Well Japan's population is 128 million. Labor force in Japan is 66 million according to CIA world factbook. That would make "labor participation", the only really meaningful metric of employment in my opinion, just over 50%.
For comparison, US is 313 million population, 153.6 million labor force, slightly worse than Japan, ever so slightly below 50%, but close enough to make any difference meaningless.
So in America and Japan, every working person supports 1 non-working person on average.
Sweden, by contrast, has 9 million population and 5 million labor force, or a lot better than the US (meaning the various US social security systems support more people per capita than Sweden's. Which confirms what I've heard from actual Swedes, btw, that actually getting social support in Sweden is hard).
So every working swede only supports 0.8 non-working Swedes.
One thing I'd like to see is how that picture would change if you take out the public sector.
Actually it's possible to make gas cars run on lots of stuff. From ethanol to hydrogen. And if you include the Fisher-Tropsch process, you could argue that it's possible to run a car on anything that produces heat.
Now as for the efficiency of doing that... let's just not go there.
The final truth is that liquid (and gaseous) fossil fuels are amazingly compact and light, efficient fuels, so easy to use it's ridiculous, with an externality that only really manifests itself at enormous scale. Of course, we are currently operating at that enormous scale. Any energy policy that wants to have any hope of success would do well to acknowledge the advantages of fossil fuels.
We are NOT productive, as far as tax receipts go. 46% of Americans pay no income tax, and all we talk about are going after the "1%", which would get us less than 10% toward the goal. WE HAVE A SPENDING PROBLEM.
Yes, but stopping or even reining in that spending will mean depriving people with no other source of income of their last dollar. In more than a few cases it will mean depriving Americans of medical treatments that are keeping them alive.
So, of course it's not fair taking this away, once you've given it. It's impossible.
The Twin Towers is the result of a longstanding US foreign policy to topple foreign governments and use the CIA or military forces to meddle in other countries business where you have no legitimate reason to meddle.
Funny, the perpetrators were kind of proclaiming loudly and to everybody who wanted to hear it that it was because America is not submitting (in the military sense) to muslims. I guess you're better informed than they are - I am sorry.
America is interventionist because without doing that America would lose the ability to do international trade over the high seas. Either because nobody else would police the world, or -worse- because someone else would. We have to create the future - or others will do it for us.
We are going into an energy shortage, and we are seeing the beginnings of the end of middle eastern oil (production hasn't risen for ~7 years now, aside from a few random movements). What happened was a result of their governments being forced to no longer increase spending (delayed by a few years of ridiculous lending - you'd think in a culture that places the death penalty on lending money the government would not be trillions in debt - you'd be wrong).
Give it 2-10 more years and the oil production will be in freefall across most of the middle east. What do you think will happen ?
The middle east doesn't export oil because America is holding a gun to their heads, they export it for the money. They're about to lose the vast majority of their money, and it will happen in less than a decade. Of course it will all be the fault of America and Israel, but fact of the matter is that without oil, middle eastern states -aside from Israel and Lebanon- aren't capable of providing enough water for their population, not to mention food.
The cause behind a lot of middle eastern problems used to be religion, it is however rapidly changing to energy shortage.
- Aborting unwanted children means less children on welfare and medicaid - Aborting children with detectable birth defects means less children with expensive medical problems on the dole, and less money to spend on special-ed, etc. (I have such a sibling, I can speak to his medical bills and to how effectively his tea-party governor has cut him off in recent years) - Government enforced abortion of children of parents who are already on some form of welfare or assistance is a solution to a problem that Fox news trolls on about for hours whenever "soshulism" comes up
Killing you in the most cruel manner possible the day you go on a pension would provide the exact same benefits, yet it sounds like a much better solution.
As you say:
Call me cold and heartless if you wish, I'm probably not on an individual basis, but when it comes to running a society the cute cuddly things we all tell each other starts to cost real money and we have to make calculated decisions. I don't approve of abortion at all, but I think it is in our collective best interests for it to be legal.
Exactly. You can call me cold and heartless if you wish but I say you need to get executed. Tortured first of course. It is in our collective best interest !
(here's hoping some sarcasm can make you see the light)
Heh, the joke of this is that the vast majority of the people on this planet are in favor of censorship. "The west" is between 800 million and a billion people. The Chinese want censorship, Indians (a democracy) want censorship, muslims want censorship. Those 3 groups together are close to 2/3rds of our planet's people.
