because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology
This suggests that the US is "prisoner of the free market ideology", which is a wrongheaded diagnosis of the problem. The "free market = unregulated market fallacy" has more to do with it. Many of the better performing countries regulate for competitiveness and have functioning competition regulators. Some effective restrictions on product bundling, price discrimination, etc. for the owners of the land lines, all in the name of the free market, helps a lot to create a market that actually offers choices.
The EU is responsible only for duties on the EU's external borders, which is also its preferred source of income (as opposed to begging with the member states), as far as I know. It *cannot* even impose the duty without discriminating between the non-existent "domestic camera industry" and imports.
Internal duties are still a responsibility of member states (who also keep the revenue). The commission states in other news articles that it is merely "...clarifying the criteria for tariff classifications to eliminate variation in duty rates for EU members". It is now up to the member states to align their own classifications with the commission's, and most, if not all, of them probably will reclassify, as the reclassification is actually quite sensible. So the "protectionism" discussions are a bit premature. The US and Japan crying wolf is just a political tactic.
Reversing the polarity actually doubles the storage space on the HD, but you do have to reconfigure the crystals with a proton beam (for instance by extending the warp field) first to make it work.
Sure, the US probably has the capability to play hardball by threatening to shoot down or otherwise disable satellites if others don't go along, but
Many countries have that capability. Sending a lot of shrapnel into orbit isn't very complicated, and if you don't have valuable satellites of your own you don't even have to aim well. China even demonstrated recently that they can shoot down satellites with ballistic missiles.
Hitler killed 34 million people, and Stalin 20 million. So you are wrong. These numbers are open to debate (Stalin may for instance have killed "just" 11 million, Hitler 55 million if he is made responsible for all WWII dead), but no serious historian argues that Hitler killed less people than Stalin.
A major reason that Russia -- and China -- make it to the top of any mass atrocities list is that they have many potential victims to begin with. By this reckoning killing one in ten of the national population to consolidate your position (Stalin) makes you a worse mass murderer than killing, let's say, one in five (Pol Pot), simply because you are a Russian dictator instead of a Cambodian dictator. I don't think Pol Pot is a better person than Stalin, and as for instance this list (see the proportionality table) shows, Hitler's activities in Poland (specifically) do rank higher than Stalin's activities in Russia as a horror scenario for the people involved. When you limit the subjected population to jews only, Hitler obviously jumps solidly to the number one position. And when you consider the more limited time frame in which the Nazis made their victims, you will appreciate that some populations victimized by Hitler are entitled to a greater national trauma than the Russians.
Note: when you look at the proportionality table you will also see another interesting thing, as the author puts it:
If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not have gotten a more diverse spread than we've got here. We've got rich countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We've got people of all colors -- white, black, yellow and brown -- widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We've got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we've got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.
Txting will not replace writing. It is just an additional way to communicate on the level of detail of ship signals. If you want your words recorded, you write. People worldwide write more than they ever did, if you count email, sms, etc.
Previous generations were hardly more literate. My grandfather was for instance in practice a functional illiterate, who was taken out of school during WWII to work in a Nazi labor camp making gun shells, and after the war worked as a soldier and a steel mill worker. Besides filling in the occasional form, he never wrote at all. Nowadays you don't get away with that, even if you flip hamburgers. Employers simply expect to be able to communicate to employees in writing.
I could easily look up F=MA in a basic physics book
Bad example. If you understand physics this relationship between the concepts of force, mass, and acceleration is obvious. In fact you cannot truly understand the classical concept of force separate from this relationship.
Same with for instance historical facts. Surely the general story and its historical significance is more important than mere dates, places, and persons, but remembering the year some battle happened, who fought whom, who won, or where it happened becomes a whole lot easier if you already know what happened before and what happened after, if you know the geography of the place, etc.
Learning words in a foreign language becomes easier the more languages you already know, because of the similarities.
