You had me interested, but my Google-fu couldn't dig anything up. Do you remember any of the other ingredients in the paste? I might give it a try with a chicken first, but if it works treat the family at Christmas.
This slashdotter thinks you shouldn't let your SO represent you in any legal matters;-)
The owner (or renter) of the property is not at issue here. If, say, your state had a requirement that all students had to complete 100 hours of community service to graduate, and that they had to wear an RFID tag while doing that service work, it would be exactly the same situation wherever the community service took place.
The issue is the extent to which a public school system can enforce the surrender of some of your privacy and freedoms. Your child must attend a school or be homeschooled, and for almost all families the only option that makes sense is to enroll your child in the public school suggested / mandated by the school board. Given that we, the people, have decided that you are all but required by law to send your children to this school, we the people are well advised to tread extremely carefully in reducing the rights of you and your child any further. Whether this case is an acceptable infringement is up for debate, and the argument needs to include a review of the benefits to individual students, the collective student body and the school administration. Personally I doubt it would pass my internal bar for acceptable, but I haven't heard all the arguments.
Small coffee farmers struggling to survive could unite and form a cooperation to develop s competitive strategy using Porter's ideas.
Analysing the market and finding a strategy to compete against the existing corporations surely isn't easy but using Porter you can go about it in a rather structured way.
Once and if a strategy is found and implemented to achieve a defensible position, I'd expect the existing corporations to fight a very dirty war in order to maintain their own positions.
Thanks for replying. I agree with you, and that seems to be what is happening, although there's a lot of debate about implementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade_coffee.
Off topic, my interest in the area came from a time when I was living and working in Aceh, but happened to be in a Costco in a place called Tsawwassen, outside Vancouver BC. They had a promotional display in the middle of one area, with a young woman offering a variety of Fair Trade coffees on sale, including a Sumatra decaffeinated one. I said that I would take one like that if they had with caffeine, adding that I lived in Sumatra. Young, white, very Canadian woman in the booth said she'd been there.
I don't think so, I said.
Yes, she said -- I was in Aceh.
I live in Aceh, says I, I don't think you've been there.
Yes, she replies, I was in Takemku... Takenku...Takengku...
Takengon? I ask, shocked
That's it! she cries
Holy shit. I'm having a conversation in Costco about a hilltop town 10,000 miles away that almost nobody else on the planet has been to
I'm reading Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy". Apparently it's the manager's bible.
Porter advocates that competition to be the best is not a viable path to follow. Instead value must be created, the value chain must be enforced and the influences concerning 1) threats of competition, 2) threats of substitution, 3) bargaining power of customers and 4) bargaining power of suppliers must be managed well. Porter mentions patents and IP as factors but, of course, takes no political position.
So, the most important issue here is that it's actually good that coffee producers actively consider competitive strategy. It should result in a more balanced coffee market whereby 1) we value and pay more for it and 2) the value chain of producing countries is enforced.
It remains to be seen whether the distribution of this newly created wealth will be undertaken fairly.
You've come very close to hitting the mark. Porter writes about the real world of business, where few businesses are in a pure competitive market, but more likely an oligopoly. The key point for this discussion is the four-way dynamic you mention -- the bargaining power between poor farmers and middlemen has traditionally been very lopsided in favour of the middlemen. If the origin of the coffee becomes marketable, the balance becomes more equal and the farmers become less poor. This has worked elsewhere. Registering a trademark isn't enough on itself, though, you need resources to knock down scumbags who try to sell lower-quality coffee with your trademark on it or customers will not return.
"Whether or not you can extract (and I choose that word deliberately) wealth from a nation through the fiction we call "intellectual property" has nothing to do with the long-term viability of that concept.
When people starve to death because Monsanto won't let them grow patented plants, we need to put the bastards up against the wall.
When people starve to death because Goldman Sachs has cornered the Red Spring Wheat market, we need to put the bastards up against the wall.
When people die of malaria because Novartis would rather profit than save lives, we need to put the bastards up against the wall.
"Intellectual property" literally means nothing more than "we value dollars over your life". Anyone using that as a defense for their actions counts as nothing short of a race traitor - To the human race.
Nice rant. In many cases I'd agree with what you're saying, stripped of hyperbole. But in this case, asserting trademark rights (intellectual property) is a way to protect the poor coffee farmers. If they want to grow their traditional coffee, or grow "Fair Trade" coffee in a more sustainable manner, they need the protection of a trademark, or some cheap low-life grower from somewhere else will start marketing "Tanzania" coffee with a lousy taste, killing off their future sales, and perhaps their wives and children. IP is exactly what these farmers need to grow their business, and perhaps to survive (I don't know Tanzania).
