash. So... "ban all cash" because my kid left some in his apartment and it got burgled.
Who TF is this idiot Bjorn?
I would have thought that a burglar breaking into a flat would cause far more cost in damage (new front door - $1000?) than any cash that a sane person would leave lying around. That was certainly the case with my car being broken into - new door: $500, value stolen from inside: $4.
I think it's incredibly myopic to think any privacy already exists for your payments.
3) Once the money hits your bank account, your bank already knows where it goes. If you withdraw cash, they may even know the serial numbers (and can track to some extent from that).
Yes, I'm sure that Miss Whiplash phones the bank with the serial numbers of my payment as soon as I leave her flat each time.
The only thing the bank know, is where I spent my money. The bank don't know what I bought.
You bought something at Anne Summers (sex accessories chain in the UK), say. Let's leave what it was exactly to their imagination.
Typically, a cash society has a lot of hidden overheads......... All of this costs money, and is much cheaper and mostly eliminated if you use electronic transactions.
It is a truism to say that eliminating cash eliminates the costs of dealing with cash. I think most of us can agree that both methods (cash and plastic) cost money. Which costs most depends on the nature of the business. What is clear is that the credit card companies and banks charge far too much commission on transactions - 2% I am told on top of standing charges for equipment. 2% the cost of a TV or car for about a microsecond of computer time?
There is clearly so much easy profit in plastic cards that (in the UK) everyone and his dog has got into issuing them - my old Uni, the National Trust, every chain store, the AA (Automobile Assn) - there are hundreds of them. I would be more positive about them if they became just a functional tool like cheque-books were rather than a bankers' money-making scam.
even when they have a checkbox option saying "don't spam me" or similar, some arsehole in their marketing department will take it upon themselves to decide that i didn't really mean that
Use a disposable email address, like from http://spamdecoy.net/
Where do you live? Here in Sweden I had a bank account in my own name when I was ten. Not a debit card though, that was later.
In the UK I was buying sweets from shops when I was six.
Stores prefer less cash, because handling cash is expensive. Money cost money.
Credit cards cost money too - I was in a small shop (in the UK) just before Xmas and overheard the owner complaining to a credit card customer that they had to pay a 2% fee for every transaction. She was relieved when I paid cash.
Moreover my wife is a bookeeper for a small business selling plastic containers mostly to industry. They looked into installing the facility for credit cards and the cost was shocking. Most of their customers are account customers and they prefer to turn away those others that only want to pay with credit cards.
There you go Menkhaura, a Windows phone fan.
There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars
That depends on the rules. It is illegal for a bus to pass a car where you are?! As for buses, there is a fortunate tendency in the UK to give way to them; otherwise they would never be able to pull away from any bus stop in cities. Perhaps that is what you mean by "breaking the rules"?
My experience is the opposite. Every day I am in a long traffic jam of cars waiting to pull out at a "T" junction onto another road which has priority. This is all in a city suburb with 30mph speed limit. The traffic on the through road is fairly light and the cars on my road could easily pull out into its gaps if only the through traffic were keeping to 30mph. In fact the through traffic is mostly doing 40-45 mph and at that speed there is not enough space between those cars to pull out without making them slow considerably. Hence a long and unneccesary traffic queue with several man-hours wasted each day there in total bacause drivers do not keep to the speed limit.
In fact when I get to the front of the queue I do often pull out, against the "Give Way" sign, in a way that does make the through traffic slow a bit. Who is breaking the rules then, me or them?
Without working through their figures, I have no doubt that they get to their staggering $190 billion "boost" by adding up the current tariffs around the world.
But that tariff money does not evaporate after payment, it goes into the economy of where it was paid. If you transfer money from Peter to Paul, there is no direct loss to any economy which includes them both - and in this case it does include both as it is the global economy they are claiming for.
Of course there can be secondary effects such as encouraging or discouraging manufacture here or there. In this case though it will only further discourage manufacture in the West and encourage it where wages are cheap, but that trend does not look to me like it needs any more encouragement.
>There are already nearly 3 million Muslims in America, anything that makes them feel more discriminated against .... is very likely more dangerous than the risk that immigration poses.
Immigrants I have known have actually been uneasy about further immigration, and don't hesitate to say so. They can express this view because they do not need to fear being thrown in jail for "racism". Some reasons :-
1) They, the sane ones anyway, are generally trying to integrate themselves. The arrival of fresh immigrants sets back their agenda because it keeps alive the idea that immigrants are a bunch of intruding newcomers. More bluntly, they want to pull up the drawbridge.
2) They know that continued immigration only raises the native people's resentment and anger against them, if not today then possibly reaching exploding point at some time in the future. We in the west tend to assume everlasting political stability; they have probably seen otherwise.
3) The further immigrants are importing a way of life, rules and culture that the original ones were trying to escape from. There are now large parts of cities (here in the UK) that look like you are in an Asian or African country, where a dark-skinned woman without a burka gets hard looks from the people there. I expect we shall soon see the laws permitting bigamy to satisfy the hard-line Muslims. [I once had a Muslim GF who wanted to escape from having to wear a burka]
4) They recognise that the country (the UK anyway) is already desparately overcrowded.
5) They are not blinded by "white guilt",
6) They can see straight away that the majority of immigrants are not political refugees (the usual "reason" for admitting them to the UK) but are adventurers, skivers, petty crooks for whom things have got too hot at home, jocks escaping from getting a girl pregrant back home, men escaping the draft, and are looking for easy money, easy women, and streets "paved with gold". They get disappointed.
You're talking about them like they're ticking time bombs. Where did you get that idea?
