There's certainly merit in constraining the growth of government, but if it isn't working, you do not necessarily ensure better governance by tying the hands of those in power.
Well, they would need a scheme like this one for it to be politically acceptable. Certainly that is the route that was taken here in Ireland - first a national "scrappage scheme" and then the introduction of a "national car test".
Such a scheme worked here in Ireland, but it was about the era of the dot-com boom, and also the start of cheap credit (and we all know where that led...)
However, it has meant that once and for all we got rid of all the bangers. This allows the government to get away with bringing in a "National Car Test" to ensure cars are a certain operational standard. As a result, most cars on the road are no older than 10 years. The few "bangers" nowadays are maybe 15 years old and they have at least passed the NCT.
OK, it seems I was misinformed about the regulations. It would seem that the problem is due to breach of regulations on a huge scale by many builders, particularly in the Dublin area. I can accept that there are plenty of reputable builders, but my experiences of even visiting modern dwellings in Dublin is that they are thin on the ground in that neck of the woods. It's truly shocking the conditions that some people are living in, despite paying insane amounts for modern properties.
Here in Ireland, double glazing is used as standard now. However, in Dublin at least, there are no rules on insulation, so despite fitting double glaze windows, the crazy builders/developers are allowed to build single-wall buildings with a simple damp-seal and plasterboard on the interior. No attic insulation either. Also our builders/plumbers haven't a clue about properly designing a heating system, and work on an ad-hoc basis of randomly sticking in a few radiators around the place in an ineffectual manner and plumbing them in such a way that they barely work, with overpowered gas boilers that consume gas like anything to very little effect.
And yet rather than tackle such pathetic building standards (other regions of the country do have double-walled insulated buildings) our fanatical Green Party are insistant on focussing instead on having us all dwell in a netherworldish CFL-lit glow as they scrap ordinary light bulbs (you know, the non mercury-containing kind that don't make as much money for light bulb manufacturers).
It's a disaster for Limerick though - particularly as there are thousands more jobs likely to be lost in companies relying on business from Dell. Not to mention the effect of the jobless not having money to spend locally.
I guess it's just going to be another event cementing the emigration in Ireland to Dublin. It's bad news even for Dublin to have a quarter of the State's population living there, pushing infrastructure to the limits. Also the depopulated rural areas still have to have services - services which benefit fewer and fewer people. A more even regional distribution of jobs and population would ensure better value-for-money for all taxpayers in the State.
Well, it's a bit worse than people simply attributing existing ills to some piece of technology. It would seem that people, if they think something will make them ill, can indeed make themselves ill to some degree, or at least be convinced that they are ill (which from their perspective, is much the same thing - or even worse, as real cures won't work on the latter). It's the reason that a lot of the superstitious stuff can actually seem to work at times, and why it's quite important not only to combat such nonsense, but act in an understanding way to those who've fallen for it. The peddlers of superstitions require a sterner approach though.
It's certainly not all a bit of a laugh. At the very least such superstitions do give rise to troubles of the mind (which lets face it, usually result in a poorer physical condition too).
Not exactly French, as the modern French sort of gradually took over the former Norman continental holdings. Hence the English claim to the French throne, rather than having the reverse.
I'm Irish, so all I can say about the French is that they let us down badly a number of times when we tried to get them to invade us to get rid of the British.
I know if a localised calamity was due to affect a city here in Ireland, we would have the national bus operator's fleet transferred to special trips for evacuation, and similarly full trainloads would be organised to other cities and emergency facilities. The government would reemburse the transport operators from tax money - because we all pay taxes (yes, even the unemployed thanks to our regressive indirect taxation of 21.5% sales tax and direct charges for just about everything). Ireland is kinda US-looking, so I guess you would get a bunch of morons on the other coast complaining about the cost (despite the fact they would be quite in favor of such action if the calamity affected them instead - and the fact the country would be rather worse off with a sudden wiping out of so many citizens).
It seemed crazy to me that in the New Orleans situation, it was expected of everyone to get out under their own steam by private car or regular transport. Even for many who did have private cars, it should have been preferable for them to be specifically evacuated by special mass transit services. There should *never* have been a need to provide "centres of last resort". Anyone left should have been forcably evacuated. Of course some people's reluctance to leave is an indictment of the ability of the forces of law and order to protect people's property (i.e. from thieves rather than natural forces) even under normal circumstances in the US.
It seemed like they did things more along the correct lines the second time around (masses of special bus services, etc.), but it's actually distressing that they didn't get it right first time around when it was not an unanticipated problem.
I find it incomprehensible that in the US, your prices don't include sales tax already. OK the tax varying state to state is less odd - after all we have different VAT rates here in Europe. But it's far less hassle to have the VAT already included - no wonder people in the US don't like tax. I won't even start on the whole thing of having to "do your taxes - again, little wonder taxes are unpopular.
Transparency in this case is not beneficial. It is not as if you can't sit down here in Ireland and work out how much tax you pay, if you wish to. Indeed you are still free to work out all the tax schemes, benefits and loop-holes you can make use of, more is the pity (our state is woefully underfunded by a relatively wealthy population).
