You are presupposing that Brexit will be a brilliant success and that the EU will cave in to all of Britain's demands
I didn't say that. For example, contrary to some Brexiteers, I hope that Britain will NOT be a member of the single market, a trade deal would be more than enough. Not only because otherwise we would have to accept free movement, but also because we have a trade deficit with the EU, we're actually losing money by trading with it, and as a Brexiteer and Protectionist, I actually hope that Britain will be able to set tariffs on some goods and services, so it will be able to protect its companies from unfair competition from low-salary countries like Bulgaria or Poland.
For one thing a trade deficit is not necessarily a bad thing and it is not the same as loosing money. You yourself and every other slashdotter have a massive trade deficit with your grocery store. Does that mean you are loosing money? No, it doesn't , in fact you are deriving a very visible benefit from that deficit in that you don't starve to death and as long as your salary covers your trade deficit with the grocery store tje deficit does not matter and you won't starve. There is no such thing as 'unfair competition' so long as no subsidies are involved. 'Unfair competition' from Bulgaria and Poland simply means that they have better educated workers thanks to the British government under funding your education system for decades while the Poles invested large amounts of money in building theirs up. It also means that the Poles are willing to work harder and they have an economic environment that is more appealing to businesses. Sealing the borders of the UK to foreign labour will do nothing other than piss British people off over the fact that the prices of the goods they consume have gone up and they can't buy cheaper alternatives from abroad due to protectionist tariffs. Protectionism will also cause unemployment. Firstly because protectionist tariffs imposed by Britain will be met tit-for-tat by it's trading partners. Secondly because if, Nissan for example and one of their hundreds of UK suppliers cannot get cheap hardworking labour anymore then those jobs are going to go to where the cheap labour is. The UK government will try to stop that from happening by giving Nissan tax breaks which erode the UK tax base and further limit the UK governments ability to finance services. The thing is though, while all this is happening the CEO of Nissan will be at a conference with the finance, foreign and trade ministries of Poland discussing how they will give him the same tax breaks if he comes to Poland where the cheap labour is and where the factory will be inside the common market which equals no import duties and no worries about what the next protectionist bombshell hosed off by the Brexiteer government will be taking yet another chunk out of his bottom line next.
Johnson is not competent, which is demonstrated by the fact that May does not trust him to negotiate Brexit
And that's why she gave him the Foreign Office, a notoriously unimportant role, right? Brilliant logic. LOL!
The entity in the UK that governs it's relations with other nations is a 'notoriously unimportant role'? In most of the rest of the world these are the people that negotiate trade agreements, peace accords, build relatoinships with other nations that are aimed at avoiding the outbreak of war... the list goes on. If you think that is unimportant you must be some kind of nuts.
Lol! You just sound desperate. What if May hadn't given top jobs to Brexiteers? You would obviously say that Brexit was just a delusion, the referendum was only a lost buttle, but Remainers won the actual war. Now you see that Brexiteers got top jobs, especially Davis who is pretty radical on the issue, and you say: "Clever! They'll fail and they'll get the blame!".
What an hilarious exercise of wishful thinking. Reality check: your "multicultural" cesspool dream is dead, the "united states of europe" is not going to exist, and you pro-EU people are destined to the Landfill of History, live with it.
No he doesn't. You are presupposing that Brexit will be a brilliant success and that the EU will cave in to all of Britain's demands, which it will not do. Given the situation it is only proper that the Brexiteers be allowed to play things their way. They are the winners of the referendum, they have the British people's mandate and they should be allowed to step forward and take responsibility and if they are reluctant to take responsibility like Johnson and Farage have been they should be forced to. As for complaining about Brexiteers being put into positions where they are in charge of, or in the case of Johnson can at least influence, the Brexit process one can at the very least expect from May that if she is going to appoint Brexiteers that she at least appoint competent ones. Johnson is not competent, which is demonstrated by the fact that May does not trust him to negotiate Brexit nor does she trust him to negotiate trade agreements. The other two Brexiteers she appointed to do those tasks certainly seem more competent choices than Johnson when it comes to diplomacy and negotiating but then so would an average 9th grader.
Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary isn't the only Cabinet Minister she's appointed which will have international implications, she has also created two new cabinet posts;
Secretary of State for Exiting the EU - David Davis
Secretary of State for International Trade - Liam Fox
The first is getting us out of the EU, the second is for getting new trade agreements for when we are out of the EU.
All these three are Brexiters, and will be responsible for the aftermath. Very clever - as May was a Remainer, she has effectively delegated responsibility for the success or failure of exiting the EU on to those who campaigned to get us into this situation in the first place!