If the internet was governed democratically, as in 1 head = 1 vote, there would be no freedom on it. These countries have already proven that they'd rather cooperate on censorship, enforcing eachother's firewalls, rather than stand for freedom.
If the "bad" US loses control, expect the internet to become a nightmare.
The point is that you can't measure probabilities with anything like that sort of accuracy in the real world. It's more likely to be "a 75% chance of a 20%+ annual ROI" or a "somewhere between 0 and 100% chance of earning anything more than that".
That's true, however recent business history has shown that benefits of big risky projects accumulate, resulting in exponential advantage. Look at google/facebook, or at least that's the theory. And there's plenty of "smaller" non-IT examples of this too.
Which means either you run risky little-chance-for-success-huge-payoff projects, or you get eaten by a tiny upstart.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here : The way to debate this with republicans is simple : global warming is being used to massively expand government and regulation. It effectively regulates one of the few things nothing and nobody can do without : energy. I don't think anyone really denies that that is happening.
Which is also why this responsibility thing is so huge with them : they don't feel responsible for global warming. Their grandfather's grandfather had nothing to do with it, other than having kids (ie. you). It's 15-20 generations back that it got started, long before accurate family records even began, and once started it was (and is) just a feedback loop that will complete with or without humans (look at the models in the IPCC reports, and ignore your "you averaged highdimensional non-linear models to arrive at a conclusion ?" impulse, which any statistician should have. And btw, that is not the only alarm that goes off in my head looking at those studies. I agree that those models are the best currently possible way to predict climate. Agreed. How does that fact make them valid ? Our best may simply not be good enough).
In no reasonable sense of the word is anyone, nor humans "as a whole" responsible for global warming and there is zero moral justification to force people to take global warming into account. Were some humans part of the initial cause of global warming ? Yes, very likely. All the pain the entirety of the west put itself through in the last 15 years, btw, have been worse than useless.
Ok, but maybe we can justify it by pointing out the success we've had by all that interference and government expansion, right ? Otherwise all the people hurt because of this goal, from people starving due to bio-ethanol idiocy to the masses of people fired from no-longer-profitable factories in the west were hurt merely to make intellectuals feel good about themselves, with no measurable advantage. The only measure of importance in the models is worldwide co2 concentration, which has worsened due to government interference (e.g. because factories in the US by large run on nuclear and oil, whereas the chinese factories replacing them run on coal, producing about 20x more co2 for the same amount of energy).
So have we improvided global co2 production ? Nope, we've actually worsened it.
And of course, like all failing political goals, total failure can only be responded to in one way : we must do it again ! More ! Harder ! Which of course, to these sceptics, and to anyone observing the situation proves that the only goal of politicians is not to do do anything about global warming, but to amass more power and hurt more people, make everyone more dependent.
The result, of course, will be a complete crash followed by wars. But of course, we won't know that for sure until it really happens, and then everyone can say "I didn't know". You just did what was popular, right ? How can popular thinking be wrong ?
We're on the titanic, slaughtering working people to satisfy the almighty atheismo on the front deck, them screaming and we celebrating, celebrating how he has delivered us from icebergs... say, what's that in the distance ?
I think that is because actually teaching someone a subject like mathematics only works if you love the subject yourself, and vastly exceed the ability of your students, at least at the start of the year. That's just not true for most teachers.
Of course they declared independence and they have been recognized by other countries. It's just that they lack recognition from most of the powerful countries, in particular USA, and from UN since USA has veto rights, and from the most powerful neighbour which coincidentall yalso wants those lands. Anything Israel is doing in Gaza becomes much worse/more illegal if you allow statehood, while now they are simply occupying a no-man's land in the eye of UN (still in violation of resolutions). Basically, I think we agree, I just want to make clear that the current situation is not what is meant by "two state solution".
You comment is only the truth if you define "those lands" as Israel. If you take "those lands" to mean Palestine or Gaza, then it's just a lie, and wrong. Hamas will not settle for "just" Palestine. I love how you made this comment in a way that it sounds bad, and it's perfectly true if Hamas is indeed only trying to conquer Israel, which would be totally unacceptable.
As a manager / investor / shareholder, I'd rather have a predictable team with a 90%+ chance of turning a 30%+ annual ROI, instead of a 30% chance of a 300% ROI (and 70% chance of 0), but that's just my style - when you are either young and bold, or old and rich enough to throw away money on chances, the high risk investments are more attractive.
