Europeans dont buy american fridges or washing machines for the following reasons:
So you're confirming what I was saying: Europeans simply cannot afford the bigger, more expensive, more frequently replaced US appliances. Many US middle class homes have refrigerators that are bigger than European closets, and they don't hesitate to throw them out when a new gadget comes out.
If you see economic interests in the Kyoto Protocolls, care to point some out?
Limitations on greenhouse gas emissions are limits on economic activity, because economic activity is pretty much proportional to emissions; they also cause emission intensive processes simply to be moved to nations that don't have limits imposed on them.. Emissions trading is a second means of implementing transfer of money from productive societies to unproductive ones.
And all of that has to be seen in the context that the Kyoto protocol does not make a meaningful difference to global warming.
What is the problem in recycling? And what is the problem in better insulations? And why is there a problem in being more economic in fuel usage and energy usage? How do you even come to the idea that reducing energy consumption is costing you anything? If I safe energy, I safe money, must be a wierd society you live in that more energy usage gives you an economical advantage... and 'forcing' you to reduce that, an disadvantage
There are no problems with any of those, which is why they are widely practiced in the US. In fact, many of these programs, like the entire environmental movement, started in the US before Europeans adopted them.
The reason all of this confuses you so much is because you're starting with incorrect assumptions, namely that Americans use energy inefficiently. As I was pointing out, US households only use 20% more energy than British or German households. The larger per capita usage in the US translates directly into economic output, making the US about as efficient as Sweden or Finland.
However, "energy efficiency" becomes an economic disadvantage if the cost savings through using less energy are offset by disproportionately higher production costs. And often, "energy efficiency" (in particular in Europe) amounts simply to exporting the carbon emissions to a third world nation.
Wow, are you really that stupid to think that cherry-picking numbers for a small number of European nations out of a Swiss feel-good report apparently related to savings (but it's hard to tell because there is no methodology) has any relevance to what we're talking about?
Fact is that median equivalized disposable household income in the US is higher than any nation in the world (2010). The median US family ha y 55% more money available than the median German family, and Germany is one of the wealthiest EU nations. That's what determines how wealthy you are in the sense we are talking about: how much stuff you can buy. And that's "median", so it's not affected by income inequality either (the mean equivalized US family income is 61% higher than that German families). And those differences are so large and US growth rates so high that nobody is going to catch up any time soon.
You must be very confused. Kyoto is about reducing CO2 emissions. There is no wealth transfere schema anywhere...
Kyoto is useless in terms of preventing climate change; the participants themselves admitted that. Instead, it was hijacked by economic interets.
A typical USA household needs 3 or 4 times the energy an european does. That is neither efficient nor productive.
A typical US household only uses about 20% more energy than a British or German household (but it is typically also larger, both in terms of people and size). You're confusing household and "per capita" energy expenditures. Per capita, the US uses a lot more energy, but that's not household use, it's business use, and it is matched by a proportionately higher economic output. In terms of energy intensity (energy used to produce a dollar of output), the US is similar to European nations, somewhere between Sweden and Finland.
Guess how many people in europe own an USA made fridge or washing mashine ?
Probably not a lot because Europeans are considerably poorer than Americans and have smaller homes, so large and expensive appliances designed for the US market wouldn't sell well in Europe.
(The degree of ignorance of Europeans of anything outside their borders never ceases to amaze me.)
Manufacturing has declined as a percentage of the economy, but it has never declined in absolute terms. The US manufacturing sector is bigger than it has ever been.
Carbon emissions and the economy are pretty tightly linked, so if the economy is down, carbon emissions go down. And if you force carbon emissions to go down, the economy goes down. That's because energy is the single most important input to economic activity.
I'm sure lots of good things have happened under the covers in Gnome and the libraries etc are likely fine. The objections in Gnome 3 are mainly to the rather radical and unnecessary changes to the UI. But reverting that to something that resembles a UI people are used to shouldn't be so hard: just change the top-level graphical shell to use panels, menus, and window management in the traditional way.
I think science would gain overall if projects like NIF were scrapped, half that money is saved, and the other half invested in education and "small science". Unfortunately, even Ryan probably wouldn't have the clout to pull that off.
I think Savulescu is full of sh*t if he thinks anybody has an obligation to tinker with the genetic makeup of their babies. And society certainly doesn't think so: parents don't even have much of a responsibility for dealing with the consequences of their parenting mistake, the taxpayer usually does that.