I find it interesting to note that you only talked about what the first and second persons on your list are responsible for when in actual fact there are three people on your list. So, actually, the first one (Johnson) now seems to have been placed in charge of pissing off every every foreign dignitary he meets seeing as how he has been stripped of responsibility for negotiating trade deals and Brexit. These are two tasks that would very much be the job of the foreign minister in most other countries. I'm theorising this is because May knows he would do even more serious and irreparable economic damage than he already has if he was sent to Brussels to negotiate Brexit. However, Johnson still retains responsibility for the parts of the foreign minister's job where he can do some serious political damage. He has at some point insulted every single European leader of any note and in the US he has insulted everybody from Hilary Clinton through Obama to Donald Trump. I only wonder what happens when Boris Johnson goes on record and compares Vlad Putin to Dobby the House Elf? Perhaps we can hope, with her now being in charge of the all of the intelligence services, that Theresa May has taken the precaution of seeing to it that one of Johnson's bodyguards will be equipped with the remote control for a Tazer cleverly hidden in Boris Johnson's shirt collar in anticipation of just that eventuality?
The other two weasels you mentioned I don't know that well but they are high ranking Brexiteers and it certainly seems advisable to force the responsibility of negotiating Brexit on the people who initiated it. That way it will have to be them that end up explaining to the public why all their promises of a post Brexit paradise could not be kept.
It is also worth speculating why Michael Gove isn't in the cabinet. Perhaps he is just too untouchable after knifing Johnson in the back but then Johnson knifed Cameron in the back an he has now been made the minister in charge of wrecking the last 71 years of patient British diplomacy. I'd like to think Gove simply isn't dumb enough to take a position where he could be left holding the bag for any failures of the Brexit adventure which in turn makes me wonder whether we have in Gove a future British PM waiting in the wings, sharpening his knife....
You people are ridiculous. You have what unemployment levels in the USA - just 5%? So stop saying that more and more people are jobless!
Unemployment statistics don't tell you everything. You can have 5% unemployment with 40% of the nation working jobs that pay so badly they can't hardly live off the salary and have to take extra jobs only to find that this still isn't enough. That's the resentment driving Brexit, that's the resentment driving every single Nationalist nut-bag party in Europe and that's what's driving Donald Trump.
Brexit for example has been sold as a fix-all solution to all the problems that ail people in the 'rust belt' of Britain. If we just limit or eliminate immigration, if we just leave the EU and make one sided trade agreements with China and Russia, If we just leverage our 'special relationship' with the USA (which, incidentally, most Americans are blissfully unaware of) to get a better trade agreement with the USA than the EU ever will, if we can just become an off shore tax haven for Europe... if, if, if... then everything will be OK and a golden flood of high paying jobs will flood the disenfranchised working poor in the UK. The thing I am afraid of is that even if the UK economy booms after Brexit, even if the economic growth in the UK explodes, that this will not benefit the people that voted for Brexit. Manufacturing jobs will not return, cracking down on immigrants will not happen and if it does it will not cause a sharp increase in wages for the working poor accompanied with a return of manufacturing jobs to the UK. Successive British governments run by political parties whose leadership is made up of wealthy elites will not tackle the root of the problem with the creation of well paying jobs, no more cutbacks in education, more money spent on education (which will have to continue for the next 20 years before it shows effect), and that there will be no effort to fix the National Health Service (despite what it said on that bloody bus), etc., etc... When the working poor in the UK find in a few years that they have yet again been stuck with a bucket full of shit they'll be even more angry except now the EU can't be blamed for it anymore.
The same essentially goes for Trump and the economically disenfranchised in the USA. If Trump actually becomes president and even if he gets reelected I seriously doubt that he will do anything for the urban and rural poor in the USA who live on a pittance pay working two or three jobs and that even if Trump tries to do something he'll meet with ferocious resistance from the wealthy and privileged classes. The net result is that all those angry three job working urban and rural poor who are voting for Trump now out of anger will find themselves, in a few years, if he gets elected, being shafted even worse by the likes of the Koch brothers than they are today and they'll be way more pissed off. All this while the US economy is booming, unemployment is low, growth is high and the purchasing power of their salary just shrunk again. Oh, and NO, I do not think Hilary Clinton will do anything to fix the problems that ail the USA. I also think that Bernie Sanders, if he had been elected, would have earnestly tried to fix these problems but that he would have been defeated by the same wealthy and privileged classes that will defeat Trump in the unlikely event that he tries to do anything to benefit his disenfranchised electoral base.
Why people don't like bats is bejond me.
They are cute, it looks nice when they fly around and they harm no one.
I have never understood that either. I remember reading an article in a science magazine years and years ago about bats. The article was about a biologist who studied the bats and the guy told this story about how he'd been talking to a farmer about being allowed to look for bat roosts on his land. The farmer just grinned and replied that if the biologist found any he should be sure to tell him so he could rot them out. Instead of blowing his stack this guy just asked the farmer if potato Beatles were a problem for him?...to which the farmer replied that, yes, the were. The biologist then went on to give him a short lecture on bats and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many potato beetles the average bat colony the size of the ones he had been finding in the region consumed in one night which turned out to be something like a metric ton of bugs. When the guy came back a while later to check on the bats he found that the farmer had put up a bunch no-trespassing signs around the bat roost. I read somewhere that the free-tailed bats from Bracken Cave in Texas eat 250 tons, thats TONS of bugs in a single night!!...but that's a pretty big colony. Nevertheless, if I was a farmer I'd build bat roost in my fields and get advice from biologists about how best to persuade the critters to move in.