Then you're an irrational fool. 30% * 300% = 90% return, 90% * 30% ~ 30% return. Although I will agree the second option is easier on the nerves. Also I would argue the rewards curve for a lot of projects follows a power law, so the 300% is going to be much higher.
Most large business are doing the "large amounts of long bets" thing. Google, Apple, Microsoft,... I am sure they're not alone. Frankly if you want to do something new and make a profit at it you want to be going for the long shot. It's sort of logical. When you're young and can fall back on state support like in Europe and US in the worst case, why wouldn't you go for the extreme long shot ? Of course, for us 30 year olds with families that arrangement feels like it was coming from a slavemaster in the 18th century.
If enough people go for it, it makes all other tactics sure to fail. I think that there is ample evidence that's exactly what's happening.
Yes, but have you factored in exactly how much difference that Obamacare provision makes ? At the risk of introducing some actual facts into the discussion, here's the actual rule :
Any employer with 50 or more full-time employees has to provide health insurance to all employees or pay a fine. Full time = 30 hours per week or more, calculated monthly.
So suppose you're a business, right now not providing health insurance, who would suffer from this (meaning > 50 employees). Well, let's calculate, shall we ? Minimum cost = $50, or up to $200 in some states. That's 2500$ - 10000$ per month recurring cost with zero gain for the business owner, or between one and eight extra employees.
Presumably, given that we are in a recession and getting new customers is too hard that means that the business owner has one of two choices : cheat the system, and not get to 50 full-time employees, or fire between one and eight employees, eat the cost (assuming they have enough profit to cover that cost, of course, if they are using the business to pay off loans etc, then there is no margin at all), or go bankrupt and effectively fire everyone without giving them their last 2 paychecks.
So now you will start getting European practices. Similar rules exist in Europe, and of course they effectively mean every temp agency has at most X people working for them, but there sure are a lot of temp agencies that share the exact same address and "buy administration services" from the same management company. Welcome to Europe ! Ditto for hours claimed. Can you work overtime ? You can't declare it as hours worked, but I'll buy you anything you like from amazon for $50 (or just get you a gift certificate).
Even inside Israel they won't go after them. Inside Israel, there's of course the problem of the people on the street who are being targetted by rockets. Shouting too hard that they deserve getting killed by those rockets, of course, is not likely to be appreciated.
The vast vast vast majority of people on both sides favor a two state solution. the US wants this too, as does virtually everybody else. its the obvious answer. why dosen't it happen?
Where do you get the idea that Palestinians want a two state solution ? They HAVE a two state solution in Gaza, and yet they still attack. So this is clearly not what they want.
Of course, if you look at the stated aims of the Palestinian state, here on wikipedia one of their stated aims is to kill every last Jew walking this earth. Various reasons are given, from outright conspiracy theories, to stating (with a direct and correct quote from islamic holy texts I might add) that allah not just wants every Jew eliminated, but will actively help accomplish that.
If you assume that hamas is indeed religious, there is no solution to this conflict short of the elimination of either side.
america and most of the west LOVES the notion of revenge or payback.
Have you read a few articles on the internet or a paper ? How can you possibly make a claim like this. Half the democratic blogs are rife with comments about attacking Jews in America (thankfully the editors themselves are attacking Israel, and staying away from open racism, but they don't seem to be doing anything about racist comments), and the conservative blogs are full of "but palestinian children died" comments. Not that there isn't a significant amount of racist anti-Palestinian comments too, but the Jews are by far the most villified here.
If you're interpreting that as "the West loves Israel", you need your head examined.
The Pals gained a lot of worldwide sympathy with those moronic flotillas. And, here they squander much of that sympathy by attacking Israel in some hopeless gamble.
No they don't. The entire islamic world has larger levels of anti-Semitism than Germany had in the 1930s (not that other kinds of racism are far behind), and the issue is simple : the more attention hamas captures, the more this anti-Semitism will play in politics in other muslim countries.
The more attention hamas grabs, using any and all means, including their favorite tactic of getting their neighbours' children killed, the more successful they're likely to become.
Their stated purpose is to bring back traditional islamic values, and they explicitly mention including eternal war (one translation "jihad") with, well, with everyone else. Another stated purpose of Hamas is to kill every Jew in the world.
I'm not at all a heavy word user, so I don't think this is a huge demand and what I'm missing in OO is a well designed style system. This is important when you make a largish document and expect word to handle the markup for you.
