Re:How can we get women to buy G.I. Joe?
on
Getting the Girl
·
· Score: 1
Spot on. Several of my friends work in the games biz and we had various conversations along these lines over the holidays.
They'd ponder the adolescent-male demographic a bit and talk about how crossover/breakout games could grow entire new markets (and make metric buttloads of cash) and then they'd mull on what the magic ingredient for a gender crossover might be.
Then various wives/partners etc would chip in to point out that 99.999% of the stuff currently being shifted by the computer games industry is aimed laser-like at the psychological sweet spot of basement-dwelling teen males and that the stuff that *they* tended to like was pretty simple and straightforward - namechecking many of the games you mention - and foregrounding stuff like having fun in a group, not requiring hours of obsessive play to complete and not involving the whole 'scatter your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women' aesthetic that is at the core of practically all computer games.
The games biz guys would get a bit defensive and respond that not all games were like that, but when put to the test they were hard pressed to come up with games that didn't involve either direct violence (first person shooters, arcade beat 'em ups et alia) or 'grind your opponents into the dust' (4x strategy, sports games, racing games etc) at which point they'd concede the point and someone would suggest a round or two of Singstar in the living room...
As others have said being a knight doesn't confer any formal benefits; you get the prefix to your name, some letters as a suffix and a medal that you can wear on formal occasions if you want to eg Russel Crowe has worn his MBE (which isn't a knighthood, but you do get a medal and some letters) to the Oscars at least once.
Having said all that, a title still has a certain amount of 'soft power' - its extremely handy for booking restaurant tables for instance (not to be sniffed at) and it smooths the way in highly status conscious places, even (or especially) when they are outwardly egalitarian. The other thing is that it gives you the metaphorical key to the executive washroom - having a K may not confer any substantive powers, but even in this day and age it will open doors that are otherwise mostly shut. Whether you want to go through said doors is, of course, another question entirely.
So it would seem that you do. All American citizens are also American subjects. A British citizen is also a British subject, but there are also those subject to British allegiance who are non-citizens, principally colonials, and they have no right to live, work, or stand for election in the UK (oddly, like all Commonwealth citizens they do have the right to vote if they happen to be in the UK at the time, about 1/3 of the world's population can theoretically vote in a UK General Election).
This seemed wrong to me, but in fact is entirely correct (learn something new... yadda-yadda-yah) - subject to the proviso that said Commonwealth citizens need to satisfy UK residency requirements before they can exercise this franchise, which in practise excludes a large fraction of those who are theoretically entitled to it.
The citizen/subject distinction is one of those legal definition thingies. Current law defines us Brits as citizens (there are three flavours of citizenship depending on where you live, but the distinction isn't germane) and reserves the 'subject' classification for various people who have a historical claim on the UK polity in some sense (eg. Irish citizens who were born before 1948 can be UK subjects if they want). As nickco says, citizens are implicitly a subset of subjects but you only bother to call someone a British Subject if you haven't got anything more useful to call them.
Subjects can, for the most part[*], settle in the UK and after five years they qualify for citizenship, but subject status cannot generally be inherited by your children - so it seems clearly intended to be a temporary catch-all for various special cases that have arisen during our retreat from empire in the last century.
Regards Luke
[*] The key exception being the disgraceful bit of frothing Daily Mail-ism that led to the right of settlement being retroactively withdrawn from Hong Kong citizens in the run up to the 1997 handover to the PRC. HK-ers, being supremely pragmatic, failed to be disturbed by this and decided that, if a safe-haven passport were needed, Canada, Australia or the US were better bets in any case. So the British ended up looking like hypocritical racist jerks (again) and we missed out on any chance for an infusion of dynamic, highly entrepreneurial immigrants if the mainland Chinese went insane at some point and decided that strangling the HK goose was a good idea. Yay us.
Why don't scientists use the word 'concensus' when talking about things we actually understand? (The consensus is the Earth is round. The consensus is matter exhibits properties of both waves and particles. The consensus is...)
Because scientists who deal with the shape of the planet, general relativity or the germ theory of disease aren't constantly being barracked and undermined by powerful sectors of industry whose short-term wellbeing and status are directly tied to seeing that no action is taken that is derived from these 'consensual scientific facts'. They can simply point at the huge collection of disproven hypotheses, the mountains of data collected and the remaining nuggets of surviving theories and rationality generally prevails.
In areas which are equally consensual but which have the misfortune to be hot policy topics and bad news for powerful people - such as climate change or (in parts of the US) Darwinian evolutionary theory or (in the recent past) whether smoking is bad for your health - one of the standard down'n'dirty tricks is to latch on to whatever crackpot fringe dissension you can turn up (or have manufactured) and then generate lots of FUD about how "there is no scientific consensus", "the facts are in dispute", "there are several conflicting interpretations as to what the data implies" and so on.
Scientists who see this sort of stuff being touted around when, in fact, there *is* a solid consensus tend to get a bit antsy and start talking about how the consensus is actually quite strong and that the reason its so strong is because of, you know, all these data they and their colleages have painstakingly collected over the past however many years and had published in umpty dozen peer-reviewed articles...