This is the brainchild of Andrea Leadsom, one of the two final contestants for leadership of the Tory party (and hence the post of PM until the next general election). According to a comment on this story on The Register, she already has a reputation around Westminster as a "self-serving simpleton". Theresa May (the other contestant) is generally expected to win.
I got that impression too, i.e. that May will win. Having said that, I watched Leadsom being grilled pretty hard by some parliamentary committee on YouTube yesterday and she seemed eloquent enough so I wouldn't exactly call Leadsom a 'simpleton', but she does not make the impression of being the kind of Machiavellian psychopath that you need to be to win a Tory party leadership election and then stay in that position for any length of time. It probably also helps to have a patch of lizard armour-skin grafted onto your back if you want to be leader of the Tory party.... the ides of March, knives in the dark and all that.... But then again, who knows? Leadsom might surprise us, it's the seemingly totally ordinary ones you have to watch out for according to the FBI's profilers. I'm certainly looking forward to how this all ends. The British press is already calling this Tory leadership election: "The Whitehall chainsaw massacre". Somebody should make a comedy sketch based on that theme. It's pity that Spitting Image isn't on air anymore.
Unless I'm missing something, how exactly do they plan to enforce this for overseas sites?
Or is this going to end up with some braindead ISP filter saying: "I see you're trying to access a porn site, I've logged that for you, now confirm who you are so I can log that too (under the guise of letting you have access once verified)"
Privacy invasion, much.
It's the job of the parents to control access to the internet from their house, not the state. If the state has to do this, then perhaps the parents should be held more responsible?
I find it amusing how conservatives, who are usually the most energetic at raging against regulations and the mommy state, are the most eager to impose mountains of regulations, draconian censorship and generally the mommy state on the public in order to regulate other people's sexual behaviour. In fact it is downright creepy how obsessed they are over who other people might be having sex with in the privacy of their bedrooms and how they are doing it, or in this case what they are using their laptops or tablet computers and tissue dispensers for in the privacy of their bedrooms.
You seem to forget that the government is supposed to be serving the voters, not the other way around.
No, it's more that you, along with many other people, seem to think that the democratic process aways results in optimal decisions and that democratic decisions made in a referendum are above criticism. The OP and myself on the other hand think that the democratic process sometimes results in galactically stupid decisions and we're not afraid to say so. But don't believe us, by all means do your own research. Go out on the street and have a five minute conversation with an average voter. After a few of those you may be able to handle the next step in exploring the sweaty underbelly of democracy which is attending one of Donald Trump's election rallies or listening to one of Nigel Farage's speeches.
Replacing the entire cast of Monty Python, and expecting the audience to like the shit that was just shoved down their throat. The only way Top gear is going to succeed is to get Clarkson, May, and Hammond back and fire the dumbass producer that Clarkson backhanded. The US version is crap too and was just cancelled.
I didn't even like "the shit" before they changed the cast.... on another note how is this 'News for Nerds'? Did they use a giant trebuchet to eject Evans from the BBC building and into that swampy pond in Hammersmith Park?... because that would be (a) funny and (b) 'News for Nerds'.
If you mean the EU when you talk about leftist, you don't have the slightest clue about what's going in dude
I agree. It always amuses me when right wingers randomly throw the word 'socialist' at things they do not like. Whenever somebody does that I get this visual of him standing there next to his toaster looking reflectively at a burned slice of toasted bread muttering to himself: 'Yet, another perfect example of the failure of socialism'. Overuse of the word 'socialist' in some form is the perfect litmus test to tell the stupid right wingers ones from the smart ones. The smart ones use 'socialism' sparingly because they know what it is, the stupid ones usually can't let fly more than three sentences in any discussion without wrongly applying the word 'socialism' to something that has little or nothing to do with socialism.
He also directly instigated US involvement in Vietnam by leaving NATO, so there's that.
Oh no, don't even try to offload that on France. De Gaulle just drew some obvious conclusions about the stupidity of fighting land wars in Asia and ended a futile involvement. The USA thought it knew better and walked right into that minefield having learned nothing from watching the French army play a game of Whack-A-Mole with Vietnamese insurgents for years.
Boats are even more competitive than rail once you start looking at routes like Hong Kong -> Los Angeles or London -> Mumbai
The bigger the better, growth will continue to feed these monsters, and the larger they get, the more efficient they are. I'm not really sure what the article is blabbering on about, beyond some hand-wavey fear-mongering.
It sounded to me as if their many of their main concerns were similar to those critics have with the Airbus 380:
- Existing facilities will have to be enlarged to handle these things which to many critics seem to be a deal breaker.
- Overcapacity, i.e. there is a certain minimum load these behemoths need to have be profitable, will they have enough cargo on a regular basis to be profitable?
- What happens if two of these things collide, i.e. the insurance hit.