Anyway - I don't relish next time I have to go to the US and after a nice meal go into "school" mode and have wonderful impromptu calculation sessions afterward to derive the tax and the tip. At least your banknotes aren't quite so indistinguishable from one another now, although the coins are still stupidly awkward for making change.
In case you think I'm singling out the US for criticism - while on the subject of VAT I will say that the United Kingdom are stark raving mad for cutting their VAT to 15%. It will do nothing to get people spending, and leaves a giant hole in the goverment funds - that will have to be filled later with massive tax hikes when things are even worse. It's like a gambler having lost a large chunk of money, and making a similarly sized large bad bet in an act of desperation to try and win back what he has lost. We had it here in Ireland in the 1980s. Admittedly it was rather more insane - abolishing motor taxation for a brief spell, and we still have shambolic local services from underfunded local government since domestic rates were abolished. But sure enough we had to raise taxes again (that was overdone too in over-reaction of course, and we saw massive tax evasion).
To end the ramble - if you live in even a barely organised country, you need taxes. Being anti-taxation is just stupid - it's not even self-serving. It's not like it is better for people to spend crazy money privately on health and education rather than have properly run public services - those are far cheaper and easier to achieve, even just from the economies of scale. Is it better for people to spend money on car repair and depreciation from wear & tear, and pay the price of accidents, rather than collectively spend money on decent roads and public transport?
People get so selfish they end up not actually acting in their own interest. Pay your taxes and campaign for them to be used properly, and where necessary, for more people to pay them (not necessarily for people paying tax to pay more, or for people at the bottom to pay anything).
With €10 DVDs and now €5 or less DVDs, even the VHS tapes in my collection that I wasn't actively looking to replace are now getting replaced. There are a handful of films I can't get hold of on DVD yet, but even this year has seen old films released cheaply on DVD - so chances are I'll replace them all. Hopefully the one or two only out on Region 1 DVD will be out on Region 2 eventually - I'm not interested in the lower resolution NTSC DVDs rather than PAL.
Even the good VHS recordings are distracting to watch nowadays, with the blurring and grain, and sub-par sound. I think I have one or two "Super VHS" recordings made from a perfect TV signal, and these are OK (again, only one or two left now that haven't been picked up on sub-€10 DVD).
With the £/€ exchange rate, I'm hoping to fill out the cheap DVD collection a bit more in the New Year thanks to Amazon.co.uk.
----
Note - hello Slashdot, 2009 marks 10 years since the introduction of the euro. How about supporting the symbol properly in posting?
There's no conversion necessary, except for mindset and lifestyle. If people would bike to work, for example, then the energy demands would be far less than today and we wouldn't have to deal with smog. If people would compost and grow even just 50% of their own food then you Americans could decrease your pollution and consumption even further.
I don't understand why people want to live beyond their energy means and then start complaining when gas prices start rising.
I do not believe that enforced "conversion" is either attainable or desirable. One can however bring in positive discrimination - make things easier for those cycling for example and provide tax reliefs. In many places in continental Europe for example, traffic is arranged in a far more bicycle-friendly fashion than here in Ireland (not American, sorry to blow out your prejudices, although we do betray our position as the nearest country in Europe to the US, excluding Iceland). A dose of reality is needed however. In the absence of dictatorial authoritarian enforced cycling, most people won't cycle.
As regards growing their own food, this is not actually that useful an ambition. Certainly if someone has the means to, it isn't necessarily a bad thing, but suggesting everyone should grow 50% of their own food betrays a gross ignorance of the economies of scale that even historical farming achieves, nevermind modern food production (which yes, I do have some problems with).
"Living beyond ones energy means" is a fairly meaningless phrase. We all have net energy consumption, all the more so to even live in rudimentary comfort. Living in even a frugal enough modern style, you are still an energy consumer. I don't know about you, but I don't have a magical energy production system of my own (and if I bought, e.g. a windmill, it cost more energy to produce than it will ever provide). I don't have land enough to grow enough trees for sustainable heating fuel.
Scale up to a population of even just 4 million as we have here in Ireland, and you have to provide power somehow. In the provision of power, there is currently no magic solution that has zero environmental impact and satisfy even basic energy needs (and even being optimistic and assuming a sea change, we will still be quite high consumers of energy).
Instead of ranting on a grandiose scale about the entire Western way of living, it would be far better if people focussed on basic simple measures, like building regulations to ensure homes are properly insulated, i.e. that is a more sensible first step before coming up with brilliant ideas on how to heat places with sustainable energy. Also regulations to ensure enough natural light to minimise artificial light during daytime - again, more useful than pontificating about using mercury-laden complex units instead of basic light bulbs (OK, so ordinary lightbulbs are archaic pathetically inefficient devices - but compact flourescents are a scam by lightbulb manufacturers and a sop to Joe Soap by governments to look "green"). Further regulations to avoid people using too *much* windowing, i.e. building greenhouses for the summer. Planning regulations to stop "throw-away" buildigns that are good for 10 years being built. Planning regulations to arrange rural/urban landscapes to preserve natural environment, encourage positive social fabric, and suit utility provision and transport. These are all areas where interference can be tactfully arranged rather than having an enforced change in the way we live.