One example would be style inheritance, and then afterwards changing how, say images are located on a line, say from left aligned to centered. Or you want to switch from normal numbered headers to full tree numbers (e.g. chapter 1 heading 2 would be "2." in normal numbered and "1.2" in full numbered). And I want to do this without going through the entire document and doing it manually, and oh right, please also update the contents sections and cross references (and if applicable, index, tables, etc.).
Word is VERY good at this (e.g. you can just type in a style as text, and have word parse it for you, creating predictable results), and OO (I'm not very familiar with LibreOffice).
In general, Word is more polished, and that gains you time.
What word sucks at, sharing and cooperating on documents with ad-hoc groups, OpenOffice sucks at even worse (because few people have -the same version of- OpenOffice, and you can't share styling and macros with them). That's where Google docs rocks, so I use that as well, for cooperating with geeks or really anyone on the internet, it rocks. Google's very, very weak point is their scripting. Getting data into a google spreadsheet from a local python script is so horribly hard it's not funny. I mean just getting authenticated is horrible ? CSV upload to spreadsheet, anyone ? Second thing google sucks at is their functions list, which is short, doesn't have what you want, and generally works in weird ways (because they tried - badly - to imitate microsoft's function list, they should have gone with just having javascript or python, or Go, or their own language functions).
But what is the advantage of OO ? Free software ? Makes my documents unshareable. Free ? I get word from any one of 5 employers for free and I've bought it myself because it's software I use. If it makes me have to 5 minutes longer on a weekly basis, word is a good investment. Freedom ? OO's existence proves that there is enough word processor freedom, and I'm not Stallman. Other OS'es ? I need a windows VM for lots of reasons, and sure having to press right ctrl to alt tab irritates me, but it's not a dealbreaker, besides, I should get a retina macbook anyway.
OO should find some painful gap in Word and solve that problem for everyone, like Google did. Google fixed the sharepoint problem. I wish I could say that some component of sharepoint was the problem, but that wouldn't be true, sharepoint as a whole is a problem. Shared folders in a windows domain work a LOT better than Sharepoint ever does.
Is there seriously a need to come up with new methods other than good old fashioned fucking?
No - if you consider humanity only as a homogeneous mass of animal flesh.
As someone married to a mother, let me give an alternative view : Yes, definitely. Ever witnessed a birth, even with an epidural ? Or just stood in the same building of the hospital maternity ward ? Every 10 babies or so you will hear the screams. While many young women, and most men have this romanticized notion of birth (for obvious reasons), but you'll find a much different view among women who've already given birth.
On another note...when asking "why"....is it like we have some type of population problems? Not enough people being born?
No, it's because individuals have this crazy instinct to fulfil their biological urges by propagating their DNA.
Actually yes, we do. The human birthrate is falling worldwide, right now still heading to overpopulation in the short term, as the total number of young people is still increasing (the number of babies is very close to stagnation, and will soon start to drop though). However, if the decreasing fertility trends spread around the globe (and they are), once we hit ~2055, the number of humans alive will fall off a cliff, which will not be a desirable outcome at all. A little before that, so many people will become pensioners it won't be funny at all. It won't be localized anywhere, it'll be global. Think recession, but with no cheap mexicans/asians/africans to import at all, and every country having the exact same problem.
Regardless of how far robotics will be along at the time (and there's always the chance it won't be far enough along at all), do you really think having a country's population drop by ~8% per year for 2 decades will lead to stable countries ?
So it would be very prudent to start breeding humans, which imho is only unethical if they are somehow treated as inferior to the rest of us, in 10-15 years in relatively large numbers (hundreds of thousands a year). We can still let the total population drop, but slowly, in a way that countries, nations and we ourselves might actually survive.
That's one problem. Although one can ask the question of why in the name of all that is good and holy would you want one of the main financial centers of the country/world in a freaking easily flooded harbour ? And on an island to boot.
I imagine a similar argument was made in the USSR about Xerox photocopiers. Oh, right, those spying photocopiers.... Now while you can argue that it's just the US being evil and therefore expecting everyone else to be evil, anyone who deals with the Chinese government has absolutely no illusions about which government is the best of the two.
The Chinese government has been caught red handed on several occasions attacking private companies, so... what doubt is there, really, that Huawei equipment is too dangerous, even if it's not outright sabotaged from the start ?
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Well Japan's population is 128 million. Labor force in Japan is 66 million according to CIA world factbook. That would make "labor participation", the only really meaningful metric of employment in my opinion, just over 50%.
