One size doesn't fit all, so it should come as no surprise that a currency made for industrial nations doesn't work so well for a tourist economy.
You're right, but not in the way you think. A common currency like the Euro works even better for a tourist economy than for an industrial one. The tourist can use the same money they use every day without losing money to parasites like money changers and some small time con artists. In other words, there are a vast number of small currency exchanges that are completely eliminated by the use of a common currency.
Meanwhile the industrial transactions don't depend on a common currency as much because the exchanges are less frequent, higher volume, and can be managed by a specialist in the business.
So in lets say 10-15 years, it will be "criminal", "not eco friendly" and so to collect free water.
Or we could just not say that. I don't see any reason to "expect" water quotas.
If there is a "right" to have access to water, how far does that right go? Does my mobile home on the Moon have a right to the same access to water as you? Should society ship me water at 10k euro per kg? I see that there's apparently about 150 liters of water consumed per person in Europe. That's a 1.5 million euro per day per person right I have there. And oh look, I'm the one providing the extremely profitable shipping to my locale. How convenient.
Entitlement rights are nonsensical. It's too easy to contrive a situation where one can milk such a system for tremendous gain. Then it becomes the duty of some mealy-mouthed bureaucrat to explain why the right really isn't a right. Cue the water quotas. It's better not to waste our time with the exercise in the first place.
That's wrong to say since this researcher doesn't have infinite time and resources to both deal with the alleged investigation and impounding of equipment as well as doing whatever they do for a living and discussing the security issue they have allegedly found. At best, it might be that the censorship is an unintentional consequence of a police investigation of a genuine criminal activity with genuine probable cause. But the above actions indicate the police did not think the researcher would be cooperative in the investigation. Why?
The existence of an exploit is not evidence that anyone, government or not, is actually rigging an election. Its evidence of risk. There are most likely exploits in every electronic balloting device and in every web voting system ever made.
Depends on the exploit. The original report claimed the potential for introducing false voting data as well as a denial of service attack. The latter would not be useful to throw an election, but the former would. Further, if such accusations routinely result in an abusive police probe, harming the livelihood of anyone involved, then that would be indication of a serious risk to a democracy. After all, voting is one of the most important aspects of the democracy.
Rainwater harvesting is not illegal. It was heavily restricted in Colorado, Washington and Utah until 2009, but all three states have since relaxed their bans. In six or seven other states, rainwater harvesting is regulated -- you have to obtain a permit, which is in most cases is about making certain that your harvesting equipment doesn't contaminate groundwater -- but not illegal. (You have to obtain permits to construct houses or drive automobiles, but that doesn't make people claim such activities are "illegal.")
It remains to be seen if there is censorship. Impounding material evidence is not necessarily suppression.
But heavy-handed behavior is a good indication that such suppression is going on. After all, why wouldn't this researcher cooperate with the police?
As for the "definition". In a region where a generation or two ago "kill the messenger" was literal not figurative, the figurative definition doesn't work.
Bullshit. When the figurative definition is ignored the literal one comes back. Throwing elections (and thuggish suppression of evidence of that) is a phase I'd expect in a return to such tyranny.
The truth is the automobile industry is heavily subsidized through tax incentives and the oil industry even more so.
Let's see this truth. One of the huge problems with discourse in this area is rampant dishonesty of comparing renewable energy subsidies to fossil fuel subsidies. For example, a subsidy that discourages oil production, such as selling oil at below cost to a certain country's inhabitants in order to stabilize a particular country's kleptocracy is considered a subsidy for oil. Similarly,there are a number of supposed fossil fuel subsidies that renewable energy businesses can share in.
Also, depending on the survey, there are plenty of nonsensical subsidies that are pulled out of someone's ass such as deciding without a shred of justification that fossil fuel use has a high externality or that oil companies not paying huge penalties to a government is a form of subsidy that somehow doesn't apply to the renewable energy sector.
Having to buy a new computer and restore from backups is not in the same league.
Doesn't have to be in order to fit the definition. And milder forms of censorship and suppression are often preludes to greater forms especially in places where there's already a history of such tyranny.
