Why don't we just give all Americans incurable diseases while we're at it to stimulate the medical industry properly? Snarky sounding, but perhaps you're right, the US has shown a fairly strong track record for solving problems that it can actually be motivated to deal with.
It's worth pointing out though that the high cost of gasoline outside of the US has been pushing large numbers of people to CNG, which although less less polluting is still not a long term solution to the problem, simply a delaying effort that very well may be immediately offset by increased use. In India it costs half as much but releases 2/3rds the CO2 for equivalent usage. These systems can however sometimes run on landfill waste products at which point we simply have a logistical problem.
Continue to mod parent up. Whether you agree with Lomborg or not his response is extremely level headed and informative. If the passages he responds to are any indicator of the quality of this "debunking" it's nothing more than another log of rhetoric on the fire that does nothing to serve either side of the argument.
Would they care if a woman was topless? Probably not, although the Brits don't strike me as any less repressed in this respect than any Americans I've met.
Are there hot naked women running all over the place? Not even close. Strip clubs and billboards in the East are the closest you'll get most of the time, and the only time you'll get it without seeing 100x more naked men in the process.
It's not an issue of defending Nazism, it's an issue of defending the right to political expression. Germany has specific laws stating that they will not censor political speech further reinforced by EU regulations. I have no love for Nazis, but that in no way means I have to support a government that already knows it doesn't have to follow its own rules.
The sad thing in both cases is the heavy handed approach to "safety" has only served to galvanize the opposition and give them more power than they ever would have had if they were simply ignored.
There was at least one well known case, I believe in NYC of a SxE group that was classified as a gang and handled accordingly due to their habit of brutally beating drug dealers and robbing them. I think there were even a number of incidents that actually involved kicking in doors and shots fired. Not representative of the movement as a whole, but neither is bombing animal testing labs.
What about the detrimental impact that the minority group has on itself by teaching generation after generation that the reason they will never succeed is racism and as a result it's fully understandable if they hate everyone who isn't like them. The breeding of an "us vs. them" mentality may not make the majority group loose any sleep, but it's certainly been doing its best to poison the ambitions and futures of minorities.
it's that there's less harm resulting when a minority engages in it than when somebody in the majority does
I for one would argue that's not the case. A hate crime is a hate crime, discrimination is discrimination, all you're saying is that it's less of a problem if some people do it than others. Do you have some metric for measuring whether it's worse for the person or for society for a white woman to think all black men are trying to rape/rob her than for a black man to think that any perceived slight towards him is a result of everyone else being a racist? Social stigmas die hard but that's no excuse for ignoring the perpetuation of the situation caused by that kind of behavior from either side.
Or, and hear me out on this, he could take legal action, if there is any to be taken, in the applicable country. It seems to be a much disregarded fact on Slashdot that you don't need to be the citizen of, resident of, or even present in, a country to hire a lawyer there to file whatever papers you choose.
Obama is just as beholden to special interests as Bush was, his record setting fund raising didnät come out of nowhere after all. The problem is that he promised change and even the parts that were well within his control have failed.
1)More transparency such as putting health care reform documentation online before it was voted on OR even allowing the debates to be televised like everything else - Fail
2) Promising not to hire lobbyists for his cabinets lasted all of week.
This is not to say that he hasn't done some things correctly, but for most people living in the US his likability (which is very high) is staring to take a back seat to an honest evaluation of his accomplishments (which have been few because of his unability to organize his own party behind him) and that's why his popularity dips ever lower here. There's already backlash against at the level of elected officials and it's starting to look like the next round of elections wont be a fun one for the Democrats even this soon after Bush.
Look at the posts in this thread and tell me who has an "us vs. them" mentality. Bush didn't do anything to convince Americans to dislike Europe (rumors of Freedom Fries are greatly exaggerated), and he didn't need to do anything to convince Europeans to dislike the US.
Since when is the US high tax or high unemployment?
I think the far easier answer to why Europeans donät hide their money in the U.S. is that it's much convenient to hide it in Switzerland, Luxemburg, or Lichtenstein.
