Switzerland has gotten rich by allowing criminally obtained money to be stored in it's banks
And so did every single person who ever sold anything to a criminal, ever.
refusing to cooperate with the authorities of nations from where it was obtained illegally.
When do they do that ? Seems to me from the news that they've pretty much always cooperated with other countries in order to freeze criminals' assets, when their judicial system is provided with sufficient proof of the crimes. As detailed here:
However, Swiss bank secrecy is not absolute and offers no protection to criminals. It is lifted in all criminal proceedings, including cases involving money laundering, corruption, insider trading, manipulation of stock exchange rates and tax fraud (which targets acts of commission and not omission, that is, forged documents - such as false invoices, false accounts or false balance sheets - which have been used to deceive the tax authorities).
On the topic of 'tax evasion': to think it wrong that swiss banks refuse to cooperate with US authorities when the US try to apply their own standards of "taxation by nationality" rather than "taxation by residence" standards of all of Europe and most of the world, makes as little sense as demands that adulterous women residing in the US be stoned to death at the demand of Saudi authorities.
As a french citizen I'm not so sure their choice is that ridiculous. You wouldn't believe the number of people here who seriously believe that Switzerland is sitting on "massive french tax-evaded riches", just because the government implied it over and over as it was doing all it could to avoid bankruptcy. We have worker unions who, in 1991, were caught piling up automatic rifles and ammunition in preparation for a coup, yet did not get any punishment for that. We have double-digit percentage of voters going to overtly revolutionary communist candidates. And there's much more of that sort going on everyday as normal...
Living in France is like living in Ionesco's Rhinoceros play.
Even better, black holes are time-stasis bubbles. Studying them from a spacetime metric POV and adding entropy considerations make for a fascinating journey.
Given the landscape of the gaming industry, the console-dumbing-down of games, the "next-gen" consoles rivaling in unattractiveness, the Nintendo sorry state of affairs, etc. the only thing Valve has to absolutely do to succeed, is just this: don't flunk it.
For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results. Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ? Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.
You're right that we are more vindicative and aren't prone to political apathy, but it's clearly not helping when it's radical politicians who stand to be the only beneficiaries. If I were to summarize the mainstream french political sentiment, it would seem completely schizophrenic: - we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase, - we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news, - we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.
I'm pretty sure some of it will sound familiar to Americans.
Well there is a massive export of brainpower underway, which has been ongoing for years: lately it seems that anyone who can expatriate does. Of the half dozen friends I kept in touch with since college, I am the only one who has not yet moved abroad, though I'm now looking for a job in Switzerland. The yearly canadian quotas of french immigrates are expended in mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. Swiss companies have started discriminating against cross-border candidates ("Swiss residency mandatory" is increasingly common in job ads). The economic crisis has worsened this situation, just like with Spain.
Letting anyone study anything is what we do here in France: public universities do not have admission exams nor selection process, their only limit enforced is their total capacity. The result is that the selection process is simply post-poned.
For example in medical universities, the real admission exam is at the end of first year instead of being at the start (if you've seen the movie The Adversary, the protagonist is noted for having redone the first year of medical university twelve times in a row, and never bothered attending the exam, until he simply faked being a MD).
A sick side effect is that for many studies (liberal arts ?) the selection is post-poned until after graduation, when those people enter the job market for the first time. We have lots and lots of students in litterary, artistic, sports and historical studies, lots more than jobs in those domains, while sectors like restaurants, tourism and construction have a hard time finding workforce. Tuition fees are heavily subsidised so universities benefit from keeping students as long as they can, students don't face any real test beyond what is enough to maintain the school's reputation, so all too often they pursue studies not as a step into a lifetime project, but rather as a passing interest, intellectual endeavours are highly regarded while anything to do with manual labor, entrepreneurship or commercial operations is dismissed as being much less prestigious ; and then the students are left on their own to face the hard cold reality of the marketplace.
