>First off, the gestapo did a LOT more than just >murdering jews. They spent a lot of time monitoring >as many of their citizens as possible. Basically, >you did not dare speak out, as the person next to >you may very well be SS.
This is really going offtopic, but you shouldn't confuse historical details. The GeStaPo - Geheime Staats Polizei, or Secret State Police - was, as the name implies, acting in secret, carting off anyone suspected as a political enemy. The SS, on the contrary, was a very public organisation, which was, among other things, running the concentration camps.
Other parts of the Nazi machinery were also used in the surveillance network, down to the neighbourhood level, starting a tradition that was continued by the East German Stasi, who allegedly had 10% of the population on the payroll as informers!
> Unreasonable is relative. Have the higher prices promoted smart urban live/work growth and mass transit systems?
No. They've not noticeably reduced suburban sprawl (planning regulations & the "greenbelt" do that to some extent). As for mass transit, the last time it saw the necessary investment was roughly when Queen Victoria was still alive;(
Apologies, looks like I got you a bit wrong - I'm just rather sensitive on the whole race issue. The thing that got my goat was >If you are not allowed to criticise others because of differences in their race, what else are you not allowed to criticise? which just doesn't make any sense. Criticising "race" (agreed, it's to a large extent is an artificial concept) is just ludicous.
With hindsight, that's not what you're saying, and it's clear that you're quite well informed about singapore and its issues. It's not exactly my idea of a pefect society, either, but then again, I can understand - to a degree - why they made that particular tradeoff between freedom of speech and possible conflicts.
Anyway, good luck to your wife, hope she enjoys her course there. But bear in mind that avant-guard theatre has always been defined by conflict with the authorities. If it doesn't piss people off, it's possibly not radical enough;)
>She is not at all a racist, but she is very opinionated. Yeah, right. Whenever people start saying "I'm not racist, but..." it makes me want to throw up. If you're a racist troglodyte, at least be honest to yourself about it.
> If you are not allowed to criticise others because of differences in their race, what else are you not allowed to criticise? Pray explain to me how you could legitimately criticise anything about a person's race? How can you criticise someone's genetic makeup, or, conversely, be proud of your own, since you had precious little to do with making it? [ This being slashdot - time travellers are of course excepted. ] re you allowed to challenge people's cutural beliefs about religon, or would that upset people too much?
Looking at the CIA World Factbook: Buddhist 42.5%, Muslim 14.9%, Taoist 8.5%, Hindu 4%, Catholic 4.8%, other Christian 9.8%, other 0.7%, none 14.8% (2000 census)
Most people there seemed fairly relaxed about religion and race, but then I've not spent much time there, and dealt mainly with youngish people.
> I hope that she will be allright... Singapore is probably one of the safest places in the world, and even if she posted something racist on her blog I'd guess an American is more likely to be deported than anything else.
>For example, what if every airplaine seat had a 6 inch knife strapped to it, do you think for a minute there could be a repeat of 9/11?
No, but plane rage would regularly lead to death. I know If've sat next to people on long haul flights that would have tempted Ghandi...
> What if people were encouraged to posess guns resopnsibily for personal protection, do you think Columbine could have even started? Well, it did.
> What if peacfull people were able to cross borders freely, do you think it would be easier for terrorists to use established routes to smuggle themselves in thru the back country, in fact all our "security" didn't stop them from getting in with letitimate visas. Peaceful people are often able to cross borders freely. But face it, talking about visa controls in the US when thousands of people cross the Rio Grande per year is a bit pointless.
>What if drugs were legalized, do you think gangsters and drug lords would get the opportunity of making millions on the black market, while driving the problem underground? The tax revenues on legalised drugs could probably finance Bush's spending plans, not that he'd care. After all, you have to be able to add to do accounting.
Oh, and it's crisis (singular) and crises (plural). All the Chrises in the world can't be blamed for all the crises;)
Immigration is not a right (with the exception, in the EU, of citizens of other EU members), but asylum is. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14, 1:"Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."
Interestingly, there is a right to emigrate though.
> Therefore, there is no tradeoff between civil rights and immigration. That doesn't follow. For example, you don't have to allow someone into your country, but you don't have the right to detain them without due process.
But that's beside the point. MI5 is talking about the rights of people already IN the country - you and me, for example. You might not care much about my rights, what with me being a bloody foreigner, but I do care about yours. Honestly. And mine, by the way.
