And householders would be 1.5bn better off if they didn't have to fit locks, and alarms, and other security.
And airports would be 1.5bn better off if there wasn't terrorism.
And countries would be BILLIONS better off if people just got off their arses and got a job, and paid taxes honestly.
But none of that is going to happen. You have legislation in place to combat all those. For copyright, It's already disproportionally harsh, and enforced where necessary (i.e. mass duplicators, and those people who are brought to court reasonably for deliberately downloading movies they haven't paid for).
Stop whining, get off your arses and focus on making movies.
Hint: Not been to a cinema in years. Don't buy DVD's any more, unless it's second-hand and thereby not profitable for you at all. Will pay a reasonable price for legal download rights for stuff I consider worthwhile in a half-playable format.
The reason you're not making all that you could? That shit you put into the cinema and flood everything else out with. That crap you enforce on your media and streams. The bollocks that you make me sit through on legally owned media.
I do not pirate. I pay for things. I paid for my shareware in the 90's (yes, I own mIRC, WinZIP, Doom and lots of other things that nobody ever paid for). I paid for proper licensing for commercial software of those things I used "for personal use" that were more than worth the money (VMWare was worth its hefty price and that's the MOST I've ever paid for software). I donate to software projects that I have no need to. I buy copies of good games for friends and give them out at Christmas, birthdays, special occasions and even run competitions on my game servers that I run FOR FREE for various communities. I have no qualms about handing over money for the legal right to play content that I *could* acquire elsewhere and supporting things I enjoyed myself.
But all that shit you do? It makes me choose between supporting that side of the shit, or pirating, if I want to watch it. So I choose not to watch it instead.
Honestly, best thing of buying a handful of movies with "free" credit from Amazon / Google Play? No unskippable trailers. Play from a multitude of devices, when I want, where I want, how I want. I don't even care that the downloads are DRM'd, to be honest, I have 1000 Steam games and that doesn't bother me either.
But it's the shit that GETS IN THE WAY that really bugs me. Software updates to BluRay players in order to watch a movie? Fuck that. I press play, I want to watch it. Wait MONTHS for a movie I do want to see to come out somewhere other than the cinema? I'd rather just forget about it and pick it up when it comes out as a "freebie" movie on some download service if you're going to deliberately stymie my initial enthusiasm for it. DVD's that don't play in laptops? Fuck off. And TEN MINUTES of fucking trailers that I can't skip when I just want to put on a Disney movie to occupy a child? That's just fucking evil. So I stopped buying them.
Stop whining about how unfair the world is, because copyright infringement is part-and-parcel of your industry the same way that "No the parcel never arrived" is part-and-parcel of running a mail order business. Sometimes it could be honest, sometimes it could be fraudulent. But you can't piss away your profits chasing it except in obvious - or large - cases and most people just can't be bothered to go to the effort of pirating things anyway. That's why Netflix et al are so popular. And why iTunes makes a killing even though ANY song you want is available on the first page of Google if you put in "mp3" into it. But navigating the mire of illegal downloads is beyond most people. They'd rather just have one place to go, pay, and download their content in a format they'd like.
iTunes lost the MP3 battle. How long until you lose the "H264" battle where you just end up providing DRM-free copies of anything people have bought a license to?
All say "boo". Walk away and find another franchise.
Honestly, never "got" Star Wars anyway, certainly not the modern prequel crap, and can't bear to sit through any of them.
But the problem is that people think it's "a franchise for the fans" when it's just "a franchise for the finance". They honestly don't care about your fan club, they just want money from you. And fucking idiots keep giving them money.
Let it die. Go "Oh, yeah, that was a good movie when I was a kid". Then forget about it. Not even out of spite. Just forget it exists and move on. It had its time. Like "The Matrix", it was great, it was milked for all it was worth, let it then die, and at least remember the first as a great movie.
Incidentally: Star Trek, Dr Who (??? Seriously don't understand this, despite being British), etc. are all the same.
Let it remain in your childhood as a fond memory, rather than playing a kid for the next 40 years and handing people money for doing nothing and screwing over actors.
Every movie and TV show I ever watched as a kid? Nowhere near as fun as I remember. Just keep them in your head, they are funnier there, and cost nothing.
Money (excluding profit) is directly correlated to difficulty.
If something saves "the Earth" but bankrupts your country, you aren't going to be any better off overall. Look at Greece. Look at the African states. Poverty is just as deadly as a choking atmosphere.
This is my point. What's the IMPACT of your PROPOSED SOLUTION. Let's all stop using oil, for instance? Great. How many people (worldwide, because this is about the global situation) will die due to lack of heating, power, life-saving products and medicine, etc.? Is that number more or less than those that might be flooded out by a rising ocean or killed by a rising air temperature? We have literally NO FUCKING CLUE because nobody proposes solutions (only "We have a problem that we must fix") and few analyse the possible impact of full implementation of that solution.
