Heavy metals and toxic chemicals become "your" problem as we import more consumer goods, food, and pharmaceuticals. Even their air pollution accumulates in Pacific fish (think mercury).
The earth does not care about per-capita. (It doesn't care about anything, really.) If a slab of land is rendered uninhabitable, it doesn't really matter whether you divide the land by 1.4 billion or 300 million - the point is that a vast track of land in uninhabitable. If anything, the soiling of land becomes MORE of a problem when you have to fit more people on it (or feed more people with it).
Even your example is not a great one - an SUV causes some CO2 emission and, depending on the local geography, maybe some smog. Rare earth mining in China is a completely different kettle of fish.
It's probably a combination of factors. They really do have horrible environmental problems, and there probably are people with power in China who really do want to limit the exportation of fruits of this damage to discourage the practices. Then you probably have people with power who want to limit exports because China has the market cornered and this raises profit or strengthens their hand in trade negotiations. Those people have reason to work together and so you have the current situation.
If there were roaming bands of people looking to do such things, they could already do them. A chainsaw is cheaper than a computer if you want to kill the electricity for a whole branch of people. For an individual, all you have to do is pull the meter.
The US funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel.
Who?
Because Iran's goal isn't to destabilize Iraq, but instead to safeguard their interests and the interests of Shiites in Iraq.
I never debated their goal - only their methods.
Considering the US toppled Iraq's government, would you characterize Operation Iraqi Freedom as "destabilization efforts"?
No - it was an invasion. At no point was destabilization even a short-term goal. Iran's short-term goal (or method if you prefer) was sectarian violence, because they gambled this would result in a Shiite victory.
While the American invasion certainly did lead to destabilization, this was more the result of ineptness than anything else. If the American goal were simply destabilization, they could have withdrawn from Iraq as soon as they captured Saddam - or a number of other methods that skip the whole messy invasion method altogether.
Whatever terminology you would like to use, Iran has been directly responsible for much loss of American life and treasure.
Is that an assumption that you're making, or do you have some specific evidence of that being the case?
If your assertion is that Mossad has "gone rogue" and is no longer taking orders from the Israeli leadership, then I think it would be up to you to provide evidence. I'm operating under the assumption that nothing has changed. But at the end of the day, neither of us has a source high up in the Israeli government that could provide better information than we get from news reports, and we're both playing amateur analyst.
Like I said, you are in the bag for Israel.
Anddd, you're back at it.
Arab Israelis face monumental discrimination and challenge.
That's what makes it such a sad fact. Arabs in general face monumental problems in their home countries. At least in Israel they can vote in largely legitimate elections. Until the Egyptian Revolution, that's more than any other Arab citizen could say - and even in Egypt the votes were largely symbolic. At least in Israel they can speak publicly about the government without risking a violent reaction from the government. Political prisoners are the norm in every other Arab state.
It's not an endorsement of Israel, but a indictment of every other Arab regime. Is there any Arab country where a Shiite can marry a Jew?
Compare that to UAE where every citizen receives their share of oil revenues in the form of a $40k/annum check from their government. It is transparently ludicrous to suggest that the standard of living for an Arab is higher in Israel than, for example, UAE.
I wasn't really referring to standard of living in economic terms, but, yes, it's true, the standard of living is higher in the UAE - it's higher than almost anywhere else in the world, so long as you are a citizen. Of course, while the Shiites get their checks, they are barred from working in government positions - and Sunni and Shiite alike have no suffrage to speak of. But yeah, as far as monarchies go, it's a pretty good one. Still not a great place to get raped, since you'll get charged with adulatory. But for the sake of argument, let's say it's an even better place to live than Israel for an Arab. It's still one little state the size of Maine in the whole Arab world, and it is still pretty damning to look at how miserable it is to be an Arab in the present day. Except, of course, in the UAE and possibly Israel. Add "woman" to the equation and it gets even worse. It's hard for me to look at that part of the world and not see Israel differently than if it were in a more enlightened neighborhood.
No, I simply said that you were making claims outside the established facts, which you were. I didn't go on to speculate as to your motivations for doing so.
It's more polite than my sarcasm, but it is still an ad hominem. You didn't advance the discussion and you didn't point out where my facts were in error - you just insulted me indirectly by suggesting that I don't have a grasp of the facts.
You make it sound as if Iran and Israel have been at war.
Which has obviously never been the case. Iran funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel. I still don't see how that changes our conversation.
Iran is the capital of the Shia world, it is unsurprising that they would vie for influence in a majority Shiite nation like Iraq, particularly one that is their neighbor.