Same with giving change: people who look up change simply failed to understand the concepts of arithmetic.
Phone numbers are opaque: no contextual knowledge makes them more easy to remember.
Of course the biology students could have replied to Feynman that learning the anatomy of the cat was really easy since they already memorized the anatomy of a dog the week before.
People are legally obliged to be insured, but the insurers are not legally obliged to accept customers for the advertised premium? That's a recipe for failure.
The system here in the Netherlands has private insurers, hospitals, and pharmacists, but a government regulated standard insurance package that must be offered by all insurers who operate in the market without discrimination to all customers for the same price, and government price fixing for a standard list of pharmaceuticals and medical treatments covered by the package. All competition is in nonessential additions to the package, efficiency, service, and better selling technique.
The system apparently costs about half of what the US spends on health care. But in my view the core of the problem of the US is that it is the world's major exporter of pharmaceuticals, and would be setting a very undesirable example from the pharmaceutical industry's point of view if it started price fixing itself. Without a free market for health care in the US, the US would have (even) less of a standing when insisting that the third world respect pharmaceutical patents and pay whatever price the US company wants them to pay to use the pharmaceutical. The US will start price fixing as soon as the rest of the world starts disregarding patents.
Why assume it is a spacecraft capable of travelling at interstellar speeds? It could be a simple entry vehicle designed for earth's atmosphere dropped off by a bigger spacecraft that crashed unexpectedly because the local rustics damaged the chute with soft metal slugs. The "fallen comrades" could be the alien equivalent of mankind's space dogs.
There is no reason to resume that the intelligent aliens would be aboard the spacecraft themselves if the object of the expedition was anything other than colonization. They are intelligent, after all. The aliens concluded that they misjudged the locals (territorial aggressiveness even greater than expected; no sign of the expected tradition of hospitality to unarmed strangers), decided to try again in the friendlier Amazon river basin next time, and moved on to the next stop in the mission.
Here in my municipality in the Netherlands we separately collect organic, glass, paper, textiles, toxic, and regular waste, and we also have pretty strict limits on amounts of regular and organic waste: a 140 liter bin every two weeks. The bin is marked with the address.
The police do give fines for not properly separating waste in the bins, but there are huge differences between municipalities in how often they check waste bins. It depends on whether they have better things to do really. The police also gives fines for putting household waste in public bins.
Recently there was a lot of attention for an appeal case of a woman who was fined for putting a plastic bread bag in a public bin after feeding ducks with stale bread. She did take the bag from home, but the case does make one wonder what you ARE allowed to put in public waste bins. There is no foolproof enforceable way to prohibit throwing household waste in public bins. What definitely IS legal is throwing excessive packaging material directly into a public bin when you walk out of a shop. It is obviously better to leave it in the shop, as you are allowed to refuse excessive packaging, but most shops don't properly accommodate this and get away with that because most people are simply too polite to just throw it on the floor. What does work for shops is the principle that you collect what you sell. If you sell appliances, batteries, bottles, etc. you also collect them.
Same with the fines for not properly separating waste. There are people who at night secretly throw waste - often the wrong kind - in other people's bins. This is an offense as it involves trespassing, but the police do nothing about it. Social control works to some extent as these people ARE considered antisocials because of this. The solution implemented in some towns is underground public containers with swipe cards and pin codes that weigh how much you throw in.
Then, guy takes the gun out, shoots few bullets into the Russian device. Resets it, and screen says "480K of RAM" instead of "640K of RAM", and booted properly - and worked. They had HUGE memory boards in the device, and even if you shot through them, they'd still work, bypassing/ignoring damaged memory boards. He shot one bullet into US device. Dead. Guess which devices were purchased?
Double the number of US devices. One backup in case the other one gets shot.
Alternatively, they allocated a billion euros to have a national contractor build a device with the looks of the US one and the ruggedness of the Russian one, and ended up with one that has the looks of the Russian one and the ruggedness of the US one.
Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating. After all, that's how many artists, movies and software developers gain a lot of attention. Do you think Photoshop would be widespread in Europe if there was no alternative to that idiotic $1,500 price tag?
Just a technicality: Europeans and Asians making illegal copies of American products should be counted as privateering, not piracy.;)
They want to regulate games, while at the same time selling weapons willy nilly to anyone with the cash to pay for them.
Don't be silly. We only sell weapons to foreigners for use on other foreigners. We do think of our own children, unlike some countries that sell weapons willy nilly to people inside the country.
There's no way to tell if the world would have come out better or worse had the colonies not declared independence. The world would probably be completely unrecognizable and it's absurd to try to consider the possibilities of what would have happened had the American Revolution not taken place.
But it is a good example of the allies variable. The American Revolutionary War probably would have been a regrettable historical episode causing many deaths and gaining nothing if France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Kingdom of Misore wouldn't have sided with the US against the British.
What is worse is that she predicts the outcome using variables whose value is not available before the war starts: whether there's going to be another strong state that will intervene on the side of the target, whether you'll have an ally, whether you have cooperation of the adversary, etc.
Wars are lost exactly because these variables are regularly misjudged. Hitler would probably never have started WWII if he had predicted that a few years later he would be at war with both the US and the USSR. This was certainly not obvious in 1939, and when he invaded the USSR a few years later he expected to actually improve his reputation with the neutral side & seriously underestimated how deep the Russian people would go to defend their own criminal regime against the foreign invader. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan they overestimated the popularity of socialism there and underestimated the importance of religion in mobilizing resistance. Same with the US and Vietnam, Iraq: mainly structural overestimation of the US's popularity abroad.
This is besides the point, since the topic is the comparison of the EU-15 with the US. The EU-15 includes only the DDR, and Germany has been succesfully supplying all those former DDR households with heat and energy, as well as increasing its GDP per capita. The fact is that most EU-15 members have voluntarily agreed to a tighter CO2 budget per capita than the US and Germany for the sake of getting them to sign it. Taking 2000 as a base year would have rewarded the US for dragging their feet, and generally would have created an incentive for all to increase CO2 emissions to get a more generous CO2 budget per capita. Germany's position is understandable: they needed the leeway to rebuild the former DDR industry.
Russia got a great deal, but they also deserved some leeway to recover from economic collapse. It is perfectly acceptable if the US would meet its obligations by economic collapse. I would never consider it cheating. I can't generalize for the EU-15 as a whole, but here in the Netherlands Russian "hot air credits" are not accepted as legal tender. Meeting your emissions reductions obligations as a company by for instance modernizing power plants in new EU member states like Poland and Czechia is acceptable, but this is exactly the effect that the credits trading scheme was supposed to have, and a responsibility of the richer, old EU members towards the poorer new ones. Maybe the US could take responsibility for Mexico?
You misread my post. I said improvement of catalytic converters, which convert i.a. CO and carcinogenic hydrocarbons into CO2. Early catalytic converters were considerably less efficient than later ones (in the sense of making the car use more fuel) and therefore the improvement of catalytic converters as emissions standards were tightened was identified as a driving force for CO2 emissions reduction in the 1990-2000 time interval by the linked report. So this is an example of policy-induced CO2 emissions reduction, which is what parent poster denied existed before 2000.
Third and probably the most important is that the EU and the rest of the world have only been attempting to reduce Co2 emisiosn since 2000 when the kyoto accord was in effect. Comparing to anything previous is senseless and misleading. It implies there was an effort that isn't and attempt to say look, we are guilty because we done this before that.
Reducing CO2 emissions is often a side effect of other efforts to curb pollution. Besides that, some of the EU-15 member states are the driving force behind Kyoto, and cared about CO2 emissions long before it was signed.