> Just shut down immigration and provide incentives for those hostile to the nation's culture to emigrate. This is where eminent domain can be used with justification Closing your borders will achieve absolutely nothing for your security, and cripple your economy. As for "eminent domain", you sound like your "incentives" are of the "Get the hell out of here or we'll thrash you all the way to the border " kind, which makes you seem a lot less likeable already.
The economy is growing, despite a dangerous asset bubble in the housing market. I'm sure you'd like to pin that on Kyoto as well - it'll be fun to watch.
But anyway, while the UK economy is far from perfect, it's hard to see how it's declining.
> as burdens from Kyoto compliance What burdens, precisely? Reducing your emissions by a few percent is trivial compared to the mess that Messrs Sarbane & Oxley cooked up for us.
>make UK's unionized labor even less efficient on a global scale Unionised labour? What unionised Labour? http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=4 Maggy pretty much got them back into rational behaviour, and even Tony's not stupid enough to allow the union's to take over again.
As for global efficiency, that's probably more down to a ridiculously inefficient and expensive goverment, and decades of a stupid education system, than Kyoto.
> More lives will be lost and more suffering will be created than any CO2 emissions can create. That doesn't even begin to make sense. Even if there were an onerous Kyoto compliance regime trying to drive the UK economy into submission, how would that cause dramatic loss of life?
>Exactly what Kyoto supporters want. Bring the middle class into the lower class through regulations and taxes rather than uplifting the lower class through opportunity and expansion of the industry base. Have you always suffered from a persecution complex? I mean, I hate regulations and taxes more than most people I know, but at least I don't base that dislike on a bizarre conspiracy theory.
> How about the London Bombings? How would decreased liberties have stopped them where over 15,000 cameras in London couldn't?
Just to clear up some apparent misconception about the thousands of security cameras in London: Very few of them are controlled by the police (The only ones I know of are on the "ring of steel" around the city, dating from IRA days. I'm sure there's some more in strategic locations). Most of them are controlled by private organisations - if you walk around the city, most buildings have cameras on them, watched mainly by bored security guards - or controlled by quasi-governmental organisations like London Transport or the Congestion Charging people. Probably very useful to help investigations after the fact, but Brits are not continually monitored by police cameras, anymore than you are monitored by the police in a department store e.g. in the U.S.
Maybe you need to have switch to a more security-conscious card company? I've had fraud on my natwest and amex cards (in both cases due to cloning at restaurants), and both immediately replaced the cards. They also do callbacks for authorisation if the transaction is unusual - e.g. when buying electronics abroad.
If you were a real "statistics geek" (whatever that is) you'd probably use a real statistics system like S-Plus or R http://www.r-project.org/ instead of a spreadsheet.
Tricky, isn't it? 65K GBP saves one life in the UK. Let's be generous - it'll save one a year, and the equipment will last ten years - 6.5K per life.
The question is then: If you have 6.5K to spend, what is the most effective way to save lives? You could probably buy at leat 650 mosquito nets, saving dozens if not hundreds of lives.... although I'd still rather have one of those things at my local pool.
That's why we have this thing called society. Shared responsibility. Social contract. But then you're probably 12, so we can't expect you to understand that yet.
65K sterling is peanuts in a public sector budget. And it's a one off cost. So yes, I would gladly have my council tax put up by 2 pence a year to have that installed in my pool. Last year it went up by 12% (4 * rate of inflation), and the only explanation I can see is that cutting services is more expensive than maintaining them. Go figure.
"Eventually a global economic equilibrium is reached, where the price is the same everwhere."
>I am sick of hearing this nonsense. I am sick of hearing nonsense like this as well. You didn't understand the statement.
>This fairy tale idea that capitalism will bring its fruit to everyone and all will be equal. Price equilibrium doesn't mean that everyone will be equal, it means that goods cost the same wherever you are (barring transport costs etc)
>It will never happen; No, of course not - it's a model, and they tend not to be perfect.
> capitalism creates inequality, not equality. "Creates" inequality? we could argue that. "tends to reinforce inequality, if not ameliorated" might be a more accurate description. Then again, is economic equality such a good thing? I mean, look at the last bunch of people that tried that... Anyway, I think equality of opportunity is a much better thing to strive for than equality of outcomes.
