I am going to go ahead and call bullshit on this. The Japanese comfort house was one of the most horrific creations in known history. Hatta did not suggest anything like what the Japanese did. Please educate yourself on the subject:
So, new to the human race? Here, read this handbook, and try not to accidentally kill or rape anyone until you fully understand the ground-rules.
This planet would do better without us. "Comfort women" count as one of the least of our sins.
Marriage gets you a shittonne more than just sex. So no.
Q: How can you tell when someone makes a shittonne less than their spouse?
A: See above.
Seriously, marriage, believe it or not, penalizes you financially if you have anything even remotely resembling comparable incomes. One of you either makes way more than the other, or you have yet to file a joint tax return. Oh, and BTW, you can't legally have one "partner" take the standard deduction, and one itemize, even if filing separately - Though my "domestic partner" and I can do that juuuuuust fine, and holy shit does that help out by giving her (the higher earner) all the deductions. Every year, she cuts me a check for a few grand for half the difference.
Wow. I just love the way you encapsulated so much stereotyping and prejudice into one comment!
Let's play the "can you spot the differences?" game:
Vegan: The (11th) Doctor likes fish fingers and custard.
Tranny: Unless they camp it up, this could already hold true and we wouldn't know.
Furry: He already stole a TARDIS so he could hang out with evolved apes from Earth - Pretty damned close conceptually, minus the need for suits.
Black: Melody already did that one. Next.
Lesbian: Hello, Jack Harkness? Though actually - Consider me good with this one. Can she get both Rose and Amy back as her companions?
Sense of Humor: Not yours.
Wheelchair: Not really conducive to action scenes, cheesy floating Daleks aside.
Retarded: The doctor solves problems largely with his mind (and a health dose of deus ex, but let's not go there). That would work sooooo well!
Muslim: The Doctor has seen into the vortex, met the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, and fought the Devil in the pit. I suspect his religious beliefs, if any, go a bit beyond petty human lunar goddesses.
So really, as you can (or rather you can't) see, the suggested change just offers an obvious spectrum of possible tweaks that would radically change the core character of The Doctor. If people hated the core character, that might make sense. Give that the show has run for 50 years this November and its viewers like the main character? Don't screw with what works.
I think it's nearly impossible to over-value great leadership. I think the problem is that some tend to over-value the people in leadership positions (regardless of their actual leadership skills.)
I don't think you answered what the FP asked. Yes, truly great leaders have an immeasurably large benefit to an organization. A great leader can take a run-of-the-mill team and get top-notch results out of them... I didn't think much of Steve Jobs as a human being, but if I had ever had the chance to hire him to lead a project/team/company for me, I would have done so in a heartbeat.
But does everyone need to try to lead? TFA makes an excellent example with Jane the furniture-maker - Jane did well because she kicked ass at making furniture, not at managing people; moving into a leadership role actively hurt her company's productivity and the quality of its output. I would say the exact same thing about my own programming skills - I love programming. I eat, sleep, breathe it. In my free time outside work, I write code for hobby projects. At the same time, I have zero interest whatsoever in telling other programmers what to do, or filing paperwork that talks about programming, or trying to explain to complete non-programmers (aka "the board") for the fifth time this year why they can't have a complete in-house replacement for Win7 by next week, no matter how much the CFO didn't like his new laptop that came with Win8 on it.
So I don't think the FP meant in any way to minimize the value of good leadership; rather, he wondered why our culture shuns people who simply strive to do to the peak of their ability.
The "activist" label suggests you don't like the status quo.
Why would any Good Citizen object to paying a third of their income to kill Arabs, pay farmers to burn wheat, fund TLAs with no real oversight to spy on us all, or make sure Octomom can still collect welfare as long as she only makes $118.9k per year?
Clearly, activists hate America. All you damned hippies should just move to Russia already.
/ I wish I didn't need this disclaimer, but I actually hear shit like that all too often. So: The above counts as sarcasm.
