Well, I don't see it on the news in any part of your country, because I live in Scotland. About the only time I've heard someone with an "American" accent recently is when Donald Trump has been flapping his gums about how building an offshore windfarm is going to destroy Scotland's economy and ecology, and ruin the view from his eco-disaster golf course - but of course he has quite clearly got a New York accent. Oddly enough I thought there was something else to it, and it turns out (looking on Wikipedia) that his mother was from Lewis - he has a distinct Lewis tone to some of his vowels.
That article doesn't tell the whole story, though. It leaves out the cost of actually producing the vegetables that you eat, which involves an unholy amount of oil. Lots of oil is used to make fertiliser, and then even more oil is used to run the tractors that spread the fertiliser, plough the fields, and so on.
Arguably vegans can be worse in this regard, since they're more likely to eat things like soya that have to be shipped half way round the planet, using even *more* oil.
My accent sounds completely different from everyone I live near, although I grew up only a couple of hundred miles away. I drove to a customer site 30 miles away from my workshop, and everyone sounds totally different again. If I drive from my house down to the south of England, I'll pass through about a dozen areas with different regional accents.
Saying "British accent" makes about as much sense as saying "American accent" - people from Texas don't talk like people from Maine, do they?
I don't really see how that works. Humans can't eat grass, because we are monogastric. Our stomachs can't break down the tough cellulose at a rate that would let us get a useful amount of energy out of it.
You can't grow grain on moorland, because the soil is unsuitable, and you can't cultivate it with machinery because it's too boggy, rocky or vertical. It's not like Farmville, you can't just click a little square and watch plants spring up.
It's just fine for grazing sheep on, though, because they don't mind it being steep and rocky and they have evolved with a ruminant digestive system and suitable teeth for eating tough grasses and heathers.
But it doesn't matter how much more land it takes, since you can't necessarily grow vegetables on it anyway. It's far cheaper and easier - and ecologically cleaner - for me to graze sheep on it then eat the sheep, than it is for me to burn hundreds of litres of oil pumping tonnes of petrochemical-derived fertiliser onto the land.
Of course we all know that all farms should only be used for growing vegetables because raising animals is bad for the environment, right?
Wrong.
This is exactly why. The only people who think that we should only grow vegetables are people who have only ever seen thousands of acres of rolling Iowa cornfields - much of which gets fed to cows. Most of the world doesn't use "feedlots" the way that the cattle industry in the US does. Most of the world isn't rolling Iowa cornfield, either.
The only thing that makes sense is to try to grow things that will actually thrive in the prevailing conditions. Trying to turn land that is not really suitable for arable crops into land that *is* suitable for arable crops is doomed to expensive failure. Now, the first problem with Africa is that cutting down forests to provide arable land has allowed what soil there was to wash or blow away, depending on whether it's getting deluged with rain or dried into powder with the sun. The first thing is not to worry too much about importing huge amounts of petrochemical-derived fertiliser, but to get irrigation working and grow green manure crops that will tie what little soil there is together, and provide some nutrients when they break down. The great thing about this is that you don't really care if the water is dirty - in fact, you *want* it to be a bit dirty, any sediment or sewage or dead animals will only make it work better. The more biomass you get in there, the better. Sure, it'll smell a bit horrible, but have you ever been near an organic farm when they're spreading the organic fertiliser out? Hint - you make organic fertiliser using cows, sheep and pigs.
A good solution would be to devise some way of processing sewage from towns into something that can be used as fertiliser. The difficulty is that allowing sewage to break down involves allowing human shit to break down, and that requires you to let bacteria multiply rapidly, and you tend to get predominantly E Coli bacteria when you do that. This isn't exactly what you want to fling onto your arable crops, and killing E Coli requires lots of chemicals or lots of heat. They've got a lot of sunshine, so maybe you could do something with that - a sort of solar steriliser to bake off the E Coli and give you a nice, dry, easy-to-handle compost.
Of course you're going to need to find some sort of livestock that thrive in these conditions, and goats do pretty well, but goats eat everything and will destroy ground-covering plants which is how we got into this mess in the first place. Hens would do pretty well, as long as you had a biggish grassy patch with plenty of bugs for them to eat. Cows would be good if you could get enough forage in for them initially, because there's nothing quite so good at turning poor grassland into fertile arable land as getting some sort of ruminant to eat the tough inedible grasses and pass them through that complex set of stomachs.
