There is a beat up hunk of a U-2 sitting in the Beijing Military Museum (well worth the visit for military buffs, and free as an added bonus). Seems they shot one down many years ago. I don't think it was one that belonged to the USA, though, but probably instead was one flown with an ROC flag (the USA transferred 10 or so U-2s to Taiwan many years back). I wasn't able to make out the markings, though... it was really beat up and displayed where you couldn't get a good look at it from the side.
People who live overseas are not only subject to taxation in the country of residence, but in the USA, as well, even if 100% of the income is earned in the foreign country. The USA is the only country, IIRC, that taxes its citizens in such a way. Add to that the currently insane banking reporting requirements (not worth going into the details here), for which not reporting can cost you a minimum $10,000 fine + a 20% penalty based on the highest balance. Take away those taxation and penalty issues and I bet many people with foreign residency would happily give up their right to vote. Until then, screw your opinion.
While the military has the ability to schlep ballots, it is the USPS job to do so, not the military. We already spend significant amounts of money (though probably not in the millions, I wonder if anyone has ever counted it) schlepping paper ballots to military bases all around the world. We would be trading an expense we already absorb for a one time upfront cost with hopefully much lower ongoing expense. Given how many instances of paper ballots arriving late or being returned late and not being counted, even if the voting was done on time, you do our military personnel a disservice by disenfranchising them.
On top of that, it is not an employer's responsibility to forward ballots to an employee, it is the governments. There was a time when I could be overseas working for 3 months at a time, a different city each week (which might not be known until the week beforehand). I left too early to do anything absentee, I came back to late to vote, and no way anything but Fed-Ex could catch up to me (which would cost far more if done for everyone than a cloud system should cost). While choosing that form of employment made me unavailable, a system like this could allow me to be as available as anyone else. I am just one person, I wouldn't expect a system like this to be set up for me, but I would have gladly piggybacked on a system which would have allowed my one vote to be cast and counted.
Finally, while the money that would be spent to develop such a system would be a one time charge that would hopefully be amortized over many elections, I have to admit based on past experience I have great difficulty trusting that the US govt. could implement such a system without it becoming a fiasco of fraud on both the monetary side and the use or abuse of such a system in the counting of votes. That probably trumps all else.
3rd world countries didn't get behind Kyoto because they cared about the environment as Kyoto. 3rd world countries foresaw no negative impact on their GDPs as a result of Kyoto and thus signing Kyoto couldn't hurt them, only help them. 3rd world countries got behind Kyoto because it was a massive transfer of wealth from developed countries to lesser developed countries, justified or not. They wanted to laugh all the way to the bank, not the thermostat.
Please tell me what the "correct" average temperature is for the Earth? Even if you could, based on 130 years of temperature data why would you pick the temperature today as the point at which you would stop the change as "correct", when the Earth has been around for 1000s (throwing the biblical types a bone here) to billions of years and based on THAT scale the "correct" temperature might be some thing far different (much hotter, in fact, even if you only include the last 65 million years?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png (ok, not billions of years, but the geologists are working on improving that, I am sure, and it won't look any better for warmists)
I am all for reducing for man made emissions as it is economically feasible to do, I am all phasing out the use of petroleum products for transportation and other purposes as we find ways to do it that don't require making Peter destitute to subsidize Paul to do it. But I just don't have the hubris to say today (or any in the last 30 years) is the "correct" average temperature for the earth and not 2 or 3 degrees warmer or 2 or 3 degrees colder based on a starting date for data that makes today look bad when other examinations of data based on different starting dates make it look like today is really cold compared to where the Earth more commonly has been. I also can't ignore the fact that ice ages come and go and they tend to do so with great rapidity. The only constant is change. If scientists and engineers actually could create a stable environment at a particular temperature set point, chances are we would find out the results of that would be far worse for people than any predictions of anything short of a runaway greenhouse effect.
How many people are actually in China, I am in no position to guess. But I am in a position to know that census undercounting does occur and why.
As I mentioned, the "uncounteds" are both internal and external illegal aliens. Unlike most of the Western world, where the right of free travel is assumed, within China you are only legally allowed to live/work/"own" property in the place where you have a hukou (this is a gross oversimplification, but it is the beginning of a discussion). Many of the presumed 400M illegals are native Chinese who have chosen to live where they have no permission to live, doing so under the radar to avoid sanctions which in the past could have been quite onerous. They aren't at their home city to be counted (though children usually are, staying with grandparents, since without a local hukou they have no right to go to school where their parents are living) and they avoid being counted in the city where they are living because they could be forced to return to their officially registered home.