Wait. Your *PC*? A laptop or a desktop? My laptop runs around 25-30 watts normal usage, but even at idle my desktop runs about 250 watts...
A home built SFF desktop PC.
Core i5 2500T (kinda on the older side at this point, but not noticeably slow on anything) with the HD2000 GPU, SSD-only, low-voltage RAM, solid-state power supply (a "PicoPSU") with an 87+ rated wall-wart.
And I could do better building today, purely with off-the-shelf parts - Haswell actually includes a 35W TDP i7 part with HD4000, vs the 45W (max) CPU I have now; newer SSDs idle a lot better than those from a few years ago (the Samsung 840, for example, idles at under a third of a Watt); I could get the same amount of RAM on one module I have on two currently.
As for monitors, yes, I have to admit I left that out of my number, because the last time I bought a new monitor, they hadn't really gotten all that focused on energy efficiency, so I just went for pixels-and-inches-per-dollar. Still only draws 38W active, but I'll do a hell of a lot better next time I upgrade it - New displays tend to sip power, with the average 24-inch LED panel coming in at under 30W, more than a handful under 20W, and the current sweet-spot, the ASUS VE278Q 27" 1080p panel at a mere 12W active (rated at substantially higher than that, but that figure comes from Energy Star's own testing).
We've long since left behind the days when a decent rig with a big ol' CRT could blow a 10A breaker.:)
a couple of square feet of solar panels provides enough power to drive four or five laptops?
My PC draws under 45W average, and around 20W idle. At my latitude, that would require about 4 square feet (as in, 2x2, not 4x4), and I live pretty far North.
Computers have gotten a lot more efficient since the bad ol' days of the P4, and solar panels have gotten a lot cheaper (like under $2/W). Given a laptop specifically designed for low power, I have no trouble considering this an entirely realistic design goal - An 8sqft 100W panel and a few laptops that draw 10-20W? You could probably even manage it with OEM hardware, never mind anything hardcore optimized for power.
From apples three, bright and red, Billy ate the first and bled - A razor had a witch hid there. One drop, two drops, three drops, more! And gazing down at the evil barb, he reflected on the primary causes of World War II. Drip. On the Pythagorean theorem, drip. On shoes and ships and sealing wax, drip drip drip. On the price of a first class stamp. On dasher and dancer and oh, the agony. He noted the blood, ignored the rest, what is six times 9 less pi? Then he died. Alone. In the rain.
Go ahead. I'll give you another when you have a program that can parse that one correctly.
You can automate one part of that, though - Any IP that answers 50.858, you simply auto-ban as a spambot.
Yes it is stupid. I understand that spam is a problem, but if you run a website, it's *YOUR* problem. CAPTCHAs make it *MY* problem and that's just stupid.
You assume the website needs you more than you need it. For the standard commercial "wall of ads with some random content between" site, sure, what you say holds true
For a lot of smaller interest-group-themed sites, usually run by a handful of non-IT-gurus, put bluntly you need them more than they need you, and they don't have a full-time body around to read through all new posts to purge the spam.
Now, personally, I prefer the "math word problem" style CAPTCHAs - Because not only do they not discriminate against the blind or the old, they effectively keep out the spam and the stupid. Win-win!
Strawmen galore, get your whacking sticks here, $5 per hit!;)
Seriously though, anti-GM folks have no "beef" here - Perfectly normal, unmodified meat, grown in a vat instead of a cow.
Vegetarians don't all snub meat on moral grounds.
The price should eventually come down to far less than growing meat on an unpredictable animal wandering around eating grass.
Most environmentalists recognize meat production as a huge resource drain, and should support vat-meat.
So that really leaves the vegans and the the meat connoisseurs. Dead-on, with them, but that seems okay to me.
Thanks to Flashblock, I never wonder which tab has started making noise, because none of them do unless I manually tell them to start playing Flash.
FireFox actually has similar content built in as a config option, but unlike Flashblock, the stock click-to-play feature seems to break a lot of sites (I think it works by not even loading the plugin, so if the page uses a script to detect your browser's capabilities, they report that you don't have Flash and give up).