IMHO facilities will be enlarged, overcapacity will not be an issue if these vessels are used on high volume routes like the trans-Atlantic route plus a free trade deal between the US and the EU will probably just keep these things busyer and the insurance industry will find some way to distribute the risk of a mega carrier being lost although the insurers do have a point; a ship this large is putting an awful lot of eggs in one basket.
US courts have a tendency to hand down draconian sentences for even trivial infractions thanks to the 'come down on him like a ton of bricks' attitude to justice among politically ambitious US judges and prosecutors.
My understanding is that many judges in the USA are elected, so I wouldn't put the blame on the judges but on the electors. You just get what you (collectively) asked for, for better or worse.
I have never understood how you can have an independent courts in a system where the judges and prosecutors are elected. Not that the old world practice of appointing judges and prosecutors is flawless with it's political appointee problem but at least those judges and prosecutors don't have to whore for campaign funding and votes every few years and they don't get tempted to send people to jail for ridiculously long periods of time to pander to public opinion and make themselves popular in an election year.
I don't see any way the actions of the German authorities were justified to prevent the hacker from being charged and standing trial in the United States.
US courts have a tendency to hand down draconian sentences for even trivial infractions thanks to the 'come down on him like a ton of bricks' attitude to justice among politically ambitious US judges and prosecutors. This has resulted in an extreme reluctance in other countries to extradite people to the US in cases where there is any chance that the prisoner might receive 25 years to life just to further some US offiial's political ambitions for something he'd get a 5 year sentence for in Europe .
It actually makes sense not to have such an emoji, because it creates a dilemma whether someone using such an emoji in a message is making a threat, and whether the company, becoming aware of such a threat, has a duty to do something about it.
Obesity kills far more humans than "rifles" ever will, and yet you see no artists blocking food emojis, and no companies worrying about what do to when someone posts a cake emoji.
Gotta love the logic surrounding this bullshit argument.
Boobs have never killed anybody, all that boobs have ever done is feed babies and put smiles on the lips of men all over the planet, the bigger and bouncier the boobs the bigger the smile. I say all of us slashdotters should unite and lobby Unicode for a set of boobs emojis in all cup-sizes...
You joke, but that's actually a more coherent plan than half the "Leave" campaign can put forward for real.
The quality of the "debate" around the EU referendum has been one of the most depressing things I think I've ever seen in our political system, and that's saying something.
I've been following the Brexit debate and It seems to me that most of the people being polled by TV crews just talk about 'feelings', they 'feel' they are getting a bad deal from the EU, they 'feel' Britain is carrying the rest of the EU financially, nobody seems to have bothered to check. Then there is a whole legion factual errors like blaming the EU for things the UK government screwed up. Things like failing to fully exploit the latitude given by EU rules to crack down on benefits scammers, the education system which was to a large extent laid waste by UK govt. mismanagement and which is also why UK businesses like importing well educated workers from places like Poland. I fail to see why immigration is a such a horrendous problem in the UK when unemployment among immigrants is lower than among native Brits, EU immigrants are on average better educated and commit less benefits fraud. Attacking foreigners is just a way of diverting people's attention from the failures of the UK political elite like fucking up education. Then there is bullshit like the UkIP claim that 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians will be coming over to the UK courtesy of the EU, 29 million is actually more than the combined population of those two countries or the 350 million pounds sent to Brussels that turned out to be about a third of that amount on closer inspection. I spent some time this weekend watching Nigel Farage debating on IQ^2 (IIRC) against Nick Clegg. Farage was making outlandish claims like "The EU plans to set up an EU army, navy and airforce the day after the Brexit vote!!" If I was Clegg I'd show up to any debate against Nigel Farage with a big old handheld sign that reads [Citation needed] and waive it around whenever Farage opens his mouth and lets fly a totally invented factoid which, on average, seems to be every third sentence that leaves his lips. Apparently, when debating these days, it is more important to spew totally unfounded claims, clown around and be entertaining than actually out-debating your opponent.
... or election results like the UK leaving Europe next week...
l keep hearing Britons say that. So how will that work? Will you fire up the ginormous diesel engines you have hidden in the White Cliffs of Dover and sail ye olde Albion out to sea while a brass band plays 'Rule, Britannia'???
That would explain why most kids now adays are so ill informed. My younger sister is 30 and lives on social media, it never ceases to amaze me the shit she believes or doesn't know about, especially around science where the just plain WRONG information is more abundant than facts on social media.
I could say the same about most Fox News watchers and Daily, Mail readers,.... the list goes on and on, except they are usually very angry too.
Slashdot Mirror
You are presupposing that Brexit will be a brilliant success and that the EU will cave in to all of Britain's demands
I didn't say that. For example, contrary to some Brexiteers, I hope that Britain will NOT be a member of the single market, a trade deal would be more than enough. Not only because otherwise we would have to accept free movement, but also because we have a trade deficit with the EU, we're actually losing money by trading with it, and as a Brexiteer and Protectionist, I actually hope that Britain will be able to set tariffs on some goods and services, so it will be able to protect its companies from unfair competition from low-salary countries like Bulgaria or Poland.
