Yeah, it's similar to the British Medical Council for example that defines who can become a doctor in the UK and will disqualify those not fit for practice. That's certainly a much better system, although it doesn't class itself as a union however it does massage wages in other ways, keeping their pay artificially high by controlling access to the profession. Still, I'd rather they do that whilst ensuring people are fit to practice and doing away with those who are not, than push for high pay via strikes and even allowing incompetent people to cash in on that.
Like you say that on you cite is the ideal union- unions must take responsibility for their members.
Agreed, does anyone know where this uproar is actually coming from? I can't imagine anyone willing to play CoD in the first place getting upset over it. Is it the usual Jack Thompson and followers crew or are there really a bunch of vocal gamers out there who are hypocritical enough to whine about this?
Gameplay is just a vehicle to put the story across, I don't really see any contradiction here. If you've played CoD4 it switches between different teams across the world, by the looks of it they've just made this initial scene a playable scene to set the stage for the rest of the game- by putting you in charge of playing these people you get to know how evil they are, afterwards you'll presumably switch back to the Marines, SAS or whoever to begin the battle to catch them and kill them through the rest of the game.
Yeah I think that's the crux of it. One of the best modern war dramas I've ever seen on TV was "Over there", but it was cancelled after only 12 episodes - too close to the truth for people's liking was also the reason I assume it was cancelled as it really did do quite well to show the brutality of the situation in Iraq in most episodes.
It seems a lot of people are happy for their country to go to war, as long as they don't have to hear about it.
I know for sure that Wakefield, Barnsley, Kirklees, Sheffield, York and Leeds certainly do. The £29k figure is for those at the top of scale SO1/2 which comes after around 5 years service, the initial figure is about £24k at the start. The £29k figure is important though as anyone getting paid that much for that low skill level will certainly hold the job long enough to be on that much, simply because they can't even get close to that with such a low skill level outside public sector. Low paid technician roles do exist for sure, but the skill difference between scale 4 and SO1/2 is non-existent in my experience- I've worked with plenty of scale 4 technicians that were better than fellow SO1/2 technicians many times when I worked in public sector, and there is no justification at all for paying these people that much money, the SCP scale 4 to 5 range is about right for the level of expertise required from most council IT support staff.
For what it's worth, the NHS and Police also often (well, not so often since the recession) have IT support jobs too. West Yorkshire police have had similarly paid adverts up a few times.
"Corporations aren't part of the market because they require a lot of legal backing to support their effectively artificial existence."
What? No they don't. Businesses arose long before a legal framework was in place to support them.
"And why are you talking about the free market in relation to a public service owned by the state?"
Please either follow the conversation or don't bother responding. This comment makes no sense in the context of the discussion, it's a straw man at best.
"The point of the union isn't to benefit the company, it's to benefit the workers. Removing the union will be to the detriment of the workers, but not to the benefit of the company."
So why should the company have to pay £20m a year for it if it's not to it's benefit? Shouldn't the workers be stumping up that £20m?
"I think you over-estimate the pay, conditions and benefits of postmen."
I think you over-estimate the difficulty and worth of their job and skills. Again, particularly when there are 2.5 million people who would love nothing more than to have their job, pay and benefits without a complaint.
"That's a peculiar comment from a country where the official government and the opposition do little for workers rights, while bailing large banks for whatever they ask. In the 70's the unions had too much power, not now."
You're making a common mistake, you're assuming in the 70s all unions were weakened, this is not the case, public sector unions were left largely untouched and as such public sector unions still have the same situation of too much power as in the 70s. The CWU is a remnant of these public sector unions that were never castrated as required.
"As for thinking that a union (a political organisation) has no place commenting on politics, I can't see your logic"
Commenting is fine, bombarding members with propaganda through the post every month like "Don't vote for X, vote for Y" is a step too far.
"RM lost the Amazon contract because they have repeatedly provided bad service. The irony is that RM have consistently moaned about the internet killing their business, while ignoring the boom in home shopping. Maybe it's time for a complete change of management."