I live in Indonesia, and I share your experience of the taste. Mind you I've never paid for it myself: this being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and a lack of certification, suggests that they just grab any reasonably good bunch of beans and label 'em "kopi luwak."
I agree with you also on Toraja, my usual choice, and also Mandeheleng (North Sumatra). Acehnese can be the best, but not if it's processed in Aceh, where they burn the shit out of the beans while roasting (on topic of this thread, there must be a pun there but I can't see it). Java arabica is also very good, but they grow a lot more robusta than arabica so getting the right brand is important.
Returning to the more general topic, since branding is so important in something like this, I'm going to agree with the WIPO and say that this is a rare example of good IP protection. Having the right trademarks protected, whether "Fair Trade" for those who like it, or at least brand names, does protect consumers and producers who have bothered to invest in good techniques.
Maybe not the walnuts themselves, but the pattern is emerging... Maple Syrup, Walnuts, next we'll see sugar missing, then cream. Look for a back-of-the-woods monster ice cream maker and someone's gonna corner the market on maple walnut ice cream, one of my favorites. Won't someone think of the children...
The company had been running an internship program that put 14- to 16-year-old children on the factory floor
And the link they reference in that quote (to anther article on their OWN site) says it was vocational interns (16+) and college students (18+). So more accurate would be "16 to 22".
I don't want to defend the authors, but Foxconn did recently admit that some of it vocational interns were 14 - 16 years old. It was on the BBC, among others.
The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.
Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.
In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?
No drug, not even alcohol, can bring out of a person something that was not already in that person. A lot of people have unresolved emotional baggage, insecurities, and unhealthy tendencies that they barely keep in check, mostly through fear of consequence. This is not real character or real strength and the dissolution of inhibition can cause it to break down.
I'm not sure about this, but I'm not an expert. I do recall reports of people getting pot or other drugs laced with PCP (a horse tranquilizer, IIRC) and completely losing self control, and becoming very aggressive. If the reports of cannibalism after ingestion of "bath salts" are true, that can't be only a result of reduced inhibition.
I'll reiterate, we live in a truly shallow and unenlightened society where the most ignorant and emotionally immature are the most comfortable.
Now that's one of the most thought-provoking things I've read here, or elsewhere, for quite a while. Thank you for that.
If you want to study engineering, that is where you should be able to concentrate.
I did that, 25 years ago. Recently I returned to my alma mater (UWO in Canada, if anyone cares) and 6 of us were invited by the fairly new Dean to discuss what they should be doing to improve the curriculum. While lab methods had changed a lot in 25 years, most of the core curriculum hadn't -- which is probably the right thing. Anyway, when he asked what we didn't get at university, but should have, we came up with two: project management and English.
Project management is an obvious skill for an engineer, and should have always been there. When he was surprised that we mentioned English (specifically a writing course) we all said that a lot of our work since graduation has included writing reports, and learning how to write well early on would have been a great advantage. I have forgotten an awful lot of math in 25 years, and learned a lot of English writing.
By all means learn the math and physics. I think you cannot possibly do anything worthwhile in economics or finance without calculus, and even political scientists must need to know about trends and statistics, both of which are built at least partially on calculus. But to do only, e.g., calculus, leaves one poorly equipped for life.
Are you implying that the Bangladeshi aren't smart enough to get out of the way of a 0.4mm annual rise in ocean levels? Or is it that they are so short they will drown in 18-59cm of water that will rise in the next 90 years? Your post does not make that clear.
I think you need to re-evaluate your understanding of sea level rise and any "catastrophes" it may cause. There are loads of antropocentric problems that will arise in the next 100 years as a result of the rise, but people drowning is most decidedly NOT one of them.
It's not that simple in practice. For one thing, where will people move to? Also, when you move the coast inland, all the drainage infrastructure, which was designed for a given sea level, doesn't drain so well. During heavy rains and/or high tides neighborhoods, perhaps entire cities, will flood. The cost in both financial and misery terms is enormous.
Corporations are full of people that will suck up IT's time with their very own customized desktop. The weight of the few that could actually make themselves more productive and not take up undue resources is outweighed by the many who'd just wasting company time being equally or less effective.
My own work laptop has, for a desktop "Active Desktop Recovery: Microsoft Windows has experienced an unexpected error. As a precaution your Active Desktop has been turned off..."
The funny thing is that as far as I can tell everyone else's computer has the same desktop. We've standardized by all having the same error.
We're running XP SP3 here.
Hell, I've only recently got IE8, and that was an improvement.
I'm on XP and IE7 at work, you insensitive clod! But more on topic, we've got 80,000 people in 70 countries and things move glacially and efficiency is not an objective. I've got different passwords for Windows/AD, our portal site, our SAP horror show and email. All but one need combinations of case, digits and special characters, those requirements vary and they all must be changed accordingly to different schedules.