More fuel-efficient cars, even just to European standards, should be an initial goal. Very little needed - in fact they could start by just selling European GM and Ford models, instant plus without all the time, money, effort and energy requirements of starting from scratch with manufacture of new technology.
The electric tech is not necessarily a great idea. The batteries and all that's involved there is a nasty messy business, not at all "eco-friendly". The electricity still has to be generated, and there's a whopping great loss between generation and using it in your vehicle.
I'm not saying people shouldn't investigate electric cars and spend money researching them and seeing if the problems can be surmounted, but it is simply an ideologically-driven nearly religious zeal to insist that we all switch to them now.
As for nuclear power - it would seem the options are thin indeed on the ground for electricity generation. Nuclear power is quite expensive - it's not a matter of an emotive "oh no, all that horrible nuclear waste", it's simply the cost of building the plants, disposing of even any reduced amounts new plants create (still an enormous logistical task), and most importantly, the fixed lifespan of nuclear plants and the much more difficult to deal with nuclear waste from decommissioning. Nuclear power may be something we have to accept, but it is not at all satisfactory or even economically positive.
So all in all, considering oil, coal and gas will be with us for some time to come, it is potentially even important to invest in more efficient and cleaner ways to convert them into energy, than to pin all our hopes on nuclear or indeed renewables. Fusion would be nice, but we still don't absolutely know that the process, on an achievable scale (i.e. not a small sun) will provide a net output!
Sorry to burst the bubble, but the enviro nuts are as clueless and naive as the politicians are clueless and short-sighted.
That aspect of DHL works to their advantage here in Ireland. We have no post codes, and barely have addresses for many places (even in cities), so the post service are about the only people who know where you live (indeed they don't always, but the person doing the rounds in your area will).
Anyways, the upshot is that DHL may sometimes be flakey here still, but they are a more dependable courier for getting the delivery to your door (rather than say, just managing to get it to "somewhere" in Ireland - I know people who've had to chase up couriers and eventually discover their delivery is stored in a depot somewhere 100 km away or more!)
Saying all that, I don't really want post-codes. It is handy and more human to have easy-to-remember addresses, and the postal service still manages to do better than that in the UK which has post codes. The only thing needed is for the postal service here to be forced to share their pseudo-address database which gets stuff to the appropriate delivery person.
I just wish online stores would stop having *mandatory* post code fields in forms. I now use IRL, because it turns out that putting NA (for non-applicable) can get your delivery sent to Namibia (yes, I kid you not).
Having been on both German autobahns and Irish and British motorways and US highways, I can safely say the biggest difference of all is that far less people drive like morons on German roads. I don't need any studies to explain why the Irish situation is so bad either when we have so many people on the roads who haven't sat a test ("provisional licence" supposed to be for learning to drive, and people who got "free" licences in 1980 or so last time there was a testing backlog). That's for starters (there are a host of other reasons that need little analysis to see their contribution to traffic mayhem).
In the US I didn't feel particularly safe on the highways, and there was a much bigger emphasis on "the bigger the vehicle the more I can act as if I am crash-proof" - the trucks in particular were road-hogs. The 55 mph limit is stupidly low of course, meaning that there is a lot of problems caused between faster drivers and slower ones (still no excuse for the maniacs driving in excess of 70mph or so).
Germany we encountered only two people trying to get everyone killed in half a week of driving well over 1000km, whereas on a single 100km trip on Irish motorways you will meet at least a dozen people trying to get everyone killed (tailgating and crazy lane-switches are exceedingly common).
A side note about German Autobahns though - it's disturbing how the hyper-fast travel distorts perceptions. At 180km/h it eventually feels just like the normal Irish limit of 120km/h. You slow down on an exit and think you are down to 50km/h for the curve (the Autobahn junctions often were pretty compact), and realise you're still 100km/h!
I think 120km/h limit as in Ireland is reasonable for two lane motorway. Where there are three lanes, it would perhaps be possible to allow the outer lane (next the median) to have 150km/h or so (don't know about elsewhere, but our new motorways in Ireland have a design speed of 160km/h). Two lane unrestricted autobahn sections in Germany were a bit hairy between the 80km/h trucks/buses, the 120 km/h normal drivers, and the people wanting to make full use of the lack of speed limits. Talk about lane changing!!!
I like the look of Macs and OSX, but Apple products are still frightfully expensive here in Europe (well, UK/IRL at any rate), and also any Mac fans I know pay dearly twice over - once for the hardware in the first place, and again for the pain and grief for tech support, failures, upgrades, just about everything. In one case every single piece of Apple hardware has given grief, even down to the iPods (I use plural due to replacements having been necessary). It also seems like some kind of cult or addiction the way folks with dodgy Apple equipment (which does look nice) keep going back for more.
Personally I'd love an iPod Touch for one thing, but the cost here doesn't allow me to even be remotely tempted to buy one in a fit of madness.
Yep, if Windows XP is "good enough", why would people flock to Linux anymore than Vista? It's even less likely than people eventually all adopting Vista. Which to be honest, does not at all look like a foregone conclusion anymore - not sure where that leaves us as it seems unlikely we can stay with XP for very many years more. I guess eventually more people and businesses may migrate to Vista, or else Microsoft will pull a "fixed-up" version of Vista out of the hat with Windows 7... OK so that's not so likely either.