We can't afford the arable land for everyone to be vegetarian, and when the oil runs out the situation will get worse. We *all* need to plan now and act soon.
So if a policeman kicks your door in because he smells dope smoke coming from your house (which they are allowed to do in the US), you're just going to shoot him?
Yeah. Let me know how that works out for you. Don't waste your one phone call on it though, I don't need to know *that* badly.
I avoid wrapping my thumbs around the steering wheel, even though the steering in my car can't kick back no matter what the road wheels hit, since there isn't really a mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the rack. It's all hydraulic, and much quicker and lighter than most clunky power steering systems.
How much heavier is that? I don't have any idea. Does it mean the new iPad weighs as much as an old one with a couple of stickers on it, or as much as a bag of cement?
There's nothing "Big Brother" about it. Would you prefer that vehicles weren't registered at all?
I don't see why it would be out-of-date. When you buy a car, you register it. It takes at most a couple of working days for the DVLA database to reflect your change of ownership - maybe a particular registration would be a day behind if you posted it late on Friday, and there was a Bank Holiday Monday, and you did it right around the beginning of March or the beginning of September when all the new registrations are issued.
Furthermore, the police can already check the DVLA database from their in-car computers. If you buy a tax disc online, it's updated instantly - we tried this out once when I got stopped by a roadside inspection (old, unusual car, it's a magnet for them). I'd just come back from having the car MOTed (another instantly-updated database) and was about to buy a tax disc online. I got talking to one of the traffic cops that was there about how quickly it updates, so we thought we'd try an experiment. Laptop out, 3G on, onto the DVLA website, buy online, check their MDT every couple of minutes and within about ten minutes the car showed up as now having valid VED for the year.
Of course thanks to our wonderful semi-privatised postal system it took nearly a week for the actual tax disc to arrive, but anyone checking would see that the vehicle was taxed. Anyone (traffic wardens) writing a ticket for an invalid tax disc would be quite right to do so, but all I'd need to do is ring up the police station, quote the ticket number, and they can check the VED status and cancel it off. Simple.
Yes, I know that some of the Ayn Rand-loving right-wing whiners may complain about this "Big Brother" breach of civil liberties, but it's not especially intrusive and it keeps uninsured drivers in unroadworthy cars off the road. I, and damn near everyone else in this country, think that's a good idea.
I am insured to drive most types of cars, so, as far as I am aware, could jump into a car registered to an uninsured friend and legally drive it.
Nope. The car has to be insured, no matter what. If your insurance allows you to drive other vehicles with the owner's permission, that vehicle has to be insured, and you are usually only covered for third-party liability anyway.
Otherwise, there would be nothing to stop you buying a Mini and insuring it for next to nothing, then driving around in an otherwise-uninsured Jag.
Because in the UK you don't change the number plate every year, it stays with the car from the day it's registered (well, unless you register a personalised number plate).
When you pay the road fund licence you get a little paper disc to stick inside the windscreen, showing that the car is taxed for that year.
I pay about £150 per year for my 24-year-old CX, fully comprehensive, protected no-claims, glass cover, agreed value (so they pay what the car is actually worth, rather than what they reckon it's worth) although it's only insured for 8000 miles per year since these days it doesn't come out to play very often. However, I'm 38 and have full no-claims discount and live out in the sticks, which helps a lot.
Central London has many areas where insurance companies just won't cover you.
A handwritten plate is kind of not OK, but if it's clearly readable and matches the towing vehicle you're very unlikely to have problems. Like, you might get an additional fine for having an out-of-spec number plate, if you happen to get caught with the six dead bodies that you're transporting in the trailer...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I don't see it on the news in any part of your country, because I live in Scotland. About the only time I've heard someone with an "American" accent recently is when Donald Trump has been flapping his gums about how building an offshore windfarm is going to destroy Scotland's economy and ecology, and ruin the view from his eco-disaster golf course - but of course he has quite clearly got a New York accent. Oddly enough I thought there was something else to it, and it turns out (looking on Wikipedia) that his mother was from Lewis - he has a distinct Lewis tone to some of his vowels.
Obvious troll is obvious.
That article doesn't tell the whole story, though. It leaves out the cost of actually producing the vegetables that you eat, which involves an unholy amount of oil. Lots of oil is used to make fertiliser, and then even more oil is used to run the tractors that spread the fertiliser, plough the fields, and so on.