On the other hand, I think you certainly have a right to tinker with the genetic of your baby. If you want blond-haired, blue-skinned babies with strong collectivist drives, knock yourself out.
Bible and Quran apps are a major feature of the Nigerian mobile content market. The evergreen 'Message Bible' was launched globally in December 2009 at almost the same time as 'Angry Birds.'
And all three apps feature about the same kind of content.
I think if they are farmed, they are probably OK. Wild insects seem risky from a disease point of view (but the same is true for meat from other wild animals).
When all is said and done, the article you point to itself at most alleges the possibility of slight effects on young children, and even that is unproven. The same is true for your claim that "soy-based oils are not the healthiest oils".
Even if those effects were real, they would be small compared to the known cancer and disease risks associated with a diet that is strongly based on meat.
Soy, rice, and seasoning are perfectly good basic nutrition. Add some fresh vegetables (pickles) and nuts and you're fine. The idea that that will disrupt your hormones or lead to nutritional deficits is ludicrous.
Yup, I agree: Swype (or rather its improved clones) is probably the best way for text entry on touch screen phones right now. I still think a thumb keyboard is faster, though. Entering individual words in Swype is faster than thumb-keying them, but the corrections kill you.
For most people, a Nokia/Blackberry-style keyboard is still more effective for text input than any touch screen keyboard, and even more so compared to Apple's awful iOS screen keyboards. (Touch is good for browsing and menu selection, but once you have decided on a capacitive touch screen, building a good UI for those purposes is easy.)
Touch has caught on as much as it has because people make a tradeoff between screen size, weight, style, and ease of input, and ease of input ends up at the bottom up on that list. That tradeoff may make sense for phones, it makes no sense in cars (or on the desktop), where you have the space.
Damaging in perpetuating the myth that race is anything but a political tool for oppressing people. Damaging in that it creates artificial divisions.
When confronted with policies designed to politically disenfranchise blacks those you don't consider damaging.
We already established that Republican policies even in your insignificant example are "designed" to improve Republican chances of winning, and that any effect on a bunch of people who self-identify as a "racial minority" is incidental.
As for the origins of racial slavery no, actually it was originally quite nationalistic. That unchristian peoples could be enslaved, and then later extended to race as we mean it.
That's a nice fiction but has no basis in reality. In fact, slavery in the US had its origins in white indentured servitude, that is, white folks enslaving white folks. And for all its many (many!) moral failings and crimes, the Catholic church has always spoken out against slavery.
That's an incredibly narrow definition of racism. Under that definition the institution of racial slavery wasn't racist since it was motivated by economic objectives.
Not at all. "Racial slavery" in the US was based on the concept that "negroes" were objectively and identifiably different from "whites". Slavery and deprivation of freedoms only applied to negroes, and hence were a consequence only of the racist idea that you can distinguish whites from negroes. The US already had abolished all other forms of slavery (such as economic slavery).
And that's why "progressive" policies on race are so dangerous, because they perpetuate the idea that something like "race" even exists, needs to be kept track of, and needs to be used to guide government policies. If government stopped pushing this idiotic notion that African Americans somehow are different from "white people" and need special help, in a couple of generations, darker skin color would be no different from red hair. The primary proponents of racist ideologies these days are progressives, and although their racism is well intentioned and less harmful than the old kind, it still is damaging.
That's provably false in Ohio. Democrats did not vote to restrict voting in republican districts.
There was no political gain for them, because voters in those districts have no problems voting in other ways; hence, it was strategically better for Democrats to vote the way they did so they can play the kinds of games you ar playing now.
But your original claim was that Republicans wanted a race blind society. Not a society where explicitly racist policy was fine as long as the underlying motivation wasn't racist.
"Race" is a completely arbitrary concept with no basis in biology. "Racism" means acting in a way as if "race" actually had biological significance. Therefore, if actions are not motivated by race, they are, by definition, not racist. And if actions are motivated by race, they are, by definition, racist.
(A lot of the policies advocated by the Democratic party are "racist" in a technical sense, although it's a kind of "racism" ostensibly intended to compensate groups of people for past wrongs.)
At worst, you can claim that Republicans try to gain an advantage by encumbering Democratic districts. The fact that those districts happen to correlate with minority districts doesn't make Republicans racist; they would do the same thing to any Democratic district regardless of race. And why not? Democrats do exactly the same thing when they can get away with it.
