Before the introduction of beans, peas, and lentils in the 11th century in western European agriculture, the "vegetarian" diet many serfs lived on was positively dangerous. They lived short lives and were thin, small of stature, and weak. The difference between the meat-eating lord and vegetarian subject was readily apparent from their physical strength and stature, and Roman writers often describe the pastoral Germanic invaders as fearsome "giants".
In northern Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands) the population in sparsely populated areas had a mostly pastoral lifestyle up to the 12th-13th century. Today the diet in those countries is very high in fish, milk, eggs, and meat, and they are the tallest people of the world. The funny thing, however, is that the Dutch quickly became one of the shortest people in Europe for a few centuries after switching to agriculture, even though they still had comparatively diverse diets, suggesting that they had an unusally low tolerance of vegetarian diets.
The difference in adaptation to agriculture between northern and southern European populations is quite large, considering that the northern populations have been exposed to agriculture just one millenium, compared to two to nine for people more to the south. These millenia of course are nothing in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of years mankind depended mostly on meat for nutrition, just like pastoral peoples today (70% nutritional value -- not volume -- from meat). And, obviously, before that we descended from herbivores, but that is true of any carnivore.
In the end it is the total amount of tax that is taken from the majority of the people, more than whether they take it when you earn it or spend it. However, as someone on a fixed, rather limited income, the higher taxes when spending rather than earning is a big factor. That's why many older people move to Oregon. We have no sales tax at all and the income and property taxes are about the same or lower as elsewhere in the US.
That's familiar. Dutch old people are increasingly moving to Spain nowadays. This leads to more waste of energy in travel. I think traditional family and community structures are more important than distances: Americans always had a greater tolerance for being far away from family and birth place and are considerably more tolerable of people from other places moving into their town or village. If Americans were more like Dutchmen population density wouldn't matter for mobility because your home, job, and mother would be in the same area anyway.;)
If you tax both earning and spending, then you can compensate by redistributing more on the income side (just 20% of the government's income) to compensate for an increase on the consumption side. The logic of it is very simple, but unfortunately people show a strong preference for invisible over visible taxes for some reason and (incorrectly) believe that most of the taxes they pay are redistributed to poor people.
The other remedy is distinguishing in tax rates between luxury and essentials, but if the US must classify energy as essential because redistribution on the income side is not an option then it loses the main instrument for regulating energy consumption. The difference in legislative tradition is easily explained by pointing out that energy was not an issue in the past in the US, while in the Netherlands we have been importing energy (wood, peet, coal, oil) since the 15th century.
Scarcity => conflict => business of government. This dynamic is often missed by Americans who confuse wealth with freedom.
Whenever I visit Europe, I take the fast, comfortable, although not exactly cheap trains.
Depending on circumstances I take my car or public transport. Excluding parking ($42 a day) the car is much cheaper than public transport for me, and public transport prices are linked to energy prices anyway. In the US many depend on cheap land to make ends meet, but expensive transport takes away the advantage of living on cheap land. Subsidizing oil is clearly not the solution. It is even stupid, given the geopolitical situation and the high indirect costs of cars to society.
Overall, Europeans are used to much more government regulation, such as the ISP monitoring in this original topic. However, our govt. over here is learning fast from you over there. Much privacy is being lost, usually in the name of "security" or for the sake of the "children".
Government both invades my privacy and protects my privacy in a proactive way. Giving private data about Dutch citizens to US companies is illegal here, because the US government insufficiently protects the privacy of citizens from others in the private sphere. In the US the government supposedly respects your privacy mostly by non-action, guided by the philosophy that freedom from government is more important than your freedom from harm by private parties.
I think you over-simplify. Europeans are proud of their history (and many times obsessed to show that they had greater history than their neighbours). Most of the archaeological sites are preserved with great care.
Sure, but only if it is rare or corroborates or contradicts specific historical events. Roman is only rare in the north of Europe. We are constructing a subway at the moment in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). A newspaper article reported they filtered out several hundreds of garbage bags of mostly 15th to 18th century knives, hooks, pottery, pipes, etc, at the site of the first underground station and the interviewed archeologist who searched them for interesting stuff (most notably a complete harness) uggested giving away the garbage to foreign tourists who buy a ticket to the Rijksmuseum.
The whole country is covered by a thick layer of human remains and manmade dirt. We don't expect that remains belong to the place they are found without a thorough survey of historical records of the place. In the 17th and 18th century people used the dirt of prehistoric Frisian terps (raised settlements) as fertilizer all over the country. There is no way for the layman to tell prehistoric pottery or bones from ubiquitous later stuff, and even if he is it is only relevant if you can relate it to a historical settlement.
Same thing for things like altars or Roman milestones with inscriptions. 9 out of 10 times it is from, say, France or Austria shipped down the Rhine, Meuse, or Scheldt to be used as a stone in a medieval construction project.
Generally speaking, you are not allowed to disturb the deeper soil without an official archeologist present in known or suspected historical sites. Everywhere else people do whatever they want in their garden, and just put the stuff they find in the garbage. Archeologists *never* search for specific places. They have more than enough work just trying to keep up with the tight schedules of construction companies. From this perspective every "archeologist" that goes around disturbing known sites is an Indiana Jones.