Instead of slimming down a phone as you reduce component size add more battery. And find a way to better manage battery use. And, make use of those battery technologies we hear so much about on Reddit.com.
But but but... Then you wouldn't need a charger at home, a charger at the office, a charger for each car, another set of the above for your other phone that has exactly the same kind of batteries but a proprietary connector, etc.
Battery capacity at the light-high-end (cars) remains an open problem. Battery capacity at the low end (phones) - Ccompanies view that as a goddamned opportunity to upsell, not a "problem" they ever want to "fix".
Qualcomm's Hexagon DSPs are pretty neat, and a typical Qcom chip has a few - they just never market them as extra cores, but they ARE there.
It takes no more work (in most cases) to write code that takes advantage of a million general-purpose cores than it does to properly take advantage of two cores (well, okay, two counts as a special case - Let's say three-or-more). If, however, I need to target a special subset of hardware to get adequate performance, and only one brand out of a dozen supports that hardware - Yeah, see ya, hope you enjoy vendor lock-in, because no one else will support their custom crap.
And I say that as a firmware engineer who has done exactly the opposite of what I say here - But when I bother coding to custom hardware, I expect it to scream, not just make routine tasks tolerable.
I remember when 12 or 16mhz was fast. Who would need that speed?
I remember those days too - And I remember so desperately needing more horsepower that we pushed the (then interrupt-driven) DRAM refresh rate to its limits just to get a few more useable cycles per second. I honestly wouldn't say I didn't care about speed until relatively modern times - Right around the 1.5GHz threshold.
I remember when 32bit was unheard of, for that matter 16bit. No one would need that much power.
No one (well, very very few) needed 32 bits of address space at the time, but 32 bit CPUs came with something far, far more valuable than merely more address space: Flat address space. No more screwing with segment registers, woo-hoo!
C developers often get accused of trying to use their particular hammer to drive in every screw they see. This very much counts as the other side of that equation.
Which raises the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
I, uh, don't really think we have all that much doubt about that one anymore.
As the better question - Do the wardens of our panopticon really consider the terrorists that stupid, that they would A) try the same attack again, and B) really need to Google the concept of a backpack?
In fairness, the scam doesn't come from the taxi companies themselves. Make no mistake, they gladly take advantage of the government imposed restriction of competition, but in some regards they count as victims here just as much as the rest of us.
The real criminals here? In NYC (which has pretty solid published numbers), guess who sells those licenses to operate 13,237 cabs at a million bucks a pop? That literally comes out to NYC pulling in slightly more than my entire state's budget, just to keep cab fares high - And still doesn't count the extra special taxes they ding you for at certain "trapped people nowhere near other ground transportation" sites, such as airports.
Yes, the government should absolutely require more stringent car inspections and driver background checks to keep passengers safe. No, that doesn't cost a million bucks a pop. Yet another bullshit tax disguised as a service.
I'm not opposed to feminism or women's rights, but isn't that just as sexist? Like black history month and affirmative action are racist?
Any serious answer to that will involve the word "privilege". The person writing it will use that word in a way that doesn't match any definition you have ever heard used before. As they explain their use, your blood pressure will steadily increase until your eyes start bulging and you start screaming at the monitor at the almost inconceivable suppression of rational thought it must take someone to memorize such a large volume of internally inconsistent drivel.
You seem to be unaware that the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 was touched of by the collapse of the Thai Bhat. That is not unimportant.
I would consider that very relevant to this news, actually!
As in, if I lived in SE Asia, right about now I'd do my damnedest to convert all my liquid assets to gold, ammo (if legal there), Euros, and yes, BTC.
History has a funny but pretty consistent trend, that when a country starts to get really paranoid about locking down control over its currency supply, that currency collapses shortly thereafter.
Wrong. 100% wrong. The owner has no say in it at all. the CAPTAIN of the boat does. In international waters the owner of that ship has no say what so ever. The captain has 100% say.