But thanks for demonstrating in a nutshell how stupid and unfounded Democratic charges of racism against Republicans are.
Others have a right to copy "their" stuff, just like Apple copied most of their designs from others. That's how products get better: people steal the best ideas from others and then make incremental improvements. Steve Jobs said so himself and said that that's how his company was operating.
In 2012 the Democratic party is opposed to most racism and the Republican party mixed though leaning towards weak opposition.
That's nonsense. Republicans tend to argue for a race-blind society, that is one in which your race doesn't matter at all: there's neither discrimination nor programs like affirmative action. And their argument is that programs like affirmative action do more harm than good. It's rather twisted logic by Democratic demagogues catering to their constituencies to try to proclaim that that kind of liberal attitude constitutes "racism".
In contrast, the Democratic party these days counts racial minorities among their major constituencies for the simple reason that they keep promising special programs and financial support for those minorities, ostensibly to make up for past injustices or to achieve some kind of statistical equality. Arguably, those policies are quite literally "racist" in that the perpetuate racial distinctions that have no basis in reality.
As a non-USAian, I've never understood why you have to "register" with a particular party. This seems like it just opens the door for all kinds of election fraud and manipulation.
To translate this for you: it's like being a member of a political party in other countries. And like in other countries, you have to be a member in order to participate in decision making within that party, like what candidates to run for office. That's what the primaries are. And since Americans like the process of candidate selection to be transparent, it's actually done in public primaries, rather than behind the scenes.
You may not be used to it because in many other countries, party membership is so low (e.g., 2% in Germany), and candidate selection happens by some nebulous process that most people never see.
Being an atheist is merely a descriptive label for a single attribute, like having red hair or being male; it doesn't describe a group of people with shared interests and beliefs.
Being a Christian means declaring yourself a member of a community, and that means you accept shared responsibility for the history and other members of that community.
And if you are church member like a Catholic or Mormon, not only do you have to choose the community, the community also chooses you, so there is an even greater degree of responsibility of all members of that community for each other's actions.
So, as an atheist, I bear no responsibility for the actions or beliefs of other atheists. But a Catholic, Mormon, Democrat, or Republican most certainly does share in the responsibility of the group that they are a member of.
And in some cases, even involuntary membership still comes with shared responsibility; for example, as Americans, we are all responsible for what our government does, whether we voted for the guy or not.
If you want to determine the future direction of the country, the primaries is where it's being decided. By the time the general election comes around, you have two choices that tend to be quite similar (despite all the rhetoric). And that's actually a pretty good system, provided people participate in the primaries.
Apple can engage in shenanigans around Android and patents for a while, but they really have nothing: right now, manufacturers may perhaps infringe on a few patents because Apple's patents are so vague and ill defined, but as part of the lawsuits, they have to put their cards on the table about which gimmicks they want to own. Once they do, it's easy enough to design around. And the damage that this b.s. is doing to Apple's reputation is immense: presumably, Apple is suing over their best innovations, and everybody now sees what they are: springy windows and black bezels.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're confirming what I was saying: Europeans simply cannot afford the bigger, more expensive, more frequently replaced US appliances. Many US middle class homes have refrigerators that are bigger than European closets, and they don't hesitate to throw them out when a new gadget comes out.
Limitations on greenhouse gas emissions are limits on economic activity, because economic activity is pretty much proportional to emissions; they also cause emission intensive processes simply to be moved to nations that don't have limits imposed on them.. Emissions trading is a second means of implementing transfer of money from productive societies to unproductive ones.
And all of that has to be seen in the context that the Kyoto protocol does not make a meaningful difference to global warming.
There are no problems with any of those, which is why they are widely practiced in the US. In fact, many of these programs, like the entire environmental movement, started in the US before Europeans adopted them.
The reason all of this confuses you so much is because you're starting with incorrect assumptions, namely that Americans use energy inefficiently. As I was pointing out, US households only use 20% more energy than British or German households. The larger per capita usage in the US translates directly into economic output, making the US about as efficient as Sweden or Finland.
However, "energy efficiency" becomes an economic disadvantage if the cost savings through using less energy are offset by disproportionately higher production costs. And often, "energy efficiency" (in particular in Europe) amounts simply to exporting the carbon emissions to a third world nation.
Wow, are you really that stupid to think that cherry-picking numbers for a small number of European nations out of a Swiss feel-good report apparently related to savings (but it's hard to tell because there is no methodology) has any relevance to what we're talking about?