I cannot imagine
You might be able to enlighten us as to how this is in any way a negative thing?
They are an eysore.
That junction looks complicated, but results in traffic passing through the junction faster than the alternatives and with fewer accidents. The 4-way stop, on the other hand,
It's a 5-way junction actually, which makes me wonder about the reliability of your other assertions and whether you could call up citations. But do go on .......
You seem to be talking about a 4-way crossroads (as we'd call it in the UK, and ignoring the 5-way issue FTTB) - ie a plain simple orthogonal 4-directions junction, with or without traffic lights. But the sensible alternative to the Swindon Magic Roundabout (in my link) would be a plain roundabout, not a "4 [or 5]-way stop". I'm not sure they have roundabouts in the USA, so if you are there you might not have come across them. They work fine for situations like Swindon and are very common in the UK - too common in fact.
That you view the safe, efficient alternative as lunacy speaks volumes.
Tell us what these volumes are speaking, exactly.
Britain's manufacturing is all but non-existent vs pre-Thatcher. The US is still one of the world manufacturing powerhouses.
Oh come off it. I am in the UK and must admit I do have an American car, but earlier this week I bought a box of Xmas crackers and was a very proud Englishman to see that they were "Made in Britain". Who said Britain could not make anything any more? Oh, and Scotch whisky (until Scotland breaks away). Let me find some other examples ......... er .......... I'll get back later.
Of-course, USA used to be the country with the least regulations, taxes and generally government oppression and millions came over.
That worked when it consisted of lots of little self-regulating high-minded communities like the Pilgrim Fathers and the present-day surviving Amish. Breaks down soon after that. Good job the government does not leave it to individuals to decide which side of the road to drive on.
That migration was not a coincidence, people move to where they imagine there is more economic activity, not where the economy is oppressed, [blah blah blah etc]
Correction in bold font for you.
Could you find some way to turn this into a pro-feminism argument?
You usually manage it.
Try this :- The removal of the steering wheel and other controls is to be celebrated as it removes any indication of relative status among male and female passengers, the bias of which is usually to the male.
The UK as a less regulated environment?
I think Google do not understand how the UK legal system works. It is negative rather than positive in that it says what is not allowed rather than what is allowed. On the face of it this is less restrictive (temporarily) because there are no laws against anything that did not occur to the original lawmakers. In fact there are a lot of laws about what is not allowed in driving, but driverless cars were never imagined by the lawmakers, so no particular restrictions currently apply to them. Nevertheless there would soon be a whole raft of new laws about driverless cars,
:-
: I shall stop this happening before it starts! : Sorry minister, but you cannot stop something before it starts. You will have to let it start first, and stop it after that.
Reminds me of a UK TV sitcom called "Yes Minister" about a ficticious government minister and the convolutions involved. His aide tells him about a possible new development which the minister does not like the sound of
Minister
Aide
If your not passing port to port, your doing it wrong ;)
All European nations drove vehicles on the left until the French Revolution. The practical reason was that, as most carriage drivers held their whip in their right hand, it made the whip less likely to get tangled in the hedge or hit pedestrians.
OTOH pedestrians walked on the right, a rule that still applies in the UK to roads without pavements (=US sidewalks). This was so that they could see carriages approaching them on their own side and could jump into the hedge or ditch if the driver did not look like he was going to avoid them (behaviour like that caused the French Revolution).
Obviously, people in carriages were toffs, and pedestrians were peasants.
Come the French Revolution, everyone desparately wanted to show they were a peasant, not a toff, even if they were in a carriage. Officials of the Revolution did use carriages. So carriages started driving on the right to show solidarity with the peasants. It was the wrong side, but the idea contaminated all nations that found themselves co-lateral to the revolution, or who admired it.
Not sure how the USA came to drive on the right. It was an admirer of the Revolution (as was possible from a distance), or perhaps it is because America has no hedges.
There is also the extremely poor state of UK roads, basically third world quality for the most part.
Also the fact that UK roads (like the country as a whole) are desparately overcrowded, narrow, traffic jams everywhere, traffic lights and roundabouts (often combined these days) everywhere, anomalous speed restriction policies, and local council traffic officers' crackpot scheme pet ideas*. I am often confused myself at unfamiliar junctions which traffic light head applies to which lane. I would have though a nation of more wide-open roads would be a better starting ground.
* Take a look at this lunacy : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's a ton of AC posts, and most of them never get modded up even if they're of good quality.
I make a point of modding up AC posts if they are good to compensate for their one point handicap. IMHO, unless you register with your real name, a /. persona is no better than AC.
I have sometimes modded as AC to given an inside view of my own industry and would rather my bosses did not identify me, which perhaps they could if they delved deeper into my past posts if I gave my "real" false name. Those AC posts of mine have often contained more insightful and expert information than if I were to comment on, say, an article on meat labelling which I really know FA about but I can rant away with my real false name because I have no connection with the business.
I've had an account for months that has excellent karma but for some reason doesn't get to metamoderate and has never gotten mod points....... I can't figure out what criteria are used to determine who gets to moderate
Don't know, but you won't collect karma by posting AC, as now
...... Fuck you moderators!
Thanks, but I only mod. I don't get to choose who else moderates.
In the railway world :-
years.
1) The British High Speed Train (HST) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., mainstay of UK non-electrified Inter-City services for the last 40 years.
2) London Underground "1938 Tube Stock". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Having spent decades as the workhorse of the extremely heavily used London Northern Line, six of them are still at work on the Isle of Wight line today. This is an ordinary work-a-day line, not a preserved heritage one, and ex-London tube stock was chosen to solve the problem of its close clearances. "1938" is when they were built, so over 75 years old and going strong.