I think not living in a city has made you paranoid to the incredibly small number of robberies that actually happen. Not everyone is cities is a drug addict, not all drug addicts are going to rob you, and very few of them are going to do it on noon on a Sunday. I imagine you should try to find some other things to be paranoid about, like being attacked by a bear in the bathroom. Most bears don't attack people in bathrooms, most banks are not assaulted by highly trained death squads while you're banking, but most != all!
Not to get too off topic, but from what I understand most Japanese ATMs are only open during normal business hours completely negating 90% or what I thought they were used for (ie getting cash at 1AM when the banks are closed). Furthermore if your bank only has a very regional presence it's entirely likely that if you travel to another part of the islands that you'll have absolutely no access to your money. This is all hear-say from my friends who taught English there but they all kept their money in sacks under the mattress because there was no other way to ensure access to.
No on in the US cares that they sometimes have to write checks. Employees can be paid with direct deposits to their accounts, most bills can be paid direct from bank accounts with no fees. I haven't written a check in three years, I honestly don't know off hand where they are at this point. Perhaps I'm in the minority though as a person that doesn't need to constantly transfer money to other people, my girlfriend is German and I see her making bank transfers of 10-20 Euros to people all the time instead of just giving them cash.
Same thing happened to Peter Jackson with Lord of the Rings, although he received substantial money in addition to the percentage of net profits he thought he was going to be getting.
I don't, but last time I checked there's nothing wrong with telling an artist that his "Jar Jar Binks" phase of work was absolute shit. I don't want him to change them like he did with 4-6, I want him to go back in time and do them right before I ever watch them the first time.
My personal hatred of Lucas includes but is not limited to:
1) Destroying all the suspense of the original trilogy by revealing in Episode III that Luke and Lea are siblings potentially ruining the quality of Episodes 4-6 if they aren't watched first and making the ending of 3 heavy handed and useless if they are.
2) Name dropping Chewbacca for the sake of action figure sales, unless you're implying that Chewbacca simply forgot that he knows Yoda and it never came up in conversation.
3) Giving R2D2 a jet pack and lightning gun. (What the fuck?)
4) Making almost everyone in 1-3 speak English. So everyone could speak basic just fine under the Old Republic and simply forgot while they were being crushed under the xenophobic galactic Empire?
5) I can't even explain the crazy conspiracy theories that have to be involved with the clone wars and the Death Star. If Palpatine can clandestinely have an army of hundreds of thousands of clones and star ships built with absolutely no one knowing about it why does he need to use Lord Dooku to be the puppet-master of the Trade Federation (who apparently weren't important enough to mention in the original trilogy) to design the Death Star and shit why wasn't that conveniently waiting to roll out as well? Why did it take 15 years from Palpatine gaining supreme authority to dissolving the senate? How does someone create three movies with more plot holes than quality acting performances?
I stop here because the case in point isn't that he changed his audience, it that he made blatantly shitty movies with no respect to even his own previous work. I understand time passed between creating the two but I can't imagine that he forgot one of his greatest successes to the point that he couldn't spot massive continuity errors. I was personally a large fan of the expanded universe, and it's certainly well within Lucas' right not to honor the creation of others but for Christ sake they did a much much much better job respecting the canon that Lucas had laid down.
Seeing as how almost all contracts begin in the 300-500 minute rage not including free nights and weekends, in-calling, or any other deals a particular carrier might offer you fall squarely in the "I don't use my phone" group.
It makes perfect sense if you use less minutes than any contract will offer you to pay a higher per minute rate to lower your overall bill, but very few people are in that situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't we just give all Americans incurable diseases while we're at it to stimulate the medical industry properly? Snarky sounding, but perhaps you're right, the US has shown a fairly strong track record for solving problems that it can actually be motivated to deal with.