>Just look at the US and how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Okay, the rich are getting richer - but are the poor actually getting poorer? Relative to the rich, perhaps, but in real terms, even the poor in the US are a lot better off than they were - say - a 100 years ago. It's not just average wealth that's increasing, it's the median as well.
>It's no different on a global scale. As long as the rich are willing in their greed to screw up whole nations - as the US is doing right now and has been doing for a long time - there will be plenty of starving people who will work for pennies under sweatshop conditions. Now, I blame the US and other western governments for a lot of things (The Shah in Iraq, for example, and the resulting revolution; propping up Saddam Hussain for far too long, the Contras in Nicaragua - I won't bore you with an exhaustive list), but blaming them wholly for world poverty is rather silly.
Has it not occured to you that working for what seems to me and you a pitiful wage is infinitely preferrable to not working at all? That's why people do it - to feed themselves and their families. So buy buying things, especially manufactured goods, from the third world you are HELPING people, not hurting them.
Yes, there are a lot of problems with world trade - agricultural subsidies in the EU and US, stupid import quotas to protect the farming lobby and other special interests, lack of labour rights in countries, lack of democracy - but protectionism is part of the problem, not the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Even rechargable batteries don't last forever...
Well, you're using Emcas. That's the problem ;)
>First off, the gestapo did a LOT more than just >murdering jews. They spent a lot of time monitoring >as many of their citizens as possible. Basically, >you did not dare speak out, as the person next to >you may very well be SS.
This is really going offtopic, but you shouldn't confuse historical details. The GeStaPo - Geheime Staats Polizei, or Secret State Police - was, as the name implies, acting in secret, carting off anyone suspected as a political enemy. The SS, on the contrary, was a very public organisation, which was, among other things, running the concentration camps.
Other parts of the Nazi machinery were also used in the surveillance network, down to the neighbourhood level, starting a tradition that was continued by the East German Stasi, who allegedly had 10% of the population on the payroll as informers!
Otherwise, I couldn't agree more.
> Unreasonable is relative. Have the higher prices promoted smart urban live/work growth and mass transit systems?
;(
No. They've not noticeably reduced suburban sprawl (planning regulations & the "greenbelt" do that to some extent). As for mass transit, the last time it saw the necessary investment was roughly when Queen Victoria was still alive
Randy,
;)
Apologies, looks like I got you a bit wrong - I'm just rather sensitive on the whole race issue. The thing that got my goat was
>If you are not allowed to criticise others because of differences in their race, what else are you not allowed to criticise?
which just doesn't make any sense. Criticising "race" (agreed, it's to a large extent is an artificial concept) is just ludicous.
With hindsight, that's not what you're saying, and it's clear that you're quite well informed about singapore and its issues. It's not exactly my idea of a pefect society, either, but then again, I can understand - to a degree - why they made that particular tradeoff between freedom of speech and possible conflicts.
Anyway, good luck to your wife, hope she enjoys her course there. But bear in mind that avant-guard theatre has always been defined by conflict with the authorities. If it doesn't piss people off, it's possibly not radical enough
Geez, I've gotta give up my modpoints....
>She is not at all a racist, but she is very opinionated.
Yeah, right. Whenever people start saying "I'm not racist, but..." it makes me want to throw up. If you're a racist troglodyte, at least be honest to yourself about it.
> If you are not allowed to criticise others because of differences in their race, what else are you not allowed to criticise?
Pray explain to me how you could legitimately criticise anything about a person's race? How can you criticise someone's genetic makeup, or, conversely, be proud of your own, since you had precious little to do with making it? [ This being slashdot - time travellers are of course excepted. ]
re you allowed to challenge people's cutural beliefs about religon, or would that upset people too much?
Looking at the CIA World Factbook:
Buddhist 42.5%, Muslim 14.9%, Taoist 8.5%, Hindu 4%, Catholic 4.8%, other Christian 9.8%, other 0.7%, none 14.8% (2000 census)
Most people there seemed fairly relaxed about religion and race, but then I've not spent much time there, and dealt mainly with youngish people.
> I hope that she will be allright...
Singapore is probably one of the safest places in the world, and even if she posted something racist on her blog I'd guess an American is more likely to be deported than anything else.
>Beyond that, the countries with the highest birth rates are the ones who are not limiting their CO2 output to begin with.
That's because they have much lower CO2 output per head to begin with.