Another consequence is that there are many people who are overqualified but inexperienced competing for jobs that require no specific qualifications, which often means having no diploma = no job at all, further inciting young people to get into college - any college that will have room left. As a result we spend less per student compared to neighbouring countries, and we may well have the most over-diplomed unemployed people on Earth, and the most professionally miserable employed people of the planet - doctors in all kinds of subjects, people with university baggage worthy of a college teacher, even engineers with high technical skills, and whose best career prospects are flipping burgers, managing office menial paperwork or, for the lucky few, teaching in junior high school.
Thanks for missing my point entirely. Let's retry.
I completely agree with you that "less calories stored = losing weight", and that wherever there is thinning observed it will be linked to a more favourable balance between calories in and calories out. I'm not trying to contest thermodynamics.
My point is that it works the other way to that you infer incorrectly from the link between the two.
In my mind it's just one symptom of the cancer of lawyers infesting the body public. Class action laywers have given up even the pretense of giving their clients a coupon for a discount toward their opponent's products in settlement as justification for their disproportionate share of the penalty, and now collect without compensating the victims at all. In cases like Prenda they generate their own plaintiffs, respondents and misdeeds to generate profits out of whole cloth.
The sad fact that victims don't get compensated over damages is plain unacceptable, but like the existence of copyright privileges and the ongoing mob-racket of random people suspected of using filesharing services, it's a consequence of normative inflation, or runaway legislation (some might call it lawrrhea). The more complex right and law is, the more costly (in efforts, knowledge, time spent and capital expense) it is to stay out of trouble. This situation artificially creates a market for more and more lawyers, so it's no surprise there are some who take advantage of it, whether prosecuting or defending.
So, make no mistake: the cancer started in the Houses. It merely metastasized across economy from there.
I do not see how imposing tax levels upwards of 100% in some cases, as was the case for quite a few businesses in occupied countries, can be construed to "favoring big business". Also, what you call "support right-wing military" was simple welfare, like pensions for widows and orphans of soldiers. That too is purely left-wing.
Saying "It's the thermodynamics" does not help understand the process at all, it's just a restatement of its end result. "You are getting fatter" is nothing but a paraphrase of "your body is accruing calories", and holds zero insight. It does not explain why cows can be selectively bred to be fatter or leaner, it doesn't explain lipodystrophies - especially the progressive forms where only half of the body gets obese. That's why trying to get lean by eating less works so poorly: it has little to no impact on the underlying cause.
And so, in the end, it's really the customers that the thieves did fark over, weighted inversely against the efficiency of these customers' bank's security. This is exactly like how, with welfare states, net wealth transfers are averaging to the base amount of voluntary contribution to the wealth pool by participants, minus the losses of doing the transfers ; and at the individual scale those net effects are weighted against the participant's competitive advantage at being a recipient and at avoiding being a contributor. Same mechanics, same dubious morality, same usual victims.
We (as in, we users of the Internet) should not be so reliant on a single entity's web services, just as we (as computer users) are not reliant on a single entity's OS. Guess what, you can participate in a decentralised web search engine right away, with project YaCy, by running a node on your computer(s). There are very few nodes at the moment given the potential, and the search will only get better as more people join.
Let's say the UK lodges a formal complaint against the USA in the UN, being a security council member and all that shizzle. I'm pretty sure Russia and China would condemn the drone attack fiercely, just as they have condemned other foreign interventions by the US time and again, but that wouldn't get them far as the USA is also a member and can veto any penalty.
At the EU level though, most countries would side with the UK: at a baser level, the UK could expel US diplomatic personnel (and jail the spies), cease cooperation with US federal services for fiscal and criminal stuff, maybe become more stringent about US citizens' entry into the country. What about denying fly-over for any US airplane ? What about extending that ban all over Europe ? That would be a major inconvenience, especially for military operations. Same with maritime access... that could cripple US exports and imports really fast (just as it would cripple Europe's, sure). What about cancelling the 2003 extradition treaty ?
And then there's the population's attitude towards US citizens and representatives. As a french resident I still remember how french people were sometimes (mis)treated while in the US during the whole "freedom fries, must bomb Iraq" nonsense. I don't wish that on anyone.
That particular advice was for getting to Heaven's realm in this life. Otherwise, to get to it in the afterlife, he said you'd just have to obey the Ten (twelve ?) Commandments.