For one thing a trade deficit is not necessarily a bad thing and it is not the same as loosing money. You yourself and every other slashdotter have a massive trade deficit with your grocery store. Does that mean you are loosing money? No, it doesn't , in fact you are deriving a very visible benefit from that deficit in that you don't starve to death and as long as your salary covers your trade deficit with the grocery store tje deficit does not matter and you won't starve. There is no such thing as 'unfair competition' so long as no subsidies are involved. 'Unfair competition' from Bulgaria and Poland simply means that they have better educated workers thanks to the British government under funding your education system for decades while the Poles invested large amounts of money in building theirs up. It also means that the Poles are willing to work harder and they have an economic environment that is more appealing to businesses. Sealing the borders of the UK to foreign labour will do nothing other than piss British people off over the fact that the prices of the goods they consume have gone up and they can't buy cheaper alternatives from abroad due to protectionist tariffs. Protectionism will also cause unemployment. Firstly because protectionist tariffs imposed by Britain will be met tit-for-tat by it's trading partners. Secondly because if, Nissan for example and one of their hundreds of UK suppliers cannot get cheap hardworking labour anymore then those jobs are going to go to where the cheap labour is. The UK government will try to stop that from happening by giving Nissan tax breaks which erode the UK tax base and further limit the UK governments ability to finance services. The thing is though, while all this is happening the CEO of Nissan will be at a conference with the finance, foreign and trade ministries of Poland discussing how they will give him the same tax breaks if he comes to Poland where the cheap labour is and where the factory will be inside the common market which equals no import duties and no worries about what the next protectionist bombshell hosed off by the Brexiteer government will be taking yet another chunk out of his bottom line next.
Johnson is not competent, which is demonstrated by the fact that May does not trust him to negotiate Brexit
And that's why she gave him the Foreign Office, a notoriously unimportant role, right? Brilliant logic. LOL!
The entity in the UK that governs it's relations with other nations is a 'notoriously unimportant role'? In most of the rest of the world these are the people that negotiate trade agreements, peace accords, build relatoinships with other nations that are aimed at avoiding the outbreak of war... the list goes on. If you think that is unimportant you must be some kind of nuts.
Lol! You just sound desperate. What if May hadn't given top jobs to Brexiteers? You would obviously say that Brexit was just a delusion, the referendum was only a lost buttle, but Remainers won the actual war. Now you see that Brexiteers got top jobs, especially Davis who is pretty radical on the issue, and you say: "Clever! They'll fail and they'll get the blame!".
What an hilarious exercise of wishful thinking. Reality check: your "multicultural" cesspool dream is dead, the "united states of europe" is not going to exist, and you pro-EU people are destined to the Landfill of History, live with it.
No he doesn't. You are presupposing that Brexit will be a brilliant success and that the EU will cave in to all of Britain's demands, which it will not do. Given the situation it is only proper that the Brexiteers be allowed to play things their way. They are the winners of the referendum, they have the British people's mandate and they should be allowed to step forward and take responsibility and if they are reluctant to take responsibility like Johnson and Farage have been they should be forced to. As for complaining about Brexiteers being put into positions where they are in charge of, or in the case of Johnson can at least influence, the Brexit process one can at the very least expect from May that if she is going to appoint Brexiteers that she at least appoint competent ones. Johnson is not competent, which is demonstrated by the fact that May does not trust him to negotiate Brexit nor does she trust him to negotiate trade agreements. The other two Brexiteers she appointed to do those tasks certainly seem more competent choices than Johnson when it comes to diplomacy and negotiating but then so would an average 9th grader.
Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary isn't the only Cabinet Minister she's appointed which will have international implications, she has also created two new cabinet posts;
Secretary of State for Exiting the EU - David Davis
Secretary of State for International Trade - Liam Fox
The first is getting us out of the EU, the second is for getting new trade agreements for when we are out of the EU.
All these three are Brexiters, and will be responsible for the aftermath. Very clever - as May was a Remainer, she has effectively delegated responsibility for the success or failure of exiting the EU on to those who campaigned to get us into this situation in the first place!
I find it interesting to note that you only talked about what the first and second persons on your list are responsible for when in actual fact there are three people on your list. So, actually, the first one (Johnson) now seems to have been placed in charge of pissing off every every foreign dignitary he meets seeing as how he has been stripped of responsibility for negotiating trade deals and Brexit. These are two tasks that would very much be the job of the foreign minister in most other countries. I'm theorising this is because May knows he would do even more serious and irreparable economic damage than he already has if he was sent to Brussels to negotiate Brexit. However, Johnson still retains responsibility for the parts of the foreign minister's job where he can do some serious political damage. He has at some point insulted every single European leader of any note and in the US he has insulted everybody from Hilary Clinton through Obama to Donald Trump. I only wonder what happens when Boris Johnson goes on record and compares Vlad Putin to Dobby the House Elf? Perhaps we can hope, with her now being in charge of the all of the intelligence services, that Theresa May has taken the precaution of seeing to it that one of Johnson's bodyguards will be equipped with the remote control for a Tazer cleverly hidden in Boris Johnson's shirt collar in anticipation of just that eventuality?