>For example, what if every airplaine seat had a 6 inch knife strapped to it, do you think for a minute there could be a repeat of 9/11?
;)
No, but plane rage would regularly lead to death. I know If've sat next to people on long haul flights that would have tempted Ghandi...
> What if people were encouraged to posess guns resopnsibily for personal protection, do you think Columbine could have even started?
Well, it did.
> What if peacfull people were able to cross borders freely, do you think it would be easier for terrorists to use established routes to smuggle themselves in thru the back country, in fact all our "security" didn't stop them from getting in with letitimate visas.
Peaceful people are often able to cross borders freely. But face it, talking about visa controls in the US when thousands of people cross the Rio Grande per year is a bit pointless.
>What if drugs were legalized, do you think gangsters and drug lords would get the opportunity of making millions on the black market, while driving the problem underground?
The tax revenues on legalised drugs could probably finance Bush's spending plans, not that he'd care. After all, you have to be able to add to do accounting.
Oh, and it's crisis (singular) and crises (plural). All the Chrises in the world can't be blamed for all the crises
> There is no right to immigrate.
Immigration is not a right (with the exception, in the EU, of citizens of other EU members), but asylum is. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 14, 1:"Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."
Interestingly, there is a right to emigrate though.
> Therefore, there is no tradeoff between civil rights and immigration.
That doesn't follow. For example, you don't have to allow someone into your country, but you don't have the right to detain them without due process.
But that's beside the point. MI5 is talking about the rights of people already IN the country - you and me, for example. You might not care much about my rights, what with me being a bloody foreigner, but I do care about yours. Honestly. And mine, by the way.
> Just shut down immigration and provide incentives for those hostile to the nation's culture to emigrate. This is where eminent domain can be used with justification
Closing your borders will achieve absolutely nothing for your security, and cripple your economy. As for "eminent domain", you sound like your "incentives" are of the "Get the hell out of here or we'll thrash you all the way to the border " kind, which makes you seem a lot less likeable already.
>The UK business market continues to decline
Gosh, that statement is so vague as to be almost immune to attack. But a couple of broadsides:
Stocks are going up http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=%5EFTSE&t=my
The economy is growing, despite a dangerous asset bubble in the housing market. I'm sure you'd like to pin that on Kyoto as well - it'll be fun to watch.
But anyway, while the UK economy is far from perfect, it's hard to see how it's declining.
> as burdens from Kyoto compliance
What burdens, precisely? Reducing your emissions by a few percent is trivial compared to the mess that Messrs Sarbane & Oxley cooked up for us.
>make UK's unionized labor even less efficient on a global scale
Unionised labour? What unionised Labour? http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=4
Maggy pretty much got them back into rational behaviour, and even Tony's not stupid enough to allow the union's to take over again.
As for global efficiency, that's probably more down to a ridiculously inefficient and expensive goverment, and decades of a stupid education system, than Kyoto.
> More lives will be lost and more suffering will be created than any CO2 emissions can create.
That doesn't even begin to make sense. Even if there were an onerous Kyoto compliance regime trying to drive the UK economy into submission, how would that cause dramatic loss of life?
>Exactly what Kyoto supporters want. Bring the middle class into the lower class through regulations and taxes rather than uplifting the lower class through opportunity and expansion of the industry base.
Have you always suffered from a persecution complex? I mean, I hate regulations and taxes more than most people I know, but at least I don't base that dislike on a bizarre conspiracy theory.
> How about the London Bombings? How would decreased liberties have stopped them where over 15,000 cameras in London couldn't?
;)
Just to clear up some apparent misconception about the thousands of security cameras in London: Very few of them are controlled by the police (The only ones I know of are on the "ring of steel" around the city, dating from IRA days. I'm sure there's some more in strategic locations). Most of them are controlled by private organisations - if you walk around the city, most buildings have cameras on them, watched mainly by bored security guards - or controlled by quasi-governmental organisations like London Transport or the Congestion Charging people. Probably very useful to help investigations after the fact, but Brits are not continually monitored by police cameras, anymore than you are monitored by the police in a department store e.g. in the U.S.
At least that's what they want us to believe
That depends on whether they can - or can't - write proper english sentences. ;)
..... How long is a piece of string?
Apart from that, it presumably depends on Location (I've seen 30 miles make 2/3 difference), Industry, experience,
> No matter how hard you try. You can't steal my ID if I use cash. You might steal my cash. Not my ID.