Then you don't know what you are talking about. Design Patents have almost nothing to do with regular patents. They are much more along the lines of Trademarks. They are very, very, very specific and almost impossible to enforce.
My hazy 25-year-old recollection from "Law for Engineers" suggests that in Canada, and therefore probably in other common law countries, these rights are covered by the name "Industrial Design" and the word patent wasn't used. The types of IP protected were three (excluding trademarks): patents, copyright and industrial design.
Why do you think the founders put those two things as first and second in the list of rights? According to them, it's because without the 2nd Amendment, you can't defend the 1st Amendment, and will quickly lose it.
Strat
This is patently incorrect. Many, many other countries have laws protecting freedom of speech with strict restrictions on firearm ownership. You are free to debate the pros and cons of both amendments, and any other rights you believe people have, either due to legislation or inherent human rights, but you cannot claim that the 2nd amendment is a necessary partner of the 1st.
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity...
Doubling, tripling; sounds to me like it could be explained by an untrained operator not receiving feedback that an operation has been completed, and so clicking again on the button which initiates the operation. Combine that extremely plausible scenario with software which doesn't bother to check before re-accumulating totals, and you have a likely explanation.
Not if you RTFA. The database tables WEREN'T NORMALIZED and the doubling/tripling seemed to coincide with updates to tables when, e.g., the VOTER table had a precinct column, but there was also a PRECINCT table. The data in one got changed, the business logic bit panicked and duplicated all the records for that precinct. I haven't written a line of code in decades and I know how to normalize tables.
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Bill Gates did no such thing as give away his fortune, he merely transferred it to a foundation to avoid taxes, and still exercises complete control over it. This is a matter of public record. Gates foundation invests the absolute minimum in actual charitable work that is required to maintain its charitable foundation status, and more often than not in less than worthy forms such as subsidizing the purchase of Microsoft software or subsidizing the purchase of patented drugs, cash flow that flows straight back in to Gates' considerable investments in major drug companies. As a philatrophist, Bill Gates is no Andrew Carnegie.
Since you claim your rant is a "matter of public record" it's a shame you couldn't cite any sources. Whatever my personal feelings about the guy, I freely acknowledge that he's given away more than any other person in history. Over $1 billion just to eradicate polio http://www.polioeradication.org/Financing/Contributions.aspx. That's better than a wikipedia link on a different topic. Over to you...
I've no idea how a misinformed troll like you gets modded +4 Insightful, but I'd like to set the record straight for others, using your links even. In one of them is a discussion of BMGF funding research into a malaria vaccine. It also talks about the price of third-world-disease vaccines dropping from over $100 to $2.50. That would seem to blunt your claim that only rich people will benefit from the drugs, since rich people don't generally get malaria. As for a charity monopoly, you're an idiot. There are of course many charities, from the global ones down to local one-person operations. The kind of things BMGF attacks are generally so big, like malaria and polio, that even governments can't address them adequately. They make a difference precisely because they are big enough to tackle really big problems. That is a good thing. I'm gonna ignore your rant about education as off-topic and poorly cited.
No I was thinking how I read somewhere that polio got trapped in North Africa and that the "final push" would get rid of it but then their anti-vaxers showed up and it got out. (Although I'm not even sure if that's even true because I've since read that the whole time it was still endemic to the Indian subcontinent so even if they eradicated it in North Africa there was at least one more reserve.)
My understanding is not complete, but I recall that it was down to very few countries at one point -- like 2 or 3. Nigeria was one, and there was a group of conservative Moslem community leaders there who convinced villagers not to get the vaccine. Some of those people got the bug, took it to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage and infected people from several other countries. I don't know if India and Pakistan were ever clear, but they are two of the hot spots receiving the most attention these days. You can read the report at http://www.polioeradication.org/Aboutus/Annualreports.aspx#fragment-1 but here's the slashdot version:
Success in India was the most remarkable milestone, deemed “magnificent” by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) of the GPEI. Long considered one of the most challenging countries in which to eradicate polio, India accomplished what the IMB called the “systematic enforcement of best practice” to reach over 98% of children with polio vaccine. The country freed itself of endemic polio and finally laid to rest the question of whether polio eradication is technically feasible.
Globally, polio cases fell to half the level of the previous year. In two of the four countries with re-established
transmission of polio, no cases have been reported in the Republic of South Sudan and in Angola since June 2009 and July 2011, respectively. In the other two, Chad geographically restricted polio in the second half of the year and cases plummeted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after aggressive response to extensive outbreaks in early 2011. All of the eight outbreaks recorded in previously polio-free countries were successfully stopped, all but one within six months.