Close to my house (in the Netherlands) there is a small, perfectly conical, very steep, and pointy hill in the center of one of the major iron age sites of the country, in an otherwise nearly flat landscape. People used to believe it was manmade, but it turned out to be made by a glacier and simply used by those iron age people as a lookout or motte or something. If the iron age people had any influence on its shape, it is only by removing sand and stones.
If Illyrian remains from 12,000 yrs ago are found on and in the hill, this should suggest to any sane person that it is a natural hill, with caves in it. It certainly can't be younger than 12,000 yrs old. Mr. Osmanagic finds evidence contradicting his theory and interprets it as evidence the 'pyramid' must be at least 12,000 yrs old.
I am considering announcing that we have proof of extremely advanced stone age and iron age civilizations in the North Sea near the coast of the Netherlands that were able to drain polders we today can't. The proof is irrefutable: fishermen have been collecting artifacts from these ages in their nets for as long as we have written history. It is a mystery how they did this without even having mills and engines.
Not aliens, but ancestors of the Serbians. Serbians constructed the pyramids, and the one they call the pyramid of the (Bosnian) dragon is actually called the "pyramid of the white double-headed eagle between two fleurs-de-lis", which is even today still found on the coat of arms of Serbia.
However, the total number of miles someone over there drives is much less each year. There are some people in the American West whose commute is farther than the longest point to point distance possible in a tiny country. The state of Oregon where I live, for example, has a larger area than Germany, but less than 4 million people scattered over this large area. About three million of these live in an area STILL much larger than the Netherlands.
No argument here. Population density is a relevant factor for miles/yr. But I wonder how this actually relates to gas consumption and hours of your live spent in the car. There is a limit to how many hours people will spend in a car. I mean, if it takes me some 60-90 minutes to go to work less than 20 kilometers from my home I am just driving slower but consuming largely the same amount of gas as someone in a sparsely populated area driving faster to work (IF we are using the same type of car: in the US they use bigger but cheaper design engines that are less efficient). High population density at some point becomes a negative factor in traffic infrastructure. The fact that much of the infrastructure was designed in the middle ages doesn't help either: their is always something historically important in the way of solutions to traffic bottlenecks.
The size of country argument is less convincing. I may be living in a smaller country, but I also leave it far more often. This year the biggest trip was to Bologna in Italy for work (about 14 hrs). Obviously there is a relation between population density and size of countries (and states in the US), but borders do not really have a direct relation with mobility. A good indication of this is that small countries usually traditionally have very open borders: the one between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg for instance has always existed only on paper and runs right through houses etc.
Most of the money Europeans pay for fuel is the taxes. [..] In Europe the gas tax is part of general revenue, used for all government and social expenses.
Consumption-based taxation instead of income-based taxation is very fashionable here. Still we supposedly also pay more income taxes. I say supposedly, because I do believe we get a better deal in terms of value for money (in the sense that the package includes a number of things that are left to the market in the US, i.e. your income after taxes). Americans on average do have a higher income, and have traditionally had the advantage of the US itself being a considerable energy producer.
High consumption-based taxation has more effect on the type of car people buy (and the type of homes built and heating systems used) than on people's behaviour. I only have to look at the kind of things Americans buy to conclude that energy efficiency is not yet at the top of their priority list. Surely the people in states like Oregon have a signal function for the rest of the population (and little more because there are too little of them to influence elections) because they feel the effect first, but prices are still much too low to affect mobility. If many people can't make ends meet, they must be paying too much for something else.
In the US, taxes for fuel are legislated to be used only for transportation related costs, mostly to build and maintain roads.
Here we argue that we pay for both transportation related costs and 'externalities', and we still pay too little considering that we have paved over 8% of our country by now to accommodate traffic jams and some 20,000 people a year die because of pulmonary diseases caused by soot particles.
Across the whole of the West everyone drives very long distances to shop, work, and all the other things Americans do. So $3/gallon bites hard.
How can that be? Here in the Netherlands we pay $7.15/gallon (E1.50/liter). US GDP/capita is some 30% higher than ours, so in terms of purchase power this should feel like $9.28 ceteris paribus in the US. Average home prices are similar ($290.000 real, 375.000 in purchase power), and we supposedly pay more taxes (but less for health care). Research here shows we don't drive any less if prices rise, so I don't think people in the US have to worry about their mobility yet.
the outer surface (dressed stone) of the pyramids in egypt were cannibalized over the centuries for other projects - until is was deceided to preserve them. the coliseum in rome was used as a quarry for stone for a couple hundred years as well. it also has been hit with a couple earthquakes. unless it starts to rain a whole bunch for the next 100k years, i think the pyramids will still be there.
It's worth noting that these are examples of landmarks that are exceptionally well-preserved. In Eqypt there is hardly a shortage of stone for construction, and Rome has been continually inhabited by people who considered the builders of the Coliseum their ancestors.
In parts of Europe where stone is scarce the only signs of Roman presence are Roman milestones found in newer stone constructions like city walls and castles. The towns and roads are completely gone, and we can only guess where they were once located.
Metal is also continually reused. Our large constructions will only survive if there is no mankind around. Places in ancient Eqypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, etc. are preserved because of desertification.