No, RM originally gained the contract from Amazon by realising the boom in home shopping was one way to save their business. Amazon only a few weeks ago dropped the contract because of the threat of strikes (after RM strikes caused them harm last year). It was not sustainable for Amazon to use RM if they can't ensure reliability. See the following, I include a selection of sources whether you're right wing, centrist, left wing or whatever, it's fact not political biased propaganda:
Note also the reference to eBay, many of whose members indeed rely on Royal Mail. Royal Mail management has made strides to support the home shopping revolution- you realise you can even pay for and print of postage barcodes rather than rely on Paypal now right? The problem is all this is useless if it can't guarantee it's workers are going to show up to work to perform the actual deliveries. The Royal Mail has far from moaned about the internet killing their business, it's often been pointed out that it's a problem for them but they've always worked hard to work around the rise of e-mail rather than just moan about it as you seem to be incorrectly suggesting they do.
"You're twenty years too late, Thatcher already destroyed the unions. This is why we have the longest working hours and most inequality in Europe. Maybe if we'd kept the unions around we wouldn't be scrapping for minimum wage agency work whilst the bankers and executives walk off with all the cash."
No, Thatcher destroyed private sector unions, hence why the British economy recovered from it's low point post-Labour in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You cannot blame her for Britain's long working hours because it is Labour that has pushed the opt-out of the EU working hour limit. Also, Labour is equally to blame for bankers running rampant, I know it's fashinable for pro-union people to blame the countries ills on Thatcher, but the longer ago Thatcher was in power, and the more our country descends into economic tragedy under Labour the less sense that argument makes.
"So workers who would otherwise make fuck-all, now get an income which may well help them pay a mortgage and raise a family. No doubt if these same workers were making £16k, you'd be whining about having to pay taxes for the services which they can no longer afford themselves."
People don't have a right to make a decent wage if they're not willing to put effort into working hard and learning skills. I would agree there is an issue when skilled, intelligent, hard working people are underpaid for sure, but in the case I'm referring to we have lazy, unskilled people getting overpaid due to union support.
"On the other hand, we have newspapers regularly telling millions of people who to vote for. Considering your anti-union views, I'd imagine the Times is the paper which tells you how to think."
Yes, that's right. Wait what? Sorry, I didn't realise I read newspapers? Nice assumption- obviously everyone whose anti-union is a Conservative that reads the Times of course. No, you see, my anti-union views stem from being a member of Unison and seeing how utterly stupid the decisions it made were, seeing how it pushed the mindless agenda and how it protected and tried to seek rewards for incompetence. My political leaning is towards the Liberal Democrats, I would vote neither Tory nor Labour.
"Britain has the weakest and smallest unions in Europe, according to right-wing dogma this should make us extremely prosperous. Instead, we're actually worse off, still in recession when everyone else is recovering."
What? You do know the only country with a stronger economy than Britain in Europe is Germany and France right? I didn't realise length in recession was the only possible measure of a countries economic strength. You do realise Germany fell further into recession than us right? and that France is only ahead of us because our reliance on the banking sector which is not good in the current economic climate yes? You do realise France could be way ahead of us if it weren't for the heavy subsidies it had to pay industries like agriculture because of it's strong farmers unions threatening to bring the entire nation to a standstill each time right? Britain still has a stronger economy than every other single country in Europe bar these two by quite a margin. It's almost certain that Britain will in a few years move ahead of France again, and for a while we were even almost ahead of Germany. I agree our reliance on finance is a bad thing, but to suggest unions have any relation to our countries imagined lack of prosperity when we're still one of the top world economies is laughable. The only country that comes close is Italy, after that it's Russia followed by Spain, whose economies are almost half the size of ours.
"The Royal Mail staff might not be on strike if the management hadn't reneged on the deal. But as your only information on the strike comes from right-wing sources, it's no wonder you're so ill-informed. They can't be struggling that much for cash if they can afford to pay Crozier several million a year."
Obviously you're dead right about my sources, because after all the BBC and The Guardian are so utterly rig
"More power to them! In fact you could argue Unison is keeping the pay of private sector technicians from falling further."
