As launches closer to the equator are given a 'free' boost by the rotation of the earth. There was a doomed project called sea launch from sea platforms which sailed to the equator specifically for this purpose.
Though granted Europe has Guyana which is even closer.
I don't know about that, it is probably a difference of philosophies, while UK and US see bottom line Asian corporates don't (when they hire western CEOs the company often goes to hell). Anyway I've noticed in Asia it is generally a want to keep people in jobs.
People with jobs have money, money which is spent after all employees are consumers too. It's strange things like platform guards (lots of them) at trainstations, fully staffed counters at banks. Even people holding up signs when a block of concrete would suffice.
Japan reputed to be techno country of the world is surprising backwards outside Tokyo, fax machines still exist and there is heavy bureaucracy everywhere things like booking tickets online is rare, no no they'd rather have a person do it. Similar with self service checkouts, I'm not sure I've ever seen one in Asia, nor have I seen self serve petrol either though granted I haven't driven a whole lot in Asia.
Free markets as a concept work. The problem is free markets don't actually exist any that do exist quickly stop become free markets.
Hell Hong Kong which is reputed to be ruthlessly capitalist which only got a min wage this year, with virtually non existent taxes for the everyday man still has a lot of non freemarket policies, like maximum of 65% APR on any sort of loan, people have gone to prison for 150% APR loans, they have lots of social housing and free up to college undergrad education.
Is there such a thing in the USA as a zero hour contract?
These things were rare in the early 00s and are becoming the norm. Where you are tied into an exclusivity contract with an employer while at the same time they are not obliged to give you any hours at all.
Its worse than part time and you never get ANY rights at all and can be fired on a whim because they can merely offer you 0 hours. Its pretty horrible as you can't plan anything as you don't know how much you will get every month/week/year.
I had a bonza week making £900 in a week, the two weeks since have been £0.
Except in the UK because fuel consumption went down due to people driving more efficient cars and travelling less.
The government are implementing pay per mile charges. You can see the infrastructure all around Manchester there are camera gantries on every road in and out of Manchester even though there was a referendum which 85% said no to it.
Must protect government revenue at ALL costs.
In the UK public transport is fantastic and heavily subsidised by the government in LONDON. Everywhere else it is awful. Manchester for instance appears to have a great public transport system (except it is eye watering expensive).
For instance I can take a train or a tram or a bus into the city centre. Except all of these stations are 4+ miles away with nothing to cover the distance inbetween and I'm not exactly in the suburbs here.
Plus there are ridiculous hub and spoke systems, meaning to get to the next town over which is 3 miles away, there is no town to town bus, no no you have to go into the city centre and get a bus out. Therefore to travel those 3 miles it can take 3 hours, as the government in their wisdom decided to reduce road capacity by introducing traffic calming measures.
The main road into Manchester the A56 for example, it used to be a 5 lane road (3 in 2 out).
It is now 1 road in 1 road out. As they put bus lanes on bothsides., then put cycle lanes on both sides AND a large central reservation in the middle with bollards and traffic islands.
Thats not strictly true, in the UK we have something called a CBT which you can ride a 125cc (11bhp) motorcycle, these babies do a real 120mpg.
A CBT is £90, a beater 125 is £500, insurance is £100 a year while lots of them are sold the number of bikers are declining big time.
The problem is in the UK they gouge you on both the roads AND the alternatives.
For instance a train ticket into Manchester is £6.10 ($10) buses are about $9 and if you travel during peak times they jack up the charges to around $15 for a SINGLE one way ticket.
Sure, we pay 61p fuel duty.
Then we pay VAT of 23.9p (note VAT is charged on fuel duty so it is in effect a tax on a tax!)
Those figures are both per LITRE btw
If you remember back before 2010 the Labour government were super keen on road pricing. They utterly denied it in 2000 before the election stating they had no plans for road pricing, about 3 days after the 2001 election they announced it as a future policy.
They dropped it like a hot potato for the 2005 election yet again wanted to put it in place about 2 days after the 2005 elections.
A labour policy making think tank announced something similar a couple weeks ago, whereby you were tracked and charged a different price at the pump for your fuel depending on what the mandatory black box installed in your vehicle said. Labour immediately distanced themselves from this policy. Which means they fully intend to implement this policy, come 2015 I have a horrible feeling they will get in on a landslide, as the Lib Dem vote is gone, the tory vote is split between UKIP meaning labour will be in power.