If you were on your way to buy a high spec laptop, for example, I'd be just as happy with the cash, thank you.
I'd also like you to do things like checking into a decent hotel, booking a flight, renting a car without using your credit card.....
Maybe you need to have switch to a more security-conscious card company? I've had fraud on my natwest and amex cards (in both cases due to cloning at restaurants), and both immediately replaced the cards. They also do callbacks for authorisation if the transaction is unusual - e.g. when buying electronics abroad.
If you were a real "statistics geek" (whatever that is) you'd probably use a real statistics system like S-Plus or R http://www.r-project.org/ instead of a spreadsheet.
No, I was making up some numbers for the purposes of a wildly guessed cost / benefit analysis.
I call "Read the parent poster before flaming".
If you have small children, you shouldn't have a pool. Or at least it should be safely fenced in.
I thinkat 65K sterling it's unlikely to be mandated in the US anytime soon.
Tricky, isn't it? 65K GBP saves one life in the UK. Let's be generous - it'll save one a year, and the equipment will last ten years - 6.5K per life.
The question is then: If you have 6.5K to spend, what is the most effective way to save lives? You could probably buy at leat 650 mosquito nets, saving dozens if not hundreds of lives.... although I'd still rather have one of those things at my local pool.
That's why we have this thing called society. Shared responsibility. Social contract. But then you're probably 12, so we can't expect you to understand that yet.
65K sterling is peanuts in a public sector budget. And it's a one off cost. So yes, I would gladly have my council tax put up by 2 pence a year to have that installed in my pool. Last year it went up by 12% (4 * rate of inflation), and the only explanation I can see is that cutting services is more expensive than maintaining them. Go figure.
So when I'm calling landlines and cellphones (or mobiles, as they're known where I call from) all over the world using Vonage I was dreaming, was I?
I know this is slashdot, but would it really hurt if someone with two brain cells read a submission before it gets put out?
Black coffee, no sugar is the only way to drink it.
For chocolate, I'll compromise on 70% cocoa though. FairTrade and organic, if possible.
>often their grammar is superior to the average American's.
/ducks ;)
That's like shooting fish in a barrel.
"Eventually a global economic equilibrium is reached, where the price is the same everwhere."
>I am sick of hearing this nonsense.
I am sick of hearing nonsense like this as well. You didn't understand the statement.
>This fairy tale idea that capitalism will bring its fruit to everyone and all will be equal.
Price equilibrium doesn't mean that everyone will be equal, it means that goods cost the same wherever you are (barring transport costs etc)
>It will never happen;
No, of course not - it's a model, and they tend not to be perfect.
> capitalism creates inequality, not equality.
"Creates" inequality? we could argue that. "tends to reinforce inequality, if not ameliorated" might be a more accurate description.
Then again, is economic equality such a good thing? I mean, look at the last bunch of people that tried that... Anyway, I think equality of opportunity is a much better thing to strive for than equality of outcomes.
>Just look at the US and how the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer.
Okay, the rich are getting richer - but are the poor actually getting poorer? Relative to the rich, perhaps, but in real terms, even the poor in the US are a lot better off than they were - say - a 100 years ago. It's not just average wealth that's increasing, it's the median as well.
>It's no different on a global scale. As long as the rich are willing in their greed to screw up whole nations - as the US is doing right now and has been doing for a long time - there will be plenty of starving people who will work for pennies under sweatshop conditions.
Now, I blame the US and other western governments for a lot of things (The Shah in Iraq, for example, and the resulting revolution; propping up Saddam Hussain for far too long, the Contras in Nicaragua - I won't bore you with an exhaustive list), but blaming them wholly for world poverty is rather silly.
Has it not occured to you that working for what seems to me and you a pitiful wage is infinitely preferrable to not working at all? That's why people do it - to feed themselves and their families. So buy buying things, especially manufactured goods, from the third world you are HELPING people, not hurting them.
Yes, there are a lot of problems with world trade - agricultural subsidies in the EU and US, stupid import quotas to protect the farming lobby and other special interests, lack of labour rights in countries, lack of democracy - but protectionism is part of the problem, not the solution.
Maybe a basic course in economics should be mandatory for all CS degrees?
>or those considering a career at UPS: please first consider dealing smack or pimping out underaged runaways. It's a good deal more fulfilling.
It probably pays a lot better as well!