No, the fundamental issue is that the type of technicians we're talking about are technicians whose ability doesn't reach much past being able to stick a Windows CD in the drive, boot off it and install it then maybe install a few apps- I would add network drives to the list, but one particular person I used to work with couldn't even do that. He spent 4 hours trying to figure out why he couldn't get a drive to map from another PC, the reason? He hadn't shared it on the other machine. How can we justify paying these people £29k? So what if private sector only pays them £16k - it's all they're worth. Skilled IT workers still get a decent wage in private sector, but the fundamental issue is that many IT workers simply are not skilled despite them believing otherwise because they built their last PC all by themselves. The person to which I refer was by no way unique either, at least 90% of IT workers on that wage level in the council were of similar low levels of ability to him.
Unions aren't part of the market because they require a lot of legal backing to support their effectively artificial existence. In a free market Royal Mail would not have to pay £20million a year to support a union that does not benefit it as a company. If people went on strike in a truly free market they would simply be sacked and replaced - especially in this climate where you have 70,000 Royal Mail workers whining that they don't know their companies future business plan, whilst 2.5million are sat jobless only able to dream of having the job, the pay and the benefits those workers have in the Royal Mail right now.
We have systems like the minimum wage, equality laws, and the industrial tribunal system to ensure workers aren't totally abused so the loss of unions altogether wouldn't be the end of the world, but as I say I don't totally detest the idea of unions. I just wish they stuck to their remit, and were capable of accepting when things are good rather than insisting on continuing to fight battles which really don't make sense to fight- again the CWU won a battle against the Royal Mail a year or two ago, and what's the result of that? It moves onto something else which is so loosely defined it shows they're just trying to justify their existence and it is to the detriment of society- we can't for example justify having a two tier system where the private sector employee getting paid what he's worth at £18k a year is paying taxes so the equally low skilled worker in public sector is getting paid £29k a year, all because the union will play havoc with society if anyone dares try to fix it.
To add to this, I don't know so much about animals, but in the plant world it's certainly possible to have hybrids from two separate genus also.
The issue is that even with DNA mapping where you draw the line between two species isn't always clear, and depending on who you ask, the response can be quite varied- some will say they're the same species, one merely a subspecies, others will go as far as trying to classify into different genus.
The problem from what I understand effectively arises because the evolutionary tree can be quite messy- if you have multiple closely related ancestor species that can interbreed to create a new species it maybe that one set of descendents of that tree is eventually say for example, comprised of 20% species A, 30% species B, 50% species C whilst the other is 70% species A, 10% species B, 20% species C. They would share the same common acenstory but possibly be quite different and so comes the decision as to whether they should be treated as distinct or not, and even a question then of how distinct.
The reality is we still don't fully understand how it fits together and as you rightly state, we have interbreeding between distinct species, and the rule that suggests distinct species can't interbreed isn't wrong simply because there is imperical evidence of such, but is wrong because species are defined by humans, and those definitions do not necessarily map to the genetic complexities involved- just because we call two species distinct doesn't mean they're really genetically distinct enough to prevent interbreeding. There have been many occasions where we've labelled two species distinct only to backtrack and decide that's not the case, then a couple of decades later decide that it in fact is. Effectively the definition of a species as distinct should not be treated as precise, only ever as a best guess from what we know and decide at the time.
I think there's another facet to it though, you have to look at the thinking behind the use of such take down notices.
Companies like the media companies do it because they think it's right, because they think they should be able to block and stifle fair use, groups like NPR most likely do not agree with that stance, however are embroiled in a battle where dirty tactics are used, and if the tactic is available then they might as well use it.
It doesn't mean they inherently support the existence of such laws. A good example that is similar is that if we were to create a list of restrictive software licenses then you'd have to include the GPL (because it restricts your ability to keep changes private etc.), however you have to look at why the GPL says what it does - it's not because it inherently supports the copyright/patent system we have, it's quite the opposite- it's because it disagrees with them, but recognises they exist so makes the most of them in the best way it can.
The test of whether someone is fit for the list should really be "Would this company support the creation of such takedown laws factoring in the damage they can have on fair use if they did not exist". It maybe that NPR would indeed support this stance, but then it may not- to include NPR but not Scientology for example is a bit silly. This is the problem with binary views of things like this, it is possible to do the wrong thing for the right reasons and there are a lot of grey areas. It may well be that NPR agrees with you entirely, but if they don't use it it wont just go away, so they might as well use it, just as their opponents would.
"Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out."