I don't know, there is a massive amount of suspicion that these taxes per a mile are a red herring. With the alternative option of putting more taxes on fuel.
When faced with two bad options people choose the least worst option, which was the option the government wanted in the first place, i.e. to raise fuel taxes.
The problem of course is people countered this by driving a whole lot less and bought more efficient cars, so its all about the revenue protection.
It's called eCall.
It is mandated from October 2015 for new cars and vans. It can transmit GPS data and acceleration and deceleration and airbag deployment to the emergency services.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...
Everybody knows that there will be mission creep for this system, like a justification for the EU GPS competitor and that shortly afterwards there will be laws to retrofit them to current vehicles.
1.0 litre engine in a 1.5 ton car... it happens! a lot of specified weights car manufactures use are dry not kerb weight.
To get around the emissions standards for a while small engines (even 2 and 3 cylinders) were put into normal cars but they were given turbo chargers to cheat the regs.
Sometimes it worked like the Daihatsu copen, 900kilos wet, with a 660cc engine which was turbo charged.
The Prius is actually a confidence trick.
I know taxi drivers who get about the same MPG as they did in their old Toyota corollas, while being considerably less pleasant to drive as the prius is hypermilled with a thin skin and very little sound insulation.
There is a range of expensive motorbike helmets made from Bamboo (and other foam) they pass the helmet standards tests fine.
Also considering the Chinese in Hong Kong (and other places) use bamboo rods instead of steel scaffolding on high skyscrapers. Its pretty strong.
Since petrol went up to £1.36 a litre (thats $2.30) MPG has increased and actual fuel used has fallen partly due to people driving a whole load less.
Back in 1999 driving to work in exactly the same town, took 35 minutes to get through one particular section.
Today it takes 10 as there are fewer cars.
However this is not in the best interests of the government! which is why the EU are mandating ET phone home systems in all cars from 2015 which allow you to monitor and track a car in motion acceleration and deceleration. The Labour government want to introduce a pay per mile system precisely because revenue from fuel taxes have fallen due to more efficient cars.
Heh I've moved down from a 929cc missile down to a more sensible 650cc with 1/3 of the horse power..
No but there is conspiracy between politicians and corporations all the time.
They enact a policy, then once they leave office they by complete coincidence get a job with the corporations which their policies favoured.
Why is this any different?
The UK had a couple of issues.
Wind farms are subsidised as are solar panels, subbed so heavily that you can use a diesel generator to shine lines on solar panels and still make a profit. Many MPs in the UK happened to own large amounts of shares in such companies. Guess where the money for this comes from? a tax on energy bills.
I forget the name of the author but around 2002 was a Climate change report, it was badly written as it massively overstated the benefits of switching to renewables and cutting carbon, while massively underestimating the costs.
He was slammed for constantly changing the variables in his report.
Hell there was a bloke on the UK IPPC panel Dr Pachauri, he was extremely alarmist, and just by complete coincidence owned a company which was to receive 15m a year funding from the government.
Until the capacity expands so that they can be watching you all the time.
The problem is that while they may not catch crimes, they can certainly use it to shut you up if you have a valid complaint. The UK government and police have a strategy to defame and destroy your reputation if you have any sort of complaint.
The UK government has a track record of this, whenever somebody is arrested and subsequently released, y'know because they were innocent they get defamed. Hostile 'leaks' are released to defame this person and blacken their reputation.
For instance two men who were subject to a police raid, one of them was even shot, they took their house apart and found no evidence of wrong doing. Instead of an apology they were then arrested on child porn possession charges. This made the front pages of the dead tree press. The charges were then dropped for 'insufficient evidence'.
Again with the Brazilian electrician shot in London, press releases made out he was a rapist, again no evidence.
Pam Warren survivor of a train crash was subject to a mud slinging campaign.
So if threatened to have the stuff which goes on in your private bedroom exposed to the public would you back off? especially as they would undoubtedly edit it to show your worst side. Normal sex for instance..... edit it to put the words stop you're hurting me.... oops you're now a rapist.
Erm no?
UK Nuclear weapons were armed using a bicycle lock key.
The base which they used to be stored on had very little security, as numerous people managed to fly over it (it had unrestricted airspace) and was not patrolled heavily seeing as protesters tended to walk right in through the front gate.
We're not alone of course..... I've inadvertently entered secure zones in Kazahstan, set up my tent and driven away in the morning without being bothered.