The other two weasels you mentioned I don't know that well but they are high ranking Brexiteers and it certainly seems advisable to force the responsibility of negotiating Brexit on the people who initiated it. That way it will have to be them that end up explaining to the public why all their promises of a post Brexit paradise could not be kept.
It is also worth speculating why Michael Gove isn't in the cabinet. Perhaps he is just too untouchable after knifing Johnson in the back but then Johnson knifed Cameron in the back an he has now been made the minister in charge of wrecking the last 71 years of patient British diplomacy. I'd like to think Gove simply isn't dumb enough to take a position where he could be left holding the bag for any failures of the Brexit adventure which in turn makes me wonder whether we have in Gove a future British PM waiting in the wings, sharpening his knife....
Yes, gerrymandering causes some problems...
Some problems? You make it sound like a coffee stain on a brown T-shirt. Gerrymandering is a huge problem in the US.
You people are ridiculous. You have what unemployment levels in the USA - just 5%? So stop saying that more and more people are jobless!
Unemployment statistics don't tell you everything. You can have 5% unemployment with 40% of the nation working jobs that pay so badly they can't hardly live off the salary and have to take extra jobs only to find that this still isn't enough. That's the resentment driving Brexit, that's the resentment driving every single Nationalist nut-bag party in Europe and that's what's driving Donald Trump.
Brexit for example has been sold as a fix-all solution to all the problems that ail people in the 'rust belt' of Britain. If we just limit or eliminate immigration, if we just leave the EU and make one sided trade agreements with China and Russia, If we just leverage our 'special relationship' with the USA (which, incidentally, most Americans are blissfully unaware of) to get a better trade agreement with the USA than the EU ever will, if we can just become an off shore tax haven for Europe... if, if, if... then everything will be OK and a golden flood of high paying jobs will flood the disenfranchised working poor in the UK. The thing I am afraid of is that even if the UK economy booms after Brexit, even if the economic growth in the UK explodes, that this will not benefit the people that voted for Brexit. Manufacturing jobs will not return, cracking down on immigrants will not happen and if it does it will not cause a sharp increase in wages for the working poor accompanied with a return of manufacturing jobs to the UK. Successive British governments run by political parties whose leadership is made up of wealthy elites will not tackle the root of the problem with the creation of well paying jobs, no more cutbacks in education, more money spent on education (which will have to continue for the next 20 years before it shows effect), and that there will be no effort to fix the National Health Service (despite what it said on that bloody bus), etc., etc... When the working poor in the UK find in a few years that they have yet again been stuck with a bucket full of shit they'll be even more angry except now the EU can't be blamed for it anymore.
The same essentially goes for Trump and the economically disenfranchised in the USA. If Trump actually becomes president and even if he gets reelected I seriously doubt that he will do anything for the urban and rural poor in the USA who live on a pittance pay working two or three jobs and that even if Trump tries to do something he'll meet with ferocious resistance from the wealthy and privileged classes. The net result is that all those angry three job working urban and rural poor who are voting for Trump now out of anger will find themselves, in a few years, if he gets elected, being shafted even worse by the likes of the Koch brothers than they are today and they'll be way more pissed off. All this while the US economy is booming, unemployment is low, growth is high and the purchasing power of their salary just shrunk again. Oh, and NO, I do not think Hilary Clinton will do anything to fix the problems that ail the USA. I also think that Bernie Sanders, if he had been elected, would have earnestly tried to fix these problems but that he would have been defeated by the same wealthy and privileged classes that will defeat Trump in the unlikely event that he tries to do anything to benefit his disenfranchised electoral base.
Why people don't like bats is bejond me. They are cute, it looks nice when they fly around and they harm no one.
I have never understood that either. I remember reading an article in a science magazine years and years ago about bats. The article was about a biologist who studied the bats and the guy told this story about how he'd been talking to a farmer about being allowed to look for bat roosts on his land. The farmer just grinned and replied that if the biologist found any he should be sure to tell him so he could rot them out. Instead of blowing his stack this guy just asked the farmer if potato Beatles were a problem for him? ...to which the farmer replied that, yes, the were. The biologist then went on to give him a short lecture on bats and do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many potato beetles the average bat colony the size of the ones he had been finding in the region consumed in one night which turned out to be something like a metric ton of bugs. When the guy came back a while later to check on the bats he found that the farmer had put up a bunch no-trespassing signs around the bat roost. I read somewhere that the free-tailed bats from Bracken Cave in Texas eat 250 tons, thats TONS of bugs in a single night!! ...but that's a pretty big colony. Nevertheless, if I was a farmer I'd build bat roost in my fields and get advice from biologists about how best to persuade the critters to move in.
Panic not, it won't happen.
This is the brainchild of Andrea Leadsom, one of the two final contestants for leadership of the Tory party (and hence the post of PM until the next general election). According to a comment on this story on The Register, she already has a reputation around Westminster as a "self-serving simpleton". Theresa May (the other contestant) is generally expected to win.