On the other side of the scales, the three remaining endemic countries witnessed an unexpected and serious upsurge of polio. In Nigeria and Pakistan, the continued circulation of two wild poliovirus serotypes – and a vaccinederived poliovirus in the former – had the ripple effect of international spread to two neighbours.
In Afghanistan, the number of cases also increased, with the national programme unable to reach enough children to stop outbreaks in the insecure Southern Region. At the end of 2011, the three endemic countries were off-track for eradicating polio.
I was just discussing this on G+ where it was claimed that Billy boy has wiped out Polio in the third world. To which I said, Uh, No.
Bill Gates has temporarily suppressed Polio in certain parts of the third world and helped sell it out in the process. In order to get vaccinations you have to provide strong IP protection to Big Pharma. So strong that if your people are dying and you make the medication to save them instead of buying it because you can't afford it that the WTO will end up owning your asshole. Meanwhile, they're not going to get into every nation, which is what it actually takes to eradicate a disease. Instead they are lending a false sense of security while creating a ticking time bomb.
The drive to eradicate polio around the world is sponsored by the WTO, the CDC and Rotary International (oops, I just checked and now Unicef has been added). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a big donor, contributing at least $1 billion, but they do not call the shots. Further, polio vaccines are not protected by IP laws, you might want to google Salk and Sabin, or even just visit the polio eradication web site. How you got so misinformed I have no idea, but you really should at least conduct a simple fact search on the internet before putting your online name against such poppycock.
"selling land mines has no legitimate military purpose."
Nonsense. If I'm defending a fixed position, I want a line of mines in front of me. Why? So it's harder for any attackers to overrun us, and kill not only us but whoever/whatever we're trying to protect. Mines are very effective for that.
They have absolutely legitimate military use. The problem is when they're left behind and kill civilians. Or worse, when a regime plants them throughout farm fields so they can't be worked as a way to cause starvation.
I'm very much with GP and against you on this. "The problem is when they're left behind and kill civilians" is true but a smoke screen. They're pretty much ALWAYS left behind where they kill and maim innocents, for generations. They take minutes to deploy but years to clear. You deploy now with the full expectation that you will be committing egregious human rights violations in the future. Where we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is obviously different in peacetime and at war -- that's almost the definition of war. However, landmines are now clearly on the wrong side of that line, even in wartime. Or, put another way, just as your right to swing your fist stops at my nose, your right to deploy mines stops unless you can guarantee you will clean them up again. And you can't guarantee that.
As an aside, I've known two people who spent many years serving in the Canadian army, who admit they previously supported land mines where appropriate, and now work or volunteer time to make sure the world stops using them, and cleans up, bit by bit, the mess we are in now.
Until rain becomes contaminated this is not going to be a world wide issue. There are a few places that are having issues with potable water such as the Nile and the Ganges but most of the world will not have that issue. With solar energy and contaminated water portable water is one step away.
I think it's already portable, it's just heavy that it's difficult to move a lot of it unless you can channel it downhill;-)
Seriously, on the larger issue I couldn't disagree more. Google gives lots of good stuff. The very first document says: "Our Bottom Line: During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems—shortages, poor water quality, or floods—that will risk instability and
state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States on important US policy objectives. Between now and 2040, fresh water availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources. Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate energy, posing a risk to global food markets and hobbling economic growth. As a result of demographic and economic development pressures, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems.
Filtering dirty water to make it useful for crops or washing your car is easy. Filtering it (cheaply) to make it drinkable is much harder. Desalinating it, as this does, is more difficult still, and usually very energy intensive.
Two words: Impossible.
I don't believe that a backwater like Sudan has 32 computers, nevermind 32 stuxnet infections, unless maybe these are real viral infections of decimated cattle. So that map and analysis looks like total bulldust to me.
I know you've got your tongue at least near your cheek, but I worked there a few years ago. They do have computers. The more reputable multinationals were running linux and StarOffice, due to US embargo Microsoft wasn't allowed to sell there. Given the rather not-ready-for-prime-time condition of Star Office in the mid-90s, people did complain and I expect productivity suffered. The embargo also meant that Visa, MasterCard and Amex couldn't operate there, so everything was done with cash. It was a little disturbing arriving in Khartoum with a few grand in cash inside my pockets.
If you ever wonder about what a really, really bad business trip might resemble, I suggest Khartoum.
Slashdot Mirror
You had me interested, but my Google-fu couldn't dig anything up. Do you remember any of the other ingredients in the paste? I might give it a try with a chicken first, but if it works treat the family at Christmas.
This slashdotter thinks you shouldn't let your SO represent you in any legal matters ;-)
The owner (or renter) of the property is not at issue here. If, say, your state had a requirement that all students had to complete 100 hours of community service to graduate, and that they had to wear an RFID tag while doing that service work, it would be exactly the same situation wherever the community service took place.