I didn't say that it was surprising, and I'd love to know what isn't "honest" about saying that Iran's involvement in Iraq can be characterized as destabilization efforts.
It seems like they pissed the CIA off quite a bit, and endangered the American public by potentially exposing us to retaliation for their actions.
Right, but it's not like Mossad executed the plan without political direction. It sounds like Mossad has agents working within Iran carrying out targeted assassinations, using agents they recruited under the guise of the CIA. Isn't that successful?
No, I don't. You only think so because you yourself are very biased, in the same way that a Fox News enthusiast thinks that all the other media is too liberal. You are clearly "in the bag" for Israel, and consequently your scales are off. I'm being completely fair and fact-based, while you're advocating a cause using hyperbole, exaggeration, hypocrisy, misstatement, and when all of that fails, mud-slinging.
Nuh-uh, you are! LOL. Wanna keep at this? I don't mind when you point out where my "facts" are off-base or my analysis is faulty, but characterizing me as "in the bag" for Israel is silly. I happen to think that Zionism is faulty and that Israel has done a lot to cause their own problems. At the same time, I recognize that Israel is probably the most sane place in that part of the world right now. The sad fact is that an Arab Israeli is significantly better off in almost any way then their counterparts in the Arab states.
You were engaging in an ad hominem attack against me, rather than addressing any of the points that I've been making.
You started it:
I guess that is true, as long as you're willing to go well outside of the facts.
At which point I insinuated that your "facts" are all filtered for the anti-Israel point of view.
I apologize for the counter-insult, and I will be happy to move on if you are ready to as well.
Do you see the difference? What you said isn't even remotely true.
I see "a difference", but I don't see how it changes the conversation. It seems like a semantic argument.
I think that's not really an honest characterization of the relationship between Iran and the main Shi'ite religious political party in Lebanon.
I was referring to their involvement in Iraq.
Did you read that article?
I did. It was very interesting, BTW - thank you for that. I'd say that Israel is making a pretty big political gamble by pretending to be the CIA - but it doesn't sound like Mossad messed up in any way. If the strategy backfires, it's clearly the fault of the Israeli political leaders.
I'm guessing that you don't mean "respected international affairs periodical websites"? Just come out and say what you mean. What are you trying to say?
I'm quite sarcastic, which doesn't always play well in written form. You seem to be very one-sided in your analysis of the Iran-Israeli relationship, so I was insinuating that all your news came from sites with a anti-Zionist leaning. I'd suggest that both the Israelis and the Iranians need some serious attitude adjustment if they ever hope to stop fighting one another. I haven't seen any evidence that either party is even interested in change.
The difference is that while the technology is interacting with other computers, you may or may not even be aware that this is taking place. To the user, a torrent can look like a fancy download.
When you view CNN video, you are actually part of a torrent-like network - downloading bits of the video from other viewers like yourself. I'd wager most people don't know this. Are they "interacting" with other CNN viewers?
Similarly, when my computer sits on a network with other computers, by definition it is "interacting" with the other computers... but am I?
Take a stand: I don't run ANYTHING that eventually translates to machine code.
To make my post actually relevant, I will add that it runs fine with Diablo, in case you have some objection to Oracle and not just an objection to a language.
That isn't the case at all. Israel's military has, since the 1979 revolution, actually never had a single publicly-known confrontation with Iran. Iran has never attacked Israel.
Iran has very actively and apologetically supported Hezbollah practically since the founding of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
that would be like a Spanish person complaining about America sabotaging their efforts in Mexico.
So then Spain wouldn't have a legitimate grievance if Americans were aiding groups who were attacking their troops?
Of course we're going to want some involvement
Iran's "involvement" mostly included destabilization efforts - things like arms and support for sectarian violence.
I think you are thinking of Mossad
No, Mossad actually has their shit together most of the time. I'm talking about the Iranians hatching all of these failed plots recently.
I guess that is true, as long as you're willing to go well outside of the facts.
Why do I get the idea that your "facts" all come from a certain type of website?
Iran has been in almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding. They actively worked to sabotage American efforts in Iraq, and now Afghanistan. They have been caught recently trying to play CIA in several different countries. The idea that Iran is somehow passive in this whole mess is not very hard to dismiss.
NPT explicitly gives that right to developer nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment.
Yeah, I think there's a bit about inspections in there as well...
And it would just postpone the problem and it is unlikely that USA or Israel would be happy with uranium enrichment at that time either
But they'd keep providing enriched uranium (well, France or Russia would) for the same reasons they did to start with.