See for instance the IMD, or a CNN article about an ILO study: the US appears to have an average worker productivity per hour compared to other developed countries. Some European countries score higher, some lower. Differences in calculation of GDP/GNP/PPP, number of (potential) 'workers' included, and maybe the distinction between working and not working explains why different organisations produce different values in comparative tables.
More to the point is that worker productivity should not be interpreted as a measure of whether the population works hard for a living. It is a measure useful for 'optimizing the investment of human capital' in an economy (as Eurostat puts it). It has limited validity for temporal or international comparison. Is the population of Monaco working in casino's, bars, and restaurants really that 'productive'? Is Bill Gates really more 'productive' than the population of the average African country? It basically quantifies the aggregated value of all kinds of factors like knowledge, location, local resources, the added value of brand names like Nike and Coca Cola, and the degree to which a market is monetarized, that influence GDP without having any explanatory power in terms of the quality or quantity of work people perform.
GDP and 'hours worked' are also very subjective. Very many people work more hours than they are supposed to in their contract. What hours do you count? In the EU there is at the moment an illustrative issue with the harmonisation of the definition of 'working'. Is a firefighter who is asleep on duty in the fire station 'working'? In some countries he is, and in some countries he isn't. For some purposes he is, and for some purposes he isn't. If I care for my children, is it work? If I hire someone to care for my children, is it work? If I care for someone else's children for a few days a week in return for them caring for my children a few days a week, is it work? If I don't declare the income earned in this way to the tax administration, does it end up in the GDP and worker productivity?
I was arguing 'for the audience', backing up my own statement and yours, not against you. I replied to you and not your parent because I don't like replying to ACs, and I am sorry you interpreted it this way.
...Is a patent for [..] "a device that cuts out your eyelids" said one Phillips executive as he vanished in a cloud of his own vomit.
You may be on to something. Considering that Philips is big in surgery equipment, patient monitoring and razors such a device would fit perfectly in their product portfolio.
Yeah, but in 30 years all the scientists who presently don't believe in global warming will have drowned.
By that time they have sold their house and moved into the hills. Do as they do, not as they say. Don't tell others because you don't want to cause a panic before you have sold your house.
It is remarkable how many people here think that ABS is perfect, and even go as far as suggesting I am on crack because I claim to have done it. I did it myself on a dry, smooth surface with a Mercedes A class with ABS on/off switch and tires without profile. Maybe the tires or wear on the brakes change the performance of the ABS, but even that would prove it is fallible. There are so many indications it cannot possibly be optimal:
- It is pulsating: it is applying the wrong brake pressure most of the time. - Manufacturers build different ABS systems, based on different algorithms: if there was an optimal algorithm ABS systems wouldn't behave differently. - Just like many other automated supports it suffers from a major weakness: it cannot look out of the window and see what happens, and what the road surface is like.
I can imagine matching the performance of the ABS if I have to make a sudden emergency stop on the highway. The ABS is going to be most helpful if I suddenly have to avoid orange traffic cones on ice and I have more pressing things to do than braking perfectly.
However, they won't do it consistently, they won't do it by large amounts and as soon as you throw any sort of non-ideal elements into the scenario (wheels on difference surfaces, maneuvering) the ABS will win every time.
I agree with that. Even on the track, in ideal and predictable circumstances, it sometimes works and often doesn't. I am happy with the ABS in my car. ABS does reduce freedom of action, though, which was the original point.
Here in the Netherlands we have reduced drivers licenses only valid for cars with automatic transmission for invalids and foreigners from countries where you are allowed to use such cars in exams. This is a bit of a relic from the past when mt vs. at was the only major difference. With today's variety in automatic support systems it is becoming increasingly problematic to give someone a drivers license for all types of cars.
By your reasoning you could just as easily say an internationally accessible server with web sites about democracy should be subject to Chinese censorship laws even if the server is physically in America and operated by an American company. Do you seriously want to see the censorship laws of oppressive nations applied universally to the Internet? And do you really think that every American company should be personally responsible for filtering and censoring their own content so that it meets the legal requirements of countless nations each with a highly diverse and dynamic set of laws?
That kind of reasoning is exactly what the EFF is concerned about. If you read the article, you will see that applying foreign legislation that infringes on first amendment rights is fundamentally unconstitutional. The additional risks to civil liberties are all clearly spelled out in the EFF brief, which you might want to read before leaping to conclusions.
Applying eachother's IPR rulings is opinio iuris in the international community. Applying eachother's censorship laws is not. There is a big difference: censorship is exercised by the government, and IPR is a matter between private parties. IPR also only pertains to making copies of expressions, and it can only be the author of the expression requesting the ruling.
ABS interferes with the ability of your car to make an emergency stop. Certainly on a dry and smooth surface, but also on ice, you can do much better than the ABS by locking your wheels at the right point, if only the ABS allowed it. I experienced this myself in a two-day vehicle control course. Of course having this skill is pointless anyway, because the retard behind you is going to hit you even harder if you use it.
And so we kept the British legal traditions in this country, except in Louisiana, where they use French legal traditions at the State level.
New York, the most important economic area of the young republic, based its legal traditions on the Roman-Dutch law of the Dutch republic. The influence of the Republic of the United Netherlands on American institutions is quite obvious, if only because of the federal structure and explicit self-delegation of legislative power in an explicit constitution. The very notion of having an explicit constitution is antithesis of British legal traditions. Even the Declaration of Independence is modeled on the Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1581 (together with the Union of Utrecht considered the constitution of the Dutch Republic), which was standard fare for legal practitioners in the US in those days.