About 6 or 7 years ago, the hukou laws were supposedly eliminated, but anyone who says they have been completely abolished is wrong. Decentralized, perhaps, but they still exist and are enforced whenever the right government official gets their panties in a wad. Unless and until the hukou laws are actually abolished, the charade will continue.
It isn't an issue of error bars, it is more an issue of outright fraud in the census.
Illegal aliens (both internal and external... do you know anything about the hukou system?) have an extremely high incentive to remain uncounted, particularly if they have children.
Don't forget moving the speed bump signs so the snow plows would scrape them off. And if anyone needed a good dunking, Commodore's entire marketing and management teams had to be first in line.
I miss the days of completely violating my job description to take the opportunity to come up and visit you guys, though I definitely don't miss what you used to think of was good Mexican food in those days:P.
Regards from China, Dave. I still have my 1M Agnus that you handed me in the lab, but the Amiga's couldn't make the trip with me.
Maybe not all, but they do inform pilots who are flying across the poles -- the Earth's magnetic field deflects some space weather, but ends up concentrating the stuff at the poles (which is why the Northern/Southern Lights are strongest near the poles)
The result is that many pilots won't fly those routes, instead taking other routes which often require an extra stop for refueling, or reducing the amount of luggage (to be brought later).
So if you're planning on a trip that's to the other hemisphere, odds are, you're looking at delays and/or lost baggage.
Commercial pilots have little leeway over the routes they fly, so your statement that pilots avoid flying polar routes doesn't seem based on valid information. A better reason why polar routes aren't flown is because FAA rules require that planes never be further than a certain distance (referred to as ETOPS XXX, where XXX is the number of minutes flight time) from an airport where they can land in an emergency. Until Santa Claus opens up North Pole Field for international arrivals and departures, there just aren't many places in the Great White North where you can land a fully loaded jumbo jet year round.
However, the rules are changing. Just in time for Christmas, Santa's shortcut was green-lighted (though, should be red-lighted in Rudolf's honor).
These stories about Chinese censorship and an all-controlling communist party are really easy for reporters to write. I follow blogs written in China, mostly USA writers who are based there. They basically don't see it. One writer keeps a regular column to "fact check" claims of blogs being censored and words being deleted, and says the majority of the time the reporter either assumed it, repeated a rumor, or just made it up. Most commentary on most social media is boring, and CCP (Chinese Communist Party) officials generally have better things to do than censor LOL status and twitter updates. There is just too much content to effectively censor. And Facebook etc. not catching fire in China may have more to do with Chinese language than with the CCP struggle to control it. It sounds like MySpace blaming government interference for losing to Facebook.
To talk about reporters repeating rumors as fact has some standing, but to deny that the CCP has blocked Facebook and Twitter because of the ability to use them in organizing groups against the government is ludicrous. Facebook and Twitter CAN'T catch on in China because they are blocked by the GFOC, though a tiny number of people use VPNs to get around such restrictions. Facebook used to be very popular in China, and I was in China the day Facebook and Twitter got blocked... it was right around the anniversary of some minor date in modern Chinese history...it's on the tip of my tongue... I am sure you could guess it if you thought about it.
Traveling through intersections in Beijing is an exercise in creative insanity. The pathings people follow seem to be made up on the spot, and don't follow the rules as laid down in the driver's manual that I have read. The one thing they did get right is putting countdown timers for the red and green lights on the worst intersections and you can generally figure things off the pedestrian timers when there isn't one for the drivers.
Now if they could just do something about the fact that red symbol plates are legally allowed to ignore all the rules...
I was doing a deeply technical presentation to a company in Tokyo. There were 8 engineers (1 senior, a woman, 7 junior, all men) and 3 managers (all men, and who demanded translation into Japanese, in spite of the fact that they didn't understand the translation either, according to the engineers helping me with translation). It was a great presentation, with good interaction between the senior engineer and me and the juniors following along in spite of being outside their normal field of expertise.
Then I asked one of the junior engineers to get me coffee (or water, or anything else).
I had to wait 10 minutes before I could restart my presentation while the senior engineer went to get coffee for me. After all, getting coffee is a woman's job. \facepalm
Slashdot Mirror
Stem cell treatments are something to which I pay close attention (for obvious reasons).
I keep looking at your handle trying to figure out what the obvious reason might be... I got nothing.