Personally I will be sticking with my 3.5 y.o. desktop with XP (still just under a year's Dell on-site warranty, thanks to a 3 year offer a few months after my one year CAR ran out), and my 2 y.o. laptop also with XP (a year's Dell on-site warranty left on that too).
I did admittedly upgrade my graphics card in my desktop a year ago for €150, but I got €50 for my old card too.
I am inclined to think the days of frequent upgrading are at an end.
I still think it's reasonable not to mistreat animals even if you are going to just kill them to eat. Also they should be killed quickly and without distress (and almost always are). Apart from being appropriate behaviour for humans, it does also mean better quality meat!
In any case, having seen a lot of the local beef production here in Ireland, I think there is even less grounds for boycotting Irish beef than meat in general.
Here in Ireland, wasps get agitated *very* easily. They'll happily be investigating a litter bin or your lunch, but even if you stay calm they often take to buzzing angrily around your head. A newspaper handy in summertime is the only option for the most part.
This year though we seemed to have some less agressive wasps, and looking at their markings and size they seem to be European hornets rather than the usual German wasps (yellowjackets). Don't know if we usually get these, but the difference in behaviour was noticible. They also went a bit crazy at the flourescent lights in the evening - like moths. I hadn't seen wasps do that before.
Is it not also a question of whether the venom has much effect on a human? As far as I know, even if any of the spiders here in Ireland did have the ability to successfully inject someone with venom, the most you would feel is a bit of a sting.
It's rather nice not to have to worry about any insects here in Ireland, although wasps are annoying nevertheless.
In fact one doesn't have to worry about larger animals either - no rabies or nasty large carniverous beasties. Some dangerous dog breeds (not even any restrictions on that in Ireland) and you want to be careful of a field of cattle in case of a bull (one of the few things our army snipers have had to do on domestic soil is take out the odd raging bull that's escaped in some town/village).
But I'm getting a bit off-topic here. I'll just finish by noting that we don't have poison ivy either (just nettles, although a counter-agent, dock, grows right next to them).
Well, there may be cracks appearing these days, but I think the creation of the NHS in the UK was an example of the government getting it right - at least in broad terms.
I consider the introduction of low corporation tax here in Ireland to have been a good move (it meant jobs). Indeed it was canny to go further than that and for a time have tax-free industrial areas with government-built factories to attract foreign investment. It turned this country around.
I consider the abolition of tuition fees for third level education here in Ireland to have been similarly inspired. There is now lobbying to have them returned for those who "can pay". I say that anyone who "can pay" should be paying more tax - and that would let the government properly fund the Universities. Those who "can pay" are then paying their way in a more efficient (and cheaper) manner and should keep the same benefits as those who can't pay.
The hybrid idea is nice in theory, and I think actually probably quite a number of countries have aspects of it (e.g. members of the upper house not elected by the general public, or the EU commission elected by governments not the public). However, I think in practice, we mostly seem to get the balance wrong. Indeed I think often governments can at the same time be too authoritarian in some areas and not authoritarian enough in others.
There's no doubt that though we haven't really found much alternative other than these hybrid aspects, democracy mostly seems to be not entirely satisfactory, and it is certainly not an absolute defence against a bunch of nutjobs getting into power. So it does get to me when particularly in the USA, people sing gushing praises of democracy. It's certainly preferable to the alternatives, but it is not some divine perfect form of government. Installing democracy is not really a valid argument for invading a country either.
A final note - if less socially-orientated governments invested a lot more in education, then democracy in those countries would work better (in addition to just about everything else benefitting, including the ability of the country to make money).
Being outside America, I would agree that the media in the US by and large has, for the US, a liberal bias. But not "pretty large" by any measurement.
Fox News is an exception, but it is far more extreme "conservative" (if one can apply that label to such extremism) than the other outlets are liberal. Their use of the "fair and balanced" slogan is obscene (it would be false for other media outlets in the US also, but not remotely as ironic for any others).
The rest of mainstream American media would seem pretty centrist really outside the US, and much the same as the media here in Ireland which is mostly centre-left/right.
I stuck with US coverage of the election, as the Irish/UK coverage is rather "outsider looking in" no matter how well they tried to do it.
If everybody pays, then it's not such a big deal for "somebody" who could tomorrow be "anybody" including you, me, etc. If people have no problems paying health insurance (if they can afford it), then why is it such a problem to pay taxes to fund a proper health system?
The overall cost to society as a whole in the American model is a heck of a lot more than the cost to taxpayers in a state with universal health care.
There's no sense either in the concept of those who can pay out of their own pocket should do so (i.e. means-tested). Higher earners under just about any tax system used today, pay a lot more tax. So they should get just the same benefits of "free" services as anyone else. To do anything else is to have an unfair arbitrary cut-off.
Slashdot Mirror
There's certainly merit in constraining the growth of government, but if it isn't working, you do not necessarily ensure better governance by tying the hands of those in power.