I'm over-exaggerating, but leaping from the frying pan into the fire is a real possibility with snap decisions made by politicians and knee-jerk reactions rather than putting a few serious proposals on the table and telling people "You can do this, but you will lose this to do so", whether that's tax money, mod-cons, certain materials or freedoms, or whatever.
(P.S. No, I'm not American as you later found out).
Facebook app is shit and just fills up my phone (presumably with cached photos etc.) until it gets so bogged down that it literally just stops loggin in. Literally, it's quicker and easier to load up Chrome on my phone and do Facebook from there.
Facebook messenger app - why the fuck is that separate?
Whatsapp - currently okay. Except I paid for five years and then you just made it free and I get NOTHING for that.
Get rid of the first two, put in a browser window that does Facebook notifications into it, and I might use it more often. Until then, it's really a website I go on when I get an email (i.e. someone's talking to me on it), and then I talk to them on WhatsApp anyway.
Now what the FUCK would you like us to do about it that we're a) not already doing, b) will provably (or probably) make a measurable difference within a reason time, c) doesn't cost the (non-literal) Earth, d) that will get approval from those parties that need to do it?
Ignore all the name-calling and shit, let's assume we ALL agree it's happening. I'm of scientific mind, I can do that for any subject that I agree with or not.
Parental leave isn't about freeloading, it's about a medical condition and massive change of circumstances that employers have always been required to recognise anyway and formalising the thing that EVERY employer has to do such that it becomes a legal duty is merely formalising a process that you have to endure anyway to stop arguments, override employers with attitudes like your own, and provide some security and stability in a major life event.
You get a day off work in any extraordinary circumstance. So you get days off work for destroying your body to push out offspring (that will pay more tax than it costs to live over the course of its life, you seem to forget) and stop employers abusing such events to force people not fit for work back into it.
It's not permanent, it's not "free" (it's enough to survive), it's not able to be instigated for more than a handful of times in ANYONE'S life.
This isn't even about the child. Social services sort that out. It's about the mother and father who can't even have a day off work for a major change of circumstance - the same UK law also covers parental paid leave for ADOPTION, FOSTERING and MISCARRIAGE, you ignorant prick, which are counter to your arguments (i.e. taking children away from state care and/or serious medical bereavement that can occur to any couple). Even in the case of no medical intervention (adoption/fostering), it's a major life-change that needs support to ensure it starts properly. Not someone forced to go back to work at 9am the next morning and "do something" (hand it to a stranger on a paid service) with their newborn for that time.
You get a day off for granny's funeral but not a day off to have your baby, recover from serious bodily trauma and/or adjusting to the new living pattern, even if it's healthy? This is EXACTLY what you should pay for in order to avoid things like parents strangling their babies, abandoning them to the state, and other things that might mean you have to "buy stuff" for others.
If ever a comment existed to highlight how some people don't get humanity, it's yours.
This is how humanity works.
YOU PAY TO SUPPORT PEOPLE IN EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES. YOU PAY FOR SCHOOLS. YOU PAY FOR MEDICAL AID. YOU PAY FOR BASIC SERVICES LIKE THE ABOVE.
That's what taxes are FOR. That's why you pay them. That's why you're FORCED to pay them. And people like you are the reason you don't get a choice.
This has nothing to do with people pushing out kids in place of getting a job, or drug-addicts abandoning their babies in public places, or anything even remotely about that. Those are matters for social services and employment benefits. If anything, I'm so against people being able to live off the state for anything more than a few months, that your comment is just insulting.
It's about a couple who, having decided they have the finances, desire and capability to start a family (whether with their own DNA or others) are not press-ganged back into work the next morning by people who don't care about their personal circumstances but just want to make a quick buck.
So the government says that employers get NO choice over the matter, and the parents get enough pay to keep them in bread and water and pay a few bills for the first few weeks. And the government GUARANTEES they still have a job to go back to, under threat of prosecution, if their employers try and wheedle out of their responsibility just because they have a few days off to cope with a newborn and get into the pattern of looking after the child, healthy or not.
Civilisation doesn't mean "buy me stuff" at all. It means "others who are able pay for those who are not".
P.S. ZERO fucking days on social benefit in my entire life, since leaving education. ZERO income support. NEVER taken paternity leave (even though I have a child). ZERO non-trivial medical treatment since I was a kid (and it's free here). Every single tax return paid in full, on-time, and not even claiming half of what I could have been entitled to.
Government-mandated statutory maternity (and/or paternity) leave, including pay (not the full amount but enough), for 26 weeks, guaranteed by law, for EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WORKING PERSON, no matter their job.
What with Facebook and this, you might soon get into something called a civilised state where you actually have a social support network that vaguely resembles humanity.
It's also extremely windy, extremely empty (that's one of its highlights), has only concentrated centres of population (so you don't have to transport stuff very far to serve a lot of people), and approves huge fields of on-shore and off-shore wind turbines (several high profile projects there).