Arguably vegans can be worse in this regard, since they're more likely to eat things like soya that have to be shipped half way round the planet, using even *more* oil.
My accent sounds completely different from everyone I live near, although I grew up only a couple of hundred miles away. I drove to a customer site 30 miles away from my workshop, and everyone sounds totally different again. If I drive from my house down to the south of England, I'll pass through about a dozen areas with different regional accents.
Saying "British accent" makes about as much sense as saying "American accent" - people from Texas don't talk like people from Maine, do they?
Resource availability changes. Lifestyles have to adjust.
My lifestyle can't adjust, much. If fuel prices continue to rise, I won't be able to afford to buy any. That means I won't be able to do any work.
That, in turn, means that you won't have food in the shops, and that's sure as hell going to affect rich and poor alike.
I don't really see how that works. Humans can't eat grass, because we are monogastric. Our stomachs can't break down the tough cellulose at a rate that would let us get a useful amount of energy out of it.
You can't grow grain on moorland, because the soil is unsuitable, and you can't cultivate it with machinery because it's too boggy, rocky or vertical. It's not like Farmville, you can't just click a little square and watch plants spring up.
It's just fine for grazing sheep on, though, because they don't mind it being steep and rocky and they have evolved with a ruminant digestive system and suitable teeth for eating tough grasses and heathers.
How can veggies "win" if you can't actually get them to grow?
But it doesn't matter how much more land it takes, since you can't necessarily grow vegetables on it anyway. It's far cheaper and easier - and ecologically cleaner - for me to graze sheep on it then eat the sheep, than it is for me to burn hundreds of litres of oil pumping tonnes of petrochemical-derived fertiliser onto the land.
To be fair the US also seems to treat its citizens like government property, and people in the US appear to be worked like slaves.
I don't know anyone in the US who does less than a 40-hour week, and many of them do over 50 hours.
Of course we all know that all farms should only be used for growing vegetables because raising animals is bad for the environment, right?
Wrong.
This is exactly why. The only people who think that we should only grow vegetables are people who have only ever seen thousands of acres of rolling Iowa cornfields - much of which gets fed to cows. Most of the world doesn't use "feedlots" the way that the cattle industry in the US does. Most of the world isn't rolling Iowa cornfield, either.
The only thing that makes sense is to try to grow things that will actually thrive in the prevailing conditions. Trying to turn land that is not really suitable for arable crops into land that *is* suitable for arable crops is doomed to expensive failure. Now, the first problem with Africa is that cutting down forests to provide arable land has allowed what soil there was to wash or blow away, depending on whether it's getting deluged with rain or dried into powder with the sun. The first thing is not to worry too much about importing huge amounts of petrochemical-derived fertiliser, but to get irrigation working and grow green manure crops that will tie what little soil there is together, and provide some nutrients when they break down. The great thing about this is that you don't really care if the water is dirty - in fact, you *want* it to be a bit dirty, any sediment or sewage or dead animals will only make it work better. The more biomass you get in there, the better. Sure, it'll smell a bit horrible, but have you ever been near an organic farm when they're spreading the organic fertiliser out? Hint - you make organic fertiliser using cows, sheep and pigs.
A good solution would be to devise some way of processing sewage from towns into something that can be used as fertiliser. The difficulty is that allowing sewage to break down involves allowing human shit to break down, and that requires you to let bacteria multiply rapidly, and you tend to get predominantly E Coli bacteria when you do that. This isn't exactly what you want to fling onto your arable crops, and killing E Coli requires lots of chemicals or lots of heat. They've got a lot of sunshine, so maybe you could do something with that - a sort of solar steriliser to bake off the E Coli and give you a nice, dry, easy-to-handle compost.
Of course you're going to need to find some sort of livestock that thrive in these conditions, and goats do pretty well, but goats eat everything and will destroy ground-covering plants which is how we got into this mess in the first place. Hens would do pretty well, as long as you had a biggish grassy patch with plenty of bugs for them to eat. Cows would be good if you could get enough forage in for them initially, because there's nothing quite so good at turning poor grassland into fertile arable land as getting some sort of ruminant to eat the tough inedible grasses and pass them through that complex set of stomachs.
We can't afford the arable land for everyone to be vegetarian, and when the oil runs out the situation will get worse. We *all* need to plan now and act soon.
Yes, exactly. No-one Rs TFM if they can help it, but zapping pretty much anything with lasers is always cool.