For instance, the main reasons for the favourable trend in Germany in the 90s are an effort to increase efficiency in power plants and the restructuring of the industry of the former DDR after reunification, and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK was primarily the result of fuel switches from oil and coal to gas in electricity production and N2O emissions reduction measures in the chemical industry.
Also the shift towards smaller cars and diesel engines, driven by higher excise taxes on gas, and improvement of (legally required) catalytic converters on cars, are contributors, as well as thermal isolation subsidies and requirements for households in many EU-15 member states. The reform of the CAP in 1992 led to reduced use of fertilizer and less cattle, and the landfill waste directive to recovery of CH4 from landfills in the EU-15. (cf. generally Gugele et al, 2002) All of those efforts have CO2 emissions reduction as a side effect.
It is relevant to include recent history in evaluating track record, because countries that started to curb pollution early have to make a greater effort to achieve the same reduction (certainly if the target is set as a percentage of current emissions). The US has a long way to go to have CO2 emissions per capita equal to the EU-15, and the US does not have any excuses for high emissions: it's not a major exporter of energy-intensive manufactured goods like for instance Germany or Japan.
Too little space in my toilet. What we need is a removable plastic urinal on top of the toilet rim. This has the added advantage that we can insist that she must put it back on when she's done.
People who are engaging in real criminal activity are already using strong crypto and it's getting easier every day.
Professionals maybe, but a large proportion of serious crimes are committed by complete amateurs in information hiding. The police still collects fingerprints at crime scenes, even though one would expect criminals to know by now that they should wear gloves. Fingerprinting has been around since the 1890's.
The city of Veere in the Netherlands for instance has about 1500 inhabitants. It was already a walled city when Columbus discovered America, it has a busy harbour, and it is the administrative center for twelve other towns and villages, some of which have more inhabitants.
Most important qualifications for the predicate urban are in my view the type of economic activities that take place there, and the central function relative to the area around it. Rural means pastoral or agricultural activities. Suburbs are obviously neither urban nor rural: they are suburban. Nothing happens there. And wilderness is not rural as well. The notion that space can be neatly divided into urban and rural only ever applied to the Western European plains anyway, and has been past its sell by date since we tore down city walls and started using cars.
Population density has little to do with it. Even populations that survive on subsistence farming alone can reach impressive population densities: a family needs about an acre to survive. Take the fertile regions in Rwanda as an example. Rural areas in one country can have a higher population density than suburbs in another, and some urban areas have no inhabitants at all, only shops, offices, etc.
Soleirolia soleirolii is a possible solution. The English Wikipedia gives baby tears, angel tears, mind-your-own-business, peace-in-the-home, pollyanna vine, mother of thousands, and the Corsican curse as common names. I don't know which one is most appropriate.
Looks like a grass lawn, better actually, but is guaranteed not to exceed 5cm, grows easier than grass, and few other weeds can compete with it. A catch is that behaves differently depending on prevaling weather conditions and groundwater level. It can't stand too much sunlight or drought, and dies back in the winter if it is too cold. Here in the Netherlands it works, but this is an exceptionally wet place. Second catch is that it is less resistant than grass to being walked or driven on, although it can handle occasional abuse.
This is sort of insightful and funny at the same time. This mechanism is largely responsible for the lone innovator myth. Businessmen, managers, and professors get the credit for the "idea", while their employees solve solve the many subproblems in actually realizing it.
According to Edison, who was himself a businessman owning a research lab, "genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." But even this is a misrepresentation in my opinion. There are obvious ideas, like the electrical light, and non-obvious ones, like the idea that the strange substance of wolframite might contain a new chemical element to be studied, tungsten, which more than a century later turned out to be the perfect filament for light bulbs. People who realize the obvious ideas get all the credit, but there is no reason to believe that the people who make obvious ideas reality are greater geniuses than the people doing the details.