There's probably exactly 0% solar, to be honest.
Outside the major cities, up in the Highlands, you will literally struggle to find a petrol station and/or a pub that has an Internet connection at all. But you'll pass at least two fields full of wind turbines on the way there.
Maybe Putin is a lot better at this "h money" shit than some random MP (have you seen some of our former MPs? You'll be amazed they can tie their shoes) and so it's a lot harder to pin anything down to him personally?
If it's "of the public interest", then the press are allowed to report it. It's a very low bar.
However, if this is a leak from one country, pretty much no other country in the world will care about it until legal action comes to their courts. Which it generally won't.
My home is insulated. My appliances are A+ or better. I don't use a dryer whenever possible, we have washing lines for that. I drive a brand-new car, it's got a 1.5l Eco engine. I only own one car (for two people) I can't take public transport to work, it's not safe to walk (across dual carriageways). I buy whatever the supermarket has (the cost of air travel directly translates to the cost of the product). I don't have a choice in that matter, as I live in a city and there really aren't many things like local butchers etc. I don't eat much meat. I am forced to recycle by my local council. I hate flying (not scared of it, just hate the rigaramole of it all). I don't buy clothes (honestly, haven't changed size in 10 years, so I only replace what wears out, and my girlfriend is Italian from a farm-community so most of what breaks we sew or repair or her family does for us). My last phone was bought 6 years ago, before that I hate a phone for nearly 10 years. I actually barely buy home electronics. Fuck voting for someone just because of ONE policy. I don't HAVE air conditioning. House heating is efficient and the house is solid brick so it's like a box. No word of exaggeration it's 4 degrees outside today and the house was 16 before the heating kicked in this morning (and that only because it was below it's "early morning" setting of 18 for when we get up, and we forgot to adjust it for DST the other day). Our water use is so suspicious that they installed a water meter.
But, my science brain tells me, all that does next-to-fuck-all to save the planet and is barely worth bothering. I don't do any of the above for planetary reasons, I do it for cost. Hell, I've got LED lightbulbs everywhere because of the cost too.
Planting trees doesn't do much when we've destroyed something like 90% of the natural forest since cities started to take hole.
Green technologies aren't efficient enough and certainly give little return on investment. I live in the UK - solar just isn't practical and the legal hassles of "who owns the solar panel on the roof" and/or "can I erect that turbine" remove all profit and kill any plan before you start. That's before you work out that actually you'll never make back the cost of a kit just on energy usage alone, even with subsidies.
And I'm TRYING to educate myself, which is why I've looked this shit up and people still give the same crappy answers. I'm there. I've done this. And I don't think it makes anywhere near the difference you think it does.
I live in the UK, in a major city, so it's not like the US and we have no fault lines, few flood plains (certainly nothing close), and no forest fires (NO FOREST!).
Thus educating my (usually more educated, they're all in science labs) friends is hard because... well, they know and they know it's not inside the error margins, and they know that a lot of it is just tosh.
This is my point - looking at all that list, the difference you'll make is miniscule. And most people either already co-operate for reasons of cost, can be co-erced into co-operation for reasons of cost (start taxing things), or just don't care. Thus, it's not a global solution, and certainly MOST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD would love the luxury of having almost anything mentioned above, let alone having so much they have to reduce their usage of it.
We can all say "well, every little bit", but that's like saying that the old woman who brushes sand off her feet when she gets off the beach is "doing her bit" to keep the beach there, when it really makes no difference and barely figures in the error of measurement, let alone actually changes the situation.
Reduction of usage is also a complete red herring. Hypothetically, I can't think of a reason why - if we were to suddenly stop producing electricity and air-travel and all these things - the situation globally would improve. It might stop getting worse, but would it improve now? In a decade? In a century? I can't see it myself. We mig
Validate untrusted data. Don't just rely on a "1" in a form field somewhere to say something is okay.
I mean... seriously, Valve. I was quite impressed that - as yet - still NOTHING came of your "compromise" where the encrypted credit card database of Steam services was stolen, which means you DID IT RIGHT where countless others couldn't.
But, seriously? A form field for validation? For God's sake.
You think people bought HD because they could see the resolution, or because large flat-screen LCD TV's came into vogue with new connectors at the same time?
And are contributing to much higher peak energy usage (some rapid chargers are 45KW or more).
However, their impact is limited. To get people to ditch ICE and go all EV, what would that take? We're talking replacing 75 million annual car sales into EV that are currently selling in the hundreds of thousands at best.
Even at TEN TIMES that rate, it will be decades before it makes a dent in total car ownership.
And total greenhouse gas emission of them isn't as large as you might think:
(Don't forget that "transportation" at 1/4 of total emissions includes support for industry which makes up another 1/4.) Assuming you cut car emissions and electricity emissions BY HALF over the next, what, century? That's only 25% of current emissions. Which takes us back to 1991 levels of emissions, roughly.