Only in the course of the 19th century British common law became the dominant jurisprudence, arguably for the sake of consistency in dealing with things like property, and - more importantly - because the US gradually became a monolingual country and using foreign language jurisprudence is inefficient.
TFA sounds a lot like the early descriptions of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System for defense of ships against low-flying antiship missiles like the infamous Exocet. I recall the Phalanx being described around the time of the Falklands War as throwing up a "wall" of bullets in front of an incoming missile through its extremely high rate of fire (up to 75 rounds per second). The widget in TFA may do much the same with a "force field" of fragments from the explosion of a shaped charge.
The Dutch Goalkeeper is much better than the Phalanx, and a better reference for a modern CIWS. It has more firepower, tracks up to 18 targets simultaneously instead of one, and is fitted on the HMS Illustrious and HMS Invincible. The Chinese have copied it.
The issue is that they are blowing up their fellow citizens indiscrimently. They are not even limiting their targets to security forces of their government. They are hitting purely civilian targets with the intention of killing clearly innocent people.
The civil war doesn't disqualify them as a resistance movement. Fellow citizens considered traitors are often targeted by resistance movements, even the more respectable European ones in WWII.
Violent media may be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back in some situations.
Sure, but the cutting of the straw is not the proximate cause of the harm the camel suffers. If the mediating mechanism is merely that the playing the violent game works as a primer for a more aggressive attitude immediately afterwards, it doesn't tell us anything we couldn't have predicted.
It's common sense that you don't try to feed the cat the antibiotic pill after you have played with him, and you don't let the a kid play a violent game directly before you try to send them to bed. The difference is that the cat will always remain the cat, but the kid will in most cases eventually grow up and learn to think before he acts.
If the conclusion parents draw from this type of research is that you should take away all causes of aggression, then they are really barking up the wrong tree. God help us if children raised with this philosophy ever end up in a warzone as a soldier. They should learn to handle aggression. It's useful if used with moderation and judgment, and people are born with the capacity for aggression (and judgment).
For some people the removal of all stimuli triggering aggression is the only solution. They should not play GTA. Neighbours of mine have a daughter like that. She's institutionalized, like she should be. She regularly visits her parents, and most neighbours know about it. But the outside world cannot be held to the standards of a mental institution.
You can frame a similar false discussion about for instance martial arts: does it cause aggression or is it a benign "outlet for aggression"? The correct answer is of course yes and yes. It can function as an outlet because it causes it.
The fact that you play an "evil" role in a game like GTA doesn't really worry me. The idea that identifying with the good role requires no more choices than opening the box the game came in is far more harmful to the development of a conscience in my opinion.
Re:No, just naives ... Re:Neanderthals?
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Stone Age Dentists
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even if the people of Babilon used, well, voltaic cells to gold plate their jewels, they did not discover electricity... they just discovered a method for gold plating cheaper metals.
We have no Babylonian explanation of the phenomenon, because we have no Babylonian writing on the subject. Therefore we can't tell what they thought they discovered. The only thing we know is that they were not able to put it to more generic uses, suggesting a lack of understanding of the more general principles, but that is just as true for famous 17th century scientists playing around with toy Leyden jars and stuff like that. The 17th century celebrities are only relevant because we know there is a continuity from them to the present. We have no way of knowing how many false starts were made in the past on the subject of electricity.
I still can't believe that stone tools could be used for drilling in live teeth... if there is a stone that could be polished into a thin enough point, I don't know about it... flint is the only solution I know (some mesolithic and neolithic flint tools were very sofisticated), but flint would not work for drilling....
The pictures of the teeth suggest drilling, although the only relevant quote sheds no light whatsoever on how well flint works in a drill: "Analysis of the teeth shows prehistoric dentists had a go at curing toothache with drills made from flint heads. The team that carried out the work say close examination of the teeth shows the tool was surprisingly effective at removing rotting dental tissue." If flint is not convincing, then what is the explanation for the holes in the teeth? Horn? Teeth?
An important factor in the loss of air superiority by the Germans was their inability to train sufficient competent pilots to replace the large numbers of well-trained and experienced pilots lost in the May 1940 campaign and the Battle for Britain. Once the air war was brought to Germany, the life expectancy of German pilots dropped considerably. They were sent into combat almost directly from the instruction room, and many planes (+ pilots) were lost at takeoff. The only solution would have been to stop throwing everything askedagainst the allied bombers, but this was unpalatable for Hitler. In these circumstances the Me 262 (as an interceptor) would have had great effect because you utilize your few experienced pilots, the scarcest resource, much better.
Hitler's problem as a military leader is that he always wanted more than the German people where capable of. Hitler was not really a people person.
Poor man's delivery system for smaller countries: a Diesel-electric submarine, a nuclear torpedo, and the Hudson Bay. The technology is there already, and the US Navy has demonstrated on several occasions it cannot detect allied DE submarines in NATO exercises. The best defense against that is making sure you never lose track of hostile nation's submarines (assuming a limited submerged action radius).