There is a beat up hunk of a U-2 sitting in the Beijing Military Museum (well worth the visit for military buffs, and free as an added bonus). Seems they shot one down many years ago. I don't think it was one that belonged to the USA, though, but probably instead was one flown with an ROC flag (the USA transferred 10 or so U-2s to Taiwan many years back). I wasn't able to make out the markings, though... it was really beat up and displayed where you couldn't get a good look at it from the side.
People who live overseas are not only subject to taxation in the country of residence, but in the USA, as well, even if 100% of the income is earned in the foreign country. The USA is the only country, IIRC, that taxes its citizens in such a way. Add to that the currently insane banking reporting requirements (not worth going into the details here), for which not reporting can cost you a minimum $10,000 fine + a 20% penalty based on the highest balance. Take away those taxation and penalty issues and I bet many people with foreign residency would happily give up their right to vote. Until then, screw your opinion.
While the military has the ability to schlep ballots, it is the USPS job to do so, not the military. We already spend significant amounts of money (though probably not in the millions, I wonder if anyone has ever counted it) schlepping paper ballots to military bases all around the world. We would be trading an expense we already absorb for a one time upfront cost with hopefully much lower ongoing expense. Given how many instances of paper ballots arriving late or being returned late and not being counted, even if the voting was done on time, you do our military personnel a disservice by disenfranchising them.
On top of that, it is not an employer's responsibility to forward ballots to an employee, it is the governments. There was a time when I could be overseas working for 3 months at a time, a different city each week (which might not be known until the week beforehand). I left too early to do anything absentee, I came back to late to vote, and no way anything but Fed-Ex could catch up to me (which would cost far more if done for everyone than a cloud system should cost). While choosing that form of employment made me unavailable, a system like this could allow me to be as available as anyone else. I am just one person, I wouldn't expect a system like this to be set up for me, but I would have gladly piggybacked on a system which would have allowed my one vote to be cast and counted.
Finally, while the money that would be spent to develop such a system would be a one time charge that would hopefully be amortized over many elections, I have to admit based on past experience I have great difficulty trusting that the US govt. could implement such a system without it becoming a fiasco of fraud on both the monetary side and the use or abuse of such a system in the counting of votes. That probably trumps all else.
You mean... like Canada and Russia?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/dec/16/russia-canada-kyoto-protocol
3rd world countries didn't get behind Kyoto because they cared about the environment as Kyoto. 3rd world countries foresaw no negative impact on their GDPs as a result of Kyoto and thus signing Kyoto couldn't hurt them, only help them. 3rd world countries got behind Kyoto because it was a massive transfer of wealth from developed countries to lesser developed countries, justified or not. They wanted to laugh all the way to the bank, not the thermostat.
Please tell me what the "correct" average temperature is for the Earth? Even if you could, based on 130 years of temperature data why would you pick the temperature today as the point at which you would stop the change as "correct", when the Earth has been around for 1000s (throwing the biblical types a bone here) to billions of years and based on THAT scale the "correct" temperature might be some thing far different (much hotter, in fact, even if you only include the last 65 million years?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png (ok, not billions of years, but the geologists are working on improving that, I am sure, and it won't look any better for warmists)
I am all for reducing for man made emissions as it is economically feasible to do, I am all phasing out the use of petroleum products for transportation and other purposes as we find ways to do it that don't require making Peter destitute to subsidize Paul to do it. But I just don't have the hubris to say today (or any in the last 30 years) is the "correct" average temperature for the earth and not 2 or 3 degrees warmer or 2 or 3 degrees colder based on a starting date for data that makes today look bad when other examinations of data based on different starting dates make it look like today is really cold compared to where the Earth more commonly has been. I also can't ignore the fact that ice ages come and go and they tend to do so with great rapidity. The only constant is change. If scientists and engineers actually could create a stable environment at a particular temperature set point, chances are we would find out the results of that would be far worse for people than any predictions of anything short of a runaway greenhouse effect.
How many people are actually in China, I am in no position to guess. But I am in a position to know that census undercounting does occur and why.
As I mentioned, the "uncounteds" are both internal and external illegal aliens. Unlike most of the Western world, where the right of free travel is assumed, within China you are only legally allowed to live/work/"own" property in the place where you have a hukou (this is a gross oversimplification, but it is the beginning of a discussion). Many of the presumed 400M illegals are native Chinese who have chosen to live where they have no permission to live, doing so under the radar to avoid sanctions which in the past could have been quite onerous. They aren't at their home city to be counted (though children usually are, staying with grandparents, since without a local hukou they have no right to go to school where their parents are living) and they avoid being counted in the city where they are living because they could be forced to return to their officially registered home.
