You do understand the China sells to everybody on the planet?
Yes, and the same goes for them as well - German Companies who make German Products for Germany in China, should pay their share of China's damage to the planet. And a German Company that makes things in China for France should split the cost with the French.
If you want to take your somewhat irrational argument to its logical conclusion, everybody is responsible for the mess China is in.
It's not irrational at all, I showed you the progression form NJ to Ohio to China. It's perfectly rational. your inability to understand it is what is irrational.
The U.S. buys a lot of Chinese goods, but given that dozens and dozens of other countries are selling their industrial self-sufficiency for a song, I won't allow you to lay all the responsibility at our feet.
You're being stupid. Sure: move the widget factory from China to Antarctica for all I care. It doesn't matter. The pollution being generated would NOT be generated if it wasn't for the socio-economic proclivities of the country buying the crap. So, yes it is at your feet. And the EU and the rest of the industrialised world. There is precisely one planet we can live on. Making a mess of it is a bad thing. If you pay someone else to make a mess of it, and would cheerfully pay yet another person ifthey work cheaper, the mess is YOUR problem, not that of the poor miserable illiterate slobs you're exploiting.
The reality is that China's government doesn't give a single goddamn about the lives of its people
And neither does a LONG list of American Client states. Don't shift the argument - I don't care about the superstructure of gov't forms, the only thing that matters is resource use and pollution as accomplished by some at the behest of others.
Your displaced guilt trip is really kind of hard to take.
And your wilful ignorance is an order of magnitude more distasteful.
It's actually american pollution. Just think it through. I own a company called Widgets Corp. and we make plastic widgets. The company, based in NYC, made these nasty polluting widgets in our factory in New Jersey. And for the most part, the sales were to people in the USA, as most other countries had local widget makers.
Well, times got tough, and to save money in the 1970s, we moved the widget factory to southern Ohio, closer to the coal in West Virginia which saved money in moving the corrosive plastic shit we make them out of and as noted, the coal used to power the mighty widget machine was right there in West Virginia. So, all the pollutants were being belched out of Ohio, killing the local rivers and dumping tons of pollution on the unemployed fuckers we left behind in NJ, and the the HQ in NYC, so as to make widgets for people in the USA.
So, is the pollution still American? Yes.
In the 1990s, we figured out we could save EVEN MORE money and we haul the whole bloody fucking mess to China, to use Chinese coal, and poop all the crap into their rivers, so they can then ship the widgets on a container ship to the USA for Americans to keep up with their widget collecting.
So, the HQ is in NYC, the stuff is sold in the USA, as the Chinese have no use for widgets and can make their own as they need. So, is it really Chinese pollution, or simply DISPLACED AMERICAN POLLUTION?
I would humbly submit that carbon bill be submitted to the buyer as well as the maker. And if Widget Corp is based in the USA and has the Chinese make widgets for the USA, then it is up to the USA to pay the carbon and pollution debt, not the Chinese. The Americans could easily pay for widgets sourced from less polluting chines ecompanies, but they don't because they just don't give a fuck - they're interested in the quarterly bottom line and shareholder dividends.
So, I frankly think that pollution wafting its way from the PRC to the USA only serves the Americans right, and they I think the chinese should can all their pollution and send it to the states (or whoever else hired them to make te crap in te first place) and be done with it.
This is not Chinese pollution. It is american pollution coming home where it belongs.
i thought the same thing. What do you bet the sun has a serious case of Helium constipation, and in a year or two, it's just going have a massive core flameover or something evil and fry the planet.
we will all have to run! where, I have no idea. But RUN!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!
put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, write the address, and walk to the fucking mail box next to the bus stop where I board 5 days a week to go to work.
It's not like it's some great huge pain in the ass. It takes all of maybe 20 minutes a month. I pay the mortgage, hydro, gas, credit card, and phone bill. Pretty simple, really. I don't see much advantage to automated systems.
as some one noted, (thanks!) I wasn't trolling, I was making a joke. did you ever go to an airshow? You look UP all the time and your neck hurts. See? It's a PAIN IN THE NECK. Fuck - you people have zero sense of humour sometimes. Was it knock down drag out funny? No, but I thought it was clever, and did it in like 5 seconds...
This instrument is so sensitive it should allow the detection very low levels of microbial life on Mars, and will determine its phylogenetic position by analysis of the DNA sequence of the genes detected in situ.