There is hardly anything new in here to see, except maybe for a new take on jet tip rotor.
Jet-tip rotor helicopters are old technology, especially in France where the only successful model of such an helicopter, the Sud Ouest SO.1221 "Djinn", has been designed and commercialized over 50 years ago.
Jet tip rotors had a lot of issues, from the thrust-control, failure-mitigation and temperature-control mechanisms that have to fight the huge centrifugal force at the end of blades, to the poor autorotation performance and, mainly, to the difficulty of designing reliable multi-engine configurations which pretty much limits this technology to small helicopters (and over-land operation only). Additionnally, a lot more power is lost in the compression and transport system than in a conventional gearing system, which eats away quickly any weight-saving. For one, the Djinn had double the fuel consumption of a similar-size chopper. That's why they disappeared.
Here, the Sagita's description from the article claims that the two contrarotating main rotors are driven by a pair of turbines which are driven by a compressor which is itself driven by the main engine and its turbine. That makes it a hybrid between a conventional turboprop helicopter where a turbine in the engine drives the main rotor through a gearbox, and a jet tipped helicopter where the engine's turbine drives a compressor which blows air (usually with added combustion, as in the ramjet-tip configuration used on the Djinn) through the rotor's blade tips.
In a way, it can be understood as the application to helicopters of a somewhat modern-ish turbopropeller tech used in airplanes, where different sets of turbines each drive the main propeller and the engine's inner compressor at different rotation rates. However, in an airplane this design is streamlined and integrates in a very straight-forward way inside the engine because the main propeller IS the "additional compressor", whereas on the Sagita, the main rotors are not aligned nor even integrated with the main engine, requiring a whole compressor added to the mix. That implies more mass, more complexity and some transmission losses that mitigate the efficiency of the whole thing, so I doubt their efficiency gains figures.
Slashdot Mirror
And so did every single person who ever sold anything to a criminal, ever.
When do they do that ? Seems to me from the news that they've pretty much always cooperated with other countries in order to freeze criminals' assets, when their judicial system is provided with sufficient proof of the crimes. As detailed here:
On the topic of 'tax evasion': to think it wrong that swiss banks refuse to cooperate with US authorities when the US try to apply their own standards of "taxation by nationality" rather than "taxation by residence" standards of all of Europe and most of the world, makes as little sense as demands that adulterous women residing in the US be stoned to death at the demand of Saudi authorities.
Yes it was. Someone building up riches in one place does not cause some other guy in another place to suddendly lose his.
As a french citizen I'm not so sure their choice is that ridiculous. You wouldn't believe the number of people here who seriously believe that Switzerland is sitting on "massive french tax-evaded riches", just because the government implied it over and over as it was doing all it could to avoid bankruptcy. We have worker unions who, in 1991, were caught piling up automatic rifles and ammunition in preparation for a coup, yet did not get any punishment for that. We have double-digit percentage of voters going to overtly revolutionary communist candidates. And there's much more of that sort going on everyday as normal...
Living in France is like living in Ionesco's Rhinoceros play.
Even better, black holes are time-stasis bubbles. Studying them from a spacetime metric POV and adding entropy considerations make for a fascinating journey.
Given the landscape of the gaming industry, the console-dumbing-down of games, the "next-gen" consoles rivaling in unattractiveness, the Nintendo sorry state of affairs, etc. the only thing Valve has to absolutely do to succeed, is just this: don't flunk it.
Wolf3D was the first FPS I ever played, sure, but it was Doom they went and made a movie out of instead.
We will eventually make machines be better than us at everything we do.
And thus achieving a more perfect Bureaucracy for all. Amen.
Wouldn't that be the communication stones from Stargate lore ?
For all the overqualification we get "on paper", we french still have the poorest understanding of economics in the entire OECD, and it shows in the polls and election results. Where else in the western world can there be overtly authoritarian communist candidates to the presidency or representative elections raking in a two-digit percentage of voters ? Defiance towards politicians is on a all-time high in France, yet they are the ones we turn to in order to fix all our problems.