Hence the appearance of websites like Real Climate and similar. Of course for those who are truly invested in the idea that global warming is a pile of hooey, this emphasis on the consensus position and so on is proof positive that those hippie, tree-hugging scientists are just scare-mongering because they Hate America or something.
Yes. Although not if you live in the UK. Chances are you'll need the parka if/when the North Atlantic Current switches off, even if the rest of the planet is being griddled.
Instead of saying that "Research institute X has found Y, but their model is incorrect because they didn't factor in Z", these people are pretending that the other research doesn't exist.
But the thing is, it doesn't exist. These research institutes that you are hypothesising about haven't managed to get one paper through the peer-review process. Not one. Despite the fact that such a paper is the stuff Nobel Prizes are made of (not that climatology gets a Nobel, but you know what I mean). So the FA's position is actually very close to what you say it should be - viz "Research Institute X has found Y, but peer review found that their model is incorrect because they didn't factor in Z and so their paper was withdrawn before publication."
This is interesting because it implies that the data and analytical techniques to support such a paper either (a) do not exist, (b) have not been found yet or (c) are being supressed or overlooked in some way. I know a bunch of people hereabouts incline towards (c) but frankly, they are on crack; (b) was a respectable (indeed a responsible) position back in the 70s, 80s and into the 90s, but is increasingly implausible given the amount of work being in done in the area; which leaves (a).
Eg if adding green house gasses to a system which is heated by the sun (or a radiant heat source producing the same wavelengths as the sun) causes temperatures in the system to rise, global warming is as proven as relativity, given the limits of our ability to demonstrate large scale processes within controlled environments...
Is that all you need? Seriously? Because the thermal forcing effect of CO2 is an observably proven fact since the mid-19th century at least. John Tyndall was the first to do rigorous work on how greenhouse gases operated and Arrhenius was the first to propose CO2 as a significant GHG. That was 1859 and 1896 respectively. Even with the crude techniques available a hundred-odd years ago it was quickly confirmed that the earth's temperature was much hotter than it 'should' be given the solar energy received at our orbit. This was reconfirmed when we got reliable measurements of conditions on Venus (which is much hotter than it would be absent an atmosphere).
I can't think of anyone with any remotely credible claim to being a scientist who would argue that CO2-is-a-greenhouse-gas wasn't as utterly obvious and trivially uncontentious as, for example, the assertion that glaciers once covered large swathes of Europe.
Thanks for the public service. Your list of websites doesn't appear to have this site.
To my relatively ignorant eye is a useful compendium of various global warming questions along with links to the research underlying the answers put forward.
The point I am trying to make is that the Earth has undergone drastic climate and geographic changes in the past with little to no human influence. Far more drastic than the fractions of degrees global warming theorists are talking about today.
Thus far its fractions of degrees, but the extrapolations (I know, who knows how accurate they are? Any climatologist worth their salt will agree that the models could be better) project a worst-case warming of around 8 degrees celcius. Thats as big a change as anything that's happened in the last 100 million years and the rate of change is much, much faster. Decades or centuries vs the more usual millenial scale that these shifts generally occur on.
Your error lies in assuming that because the scientific consensus states that the current warming event is partly/largely anthropogenic it follows that the scientific consensus states that all the warming events we know about are partly/largely anthropogenic.
This is obviously a stupid proposition but, guess what, no climatologists make it. Yes, the climate has been warmer than now; yes, CO2 concentrations have been higher than now (sometimes much higher). Those warming and cooling events had nothing to do with anything we did, this one almost certainly does.
Hasn't the climate been drastically changing for millions of years... were we the cause of that too?
Of course not - the planet has been warmer than now and colder than now. CO2 levels have been higher than now (often much higher) and lower than now. To imply that this is something that climatologists aren't aware of is a grotesque misrepresentation.
Having said that, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently higher than at any time in the last half-million years or so and there is a well-established paleohistorical correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures that has been observed back for several millions of years at least (beyond that you have to start accounting for things like continental drift, so the comparisons get harder to make).
Furthermore the rate of increase is higher than it has been since at least the end of the last ice-age. This is key, since sudden changes are much harder to handle (both by our civilisation and by the ecological systems our civilisation depends upon). By way of comparison let us look at one of the fastest natural spikes in gobal temperatures that has been found so far - the LPTM (Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum) saw a 8 degree celcius increase in sea surface temperatures, yet produced no detectable change in the extinction rate (unlike the other significant temperature spike in the last 100 million years - the KT Boundary event - but then having pieces of the sky fall on your head generally a bad thing). Paleoclimatologists point to the fact that this rise took place over several thousand years as the probable reason for the relatively minor ecological impact the LPTM had.
Current climate models are predicting a similar rise as their worst-case scenario, but over decades/centuries rather centuries/millenia. That's an order of magnitude faster and climatologists expect this will lead to major qualitative differences in the second and third order effects of such a rise.
What wonderful arrogance that our blink of an eye existence could cause such global changes... Hate to break it to you.. but industrial emissions have only been around for a 100 years or so... which is not even a blip on the radar in the geologic time that such changes are measured.
Yet the CO2 is in the atmosphere. You may think it is breathtakingly arrogant to ascribe such things to the eyeblink duration of our industrial civilisation, but absent the discovery of magic carbon pixies how do you account for it?