In any event, I have no reason to believe that Iran is doing this for anything but security reasons. It's not as if Iran has a large amount of uranium, so they'd just be trading the depletion of their oil reserves for the depletion of their uranium reserves. When they build a bomb, they will presumably need the ability to reprocess uranium - so maybe they will scale that up for commercial power and that would extend their reserves. Economically it would still make more sense to let France do it for them.
Why would they go tit-for-tat? They may not have the resources to do that easily, at least not immediately. Even if they did, the bang-for-the-buck isn't there. Killing American scientists would do very little to actually harm any program in the US, so it would be simple revenge. Cathartic, but not very strategic and a terrible waste of resources. Sending a boatload of missiles to Hezbollah is something that they can do using established channels, and it commands a huge amount of Israeli resources.
Without own uranium enrichment, Iran would always depend on the good will of other countries to suply it uranium and that would make it very easy target for coersion of other countries. And Iran will run out of oil relatively soon.
This is remedied by stockpiling enough fuel to give them time to start up an enrichment program of their own if need be.
Iran has absolute right for nuclear power and uranium enrichment.
There are no absolute rights of nations. Their "right" to develop nuclear technology has to be weighed against the rights of other nations to defend themselves.
And now USA has said that even if Iran would stop nuclear encrichment, which is right Iran has, the sanctions would still stay
That's not what "USA has said". The problem is that the Iran sanctions (at least most of them) come from the US congress and not from Obama. So you have a situation where Obama is doing the negotiations since he presides over the Dept. of State, but he has no real power to lift sanctions. He can still work to get the UN and EU sanctions lifted, and he can lobby congress. Nothing of any import will happen in that body until the presidential elections are over.
Let's say I'm the CIA. Let's say Iran is buying PCs through some outside country which I or the Israelis have infiltrated. Is it still so hard to imagine how the computers could be tampered with?
My understanding is that the centrifuges were NOT on the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Heavy metals and toxic chemicals become "your" problem as we import more consumer goods, food, and pharmaceuticals. Even their air pollution accumulates in Pacific fish (think mercury).
The earth does not care about per-capita. (It doesn't care about anything, really.) If a slab of land is rendered uninhabitable, it doesn't really matter whether you divide the land by 1.4 billion or 300 million - the point is that a vast track of land in uninhabitable. If anything, the soiling of land becomes MORE of a problem when you have to fit more people on it (or feed more people with it).
Even your example is not a great one - an SUV causes some CO2 emission and, depending on the local geography, maybe some smog. Rare earth mining in China is a completely different kettle of fish.
I'm sure it has to do with the licensing agreement that Google has with the studios that allows the music to be on YouTube in the first place.
Probably because the OPEC countries are not in the WTO...
It's probably a combination of factors. They really do have horrible environmental problems, and there probably are people with power in China who really do want to limit the exportation of fruits of this damage to discourage the practices. Then you probably have people with power who want to limit exports because China has the market cornered and this raises profit or strengthens their hand in trade negotiations. Those people have reason to work together and so you have the current situation.
I was just going to post that I've never had it flag a dependency :)
YouTube is filled with proof that people simply don't care about personal safety or legality :)
There are also videos of people taking chainsaws to utility poles. Or if you prefer, buckshot :)
I don't see roving bands of people attempting to break into military facilities, the NRO or NASA.
Probably not the best analogy... I'm pretty sure that spycraft is alive and well.
If there were roaming bands of people looking to do such things, they could already do them. A chainsaw is cheaper than a computer if you want to kill the electricity for a whole branch of people. For an individual, all you have to do is pull the meter.
Besides, the utilities have a powerful incentive to keep the meters secure.
Throw that on a poster and it'll be almost as worthless as those other platitudes: "Don't work harder, work smarter!"
I was with you up to green, but blue is a menace! It's a blue menace!
DDT is pretty safe if you aren't a bird.
The US funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel.
Who?
Because Iran's goal isn't to destabilize Iraq, but instead to safeguard their interests and the interests of Shiites in Iraq.
I never debated their goal - only their methods.
Considering the US toppled Iraq's government, would you characterize Operation Iraqi Freedom as "destabilization efforts"?
No - it was an invasion. At no point was destabilization even a short-term goal. Iran's short-term goal (or method if you prefer) was sectarian violence, because they gambled this would result in a Shiite victory.
While the American invasion certainly did lead to destabilization, this was more the result of ineptness than anything else. If the American goal were simply destabilization, they could have withdrawn from Iraq as soon as they captured Saddam - or a number of other methods that skip the whole messy invasion method altogether.