So, what makes them think that a DNA based creature from MARS is going to be in any particular phylum that we know and/or can comprehend?
The tone of your post sets yourself up for people to call you a hypocrite.
No, I do not practice what I preach because I am not the kind of person I am preaching to.
If you're looking to make change to the world, it will have to be in small steps.
any changes anyone makes are of no consequence. We are deeply into overshoot, and as soon as our energy diet declines, we will see the die off begin. If you are less than 30 years old, you will probably be part of the first major stages of it as either a victim or a witness.
Fuel cells can help wean us off of oil,
You don't need to be weened off oil. The development of the third world and the oil producing nations will decimate the oil trade, and oil importing nations will lose out. It's called the "Export Land Model". Look it up.
Then even the exporters will cease exporting and the declines will begin in earnest, as will the dying. you think people starving thanks to the manufacture of ethanol is nasty, wait until the soil is devastated from lack of fertiliser for 15 years.
Backlash doesn't matter. This isn't a political issue. This is a fact of Geology and the second law of thermodynamics. It would be like protesting against the law of gravity or el Nino or Sunspots. What you want doesn't matter. And the more we dither about nonsense like fuel cells, what you NEED will begin to not matter, also.
I don't like it. I'm not happy about it. It's just facts. Facts are facts.
1. "Communist regimes" are as guilty of this as any capitalist nation - it's not the political system that's the problem, it's the material expression of civilisation. The earth doesn't give a rats ass about your political stance. But when you go dumping tons of crap into the air and oceans, there are direct consequences which the planet will cheerfully dole out whether you like it or not.
2. As competing systems to capitalism have failed, capitalism and its mantra of growth are now front and centre responsible for the disaster.
3. The ends of the poles are madness, true, but the pole itself is also madness, and that's what you're not getting. The whole entire deal is rotten, unsustainable and destined to collapse and be forgotten.
So before you all go rushing off to buy your fuel cell cars to shlep you to your job enabling the mindless consumption of resources and goods, kindly apprise yourself of how utterly devastating your every choice is upon the planet.
A major failure of capitalist economics is its discounting of the future - it works to maximise immediate profits, but when applied to resource management, it necessarily entails ecocide.
So, sure: get in with the hydrogen economy, and push the species over the cliff. We're already well into overshoot, and fuel cells are just the first of what will prove to be many failed attempts at sustianing the unsustainable.
Now, a much more useful metric in my mind is "percentage of total company sales spent on IT". I think it's about 2% for this company (though again, definitions of "IT" are tricky). I've heard that 5% is a more typical number for most companies in the US, speaking across a broad range of industries. Anyone know a source for more concrete numbers?
I disagree. You can farm out your IT to some third world hell hole and bring your percentage WAY down, but you end up with variable quality issues, legacy issues, all kinds of problems - and if they're on the other side of the planet, you need to have a daily dev cycle that makes sense. The other problem comes in with testing. So, you could reduce it to some miniscule ratio, but result with mission critical failures.
The solution is quality and rational intelligent work.
excellent post. I never liked Flash, and I am happy to see it die - but: how does one work the kinds of things flash does, without flash? And if you say "environment x" how is that environment available and explainable to people such that it has the learning curve AND the functionality of Flash? Flash's UI is a nauseating piece of shit that was craptastic right out of the gate. Adobe's done a lot of work to improve it, so now we have a pig covered in lipstick. It still sucks. However, one can do very poweful things, quickly, and without resortign to much code. Does environment (x) have the UI so that people can get their work done quickly and easily? If not, then the geeks in Adobe will start blasting the pig with liposuction and hair extensions and it will start to look like Amy Winehouse, only sober. And willing to eat table scraps. But it will still be a PIG.
And, as it is, I already ride my bike or walk to work. However, there are millions of people who are not in my position to do so, and given te sunk cost of building the burbs in the first place, it only makes sense to use them via telecommuting.
Of course, most of those houses are built out of crap, so they might last as long as their mortgage. But shortly thereafter, they will tend to self-disintegrate, and living such distances will be uneconomic, even for the poor, and they will revert to what they were: farms.
In the meantime, asshole, don't be so presumptuous.
Fact: Oil production peaked in May 2005
Fact: demand for Oil has continued to go up
Fact: the USA invaded Iraq for oil
Fact: Russia was happy to beat the crap out of the stupid Georgians so they could control the pipleline.
Fact: as oil depletes, gas will go up and down in price, but will trend upwards. Forever.