Sadly, in more and more parts of it, it's becoming illegal to collect it. And mind you, I'm not talking about diverting seasonal drainage, I'm talking about collecting rainfall from your roof, let alone from a structure purpose-built for collecting water like you commonly see in areas with high rainfall and low government interference.
That's a far cry from a hydraulic empire since first, there would be no central control over water and it's trivial in the cases you mention to circumvent any such authority.
Oil is the big one right now, but water is showing all signs of being the next.
No, it isn't. Water falls out of the sky in most of the world. And farmers, the largest consumers of water can in most parts of the world considerably reduce their water consumption with some simple approaches should that ever become important enough to do so.
I don't think you understand the tragedy of the commons from your interpretation of it there. What you are describing is straightforward fraud, and it's much more easily dealt with than by saying "well sorry, nobody can have anything".
Fraud when used to overconsume a public good is a manifestation (and a very common one at that) of tragedy of the commons.
and it's much more easily dealt with than by saying "well sorry, nobody can have anything".
Sure, we'll just make more rules and increase our surveillance of everyone. And sometimes we won't actually do anything to diminish the fraud, because the point of creating the public good was to enable the fraud. One ends up with a lot of theater and a diminishment of human freedom as a result.
For example, I believe that's what US defense procurement is about these days. They make a great show of accounting for screws and a remarkably poor one of accounting for the effectiveness of the resulting military systems. Using substandard screws is abhorrent while building a few hundred planes for a good part of a trillion dollars that are terrible for the roles they are used in is just fine.
No, we don't even have evidence that anyone even tried. I think it's silly to conflate willfully negligent economic and fiscal decisions for at least a couple of decades (and really ever since the 1950s off and on) with actual enemy action.
Just wow, socialism does not advocate panopticon surveillance, infact I don't think socialism has anything to say about matters relating to observation of the population.
While sure, it's true that some flavors of socialism don't, it's worth noting that public surveillance is a natural consequence of the creation of public goods. For example, are you going to take my word for it that I'm actually five hundred people, all drawing a public pension and all using up expensive health care at my personal health care facility which strangely enough has an abandoned parking lot as address and only employs a few dozen members of me.
To prevent such fraudulent overconsumption of public welfare-related public goods (a standard tragedy of the commons situation BTW), by necessity, they need to know that the application is a real human and relevant data to that applicant. The more services and goods provided, be it welfare or some other things, the more surveillance of its citizens needs to be done merely to protect the viability of what is provided.
Not only does this directly encourage more surveillance of a populace inching towards total surveillance, it also creates ammunition for a future tyranny. Health care records which can be used to prevent abuse of public health care can also be used in combination with other data to create a more complete understanding of would-be rebels and their associates in a society.
The entire point of asimovs multi book sagas about the 3 laws is... they don't work, can't work, and are a really bad idea.
Actually, the laws did work and by the end of the series had worked too well, to the point that robots had not only removed themselves from human society in order to protect humans, but it is implied that they also had removed any other potential intelligences (in the whole galaxy!) that they had deemed non-human as well.
the former did not take the right steps, or ask for help when they needed it; and the latter did not design for adequate backup power during expected emergencies like the quake.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. I found their response to the disaster more than adequate. Similarly, now that we know there's a problem, it would be inexcusable to do that. But not prior.
And we know that you haven't read a lot about the accident, and you don't have a background that can help you make sense of what you read.
I've been right more often than people like you have. For example, you make above the classic conflation of hindsight with foresight. That demonstrates profound ignorance of how we learn stuff that we haven't done very often like operating nuclear reactors in times of disaster.
In summary, go to edx or coursera and learn something before you make white noise on subjects you know nothing about.
Why don't you do that yourself and show me how it's done? Who knows, maybe you'll learn something.
Somehow you've managed to miss the austere in austerity. The trait of great self-denial (especially refraining from worldly pleasures). Not only that, you've manage to ignore the role of income.
Income is a hard problem to control. Spending is an easy problem to control. If spending were the most important part of income, then Greece would have never gotten into trouble in the first place.