For comparison, US is 313 million population, 153.6 million labor force, slightly worse than Japan, ever so slightly below 50%, but close enough to make any difference meaningless.
So in America and Japan, every working person supports 1 non-working person on average.
Sweden, by contrast, has 9 million population and 5 million labor force, or a lot better than the US (meaning the various US social security systems support more people per capita than Sweden's. Which confirms what I've heard from actual Swedes, btw, that actually getting social support in Sweden is hard).
So every working swede only supports 0.8 non-working Swedes.
One thing I'd like to see is how that picture would change if you take out the public sector.
Actually it's possible to make gas cars run on lots of stuff. From ethanol to hydrogen. And if you include the Fisher-Tropsch process, you could argue that it's possible to run a car on anything that produces heat.
Now as for the efficiency of doing that ... let's just not go there.
The final truth is that liquid (and gaseous) fossil fuels are amazingly compact and light, efficient fuels, so easy to use it's ridiculous, with an externality that only really manifests itself at enormous scale. Of course, we are currently operating at that enormous scale. Any energy policy that wants to have any hope of success would do well to acknowledge the advantages of fossil fuels.
Plenty of Ayn Rands fans in the valley. I have yet to meet the first one in favor of the patent system.
Am I missing something ?
Politics in a nutshell:
Step 1: A: your solution sucks !
Step 2: B: your solution sucks too !
Step 3: Profit !
We are NOT productive, as far as tax receipts go. 46% of Americans pay no income tax, and all we talk about are going after the "1%", which would get us less than 10% toward the goal. WE HAVE A SPENDING PROBLEM.
Yes, but stopping or even reining in that spending will mean depriving people with no other source of income of their last dollar. In more than a few cases it will mean depriving Americans of medical treatments that are keeping them alive.
So, of course it's not fair taking this away, once you've given it. It's impossible.
The Twin Towers is the result of a longstanding US foreign policy to topple foreign governments and use the CIA or military forces to meddle in other countries business where you have no legitimate reason to meddle.
Funny, the perpetrators were kind of proclaiming loudly and to everybody who wanted to hear it that it was because America is not submitting (in the military sense) to muslims. I guess you're better informed than they are - I am sorry.
Not really.
America is interventionist because without doing that America would lose the ability to do international trade over the high seas. Either because nobody else would police the world, or -worse- because someone else would. We have to create the future - or others will do it for us.
We are going into an energy shortage, and we are seeing the beginnings of the end of middle eastern oil (production hasn't risen for ~7 years now, aside from a few random movements). What happened was a result of their governments being forced to no longer increase spending (delayed by a few years of ridiculous lending - you'd think in a culture that places the death penalty on lending money the government would not be trillions in debt - you'd be wrong).
Give it 2-10 more years and the oil production will be in freefall across most of the middle east. What do you think will happen ?
The middle east doesn't export oil because America is holding a gun to their heads, they export it for the money. They're about to lose the vast majority of their money, and it will happen in less than a decade. Of course it will all be the fault of America and Israel, but fact of the matter is that without oil, middle eastern states -aside from Israel and Lebanon- aren't capable of providing enough water for their population, not to mention food.
The cause behind a lot of middle eastern problems used to be religion, it is however rapidly changing to energy shortage.
- Aborting unwanted children means less children on welfare and medicaid
- Aborting children with detectable birth defects means less children with expensive medical problems on the dole, and less money to spend on special-ed, etc. (I have such a sibling, I can speak to his medical bills and to how effectively his tea-party governor has cut him off in recent years)
- Government enforced abortion of children of parents who are already on some form of welfare or assistance is a solution to a problem that Fox news trolls on about for hours whenever "soshulism" comes up
Killing you in the most cruel manner possible the day you go on a pension would provide the exact same benefits, yet it sounds like a much better solution.
As you say:
Call me cold and heartless if you wish, I'm probably not on an individual basis, but when it comes to running a society the cute cuddly things we all tell each other starts to cost real money and we have to make calculated decisions. I don't approve of abortion at all, but I think it is in our collective best interests for it to be legal.
Exactly. You can call me cold and heartless if you wish but I say you need to get executed. Tortured first of course. It is in our collective best interest !
(here's hoping some sarcasm can make you see the light)
Heh, the joke of this is that the vast majority of the people on this planet are in favor of censorship. "The west" is between 800 million and a billion people. The Chinese want censorship, Indians (a democracy) want censorship, muslims want censorship. Those 3 groups together are close to 2/3rds of our planet's people.