For example a recent case was with World of Tanks.
There was a botter who had been caught red handed, he was even silly enough to use his WoT user name as the bot forum user name. He was subsequently banned, but had a long winded argument with the support crying innocence, claiming it was a bad connection. The forumites even suggested he say that his son was disabled and used WoT as his only communication outlet.
As a result quite a lot of legitimate WoT players visited this site (before the link was removed) simply to laugh and mock him.
Does this mean all of us who went are all guilty of being cheaters?
Pfft...
Until you start getting bored and tired of it, and lose your outlet for frustration and stress.
I happen to know a lot of musicians, skydivers and dispatch riders.
Musicians in orchestras, if they aren't the lead chair they get maybe two or three bars with one or two notes. You get sick of the same set over and over and over and over again. Travel to a new city same set over and over.
Skydivers... some become instructors, some become tandem masters. But have a look at the many youtube videos of tandem jumps. A lot of them have forced smiles because they are so incredibly bored out of their minds having done it 10,000+ times.
Dispatch riders, I've been one, I used to love riding motorbikes.... I don't anymore...
A lot of this badge of honour BS sounds a lot like my Japanese friends.
Where they are made to feel guilty if they leave on time as betraying the country.
As a result there is something called Karoshi death from overwork, people literally dying at their workstation.
I've done some crazy stuff in my time.
Working in accounts around tax season 100+ hour weeks were normal but then we got time off in lieu.
Working for myself I maxed out at 126 hours a week when my company was first starting up, this went down to 90 and then 56 as I bought in more and more staff it fell to 45 after I got enough staff. However being squeezed by inflation and tax increases I found myself saving money by letting staff go and covering more for myself.
I found myself back at 80+... I realised my company was untenable and I was trading my health for my business. I threw in the towel and shut the company.
Why would companies do that? when they can get people to pay for all their training and studies themselves, AND then you get to pick the best.
After all staff development costs money which is why most companies don't do it.
My last gig, I informed the head of dept that I wasn't familiar and required training on something. She told me to look it up on wikipedia. The cheek they had about world class staff development.
Slashdot Mirror
As launches closer to the equator are given a 'free' boost by the rotation of the earth. There was a doomed project called sea launch from sea platforms which sailed to the equator specifically for this purpose. Though granted Europe has Guyana which is even closer.
I don't know about that, it is probably a difference of philosophies, while UK and US see bottom line Asian corporates don't (when they hire western CEOs the company often goes to hell). Anyway I've noticed in Asia it is generally a want to keep people in jobs. People with jobs have money, money which is spent after all employees are consumers too. It's strange things like platform guards (lots of them) at trainstations, fully staffed counters at banks. Even people holding up signs when a block of concrete would suffice. Japan reputed to be techno country of the world is surprising backwards outside Tokyo, fax machines still exist and there is heavy bureaucracy everywhere things like booking tickets online is rare, no no they'd rather have a person do it. Similar with self service checkouts, I'm not sure I've ever seen one in Asia, nor have I seen self serve petrol either though granted I haven't driven a whole lot in Asia.
Free markets as a concept work. The problem is free markets don't actually exist any that do exist quickly stop become free markets. Hell Hong Kong which is reputed to be ruthlessly capitalist which only got a min wage this year, with virtually non existent taxes for the everyday man still has a lot of non freemarket policies, like maximum of 65% APR on any sort of loan, people have gone to prison for 150% APR loans, they have lots of social housing and free up to college undergrad education.
Is there such a thing in the USA as a zero hour contract? These things were rare in the early 00s and are becoming the norm. Where you are tied into an exclusivity contract with an employer while at the same time they are not obliged to give you any hours at all. Its worse than part time and you never get ANY rights at all and can be fired on a whim because they can merely offer you 0 hours. Its pretty horrible as you can't plan anything as you don't know how much you will get every month/week/year. I had a bonza week making £900 in a week, the two weeks since have been £0.
Except in the UK because fuel consumption went down due to people driving more efficient cars and travelling less. The government are implementing pay per mile charges. You can see the infrastructure all around Manchester there are camera gantries on every road in and out of Manchester even though there was a referendum which 85% said no to it. Must protect government revenue at ALL costs.