And "austerity" is not being used in the meaning above. It's painfully obvious that Greece isn't embracing any sort of self-denial, but is rather being subject to fiscal discipline by external pressure.
The Three Gorges dam uses up a bit more than 1000 sq km of land due to its reservoir. That's about the area exclusion zone from Fukushima (which I gather is a bit smaller, maybe 600-800 sq km), but considerably smaller than the current exclusion zone around Chernobyl which is around 2600 sq km. In other words, one of the larger dams (by reservoir size) uses up more than a quarter of the land set aside after the only two significant nuclear power accidents (in terms of radiation released to the outside world).
And dam failures kill more people than radiation poisoning from nuclear accidents does.
One of these is not like the others. One can warble on about "neoconservative economic pseudo-science", but Greece fucked up badly and now it's paying for it. Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries did not, and they don't have to undergo such things.
So what? Expecting idiots to agree with me would be like expecting it to rain only on Tuesdays. I see, for example, that the author completely ignores the most important factor in why these countries are able to keep their social programs intact. Namely, their governments don't have extremely high levels of public debt.
The difference between Finland and Greece, for example, is that Finland owes a factor of four less as a fraction of its GDP. The other Scandinavian countries do even better.
Bottom line is that if you want pretty social programs or anything else on the public dollar, you need to control spending and borrowing. That's austerity in a nutshell. I find it bizarre that the countries which best exemplify this maxim are the ones being presented as a demonstration of why austerity supposedly doesn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Then my favorite example: fool's gold.
Ah, yes, the definitive scientific term for pyrite/iron sulfide. /sarc
It's interesting how unscientific the arguments are for claiming a dwarf planet is not a planet.
One size doesn't fit all, so it should come as no surprise that a currency made for industrial nations doesn't work so well for a tourist economy.
You're right, but not in the way you think. A common currency like the Euro works even better for a tourist economy than for an industrial one. The tourist can use the same money they use every day without losing money to parasites like money changers and some small time con artists. In other words, there are a vast number of small currency exchanges that are completely eliminated by the use of a common currency.
Meanwhile the industrial transactions don't depend on a common currency as much because the exchanges are less frequent, higher volume, and can be managed by a specialist in the business.
So in lets say 10-15 years, it will be "criminal", "not eco friendly" and so to collect free water.
Or we could just not say that. I don't see any reason to "expect" water quotas.
If there is a "right" to have access to water, how far does that right go? Does my mobile home on the Moon have a right to the same access to water as you? Should society ship me water at 10k euro per kg? I see that there's apparently about 150 liters of water consumed per person in Europe. That's a 1.5 million euro per day per person right I have there. And oh look, I'm the one providing the extremely profitable shipping to my locale. How convenient.
Entitlement rights are nonsensical. It's too easy to contrive a situation where one can milk such a system for tremendous gain. Then it becomes the duty of some mealy-mouthed bureaucrat to explain why the right really isn't a right. Cue the water quotas. It's better not to waste our time with the exercise in the first place.
And my link notes, it used to be three states with tighter restrictions than Colorado now has and now it is none.
There was no censorship.
That's wrong to say since this researcher doesn't have infinite time and resources to both deal with the alleged investigation and impounding of equipment as well as doing whatever they do for a living and discussing the security issue they have allegedly found. At best, it might be that the censorship is an unintentional consequence of a police investigation of a genuine criminal activity with genuine probable cause. But the above actions indicate the police did not think the researcher would be cooperative in the investigation. Why?
The existence of an exploit is not evidence that anyone, government or not, is actually rigging an election. Its evidence of risk. There are most likely exploits in every electronic balloting device and in every web voting system ever made.
Depends on the exploit. The original report claimed the potential for introducing false voting data as well as a denial of service attack. The latter would not be useful to throw an election, but the former would. Further, if such accusations routinely result in an abusive police probe, harming the livelihood of anyone involved, then that would be indication of a serious risk to a democracy. After all, voting is one of the most important aspects of the democracy.