So by two major, radical changes in policy (energy production and transport), with millions of knock-on effects (how do you convince people to buy new EV cars?), and assuming quite good ratios of conversion, efficiency, discounting "cost", and investing decades of work, we might get back to where we were... two decades ago.
I'm literally googling this as I go, I'm not claiming it as gospel. But even TRYING to follow that path, I can't see the way out that would make any significant difference. Certainly not compared to, say, doubling the price of electricity or fuel by taxation, for instance.
Which is a paperwork exercise that can be reverted in a day.
And quite what are those people saying, for instance? Because there's shockingly little air-time ever given to that.
Let's say we tax all cars over a certain engine size, applicable to the US. Will that reduce emissions by any noticeable amount? Will that amount recede the ice-caps by anything significantly measurable? Because, pretty much, as far as I can tell the answer is no.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I'm also quite serious. As someone of scientific mind, "What's happening?" is a good question, but not one millionth as interesting as "What does that mean?" and "What are the alternatives?"
What, precisely, are the listed actions that - if we impose them immediately, world-wide, without anyone trying to find a way around them, would reduce the danger and NOT introduce more problems (e.g. if we taxed ALL cars, would that push people into poverty and/or would it mean that people instead started overcrowding the train systems?). And how feasible is that of ever happening?
Stop using oil? Start taxing it heavily? Start rolling, scheduled power-cuts to reduce usage (like the UK did in the 1970's?)? Stop the sale of cars, appliances, etc. that are less than super-efficient?
And how long, if we do all that, do we have to do it for? Centuries? Permanently? Until we spot a difference?
And, playing absolute devil's advocate, what if we notice NO difference? What if we ban oil-use and nothing changes and we continue to flood the world? What did we gain by doing so? Could we have predicted that? What other mechanisms could be responsible.
Sorry, but it's really not as simple as "stop buying SUV's". The engine sizes in Europe are tiny compared to the US, so we're already effectively doing what a ban on SUV's in America would do. And it's always been that way. So do we spot differences in emissions? Not really, our scientists are still saying the same as the US scientists. And while China is just burning coal like there's no tomorrow, would/could anything we do actually make a difference if they don't also co-operate?
I'm being serious here, and have had this conversation many dozens of times online.
Let's assume, for whatever purpose, that I believe you.
What, precisely, would you like to do about that? What's the impact of your suggested actions? Are they more or less dire than the proposed scenario if we a) do nothing at all, b) just don't give a shit and do more of what we're doing?
Because NOBODY, really NOBODY, actually has a solution.
Because it's a very different kettle of fish to publish and test updates only for your own devices, and to publish them for several hundred different manufacturer's.
Fact is, if Apple don't want to fix the bug, you're stuffed. iPad 2 users have already found that out before with iOS 8 (was it?) that killed their performance. And there are still bugs in iOS and the default apps that aren't fixed and have been known for a while.
Not that bad, to be honest. If you can't have a week's worth of food in stock, then you're never going to last the winter anyway. And that's "in stock" for each man alive, for his families, etc.
Extrapolating that to "Lads, these newcomers are raping our women (or whatever), all the other villages are affected too, and we need to get rid of them. It's agreed that we all attack at dawn on the day after full moon?" and each man bringing a bag of food, plus some extra, plus telling all their friends in the next village and so on until it gets down to the guy who says "That's two weeks walking, I'll have to consider it more carefully"? Not that unusual.
People think that ancient peoples were stupid, unskilled or unable to plan. They weren't. The pyramids had been up for thousands of years at this time, remember. Do you assume that Egypt was the only civilisation capable of organisation?
Think of the Bronze Age (hint: Bronze. Weapons) as a time of the hunter, and it all becomes clear. We used to run huge animals to exhaustion over days of chasing. You can't do that on an empty stomach either. These people weren't stupid. They just weren't intellectual.
Nope. I type the £ symbol on my keyboard, into a standard browser, that works on EVERY OTHER WEBSITE IN THE WORLD, even "just works" in Notepad, etc. And I get that shit.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason they died is because there's so much coal available from other sources that they were priced out of the market.
If anything, OTHER countries caused that problem.
And householders would be 1.5bn better off if they didn't have to fit locks, and alarms, and other security.
And airports would be 1.5bn better off if there wasn't terrorism.
And countries would be BILLIONS better off if people just got off their arses and got a job, and paid taxes honestly.
But none of that is going to happen. You have legislation in place to combat all those. For copyright, It's already disproportionally harsh, and enforced where necessary (i.e. mass duplicators, and those people who are brought to court reasonably for deliberately downloading movies they haven't paid for).
Stop whining, get off your arses and focus on making movies.