We don't have much choice. We need to insist on telecommuting and we need to make our computers and devices out of something other than oil and exotic materials.
iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?"
Yeah, sure - and when powerbooks were going off like poprocks and Dells were self incinerating like no tomorrow, did we ban them fro maircraft? No. Why? Wiser heads prevailed. If we went with "iminplaya"'s idea, the next thing you know - "Hey gramps - no batteries on board." "But they power my pacemaker!!!" Obviously, since unterfuhrer Cheney has a pacemaker, that would never happen...
The RIAA sez:
Hey, you fuck. So's like yer gonna pay up cuz like it would suck if me and the boyz took you ta court and sued your ass. It would be like really expensive, and we're willin' ta do it, so like just FORK OVER THE FUCKIN MONEY ASSHOLE and we'll let ya go. Just pay up, so we can live like we likes ta live and everything'll be just fine - ya got that?
The Ontario government has GM and Ford's dick so far up it's ass, it is all but impossible to get an electric car registered in Ontario.
It's a total piss off, and indicates the degree of cranio-rectal inversion present in the provincial government. We even have an electric car company (Zenn Motors) but we can't buy their CARS!!!
Pathetic bunch of cowardly shitbags at the top, standing in the way, as usual. And it's not like it's a Liberal v conservative v NDP v Green problem. The Greens are good to go, but the other three parties are too busy getting fucked by the car companies and the auto workers unions.
They would walk around the halls with their fist at their waists, and heads looking upward and off to the side and periodically bark nonsense like:
I'm Captain John Doe of... (then look off in the other direction) THE CYBER COMMAND!!!!
When people from other parts of the building would ask them - "hey where do you guys work?" They would, in unison, put their fist at their waists, look up to the left and say "We work for..." and then look in the other direction and shout "CYBER COMMAND!!!!"
And then promptly burst into fits of giggling...
The whole idea was so stupid they couldn't stand themselves - it was like Buck Rogers without the cool costumes. They all knew the Real Heavy Lifting was being done at the NSA, and this was just an offshoot of the White House being a bunch of paranoid dicks who didn't trust the Pentagon brass, especially after they consistently scolded the WH upon retiring - combined with forces within the Air Force looking for relevance when clearly the future belongs to drones.
Other than mobile airbases (ACC's) I don't even understand why you need people on boats, for the most part... The only military than can't be replaced with machines and "at a distance" command is infantry.
OK: Marge gets abducted by aliens. They bang her six ways to Xmas, and release her back to Homer et al. She is now pregnant with alien spawn, and when she finds out it's an Alien a la the movie Alien, she is not looking forward to the delivery date, much les shave some nasty lizard punch out of her chest. So she has an abortion, with the notion that it is murder, "But murder in self defense! I don't want some crittur growing inside me! Eeeeww!"
Hey, dickwad - I'm not in Europe. Oh, and by the way - the USA doesn't run the world anymore either, so get over it, fuckwit. How you got an interesting and I got a flamebait, I'll never understand.
US does not target the innocent â" when we kill them, it is by a tragic mistake, a major failure. Terrorists do target them â" the "decapitated mothers" means success for them, and a cause for celebrations.
It sure as hell does target the innocents. Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11, had NO weapons of mass destruction, and was NO threat to the USA. Therefore, ANY deaths of Iraqis have been murder, pure and simple, at the hands of an imperial agressor hell bent for leather to take the country's vast oil reserves and turn them over to the gangsters who run the Oil corporations.
If the USA had simply left Iraq alone, none of these "innocent" people would have died, nore would the other 600,000 from the invasion and occupation and resulting civil war, nor would there be millions of refugees scattered all over the region.
So, don't give me this hair splitting malarky about how the US military doesn't target civilians, because it certainly as hell targeted a nation it had no business invading, period.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to take your somewhat irrational argument to its logical conclusion, everybody is responsible for the mess China is in.
It's not irrational at all, I showed you the progression form NJ to Ohio to China. It's perfectly rational. your inability to understand it is what is irrational.
The U.S. buys a lot of Chinese goods, but given that dozens and dozens of other countries are selling their industrial self-sufficiency for a song, I won't allow you to lay all the responsibility at our feet.