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because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology
This suggests that the US is "prisoner of the free market ideology", which is a wrongheaded diagnosis of the problem. The "free market = unregulated market fallacy" has more to do with it. Many of the better performing countries regulate for competitiveness and have functioning competition regulators. Some effective restrictions on product bundling, price discrimination, etc. for the owners of the land lines, all in the name of the free market, helps a lot to create a market that actually offers choices.
The EU is responsible only for duties on the EU's external borders, which is also its preferred source of income (as opposed to begging with the member states), as far as I know. It *cannot* even impose the duty without discriminating between the non-existent "domestic camera industry" and imports.
Internal duties are still a responsibility of member states (who also keep the revenue). The commission states in other news articles that it is merely "...clarifying the criteria for tariff classifications to eliminate variation in duty rates for EU members". It is now up to the member states to align their own classifications with the commission's, and most, if not all, of them probably will reclassify, as the reclassification is actually quite sensible. So the "protectionism" discussions are a bit premature. The US and Japan crying wolf is just a political tactic.
Reversing the polarity actually doubles the storage space on the HD, but you do have to reconfigure the crystals with a proton beam (for instance by extending the warp field) first to make it work.
Sure, the US probably has the capability to play hardball by threatening to shoot down or otherwise disable satellites if others don't go along, but
Many countries have that capability. Sending a lot of shrapnel into orbit isn't very complicated, and if you don't have valuable satellites of your own you don't even have to aim well. China even demonstrated recently that they can shoot down satellites with ballistic missiles.
Hitler killed 34 million people, and Stalin 20 million. So you are wrong. These numbers are open to debate (Stalin may for instance have killed "just" 11 million, Hitler 55 million if he is made responsible for all WWII dead), but no serious historian argues that Hitler killed less people than Stalin.
A major reason that Russia -- and China -- make it to the top of any mass atrocities list is that they have many potential victims to begin with. By this reckoning killing one in ten of the national population to consolidate your position (Stalin) makes you a worse mass murderer than killing, let's say, one in five (Pol Pot), simply because you are a Russian dictator instead of a Cambodian dictator. I don't think Pol Pot is a better person than Stalin, and as for instance this list (see the proportionality table) shows, Hitler's activities in Poland (specifically) do rank higher than Stalin's activities in Russia as a horror scenario for the people involved. When you limit the subjected population to jews only, Hitler obviously jumps solidly to the number one position. And when you consider the more limited time frame in which the Nazis made their victims, you will appreciate that some populations victimized by Hitler are entitled to a greater national trauma than the Russians.
Note: when you look at the proportionality table you will also see another interesting thing, as the author puts it:
If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not have gotten a more diverse spread than we've got here. We've got rich countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We've got people of all colors -- white, black, yellow and brown -- widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We've got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we've got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.
Txting will not replace writing. It is just an additional way to communicate on the level of detail of ship signals. If you want your words recorded, you write. People worldwide write more than they ever did, if you count email, sms, etc.
Previous generations were hardly more literate. My grandfather was for instance in practice a functional illiterate, who was taken out of school during WWII to work in a Nazi labor camp making gun shells, and after the war worked as a soldier and a steel mill worker. Besides filling in the occasional form, he never wrote at all. Nowadays you don't get away with that, even if you flip hamburgers. Employers simply expect to be able to communicate to employees in writing.
I could easily look up F=MA in a basic physics book
Bad example. If you understand physics this relationship between the concepts of force, mass, and acceleration is obvious. In fact you cannot truly understand the classical concept of force separate from this relationship.
Same with for instance historical facts. Surely the general story and its historical significance is more important than mere dates, places, and persons, but remembering the year some battle happened, who fought whom, who won, or where it happened becomes a whole lot easier if you already know what happened before and what happened after, if you know the geography of the place, etc.
Learning words in a foreign language becomes easier the more languages you already know, because of the similarities.
Same with giving change: people who look up change simply failed to understand the concepts of arithmetic.
Phone numbers are opaque: no contextual knowledge makes them more easy to remember.