I got that impression too, i.e. that May will win. Having said that, I watched Leadsom being grilled pretty hard by some parliamentary committee on YouTube yesterday and she seemed eloquent enough so I wouldn't exactly call Leadsom a 'simpleton', but she does not make the impression of being the kind of Machiavellian psychopath that you need to be to win a Tory party leadership election and then stay in that position for any length of time. It probably also helps to have a patch of lizard armour-skin grafted onto your back if you want to be leader of the Tory party .... the ides of March, knives in the dark and all that.... But then again, who knows? Leadsom might surprise us, it's the seemingly totally ordinary ones you have to watch out for according to the FBI's profilers. I'm certainly looking forward to how this all ends. The British press is already calling this Tory leadership election: "The Whitehall chainsaw massacre". Somebody should make a comedy sketch based on that theme. It's pity that Spitting Image isn't on air anymore.
Unless I'm missing something, how exactly do they plan to enforce this for overseas sites?
Or is this going to end up with some braindead ISP filter saying: "I see you're trying to access a porn site, I've logged that for you, now confirm who you are so I can log that too (under the guise of letting you have access once verified)"
Privacy invasion, much.
It's the job of the parents to control access to the internet from their house, not the state. If the state has to do this, then perhaps the parents should be held more responsible?
I find it amusing how conservatives, who are usually the most energetic at raging against regulations and the mommy state, are the most eager to impose mountains of regulations, draconian censorship and generally the mommy state on the public in order to regulate other people's sexual behaviour. In fact it is downright creepy how obsessed they are over who other people might be having sex with in the privacy of their bedrooms and how they are doing it, or in this case what they are using their laptops or tablet computers and tissue dispensers for in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Britain's prime minister "says none of Britain's top 10 porn sites -- which account for 52% of all views...
Ok... lost me right there... where can I find that list?
You seem to forget that the government is supposed to be serving the voters, not the other way around.
No, it's more that you, along with many other people, seem to think that the democratic process aways results in optimal decisions and that democratic decisions made in a referendum are above criticism. The OP and myself on the other hand think that the democratic process sometimes results in galactically stupid decisions and we're not afraid to say so. But don't believe us, by all means do your own research. Go out on the street and have a five minute conversation with an average voter. After a few of those you may be able to handle the next step in exploring the sweaty underbelly of democracy which is attending one of Donald Trump's election rallies or listening to one of Nigel Farage's speeches.
So why is he pretending to be stupid?
Perhaps he's been in power too long and it's beginning to mess with his sanity like it happened to many other dictators before him?
Replacing the entire cast of Monty Python, and expecting the audience to like the shit that was just shoved down their throat. The only way Top gear is going to succeed is to get Clarkson, May, and Hammond back and fire the dumbass producer that Clarkson backhanded. The US version is crap too and was just cancelled.
I didn't even like "the shit" before they changed the cast.... on another note how is this 'News for Nerds'? Did they use a giant trebuchet to eject Evans from the BBC building and into that swampy pond in Hammersmith Park? ... because that would be (a) funny and (b) 'News for Nerds'.
Another Leftist failure.
If you mean the EU when you talk about leftist, you don't have the slightest clue about what's going in dude
I agree. It always amuses me when right wingers randomly throw the word 'socialist' at things they do not like. Whenever somebody does that I get this visual of him standing there next to his toaster looking reflectively at a burned slice of toasted bread muttering to himself: 'Yet, another perfect example of the failure of socialism'. Overuse of the word 'socialist' in some form is the perfect litmus test to tell the stupid right wingers ones from the smart ones. The smart ones use 'socialism' sparingly because they know what it is, the stupid ones usually can't let fly more than three sentences in any discussion without wrongly applying the word 'socialism' to something that has little or nothing to do with socialism.
I'm always amazed by Socialists/Globalists complaining about socialism failing. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault.
Maybe it's time to re-evaluate your college theory/fantasies?
You need to look up the word socialism. Just throwing that word randomly at things you do not like just makes you look stupid.
He also directly instigated US involvement in Vietnam by leaving NATO, so there's that.
Oh no, don't even try to offload that on France. De Gaulle just drew some obvious conclusions about the stupidity of fighting land wars in Asia and ended a futile involvement. The USA thought it knew better and walked right into that minefield having learned nothing from watching the French army play a game of Whack-A-Mole with Vietnamese insurgents for years.
Good riddance. The British have been sabotaging the EU since they joined.
Well, maybe Charles de Gaulle knew something the rest didn't when he said NON! (twice)
Voters rightfully want to control their country's own destiny without having to cater to some international rule-making body a thousand miles away....
Actually it's 199.26 miles genius ... now go get a snickers and stop being such a drama queen.
Boats are even more competitive than rail once you start looking at routes like Hong Kong -> Los Angeles or London -> Mumbai The bigger the better, growth will continue to feed these monsters, and the larger they get, the more efficient they are. I'm not really sure what the article is blabbering on about, beyond some hand-wavey fear-mongering.
It sounded to me as if their many of their main concerns were similar to those critics have with the Airbus 380:
- Existing facilities will have to be enlarged to handle these things which to many critics seem to be a deal breaker.