Hint: Not been to a cinema in years. Don't buy DVD's any more, unless it's second-hand and thereby not profitable for you at all. Will pay a reasonable price for legal download rights for stuff I consider worthwhile in a half-playable format.
The reason you're not making all that you could? That shit you put into the cinema and flood everything else out with. That crap you enforce on your media and streams. The bollocks that you make me sit through on legally owned media.
I do not pirate. I pay for things. I paid for my shareware in the 90's (yes, I own mIRC, WinZIP, Doom and lots of other things that nobody ever paid for). I paid for proper licensing for commercial software of those things I used "for personal use" that were more than worth the money (VMWare was worth its hefty price and that's the MOST I've ever paid for software). I donate to software projects that I have no need to. I buy copies of good games for friends and give them out at Christmas, birthdays, special occasions and even run competitions on my game servers that I run FOR FREE for various communities. I have no qualms about handing over money for the legal right to play content that I *could* acquire elsewhere and supporting things I enjoyed myself.
But all that shit you do? It makes me choose between supporting that side of the shit, or pirating, if I want to watch it. So I choose not to watch it instead.
Honestly, best thing of buying a handful of movies with "free" credit from Amazon / Google Play? No unskippable trailers. Play from a multitude of devices, when I want, where I want, how I want. I don't even care that the downloads are DRM'd, to be honest, I have 1000 Steam games and that doesn't bother me either.
But it's the shit that GETS IN THE WAY that really bugs me. Software updates to BluRay players in order to watch a movie? Fuck that. I press play, I want to watch it. Wait MONTHS for a movie I do want to see to come out somewhere other than the cinema? I'd rather just forget about it and pick it up when it comes out as a "freebie" movie on some download service if you're going to deliberately stymie my initial enthusiasm for it. DVD's that don't play in laptops? Fuck off. And TEN MINUTES of fucking trailers that I can't skip when I just want to put on a Disney movie to occupy a child? That's just fucking evil. So I stopped buying them.
Stop whining about how unfair the world is, because copyright infringement is part-and-parcel of your industry the same way that "No the parcel never arrived" is part-and-parcel of running a mail order business. Sometimes it could be honest, sometimes it could be fraudulent. But you can't piss away your profits chasing it except in obvious - or large - cases and most people just can't be bothered to go to the effort of pirating things anyway. That's why Netflix et al are so popular. And why iTunes makes a killing even though ANY song you want is available on the first page of Google if you put in "mp3" into it. But navigating the mire of illegal downloads is beyond most people. They'd rather just have one place to go, pay, and download their content in a format they'd like.
iTunes lost the MP3 battle. How long until you lose the "H264" battle where you just end up providing DRM-free copies of anything people have bought a license to?
Honestly,
All say "boo". Walk away and find another franchise.
Honestly, never "got" Star Wars anyway, certainly not the modern prequel crap, and can't bear to sit through any of them.
But the problem is that people think it's "a franchise for the fans" when it's just "a franchise for the finance". They honestly don't care about your fan club, they just want money from you. And fucking idiots keep giving them money.
Let it die. Go "Oh, yeah, that was a good movie when I was a kid". Then forget about it. Not even out of spite. Just forget it exists and move on. It had its time. Like "The Matrix", it was great, it was milked for all it was worth, let it then die, and at least remember the first as a great movie.
Incidentally: Star Trek, Dr Who (??? Seriously don't understand this, despite being British), etc. are all the same.
Let it remain in your childhood as a fond memory, rather than playing a kid for the next 40 years and handing people money for doing nothing and screwing over actors.
Every movie and TV show I ever watched as a kid? Nowhere near as fun as I remember. Just keep them in your head, they are funnier there, and cost nothing.
Been there. Said that. Some countries (*COUGH* AMERICA *COUGH*) didn't bother to do anything about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Money (excluding profit) is directly correlated to difficulty.
If something saves "the Earth" but bankrupts your country, you aren't going to be any better off overall. Look at Greece. Look at the African states. Poverty is just as deadly as a choking atmosphere.
This is my point. What's the IMPACT of your PROPOSED SOLUTION. Let's all stop using oil, for instance? Great. How many people (worldwide, because this is about the global situation) will die due to lack of heating, power, life-saving products and medicine, etc.? Is that number more or less than those that might be flooded out by a rising ocean or killed by a rising air temperature? We have literally NO FUCKING CLUE because nobody proposes solutions (only "We have a problem that we must fix") and few analyse the possible impact of full implementation of that solution.
I'm over-exaggerating, but leaping from the frying pan into the fire is a real possibility with snap decisions made by politicians and knee-jerk reactions rather than putting a few serious proposals on the table and telling people "You can do this, but you will lose this to do so", whether that's tax money, mod-cons, certain materials or freedoms, or whatever.
(P.S. No, I'm not American as you later found out).
Facebook app is shit and just fills up my phone (presumably with cached photos etc.) until it gets so bogged down that it literally just stops loggin in. Literally, it's quicker and easier to load up Chrome on my phone and do Facebook from there.