Of course the biology students could have replied to Feynman that learning the anatomy of the cat was really easy since they already memorized the anatomy of a dog the week before.
People are legally obliged to be insured, but the insurers are not legally obliged to accept customers for the advertised premium? That's a recipe for failure.
The system here in the Netherlands has private insurers, hospitals, and pharmacists, but a government regulated standard insurance package that must be offered by all insurers who operate in the market without discrimination to all customers for the same price, and government price fixing for a standard list of pharmaceuticals and medical treatments covered by the package. All competition is in nonessential additions to the package, efficiency, service, and better selling technique.
The system apparently costs about half of what the US spends on health care. But in my view the core of the problem of the US is that it is the world's major exporter of pharmaceuticals, and would be setting a very undesirable example from the pharmaceutical industry's point of view if it started price fixing itself. Without a free market for health care in the US, the US would have (even) less of a standing when insisting that the third world respect pharmaceutical patents and pay whatever price the US company wants them to pay to use the pharmaceutical. The US will start price fixing as soon as the rest of the world starts disregarding patents.
But do they bring a 20 mile drift net?
Why assume it is a spacecraft capable of travelling at interstellar speeds? It could be a simple entry vehicle designed for earth's atmosphere dropped off by a bigger spacecraft that crashed unexpectedly because the local rustics damaged the chute with soft metal slugs. The "fallen comrades" could be the alien equivalent of mankind's space dogs.
There is no reason to resume that the intelligent aliens would be aboard the spacecraft themselves if the object of the expedition was anything other than colonization. They are intelligent, after all. The aliens concluded that they misjudged the locals (territorial aggressiveness even greater than expected; no sign of the expected tradition of hospitality to unarmed strangers), decided to try again in the friendlier Amazon river basin next time, and moved on to the next stop in the mission.
Here in my municipality in the Netherlands we separately collect organic, glass, paper, textiles, toxic, and regular waste, and we also have pretty strict limits on amounts of regular and organic waste: a 140 liter bin every two weeks. The bin is marked with the address.
The police do give fines for not properly separating waste in the bins, but there are huge differences between municipalities in how often they check waste bins. It depends on whether they have better things to do really. The police also gives fines for putting household waste in public bins.
Recently there was a lot of attention for an appeal case of a woman who was fined for putting a plastic bread bag in a public bin after feeding ducks with stale bread. She did take the bag from home, but the case does make one wonder what you ARE allowed to put in public waste bins. There is no foolproof enforceable way to prohibit throwing household waste in public bins. What definitely IS legal is throwing excessive packaging material directly into a public bin when you walk out of a shop. It is obviously better to leave it in the shop, as you are allowed to refuse excessive packaging, but most shops don't properly accommodate this and get away with that because most people are simply too polite to just throw it on the floor. What does work for shops is the principle that you collect what you sell. If you sell appliances, batteries, bottles, etc. you also collect them.
Same with the fines for not properly separating waste. There are people who at night secretly throw waste - often the wrong kind - in other people's bins. This is an offense as it involves trespassing, but the police do nothing about it. Social control works to some extent as these people ARE considered antisocials because of this. The solution implemented in some towns is underground public containers with swipe cards and pin codes that weigh how much you throw in.
bologna university is the oldest western university in the world
Forgive the Americans. They know more about food than about world history.
Then, guy takes the gun out, shoots few bullets into the Russian device. Resets it, and screen says "480K of RAM" instead of "640K of RAM", and booted properly - and worked. They had HUGE memory boards in the device, and even if you shot through them, they'd still work, bypassing/ignoring damaged memory boards. He shot one bullet into US device. Dead. Guess which devices were purchased?
Double the number of US devices. One backup in case the other one gets shot.
Alternatively, they allocated a billion euros to have a national contractor build a device with the looks of the US one and the ruggedness of the Russian one, and ended up with one that has the looks of the Russian one and the ruggedness of the US one.