Plaid Cymru just burns down the houses of the English settlers
I think you mean 'Mabion Glyndyr' (trans. 'Sons of Glendower') - the lairy idiots who decided a couple of decades ago that burning down holiday cottages was an effective way of striking back at eeevil English invaders (or at least was a diverting way to while away the long winter nights) probably vote Plaid Cymru, but I doubt the PC leadership are overjoyed to be recieving support from such quarters.
This is an excellent plan. With luck all of the really whacked out, extropian loony tunes will sign up for the leaking deathtra... err... libertarian utopia and will be well on their way to Davy Jones Locker the next time their local weather hits 9+ on the Beaufort Scale.
Not only that, but they'll take all the toxic rustbuckets that the US tried to ship over to Europe for decommissioning earlier in the year and pay actual money for the privilege! And they want a nuke as well... I'm sure the Russians have a couple or three they'd like to be shot of if they could be sure it was going to drop into a very deep ocean trench sometime in the near future. Everybody wins!
[Except for the extropian nutbars of course, but they'll have fun 'living the dream' before ugly reality intrudes in the shape of a cat 5 tropical storm.]
Corresponding numbers for the UK: Income tax is progressive in 4 bands:
0% first £4,745 10% the next £1,960 22% £1,961-30,500 40% >£31,001
Then add:
11% for 'National Insurance' the notional levy that funds healthcare, pensions and unemployment payouts (up to a max income of ~£30,000, then down to 1% beyond that level).
Local property taxes - also highly variable. I paid about £1100 this year for a small place (hence cheaper) in London (hence expensive).
Sales taxes (actually VAT) of 17.5% - not on 'essentials' such as groceries which are zero-rated, but this is an ouch and often folded into posted prices, so less obvious than the equivalent imposts in the US.
There are lots of one-off duties and charges squirrelled away in various bits of the economy of course (sin taxes are popular over here, which includes gasoline these days) but the above are the headline items.
Who was building the empire? By what right did Great Britain get to decide who could build an empire and who could not?
Germany was. Or rather rebuilding an empire - their previous one having been taken away from them in the prior bout of great power nonsense they got involved with. Britain (and France) already had empires and by the 30s they weren't in the market for new colonial posessions. Great Britain's right to dispose of affairs in the concert of nations is the same one that the US has now, they were the bigger and badder than anyone who might have been inclined to object.
Your racism theory is also quite wrong, as another poster mentioned. Germany had hundreds of thousands of volunteers from non-European countries like India, Persia, and even places like Tibet, far more than the British and Americans combined.
Ummmm no. Non-European combatants on the allied side far outstripped the pathetic fragments Germany mustered. Himmler managed to scrape together what, one SS regiment of Indians? The Commonwealth had more Nepalis under arms than that... part of an entire *army* from the subcontinent, plus significant formations recruited from elsewhere in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Same goes for France (SE Asia and North Africa) and the US (chiefly Filippinos).
Then of course there is the obvious: Germany's strongest ally was Japan! If racism was their goal, I don't think they would have worked so closely with a people they considered inferior by default.
Racisms come in many flavours and are culturally determined. The Nazis particular thing was mostly focused on Jews, Slavs and Gypsies (with a side helping of anti-black African prejudice but then pretty much everyone who is racist has it in for Africans, even other Africans) - strange to tell these were precisely the three ethnic 'others' that most Germans would have encountered with any kind of frequency in the first part of the C20th, so its entirely predictable that a political movement with race at the centre of its ideology would fixate upon them. I'm not sure where in the contorted hierarchy of Nazi racial theory the Japanese fell but they were sufficiently high up the totem pole (and more importantly, didn't pose any kind of geopolitical threat to the regime) that their non-Aryanness could be overlooked at least for the duration (all bets would have been off if the Axis had managed to win WW2 IMO). All this demonstrates however, is that Nazi racism was contingent, contradictory and that even the senior figures of the regime understood "my enemy's enemy is my friend".
Racism may well have had little to do with why the allies decided to go to the mattresses in WW2, but that doesn't mean that Nazi Germany wasn't a vicious racist dictatorship or that its viciousness and its racism (the one following from the other for the most part) weren't powerful factors in mobilising and cementing the alliance against the Axis once a war policy had been decided upon. So your argument that the racism of the Nazi regime had nothing to do with the causes of WW2 is a peverse misreading of history.
Do the states levy their own income taxes or do they subsist on property taxes, sales taxes and the like? I imagine some would and some won't. For those that do, how much would be representative?
Third, comparing national emissions output between countries is not a valid measurement, and neither is a per-capita emissions level comparison. Basically, what is needed is some type of emissions-per-productive-unit measurement.
Something like an oil intensity metric perhaps? There is work being done to collect data on a wider carbon intensity metric I think, but it appears to be a fairly new field and swift googling didn't turn up any sites listing comparitive figures between national or regional economies.
I recall Jerry Pournelle getting very excited by the potential for ground-based laser back in the late 70s. Is any work being done on that or has it proven to be impractical?
Salination of the Tigris/Euphrates flood-plain thanks to intensive over-irrigation.
Several chinese dynastic collapses seem to be linked to failure of irrigation systems (some dispute as to which way the causality runs in these events however). There are others, but off the top of my head I don't recall specific details.