Facebook messenger app - why the fuck is that separate?
Whatsapp - currently okay. Except I paid for five years and then you just made it free and I get NOTHING for that.
Get rid of the first two, put in a browser window that does Facebook notifications into it, and I might use it more often. Until then, it's really a website I go on when I get an email (i.e. someone's talking to me on it), and then I talk to them on WhatsApp anyway.
ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH ARGH!
Sick of making the same tired old post.
WE GET IT.
WE BELIEVE YOU.
Now what the FUCK would you like us to do about it that we're a) not already doing, b) will provably (or probably) make a measurable difference within a reason time, c) doesn't cost the (non-literal) Earth, d) that will get approval from those parties that need to do it?
Ignore all the name-calling and shit, let's assume we ALL agree it's happening. I'm of scientific mind, I can do that for any subject that I agree with or not.
But... Now what?
What an ignorant comment.
Parental leave isn't about freeloading, it's about a medical condition and massive change of circumstances that employers have always been required to recognise anyway and formalising the thing that EVERY employer has to do such that it becomes a legal duty is merely formalising a process that you have to endure anyway to stop arguments, override employers with attitudes like your own, and provide some security and stability in a major life event.
You get a day off work in any extraordinary circumstance. So you get days off work for destroying your body to push out offspring (that will pay more tax than it costs to live over the course of its life, you seem to forget) and stop employers abusing such events to force people not fit for work back into it.
It's not permanent, it's not "free" (it's enough to survive), it's not able to be instigated for more than a handful of times in ANYONE'S life.
This isn't even about the child. Social services sort that out. It's about the mother and father who can't even have a day off work for a major change of circumstance - the same UK law also covers parental paid leave for ADOPTION, FOSTERING and MISCARRIAGE, you ignorant prick, which are counter to your arguments (i.e. taking children away from state care and/or serious medical bereavement that can occur to any couple). Even in the case of no medical intervention (adoption/fostering), it's a major life-change that needs support to ensure it starts properly. Not someone forced to go back to work at 9am the next morning and "do something" (hand it to a stranger on a paid service) with their newborn for that time.
You get a day off for granny's funeral but not a day off to have your baby, recover from serious bodily trauma and/or adjusting to the new living pattern, even if it's healthy? This is EXACTLY what you should pay for in order to avoid things like parents strangling their babies, abandoning them to the state, and other things that might mean you have to "buy stuff" for others.
If ever a comment existed to highlight how some people don't get humanity, it's yours.
This is how humanity works.
YOU PAY TO SUPPORT PEOPLE IN EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES.
YOU PAY FOR SCHOOLS.
YOU PAY FOR MEDICAL AID.
YOU PAY FOR BASIC SERVICES LIKE THE ABOVE.
That's what taxes are FOR. That's why you pay them. That's why you're FORCED to pay them. And people like you are the reason you don't get a choice.
This has nothing to do with people pushing out kids in place of getting a job, or drug-addicts abandoning their babies in public places, or anything even remotely about that. Those are matters for social services and employment benefits. If anything, I'm so against people being able to live off the state for anything more than a few months, that your comment is just insulting.
It's about a couple who, having decided they have the finances, desire and capability to start a family (whether with their own DNA or others) are not press-ganged back into work the next morning by people who don't care about their personal circumstances but just want to make a quick buck.
So the government says that employers get NO choice over the matter, and the parents get enough pay to keep them in bread and water and pay a few bills for the first few weeks. And the government GUARANTEES they still have a job to go back to, under threat of prosecution, if their employers try and wheedle out of their responsibility just because they have a few days off to cope with a newborn and get into the pattern of looking after the child, healthy or not.
Civilisation doesn't mean "buy me stuff" at all. It means "others who are able pay for those who are not".
P.S. ZERO fucking days on social benefit in my entire life, since leaving education. ZERO income support. NEVER taken paternity leave (even though I have a child). ZERO non-trivial medical treatment since I was a kid (and it's free here). Every single tax return paid in full, on-time, and not even claiming half of what I could have been entitled to.
Welcome, America, to the beginnings of civilisation:
https://www.gov.uk/maternity-p...
Government-mandated statutory maternity (and/or paternity) leave, including pay (not the full amount but enough), for 26 weeks, guaranteed by law, for EVERY SINGLE FUCKING WORKING PERSON, no matter their job.
What with Facebook and this, you might soon get into something called a civilised state where you actually have a social support network that vaguely resembles humanity.
It's also extremely windy, extremely empty (that's one of its highlights), has only concentrated centres of population (so you don't have to transport stuff very far to serve a lot of people), and approves huge fields of on-shore and off-shore wind turbines (several high profile projects there).
There's probably exactly 0% solar, to be honest.