You've seen a few too many cheesy movies.
In theory, that sounds great - Only the captain knows the real conditions affecting his vessel at any given moment; and it romantically hearkens back to an era when they didn't have things like "global weather reports" at least reasonably accurate for the next few hours.
In practice, try it today (in the absence of a life-threatening emergency) and see how long you remain a free man. Or since that won't happen (since we both count as arm-chair braggarts, ARRR!), show me case law where a captain, with no good reason, decided to go somewhere else, the owner pressed charges, and the court found the captain not guilty by reason of the-captain-can-do-whatever-the-hell-he-wants.
I can't believe I'm arguing English literature with someone who confuses "trite" and "tripe", but whatever.
I can see your confusion, but believe it or not, I actually meant to call it a load of dingo's kidneys, rather than overused and banal. For some reason on revision I added "bit of fluff" after the fact, totally throwing that sentence off. Mea culpa.
To look at the social commentary all you have to do is examine the fate of some of the secondary characters. It is very clearly not a good fate.
I didn't say it lacks in social commentary. I implied that any meaningful social commentary it contains occurs purely by accident. Thus the analogy to Dallas-vs-the-geography-of-Texas. Or perhaps more apropos, like an in-depth analysis of the late 20th century culinary arts as expressed through the medium of home pizza delivery service in such classics as "Did you want sausage with that?" and "Anal sluts 7".
Slashdot Mirror
I am going to go ahead and call bullshit on this. The Japanese comfort house was one of the most horrific creations in known history. Hatta did not suggest anything like what the Japanese did. Please educate yourself on the subject:
So, new to the human race? Here, read this handbook, and try not to accidentally kill or rape anyone until you fully understand the ground-rules.
This planet would do better without us. "Comfort women" count as one of the least of our sins.
Marriage gets you a shittonne more than just sex. So no.
Q: How can you tell when someone makes a shittonne less than their spouse?
A: See above.
Seriously, marriage, believe it or not, penalizes you financially if you have anything even remotely resembling comparable incomes. One of you either makes way more than the other, or you have yet to file a joint tax return. Oh, and BTW, you can't legally have one "partner" take the standard deduction, and one itemize, even if filing separately - Though my "domestic partner" and I can do that juuuuuust fine, and holy shit does that help out by giving her (the higher earner) all the deductions. Every year, she cuts me a check for a few grand for half the difference.
Congratulations, you may kiss the bride.
Wow. I just love the way you encapsulated so much stereotyping and prejudice into one comment!
Let's play the "can you spot the differences?" game:
Vegan: The (11th) Doctor likes fish fingers and custard.
Tranny: Unless they camp it up, this could already hold true and we wouldn't know.
Furry: He already stole a TARDIS so he could hang out with evolved apes from Earth - Pretty damned close conceptually, minus the need for suits.
Black: Melody already did that one. Next.
Lesbian: Hello, Jack Harkness? Though actually - Consider me good with this one. Can she get both Rose and Amy back as her companions?
Sense of Humor: Not yours.
Wheelchair: Not really conducive to action scenes, cheesy floating Daleks aside.
Retarded: The doctor solves problems largely with his mind (and a health dose of deus ex, but let's not go there). That would work sooooo well!
Muslim: The Doctor has seen into the vortex, met the White Guardian and the Black Guardian, and fought the Devil in the pit. I suspect his religious beliefs, if any, go a bit beyond petty human lunar goddesses.
So really, as you can (or rather you can't) see, the suggested change just offers an obvious spectrum of possible tweaks that would radically change the core character of The Doctor. If people hated the core character, that might make sense. Give that the show has run for 50 years this November and its viewers like the main character? Don't screw with what works.
I think it's nearly impossible to over-value great leadership. I think the problem is that some tend to over-value the people in leadership positions (regardless of their actual leadership skills.)