There does seem to be a pattern where societies and civilisations to trade up the risk scale as they become more complex and sophisticated. Eg. by mobilising efforts upon irrigation works to handle the once-per-decade drought (rather than shifting out of agriculture to nomadic pastoralism in bad years) a village society ties themselves to the land in a way that means the once-per-century drought (that their irrigation efforts can't handle) results in an overwhelming calamity for them.
Interesting litany of assertions you have there. I'd be happy to look into any cites you have to back them up but... oh dear you don't appear to have provided any.
OK. Here's what I've got after a bit of googling on a quiet Friday afternoon.
- It's composed of over 2 million blocks of stone, over 2 tons each. Many of them are over 20,000 tons - all this despite the fact that there is no substantial amount of stone or anywhere to quary it from for over 100 miles. Keep in mind that our best cranes today can lift a mere 3,000 tons.
Numbers match what I've found (2-2.5 million seems to be the range) average weight of 2.5 tons yup (which also chimes to the weight given elsewhere). I can't find anything to support the claim that many were over 20,000 tons, the highest weight I could find a reference for is 50 tons. Given that, who cares that the best cranes today can lift 3000t?
- It was 481 ft high at the time of construction. That's 1/3rd the height of the Empire State Building.
Agreed. Its a mighty big pile.
- It took approximately 10 years to build without using anything approaching what we'd call 'modern' machinery, to our knowledge, and weighs a total of 7 million tons (estimated) from 3 different types of stone (limestone, basalt, granite).
The numbers match 2.5 million blocks at an average of 2.5t each more or less - good to see that you're remaining internally consistent. However general archaeological estimates gives building times of about twenty years, based upon surveys of the worker's settlements, graveyards etc. There is indeed no evidence of anything approaching modern machinery or materials that dates back to the mid-third millenium BC.
The Empire State Building only took roughly 1/7th of that amount of time, weighing in at 365,000 tons, and took as many as 3,000 workers at any given time, despite having such modern conveniences as locomotion.
Why the comparitives with the ESB? All I get from this is that industrial-era engineers can build a taller structure, using fewer materials, in much less time and using a smaller workforce. This is not news.
- The horizontal cross section of the pyramid is square at any level, with each side measuring 751 feet
ITYM size at the base here. I've already agreed its a big structure and well laid out. So they could build on the square and to impressive tolerances, fine.
- There are areas within the giza pyramid that have hyroglyphs and odd structural design that, given our understanding of how the pyramids were made, could not have been made or put in place during building (in a vulnerable area) or after building (dark, enclosed area, and no soot on walls), and thus must've been fully constructed and put in place as a module
Cite? I'm not clear on what you're driving at with this.
- The ground area covered by the Giza pyramid alone is enough to accommodate St Peter's in Rome, the cathedrals of Florence and Milan, and Westminster and St Paul's in London combined.
Yes its big. We agree.
- The entire interior of the pyramids are harmonically tuned. (That's a physical characteristic, mind you, not some crazy new age nonsense.)
And yet when I google 'giza harmonically tuned' I get a page of links all spouting new age crap (frequently the same newage crap). Unless you can give me some pointers to people who aren't obsessed with crystals, chakras, massive subterranean cities or hitech precursor civilisations, this goes into my 'whacky ideas for the next time I play Call of Cthulhu' file.
- It was constructed directly on the Earth's equator (which was 30 south of the current magnetic pole at that logitude) and is a mirror of heavenly bodies - which, at the time of construction, wouldn't reach the alignmen
Britan is conqured territory. Not hardly a Celt left. No major resources to speak of in it's early history. They were, and largley still are, the eminent power.
The technological disparity between aborinals and invaders in any of the conquests of Britain was never as sharp as it was in the New World territories post-Columbus. Also Britain only really got motoring in the Great Power stakes once we realised that all this coal we had was useful for steam engines and factories. We had a few other good ideas in the run up (constitutional monarchy, religious toleration, maintaining a decent navy etc etc) but there were a fair few geographic realities underpinning the Industrial Revolution.
Japan has neither concqued teritory, genocidal or amassed of resources. They are also dangerously close to the Chinese, who I'm sure haven't forgotten the land of the rising sun.
ITIYM post-war Japan here. They have indeed done very well since '45. Pre-45 of course they tried applying the US 'move the frontier West' lesson and failed dismally. This is what tends to happen when expand into territories held by industrial states rather than bands of nomadic barbarians.
The Greeks were quite wealthy up untill the Roman conquest, and much of that time they kept to them selves, on shores that grew little more than olives, grapes, and sheep.
Ummm. Alexander? Leaving aside the Macedonian as an aberration, there's all those Greek poloi along what is now the Turkish shore of the Agean and scattered across Southern Italy.
Austrailia has abundent resources and is further seperated from the rest of the world than North America, and while they are by no means poor, they've yet to see the economic boon of the USA.
This would be because most of Australia is a desert perhaps? And that the good bits are on the far, far side of this desert (oh, plus the substantial fringe of rainforest and croc-infested swampland)? And that the maximum population that could realistically be supported is maybe a tenth of what the US currently has?