Rainwater harvesting is not illegal. It was heavily restricted in Colorado, Washington and Utah until 2009, but all three states have since relaxed their bans. In six or seven other states, rainwater harvesting is regulated -- you have to obtain a permit, which is in most cases is about making certain that your harvesting equipment doesn't contaminate groundwater -- but not illegal. (You have to obtain permits to construct houses or drive automobiles, but that doesn't make people claim such activities are "illegal.")
I note your link says pretty much the same thing.
It remains to be seen if there is censorship. Impounding material evidence is not necessarily suppression.
But heavy-handed behavior is a good indication that such suppression is going on. After all, why wouldn't this researcher cooperate with the police?
As for the "definition". In a region where a generation or two ago "kill the messenger" was literal not figurative, the figurative definition doesn't work.
Bullshit. When the figurative definition is ignored the literal one comes back. Throwing elections (and thuggish suppression of evidence of that) is a phase I'd expect in a return to such tyranny.
The truth is the automobile industry is heavily subsidized through tax incentives and the oil industry even more so.
Let's see this truth. One of the huge problems with discourse in this area is rampant dishonesty of comparing renewable energy subsidies to fossil fuel subsidies. For example, a subsidy that discourages oil production, such as selling oil at below cost to a certain country's inhabitants in order to stabilize a particular country's kleptocracy is considered a subsidy for oil. Similarly,there are a number of supposed fossil fuel subsidies that renewable energy businesses can share in.
Also, depending on the survey, there are plenty of nonsensical subsidies that are pulled out of someone's ass such as deciding without a shred of justification that fossil fuel use has a high externality or that oil companies not paying huge penalties to a government is a form of subsidy that somehow doesn't apply to the renewable energy sector.
What end justifies your profit at everyone else's expense? I think there's other principles at work here.
Having to buy a new computer and restore from backups is not in the same league.
Doesn't have to be in order to fit the definition. And milder forms of censorship and suppression are often preludes to greater forms especially in places where there's already a history of such tyranny.
Existing in this reality apparently.
Sadly, in more and more parts of it, it's becoming illegal to collect it. And mind you, I'm not talking about diverting seasonal drainage, I'm talking about collecting rainfall from your roof, let alone from a structure purpose-built for collecting water like you commonly see in areas with high rainfall and low government interference.
That's a far cry from a hydraulic empire since first, there would be no central control over water and it's trivial in the cases you mention to circumvent any such authority.
Oil is the big one right now, but water is showing all signs of being the next.
No, it isn't. Water falls out of the sky in most of the world. And farmers, the largest consumers of water can in most parts of the world considerably reduce their water consumption with some simple approaches should that ever become important enough to do so.
I don't think you understand the tragedy of the commons from your interpretation of it there. What you are describing is straightforward fraud, and it's much more easily dealt with than by saying "well sorry, nobody can have anything".
Fraud when used to overconsume a public good is a manifestation (and a very common one at that) of tragedy of the commons.
and it's much more easily dealt with than by saying "well sorry, nobody can have anything".
Sure, we'll just make more rules and increase our surveillance of everyone. And sometimes we won't actually do anything to diminish the fraud, because the point of creating the public good was to enable the fraud. One ends up with a lot of theater and a diminishment of human freedom as a result.
For example, I believe that's what US defense procurement is about these days. They make a great show of accounting for screws and a remarkably poor one of accounting for the effectiveness of the resulting military systems. Using substandard screws is abhorrent while building a few hundred planes for a good part of a trillion dollars that are terrible for the roles they are used in is just fine.
No, we don't even have evidence that anyone even tried. I think it's silly to conflate willfully negligent economic and fiscal decisions for at least a couple of decades (and really ever since the 1950s off and on) with actual enemy action.
Just wow, socialism does not advocate panopticon surveillance, infact I don't think socialism has anything to say about matters relating to observation of the population.
While sure, it's true that some flavors of socialism don't, it's worth noting that public surveillance is a natural consequence of the creation of public goods. For example, are you going to take my word for it that I'm actually five hundred people, all drawing a public pension and all using up expensive health care at my personal health care facility which strangely enough has an abandoned parking lot as address and only employs a few dozen members of me.