The issue is the extent to which a public school system can enforce the surrender of some of your privacy and freedoms. Your child must attend a school or be homeschooled, and for almost all families the only option that makes sense is to enroll your child in the public school suggested / mandated by the school board. Given that we, the people, have decided that you are all but required by law to send your children to this school, we the people are well advised to tread extremely carefully in reducing the rights of you and your child any further. Whether this case is an acceptable infringement is up for debate, and the argument needs to include a review of the benefits to individual students, the collective student body and the school administration. Personally I doubt it would pass my internal bar for acceptable, but I haven't heard all the arguments.
Small coffee farmers struggling to survive could unite and form a cooperation to develop s competitive strategy using Porter's ideas.
Analysing the market and finding a strategy to compete against the existing corporations surely isn't easy but using Porter you can go about it in a rather structured way.
Once and if a strategy is found and implemented to achieve a defensible position, I'd expect the existing corporations to fight a very dirty war in order to maintain their own positions.
Thanks for replying. I agree with you, and that seems to be what is happening, although there's a lot of debate about implementation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade_coffee. Off topic, my interest in the area came from a time when I was living and working in Aceh, but happened to be in a Costco in a place called Tsawwassen, outside Vancouver BC. They had a promotional display in the middle of one area, with a young woman offering a variety of Fair Trade coffees on sale, including a Sumatra decaffeinated one. I said that I would take one like that if they had with caffeine, adding that I lived in Sumatra. Young, white, very Canadian woman in the booth said she'd been there.
I'm reading Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy". Apparently it's the manager's bible. Porter advocates that competition to be the best is not a viable path to follow. Instead value must be created, the value chain must be enforced and the influences concerning 1) threats of competition, 2) threats of substitution, 3) bargaining power of customers and 4) bargaining power of suppliers must be managed well. Porter mentions patents and IP as factors but, of course, takes no political position. So, the most important issue here is that it's actually good that coffee producers actively consider competitive strategy. It should result in a more balanced coffee market whereby 1) we value and pay more for it and 2) the value chain of producing countries is enforced. It remains to be seen whether the distribution of this newly created wealth will be undertaken fairly.
You've come very close to hitting the mark. Porter writes about the real world of business, where few businesses are in a pure competitive market, but more likely an oligopoly. The key point for this discussion is the four-way dynamic you mention -- the bargaining power between poor farmers and middlemen has traditionally been very lopsided in favour of the middlemen. If the origin of the coffee becomes marketable, the balance becomes more equal and the farmers become less poor. This has worked elsewhere. Registering a trademark isn't enough on itself, though, you need resources to knock down scumbags who try to sell lower-quality coffee with your trademark on it or customers will not return.
"Whether or not you can extract (and I choose that word deliberately) wealth from a nation through the fiction we call "intellectual property" has nothing to do with the long-term viability of that concept.
When people starve to death because Monsanto won't let them grow patented plants, we need to put the bastards up against the wall. When people starve to death because Goldman Sachs has cornered the Red Spring Wheat market, we need to put the bastards up against the wall. When people die of malaria because Novartis would rather profit than save lives, we need to put the bastards up against the wall.
"Intellectual property" literally means nothing more than "we value dollars over your life". Anyone using that as a defense for their actions counts as nothing short of a race traitor - To the human race.
Nice rant. In many cases I'd agree with what you're saying, stripped of hyperbole. But in this case, asserting trademark rights (intellectual property) is a way to protect the poor coffee farmers. If they want to grow their traditional coffee, or grow "Fair Trade" coffee in a more sustainable manner, they need the protection of a trademark, or some cheap low-life grower from somewhere else will start marketing "Tanzania" coffee with a lousy taste, killing off their future sales, and perhaps their wives and children. IP is exactly what these farmers need to grow their business, and perhaps to survive (I don't know Tanzania).
I live in Indonesia, and I share your experience of the taste. Mind you I've never paid for it myself: this being one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and a lack of certification, suggests that they just grab any reasonably good bunch of beans and label 'em "kopi luwak."
I agree with you also on Toraja, my usual choice, and also Mandeheleng (North Sumatra). Acehnese can be the best, but not if it's processed in Aceh, where they burn the shit out of the beans while roasting (on topic of this thread, there must be a pun there but I can't see it). Java arabica is also very good, but they grow a lot more robusta than arabica so getting the right brand is important.
Returning to the more general topic, since branding is so important in something like this, I'm going to agree with the WIPO and say that this is a rare example of good IP protection. Having the right trademarks protected, whether "Fair Trade" for those who like it, or at least brand names, does protect consumers and producers who have bothered to invest in good techniques.
Maybe not the walnuts themselves, but the pattern is emerging... Maple Syrup, Walnuts, next we'll see sugar missing, then cream. Look for a back-of-the-woods monster ice cream maker and someone's gonna corner the market on maple walnut ice cream, one of my favorites. Won't someone think of the children...