Canada, Mexico, and South America all share our oceanic borders and resources, yet they have not accelled nearly as far militarily or economicaly as the USA.
Canada - arctic terrain over the bulk of their territory and very small population. Mexico - not as geographically challenged as Canada but plentiful deserts and rainforests to cramp their style, also subject to predation by European powers and an aggressive northern neighbour. South America - their revolutionary generation failed disastrously, so instead of being allowed to prosper behind an oceanic bulwark they've had plenty of rivals and enemies close to hand (a nasty picture of what might have been the case for the US if the Federalists hadn't won the argument in the 1780s).
Look - I'm not denying that the social/political factors you've been talking about WRT the US play a role and that elsewhere advantages have been squandered or disadvantages overcome. It remains the case that the US has had some spectacular luck vis a vis their starting position in the Great Powers game. The US has undoubtedly compounded that luck with good choices and hard work, but it doesn't alter the fact that having a hundred year period to open up a continent's worth of territory and resources without being seriously bothered by any of the Great Powers of the day (other than providing a hefty chunk of the capital for said expansion that is) was extremely fortunate.
BTW: The endless canard of racism agains the USA is tiresome. Old Europe still carries more racism in it's most civilized circles than you would find in some of the lowest class pubs in America. Racism is in America at the point where groups like the KKK are litteraly at the fringes of society, and not the least bit welcome inside. See if you find cafes of France, or the sands of Saudi Arabia so t
I resent that. Here in the true 51st State (Britain)
Why be shy? With a population of 60 million we should be holding out to be the 51st thru 55th states at least. Canadian provinces can form an orderly queue from 56...
we know and understand why this province isn't allowed to vote. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die. My tax pounds and the lives of my countrymen are required to support the Emperor at all times.
The interesting historical parallel is with the late Republic. We've had the two charismatic brothers felled by assassins of course - that was a generation ago, so I guess we're up to the early consulships of Marius by now (altho' I can't picture Dubya in the role somehow). We should be getting to the Social War in about 2015 or so. Then there's Slave Revolts, Sulla's proscriptions and it starts to get really ugly. Hmmm.
With any luck we'll get to Augustus by about the end of the century and then the main concern will be a loony Emperor every other generation or thereabouts, but so long as they restrict themselves to murdering other Beltway bandits in interesting and inventive ways the rest of us can be left to get on with our lives.
Thankyou for your insightful and interesting comments. Unpicking some of the why's and the wherefore's behind the US/RestoftheWorld mental divergence is a signal service. For the most part I concur with your analysis however I have a question about this bit:
but Kerry has no record (Hasn't authored any legislation, has no "cause" except opposition to military action, but surprisingly, claims to support (in substance if not in form) current policy toward Iraq, at least last time I checked). So.... performance is moot to Americans.
Firstly what sort of record would be deemed noteworthy of a Senator and, more importantly, recommend him as a candidate for the Presidency? I was talking to an American about the election a few weeks back and he pointed out that only two sitting Senators have ever been elected President. I have no idea who these two were or even if he was correct in his assertion, but I thought the inference he was drawing - that the deal-making that goes on in the senate leaves them too exposed or compromised to function effectively in a Presidential race - was an interesting one and probably puts a finger on part of the thinking behind the 'flip-flop' tactic that the GOP have adopted during the campaign.
My second question is related to the first. From what reading I've done about Kerry's time in the Senate he did a lot of the groundwork digging into the Iran-Contra mess back in the late 80s and that this preoccupation with the whole drugs/terrorism/intelligence nexus continued well into the 90s (he was an early voice calling for bin Laden and AQ to be taken seriously I believe). To my mind this is quite an impressive record - mostly unglamorous and behind the scenes but certainly worth mentioning; however the impression I've got is that this has had very little emphasis during the campaign - is it because this sort of commitee-based, 'holding the executive to account' type of activity is generally deprecated in the US? Not a proper activity for a legislator? Or is it just that it can't be fitted into a 10 second soundbite so gets ignored?
Slashdot Mirror
Spot on. Several of my friends work in the games biz and we had various conversations along these lines over the holidays.
They'd ponder the adolescent-male demographic a bit and talk about how crossover/breakout games could grow entire new markets (and make metric buttloads of cash) and then they'd mull on what the magic ingredient for a gender crossover might be.
Then various wives/partners etc would chip in to point out that 99.999% of the stuff currently being shifted by the computer games industry is aimed laser-like at the psychological sweet spot of basement-dwelling teen males and that the stuff that *they* tended to like was pretty simple and straightforward - namechecking many of the games you mention - and foregrounding stuff like having fun in a group, not requiring hours of obsessive play to complete and not involving the whole 'scatter your enemies and hear the lamentations of their women' aesthetic that is at the core of practically all computer games.
The games biz guys would get a bit defensive and respond that not all games were like that, but when put to the test they were hard pressed to come up with games that didn't involve either direct violence (first person shooters, arcade beat 'em ups et alia) or 'grind your opponents into the dust' (4x strategy, sports games, racing games etc) at which point they'd concede the point and someone would suggest a round or two of Singstar in the living room...
Regards
Luke
As others have said being a knight doesn't confer any formal benefits; you get the prefix to your name, some letters as a suffix and a medal that you can wear on formal occasions if you want to eg Russel Crowe has worn his MBE (which isn't a knighthood, but you do get a medal and some letters) to the Oscars at least once.