As someone who has worked public sector, was a union member, and even striked with the union I can say that this is not entirely the case, unions are dangerous and I would rather see them severely weakened in the UK.
Unions are okay if their power is kept small, but in the UK they go out of control- Unison, one of the UK's biggest unions claims over 2 million members, and despite the fact half the working population are taking paycuts right now, Unison is still pushing for pay rises, even though basic IT technicians are still getting paid £29k in some local authorities where their true market worth in private sector for the low levels of ability would be around £16k to £18k. Governments are powerless to say no though, because they simply can't deal with the damage caused by a union that can put a good portion of it's 2 million members on strike. The story is the same with teachers whereby you have teachers strikes because secondary school teachers are underpaid whilst the same union covers primary school teachers who hence get the same rises and who are hence now heavily overpaid for their job, but what can the government do? risk having an entire generation of kids education disrupted setting them back for life?
Similarly, unions have a habit of protecting people at work regardless of the merit of that. This makes it impossible to get rid of dead weight, because you can't afford the associated costs with doing so - it's cheaper to keep those useless people in the job, providing a shit service than it is to get rid of them.
We also have them acting as a strongly political tool, they mail out regularly to their 2 million members telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, in my opinion this type of political lobbying is far beyond the remit of a union, particularly one with 2 million members who have distinctly varied political views.
I agree a country entirely without unions really would kind of suck for workers, but on the same note, as someone who lives in a country with unions that are simply far too powerful, and as someone who now, looking back wishes they had not given any support whatsoever to such unions I disagree that you want unions to become more popular or more powerful. They can bring countries to a standstill even when their argument has no merit- you only have to look at the current UK postal strikes for evidence of that and note also that the Royal Mail is having to pay £20m a year to provide premises and time off work for it's staff to perform union activities. That's a hell of a burden on a company when the only result is for the company to get screwed over for that £20m it has had to spend. It's hard to tell what the Royal Mail strikes are even about as the official line seems to be changing daily from the union involved- originally they admitted job cuts were needed and that that was not the issue but now they are saying it is about jobs. The Royal Mail has lost a £25m Amazon contract because of this, you simply can't have a union holding a company to ransom like that at the expense of the company, particularly when the union doesn't even seem to be able to remain consistent in what it's actual demands are!
"So you're expecting to see movies that aren't even available on DVD yet to be available on the on-demand service?"
I couldn't care either way as I'm not in the US and can't use Netflix even if I wanted to, but if the movie industry has any hope of beating piracy with legitimate on-demand services like Netflix then it has little choice.
"You clearly don't understand anything about the lifecycle of media then."
You're right. I don't understand the traditional lifecycle in a modern on-demand world that's for sure, because it doesn't fit and doesn't make sense, hence why piracy is so rampant because it's the only way to get such media on-demand.
Lifecycles aren't statically defined indefinitely, they can change throughout time, and in fact have to do so to keep pace (that's why although there is still disparity between US and European movie release dates, it is at least far shorter than it was 10 years ago). It's not unreasonable in this day and age where legal on-demand services are the best hope for making money from people who would otherwise pirate for them to be able to get films from an on-demand service before or at the same time as pirates can get them through other methods.
This was my thought actually, can Facebook really guarantee the layout of every single newspaper article in every single little town across the world to verify if a report of someone being "dead" is real or not?
People are going to get memorialised (sounds scary in itself) left right and centre. I wonder do they have an appeals process for this or do the dead not get appeals because, well, they're dead?
Imagine logging in one day to find you're apparently dead and half your friends are greiving over you, or even getting phone calls at work from people to see if you're really dead or not, or phone calls to your family from friends to confirm it....and all this, because Facebook's new UI gadget was recommended you talk to people you haven't spoken to in a while, which due to lack of forethought, included deceased people.
It could've been better to, you know, just fix/remove that feature? Facebook in general often seems to miss the point- if I haven't spoken to someone in a long while it's for good reason - I really can't be arsed to, or perhaps don't even want to.
I know you're joking but this seems as relevant a place as any to point out some points about this, swarm intelligence is really about emergent properties of largely random systems.