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Before the introduction of beans, peas, and lentils in the 11th century in western European agriculture, the "vegetarian" diet many serfs lived on was positively dangerous. They lived short lives and were thin, small of stature, and weak. The difference between the meat-eating lord and vegetarian subject was readily apparent from their physical strength and stature, and Roman writers often describe the pastoral Germanic invaders as fearsome "giants".
In northern Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands) the population in sparsely populated areas had a mostly pastoral lifestyle up to the 12th-13th century. Today the diet in those countries is very high in fish, milk, eggs, and meat, and they are the tallest people of the world. The funny thing, however, is that the Dutch quickly became one of the shortest people in Europe for a few centuries after switching to agriculture, even though they still had comparatively diverse diets, suggesting that they had an unusally low tolerance of vegetarian diets.
The difference in adaptation to agriculture between northern and southern European populations is quite large, considering that the northern populations have been exposed to agriculture just one millenium, compared to two to nine for people more to the south. These millenia of course are nothing in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of years mankind depended mostly on meat for nutrition, just like pastoral peoples today (70% nutritional value -- not volume -- from meat). And, obviously, before that we descended from herbivores, but that is true of any carnivore.
In the end it is the total amount of tax that is taken from the majority of the people, more than whether they take it when you earn it or spend it. However, as someone on a fixed, rather limited income, the higher taxes when spending rather than earning is a big factor. That's why many older people move to Oregon. We have no sales tax at all and the income and property taxes are about the same or lower as elsewhere in the US.
;)
That's familiar. Dutch old people are increasingly moving to Spain nowadays. This leads to more waste of energy in travel. I think traditional family and community structures are more important than distances: Americans always had a greater tolerance for being far away from family and birth place and are considerably more tolerable of people from other places moving into their town or village. If Americans were more like Dutchmen population density wouldn't matter for mobility because your home, job, and mother would be in the same area anyway.
If you tax both earning and spending, then you can compensate by redistributing more on the income side (just 20% of the government's income) to compensate for an increase on the consumption side. The logic of it is very simple, but unfortunately people show a strong preference for invisible over visible taxes for some reason and (incorrectly) believe that most of the taxes they pay are redistributed to poor people.
The other remedy is distinguishing in tax rates between luxury and essentials, but if the US must classify energy as essential because redistribution on the income side is not an option then it loses the main instrument for regulating energy consumption. The difference in legislative tradition is easily explained by pointing out that energy was not an issue in the past in the US, while in the Netherlands we have been importing energy (wood, peet, coal, oil) since the 15th century.
Scarcity => conflict => business of government. This dynamic is often missed by Americans who confuse wealth with freedom.
Whenever I visit Europe, I take the fast, comfortable, although not exactly cheap trains.
Depending on circumstances I take my car or public transport. Excluding parking ($42 a day) the car is much cheaper than public transport for me, and public transport prices are linked to energy prices anyway. In the US many depend on cheap land to make ends meet, but expensive transport takes away the advantage of living on cheap land. Subsidizing oil is clearly not the solution. It is even stupid, given the geopolitical situation and the high indirect costs of cars to society.
Overall, Europeans are used to much more government regulation, such as the ISP monitoring in this original topic. However, our govt. over here is learning fast from you over there. Much privacy is being lost, usually in the name of "security" or for the sake of the "children".
Government both invades my privacy and protects my privacy in a proactive way. Giving private data about Dutch citizens to US companies is illegal here, because the US government insufficiently protects the privacy of citizens from others in the private sphere. In the US the government supposedly respects your privacy mostly by non-action, guided by the philosophy that freedom from government is more important than your freedom from harm by private parties.
I think you over-simplify. Europeans are proud of their history (and many times obsessed to show that they had greater history than their neighbours). Most of the archaeological sites are preserved with great care.
Sure, but only if it is rare or corroborates or contradicts specific historical events. Roman is only rare in the north of Europe. We are constructing a subway at the moment in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). A newspaper article reported they filtered out several hundreds of garbage bags of mostly 15th to 18th century knives, hooks, pottery, pipes, etc, at the site of the first underground station and the interviewed archeologist who searched them for interesting stuff (most notably a complete harness) uggested giving away the garbage to foreign tourists who buy a ticket to the Rijksmuseum.
The whole country is covered by a thick layer of human remains and manmade dirt. We don't expect that remains belong to the place they are found without a thorough survey of historical records of the place. In the 17th and 18th century people used the dirt of prehistoric Frisian terps (raised settlements) as fertilizer all over the country. There is no way for the layman to tell prehistoric pottery or bones from ubiquitous later stuff, and even if he is it is only relevant if you can relate it to a historical settlement.
Same thing for things like altars or Roman milestones with inscriptions. 9 out of 10 times it is from, say, France or Austria shipped down the Rhine, Meuse, or Scheldt to be used as a stone in a medieval construction project.
Generally speaking, you are not allowed to disturb the deeper soil without an official archeologist present in known or suspected historical sites. Everywhere else people do whatever they want in their garden, and just put the stuff they find in the garbage. Archeologists *never* search for specific places. They have more than enough work just trying to keep up with the tight schedules of construction companies. From this perspective every "archeologist" that goes around disturbing known sites is an Indiana Jones.
Close to my house (in the Netherlands) there is a small, perfectly conical, very steep, and pointy hill in the center of one of the major iron age sites of the country, in an otherwise nearly flat landscape. People used to believe it was manmade, but it turned out to be made by a glacier and simply used by those iron age people as a lookout or motte or something. If the iron age people had any influence on its shape, it is only by removing sand and stones.