You're being stupid. Sure: move the widget factory from China to Antarctica for all I care. It doesn't matter. The pollution being generated would NOT be generated if it wasn't for the socio-economic proclivities of the country buying the crap. So, yes it is at your feet. And the EU and the rest of the industrialised world. There is precisely one planet we can live on. Making a mess of it is a bad thing. If you pay someone else to make a mess of it, and would cheerfully pay yet another person ifthey work cheaper, the mess is YOUR problem, not that of the poor miserable illiterate slobs you're exploiting.
The reality is that China's government doesn't give a single goddamn about the lives of its people
And neither does a LONG list of American Client states. Don't shift the argument - I don't care about the superstructure of gov't forms, the only thing that matters is resource use and pollution as accomplished by some at the behest of others.
Your displaced guilt trip is really kind of hard to take.
And your wilful ignorance is an order of magnitude more distasteful.
RS
So, I frankly think that pollution wafting its way from the PRC to the USA only serves the Americans right, and they I think the chinese should can all their pollution and send it to the states (or whoever else hired them to make te crap in te first place) and be done with it. This is not Chinese pollution. It is american pollution coming home where it belongs.
we will all have to run! where, I have no idea. But RUN!!! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!
RS
It's not like it's some great huge pain in the ass. It takes all of maybe 20 minutes a month. I pay the mortgage, hydro, gas, credit card, and phone bill. Pretty simple, really. I don't see much advantage to automated systems.
RS
as some one noted, (thanks!) I wasn't trolling, I was making a joke. did you ever go to an airshow? You look UP all the time and your neck hurts. See? It's a PAIN IN THE NECK. Fuck - you people have zero sense of humour sometimes. Was it knock down drag out funny? No, but I thought it was clever, and did it in like 5 seconds...
Little things zooming around up in the sky. Sounds like a pain in the neck to me.
So, what makes them think that a DNA based creature from MARS is going to be in any particular phylum that we know and/or can comprehend?
RS
And your blind industrialism will only make us all prematurely extinct, and make your grandchildren's lives utterly miserable in the meantime.
The tone of your post sets yourself up for people to call you a hypocrite.
No, I do not practice what I preach because I am not the kind of person I am preaching to.
If you're looking to make change to the world, it will have to be in small steps.
any changes anyone makes are of no consequence. We are deeply into overshoot, and as soon as our energy diet declines, we will see the die off begin. If you are less than 30 years old, you will probably be part of the first major stages of it as either a victim or a witness.
Fuel cells can help wean us off of oil,
You don't need to be weened off oil. The development of the third world and the oil producing nations will decimate the oil trade, and oil importing nations will lose out. It's called the "Export Land Model". Look it up.
Then even the exporters will cease exporting and the declines will begin in earnest, as will the dying. you think people starving thanks to the manufacture of ethanol is nasty, wait until the soil is devastated from lack of fertiliser for 15 years.
Backlash doesn't matter. This isn't a political issue. This is a fact of Geology and the second law of thermodynamics. It would be like protesting against the law of gravity or el Nino or Sunspots. What you want doesn't matter. And the more we dither about nonsense like fuel cells, what you NEED will begin to not matter, also.
I don't like it. I'm not happy about it. It's just facts. Facts are facts.
RS
1. "Communist regimes" are as guilty of this as any capitalist nation - it's not the political system that's the problem, it's the material expression of civilisation. The earth doesn't give a rats ass about your political stance. But when you go dumping tons of crap into the air and oceans, there are direct consequences which the planet will cheerfully dole out whether you like it or not. 2. As competing systems to capitalism have failed, capitalism and its mantra of growth are now front and centre responsible for the disaster. 3. The ends of the poles are madness, true, but the pole itself is also madness, and that's what you're not getting. The whole entire deal is rotten, unsustainable and destined to collapse and be forgotten.
There is nothing Green or Sustainable about Industrial Society, or even civilisation itself, as all such efforts entail the inevitable draw down and destruction of irreplaceable natural resources.
So before you all go rushing off to buy your fuel cell cars to shlep you to your job enabling the mindless consumption of resources and goods, kindly apprise yourself of how utterly devastating your every choice is upon the planet.
A major failure of capitalist economics is its discounting of the future - it works to maximise immediate profits, but when applied to resource management, it necessarily entails ecocide.
So, sure: get in with the hydrogen economy, and push the species over the cliff. We're already well into overshoot, and fuel cells are just the first of what will prove to be many failed attempts at sustianing the unsustainable.