It's worth pointing out though that the high cost of gasoline outside of the US has been pushing large numbers of people to CNG, which although less less polluting is still not a long term solution to the problem, simply a delaying effort that very well may be immediately offset by increased use. In India it costs half as much but releases 2/3rds the CO2 for equivalent usage. These systems can however sometimes run on landfill waste products at which point we simply have a logistical problem.
Continue to mod parent up. Whether you agree with Lomborg or not his response is extremely level headed and informative. If the passages he responds to are any indicator of the quality of this "debunking" it's nothing more than another log of rhetoric on the fire that does nothing to serve either side of the argument.
To confirm the reports of my co-responder:
Would they care if a woman was topless? Probably not, although the Brits don't strike me as any less repressed in this respect than any Americans I've met.
Are there hot naked women running all over the place? Not even close. Strip clubs and billboards in the East are the closest you'll get most of the time, and the only time you'll get it without seeing 100x more naked men in the process.
It's not an issue of defending Nazism, it's an issue of defending the right to political expression. Germany has specific laws stating that they will not censor political speech further reinforced by EU regulations. I have no love for Nazis, but that in no way means I have to support a government that already knows it doesn't have to follow its own rules.
The sad thing in both cases is the heavy handed approach to "safety" has only served to galvanize the opposition and give them more power than they ever would have had if they were simply ignored.
There was at least one well known case, I believe in NYC of a SxE group that was classified as a gang and handled accordingly due to their habit of brutally beating drug dealers and robbing them. I think there were even a number of incidents that actually involved kicking in doors and shots fired. Not representative of the movement as a whole, but neither is bombing animal testing labs.
What about the detrimental impact that the minority group has on itself by teaching generation after generation that the reason they will never succeed is racism and as a result it's fully understandable if they hate everyone who isn't like them. The breeding of an "us vs. them" mentality may not make the majority group loose any sleep, but it's certainly been doing its best to poison the ambitions and futures of minorities.
it's that there's less harm resulting when a minority engages in it than when somebody in the majority does
I for one would argue that's not the case. A hate crime is a hate crime, discrimination is discrimination, all you're saying is that it's less of a problem if some people do it than others. Do you have some metric for measuring whether it's worse for the person or for society for a white woman to think all black men are trying to rape/rob her than for a black man to think that any perceived slight towards him is a result of everyone else being a racist? Social stigmas die hard but that's no excuse for ignoring the perpetuation of the situation caused by that kind of behavior from either side.
Or, and hear me out on this, he could take legal action, if there is any to be taken, in the applicable country. It seems to be a much disregarded fact on Slashdot that you don't need to be the citizen of, resident of, or even present in, a country to hire a lawyer there to file whatever papers you choose.
"Sheeples wovle but they don't fall down"
It is, they're still using the King George mailboxes you guys installed too.
Until you're found shot to death in the doorway of your Moscow apartment?
You forgot the other complaint about the US, that we refuse to raise taxes so we just print more money.
Obama is just as beholden to special interests as Bush was, his record setting fund raising didnät come out of nowhere after all. The problem is that he promised change and even the parts that were well within his control have failed.
1)More transparency such as putting health care reform documentation online before it was voted on OR even allowing the debates to be televised like everything else - Fail
2) Promising not to hire lobbyists for his cabinets lasted all of week.
This is not to say that he hasn't done some things correctly, but for most people living in the US his likability (which is very high) is staring to take a back seat to an honest evaluation of his accomplishments (which have been few because of his unability to organize his own party behind him) and that's why his popularity dips ever lower here. There's already backlash against at the level of elected officials and it's starting to look like the next round of elections wont be a fun one for the Democrats even this soon after Bush.
Look at the posts in this thread and tell me who has an "us vs. them" mentality. Bush didn't do anything to convince Americans to dislike Europe (rumors of Freedom Fries are greatly exaggerated), and he didn't need to do anything to convince Europeans to dislike the US.
Since when is the US high tax or high unemployment?
I think the far easier answer to why Europeans donät hide their money in the U.S. is that it's much convenient to hide it in Switzerland, Luxemburg, or Lichtenstein.