If Illyrian remains from 12,000 yrs ago are found on and in the hill, this should suggest to any sane person that it is a natural hill, with caves in it. It certainly can't be younger than 12,000 yrs old. Mr. Osmanagic finds evidence contradicting his theory and interprets it as evidence the 'pyramid' must be at least 12,000 yrs old.
I am considering announcing that we have proof of extremely advanced stone age and iron age civilizations in the North Sea near the coast of the Netherlands that were able to drain polders we today can't. The proof is irrefutable: fishermen have been collecting artifacts from these ages in their nets for as long as we have written history. It is a mystery how they did this without even having mills and engines.
Not aliens, but ancestors of the Serbians. Serbians constructed the pyramids, and the one they call the pyramid of the (Bosnian) dragon is actually called the "pyramid of the white double-headed eagle between two fleurs-de-lis", which is even today still found on the coat of arms of Serbia.
However, the total number of miles someone over there drives is much less each year. There are some people in the American West whose commute is farther than the longest point to point distance possible in a tiny country. The state of Oregon where I live, for example, has a larger area than Germany, but less than 4 million people scattered over this large area. About three million of these live in an area STILL much larger than the Netherlands.
No argument here. Population density is a relevant factor for miles/yr. But I wonder how this actually relates to gas consumption and hours of your live spent in the car. There is a limit to how many hours people will spend in a car. I mean, if it takes me some 60-90 minutes to go to work less than 20 kilometers from my home I am just driving slower but consuming largely the same amount of gas as someone in a sparsely populated area driving faster to work (IF we are using the same type of car: in the US they use bigger but cheaper design engines that are less efficient). High population density at some point becomes a negative factor in traffic infrastructure. The fact that much of the infrastructure was designed in the middle ages doesn't help either: their is always something historically important in the way of solutions to traffic bottlenecks.
The size of country argument is less convincing. I may be living in a smaller country, but I also leave it far more often. This year the biggest trip was to Bologna in Italy for work (about 14 hrs). Obviously there is a relation between population density and size of countries (and states in the US), but borders do not really have a direct relation with mobility. A good indication of this is that small countries usually traditionally have very open borders: the one between the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemburg for instance has always existed only on paper and runs right through houses etc.
Most of the money Europeans pay for fuel is the taxes. [..] In Europe the gas tax is part of general revenue, used for all government and social expenses.
Consumption-based taxation instead of income-based taxation is very fashionable here. Still we supposedly also pay more income taxes. I say supposedly, because I do believe we get a better deal in terms of value for money (in the sense that the package includes a number of things that are left to the market in the US, i.e. your income after taxes). Americans on average do have a higher income, and have traditionally had the advantage of the US itself being a considerable energy producer.
High consumption-based taxation has more effect on the type of car people buy (and the type of homes built and heating systems used) than on people's behaviour. I only have to look at the kind of things Americans buy to conclude that energy efficiency is not yet at the top of their priority list. Surely the people in states like Oregon have a signal function for the rest of the population (and little more because there are too little of them to influence elections) because they feel the effect first, but prices are still much too low to affect mobility. If many people can't make ends meet, they must be paying too much for something else.
In the US, taxes for fuel are legislated to be used only for transportation related costs, mostly to build and maintain roads.
Here we argue that we pay for both transportation related costs and 'externalities', and we still pay too little considering that we have paved over 8% of our country by now to accommodate traffic jams and some 20,000 people a year die because of pulmonary diseases caused by soot particles.
Across the whole of the West everyone drives very long distances to shop, work, and all the other things Americans do. So $3/gallon bites hard.
How can that be? Here in the Netherlands we pay $7.15/gallon (E1.50/liter). US GDP/capita is some 30% higher than ours, so in terms of purchase power this should feel like $9.28 ceteris paribus in the US. Average home prices are similar ($290.000 real, 375.000 in purchase power), and we supposedly pay more taxes (but less for health care). Research here shows we don't drive any less if prices rise, so I don't think people in the US have to worry about their mobility yet.
Arguing by analogy is illuminating but also distracting.
It does convince the clueless review board doling out the money. I wish I had this 1-2-3 profit! talent for making up distracting analogies.
the outer surface (dressed stone) of the pyramids in egypt were cannibalized over the centuries for other projects - until is was deceided to preserve them. the coliseum in rome was used as a quarry for stone for a couple hundred years as well. it also has been hit with a couple earthquakes. unless it starts to rain a whole bunch for the next 100k years, i think the pyramids will still be there.
It's worth noting that these are examples of landmarks that are exceptionally well-preserved. In Eqypt there is hardly a shortage of stone for construction, and Rome has been continually inhabited by people who considered the builders of the Coliseum their ancestors.
In parts of Europe where stone is scarce the only signs of Roman presence are Roman milestones found in newer stone constructions like city walls and castles. The towns and roads are completely gone, and we can only guess where they were once located.
Metal is also continually reused. Our large constructions will only survive if there is no mankind around. Places in ancient Eqypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, etc. are preserved because of desertification.