Government is there to govern.
Well, they would need a scheme like this one for it to be politically acceptable. Certainly that is the route that was taken here in Ireland - first a national "scrappage scheme" and then the introduction of a "national car test".
Such a scheme worked here in Ireland, but it was about the era of the dot-com boom, and also the start of cheap credit (and we all know where that led...)
However, it has meant that once and for all we got rid of all the bangers. This allows the government to get away with bringing in a "National Car Test" to ensure cars are a certain operational standard. As a result, most cars on the road are no older than 10 years. The few "bangers" nowadays are maybe 15 years old and they have at least passed the NCT.
OK, it seems I was misinformed about the regulations. It would seem that the problem is due to breach of regulations on a huge scale by many builders, particularly in the Dublin area. I can accept that there are plenty of reputable builders, but my experiences of even visiting modern dwellings in Dublin is that they are thin on the ground in that neck of the woods. It's truly shocking the conditions that some people are living in, despite paying insane amounts for modern properties.
Here in Ireland, double glazing is used as standard now. However, in Dublin at least, there are no rules on insulation, so despite fitting double glaze windows, the crazy builders/developers are allowed to build single-wall buildings with a simple damp-seal and plasterboard on the interior. No attic insulation either. Also our builders/plumbers haven't a clue about properly designing a heating system, and work on an ad-hoc basis of randomly sticking in a few radiators around the place in an ineffectual manner and plumbing them in such a way that they barely work, with overpowered gas boilers that consume gas like anything to very little effect.
And yet rather than tackle such pathetic building standards (other regions of the country do have double-walled insulated buildings) our fanatical Green Party are insistant on focussing instead on having us all dwell in a netherworldish CFL-lit glow as they scrap ordinary light bulbs (you know, the non mercury-containing kind that don't make as much money for light bulb manufacturers).
It's a disaster for Limerick though - particularly as there are thousands more jobs likely to be lost in companies relying on business from Dell. Not to mention the effect of the jobless not having money to spend locally.
I guess it's just going to be another event cementing the emigration in Ireland to Dublin. It's bad news even for Dublin to have a quarter of the State's population living there, pushing infrastructure to the limits. Also the depopulated rural areas still have to have services - services which benefit fewer and fewer people. A more even regional distribution of jobs and population would ensure better value-for-money for all taxpayers in the State.
Well, it's a bit worse than people simply attributing existing ills to some piece of technology. It would seem that people, if they think something will make them ill, can indeed make themselves ill to some degree, or at least be convinced that they are ill (which from their perspective, is much the same thing - or even worse, as real cures won't work on the latter). It's the reason that a lot of the superstitious stuff can actually seem to work at times, and why it's quite important not only to combat such nonsense, but act in an understanding way to those who've fallen for it. The peddlers of superstitions require a sterner approach though.
It's certainly not all a bit of a laugh. At the very least such superstitions do give rise to troubles of the mind (which lets face it, usually result in a poorer physical condition too).
Not exactly French, as the modern French sort of gradually took over the former Norman continental holdings. Hence the English claim to the French throne, rather than having the reverse.
I'm Irish, so all I can say about the French is that they let us down badly a number of times when we tried to get them to invade us to get rid of the British.
I know if a localised calamity was due to affect a city here in Ireland, we would have the national bus operator's fleet transferred to special trips for evacuation, and similarly full trainloads would be organised to other cities and emergency facilities. The government would reemburse the transport operators from tax money - because we all pay taxes (yes, even the unemployed thanks to our regressive indirect taxation of 21.5% sales tax and direct charges for just about everything). Ireland is kinda US-looking, so I guess you would get a bunch of morons on the other coast complaining about the cost (despite the fact they would be quite in favor of such action if the calamity affected them instead - and the fact the country would be rather worse off with a sudden wiping out of so many citizens).
It seemed crazy to me that in the New Orleans situation, it was expected of everyone to get out under their own steam by private car or regular transport. Even for many who did have private cars, it should have been preferable for them to be specifically evacuated by special mass transit services. There should *never* have been a need to provide "centres of last resort". Anyone left should have been forcably evacuated. Of course some people's reluctance to leave is an indictment of the ability of the forces of law and order to protect people's property (i.e. from thieves rather than natural forces) even under normal circumstances in the US.
It seemed like they did things more along the correct lines the second time around (masses of special bus services, etc.), but it's actually distressing that they didn't get it right first time around when it was not an unanticipated problem.
I find it incomprehensible that in the US, your prices don't include sales tax already. OK the tax varying state to state is less odd - after all we have different VAT rates here in Europe. But it's far less hassle to have the VAT already included - no wonder people in the US don't like tax. I won't even start on the whole thing of having to "do your taxes - again, little wonder taxes are unpopular.
Transparency in this case is not beneficial. It is not as if you can't sit down here in Ireland and work out how much tax you pay, if you wish to. Indeed you are still free to work out all the tax schemes, benefits and loop-holes you can make use of, more is the pity (our state is woefully underfunded by a relatively wealthy population).
Anyway - I don't relish next time I have to go to the US and after a nice meal go into "school" mode and have wonderful impromptu calculation sessions afterward to derive the tax and the tip. At least your banknotes aren't quite so indistinguishable from one another now, although the coins are still stupidly awkward for making change.