I don't think you answered what the FP asked. Yes, truly great leaders have an immeasurably large benefit to an organization. A great leader can take a run-of-the-mill team and get top-notch results out of them... I didn't think much of Steve Jobs as a human being, but if I had ever had the chance to hire him to lead a project/team/company for me, I would have done so in a heartbeat.
But does everyone need to try to lead? TFA makes an excellent example with Jane the furniture-maker - Jane did well because she kicked ass at making furniture, not at managing people; moving into a leadership role actively hurt her company's productivity and the quality of its output. I would say the exact same thing about my own programming skills - I love programming. I eat, sleep, breathe it. In my free time outside work, I write code for hobby projects. At the same time, I have zero interest whatsoever in telling other programmers what to do, or filing paperwork that talks about programming, or trying to explain to complete non-programmers (aka "the board") for the fifth time this year why they can't have a complete in-house replacement for Win7 by next week, no matter how much the CFO didn't like his new laptop that came with Win8 on it.
So I don't think the FP meant in any way to minimize the value of good leadership; rather, he wondered why our culture shuns people who simply strive to do to the peak of their ability.
Dear Mr. Hayden:
.
Edward Snowden hit that
Enjoy your senescence.
So, 'activists' is a negative word now too?
The "activist" label suggests you don't like the status quo.
Why would any Good Citizen object to paying a third of their income to kill Arabs, pay farmers to burn wheat, fund TLAs with no real oversight to spy on us all, or make sure Octomom can still collect welfare as long as she only makes $118.9k per year?
Clearly, activists hate America. All you damned hippies should just move to Russia already.
/ I wish I didn't need this disclaimer, but I actually hear shit like that all too often. So: The above counts as sarcasm.
Wait. Your *PC*? A laptop or a desktop? My laptop runs around 25-30 watts normal usage, but even at idle my desktop runs about 250 watts...
:)
A home built SFF desktop PC.
Core i5 2500T (kinda on the older side at this point, but not noticeably slow on anything) with the HD2000 GPU, SSD-only, low-voltage RAM, solid-state power supply (a "PicoPSU") with an 87+ rated wall-wart.
And I could do better building today, purely with off-the-shelf parts - Haswell actually includes a 35W TDP i7 part with HD4000, vs the 45W (max) CPU I have now; newer SSDs idle a lot better than those from a few years ago (the Samsung 840, for example, idles at under a third of a Watt); I could get the same amount of RAM on one module I have on two currently.
As for monitors, yes, I have to admit I left that out of my number, because the last time I bought a new monitor, they hadn't really gotten all that focused on energy efficiency, so I just went for pixels-and-inches-per-dollar. Still only draws 38W active, but I'll do a hell of a lot better next time I upgrade it - New displays tend to sip power, with the average 24-inch LED panel coming in at under 30W, more than a handful under 20W, and the current sweet-spot, the ASUS VE278Q 27" 1080p panel at a mere 12W active (rated at substantially higher than that, but that figure comes from Energy Star's own testing).
We've long since left behind the days when a decent rig with a big ol' CRT could blow a 10A breaker.
a couple of square feet of solar panels provides enough power to drive four or five laptops?
My PC draws under 45W average, and around 20W idle. At my latitude, that would require about 4 square feet (as in, 2x2, not 4x4), and I live pretty far North.
Computers have gotten a lot more efficient since the bad ol' days of the P4, and solar panels have gotten a lot cheaper (like under $2/W). Given a laptop specifically designed for low power, I have no trouble considering this an entirely realistic design goal - An 8sqft 100W panel and a few laptops that draw 10-20W? You could probably even manage it with OEM hardware, never mind anything hardcore optimized for power.
That isn't a thoroughly hard problem
Solve it, then.
From apples three, bright and red, Billy ate the first and bled - A razor had a witch hid there. One drop, two drops, three drops, more! And gazing down at the evil barb, he reflected on the primary causes of World War II. Drip. On the Pythagorean theorem, drip. On shoes and ships and sealing wax, drip drip drip. On the price of a first class stamp. On dasher and dancer and oh, the agony. He noted the blood, ignored the rest, what is six times 9 less pi? Then he died. Alone. In the rain.