In the UK public transport is fantastic and heavily subsidised by the government in LONDON. Everywhere else it is awful. Manchester for instance appears to have a great public transport system (except it is eye watering expensive). For instance I can take a train or a tram or a bus into the city centre. Except all of these stations are 4+ miles away with nothing to cover the distance inbetween and I'm not exactly in the suburbs here. Plus there are ridiculous hub and spoke systems, meaning to get to the next town over which is 3 miles away, there is no town to town bus, no no you have to go into the city centre and get a bus out. Therefore to travel those 3 miles it can take 3 hours, as the government in their wisdom decided to reduce road capacity by introducing traffic calming measures. The main road into Manchester the A56 for example, it used to be a 5 lane road (3 in 2 out). It is now 1 road in 1 road out. As they put bus lanes on bothsides., then put cycle lanes on both sides AND a large central reservation in the middle with bollards and traffic islands.
Thats not strictly true, in the UK we have something called a CBT which you can ride a 125cc (11bhp) motorcycle, these babies do a real 120mpg. A CBT is £90, a beater 125 is £500, insurance is £100 a year while lots of them are sold the number of bikers are declining big time. The problem is in the UK they gouge you on both the roads AND the alternatives. For instance a train ticket into Manchester is £6.10 ($10) buses are about $9 and if you travel during peak times they jack up the charges to around $15 for a SINGLE one way ticket.
Sure, we pay 61p fuel duty. Then we pay VAT of 23.9p (note VAT is charged on fuel duty so it is in effect a tax on a tax!) Those figures are both per LITRE btw
Yes it does actually, its the UK.... I made a typo of course, thats 128cents tax per LITRE
12 cents per gal? ours is 128cents per gal!
If you remember back before 2010 the Labour government were super keen on road pricing. They utterly denied it in 2000 before the election stating they had no plans for road pricing, about 3 days after the 2001 election they announced it as a future policy. They dropped it like a hot potato for the 2005 election yet again wanted to put it in place about 2 days after the 2005 elections. A labour policy making think tank announced something similar a couple weeks ago, whereby you were tracked and charged a different price at the pump for your fuel depending on what the mandatory black box installed in your vehicle said. Labour immediately distanced themselves from this policy. Which means they fully intend to implement this policy, come 2015 I have a horrible feeling they will get in on a landslide, as the Lib Dem vote is gone, the tory vote is split between UKIP meaning labour will be in power.
I don't know, there is a massive amount of suspicion that these taxes per a mile are a red herring. With the alternative option of putting more taxes on fuel. When faced with two bad options people choose the least worst option, which was the option the government wanted in the first place, i.e. to raise fuel taxes. The problem of course is people countered this by driving a whole lot less and bought more efficient cars, so its all about the revenue protection.
It's called eCall. It is mandated from October 2015 for new cars and vans. It can transmit GPS data and acceleration and deceleration and airbag deployment to the emergency services. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/... Everybody knows that there will be mission creep for this system, like a justification for the EU GPS competitor and that shortly afterwards there will be laws to retrofit them to current vehicles.
Except the Yanks have smaller gallons 3.78 litres vs 4,54litres. While a UK and Yank litre is the same 1000ml/cc
1.0 litre engine in a 1.5 ton car... it happens! a lot of specified weights car manufactures use are dry not kerb weight. To get around the emissions standards for a while small engines (even 2 and 3 cylinders) were put into normal cars but they were given turbo chargers to cheat the regs. Sometimes it worked like the Daihatsu copen, 900kilos wet, with a 660cc engine which was turbo charged.
The Prius is actually a confidence trick. I know taxi drivers who get about the same MPG as they did in their old Toyota corollas, while being considerably less pleasant to drive as the prius is hypermilled with a thin skin and very little sound insulation.
There is a range of expensive motorbike helmets made from Bamboo (and other foam) they pass the helmet standards tests fine. Also considering the Chinese in Hong Kong (and other places) use bamboo rods instead of steel scaffolding on high skyscrapers. Its pretty strong.
Since petrol went up to £1.36 a litre (thats $2.30) MPG has increased and actual fuel used has fallen partly due to people driving a whole load less. Back in 1999 driving to work in exactly the same town, took 35 minutes to get through one particular section. Today it takes 10 as there are fewer cars. However this is not in the best interests of the government! which is why the EU are mandating ET phone home systems in all cars from 2015 which allow you to monitor and track a car in motion acceleration and deceleration. The Labour government want to introduce a pay per mile system precisely because revenue from fuel taxes have fallen due to more efficient cars. Heh I've moved down from a 929cc missile down to a more sensible 650cc with 1/3 of the horse power..