RTFA, although I know this isn't a popular idea.
The big asteroids become big asteroids moving in a different direction, and a puff of hot vapour where the laser has ablated a chunk of the surface.
So if a policeman kicks your door in because he smells dope smoke coming from your house (which they are allowed to do in the US), you're just going to shoot him?
Yeah. Let me know how that works out for you. Don't waste your one phone call on it though, I don't need to know *that* badly.
If you live in the US, you can be arrested and jailed for *years*, because a policeman says he thought he smelt cannabis smoke coming from your house.
Have a sense of perspective.
Works for 4x4s, too.
I avoid wrapping my thumbs around the steering wheel, even though the steering in my car can't kick back no matter what the road wheels hit, since there isn't really a mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the rack. It's all hydraulic, and much quicker and lighter than most clunky power steering systems.
How much heavier is that? I don't have any idea. Does it mean the new iPad weighs as much as an old one with a couple of stickers on it, or as much as a bag of cement?
Most people don't need accounting and tax software, because they're not tax accountants.
All the tax accountants I know just use a spreadsheet...
Most people who use mobile phones *aren't* in the US, and don't pay for things in US dinars.
$80 is about the price of a cup of coffee here, and my monthly phone bill is about a tenth of that.
There's nothing "Big Brother" about it. Would you prefer that vehicles weren't registered at all?
I don't see why it would be out-of-date. When you buy a car, you register it. It takes at most a couple of working days for the DVLA database to reflect your change of ownership - maybe a particular registration would be a day behind if you posted it late on Friday, and there was a Bank Holiday Monday, and you did it right around the beginning of March or the beginning of September when all the new registrations are issued.
Furthermore, the police can already check the DVLA database from their in-car computers. If you buy a tax disc online, it's updated instantly - we tried this out once when I got stopped by a roadside inspection (old, unusual car, it's a magnet for them). I'd just come back from having the car MOTed (another instantly-updated database) and was about to buy a tax disc online. I got talking to one of the traffic cops that was there about how quickly it updates, so we thought we'd try an experiment. Laptop out, 3G on, onto the DVLA website, buy online, check their MDT every couple of minutes and within about ten minutes the car showed up as now having valid VED for the year.
Of course thanks to our wonderful semi-privatised postal system it took nearly a week for the actual tax disc to arrive, but anyone checking would see that the vehicle was taxed. Anyone (traffic wardens) writing a ticket for an invalid tax disc would be quite right to do so, but all I'd need to do is ring up the police station, quote the ticket number, and they can check the VED status and cancel it off. Simple.
Yes, I know that some of the Ayn Rand-loving right-wing whiners may complain about this "Big Brother" breach of civil liberties, but it's not especially intrusive and it keeps uninsured drivers in unroadworthy cars off the road. I, and damn near everyone else in this country, think that's a good idea.
I am insured to drive most types of cars, so, as far as I am aware, could jump into a car registered to an uninsured friend and legally drive it.
Nope. The car has to be insured, no matter what. If your insurance allows you to drive other vehicles with the owner's permission, that vehicle has to be insured, and you are usually only covered for third-party liability anyway.
Otherwise, there would be nothing to stop you buying a Mini and insuring it for next to nothing, then driving around in an otherwise-uninsured Jag.
Because in the UK you don't change the number plate every year, it stays with the car from the day it's registered (well, unless you register a personalised number plate).
When you pay the road fund licence you get a little paper disc to stick inside the windscreen, showing that the car is taxed for that year.
I pay about £150 per year for my 24-year-old CX, fully comprehensive, protected no-claims, glass cover, agreed value (so they pay what the car is actually worth, rather than what they reckon it's worth) although it's only insured for 8000 miles per year since these days it doesn't come out to play very often. However, I'm 38 and have full no-claims discount and live out in the sticks, which helps a lot.
Central London has many areas where insurance companies just won't cover you.
A handwritten plate is kind of not OK, but if it's clearly readable and matches the towing vehicle you're very unlikely to have problems. Like, you might get an additional fine for having an out-of-spec number plate, if you happen to get caught with the six dead bodies that you're transporting in the trailer...
... you have to pay cash for uninsured medical bills.
You might want to start saving up for that cataract operation. You've got about five years.
You have to remember that ATRAC was the first consumer lossy compression format, way before this newfangled MP3 thing was available.