Go ahead. I'll give you another when you have a program that can parse that one correctly.
You can automate one part of that, though - Any IP that answers 50.858, you simply auto-ban as a spambot.
Yes it is stupid. I understand that spam is a problem, but if you run a website, it's *YOUR* problem. CAPTCHAs make it *MY* problem and that's just stupid.
You assume the website needs you more than you need it. For the standard commercial "wall of ads with some random content between" site, sure, what you say holds true
For a lot of smaller interest-group-themed sites, usually run by a handful of non-IT-gurus, put bluntly you need them more than they need you, and they don't have a full-time body around to read through all new posts to purge the spam.
Now, personally, I prefer the "math word problem" style CAPTCHAs - Because not only do they not discriminate against the blind or the old, they effectively keep out the spam and the stupid. Win-win!
Strawmen galore, get your whacking sticks here, $5 per hit! ;)
Seriously though, anti-GM folks have no "beef" here - Perfectly normal, unmodified meat, grown in a vat instead of a cow.
Vegetarians don't all snub meat on moral grounds.
The price should eventually come down to far less than growing meat on an unpredictable animal wandering around eating grass.
Most environmentalists recognize meat production as a huge resource drain, and should support vat-meat.
So that really leaves the vegans and the the meat connoisseurs. Dead-on, with them, but that seems okay to me.
This.
Thanks to Flashblock, I never wonder which tab has started making noise, because none of them do unless I manually tell them to start playing Flash.
FireFox actually has similar content built in as a config option, but unlike Flashblock, the stock click-to-play feature seems to break a lot of sites (I think it works by not even loading the plugin, so if the page uses a script to detect your browser's capabilities, they report that you don't have Flash and give up).
That's vengeance, not justice...
Sometimes justice means both.
Asset forfeiture is sufficient.
Tell that to all the people who died of starvation because Goldman saw profits in artificially inflating the hard red spring wheat futures market.
No, sometimes "justice" does mean torches and pitchforks. Real monsters just don't take the hint otherwise.
Instead of slimming down a phone as you reduce component size add more battery. And find a way to better manage battery use. And, make use of those battery technologies we hear so much about on Reddit.com.
But but but... Then you wouldn't need a charger at home, a charger at the office, a charger for each car, another set of the above for your other phone that has exactly the same kind of batteries but a proprietary connector, etc.
Battery capacity at the light-high-end (cars) remains an open problem. Battery capacity at the low end (phones) - Ccompanies view that as a goddamned opportunity to upsell, not a "problem" they ever want to "fix".
Qualcomm's Hexagon DSPs are pretty neat, and a typical Qcom chip has a few - they just never market them as extra cores, but they ARE there.
It takes no more work (in most cases) to write code that takes advantage of a million general-purpose cores than it does to properly take advantage of two cores (well, okay, two counts as a special case - Let's say three-or-more). If, however, I need to target a special subset of hardware to get adequate performance, and only one brand out of a dozen supports that hardware - Yeah, see ya, hope you enjoy vendor lock-in, because no one else will support their custom crap.
And I say that as a firmware engineer who has done exactly the opposite of what I say here - But when I bother coding to custom hardware, I expect it to scream, not just make routine tasks tolerable.
I remember when 12 or 16mhz was fast. Who would need that speed?
I remember those days too - And I remember so desperately needing more horsepower that we pushed the (then interrupt-driven) DRAM refresh rate to its limits just to get a few more useable cycles per second. I honestly wouldn't say I didn't care about speed until relatively modern times - Right around the 1.5GHz threshold.
I remember when 32bit was unheard of, for that matter 16bit. No one would need that much power.
No one (well, very very few) needed 32 bits of address space at the time, but 32 bit CPUs came with something far, far more valuable than merely more address space: Flat address space. No more screwing with segment registers, woo-hoo!
You are allowed 5 free articles (or views) of The Onion website.