About 6 or 7 years ago, the hukou laws were supposedly eliminated, but anyone who says they have been completely abolished is wrong. Decentralized, perhaps, but they still exist and are enforced whenever the right government official gets their panties in a wad. Unless and until the hukou laws are actually abolished, the charade will continue.
Illegal aliens (both internal and external... do you know anything about the hukou system?) have an extremely high incentive to remain uncounted, particularly if they have children.
From 2008:
http://www.china-briefing.com/news/2008/09/01/is-china%E2%80%99s-population-really-13-billion.html
I miss the days of completely violating my job description to take the opportunity to come up and visit you guys, though I definitely don't miss what you used to think of was good Mexican food in those days :P.
Regards from China, Dave. I still have my 1M Agnus that you handed me in the lab, but the Amiga's couldn't make the trip with me.
Skipper Smith
Maybe not all, but they do inform pilots who are flying across the poles -- the Earth's magnetic field deflects some space weather, but ends up concentrating the stuff at the poles (which is why the Northern/Southern Lights are strongest near the poles)
The result is that many pilots won't fly those routes, instead taking other routes which often require an extra stop for refueling, or reducing the amount of luggage (to be brought later).
So if you're planning on a trip that's to the other hemisphere, odds are, you're looking at delays and/or lost baggage.
Commercial pilots have little leeway over the routes they fly, so your statement that pilots avoid flying polar routes doesn't seem based on valid information. A better reason why polar routes aren't flown is because FAA rules require that planes never be further than a certain distance (referred to as ETOPS XXX, where XXX is the number of minutes flight time) from an airport where they can land in an emergency. Until Santa Claus opens up North Pole Field for international arrivals and departures, there just aren't many places in the Great White North where you can land a fully loaded jumbo jet year round.
However, the rules are changing. Just in time for Christmas, Santa's shortcut was green-lighted (though, should be red-lighted in Rudolf's honor).
http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/airlines-cleared-to-use-santas-shortcut-6281263.html
These stories about Chinese censorship and an all-controlling communist party are really easy for reporters to write. I follow blogs written in China, mostly USA writers who are based there. They basically don't see it. One writer keeps a regular column to "fact check" claims of blogs being censored and words being deleted, and says the majority of the time the reporter either assumed it, repeated a rumor, or just made it up. Most commentary on most social media is boring, and CCP (Chinese Communist Party) officials generally have better things to do than censor LOL status and twitter updates. There is just too much content to effectively censor. And Facebook etc. not catching fire in China may have more to do with Chinese language than with the CCP struggle to control it. It sounds like MySpace blaming government interference for losing to Facebook.
To talk about reporters repeating rumors as fact has some standing, but to deny that the CCP has blocked Facebook and Twitter because of the ability to use them in organizing groups against the government is ludicrous. Facebook and Twitter CAN'T catch on in China because they are blocked by the GFOC, though a tiny number of people use VPNs to get around such restrictions. Facebook used to be very popular in China, and I was in China the day Facebook and Twitter got blocked... it was right around the anniversary of some minor date in modern Chinese history...it's on the tip of my tongue... I am sure you could guess it if you thought about it.
Traveling through intersections in Beijing is an exercise in creative insanity. The pathings people follow seem to be made up on the spot, and don't follow the rules as laid down in the driver's manual that I have read. The one thing they did get right is putting countdown timers for the red and green lights on the worst intersections and you can generally figure things off the pedestrian timers when there isn't one for the drivers.
Now if they could just do something about the fact that red symbol plates are legally allowed to ignore all the rules...
I was doing a deeply technical presentation to a company in Tokyo. There were 8 engineers (1 senior, a woman, 7 junior, all men) and 3 managers (all men, and who demanded translation into Japanese, in spite of the fact that they didn't understand the translation either, according to the engineers helping me with translation). It was a great presentation, with good interaction between the senior engineer and me and the juniors following along in spite of being outside their normal field of expertise.
Then I asked one of the junior engineers to get me coffee (or water, or anything else).
I had to wait 10 minutes before I could restart my presentation while the senior engineer went to get coffee for me. After all, getting coffee is a woman's job. \facepalm
According the STA, real men, do, in fact, wear clothing under their kilt. To do otherwise is childish.
And frankly, it's so unhygienic I would even shake hands with someone who did wear underwear.
your friend Adam has issues.
But would you let the someone sit on your lap?
http://www.happyplace.com/4110/bridal-dress-skidmark-causes-drunken-brawl-at-scottish-wedding-reception