Ants for example will spread out randomly from the nest looking for food, when they find it they will return with a piece of it to the hive leaving a pheromone trail behind, other ants that are moving about randomly may cross this trail and follow it, they will reach the food too by following it and will also leave a pheromone trail as they return with the food. As more ants do this the pheromone trail will get stronger and stronger until all the ants have detected it and followed it, when the food source runs out they will stop dropping pheromones and the trail will decay sending the ants back to their random pattern until they find other food.
It is indeed quite arguably intelligence, but it's different from the idea of a brain- it's certainly not sentient thought for example.
I haven't yet read TFA but I'm not sure what exactly has been achieved as emergent swarm intelligence is not new, because that's what swarm intelligence is based on- emergence.
What is particularly interesting is that these patterns seen in nature can be witnessed to evolve in artificial systems as it reinforces the idea of Darwinian evolution, not just as a theory of how species come to be, but a theory about a large, more generic pattern that can be witnessed everywhere. This is not new of course, we have seen similar ideas applied to financial markets for example. We even have an understanding of this abstract idea- this is where chaos theory comes in, Wikipedia has some decent relevant articles, see these two for example:
But anyway, I digress. The point is that swarm intelligence is not really so much about producing things that can think for themselves and make concious decisions like a killer robot from Terminator would seem to be able to do, it's about exploiting emergence and self organisation to get the swarm to perform seemingly intelligent actions (like maybe arranging a puzzle correctly) even if there is no actual individual intelligence behind the agents involved in performing those actions.
Yes, media companies refusing to license the movies to places like Netflix for use outside the US, companies like Universal, Sony, Warner etc. are the problem with that.
I think it generally comes down to the issue that movie companies want to charge more in Europe as most companies do for most other things, but that would make the service prohibitively high for for the consumer such that companies like Netflix would get zero profits from it as they'd have to pay it all to the media companies, or the cost would have to be so high the consumer simply wouldn't pay for it and it'd flop. Historically these companies have also released films later in places like Europe than the US, sometimes films come out as much as 6 to 12 months in Europe after they do in the US and companies like Netflix generally wont want to deal with this either, particularly when there's no logical reason for it in this day and age.
I suppose it depends how you define new, Wall-E is almost 18 months old for example so personally I wouldn't call it a new film, even stuff from the beginning of 2009 would be a push. I'd call things like District 9 new films - I guess it depends if you want the latest films or if you're content with the stuff people were watching over a year ago in the cinema and on DVD.
Yes, it seems that to you indeed. It seems to me they were just stating that it will be the only console to offer netflix, which was very true at the time.
They didn't say it will be true indefinitely, nor did they state it will be exclusive only for a limited time, the fact is there is no quantifier regarding period of exclusivity in that statement so you cannot possibly infer from that statement what period of time exclusivity will remain for or whether it's idefinite. Effectively it comes down to personal assumption and what your personal assumption is, if you cut away all the crap, basically boils down to whether you hate Microsoft and want to troll them, or like them and want to support them. There is a third camp of course- those who realise the summary is just a case of the former category, and the fact is this is a non-story because Microsoft haven't said anything wrong unless you make assumptions. The real story here is that the PS3 is getting netflix, not what Microsoft said and people did or didn't assume from those statements. Unfortunately, the third camp requires people capable of objective thought, which has become an ever more rare trait on Slashdot.
In the normal world yes, but the mistake you've made is that we're talking Slashdot parlance here where anything pre-fixed or post-fixed with "Microsoft" must automatically have a negative connotation to it. For example:
"Microsoft employee is first to crash scene and helps save small child"
On Slashdot this means:
"Microsoft rapes small children"
Long term accepted real world definition and understanding of words goes out the window if it contradicts the negative Microsoft rule on Slashdot.
You're wrong, to provide some examples you often get TV stations claiming exclusive interviews on certain subjects, or radio stations getting exclusive access to play new songs. This does not mean exclusivity is maintained indefinitely.
To use your analogy, yes, you might have an exclusive relationship with your wife right now (at least you assume so), but you can't guarantee that under any circumstance she wont ever have an affair with someone else, because you simply cannot predict the future.
No, the issue is simply that they'll be ignoring hidden costs. You talk about meat production but you're looking at creation of product from raw materials. Creating the car is one thing but did they factor in mining the raw materials, transport of raw materials to facility to purify them for use or turn them into a material like say plastic for use, creation of basic components from plastic, transport of basic components to assembly.