Per browser instance. You do scrub cookies between sessions, right?
One day, I will hit that limit. On that day, I will copy the URL to the clipboard, restart Firefox, paste the URL back in, and resume browsing.
Step 1) Don't.
Step 2) See step 1.
C developers often get accused of trying to use their particular hammer to drive in every screw they see. This very much counts as the other side of that equation.
You're not going to get the response times you want until we go back to electron/phosphor tech instead of physically moving pixels.
Beautiful, truly beautiful... Though I expect most responses to you to miss the joke.
Heh.
Which raises the question: How'd the government know what they were Googling?"
I, uh, don't really think we have all that much doubt about that one anymore.
As the better question - Do the wardens of our panopticon really consider the terrorists that stupid, that they would A) try the same attack again, and B) really need to Google the concept of a backpack?
In fairness, the scam doesn't come from the taxi companies themselves. Make no mistake, they gladly take advantage of the government imposed restriction of competition, but in some regards they count as victims here just as much as the rest of us.
The real criminals here? In NYC (which has pretty solid published numbers), guess who sells those licenses to operate 13,237 cabs at a million bucks a pop? That literally comes out to NYC pulling in slightly more than my entire state's budget, just to keep cab fares high - And still doesn't count the extra special taxes they ding you for at certain "trapped people nowhere near other ground transportation" sites, such as airports.
Yes, the government should absolutely require more stringent car inspections and driver background checks to keep passengers safe. No, that doesn't cost a million bucks a pop. Yet another bullshit tax disguised as a service.
I'm not opposed to feminism or women's rights, but isn't that just as sexist? Like black history month and affirmative action are racist?
Any serious answer to that will involve the word "privilege". The person writing it will use that word in a way that doesn't match any definition you have ever heard used before. As they explain their use, your blood pressure will steadily increase until your eyes start bulging and you start screaming at the monitor at the almost inconceivable suppression of rational thought it must take someone to memorize such a large volume of internally inconsistent drivel.
You seem to be unaware that the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 was touched of by the collapse of the Thai Bhat. That is not unimportant.
I would consider that very relevant to this news, actually!
As in, if I lived in SE Asia, right about now I'd do my damnedest to convert all my liquid assets to gold, ammo (if legal there), Euros, and yes, BTC.
History has a funny but pretty consistent trend, that when a country starts to get really paranoid about locking down control over its currency supply, that currency collapses shortly thereafter.
Wrong. 100% wrong. The owner has no say in it at all. the CAPTAIN of the boat does. In international waters the owner of that ship has no say what so ever. The captain has 100% say.
You've seen a few too many cheesy movies.
In theory, that sounds great - Only the captain knows the real conditions affecting his vessel at any given moment; and it romantically hearkens back to an era when they didn't have things like "global weather reports" at least reasonably accurate for the next few hours.
In practice, try it today (in the absence of a life-threatening emergency) and see how long you remain a free man. Or since that won't happen (since we both count as arm-chair braggarts, ARRR!), show me case law where a captain, with no good reason, decided to go somewhere else, the owner pressed charges, and the court found the captain not guilty by reason of the-captain-can-do-whatever-the-hell-he-wants.
I can't believe I'm arguing English literature with someone who confuses "trite" and "tripe", but whatever.
I can see your confusion, but believe it or not, I actually meant to call it a load of dingo's kidneys, rather than overused and banal. For some reason on revision I added "bit of fluff" after the fact, totally throwing that sentence off. Mea culpa.
To look at the social commentary all you have to do is examine the fate of some of the secondary characters. It is very clearly not a good fate.
I didn't say it lacks in social commentary. I implied that any meaningful social commentary it contains occurs purely by accident. Thus the analogy to Dallas-vs-the-geography-of-Texas. Or perhaps more apropos, like an in-depth analysis of the late 20th century culinary arts as expressed through the medium of home pizza delivery service in such classics as "Did you want sausage with that?" and "Anal sluts 7".