Denmark - 25%
Hungary - 25%
Sweden - 25%
There are only one country, Luxemburg, that only charges 15%
He did mention those, unfortunately he was in pretty under-developed area so only a few banks and no 24 hour ATMs.
they do, often, attract the lunatic fringe
and a highly armed lunatic fringe at that. Sounds like a dangerous customer base to screw around with.
I think not living in a city has made you paranoid to the incredibly small number of robberies that actually happen. Not everyone is cities is a drug addict, not all drug addicts are going to rob you, and very few of them are going to do it on noon on a Sunday. I imagine you should try to find some other things to be paranoid about, like being attacked by a bear in the bathroom. Most bears don't attack people in bathrooms, most banks are not assaulted by highly trained death squads while you're banking, but most != all!
Not to get too off topic, but from what I understand most Japanese ATMs are only open during normal business hours completely negating 90% or what I thought they were used for (ie getting cash at 1AM when the banks are closed). Furthermore if your bank only has a very regional presence it's entirely likely that if you travel to another part of the islands that you'll have absolutely no access to your money. This is all hear-say from my friends who taught English there but they all kept their money in sacks under the mattress because there was no other way to ensure access to.
Apathy, pure and simple.
No on in the US cares that they sometimes have to write checks. Employees can be paid with direct deposits to their accounts, most bills can be paid direct from bank accounts with no fees. I haven't written a check in three years, I honestly don't know off hand where they are at this point. Perhaps I'm in the minority though as a person that doesn't need to constantly transfer money to other people, my girlfriend is German and I see her making bank transfers of 10-20 Euros to people all the time instead of just giving them cash.
Same thing happened to Peter Jackson with Lord of the Rings, although he received substantial money in addition to the percentage of net profits he thought he was going to be getting.
I don't, but last time I checked there's nothing wrong with telling an artist that his "Jar Jar Binks" phase of work was absolute shit. I don't want him to change them like he did with 4-6, I want him to go back in time and do them right before I ever watch them the first time.
My personal hatred of Lucas includes but is not limited to: 1) Destroying all the suspense of the original trilogy by revealing in Episode III that Luke and Lea are siblings potentially ruining the quality of Episodes 4-6 if they aren't watched first and making the ending of 3 heavy handed and useless if they are.
2) Name dropping Chewbacca for the sake of action figure sales, unless you're implying that Chewbacca simply forgot that he knows Yoda and it never came up in conversation.
3) Giving R2D2 a jet pack and lightning gun. (What the fuck?)
4) Making almost everyone in 1-3 speak English. So everyone could speak basic just fine under the Old Republic and simply forgot while they were being crushed under the xenophobic galactic Empire?
5) I can't even explain the crazy conspiracy theories that have to be involved with the clone wars and the Death Star. If Palpatine can clandestinely have an army of hundreds of thousands of clones and star ships built with absolutely no one knowing about it why does he need to use Lord Dooku to be the puppet-master of the Trade Federation (who apparently weren't important enough to mention in the original trilogy) to design the Death Star and shit why wasn't that conveniently waiting to roll out as well? Why did it take 15 years from Palpatine gaining supreme authority to dissolving the senate? How does someone create three movies with more plot holes than quality acting performances?
I stop here because the case in point isn't that he changed his audience, it that he made blatantly shitty movies with no respect to even his own previous work. I understand time passed between creating the two but I can't imagine that he forgot one of his greatest successes to the point that he couldn't spot massive continuity errors. I was personally a large fan of the expanded universe, and it's certainly well within Lucas' right not to honor the creation of others but for Christ sake they did a much much much better job respecting the canon that Lucas had laid down.
Seeing as how almost all contracts begin in the 300-500 minute rage not including free nights and weekends, in-calling, or any other deals a particular carrier might offer you fall squarely in the "I don't use my phone" group.
It makes perfect sense if you use less minutes than any contract will offer you to pay a higher per minute rate to lower your overall bill, but very few people are in that situation.