The company had been running an internship program that put 14- to 16-year-old children on the factory floor
And the link they reference in that quote (to anther article on their OWN site) says it was vocational interns (16+) and college students (18+). So more accurate would be "16 to 22".
I don't want to defend the authors, but Foxconn did recently admit that some of it vocational interns were 14 - 16 years old. It was on the BBC, among others.
The contaminated material at the Gore site is 20 million metric tons of source materials in the form of uranium, uranium oxides, uranium fluorides, thorium, radium, and decay-chain products in process equipment and buildings, soil, sludge, and groundwater.
Citation needed. Here's the description of the site: http://www.wise-uranium.org/edusa.html#GORE (11-14 acres) and here's what I could find on the reclamation: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/gore.htm. In fact that link uses the exact words you used, which leads me to believe you have read it. It also says, in the same fucking article, that "The total radiological and hazardous waste volume is estimated to be 141,600-311,520 m3 (5-11 million ft3)." I leave it as an exercise to get the density of your material using these numbers and find something on earth that dense. The latter site does mention that they have a licence to "possess" up to 20 million tons of stuff including groundwater.
In fact, do you have the foggiest notion of what 20 million tons is? Assuming a density of 5 tons per cubic meter (rough approximation, within one order of magnitude) that's 4 million cubic meters. Since I bothered to google, I know that the area where the waste will be stored is 11 to 14 acres, or around 4.5 hectares. 4 million cubic meters over 45,000 square meters is about 900 meters tall. So tell me, is your claim bullshit or are they building a mountain of contaminated material?
No drug, not even alcohol, can bring out of a person something that was not already in that person. A lot of people have unresolved emotional baggage, insecurities, and unhealthy tendencies that they barely keep in check, mostly through fear of consequence. This is not real character or real strength and the dissolution of inhibition can cause it to break down.
I'm not sure about this, but I'm not an expert. I do recall reports of people getting pot or other drugs laced with PCP (a horse tranquilizer, IIRC) and completely losing self control, and becoming very aggressive. If the reports of cannibalism after ingestion of "bath salts" are true, that can't be only a result of reduced inhibition.
I'll reiterate, we live in a truly shallow and unenlightened society where the most ignorant and emotionally immature are the most comfortable.
Now that's one of the most thought-provoking things I've read here, or elsewhere, for quite a while. Thank you for that.
If you want to study engineering, that is where you should be able to concentrate.
I did that, 25 years ago. Recently I returned to my alma mater (UWO in Canada, if anyone cares) and 6 of us were invited by the fairly new Dean to discuss what they should be doing to improve the curriculum. While lab methods had changed a lot in 25 years, most of the core curriculum hadn't -- which is probably the right thing. Anyway, when he asked what we didn't get at university, but should have, we came up with two: project management and English.
Project management is an obvious skill for an engineer, and should have always been there. When he was surprised that we mentioned English (specifically a writing course) we all said that a lot of our work since graduation has included writing reports, and learning how to write well early on would have been a great advantage. I have forgotten an awful lot of math in 25 years, and learned a lot of English writing.
By all means learn the math and physics. I think you cannot possibly do anything worthwhile in economics or finance without calculus, and even political scientists must need to know about trends and statistics, both of which are built at least partially on calculus. But to do only, e.g., calculus, leaves one poorly equipped for life.
Are you implying that the Bangladeshi aren't smart enough to get out of the way of a 0.4mm annual rise in ocean levels? Or is it that they are so short they will drown in 18-59cm of water that will rise in the next 90 years? Your post does not make that clear.
Cf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
I think you need to re-evaluate your understanding of sea level rise and any "catastrophes" it may cause. There are loads of antropocentric problems that will arise in the next 100 years as a result of the rise, but people drowning is most decidedly NOT one of them.
It's not that simple in practice. For one thing, where will people move to? Also, when you move the coast inland, all the drainage infrastructure, which was designed for a given sea level, doesn't drain so well. During heavy rains and/or high tides neighborhoods, perhaps entire cities, will flood. The cost in both financial and misery terms is enormous.
Corporations are full of people that will suck up IT's time with their very own customized desktop. The weight of the few that could actually make themselves more productive and not take up undue resources is outweighed by the many who'd just wasting company time being equally or less effective.
My own work laptop has, for a desktop "Active Desktop Recovery: Microsoft Windows has experienced an unexpected error. As a precaution your Active Desktop has been turned off..."
The funny thing is that as far as I can tell everyone else's computer has the same desktop. We've standardized by all having the same error.
We're running XP SP3 here. Hell, I've only recently got IE8, and that was an improvement.