Outside the major cities, up in the Highlands, you will literally struggle to find a petrol station and/or a pub that has an Internet connection at all. But you'll pass at least two fields full of wind turbines on the way there.
Maybe Putin is a lot better at this "h money" shit than some random MP (have you seen some of our former MPs? You'll be amazed they can tie their shoes) and so it's a lot harder to pin anything down to him personally?
If it's "of the public interest", then the press are allowed to report it. It's a very low bar.
However, if this is a leak from one country, pretty much no other country in the world will care about it until legal action comes to their courts. Which it generally won't.
My home is insulated.
My appliances are A+ or better.
I don't use a dryer whenever possible, we have washing lines for that.
I drive a brand-new car, it's got a 1.5l Eco engine.
I only own one car (for two people)
I can't take public transport to work, it's not safe to walk (across dual carriageways).
I buy whatever the supermarket has (the cost of air travel directly translates to the cost of the product). I don't have a choice in that matter, as I live in a city and there really aren't many things like local butchers etc.
I don't eat much meat.
I am forced to recycle by my local council.
I hate flying (not scared of it, just hate the rigaramole of it all).
I don't buy clothes (honestly, haven't changed size in 10 years, so I only replace what wears out, and my girlfriend is Italian from a farm-community so most of what breaks we sew or repair or her family does for us).
My last phone was bought 6 years ago, before that I hate a phone for nearly 10 years. I actually barely buy home electronics.
Fuck voting for someone just because of ONE policy.
I don't HAVE air conditioning. House heating is efficient and the house is solid brick so it's like a box. No word of exaggeration it's 4 degrees outside today and the house was 16 before the heating kicked in this morning (and that only because it was below it's "early morning" setting of 18 for when we get up, and we forgot to adjust it for DST the other day).
Our water use is so suspicious that they installed a water meter.
But, my science brain tells me, all that does next-to-fuck-all to save the planet and is barely worth bothering. I don't do any of the above for planetary reasons, I do it for cost. Hell, I've got LED lightbulbs everywhere because of the cost too.
Planting trees doesn't do much when we've destroyed something like 90% of the natural forest since cities started to take hole.
Green technologies aren't efficient enough and certainly give little return on investment. I live in the UK - solar just isn't practical and the legal hassles of "who owns the solar panel on the roof" and/or "can I erect that turbine" remove all profit and kill any plan before you start. That's before you work out that actually you'll never make back the cost of a kit just on energy usage alone, even with subsidies.
And I'm TRYING to educate myself, which is why I've looked this shit up and people still give the same crappy answers. I'm there. I've done this. And I don't think it makes anywhere near the difference you think it does.
I live in the UK, in a major city, so it's not like the US and we have no fault lines, few flood plains (certainly nothing close), and no forest fires (NO FOREST!).
Thus educating my (usually more educated, they're all in science labs) friends is hard because... well, they know and they know it's not inside the error margins, and they know that a lot of it is just tosh.
This is my point - looking at all that list, the difference you'll make is miniscule. And most people either already co-operate for reasons of cost, can be co-erced into co-operation for reasons of cost (start taxing things), or just don't care. Thus, it's not a global solution, and certainly MOST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD would love the luxury of having almost anything mentioned above, let alone having so much they have to reduce their usage of it.
We can all say "well, every little bit", but that's like saying that the old woman who brushes sand off her feet when she gets off the beach is "doing her bit" to keep the beach there, when it really makes no difference and barely figures in the error of measurement, let alone actually changes the situation.
Reduction of usage is also a complete red herring. Hypothetically, I can't think of a reason why - if we were to suddenly stop producing electricity and air-travel and all these things - the situation globally would improve. It might stop getting worse, but would it improve now? In a decade? In a century? I can't see it myself. We mig
Sigh.
Validate untrusted data. Don't just rely on a "1" in a form field somewhere to say something is okay.
I mean... seriously, Valve. I was quite impressed that - as yet - still NOTHING came of your "compromise" where the encrypted credit card database of Steam services was stolen, which means you DID IT RIGHT where countless others couldn't.
But, seriously? A form field for validation? For God's sake.
You think people bought HD because they could see the resolution, or because large flat-screen LCD TV's came into vogue with new connectors at the same time?
It's going to take decades, even in China:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And the numbers aren't anywhere near as good as you might think:
https://gailtheactuary.files.w...
Electric cars are a harder sell:
http://www.bls.gov/green/elect...
And are contributing to much higher peak energy usage (some rapid chargers are 45KW or more).
However, their impact is limited. To get people to ditch ICE and go all EV, what would that take? We're talking replacing 75 million annual car sales into EV that are currently selling in the hundreds of thousands at best.
Even at TEN TIMES that rate, it will be decades before it makes a dent in total car ownership.
And total greenhouse gas emission of them isn't as large as you might think:
https://www3.epa.gov/climatech...