Having said all that, a title still has a certain amount of 'soft power' - its extremely handy for booking restaurant tables for instance (not to be sniffed at) and it smooths the way in highly status conscious places, even (or especially) when they are outwardly egalitarian. The other thing is that it gives you the metaphorical key to the executive washroom - having a K may not confer any substantive powers, but even in this day and age it will open doors that are otherwise mostly shut. Whether you want to go through said doors is, of course, another question entirely.
Regards
Luke
The citizen/subject distinction is one of those legal definition thingies. Current law defines us Brits as citizens (there are three flavours of citizenship depending on where you live, but the distinction isn't germane) and reserves the 'subject' classification for various people who have a historical claim on the UK polity in some sense (eg. Irish citizens who were born before 1948 can be UK subjects if they want). As nickco says, citizens are implicitly a subset of subjects but you only bother to call someone a British Subject if you haven't got anything more useful to call them.
Subjects can, for the most part[*], settle in the UK and after five years they qualify for citizenship, but subject status cannot generally be inherited by your children - so it seems clearly intended to be a temporary catch-all for various special cases that have arisen during our retreat from empire in the last century.
Regards
Luke
[*] The key exception being the disgraceful bit of frothing Daily Mail-ism that led to the right of settlement being retroactively withdrawn from Hong Kong citizens in the run up to the 1997 handover to the PRC. HK-ers, being supremely pragmatic, failed to be disturbed by this and decided that, if a safe-haven passport were needed, Canada, Australia or the US were better bets in any case. So the British ended up looking like hypocritical racist jerks (again) and we missed out on any chance for an infusion of dynamic, highly entrepreneurial immigrants if the mainland Chinese went insane at some point and decided that strangling the HK goose was a good idea. Yay us.
In areas which are equally consensual but which have the misfortune to be hot policy topics and bad news for powerful people - such as climate change or (in parts of the US) Darwinian evolutionary theory or (in the recent past) whether smoking is bad for your health - one of the standard down'n'dirty tricks is to latch on to whatever crackpot fringe dissension you can turn up (or have manufactured) and then generate lots of FUD about how "there is no scientific consensus", "the facts are in dispute", "there are several conflicting interpretations as to what the data implies" and so on.
Scientists who see this sort of stuff being touted around when, in fact, there *is* a solid consensus tend to get a bit antsy and start talking about how the consensus is actually quite strong and that the reason its so strong is because of, you know, all these data they and their colleages have painstakingly collected over the past however many years and had published in umpty dozen peer-reviewed articles...
Hence the appearance of websites like Real Climate and similar. Of course for those who are truly invested in the idea that global warming is a pile of hooey, this emphasis on the consensus position and so on is proof positive that those hippie, tree-hugging scientists are just scare-mongering because they Hate America or something.
Regards
Luke
There are fair quantities scattered over southern and central Iraq I believe. Various bits of the Balkans as well.
Regards
Luke
Yes. Although not if you live in the UK. Chances are you'll need the parka if/when the North Atlantic Current switches off, even if the rest of the planet is being griddled.
Regards
Luke
This is interesting because it implies that the data and analytical techniques to support such a paper either (a) do not exist, (b) have not been found yet or (c) are being supressed or overlooked in some way. I know a bunch of people hereabouts incline towards (c) but frankly, they are on crack; (b) was a respectable (indeed a responsible) position back in the 70s, 80s and into the 90s, but is increasingly implausible given the amount of work being in done in the area; which leaves (a).
Regards
Luke
I can't think of anyone with any remotely credible claim to being a scientist who would argue that CO2-is-a-greenhouse-gas wasn't as utterly obvious and trivially uncontentious as, for example, the assertion that glaciers once covered large swathes of Europe.
Regards
Luke
Hey Cally
Thanks for the public service. Your list of websites doesn't appear to have this site.
To my relatively ignorant eye is a useful compendium of various global warming questions along with links to the research underlying the answers put forward.
Regards
Luke
Regards
Luke
Your error lies in assuming that because the scientific consensus states that the current warming event is partly/largely anthropogenic it follows that the scientific consensus states that all the warming events we know about are partly/largely anthropogenic.
This is obviously a stupid proposition but, guess what, no climatologists make it. Yes, the climate has been warmer than now; yes, CO2 concentrations have been higher than now (sometimes much higher). Those warming and cooling events had nothing to do with anything we did, this one almost certainly does.
Regards
Luke
Having said that, atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently higher than at any time in the last half-million years or so and there is a well-established paleohistorical correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures that has been observed back for several millions of years at least (beyond that you have to start accounting for things like continental drift, so the comparisons get harder to make).
Furthermore the rate of increase is higher than it has been since at least the end of the last ice-age. This is key, since sudden changes are much harder to handle (both by our civilisation and by the ecological systems our civilisation depends upon). By way of comparison let us look at one of the fastest natural spikes in gobal temperatures that has been found so far - the LPTM (Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum) saw a 8 degree celcius increase in sea surface temperatures, yet produced no detectable change in the extinction rate (unlike the other significant temperature spike in the last 100 million years - the KT Boundary event - but then having pieces of the sky fall on your head generally a bad thing). Paleoclimatologists point to the fact that this rise took place over several thousand years as the probable reason for the relatively minor ecological impact the LPTM had.