I disagree. You can farm out your IT to some third world hell hole and bring your percentage WAY down, but you end up with variable quality issues, legacy issues, all kinds of problems - and if they're on the other side of the planet, you need to have a daily dev cycle that makes sense. The other problem comes in with testing. So, you could reduce it to some miniscule ratio, but result with mission critical failures.
The solution is quality and rational intelligent work.
RS
I look forward to your reply.
cheers, RS
I live in Canada, where it snows a lot, asshole.
And, as it is, I already ride my bike or walk to work. However, there are millions of people who are not in my position to do so, and given te sunk cost of building the burbs in the first place, it only makes sense to use them via telecommuting.
Of course, most of those houses are built out of crap, so they might last as long as their mortgage. But shortly thereafter, they will tend to self-disintegrate, and living such distances will be uneconomic, even for the poor, and they will revert to what they were: farms.
In the meantime, asshole, don't be so presumptuous.
RS
Fact: demand for Oil has continued to go up
Fact: the USA invaded Iraq for oil
Fact: Russia was happy to beat the crap out of the stupid Georgians so they could control the pipleline.
Fact: as oil depletes, gas will go up and down in price, but will trend upwards. Forever.
We don't have much choice. We need to insist on telecommuting and we need to make our computers and devices out of something other than oil and exotic materials.
Otherwise, game over.
RS
Yeah, sure - and when powerbooks were going off like poprocks and Dells were self incinerating like no tomorrow, did we ban them fro maircraft? No. Why? Wiser heads prevailed. If we went with "iminplaya"'s idea, the next thing you know - "Hey gramps - no batteries on board." "But they power my pacemaker!!!" Obviously, since unterfuhrer Cheney has a pacemaker, that would never happen...
iminplaya's risk assessment skills are for crap.
RS
RS
It's a total piss off, and indicates the degree of cranio-rectal inversion present in the provincial government. We even have an electric car company (Zenn Motors) but we can't buy their CARS!!!
Pathetic bunch of cowardly shitbags at the top, standing in the way, as usual. And it's not like it's a Liberal v conservative v NDP v Green problem. The Greens are good to go, but the other three parties are too busy getting fucked by the car companies and the auto workers unions.
Utterly depressing.
RS
RS
Sorry. couldn't resist...
RS
I'm Captain John Doe of... (then look off in the other direction) THE CYBER COMMAND!!!!
When people from other parts of the building would ask them - "hey where do you guys work?" They would, in unison, put their fist at their waists, look up to the left and say "We work for..." and then look in the other direction and shout "CYBER COMMAND!!!!"
And then promptly burst into fits of giggling...
The whole idea was so stupid they couldn't stand themselves - it was like Buck Rogers without the cool costumes. They all knew the Real Heavy Lifting was being done at the NSA, and this was just an offshoot of the White House being a bunch of paranoid dicks who didn't trust the Pentagon brass, especially after they consistently scolded the WH upon retiring - combined with forces within the Air Force looking for relevance when clearly the future belongs to drones.
Other than mobile airbases (ACC's) I don't even understand why you need people on boats, for the most part... The only military than can't be replaced with machines and "at a distance" command is infantry.
CYBER COMMAND!!!!
BWAHAHAAAAAA...
RS
OK: Marge gets abducted by aliens. They bang her six ways to Xmas, and release her back to Homer et al. She is now pregnant with alien spawn, and when she finds out it's an Alien a la the movie Alien, she is not looking forward to the delivery date, much les shave some nasty lizard punch out of her chest. So she has an abortion, with the notion that it is murder, "But murder in self defense! I don't want some crittur growing inside me! Eeeeww!"
RS
You're the one who posted AC. Dickwad.
Hey, dickwad - I'm not in Europe. Oh, and by the way - the USA doesn't run the world anymore either, so get over it, fuckwit. How you got an interesting and I got a flamebait, I'll never understand.
It sure as hell does target the innocents. Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11, had NO weapons of mass destruction, and was NO threat to the USA. Therefore, ANY deaths of Iraqis have been murder, pure and simple, at the hands of an imperial agressor hell bent for leather to take the country's vast oil reserves and turn them over to the gangsters who run the Oil corporations.
If the USA had simply left Iraq alone, none of these "innocent" people would have died, nore would the other 600,000 from the invasion and occupation and resulting civil war, nor would there be millions of refugees scattered all over the region.
So, don't give me this hair splitting malarky about how the US military doesn't target civilians, because it certainly as hell targeted a nation it had no business invading, period.
RS