In case you think I'm singling out the US for criticism - while on the subject of VAT I will say that the United Kingdom are stark raving mad for cutting their VAT to 15%. It will do nothing to get people spending, and leaves a giant hole in the goverment funds - that will have to be filled later with massive tax hikes when things are even worse. It's like a gambler having lost a large chunk of money, and making a similarly sized large bad bet in an act of desperation to try and win back what he has lost. We had it here in Ireland in the 1980s. Admittedly it was rather more insane - abolishing motor taxation for a brief spell, and we still have shambolic local services from underfunded local government since domestic rates were abolished. But sure enough we had to raise taxes again (that was overdone too in over-reaction of course, and we saw massive tax evasion).
To end the ramble - if you live in even a barely organised country, you need taxes. Being anti-taxation is just stupid - it's not even self-serving. It's not like it is better for people to spend crazy money privately on health and education rather than have properly run public services - those are far cheaper and easier to achieve, even just from the economies of scale. Is it better for people to spend money on car repair and depreciation from wear & tear, and pay the price of accidents, rather than collectively spend money on decent roads and public transport?
People get so selfish they end up not actually acting in their own interest. Pay your taxes and campaign for them to be used properly, and where necessary, for more people to pay them (not necessarily for people paying tax to pay more, or for people at the bottom to pay anything).
With €10 DVDs and now €5 or less DVDs, even the VHS tapes in my collection that I wasn't actively looking to replace are now getting replaced. There are a handful of films I can't get hold of on DVD yet, but even this year has seen old films released cheaply on DVD - so chances are I'll replace them all. Hopefully the one or two only out on Region 1 DVD will be out on Region 2 eventually - I'm not interested in the lower resolution NTSC DVDs rather than PAL.
Even the good VHS recordings are distracting to watch nowadays, with the blurring and grain, and sub-par sound. I think I have one or two "Super VHS" recordings made from a perfect TV signal, and these are OK (again, only one or two left now that haven't been picked up on sub-€10 DVD).
With the £/€ exchange rate, I'm hoping to fill out the cheap DVD collection a bit more in the New Year thanks to Amazon.co.uk.
----
Note - hello Slashdot, 2009 marks 10 years since the introduction of the euro. How about supporting the symbol properly in posting?
There's no conversion necessary, except for mindset and lifestyle. If people would bike to work, for example, then the energy demands would be far less than today and we wouldn't have to deal with smog. If people would compost and grow even just 50% of their own food then you Americans could decrease your pollution and consumption even further.
I don't understand why people want to live beyond their energy means and then start complaining when gas prices start rising.
I do not believe that enforced "conversion" is either attainable or desirable. One can however bring in positive discrimination - make things easier for those cycling for example and provide tax reliefs. In many places in continental Europe for example, traffic is arranged in a far more bicycle-friendly fashion than here in Ireland (not American, sorry to blow out your prejudices, although we do betray our position as the nearest country in Europe to the US, excluding Iceland). A dose of reality is needed however. In the absence of dictatorial authoritarian enforced cycling, most people won't cycle.
As regards growing their own food, this is not actually that useful an ambition. Certainly if someone has the means to, it isn't necessarily a bad thing, but suggesting everyone should grow 50% of their own food betrays a gross ignorance of the economies of scale that even historical farming achieves, nevermind modern food production (which yes, I do have some problems with).
"Living beyond ones energy means" is a fairly meaningless phrase. We all have net energy consumption, all the more so to even live in rudimentary comfort. Living in even a frugal enough modern style, you are still an energy consumer. I don't know about you, but I don't have a magical energy production system of my own (and if I bought, e.g. a windmill, it cost more energy to produce than it will ever provide). I don't have land enough to grow enough trees for sustainable heating fuel.
Scale up to a population of even just 4 million as we have here in Ireland, and you have to provide power somehow. In the provision of power, there is currently no magic solution that has zero environmental impact and satisfy even basic energy needs (and even being optimistic and assuming a sea change, we will still be quite high consumers of energy).
Instead of ranting on a grandiose scale about the entire Western way of living, it would be far better if people focussed on basic simple measures, like building regulations to ensure homes are properly insulated, i.e. that is a more sensible first step before coming up with brilliant ideas on how to heat places with sustainable energy. Also regulations to ensure enough natural light to minimise artificial light during daytime - again, more useful than pontificating about using mercury-laden complex units instead of basic light bulbs (OK, so ordinary lightbulbs are archaic pathetically inefficient devices - but compact flourescents are a scam by lightbulb manufacturers and a sop to Joe Soap by governments to look "green"). Further regulations to avoid people using too *much* windowing, i.e. building greenhouses for the summer. Planning regulations to stop "throw-away" buildigns that are good for 10 years being built. Planning regulations to arrange rural/urban landscapes to preserve natural environment, encourage positive social fabric, and suit utility provision and transport. These are all areas where interference can be tactfully arranged rather than having an enforced change in the way we live.