Current climate models are predicting a similar rise as their worst-case scenario, but over decades/centuries rather centuries/millenia. That's an order of magnitude faster and climatologists expect this will lead to major qualitative differences in the second and third order effects of such a rise.
Yet the CO2 is in the atmosphere. You may think it is breathtakingly arrogant to ascribe such things to the eyeblink duration of our industrial civilisation, but absent the discovery of magic carbon pixies how do you account for it?
Regards
Luke
Regards
Luke
This is an excellent plan. With luck all of the really whacked out, extropian loony tunes will sign up for the leaking deathtra... err... libertarian utopia and will be well on their way to Davy Jones Locker the next time their local weather hits 9+ on the Beaufort Scale.
Not only that, but they'll take all the toxic rustbuckets that the US tried to ship over to Europe for decommissioning earlier in the year and pay actual money for the privilege! And they want a nuke as well... I'm sure the Russians have a couple or three they'd like to be shot of if they could be sure it was going to drop into a very deep ocean trench sometime in the near future. Everybody wins!
[Except for the extropian nutbars of course, but they'll have fun 'living the dream' before ugly reality intrudes in the shape of a cat 5 tropical storm.]
Regards
Luke
Corresponding numbers for the UK:
Income tax is progressive in 4 bands:
0% first £4,745
10% the next £1,960
22% £1,961-30,500
40% >£31,001
Then add:
11% for 'National Insurance' the notional levy that funds healthcare, pensions and unemployment payouts (up to a max income of ~£30,000, then down to 1% beyond that level).
Local property taxes - also highly variable. I paid about £1100 this year for a small place (hence cheaper) in London (hence expensive).
Sales taxes (actually VAT) of 17.5% - not on 'essentials' such as groceries which are zero-rated, but this is an ouch and often folded into posted prices, so less obvious than the equivalent imposts in the US.
There are lots of one-off duties and charges squirrelled away in various bits of the economy of course (sin taxes are popular over here, which includes gasoline these days) but the above are the headline items.
Regards
Luke
Ummmm no. Non-European combatants on the allied side far outstripped the pathetic fragments Germany mustered. Himmler managed to scrape together what, one SS regiment of Indians? The Commonwealth had more Nepalis under arms than that... part of an entire *army* from the subcontinent, plus significant formations recruited from elsewhere in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Same goes for France (SE Asia and North Africa) and the US (chiefly Filippinos).
Racisms come in many flavours and are culturally determined. The Nazis particular thing was mostly focused on Jews, Slavs and Gypsies (with a side helping of anti-black African prejudice but then pretty much everyone who is racist has it in for Africans, even other Africans) - strange to tell these were precisely the three ethnic 'others' that most Germans would have encountered with any kind of frequency in the first part of the C20th, so its entirely predictable that a political movement with race at the centre of its ideology would fixate upon them. I'm not sure where in the contorted hierarchy of Nazi racial theory the Japanese fell but they were sufficiently high up the totem pole (and more importantly, didn't pose any kind of geopolitical threat to the regime) that their non-Aryanness could be overlooked at least for the duration (all bets would have been off if the Axis had managed to win WW2 IMO). All this demonstrates however, is that Nazi racism was contingent, contradictory and that even the senior figures of the regime understood "my enemy's enemy is my friend".
Racism may well have had little to do with why the allies decided to go to the mattresses in WW2, but that doesn't mean that Nazi Germany wasn't a vicious racist dictatorship or that its viciousness and its racism (the one following from the other for the most part) weren't powerful factors in mobilising and cementing the alliance against the Axis once a war policy had been decided upon. So your argument that the racism of the Nazi regime had nothing to do with the causes of WW2 is a peverse misreading of history.
Regards
Luke
Interesting, but I have no mod points - sorry.
Do the states levy their own income taxes or do they subsist on property taxes, sales taxes and the like? I imagine some would and some won't. For those that do, how much would be representative?
Regards
Luke
Regasrds
Luke
I recall Jerry Pournelle getting very excited by the potential for ground-based laser back in the late 70s. Is any work being done on that or has it proven to be impractical?
Regards
Luke
Easter Island - already mentioned upthread.
Maya - C9th AD.
Salination of the Tigris/Euphrates flood-plain thanks to intensive over-irrigation.
Several chinese dynastic collapses seem to be linked to failure of irrigation systems (some dispute as to which way the causality runs in these events however). There are others, but off the top of my head I don't recall specific details.
There does seem to be a pattern where societies and civilisations to trade up the risk scale as they become more complex and sophisticated. Eg. by mobilising efforts upon irrigation works to handle the once-per-decade drought (rather than shifting out of agriculture to nomadic pastoralism in bad years) a village society ties themselves to the land in a way that means the once-per-century drought (that their irrigation efforts can't handle) results in an overwhelming calamity for them.
Regards
Luke
Karma bump for the AC.
The grandparent spent their post reiterating what the great-GP said in his first paragraph.
Regards
Luke
OK. Here's what I've got after a bit of googling on a quiet Friday afternoon.