Whatever terminology you would like to use, Iran has been directly responsible for much loss of American life and treasure.
Is that an assumption that you're making, or do you have some specific evidence of that being the case?
If your assertion is that Mossad has "gone rogue" and is no longer taking orders from the Israeli leadership, then I think it would be up to you to provide evidence. I'm operating under the assumption that nothing has changed. But at the end of the day, neither of us has a source high up in the Israeli government that could provide better information than we get from news reports, and we're both playing amateur analyst.
Like I said, you are in the bag for Israel.
Anddd, you're back at it.
Arab Israelis face monumental discrimination and challenge.
That's what makes it such a sad fact. Arabs in general face monumental problems in their home countries. At least in Israel they can vote in largely legitimate elections. Until the Egyptian Revolution, that's more than any other Arab citizen could say - and even in Egypt the votes were largely symbolic. At least in Israel they can speak publicly about the government without risking a violent reaction from the government. Political prisoners are the norm in every other Arab state.
It's not an endorsement of Israel, but a indictment of every other Arab regime. Is there any Arab country where a Shiite can marry a Jew?
Compare that to UAE where every citizen receives their share of oil revenues in the form of a $40k/annum check from their government. It is transparently ludicrous to suggest that the standard of living for an Arab is higher in Israel than, for example, UAE.
I wasn't really referring to standard of living in economic terms, but, yes, it's true, the standard of living is higher in the UAE - it's higher than almost anywhere else in the world, so long as you are a citizen. Of course, while the Shiites get their checks, they are barred from working in government positions - and Sunni and Shiite alike have no suffrage to speak of. But yeah, as far as monarchies go, it's a pretty good one. Still not a great place to get raped, since you'll get charged with adulatory. But for the sake of argument, let's say it's an even better place to live than Israel for an Arab. It's still one little state the size of Maine in the whole Arab world, and it is still pretty damning to look at how miserable it is to be an Arab in the present day. Except, of course, in the UAE and possibly Israel. Add "woman" to the equation and it gets even worse. It's hard for me to look at that part of the world and not see Israel differently than if it were in a more enlightened neighborhood.
No, I simply said that you were making claims outside the established facts, which you were. I didn't go on to speculate as to your motivations for doing so.
It's more polite than my sarcasm, but it is still an ad hominem. You didn't advance the discussion and you didn't point out where my facts were in error - you just insulted me indirectly by suggesting that I don't have a grasp of the facts.
You make it sound as if Iran and Israel have been at war.
Which has obviously never been the case. Iran funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel. I still don't see how that changes our conversation.
Iran is the capital of the Shia world, it is unsurprising that they would vie for influence in a majority Shiite nation like Iraq, particularly one that is their neighbor.
I didn't say that it was surprising, and I'd love to know what isn't "honest" about saying that Iran's involvement in Iraq can be characterized as destabilization efforts.
It seems like they pissed the CIA off quite a bit, and endangered the American public by potentially exposing us to retaliation for their actions.
Right, but it's not like Mossad executed the plan without political direction. It sounds like Mossad has agents working within Iran carrying out targeted assassinations, using agents they recruited under the guise of the CIA. Isn't that successful?
No, I don't. You only think so because you yourself are very biased, in the same way that a Fox News enthusiast thinks that all the other media is too liberal. You are clearly "in the bag" for Israel, and consequently your scales are off. I'm being completely fair and fact-based, while you're advocating a cause using hyperbole, exaggeration, hypocrisy, misstatement, and when all of that fails, mud-slinging.
Nuh-uh, you are! LOL. Wanna keep at this? I don't mind when you point out where my "facts" are off-base or my analysis is faulty, but characterizing me as "in the bag" for Israel is silly. I happen to think that Zionism is faulty and that Israel has done a lot to cause their own problems. At the same time, I recognize that Israel is probably the most sane place in that part of the world right now. The sad fact is that an Arab Israeli is significantly better off in almost any way then their counterparts in the Arab states.
You were engaging in an ad hominem attack against me, rather than addressing any of the points that I've been making.
You started it:
At which point I insinuated that your "facts" are all filtered for the anti-Israel point of view.
I apologize for the counter-insult, and I will be happy to move on if you are ready to as well.
Do you see the difference? What you said isn't even remotely true.
I see "a difference", but I don't see how it changes the conversation. It seems like a semantic argument.
I think that's not really an honest characterization of the relationship between Iran and the main Shi'ite religious political party in Lebanon.
I was referring to their involvement in Iraq.
Did you read that article?