No but there is conspiracy between politicians and corporations all the time. They enact a policy, then once they leave office they by complete coincidence get a job with the corporations which their policies favoured. Why is this any different? The UK had a couple of issues. Wind farms are subsidised as are solar panels, subbed so heavily that you can use a diesel generator to shine lines on solar panels and still make a profit. Many MPs in the UK happened to own large amounts of shares in such companies. Guess where the money for this comes from? a tax on energy bills. I forget the name of the author but around 2002 was a Climate change report, it was badly written as it massively overstated the benefits of switching to renewables and cutting carbon, while massively underestimating the costs. He was slammed for constantly changing the variables in his report. Hell there was a bloke on the UK IPPC panel Dr Pachauri, he was extremely alarmist, and just by complete coincidence owned a company which was to receive 15m a year funding from the government.
Until the capacity expands so that they can be watching you all the time. The problem is that while they may not catch crimes, they can certainly use it to shut you up if you have a valid complaint. The UK government and police have a strategy to defame and destroy your reputation if you have any sort of complaint. The UK government has a track record of this, whenever somebody is arrested and subsequently released, y'know because they were innocent they get defamed. Hostile 'leaks' are released to defame this person and blacken their reputation. For instance two men who were subject to a police raid, one of them was even shot, they took their house apart and found no evidence of wrong doing. Instead of an apology they were then arrested on child porn possession charges. This made the front pages of the dead tree press. The charges were then dropped for 'insufficient evidence'. Again with the Brazilian electrician shot in London, press releases made out he was a rapist, again no evidence. Pam Warren survivor of a train crash was subject to a mud slinging campaign. So if threatened to have the stuff which goes on in your private bedroom exposed to the public would you back off? especially as they would undoubtedly edit it to show your worst side. Normal sex for instance..... edit it to put the words stop you're hurting me.... oops you're now a rapist.
Erm no? UK Nuclear weapons were armed using a bicycle lock key. The base which they used to be stored on had very little security, as numerous people managed to fly over it (it had unrestricted airspace) and was not patrolled heavily seeing as protesters tended to walk right in through the front gate. We're not alone of course..... I've inadvertently entered secure zones in Kazahstan, set up my tent and driven away in the morning without being bothered.
For example a recent case was with World of Tanks. There was a botter who had been caught red handed, he was even silly enough to use his WoT user name as the bot forum user name. He was subsequently banned, but had a long winded argument with the support crying innocence, claiming it was a bad connection. The forumites even suggested he say that his son was disabled and used WoT as his only communication outlet. As a result quite a lot of legitimate WoT players visited this site (before the link was removed) simply to laugh and mock him. Does this mean all of us who went are all guilty of being cheaters?
Pfft... Until you start getting bored and tired of it, and lose your outlet for frustration and stress. I happen to know a lot of musicians, skydivers and dispatch riders. Musicians in orchestras, if they aren't the lead chair they get maybe two or three bars with one or two notes. You get sick of the same set over and over and over and over again. Travel to a new city same set over and over. Skydivers... some become instructors, some become tandem masters. But have a look at the many youtube videos of tandem jumps. A lot of them have forced smiles because they are so incredibly bored out of their minds having done it 10,000+ times. Dispatch riders, I've been one, I used to love riding motorbikes.... I don't anymore...
A lot of this badge of honour BS sounds a lot like my Japanese friends. Where they are made to feel guilty if they leave on time as betraying the country. As a result there is something called Karoshi death from overwork, people literally dying at their workstation. I've done some crazy stuff in my time. Working in accounts around tax season 100+ hour weeks were normal but then we got time off in lieu. Working for myself I maxed out at 126 hours a week when my company was first starting up, this went down to 90 and then 56 as I bought in more and more staff it fell to 45 after I got enough staff. However being squeezed by inflation and tax increases I found myself saving money by letting staff go and covering more for myself. I found myself back at 80+... I realised my company was untenable and I was trading my health for my business. I threw in the towel and shut the company.
Why would companies do that? when they can get people to pay for all their training and studies themselves, AND then you get to pick the best. After all staff development costs money which is why most companies don't do it. My last gig, I informed the head of dept that I wasn't familiar and required training on something. She told me to look it up on wikipedia. The cheek they had about world class staff development.