I'm on XP and IE7 at work, you insensitive clod! But more on topic, we've got 80,000 people in 70 countries and things move glacially and efficiency is not an objective. I've got different passwords for Windows/AD, our portal site, our SAP horror show and email. All but one need combinations of case, digits and special characters, those requirements vary and they all must be changed accordingly to different schedules.
Oh yeah, and Lotus Notes & Domino for email. Sigh
Then you don't know what you are talking about. Design Patents have almost nothing to do with regular patents. They are much more along the lines of Trademarks. They are very, very, very specific and almost impossible to enforce.
My hazy 25-year-old recollection from "Law for Engineers" suggests that in Canada, and therefore probably in other common law countries, these rights are covered by the name "Industrial Design" and the word patent wasn't used. The types of IP protected were three (excluding trademarks): patents, copyright and industrial design.
Why do you think the founders put those two things as first and second in the list of rights? According to them, it's because without the 2nd Amendment, you can't defend the 1st Amendment, and will quickly lose it.
Strat
This is patently incorrect. Many, many other countries have laws protecting freedom of speech with strict restrictions on firearm ownership. You are free to debate the pros and cons of both amendments, and any other rights you believe people have, either due to legislation or inherent human rights, but you cannot claim that the 2nd amendment is a necessary partner of the 1st.
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by stupidity... Doubling, tripling; sounds to me like it could be explained by an untrained operator not receiving feedback that an operation has been completed, and so clicking again on the button which initiates the operation. Combine that extremely plausible scenario with software which doesn't bother to check before re-accumulating totals, and you have a likely explanation.
Not if you RTFA. The database tables WEREN'T NORMALIZED and the doubling/tripling seemed to coincide with updates to tables when, e.g., the VOTER table had a precinct column, but there was also a PRECINCT table. The data in one got changed, the business logic bit panicked and duplicated all the records for that precinct. I haven't written a line of code in decades and I know how to normalize tables.
Indeed, I have heard (no citation) that he closed the CSR department when he returned to Apple.
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Bill Gates did no such thing as give away his fortune, he merely transferred it to a foundation to avoid taxes, and still exercises complete control over it. This is a matter of public record. Gates foundation invests the absolute minimum in actual charitable work that is required to maintain its charitable foundation status, and more often than not in less than worthy forms such as subsidizing the purchase of Microsoft software or subsidizing the purchase of patented drugs, cash flow that flows straight back in to Gates' considerable investments in major drug companies. As a philatrophist, Bill Gates is no Andrew Carnegie.
Since you claim your rant is a "matter of public record" it's a shame you couldn't cite any sources. Whatever my personal feelings about the guy, I freely acknowledge that he's given away more than any other person in history. Over $1 billion just to eradicate polio http://www.polioeradication.org/Financing/Contributions.aspx. That's better than a wikipedia link on a different topic. Over to you...
I've no idea how a misinformed troll like you gets modded +4 Insightful, but I'd like to set the record straight for others, using your links even. In one of them is a discussion of BMGF funding research into a malaria vaccine. It also talks about the price of third-world-disease vaccines dropping from over $100 to $2.50. That would seem to blunt your claim that only rich people will benefit from the drugs, since rich people don't generally get malaria. As for a charity monopoly, you're an idiot. There are of course many charities, from the global ones down to local one-person operations. The kind of things BMGF attacks are generally so big, like malaria and polio, that even governments can't address them adequately. They make a difference precisely because they are big enough to tackle really big problems. That is a good thing. I'm gonna ignore your rant about education as off-topic and poorly cited.
No I was thinking how I read somewhere that polio got trapped in North Africa and that the "final push" would get rid of it but then their anti-vaxers showed up and it got out. (Although I'm not even sure if that's even true because I've since read that the whole time it was still endemic to the Indian subcontinent so even if they eradicated it in North Africa there was at least one more reserve.)
My understanding is not complete, but I recall that it was down to very few countries at one point -- like 2 or 3. Nigeria was one, and there was a group of conservative Moslem community leaders there who convinced villagers not to get the vaccine. Some of those people got the bug, took it to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage and infected people from several other countries. I don't know if India and Pakistan were ever clear, but they are two of the hot spots receiving the most attention these days. You can read the report at http://www.polioeradication.org/Aboutus/Annualreports.aspx#fragment-1 but here's the slashdot version:
Success in India was the most remarkable milestone, deemed “magnificent” by the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) of the GPEI. Long considered one of the most challenging countries in which to eradicate polio, India accomplished what the IMB called the “systematic enforcement of best practice” to reach over 98% of children with polio vaccine. The country freed itself of endemic polio and finally laid to rest the question of whether polio eradication is technically feasible.