Numbers match what I've found (2-2.5 million seems to be the range) average weight of 2.5 tons yup (which also chimes to the weight given elsewhere). I can't find anything to support the claim that many were over 20,000 tons, the highest weight I could find a reference for is 50 tons. Given that, who cares that the best cranes today can lift 3000t?
Agreed. Its a mighty big pile.
The numbers match 2.5 million blocks at an average of 2.5t each more or less - good to see that you're remaining internally consistent. However general archaeological estimates gives building times of about twenty years, based upon surveys of the worker's settlements, graveyards etc. There is indeed no evidence of anything approaching modern machinery or materials that dates back to the mid-third millenium BC.
Why the comparitives with the ESB? All I get from this is that industrial-era engineers can build a taller structure, using fewer materials, in much less time and using a smaller workforce. This is not news.
ITYM size at the base here. I've already agreed its a big structure and well laid out. So they could build on the square and to impressive tolerances, fine.
Cite? I'm not clear on what you're driving at with this.
Yes its big. We agree.
And yet when I google 'giza harmonically tuned' I get a page of links all spouting new age crap (frequently the same newage crap). Unless you can give me some pointers to people who aren't obsessed with crystals, chakras, massive subterranean cities or hitech precursor civilisations, this goes into my 'whacky ideas for the next time I play Call of Cthulhu' file.
The technological disparity between aborinals and invaders in any of the conquests of Britain was never as sharp as it was in the New World territories post-Columbus. Also Britain only really got motoring in the Great Power stakes once we realised that all this coal we had was useful for steam engines and factories. We had a few other good ideas in the run up (constitutional monarchy, religious toleration, maintaining a decent navy etc etc) but there were a fair few geographic realities underpinning the Industrial Revolution.
ITIYM post-war Japan here. They have indeed done very well since '45. Pre-45 of course they tried applying the US 'move the frontier West' lesson and failed dismally. This is what tends to happen when expand into territories held by industrial states rather than bands of nomadic barbarians.
Ummm. Alexander? Leaving aside the Macedonian as an aberration, there's all those Greek poloi along what is now the Turkish shore of the Agean and scattered across Southern Italy.
This would be because most of Australia is a desert perhaps? And that the good bits are on the far, far side of this desert (oh, plus the substantial fringe of rainforest and croc-infested swampland)? And that the maximum population that could realistically be supported is maybe a tenth of what the US currently has?
Canada - arctic terrain over the bulk of their territory and very small population. Mexico - not as geographically challenged as Canada but plentiful deserts and rainforests to cramp their style, also subject to predation by European powers and an aggressive northern neighbour. South America - their revolutionary generation failed disastrously, so instead of being allowed to prosper behind an oceanic bulwark they've had plenty of rivals and enemies close to hand (a nasty picture of what might have been the case for the US if the Federalists hadn't won the argument in the 1780s).
Look - I'm not denying that the social/political factors you've been talking about WRT the US play a role and that elsewhere advantages have been squandered or disadvantages overcome. It remains the case that the US has had some spectacular luck vis a vis their starting position in the Great Powers game. The US has undoubtedly compounded that luck with good choices and hard work, but it doesn't alter the fact that having a hundred year period to open up a continent's worth of territory and resources without being seriously bothered by any of the Great Powers of the day (other than providing a hefty chunk of the capital for said expansion that is) was extremely fortunate.
The interesting historical parallel is with the late Republic. We've had the two charismatic brothers felled by assassins of course - that was a generation ago, so I guess we're up to the early consulships of Marius by now (altho' I can't picture Dubya in the role somehow). We should be getting to the Social War in about 2015 or so. Then there's Slave Revolts, Sulla's proscriptions and it starts to get really ugly. Hmmm.
With any luck we'll get to Augustus by about the end of the century and then the main concern will be a loony Emperor every other generation or thereabouts, but so long as they restrict themselves to murdering other Beltway bandits in interesting and inventive ways the rest of us can be left to get on with our lives.
Regards
Luke
Firstly what sort of record would be deemed noteworthy of a Senator and, more importantly, recommend him as a candidate for the Presidency? I was talking to an American about the election a few weeks back and he pointed out that only two sitting Senators have ever been elected President. I have no idea who these two were or even if he was correct in his assertion, but I thought the inference he was drawing - that the deal-making that goes on in the senate leaves them too exposed or compromised to function effectively in a Presidential race - was an interesting one and probably puts a finger on part of the thinking behind the 'flip-flop' tactic that the GOP have adopted during the campaign.
My second question is related to the first. From what reading I've done about Kerry's time in the Senate he did a lot of the groundwork digging into the Iran-Contra mess back in the late 80s and that this preoccupation with the whole drugs/terrorism/intelligence nexus continued well into the 90s (he was an early voice calling for bin Laden and AQ to be taken seriously I believe). To my mind this is quite an impressive record - mostly unglamorous and behind the scenes but certainly worth mentioning; however the impression I've got is that this has had very little emphasis during the campaign - is it because this sort of commitee-based, 'holding the executive to account' type of activity is generally deprecated in the US? Not a proper activity for a legislator? Or is it just that it can't be fitted into a 10 second soundbite so gets ignored?
Regards
Luke