Last but not least, I am yet to see an anti-piracy statement that admits to the positive effects of pirating. After all, that's how many artists, movies and software developers gain a lot of attention. Do you think Photoshop would be widespread in Europe if there was no alternative to that idiotic $1,500 price tag?
;)
Just a technicality: Europeans and Asians making illegal copies of American products should be counted as privateering, not piracy.
They want to regulate games, while at the same time selling weapons willy nilly to anyone with the cash to pay for them.
Don't be silly. We only sell weapons to foreigners for use on other foreigners. We do think of our own children, unlike some countries that sell weapons willy nilly to people inside the country.
There's no way to tell if the world would have come out better or worse had the colonies not declared independence. The world would probably be completely unrecognizable and it's absurd to try to consider the possibilities of what would have happened had the American Revolution not taken place.
But it is a good example of the allies variable. The American Revolutionary War probably would have been a regrettable historical episode causing many deaths and gaining nothing if France, Spain, the Netherlands, and the Kingdom of Misore wouldn't have sided with the US against the British.
What is worse is that she predicts the outcome using variables whose value is not available before the war starts: whether there's going to be another strong state that will intervene on the side of the target, whether you'll have an ally, whether you have cooperation of the adversary, etc.
Wars are lost exactly because these variables are regularly misjudged. Hitler would probably never have started WWII if he had predicted that a few years later he would be at war with both the US and the USSR. This was certainly not obvious in 1939, and when he invaded the USSR a few years later he expected to actually improve his reputation with the neutral side & seriously underestimated how deep the Russian people would go to defend their own criminal regime against the foreign invader. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan they overestimated the popularity of socialism there and underestimated the importance of religion in mobilizing resistance. Same with the US and Vietnam, Iraq: mainly structural overestimation of the US's popularity abroad.
This is besides the point, since the topic is the comparison of the EU-15 with the US. The EU-15 includes only the DDR, and Germany has been succesfully supplying all those former DDR households with heat and energy, as well as increasing its GDP per capita. The fact is that most EU-15 members have voluntarily agreed to a tighter CO2 budget per capita than the US and Germany for the sake of getting them to sign it. Taking 2000 as a base year would have rewarded the US for dragging their feet, and generally would have created an incentive for all to increase CO2 emissions to get a more generous CO2 budget per capita. Germany's position is understandable: they needed the leeway to rebuild the former DDR industry.
Russia got a great deal, but they also deserved some leeway to recover from economic collapse. It is perfectly acceptable if the US would meet its obligations by economic collapse. I would never consider it cheating. I can't generalize for the EU-15 as a whole, but here in the Netherlands Russian "hot air credits" are not accepted as legal tender. Meeting your emissions reductions obligations as a company by for instance modernizing power plants in new EU member states like Poland and Czechia is acceptable, but this is exactly the effect that the credits trading scheme was supposed to have, and a responsibility of the richer, old EU members towards the poorer new ones. Maybe the US could take responsibility for Mexico?
You misread my post. I said improvement of catalytic converters, which convert i.a. CO and carcinogenic hydrocarbons into CO2. Early catalytic converters were considerably less efficient than later ones (in the sense of making the car use more fuel) and therefore the improvement of catalytic converters as emissions standards were tightened was identified as a driving force for CO2 emissions reduction in the 1990-2000 time interval by the linked report. So this is an example of policy-induced CO2 emissions reduction, which is what parent poster denied existed before 2000.
Third and probably the most important is that the EU and the rest of the world have only been attempting to reduce Co2 emisiosn since 2000 when the kyoto accord was in effect. Comparing to anything previous is senseless and misleading. It implies there was an effort that isn't and attempt to say look, we are guilty because we done this before that.
Reducing CO2 emissions is often a side effect of other efforts to curb pollution. Besides that, some of the EU-15 member states are the driving force behind Kyoto, and cared about CO2 emissions long before it was signed.