More fuel-efficient cars, even just to European standards, should be an initial goal. Very little needed - in fact they could start by just selling European GM and Ford models, instant plus without all the time, money, effort and energy requirements of starting from scratch with manufacture of new technology.
The electric tech is not necessarily a great idea. The batteries and all that's involved there is a nasty messy business, not at all "eco-friendly". The electricity still has to be generated, and there's a whopping great loss between generation and using it in your vehicle.
I'm not saying people shouldn't investigate electric cars and spend money researching them and seeing if the problems can be surmounted, but it is simply an ideologically-driven nearly religious zeal to insist that we all switch to them now.
As for nuclear power - it would seem the options are thin indeed on the ground for electricity generation. Nuclear power is quite expensive - it's not a matter of an emotive "oh no, all that horrible nuclear waste", it's simply the cost of building the plants, disposing of even any reduced amounts new plants create (still an enormous logistical task), and most importantly, the fixed lifespan of nuclear plants and the much more difficult to deal with nuclear waste from decommissioning. Nuclear power may be something we have to accept, but it is not at all satisfactory or even economically positive.
So all in all, considering oil, coal and gas will be with us for some time to come, it is potentially even important to invest in more efficient and cleaner ways to convert them into energy, than to pin all our hopes on nuclear or indeed renewables. Fusion would be nice, but we still don't absolutely know that the process, on an achievable scale (i.e. not a small sun) will provide a net output!
Sorry to burst the bubble, but the enviro nuts are as clueless and naive as the politicians are clueless and short-sighted.
That aspect of DHL works to their advantage here in Ireland. We have no post codes, and barely have addresses for many places (even in cities), so the post service are about the only people who know where you live (indeed they don't always, but the person doing the rounds in your area will).
Anyways, the upshot is that DHL may sometimes be flakey here still, but they are a more dependable courier for getting the delivery to your door (rather than say, just managing to get it to "somewhere" in Ireland - I know people who've had to chase up couriers and eventually discover their delivery is stored in a depot somewhere 100 km away or more!)
Saying all that, I don't really want post-codes. It is handy and more human to have easy-to-remember addresses, and the postal service still manages to do better than that in the UK which has post codes. The only thing needed is for the postal service here to be forced to share their pseudo-address database which gets stuff to the appropriate delivery person.
I just wish online stores would stop having *mandatory* post code fields in forms. I now use IRL, because it turns out that putting NA (for non-applicable) can get your delivery sent to Namibia (yes, I kid you not).
Having been on both German autobahns and Irish and British motorways and US highways, I can safely say the biggest difference of all is that far less people drive like morons on German roads. I don't need any studies to explain why the Irish situation is so bad either when we have so many people on the roads who haven't sat a test ("provisional licence" supposed to be for learning to drive, and people who got "free" licences in 1980 or so last time there was a testing backlog). That's for starters (there are a host of other reasons that need little analysis to see their contribution to traffic mayhem).
In the US I didn't feel particularly safe on the highways, and there was a much bigger emphasis on "the bigger the vehicle the more I can act as if I am crash-proof" - the trucks in particular were road-hogs. The 55 mph limit is stupidly low of course, meaning that there is a lot of problems caused between faster drivers and slower ones (still no excuse for the maniacs driving in excess of 70mph or so).
Germany we encountered only two people trying to get everyone killed in half a week of driving well over 1000km, whereas on a single 100km trip on Irish motorways you will meet at least a dozen people trying to get everyone killed (tailgating and crazy lane-switches are exceedingly common).
A side note about German Autobahns though - it's disturbing how the hyper-fast travel distorts perceptions. At 180km/h it eventually feels just like the normal Irish limit of 120km/h. You slow down on an exit and think you are down to 50km/h for the curve (the Autobahn junctions often were pretty compact), and realise you're still 100km/h!
I think 120km/h limit as in Ireland is reasonable for two lane motorway. Where there are three lanes, it would perhaps be possible to allow the outer lane (next the median) to have 150km/h or so (don't know about elsewhere, but our new motorways in Ireland have a design speed of 160km/h). Two lane unrestricted autobahn sections in Germany were a bit hairy between the 80km/h trucks/buses, the 120 km/h normal drivers, and the people wanting to make full use of the lack of speed limits. Talk about lane changing!!!
I like the look of Macs and OSX, but Apple products are still frightfully expensive here in Europe (well, UK/IRL at any rate), and also any Mac fans I know pay dearly twice over - once for the hardware in the first place, and again for the pain and grief for tech support, failures, upgrades, just about everything. In one case every single piece of Apple hardware has given grief, even down to the iPods (I use plural due to replacements having been necessary). It also seems like some kind of cult or addiction the way folks with dodgy Apple equipment (which does look nice) keep going back for more.
Personally I'd love an iPod Touch for one thing, but the cost here doesn't allow me to even be remotely tempted to buy one in a fit of madness.
Yep, if Windows XP is "good enough", why would people flock to Linux anymore than Vista? It's even less likely than people eventually all adopting Vista. Which to be honest, does not at all look like a foregone conclusion anymore - not sure where that leaves us as it seems unlikely we can stay with XP for very many years more. I guess eventually more people and businesses may migrate to Vista, or else Microsoft will pull a "fixed-up" version of Vista out of the hat with Windows 7... OK so that's not so likely either.