Fact is that median equivalized disposable household income in the US is higher than any nation in the world (2010). The median US family ha y 55% more money available than the median German family, and Germany is one of the wealthiest EU nations. That's what determines how wealthy you are in the sense we are talking about: how much stuff you can buy. And that's "median", so it's not affected by income inequality either (the mean equivalized US family income is 61% higher than that German families). And those differences are so large and US growth rates so high that nobody is going to catch up any time soon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
Kyoto is useless in terms of preventing climate change; the participants themselves admitted that. Instead, it was hijacked by economic interets.
A typical US household only uses about 20% more energy than a British or German household (but it is typically also larger, both in terms of people and size). You're confusing household and "per capita" energy expenditures. Per capita, the US uses a lot more energy, but that's not household use, it's business use, and it is matched by a proportionately higher economic output. In terms of energy intensity (energy used to produce a dollar of output), the US is similar to European nations, somewhere between Sweden and Finland.
Probably not a lot because Europeans are considerably poorer than Americans and have smaller homes, so large and expensive appliances designed for the US market wouldn't sell well in Europe.
(The degree of ignorance of Europeans of anything outside their borders never ceases to amaze me.)
Manufacturing has declined as a percentage of the economy, but it has never declined in absolute terms. The US manufacturing sector is bigger than it has ever been.
Carbon emissions and the economy are pretty tightly linked, so if the economy is down, carbon emissions go down. And if you force carbon emissions to go down, the economy goes down. That's because energy is the single most important input to economic activity.
I'm sure lots of good things have happened under the covers in Gnome and the libraries etc are likely fine. The objections in Gnome 3 are mainly to the rather radical and unnecessary changes to the UI. But reverting that to something that resembles a UI people are used to shouldn't be so hard: just change the top-level graphical shell to use panels, menus, and window management in the traditional way.
I think science would gain overall if projects like NIF were scrapped, half that money is saved, and the other half invested in education and "small science". Unfortunately, even Ryan probably wouldn't have the clout to pull that off.
I think Savulescu is full of sh*t if he thinks anybody has an obligation to tinker with the genetic makeup of their babies. And society certainly doesn't think so: parents don't even have much of a responsibility for dealing with the consequences of their parenting mistake, the taxpayer usually does that.
On the other hand, I think you certainly have a right to tinker with the genetic of your baby. If you want blond-haired, blue-skinned babies with strong collectivist drives, knock yourself out.
And all three apps feature about the same kind of content.
I think if they are farmed, they are probably OK. Wild insects seem risky from a disease point of view (but the same is true for meat from other wild animals).
When all is said and done, the article you point to itself at most alleges the possibility of slight effects on young children, and even that is unproven. The same is true for your claim that "soy-based oils are not the healthiest oils".
Even if those effects were real, they would be small compared to the known cancer and disease risks associated with a diet that is strongly based on meat.
Soy, rice, and seasoning are perfectly good basic nutrition. Add some fresh vegetables (pickles) and nuts and you're fine. The idea that that will disrupt your hormones or lead to nutritional deficits is ludicrous.
Yup, I agree: Swype (or rather its improved clones) is probably the best way for text entry on touch screen phones right now. I still think a thumb keyboard is faster, though. Entering individual words in Swype is faster than thumb-keying them, but the corrections kill you.
For most people, a Nokia/Blackberry-style keyboard is still more effective for text input than any touch screen keyboard, and even more so compared to Apple's awful iOS screen keyboards. (Touch is good for browsing and menu selection, but once you have decided on a capacitive touch screen, building a good UI for those purposes is easy.)
Touch has caught on as much as it has because people make a tradeoff between screen size, weight, style, and ease of input, and ease of input ends up at the bottom up on that list. That tradeoff may make sense for phones, it makes no sense in cars (or on the desktop), where you have the space.
Damaging in perpetuating the myth that race is anything but a political tool for oppressing people. Damaging in that it creates artificial divisions.
We already established that Republican policies even in your insignificant example are "designed" to improve Republican chances of winning, and that any effect on a bunch of people who self-identify as a "racial minority" is incidental.
That's a nice fiction but has no basis in reality. In fact, slavery in the US had its origins in white indentured servitude, that is, white folks enslaving white folks. And for all its many (many!) moral failings and crimes, the Catholic church has always spoken out against slavery.