Globally, polio cases fell to half the level of the previous year. In two of the four countries with re-established transmission of polio, no cases have been reported in the Republic of South Sudan and in Angola since June 2009 and July 2011, respectively. In the other two, Chad geographically restricted polio in the second half of the year and cases plummeted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after aggressive response to extensive outbreaks in early 2011. All of the eight outbreaks recorded in previously polio-free countries were successfully stopped, all but one within six months.
On the other side of the scales, the three remaining endemic countries witnessed an unexpected and serious upsurge of polio. In Nigeria and Pakistan, the continued circulation of two wild poliovirus serotypes – and a vaccinederived poliovirus in the former – had the ripple effect of international spread to two neighbours. In Afghanistan, the number of cases also increased, with the national programme unable to reach enough children to stop outbreaks in the insecure Southern Region. At the end of 2011, the three endemic countries were off-track for eradicating polio.
I was just discussing this on G+ where it was claimed that Billy boy has wiped out Polio in the third world. To which I said, Uh, No.
Bill Gates has temporarily suppressed Polio in certain parts of the third world and helped sell it out in the process. In order to get vaccinations you have to provide strong IP protection to Big Pharma. So strong that if your people are dying and you make the medication to save them instead of buying it because you can't afford it that the WTO will end up owning your asshole. Meanwhile, they're not going to get into every nation, which is what it actually takes to eradicate a disease. Instead they are lending a false sense of security while creating a ticking time bomb.
The drive to eradicate polio around the world is sponsored by the WTO, the CDC and Rotary International (oops, I just checked and now Unicef has been added). The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a big donor, contributing at least $1 billion, but they do not call the shots. Further, polio vaccines are not protected by IP laws, you might want to google Salk and Sabin, or even just visit the polio eradication web site. How you got so misinformed I have no idea, but you really should at least conduct a simple fact search on the internet before putting your online name against such poppycock.
"selling land mines has no legitimate military purpose."
Nonsense. If I'm defending a fixed position, I want a line of mines in front of me. Why? So it's harder for any attackers to overrun us, and kill not only us but whoever/whatever we're trying to protect. Mines are very effective for that.
They have absolutely legitimate military use. The problem is when they're left behind and kill civilians. Or worse, when a regime plants them throughout farm fields so they can't be worked as a way to cause starvation.
I'm very much with GP and against you on this. "The problem is when they're left behind and kill civilians" is true but a smoke screen. They're pretty much ALWAYS left behind where they kill and maim innocents, for generations. They take minutes to deploy but years to clear. You deploy now with the full expectation that you will be committing egregious human rights violations in the future. Where we draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is obviously different in peacetime and at war -- that's almost the definition of war. However, landmines are now clearly on the wrong side of that line, even in wartime. Or, put another way, just as your right to swing your fist stops at my nose, your right to deploy mines stops unless you can guarantee you will clean them up again. And you can't guarantee that.
As an aside, I've known two people who spent many years serving in the Canadian army, who admit they previously supported land mines where appropriate, and now work or volunteer time to make sure the world stops using them, and cleans up, bit by bit, the mess we are in now.
Until rain becomes contaminated this is not going to be a world wide issue. There are a few places that are having issues with potable water such as the Nile and the Ganges but most of the world will not have that issue. With solar energy and contaminated water portable water is one step away.
I think it's already portable, it's just heavy that it's difficult to move a lot of it unless you can channel it downhill ;-)
Seriously, on the larger issue I couldn't disagree more. Google gives lots of good stuff. The very first document says: "Our Bottom Line: During the next 10 years, many countries important to the United States will experience water problems—shortages, poor water quality, or floods—that will risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States on important US policy objectives. Between now and 2040, fresh water availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources. Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate energy, posing a risk to global food markets and hobbling economic growth. As a result of demographic and economic development pressures, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia will face major challenges coping with water problems.
Filtering dirty water to make it useful for crops or washing your car is easy. Filtering it (cheaply) to make it drinkable is much harder. Desalinating it, as this does, is more difficult still, and usually very energy intensive.
Two words: Impossible. I don't believe that a backwater like Sudan has 32 computers, nevermind 32 stuxnet infections, unless maybe these are real viral infections of decimated cattle. So that map and analysis looks like total bulldust to me.
I know you've got your tongue at least near your cheek, but I worked there a few years ago. They do have computers. The more reputable multinationals were running linux and StarOffice, due to US embargo Microsoft wasn't allowed to sell there. Given the rather not-ready-for-prime-time condition of Star Office in the mid-90s, people did complain and I expect productivity suffered. The embargo also meant that Visa, MasterCard and Amex couldn't operate there, so everything was done with cash. It was a little disturbing arriving in Khartoum with a few grand in cash inside my pockets.
If you ever wonder about what a really, really bad business trip might resemble, I suggest Khartoum.