Personally I will be sticking with my 3.5 y.o. desktop with XP (still just under a year's Dell on-site warranty, thanks to a 3 year offer a few months after my one year CAR ran out), and my 2 y.o. laptop also with XP (a year's Dell on-site warranty left on that too).
I did admittedly upgrade my graphics card in my desktop a year ago for €150, but I got €50 for my old card too.
I am inclined to think the days of frequent upgrading are at an end.
I still think it's reasonable not to mistreat animals even if you are going to just kill them to eat. Also they should be killed quickly and without distress (and almost always are). Apart from being appropriate behaviour for humans, it does also mean better quality meat!
I do object to cramming animals together, feeding herbivores animal feed that includes meat derivatives (hello BSE?), transporting live animals randomly around the place, all in the name of profit. I do not however believe in boycotting mass produced meat anymore than I believe in boycotting say Nestlé because some of their practices are wrong.
In any case, having seen a lot of the local beef production here in Ireland, I think there is even less grounds for boycotting Irish beef than meat in general.
Here in Ireland, wasps get agitated *very* easily. They'll happily be investigating a litter bin or your lunch, but even if you stay calm they often take to buzzing angrily around your head. A newspaper handy in summertime is the only option for the most part.
This year though we seemed to have some less agressive wasps, and looking at their markings and size they seem to be European hornets rather than the usual German wasps (yellowjackets). Don't know if we usually get these, but the difference in behaviour was noticible. They also went a bit crazy at the flourescent lights in the evening - like moths. I hadn't seen wasps do that before.
Is it not also a question of whether the venom has much effect on a human? As far as I know, even if any of the spiders here in Ireland did have the ability to successfully inject someone with venom, the most you would feel is a bit of a sting.
It's rather nice not to have to worry about any insects here in Ireland, although wasps are annoying nevertheless.
In fact one doesn't have to worry about larger animals either - no rabies or nasty large carniverous beasties. Some dangerous dog breeds (not even any restrictions on that in Ireland) and you want to be careful of a field of cattle in case of a bull (one of the few things our army snipers have had to do on domestic soil is take out the odd raging bull that's escaped in some town/village).
But I'm getting a bit off-topic here. I'll just finish by noting that we don't have poison ivy either (just nettles, although a counter-agent, dock, grows right next to them).
Well, there may be cracks appearing these days, but I think the creation of the NHS in the UK was an example of the government getting it right - at least in broad terms.
I consider the introduction of low corporation tax here in Ireland to have been a good move (it meant jobs). Indeed it was canny to go further than that and for a time have tax-free industrial areas with government-built factories to attract foreign investment. It turned this country around.
I consider the abolition of tuition fees for third level education here in Ireland to have been similarly inspired. There is now lobbying to have them returned for those who "can pay". I say that anyone who "can pay" should be paying more tax - and that would let the government properly fund the Universities. Those who "can pay" are then paying their way in a more efficient (and cheaper) manner and should keep the same benefits as those who can't pay.
The hybrid idea is nice in theory, and I think actually probably quite a number of countries have aspects of it (e.g. members of the upper house not elected by the general public, or the EU commission elected by governments not the public). However, I think in practice, we mostly seem to get the balance wrong. Indeed I think often governments can at the same time be too authoritarian in some areas and not authoritarian enough in others.
There's no doubt that though we haven't really found much alternative other than these hybrid aspects, democracy mostly seems to be not entirely satisfactory, and it is certainly not an absolute defence against a bunch of nutjobs getting into power. So it does get to me when particularly in the USA, people sing gushing praises of democracy. It's certainly preferable to the alternatives, but it is not some divine perfect form of government. Installing democracy is not really a valid argument for invading a country either.
A final note - if less socially-orientated governments invested a lot more in education, then democracy in those countries would work better (in addition to just about everything else benefitting, including the ability of the country to make money).
Being outside America, I would agree that the media in the US by and large has, for the US, a liberal bias. But not "pretty large" by any measurement.
Fox News is an exception, but it is far more extreme "conservative" (if one can apply that label to such extremism) than the other outlets are liberal. Their use of the "fair and balanced" slogan is obscene (it would be false for other media outlets in the US also, but not remotely as ironic for any others).
The rest of mainstream American media would seem pretty centrist really outside the US, and much the same as the media here in Ireland which is mostly centre-left/right.
I stuck with US coverage of the election, as the Irish/UK coverage is rather "outsider looking in" no matter how well they tried to do it.
If everybody pays, then it's not such a big deal for "somebody" who could tomorrow be "anybody" including you, me, etc. If people have no problems paying health insurance (if they can afford it), then why is it such a problem to pay taxes to fund a proper health system?
The overall cost to society as a whole in the American model is a heck of a lot more than the cost to taxpayers in a state with universal health care.
There's no sense either in the concept of those who can pay out of their own pocket should do so (i.e. means-tested). Higher earners under just about any tax system used today, pay a lot more tax. So they should get just the same benefits of "free" services as anyone else. To do anything else is to have an unfair arbitrary cut-off.