Or did they just go with assembly?
Of course then there's the issue of the fact their figures simply don't make sense:
"It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year"
Sorry but what? What a load of utter bullshit. In 43.3 square metres you'll get far, far more than 1kg of chicken per year.
TFA also spouts shit like this:
"Then there are the other environmental impacts of pets. Every year, for example, the UK's 7.7 million cats kill over 188 million wild animals (Mammal Review, vol 33, p 174). That works out at about 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat. Similar figures have emerged from surveys in the US and Australia. There is also a knock-on effect because cats feasting on wildlife can leave wild predators such as hawks and weasels short of food."
Because of course, cars are never responsible for road kill are they? Let alone factoring in human road deaths which seem to go completely ignored.
But then, you assume that I'm just plucking figures from the air whilst suggesting that because they've done some math their figures are somehow more valid- I can do some random sums on some figures I've plucked from thin air to give an equal level of validity if you'd like? The biggest issue though with the numbers is not that they initially seem out, but also the conversions- suggesting a dog requires 1.1 hectares whilst ignoring those 1.1 hectares also feed multiple other dogs because chicken farming or whatever is sustainable, whilst suggesting an SUV requires only 0.41 hectares whilst ignoring that's 0.41 hectares of land stripped of natural resources, fossil fuels and so forth will be gone for good is a false comparison that arises out of a unit mismatch. Take the same comparison for the lifetime of a dog in relation to an SUV- say 15 years which is reasonable and you still only have 1.1 hectares for the dog yet you have 6.15 hectares for the SUV. Of course that's even with their figures and as I say, their figures are clearly out to start with. This is a fine example of cherry picking statistics to provide a desired outcome even if it does not paint the full picture and it's something people fall for every single day.
The fact is, this article is just another attempt at raking in book sales- statistics are useless if they're not actually based on reality. The article is biased from the outset, very clearly so- the fact they mention pets killing wildlife but ignore the amount of wildlife killed by cars is damn good evidence that the author had an agenda, if it was an objective look at the idea then a) he would account for these things, and b) he wouldn't have had anything to write a book about because he wouldn't have got the sensationalist story he wanted to get, again, balance his numbers across the life of the animal in comparison and you get a completely different story, even with his figures the SUV has just short of 6 times the impact.
Exactly, and of course, no other technology company would ever fiddle the tax system in their favour either.
No, only Microsoft would ever do that.
What is the story here? Simply another anti-Microsoft troll? or has someone been asleep for the last 18 months of the financial crisis and only just realised Microsoft fiddles the system whilst missing the fact every other major company in the world also does this.
Yeah it sucks, whinging about Microsoft wont fix it, you have to whinge about the system as a whole and get that fixed if you want it to stop! The problem is the way corporations are left to get away with murder through fear of them fucking off to the next country that lets them get away with murder if you clamp down on them. It needs fixing on a global level.
Relative to a lightbulb, or not having a pet at all? Yeah.
- It's so high that it can be compared with a car
Nope, this is still the problem. It's just not that high, you have to really stretch the numbers and miss some important factors in a biased manner to reach that conclusion, just as the article has. As I said, the only reason it'd be so high it'd be compared with a car is through human stupidity but then we have this fundamental issue where it's not actually the pet that's at fault for waste- it's really the owner being wasteful in the name of the pet.
To feed a dog, to get it it's vet checkups, to look after it, does not even come close to a car. Again, I have two dogs, I know what they consume including all the hidden costs and impact they have, and I also know what my car consumes, again, including all the hidden costs. There is just no comparison between the two without severely distorting numbers and figures in favour of a specific argument (like ignoring the cost of manufacturing and replacement components as TFA did), but biased conclusions like that are worthless.
It's not, because it's the entire premise of the article. A few people have made the point of the impact of going out your way to get dog food, but I wonder, who actually does that? Anyone in their right mind will just pick it up when they go and do their shopping, it's never something you have to go out your way for. Buying a car for your dog or a less environmentally friendly car for your dog is generally just human stupidity rather than an inherent cost of dog ownership.