If the internet was governed democratically, as in 1 head = 1 vote, there would be no freedom on it. These countries have already proven that they'd rather cooperate on censorship, enforcing eachother's firewalls, rather than stand for freedom.
If the "bad" US loses control, expect the internet to become a nightmare.
The point is that you can't measure probabilities with anything like that sort of accuracy in the real world. It's more likely to be "a 75% chance of a 20%+ annual ROI" or a "somewhere between 0 and 100% chance of earning anything more than that".
That's true, however recent business history has shown that benefits of big risky projects accumulate, resulting in exponential advantage. Look at google/facebook, or at least that's the theory. And there's plenty of "smaller" non-IT examples of this too.
Which means either you run risky little-chance-for-success-huge-payoff projects, or you get eaten by a tiny upstart.
I'm going to play devil's advocate here : The way to debate this with republicans is simple : global warming is being used to massively expand government and regulation. It effectively regulates one of the few things nothing and nobody can do without : energy. I don't think anyone really denies that that is happening.
Which is also why this responsibility thing is so huge with them : they don't feel responsible for global warming. Their grandfather's grandfather had nothing to do with it, other than having kids (ie. you). It's 15-20 generations back that it got started, long before accurate family records even began, and once started it was (and is) just a feedback loop that will complete with or without humans (look at the models in the IPCC reports, and ignore your "you averaged highdimensional non-linear models to arrive at a conclusion ?" impulse, which any statistician should have. And btw, that is not the only alarm that goes off in my head looking at those studies. I agree that those models are the best currently possible way to predict climate. Agreed. How does that fact make them valid ? Our best may simply not be good enough).
In no reasonable sense of the word is anyone, nor humans "as a whole" responsible for global warming and there is zero moral justification to force people to take global warming into account. Were some humans part of the initial cause of global warming ? Yes, very likely. All the pain the entirety of the west put itself through in the last 15 years, btw, have been worse than useless.
Ok, but maybe we can justify it by pointing out the success we've had by all that interference and government expansion, right ? Otherwise all the people hurt because of this goal, from people starving due to bio-ethanol idiocy to the masses of people fired from no-longer-profitable factories in the west were hurt merely to make intellectuals feel good about themselves, with no measurable advantage. The only measure of importance in the models is worldwide co2 concentration, which has worsened due to government interference (e.g. because factories in the US by large run on nuclear and oil, whereas the chinese factories replacing them run on coal, producing about 20x more co2 for the same amount of energy).
So have we improvided global co2 production ? Nope, we've actually worsened it.
And of course, like all failing political goals, total failure can only be responded to in one way : we must do it again ! More ! Harder ! Which of course, to these sceptics, and to anyone observing the situation proves that the only goal of politicians is not to do do anything about global warming, but to amass more power and hurt more people, make everyone more dependent.
The result, of course, will be a complete crash followed by wars. But of course, we won't know that for sure until it really happens, and then everyone can say "I didn't know". You just did what was popular, right ? How can popular thinking be wrong ?
We're on the titanic, slaughtering working people to satisfy the almighty atheismo on the front deck, them screaming and we celebrating, celebrating how he has delivered us from icebergs ... say, what's that in the distance ?
I think that is because actually teaching someone a subject like mathematics only works if you love the subject yourself, and vastly exceed the ability of your students, at least at the start of the year. That's just not true for most teachers.
Of course they declared independence and they have been recognized by other countries. It's just that they lack recognition from most of the powerful countries, in particular USA, and from UN since USA has veto rights, and from the most powerful neighbour which coincidentall yalso wants those lands. Anything Israel is doing in Gaza becomes much worse/more illegal if you allow statehood, while now they are simply occupying a no-man's land in the eye of UN (still in violation of resolutions). Basically, I think we agree, I just want to make clear that the current situation is not what is meant by "two state solution".
You comment is only the truth if you define "those lands" as Israel. If you take "those lands" to mean Palestine or Gaza, then it's just a lie, and wrong. Hamas will not settle for "just" Palestine. I love how you made this comment in a way that it sounds bad, and it's perfectly true if Hamas is indeed only trying to conquer Israel, which would be totally unacceptable.
As a manager / investor / shareholder, I'd rather have a predictable team with a 90%+ chance of turning a 30%+ annual ROI, instead of a 30% chance of a 300% ROI (and 70% chance of 0), but that's just my style - when you are either young and bold, or old and rich enough to throw away money on chances, the high risk investments are more attractive.