For instance, the main reasons for the favourable trend in Germany in the 90s are an effort to increase efficiency in power plants and the restructuring of the industry of the former DDR after reunification, and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK was primarily the result of fuel switches from oil and coal to gas in electricity production and N2O emissions reduction measures in the chemical industry.
Also the shift towards smaller cars and diesel engines, driven by higher excise taxes on gas, and improvement of (legally required) catalytic converters on cars, are contributors, as well as thermal isolation subsidies and requirements for households in many EU-15 member states. The reform of the CAP in 1992 led to reduced use of fertilizer and less cattle, and the landfill waste directive to recovery of CH4 from landfills in the EU-15. (cf. generally Gugele et al, 2002) All of those efforts have CO2 emissions reduction as a side effect.
It is relevant to include recent history in evaluating track record, because countries that started to curb pollution early have to make a greater effort to achieve the same reduction (certainly if the target is set as a percentage of current emissions). The US has a long way to go to have CO2 emissions per capita equal to the EU-15, and the US does not have any excuses for high emissions: it's not a major exporter of energy-intensive manufactured goods like for instance Germany or Japan.
Too little space in my toilet. What we need is a removable plastic urinal on top of the toilet rim. This has the added advantage that we can insist that she must put it back on when she's done.
People who are engaging in real criminal activity are already using strong crypto and it's getting easier every day.
Professionals maybe, but a large proportion of serious crimes are committed by complete amateurs in information hiding. The police still collects fingerprints at crime scenes, even though one would expect criminals to know by now that they should wear gloves. Fingerprinting has been around since the 1890's.
The city of Veere in the Netherlands for instance has about 1500 inhabitants. It was already a walled city when Columbus discovered America, it has a busy harbour, and it is the administrative center for twelve other towns and villages, some of which have more inhabitants.
Most important qualifications for the predicate urban are in my view the type of economic activities that take place there, and the central function relative to the area around it. Rural means pastoral or agricultural activities. Suburbs are obviously neither urban nor rural: they are suburban. Nothing happens there. And wilderness is not rural as well. The notion that space can be neatly divided into urban and rural only ever applied to the Western European plains anyway, and has been past its sell by date since we tore down city walls and started using cars.
Population density has little to do with it. Even populations that survive on subsistence farming alone can reach impressive population densities: a family needs about an acre to survive. Take the fertile regions in Rwanda as an example. Rural areas in one country can have a higher population density than suburbs in another, and some urban areas have no inhabitants at all, only shops, offices, etc.
Soleirolia soleirolii is a possible solution. The English Wikipedia gives baby tears, angel tears, mind-your-own-business, peace-in-the-home, pollyanna vine, mother of thousands, and the Corsican curse as common names. I don't know which one is most appropriate.
Looks like a grass lawn, better actually, but is guaranteed not to exceed 5cm, grows easier than grass, and few other weeds can compete with it. A catch is that behaves differently depending on prevaling weather conditions and groundwater level. It can't stand too much sunlight or drought, and dies back in the winter if it is too cold. Here in the Netherlands it works, but this is an exceptionally wet place. Second catch is that it is less resistant than grass to being walked or driven on, although it can handle occasional abuse.
This is sort of insightful and funny at the same time. This mechanism is largely responsible for the lone innovator myth. Businessmen, managers, and professors get the credit for the "idea", while their employees solve solve the many subproblems in actually realizing it.
According to Edison, who was himself a businessman owning a research lab, "genius is one per cent inspiration, ninety-nine per cent perspiration." But even this is a misrepresentation in my opinion. There are obvious ideas, like the electrical light, and non-obvious ones, like the idea that the strange substance of wolframite might contain a new chemical element to be studied, tungsten, which more than a century later turned out to be the perfect filament for light bulbs. People who realize the obvious ideas get all the credit, but there is no reason to believe that the people who make obvious ideas reality are greater geniuses than the people doing the details.