(Don't forget that "transportation" at 1/4 of total emissions includes support for industry which makes up another 1/4.) Assuming you cut car emissions and electricity emissions BY HALF over the next, what, century? That's only 25% of current emissions. Which takes us back to 1991 levels of emissions, roughly.
So by two major, radical changes in policy (energy production and transport), with millions of knock-on effects (how do you convince people to buy new EV cars?), and assuming quite good ratios of conversion, efficiency, discounting "cost", and investing decades of work, we might get back to where we were... two decades ago.
I'm literally googling this as I go, I'm not claiming it as gospel. But even TRYING to follow that path, I can't see the way out that would make any significant difference. Certainly not compared to, say, doubling the price of electricity or fuel by taxation, for instance.
Which is a paperwork exercise that can be reverted in a day.
And quite what are those people saying, for instance? Because there's shockingly little air-time ever given to that.
Let's say we tax all cars over a certain engine size, applicable to the US. Will that reduce emissions by any noticeable amount? Will that amount recede the ice-caps by anything significantly measurable? Because, pretty much, as far as I can tell the answer is no.
I'm playing devil's advocate here, but I'm also quite serious. As someone of scientific mind, "What's happening?" is a good question, but not one millionth as interesting as "What does that mean?" and "What are the alternatives?"
What, precisely, are the listed actions that - if we impose them immediately, world-wide, without anyone trying to find a way around them, would reduce the danger and NOT introduce more problems (e.g. if we taxed ALL cars, would that push people into poverty and/or would it mean that people instead started overcrowding the train systems?). And how feasible is that of ever happening?
Stop using oil?
Start taxing it heavily?
Start rolling, scheduled power-cuts to reduce usage (like the UK did in the 1970's?)?
Stop the sale of cars, appliances, etc. that are less than super-efficient?
And how long, if we do all that, do we have to do it for? Centuries? Permanently? Until we spot a difference?
And, playing absolute devil's advocate, what if we notice NO difference? What if we ban oil-use and nothing changes and we continue to flood the world? What did we gain by doing so? Could we have predicted that? What other mechanisms could be responsible.
Sorry, but it's really not as simple as "stop buying SUV's". The engine sizes in Europe are tiny compared to the US, so we're already effectively doing what a ban on SUV's in America would do. And it's always been that way. So do we spot differences in emissions? Not really, our scientists are still saying the same as the US scientists. And while China is just burning coal like there's no tomorrow, would/could anything we do actually make a difference if they don't also co-operate?
I'm being serious here, and have had this conversation many dozens of times online.
I believe you. NOW WHAT?
Agreed. So your suggestion is....?
Let's assume, for whatever purpose, that I believe you.
What, precisely, would you like to do about that?
What's the impact of your suggested actions?
Are they more or less dire than the proposed scenario if we a) do nothing at all, b) just don't give a shit and do more of what we're doing?
Because NOBODY, really NOBODY, actually has a solution.
You're right. Okay? Let's accept that. Now what?
Press the power button.
Because it's a very different kettle of fish to publish and test updates only for your own devices, and to publish them for several hundred different manufacturer's.
Fact is, if Apple don't want to fix the bug, you're stuffed. iPad 2 users have already found that out before with iOS 8 (was it?) that killed their performance. And there are still bugs in iOS and the default apps that aren't fixed and have been known for a while.
Not that bad, to be honest. If you can't have a week's worth of food in stock, then you're never going to last the winter anyway. And that's "in stock" for each man alive, for his families, etc.
Extrapolating that to "Lads, these newcomers are raping our women (or whatever), all the other villages are affected too, and we need to get rid of them. It's agreed that we all attack at dawn on the day after full moon?" and each man bringing a bag of food, plus some extra, plus telling all their friends in the next village and so on until it gets down to the guy who says "That's two weeks walking, I'll have to consider it more carefully"? Not that unusual.
People think that ancient peoples were stupid, unskilled or unable to plan. They weren't. The pyramids had been up for thousands of years at this time, remember. Do you assume that Egypt was the only civilisation capable of organisation?
Think of the Bronze Age (hint: Bronze. Weapons) as a time of the hunter, and it all becomes clear. We used to run huge animals to exhaustion over days of chasing. You can't do that on an empty stomach either. These people weren't stupid. They just weren't intellectual.
Nope. I type the £ symbol on my keyboard, into a standard browser, that works on EVERY OTHER WEBSITE IN THE WORLD, even "just works" in Notepad, etc. And I get that shit.
What idiot would use a hard drive to store and record everything they send? No, this is about processed data.
P.S. Large storage arrays, especially those tied to high end data systems, can easily manage this.
You think Amazon aren't pushing Gbps? Google? You think millions of people transferring stuff to their DropBox isn't collectively more than this?
You really need to think before posting on an IT board.
One of the reasons I use SoylentNews - they actually bothered to use a fixed version of Slash that doesn't have these problems.
Pisses me off that I can't put in a simple currency sign: £