See for instance the IMD, or a CNN article about an ILO study: the US appears to have an average worker productivity per hour compared to other developed countries. Some European countries score higher, some lower. Differences in calculation of GDP/GNP/PPP, number of (potential) 'workers' included, and maybe the distinction between working and not working explains why different organisations produce different values in comparative tables.
More to the point is that worker productivity should not be interpreted as a measure of whether the population works hard for a living. It is a measure useful for 'optimizing the investment of human capital' in an economy (as Eurostat puts it). It has limited validity for temporal or international comparison. Is the population of Monaco working in casino's, bars, and restaurants really that 'productive'? Is Bill Gates really more 'productive' than the population of the average African country? It basically quantifies the aggregated value of all kinds of factors like knowledge, location, local resources, the added value of brand names like Nike and Coca Cola, and the degree to which a market is monetarized, that influence GDP without having any explanatory power in terms of the quality or quantity of work people perform.
GDP and 'hours worked' are also very subjective. Very many people work more hours than they are supposed to in their contract. What hours do you count? In the EU there is at the moment an illustrative issue with the harmonisation of the definition of 'working'. Is a firefighter who is asleep on duty in the fire station 'working'? In some countries he is, and in some countries he isn't. For some purposes he is, and for some purposes he isn't. If I care for my children, is it work? If I hire someone to care for my children, is it work? If I care for someone else's children for a few days a week in return for them caring for my children a few days a week, is it work? If I don't declare the income earned in this way to the tax administration, does it end up in the GDP and worker productivity?
I was arguing 'for the audience', backing up my own statement and yours, not against you. I replied to you and not your parent because I don't like replying to ACs, and I am sorry you interpreted it this way.
...Is a patent for [..] "a device that cuts out your eyelids" said one Phillips executive as he vanished in a cloud of his own vomit.
You may be on to something. Considering that Philips is big in surgery equipment, patient monitoring and razors such a device would fit perfectly in their product portfolio.
Nature wouldn't have made those tools (powerful legs and huge sharp teeth) if it didn't intend for him to use them.
Right. Like the rapacious pack-hunting elephant and kangaroo.
Yeah, but in 30 years all the scientists who presently don't believe in global warming will have drowned.
By that time they have sold their house and moved into the hills. Do as they do, not as they say. Don't tell others because you don't want to cause a panic before you have sold your house.
It is remarkable how many people here think that ABS is perfect, and even go as far as suggesting I am on crack because I claim to have done it. I did it myself on a dry, smooth surface with a Mercedes A class with ABS on/off switch and tires without profile. Maybe the tires or wear on the brakes change the performance of the ABS, but even that would prove it is fallible. There are so many indications it cannot possibly be optimal:
- It is pulsating: it is applying the wrong brake pressure most of the time.
- Manufacturers build different ABS systems, based on different algorithms: if there was an optimal algorithm ABS systems wouldn't behave differently.
- Just like many other automated supports it suffers from a major weakness: it cannot look out of the window and see what happens, and what the road surface is like.
I can imagine matching the performance of the ABS if I have to make a sudden emergency stop on the highway. The ABS is going to be most helpful if I suddenly have to avoid orange traffic cones on ice and I have more pressing things to do than braking perfectly.
However, they won't do it consistently, they won't do it by large amounts and as soon as you throw any sort of non-ideal elements into the scenario (wheels on difference surfaces, maneuvering) the ABS will win every time.
I agree with that. Even on the track, in ideal and predictable circumstances, it sometimes works and often doesn't. I am happy with the ABS in my car. ABS does reduce freedom of action, though, which was the original point.
Here in the Netherlands we have reduced drivers licenses only valid for cars with automatic transmission for invalids and foreigners from countries where you are allowed to use such cars in exams. This is a bit of a relic from the past when mt vs. at was the only major difference. With today's variety in automatic support systems it is becoming increasingly problematic to give someone a drivers license for all types of cars.
By your reasoning you could just as easily say an internationally accessible server with web sites about democracy should be subject to Chinese censorship laws even if the server is physically in America and operated by an American company. Do you seriously want to see the censorship laws of oppressive nations applied universally to the Internet? And do you really think that every American company should be personally responsible for filtering and censoring their own content so that it meets the legal requirements of countless nations each with a highly diverse and dynamic set of laws?
That kind of reasoning is exactly what the EFF is concerned about. If you read the article, you will see that applying foreign legislation that infringes on first amendment rights is fundamentally unconstitutional. The additional risks to civil liberties are all clearly spelled out in the EFF brief, which you might want to read before leaping to conclusions.
Applying eachother's IPR rulings is opinio iuris in the international community. Applying eachother's censorship laws is not. There is a big difference: censorship is exercised by the government, and IPR is a matter between private parties. IPR also only pertains to making copies of expressions, and it can only be the author of the expression requesting the ruling.
ABS interferes with the ability of your car to make an emergency stop. Certainly on a dry and smooth surface, but also on ice, you can do much better than the ABS by locking your wheels at the right point, if only the ABS allowed it. I experienced this myself in a two-day vehicle control course. Of course having this skill is pointless anyway, because the retard behind you is going to hit you even harder if you use it.
And so we kept the British legal traditions in this country, except in Louisiana, where they use French legal traditions at the State level.