The article doesn't seem to be trying to tell people the cost of pets in terms of financial impact and worry of abandoned pets- I agree with your point there. The problem is it's claiming that a pet dog is less environmentally friendly to own than a car. For what it's worth I do own two dogs, I also own a car and I can say for sure that even two dogs have less of an environmental impact than my car, the short annual trip to the vets, the big bag packaging of dog food that only has to be thrown away about once every few weeks and the transport of that just doesn't come close to the transport of petrol, the pollutants generated by burning the petrol, the manufacture of the vehicle, the disposal of the vehicle, the manufacture and disposal of replacement parts. There's just no real contest. My sister owns a horse and I'm not even convinced something that size has more of an environmental impact than a car.
I imagine perhaps those people who are stupid about owning a pet, the type who dress it up and insist it go and be groomed on a weekly basis cause high environmental impact from their pets, but even then they tend to be the type of people who drive things like gas guzzling hummers so I'm not sure it even holds in a realtive manner in the extreme cases.
Again I don't really disagree with the cost argument as you say, they do cost more than people realise. I still disagree however that pets should ultimately be less environmentally friendly to own than a car and that the only reason they would be is if their owner is stupid about pet ownership in the first place.
I'll admit I haven't read TFA (hey, this is Slashdot!), but I'd be inclined to bet that when they did their calculations they didn't factor in some important things also- if your average cat/dog lives 10 - 15 years, then over the same period a car is going to go through what, at least 5 tyre changes? How many parts are going to have to be replaced? What about the environmental impact of scrapping the old parts? specifically, what about the environmental impact of disposing of tyres? What about averaging in the disposal cost of cars that get written off in accidents in this time? A car that's written off early leads to increased waste, a dog dies early leads to relatively decreased waste.
All these things have to be factored in, which is why making comparisons like this are generally stupid, because it's a hell of a task to account for absolutely everything. There are also unquantifiable points that are entirely objective too- you can't quantify the cost of enjoyment that a pet brings. What about the security a barking dog at your house offers when you're out? There's just too many additional factors like this.
Apologies if they actually do cover all this stuff, but going on past experience of reports with such attention grabbing headlines I'm assuming not- headline titles like this seem to focus on grabbing attention and making a point, rather than actually focussing on making sure that point is solid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's similar to the British Medical Council for example that defines who can become a doctor in the UK and will disqualify those not fit for practice. That's certainly a much better system, although it doesn't class itself as a union however it does massage wages in other ways, keeping their pay artificially high by controlling access to the profession. Still, I'd rather they do that whilst ensuring people are fit to practice and doing away with those who are not, than push for high pay via strikes and even allowing incompetent people to cash in on that.
Like you say that on you cite is the ideal union- unions must take responsibility for their members.
Agreed, does anyone know where this uproar is actually coming from? I can't imagine anyone willing to play CoD in the first place getting upset over it. Is it the usual Jack Thompson and followers crew or are there really a bunch of vocal gamers out there who are hypocritical enough to whine about this?
Gameplay is just a vehicle to put the story across, I don't really see any contradiction here. If you've played CoD4 it switches between different teams across the world, by the looks of it they've just made this initial scene a playable scene to set the stage for the rest of the game- by putting you in charge of playing these people you get to know how evil they are, afterwards you'll presumably switch back to the Marines, SAS or whoever to begin the battle to catch them and kill them through the rest of the game.
Yeah I think that's the crux of it. One of the best modern war dramas I've ever seen on TV was "Over there", but it was cancelled after only 12 episodes - too close to the truth for people's liking was also the reason I assume it was cancelled as it really did do quite well to show the brutality of the situation in Iraq in most episodes.
It seems a lot of people are happy for their country to go to war, as long as they don't have to hear about it.
I know for sure that Wakefield, Barnsley, Kirklees, Sheffield, York and Leeds certainly do. The £29k figure is for those at the top of scale SO1/2 which comes after around 5 years service, the initial figure is about £24k at the start. The £29k figure is important though as anyone getting paid that much for that low skill level will certainly hold the job long enough to be on that much, simply because they can't even get close to that with such a low skill level outside public sector. Low paid technician roles do exist for sure, but the skill difference between scale 4 and SO1/2 is non-existent in my experience- I've worked with plenty of scale 4 technicians that were better than fellow SO1/2 technicians many times when I worked in public sector, and there is no justification at all for paying these people that much money, the SCP scale 4 to 5 range is about right for the level of expertise required from most council IT support staff.