Then you're an irrational fool. 30% * 300% = 90% return, 90% * 30% ~ 30% return. Although I will agree the second option is easier on the nerves. Also I would argue the rewards curve for a lot of projects follows a power law, so the 300% is going to be much higher.
Most large business are doing the "large amounts of long bets" thing. Google, Apple, Microsoft, ... I am sure they're not alone. Frankly if you want to do something new and make a profit at it you want to be going for the long shot. It's sort of logical. When you're young and can fall back on state support like in Europe and US in the worst case, why wouldn't you go for the extreme long shot ? Of course, for us 30 year olds with families that arrangement feels like it was coming from a slavemaster in the 18th century.
If enough people go for it, it makes all other tactics sure to fail. I think that there is ample evidence that's exactly what's happening.
Yes, but have you factored in exactly how much difference that Obamacare provision makes ? At the risk of introducing some actual facts into the discussion, here's the actual rule :
Any employer with 50 or more full-time employees has to provide health insurance to all employees or pay a fine.
Full time = 30 hours per week or more, calculated monthly.
So suppose you're a business, right now not providing health insurance, who would suffer from this (meaning > 50 employees). Well, let's calculate, shall we ? Minimum cost = $50, or up to $200 in some states. That's 2500$ - 10000$ per month recurring cost with zero gain for the business owner, or between one and eight extra employees.
Presumably, given that we are in a recession and getting new customers is too hard that means that the business owner has one of two choices : cheat the system, and not get to 50 full-time employees, or fire between one and eight employees, eat the cost (assuming they have enough profit to cover that cost, of course, if they are using the business to pay off loans etc, then there is no margin at all), or go bankrupt and effectively fire everyone without giving them their last 2 paychecks.
So now you will start getting European practices. Similar rules exist in Europe, and of course they effectively mean every temp agency has at most X people working for them, but there sure are a lot of temp agencies that share the exact same address and "buy administration services" from the same management company. Welcome to Europe ! Ditto for hours claimed. Can you work overtime ? You can't declare it as hours worked, but I'll buy you anything you like from amazon for $50 (or just get you a gift certificate).
Brings back memories.
Even inside Israel they won't go after them. Inside Israel, there's of course the problem of the people on the street who are being targetted by rockets. Shouting too hard that they deserve getting killed by those rockets, of course, is not likely to be appreciated.
Wouldn't be any different in any western country.
The vast vast vast majority of people on both sides favor a two state solution. the US wants this too, as does virtually everybody else. its the obvious answer. why dosen't it happen?
Where do you get the idea that Palestinians want a two state solution ? They HAVE a two state solution in Gaza, and yet they still attack. So this is clearly not what they want.
Of course, if you look at the stated aims of the Palestinian state, here on wikipedia one of their stated aims is to kill every last Jew walking this earth. Various reasons are given, from outright conspiracy theories, to stating (with a direct and correct quote from islamic holy texts I might add) that allah not just wants every Jew eliminated, but will actively help accomplish that.
If you assume that hamas is indeed religious, there is no solution to this conflict short of the elimination of either side.
america and most of the west LOVES the notion of revenge or payback.
Have you read a few articles on the internet or a paper ? How can you possibly make a claim like this. Half the democratic blogs are rife with comments about attacking Jews in America (thankfully the editors themselves are attacking Israel, and staying away from open racism, but they don't seem to be doing anything about racist comments), and the conservative blogs are full of "but palestinian children died" comments. Not that there isn't a significant amount of racist anti-Palestinian comments too, but the Jews are by far the most villified here.
If you're interpreting that as "the West loves Israel", you need your head examined.
The Pals gained a lot of worldwide sympathy with those moronic flotillas. And, here they squander much of that sympathy by attacking Israel in some hopeless gamble.
No they don't. The entire islamic world has larger levels of anti-Semitism than Germany had in the 1930s (not that other kinds of racism are far behind), and the issue is simple : the more attention hamas captures, the more this anti-Semitism will play in politics in other muslim countries.
The more attention hamas grabs, using any and all means, including their favorite tactic of getting their neighbours' children killed, the more successful they're likely to become.
Their stated purpose is to bring back traditional islamic values, and they explicitly mention including eternal war (one translation "jihad") with, well, with everyone else. Another stated purpose of Hamas is to kill every Jew in the world.
I'm not at all a heavy word user, so I don't think this is a huge demand and what I'm missing in OO is a well designed style system. This is important when you make a largish document and expect word to handle the markup for you.