New York, the most important economic area of the young republic, based its legal traditions on the Roman-Dutch law of the Dutch republic. The influence of the Republic of the United Netherlands on American institutions is quite obvious, if only because of the federal structure and explicit self-delegation of legislative power in an explicit constitution. The very notion of having an explicit constitution is antithesis of British legal traditions. Even the Declaration of Independence is modeled on the Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1581 (together with the Union of Utrecht considered the constitution of the Dutch Republic), which was standard fare for legal practitioners in the US in those days.
Only in the course of the 19th century British common law became the dominant jurisprudence, arguably for the sake of consistency in dealing with things like property, and - more importantly - because the US gradually became a monolingual country and using foreign language jurisprudence is inefficient.
TFA sounds a lot like the early descriptions of the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System for defense of ships against low-flying antiship missiles like the infamous Exocet. I recall the Phalanx being described around the time of the Falklands War as throwing up a "wall" of bullets in front of an incoming missile through its extremely high rate of fire (up to 75 rounds per second). The widget in TFA may do much the same with a "force field" of fragments from the explosion of a shaped charge.
The Dutch Goalkeeper is much better than the Phalanx, and a better reference for a modern CIWS. It has more firepower, tracks up to 18 targets simultaneously instead of one, and is fitted on the HMS Illustrious and HMS Invincible. The Chinese have copied it.
The issue is that they are blowing up their fellow citizens indiscrimently. They are not even limiting their targets to security forces of their government. They are hitting purely civilian targets with the intention of killing clearly innocent people.
The civil war doesn't disqualify them as a resistance movement. Fellow citizens considered traitors are often targeted by resistance movements, even the more respectable European ones in WWII.
Violent media may be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back in some situations.
Sure, but the cutting of the straw is not the proximate cause of the harm the camel suffers. If the mediating mechanism is merely that the playing the violent game works as a primer for a more aggressive attitude immediately afterwards, it doesn't tell us anything we couldn't have predicted.
It's common sense that you don't try to feed the cat the antibiotic pill after you have played with him, and you don't let the a kid play a violent game directly before you try to send them to bed. The difference is that the cat will always remain the cat, but the kid will in most cases eventually grow up and learn to think before he acts.
If the conclusion parents draw from this type of research is that you should take away all causes of aggression, then they are really barking up the wrong tree. God help us if children raised with this philosophy ever end up in a warzone as a soldier. They should learn to handle aggression. It's useful if used with moderation and judgment, and people are born with the capacity for aggression (and judgment).
For some people the removal of all stimuli triggering aggression is the only solution. They should not play GTA. Neighbours of mine have a daughter like that. She's institutionalized, like she should be. She regularly visits her parents, and most neighbours know about it. But the outside world cannot be held to the standards of a mental institution.
You can frame a similar false discussion about for instance martial arts: does it cause aggression or is it a benign "outlet for aggression"? The correct answer is of course yes and yes. It can function as an outlet because it causes it.
The fact that you play an "evil" role in a game like GTA doesn't really worry me. The idea that identifying with the good role requires no more choices than opening the box the game came in is far more harmful to the development of a conscience in my opinion.
even if the people of Babilon used, well, voltaic cells to gold plate their jewels, they did not discover electricity ... they just discovered a method for gold plating cheaper metals.
... if there is a stone that could be polished into a thin enough point, I don't know about it ... flint is the only solution I know (some mesolithic and neolithic flint tools were very sofisticated), but flint would not work for drilling. ...
We have no Babylonian explanation of the phenomenon, because we have no Babylonian writing on the subject. Therefore we can't tell what they thought they discovered. The only thing we know is that they were not able to put it to more generic uses, suggesting a lack of understanding of the more general principles, but that is just as true for famous 17th century scientists playing around with toy Leyden jars and stuff like that. The 17th century celebrities are only relevant because we know there is a continuity from them to the present. We have no way of knowing how many false starts were made in the past on the subject of electricity.
I still can't believe that stone tools could be used for drilling in live teeth
The pictures of the teeth suggest drilling, although the only relevant quote sheds no light whatsoever on how well flint works in a drill: "Analysis of the teeth shows prehistoric dentists had a go at curing toothache with drills made from flint heads. The team that carried out the work say close examination of the teeth shows the tool was surprisingly effective at removing rotting dental tissue." If flint is not convincing, then what is the explanation for the holes in the teeth? Horn? Teeth?
An important factor in the loss of air superiority by the Germans was their inability to train sufficient competent pilots to replace the large numbers of well-trained and experienced pilots lost in the May 1940 campaign and the Battle for Britain. Once the air war was brought to Germany, the life expectancy of German pilots dropped considerably. They were sent into combat almost directly from the instruction room, and many planes (+ pilots) were lost at takeoff. The only solution would have been to stop throwing everything askedagainst the allied bombers, but this was unpalatable for Hitler. In these circumstances the Me 262 (as an interceptor) would have had great effect because you utilize your few experienced pilots, the scarcest resource, much better.
Hitler's problem as a military leader is that he always wanted more than the German people where capable of. Hitler was not really a people person.
Poor man's delivery system for smaller countries: a Diesel-electric submarine, a nuclear torpedo, and the Hudson Bay. The technology is there already, and the US Navy has demonstrated on several occasions it cannot detect allied DE submarines in NATO exercises. The best defense against that is making sure you never lose track of hostile nation's submarines (assuming a limited submerged action radius).