Not at all. "Racial slavery" in the US was based on the concept that "negroes" were objectively and identifiably different from "whites". Slavery and deprivation of freedoms only applied to negroes, and hence were a consequence only of the racist idea that you can distinguish whites from negroes. The US already had abolished all other forms of slavery (such as economic slavery).
And that's why "progressive" policies on race are so dangerous, because they perpetuate the idea that something like "race" even exists, needs to be kept track of, and needs to be used to guide government policies. If government stopped pushing this idiotic notion that African Americans somehow are different from "white people" and need special help, in a couple of generations, darker skin color would be no different from red hair. The primary proponents of racist ideologies these days are progressives, and although their racism is well intentioned and less harmful than the old kind, it still is damaging.
There was no political gain for them, because voters in those districts have no problems voting in other ways; hence, it was strategically better for Democrats to vote the way they did so they can play the kinds of games you ar playing now.
"Race" is a completely arbitrary concept with no basis in biology. "Racism" means acting in a way as if "race" actually had biological significance. Therefore, if actions are not motivated by race, they are, by definition, not racist. And if actions are motivated by race, they are, by definition, racist.
(A lot of the policies advocated by the Democratic party are "racist" in a technical sense, although it's a kind of "racism" ostensibly intended to compensate groups of people for past wrongs.)
And that's why France has such a thriving startup business culture, right?
At worst, you can claim that Republicans try to gain an advantage by encumbering Democratic districts. The fact that those districts happen to correlate with minority districts doesn't make Republicans racist; they would do the same thing to any Democratic district regardless of race. And why not? Democrats do exactly the same thing when they can get away with it.
But thanks for demonstrating in a nutshell how stupid and unfounded Democratic charges of racism against Republicans are.
Others have a right to copy "their" stuff, just like Apple copied most of their designs from others. That's how products get better: people steal the best ideas from others and then make incremental improvements. Steve Jobs said so himself and said that that's how his company was operating.
That's nonsense. Republicans tend to argue for a race-blind society, that is one in which your race doesn't matter at all: there's neither discrimination nor programs like affirmative action. And their argument is that programs like affirmative action do more harm than good. It's rather twisted logic by Democratic demagogues catering to their constituencies to try to proclaim that that kind of liberal attitude constitutes "racism".
In contrast, the Democratic party these days counts racial minorities among their major constituencies for the simple reason that they keep promising special programs and financial support for those minorities, ostensibly to make up for past injustices or to achieve some kind of statistical equality. Arguably, those policies are quite literally "racist" in that the perpetuate racial distinctions that have no basis in reality.
To translate this for you: it's like being a member of a political party in other countries. And like in other countries, you have to be a member in order to participate in decision making within that party, like what candidates to run for office. That's what the primaries are. And since Americans like the process of candidate selection to be transparent, it's actually done in public primaries, rather than behind the scenes.
You may not be used to it because in many other countries, party membership is so low (e.g., 2% in Germany), and candidate selection happens by some nebulous process that most people never see.
Being an atheist is merely a descriptive label for a single attribute, like having red hair or being male; it doesn't describe a group of people with shared interests and beliefs.
Being a Christian means declaring yourself a member of a community, and that means you accept shared responsibility for the history and other members of that community.
And if you are church member like a Catholic or Mormon, not only do you have to choose the community, the community also chooses you, so there is an even greater degree of responsibility of all members of that community for each other's actions.
So, as an atheist, I bear no responsibility for the actions or beliefs of other atheists. But a Catholic, Mormon, Democrat, or Republican most certainly does share in the responsibility of the group that they are a member of.
And in some cases, even involuntary membership still comes with shared responsibility; for example, as Americans, we are all responsible for what our government does, whether we voted for the guy or not.
If you want to determine the future direction of the country, the primaries is where it's being decided. By the time the general election comes around, you have two choices that tend to be quite similar (despite all the rhetoric). And that's actually a pretty good system, provided people participate in the primaries.
Apple can engage in shenanigans around Android and patents for a while, but they really have nothing: right now, manufacturers may perhaps infringe on a few patents because Apple's patents are so vague and ill defined, but as part of the lawsuits, they have to put their cards on the table about which gimmicks they want to own. Once they do, it's easy enough to design around. And the damage that this b.s. is doing to Apple's reputation is immense: presumably, Apple is suing over their best innovations, and everybody now sees what they are: springy windows and black bezels.