To prevent such fraudulent overconsumption of public welfare-related public goods (a standard tragedy of the commons situation BTW), by necessity, they need to know that the application is a real human and relevant data to that applicant. The more services and goods provided, be it welfare or some other things, the more surveillance of its citizens needs to be done merely to protect the viability of what is provided.
Not only does this directly encourage more surveillance of a populace inching towards total surveillance, it also creates ammunition for a future tyranny. Health care records which can be used to prevent abuse of public health care can also be used in combination with other data to create a more complete understanding of would-be rebels and their associates in a society.
The entire point of asimovs multi book sagas about the 3 laws is... they don't work, can't work, and are a really bad idea.
Actually, the laws did work and by the end of the series had worked too well, to the point that robots had not only removed themselves from human society in order to protect humans, but it is implied that they also had removed any other potential intelligences (in the whole galaxy!) that they had deemed non-human as well.
It was essentially entirely focused on human and organizational risk factors, the sort of thing that anthropologists do actually study,
News to me.
Countries such as Greece have been brought to their knees by foreign powers without a single shot being fired,
Greece is an own goal. Don't make the mistake of assuming it took any sort of effort to take them down.
the former did not take the right steps, or ask for help when they needed it; and the latter did not design for adequate backup power during expected emergencies like the quake.
It's easy to criticize in hindsight. I found their response to the disaster more than adequate. Similarly, now that we know there's a problem, it would be inexcusable to do that. But not prior.
And we know that you haven't read a lot about the accident, and you don't have a background that can help you make sense of what you read.
I've been right more often than people like you have. For example, you make above the classic conflation of hindsight with foresight. That demonstrates profound ignorance of how we learn stuff that we haven't done very often like operating nuclear reactors in times of disaster.
In summary, go to edx or coursera and learn something before you make white noise on subjects you know nothing about.
Why don't you do that yourself and show me how it's done? Who knows, maybe you'll learn something.
Somehow you've managed to miss the austere in austerity. The trait of great self-denial (especially refraining from worldly pleasures). Not only that, you've manage to ignore the role of income.
Income is a hard problem to control. Spending is an easy problem to control. If spending were the most important part of income, then Greece would have never gotten into trouble in the first place.
And "austerity" is not being used in the meaning above. It's painfully obvious that Greece isn't embracing any sort of self-denial, but is rather being subject to fiscal discipline by external pressure.
The Three Gorges dam uses up a bit more than 1000 sq km of land due to its reservoir. That's about the area exclusion zone from Fukushima (which I gather is a bit smaller, maybe 600-800 sq km), but considerably smaller than the current exclusion zone around Chernobyl which is around 2600 sq km. In other words, one of the larger dams (by reservoir size) uses up more than a quarter of the land set aside after the only two significant nuclear power accidents (in terms of radiation released to the outside world).
And dam failures kill more people than radiation poisoning from nuclear accidents does.
China is on track to meet Americas military power by 2020.
Just no. Maybe 2040-2050. But not that close in the future.
Now, let's look at public debt as percentage of GDP:
USA: 72.5%
UK: 90.0%
France: 89.9%
Greece: 161.3%
Netherlands: 68.7%
Canada: 84.1%
Switzerland: 52.4%
Germany: 79.9%
One of these is not like the others. One can warble on about "neoconservative economic pseudo-science", but Greece fucked up badly and now it's paying for it. Meanwhile, Scandinavian countries did not, and they don't have to undergo such things.
So what? Expecting idiots to agree with me would be like expecting it to rain only on Tuesdays. I see, for example, that the author completely ignores the most important factor in why these countries are able to keep their social programs intact. Namely, their governments don't have extremely high levels of public debt.
The difference between Finland and Greece, for example, is that Finland owes a factor of four less as a fraction of its GDP. The other Scandinavian countries do even better.
Bottom line is that if you want pretty social programs or anything else on the public dollar, you need to control spending and borrowing. That's austerity in a nutshell. I find it bizarre that the countries which best exemplify this maxim are the ones being presented as a demonstration of why austerity supposedly doesn't work.