I did. It was very interesting, BTW - thank you for that. I'd say that Israel is making a pretty big political gamble by pretending to be the CIA - but it doesn't sound like Mossad messed up in any way. If the strategy backfires, it's clearly the fault of the Israeli political leaders.
I'm guessing that you don't mean "respected international affairs periodical websites"? Just come out and say what you mean. What are you trying to say?
I'm quite sarcastic, which doesn't always play well in written form. You seem to be very one-sided in your analysis of the Iran-Israeli relationship, so I was insinuating that all your news came from sites with a anti-Zionist leaning. I'd suggest that both the Israelis and the Iranians need some serious attitude adjustment if they ever hope to stop fighting one another. I haven't seen any evidence that either party is even interested in change.
The difference is that while the technology is interacting with other computers, you may or may not even be aware that this is taking place. To the user, a torrent can look like a fancy download.
When you view CNN video, you are actually part of a torrent-like network - downloading bits of the video from other viewers like yourself. I'd wager most people don't know this. Are they "interacting" with other CNN viewers?
Similarly, when my computer sits on a network with other computers, by definition it is "interacting" with the other computers... but am I?
Take a stand: I don't run ANYTHING that eventually translates to machine code.
To make my post actually relevant, I will add that it runs fine with Diablo, in case you have some objection to Oracle and not just an objection to a language.
That isn't the case at all. Israel's military has, since the 1979 revolution, actually never had a single publicly-known confrontation with Iran. Iran has never attacked Israel.
Iran has very actively and apologetically supported Hezbollah practically since the founding of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
that would be like a Spanish person complaining about America sabotaging their efforts in Mexico.
So then Spain wouldn't have a legitimate grievance if Americans were aiding groups who were attacking their troops?
Of course we're going to want some involvement
Iran's "involvement" mostly included destabilization efforts - things like arms and support for sectarian violence.
I think you are thinking of Mossad
No, Mossad actually has their shit together most of the time. I'm talking about the Iranians hatching all of these failed plots recently.
I guess that is true, as long as you're willing to go well outside of the facts.
Why do I get the idea that your "facts" all come from a certain type of website?
But you might target the brain?
Iran has been in almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding. They actively worked to sabotage American efforts in Iraq, and now Afghanistan. They have been caught recently trying to play CIA in several different countries. The idea that Iran is somehow passive in this whole mess is not very hard to dismiss.
If there weren't people with guns to each other's heads, an agreement wouldn't be necessary.
NPT explicitly gives that right to developer nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment.
Yeah, I think there's a bit about inspections in there as well...
And it would just postpone the problem and it is unlikely that USA or Israel would be happy with uranium enrichment at that time either
But they'd keep providing enriched uranium (well, France or Russia would) for the same reasons they did to start with.
In any event, I have no reason to believe that Iran is doing this for anything but security reasons. It's not as if Iran has a large amount of uranium, so they'd just be trading the depletion of their oil reserves for the depletion of their uranium reserves. When they build a bomb, they will presumably need the ability to reprocess uranium - so maybe they will scale that up for commercial power and that would extend their reserves. Economically it would still make more sense to let France do it for them.
Why would they go tit-for-tat? They may not have the resources to do that easily, at least not immediately. Even if they did, the bang-for-the-buck isn't there. Killing American scientists would do very little to actually harm any program in the US, so it would be simple revenge. Cathartic, but not very strategic and a terrible waste of resources. Sending a boatload of missiles to Hezbollah is something that they can do using established channels, and it commands a huge amount of Israeli resources.
Without own uranium enrichment, Iran would always depend on the good will of other countries to suply it uranium and that would make it very easy target for coersion of other countries. And Iran will run out of oil relatively soon.
This is remedied by stockpiling enough fuel to give them time to start up an enrichment program of their own if need be.
Iran has absolute right for nuclear power and uranium enrichment.
There are no absolute rights of nations. Their "right" to develop nuclear technology has to be weighed against the rights of other nations to defend themselves.
And now USA has said that even if Iran would stop nuclear encrichment, which is right Iran has, the sanctions would still stay
That's not what "USA has said". The problem is that the Iran sanctions (at least most of them) come from the US congress and not from Obama. So you have a situation where Obama is doing the negotiations since he presides over the Dept. of State, but he has no real power to lift sanctions. He can still work to get the UN and EU sanctions lifted, and he can lobby congress. Nothing of any import will happen in that body until the presidential elections are over.
Let's say I'm the CIA. Let's say Iran is buying PCs through some outside country which I or the Israelis have infiltrated. Is it still so hard to imagine how the computers could be tampered with?
My understanding is that the centrifuges were NOT on the internet.