- Overcapacity, i.e. there is a certain minimum load these behemoths need to have be profitable, will they have enough cargo on a regular basis to be profitable?
- What happens if two of these things collide, i.e. the insurance hit.
IMHO facilities will be enlarged, overcapacity will not be an issue if these vessels are used on high volume routes like the trans-Atlantic route plus a free trade deal between the US and the EU will probably just keep these things busyer and the insurance industry will find some way to distribute the risk of a mega carrier being lost although the insurers do have a point; a ship this large is putting an awful lot of eggs in one basket.
Due to the fact that judges are elected, you get people that are in for revenge, not for justice.
Mod him up! ...that's the problem in a nutshell. Judges and prosecutors should not deal out revenge in response to popular opinion and rage
US courts have a tendency to hand down draconian sentences for even trivial infractions thanks to the 'come down on him like a ton of bricks' attitude to justice among politically ambitious US judges and prosecutors.
My understanding is that many judges in the USA are elected, so I wouldn't put the blame on the judges but on the electors. You just get what you (collectively) asked for, for better or worse.
I have never understood how you can have an independent courts in a system where the judges and prosecutors are elected. Not that the old world practice of appointing judges and prosecutors is flawless with it's political appointee problem but at least those judges and prosecutors don't have to whore for campaign funding and votes every few years and they don't get tempted to send people to jail for ridiculously long periods of time to pander to public opinion and make themselves popular in an election year.
I don't see any way the actions of the German authorities were justified to prevent the hacker from being charged and standing trial in the United States.
US courts have a tendency to hand down draconian sentences for even trivial infractions thanks to the 'come down on him like a ton of bricks' attitude to justice among politically ambitious US judges and prosecutors. This has resulted in an extreme reluctance in other countries to extradite people to the US in cases where there is any chance that the prisoner might receive 25 years to life just to further some US offiial's political ambitions for something he'd get a 5 year sentence for in Europe .
It actually makes sense not to have such an emoji, because it creates a dilemma whether someone using such an emoji in a message is making a threat, and whether the company, becoming aware of such a threat, has a duty to do something about it.
Obesity kills far more humans than "rifles" ever will, and yet you see no artists blocking food emojis, and no companies worrying about what do to when someone posts a cake emoji.
Gotta love the logic surrounding this bullshit argument.
Boobs have never killed anybody, all that boobs have ever done is feed babies and put smiles on the lips of men all over the planet, the bigger and bouncier the boobs the bigger the smile. I say all of us slashdotters should unite and lobby Unicode for a set of boobs emojis in all cup-sizes...
You joke, but that's actually a more coherent plan than half the "Leave" campaign can put forward for real.
The quality of the "debate" around the EU referendum has been one of the most depressing things I think I've ever seen in our political system, and that's saying something.
I've been following the Brexit debate and It seems to me that most of the people being polled by TV crews just talk about 'feelings', they 'feel' they are getting a bad deal from the EU, they 'feel' Britain is carrying the rest of the EU financially, nobody seems to have bothered to check. Then there is a whole legion factual errors like blaming the EU for things the UK government screwed up. Things like failing to fully exploit the latitude given by EU rules to crack down on benefits scammers, the education system which was to a large extent laid waste by UK govt. mismanagement and which is also why UK businesses like importing well educated workers from places like Poland. I fail to see why immigration is a such a horrendous problem in the UK when unemployment among immigrants is lower than among native Brits, EU immigrants are on average better educated and commit less benefits fraud. Attacking foreigners is just a way of diverting people's attention from the failures of the UK political elite like fucking up education. Then there is bullshit like the UkIP claim that 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians will be coming over to the UK courtesy of the EU, 29 million is actually more than the combined population of those two countries or the 350 million pounds sent to Brussels that turned out to be about a third of that amount on closer inspection. I spent some time this weekend watching Nigel Farage debating on IQ^2 (IIRC) against Nick Clegg. Farage was making outlandish claims like "The EU plans to set up an EU army, navy and airforce the day after the Brexit vote!!" If I was Clegg I'd show up to any debate against Nigel Farage with a big old handheld sign that reads [Citation needed] and waive it around whenever Farage opens his mouth and lets fly a totally invented factoid which, on average, seems to be every third sentence that leaves his lips. Apparently, when debating these days, it is more important to spew totally unfounded claims, clown around and be entertaining than actually out-debating your opponent.
... or election results like the UK leaving Europe next week ...
l keep hearing Britons say that. So how will that work? Will you fire up the ginormous diesel engines you have hidden in the White Cliffs of Dover and sail ye olde Albion out to sea while a brass band plays 'Rule, Britannia'???
That would explain why most kids now adays are so ill informed. My younger sister is 30 and lives on social media, it never ceases to amaze me the shit she believes or doesn't know about, especially around science where the just plain WRONG information is more abundant than facts on social media.
I could say the same about most Fox News watchers and Daily, Mail readers,.... the list goes on and on, except they are usually very angry too.