One example would be style inheritance, and then afterwards changing how, say images are located on a line, say from left aligned to centered. Or you want to switch from normal numbered headers to full tree numbers (e.g. chapter 1 heading 2 would be "2." in normal numbered and "1.2" in full numbered). And I want to do this without going through the entire document and doing it manually, and oh right, please also update the contents sections and cross references (and if applicable, index, tables, etc.).
Word is VERY good at this (e.g. you can just type in a style as text, and have word parse it for you, creating predictable results), and OO (I'm not very familiar with LibreOffice).
In general, Word is more polished, and that gains you time.
What word sucks at, sharing and cooperating on documents with ad-hoc groups, OpenOffice sucks at even worse (because few people have -the same version of- OpenOffice, and you can't share styling and macros with them). That's where Google docs rocks, so I use that as well, for cooperating with geeks or really anyone on the internet, it rocks. Google's very, very weak point is their scripting. Getting data into a google spreadsheet from a local python script is so horribly hard it's not funny. I mean just getting authenticated is horrible ? CSV upload to spreadsheet, anyone ? Second thing google sucks at is their functions list, which is short, doesn't have what you want, and generally works in weird ways (because they tried - badly - to imitate microsoft's function list, they should have gone with just having javascript or python, or Go, or their own language functions).
But what is the advantage of OO ? Free software ? Makes my documents unshareable. Free ? I get word from any one of 5 employers for free and I've bought it myself because it's software I use. If it makes me have to 5 minutes longer on a weekly basis, word is a good investment. Freedom ? OO's existence proves that there is enough word processor freedom, and I'm not Stallman. Other OS'es ? I need a windows VM for lots of reasons, and sure having to press right ctrl to alt tab irritates me, but it's not a dealbreaker, besides, I should get a retina macbook anyway.
OO should find some painful gap in Word and solve that problem for everyone, like Google did. Google fixed the sharepoint problem. I wish I could say that some component of sharepoint was the problem, but that wouldn't be true, sharepoint as a whole is a problem. Shared folders in a windows domain work a LOT better than Sharepoint ever does.
Is there seriously a need to come up with new methods other than good old fashioned fucking?
No - if you consider humanity only as a homogeneous mass of animal flesh.
As someone married to a mother, let me give an alternative view : Yes, definitely. Ever witnessed a birth, even with an epidural ? Or just stood in the same building of the hospital maternity ward ? Every 10 babies or so you will hear the screams. While many young women, and most men have this romanticized notion of birth (for obvious reasons), but you'll find a much different view among women who've already given birth.
On another note...when asking "why"....is it like we have some type of population problems? Not enough people being born?
No, it's because individuals have this crazy instinct to fulfil their biological urges by propagating their DNA.
Actually yes, we do. The human birthrate is falling worldwide, right now still heading to overpopulation in the short term, as the total number of young people is still increasing (the number of babies is very close to stagnation, and will soon start to drop though). However, if the decreasing fertility trends spread around the globe (and they are), once we hit ~2055, the number of humans alive will fall off a cliff, which will not be a desirable outcome at all. A little before that, so many people will become pensioners it won't be funny at all. It won't be localized anywhere, it'll be global. Think recession, but with no cheap mexicans/asians/africans to import at all, and every country having the exact same problem.
Regardless of how far robotics will be along at the time (and there's always the chance it won't be far enough along at all), do you really think having a country's population drop by ~8% per year for 2 decades will lead to stable countries ?
So it would be very prudent to start breeding humans, which imho is only unethical if they are somehow treated as inferior to the rest of us, in 10-15 years in relatively large numbers (hundreds of thousands a year). We can still let the total population drop, but slowly, in a way that countries, nations and we ourselves might actually survive.
That's one problem. Although one can ask the question of why in the name of all that is good and holy would you want one of the main financial centers of the country/world in a freaking easily flooded harbour ? And on an island to boot.
Insanity.
/me puts tp1024 in a small box. This should make you happy because the entire world now thinks outside of the box.
I imagine a similar argument was made in the USSR about Xerox photocopiers. Oh, right, those spying photocopiers.... Now while you can argue that it's just the US being evil and therefore expecting everyone else to be evil, anyone who deals with the Chinese government has absolutely no illusions about which government is the best of the two.
The Chinese government has been caught red handed on several occasions attacking private companies, so ... what doubt is there, really, that Huawei equipment is too dangerous, even if it's not outright sabotaged from the start ?