You're right that we are more vindicative and aren't prone to political apathy, but it's clearly not helping when it's radical politicians who stand to be the only beneficiaries. If I were to summarize the mainstream french political sentiment, it would seem completely schizophrenic:
- we want more money individually, but do not want prices to inflate nor income discrepancies to increase,
- we want to determine our lives and be free of bureaucracy yet clamor for more government regulation with every bad news,
- we want more public expenses but do not want to deprive the private sector of the funds it needs to create jobs and wealth.
I'm pretty sure some of it will sound familiar to Americans.
Well there is a massive export of brainpower underway, which has been ongoing for years: lately it seems that anyone who can expatriate does. Of the half dozen friends I kept in touch with since college, I am the only one who has not yet moved abroad, though I'm now looking for a job in Switzerland. The yearly canadian quotas of french immigrates are expended in mere hours instead of the weeks or months it used to take. Swiss companies have started discriminating against cross-border candidates ("Swiss residency mandatory" is increasingly common in job ads). The economic crisis has worsened this situation, just like with Spain.
Letting anyone study anything is what we do here in France: public universities do not have admission exams nor selection process, their only limit enforced is their total capacity. The result is that the selection process is simply post-poned.
For example in medical universities, the real admission exam is at the end of first year instead of being at the start (if you've seen the movie The Adversary, the protagonist is noted for having redone the first year of medical university twelve times in a row, and never bothered attending the exam, until he simply faked being a MD).
A sick side effect is that for many studies (liberal arts ?) the selection is post-poned until after graduation, when those people enter the job market for the first time. We have lots and lots of students in litterary, artistic, sports and historical studies, lots more than jobs in those domains, while sectors like restaurants, tourism and construction have a hard time finding workforce. Tuition fees are heavily subsidised so universities benefit from keeping students as long as they can, students don't face any real test beyond what is enough to maintain the school's reputation, so all too often they pursue studies not as a step into a lifetime project, but rather as a passing interest, intellectual endeavours are highly regarded while anything to do with manual labor, entrepreneurship or commercial operations is dismissed as being much less prestigious ; and then the students are left on their own to face the hard cold reality of the marketplace.
Another consequence is that there are many people who are overqualified but inexperienced competing for jobs that require no specific qualifications, which often means having no diploma = no job at all, further inciting young people to get into college - any college that will have room left. As a result we spend less per student compared to neighbouring countries, and we may well have the most over-diplomed unemployed people on Earth, and the most professionally miserable employed people of the planet - doctors in all kinds of subjects, people with university baggage worthy of a college teacher, even engineers with high technical skills, and whose best career prospects are flipping burgers, managing office menial paperwork or, for the lucky few, teaching in junior high school.
Thanks for missing my point entirely. Let's retry.
I completely agree with you that "less calories stored = losing weight", and that wherever there is thinning observed it will be linked to a more favourable balance between calories in and calories out. I'm not trying to contest thermodynamics.
My point is that it works the other way to that you infer incorrectly from the link between the two.
The sad fact that victims don't get compensated over damages is plain unacceptable, but like the existence of copyright privileges and the ongoing mob-racket of random people suspected of using filesharing services, it's a consequence of normative inflation, or runaway legislation (some might call it lawrrhea). The more complex right and law is, the more costly (in efforts, knowledge, time spent and capital expense) it is to stay out of trouble. This situation artificially creates a market for more and more lawyers, so it's no surprise there are some who take advantage of it, whether prosecuting or defending.
So, make no mistake: the cancer started in the Houses. It merely metastasized across economy from there.
I do not see how imposing tax levels upwards of 100% in some cases, as was the case for quite a few businesses in occupied countries, can be construed to "favoring big business". Also, what you call "support right-wing military" was simple welfare, like pensions for widows and orphans of soldiers. That too is purely left-wing.
No, they are not. Americans are consuming less calories and exercising more yet they are getting fatter.
Saying "It's the thermodynamics" does not help understand the process at all, it's just a restatement of its end result. "You are getting fatter" is nothing but a paraphrase of "your body is accruing calories", and holds zero insight. It does not explain why cows can be selectively bred to be fatter or leaner, it doesn't explain lipodystrophies - especially the progressive forms where only half of the body gets obese. That's why trying to get lean by eating less works so poorly: it has little to no impact on the underlying cause.
Stop giving toads such a bad reputation, thanks.
And so, in the end, it's really the customers that the thieves did fark over, weighted inversely against the efficiency of these customers' bank's security. This is exactly like how, with welfare states, net wealth transfers are averaging to the base amount of voluntary contribution to the wealth pool by participants, minus the losses of doing the transfers ; and at the individual scale those net effects are weighted against the participant's competitive advantage at being a recipient and at avoiding being a contributor. Same mechanics, same dubious morality, same usual victims.
We (as in, we users of the Internet) should not be so reliant on a single entity's web services, just as we (as computer users) are not reliant on a single entity's OS. Guess what, you can participate in a decentralised web search engine right away, with project YaCy, by running a node on your computer(s). There are very few nodes at the moment given the potential, and the search will only get better as more people join.
Yes they were. And merely blabbering "no they were not" with zero argument won't somehow magically unmake them.
Let's see...
Let's say the UK lodges a formal complaint against the USA in the UN, being a security council member and all that shizzle. I'm pretty sure Russia and China would condemn the drone attack fiercely, just as they have condemned other foreign interventions by the US time and again, but that wouldn't get them far as the USA is also a member and can veto any penalty.
At the EU level though, most countries would side with the UK: at a baser level, the UK could expel US diplomatic personnel (and jail the spies), cease cooperation with US federal services for fiscal and criminal stuff, maybe become more stringent about US citizens' entry into the country. What about denying fly-over for any US airplane ? What about extending that ban all over Europe ? That would be a major inconvenience, especially for military operations. Same with maritime access... that could cripple US exports and imports really fast (just as it would cripple Europe's, sure). What about cancelling the 2003 extradition treaty ?
And then there's the population's attitude towards US citizens and representatives. As a french resident I still remember how french people were sometimes (mis)treated while in the US during the whole "freedom fries, must bomb Iraq" nonsense. I don't wish that on anyone.
That particular advice was for getting to Heaven's realm in this life. Otherwise, to get to it in the afterlife, he said you'd just have to obey the Ten (twelve ?) Commandments.
Seems there is a great opportunity for PETA&Co. to market the first grilled burger that can be produced without any animal suffering whatsoever.
Too bad at least one of these planets is already inhabited by a sentient species.
There is hardly anything new in here to see, except maybe for a new take on jet tip rotor.
Jet-tip rotor helicopters are old technology, especially in France where the only successful model of such an helicopter, the Sud Ouest SO.1221 "Djinn", has been designed and commercialized over 50 years ago.
Jet tip rotors had a lot of issues, from the thrust-control, failure-mitigation and temperature-control mechanisms that have to fight the huge centrifugal force at the end of blades, to the poor autorotation performance and, mainly, to the difficulty of designing reliable multi-engine configurations which pretty much limits this technology to small helicopters (and over-land operation only). Additionnally, a lot more power is lost in the compression and transport system than in a conventional gearing system, which eats away quickly any weight-saving. For one, the Djinn had double the fuel consumption of a similar-size chopper. That's why they disappeared.
Here, the Sagita's description from the article claims that the two contrarotating main rotors are driven by a pair of turbines which are driven by a compressor which is itself driven by the main engine and its turbine. That makes it a hybrid between a conventional turboprop helicopter where a turbine in the engine drives the main rotor through a gearbox, and a jet tipped helicopter where the engine's turbine drives a compressor which blows air (usually with added combustion, as in the ramjet-tip configuration used on the Djinn) through the rotor's blade tips.
In a way, it can be understood as the application to helicopters of a somewhat modern-ish turbopropeller tech used in airplanes, where different sets of turbines each drive the main propeller and the engine's inner compressor at different rotation rates. However, in an airplane this design is streamlined and integrates in a very straight-forward way inside the engine because the main propeller IS the "additional compressor", whereas on the Sagita, the main rotors are not aligned nor even integrated with the main engine, requiring a whole compressor added to the mix. That implies more mass, more complexity and some transmission losses that mitigate the efficiency of the whole thing, so I doubt their efficiency gains figures.