For what it's worth, the NHS and Police also often (well, not so often since the recession) have IT support jobs too. West Yorkshire police have had similarly paid adverts up a few times.
"Corporations aren't part of the market because they require a lot of legal backing to support their effectively artificial existence."
What? No they don't. Businesses arose long before a legal framework was in place to support them.
"And why are you talking about the free market in relation to a public service owned by the state?"
Please either follow the conversation or don't bother responding. This comment makes no sense in the context of the discussion, it's a straw man at best.
"The point of the union isn't to benefit the company, it's to benefit the workers. Removing the union will be to the detriment of the workers, but not to the benefit of the company."
So why should the company have to pay £20m a year for it if it's not to it's benefit? Shouldn't the workers be stumping up that £20m?
"I think you over-estimate the pay, conditions and benefits of postmen."
I think you over-estimate the difficulty and worth of their job and skills. Again, particularly when there are 2.5 million people who would love nothing more than to have their job, pay and benefits without a complaint.
"That's a peculiar comment from a country where the official government and the opposition do little for workers rights, while bailing large banks for whatever they ask. In the 70's the unions had too much power, not now."
You're making a common mistake, you're assuming in the 70s all unions were weakened, this is not the case, public sector unions were left largely untouched and as such public sector unions still have the same situation of too much power as in the 70s. The CWU is a remnant of these public sector unions that were never castrated as required.
"As for thinking that a union (a political organisation) has no place commenting on politics, I can't see your logic"
Commenting is fine, bombarding members with propaganda through the post every month like "Don't vote for X, vote for Y" is a step too far.
"RM lost the Amazon contract because they have repeatedly provided bad service. The irony is that RM have consistently moaned about the internet killing their business, while ignoring the boom in home shopping. Maybe it's time for a complete change of management."
No, RM originally gained the contract from Amazon by realising the boom in home shopping was one way to save their business. Amazon only a few weeks ago dropped the contract because of the threat of strikes (after RM strikes caused them harm last year). It was not sustainable for Amazon to use RM if they can't ensure reliability. See the following, I include a selection of sources whether you're right wing, centrist, left wing or whatever, it's fact not political biased propaganda:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/07/royal-mail-amazon-postal-strikes
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/amazon-cancels-royal-mail-contract-over-strike-fears-1799381.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218937/Amazon-desert-Royal-Mail-strike-fears-leading-Christmas.html
Note also the reference to eBay, many of whose members indeed rely on Royal Mail. Royal Mail management has made strides to support the home shopping revolution- you realise you can even pay for and print of postage barcodes rather than rely on Paypal now right? The problem is all this is useless if it can't guarantee it's workers are going to show up to work to perform the actual deliveries. The Royal Mail has far from moaned about the internet killing their business, it's often been pointed out that it's a problem for them but they've always worked hard to work around the rise of e-mail rather than just moan about it as you seem to be incorrectly suggesting they do.
"You're twenty years too late, Thatcher already destroyed the unions. This is why we have the longest working hours and most inequality in Europe. Maybe if we'd kept the unions around we wouldn't be scrapping for minimum wage agency work whilst the bankers and executives walk off with all the cash."
No, Thatcher destroyed private sector unions, hence why the British economy recovered from it's low point post-Labour in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You cannot blame her for Britain's long working hours because it is Labour that has pushed the opt-out of the EU working hour limit. Also, Labour is equally to blame for bankers running rampant, I know it's fashinable for pro-union people to blame the countries ills on Thatcher, but the longer ago Thatcher was in power, and the more our country descends into economic tragedy under Labour the less sense that argument makes.
"So workers who would otherwise make fuck-all, now get an income which may well help them pay a mortgage and raise a family. No doubt if these same workers were making £16k, you'd be whining about having to pay taxes for the services which they can no longer afford themselves."
People don't have a right to make a decent wage if they're not willing to put effort into working hard and learning skills. I would agree there is an issue when skilled, intelligent, hard working people are underpaid for sure, but in the case I'm referring to we have lazy, unskilled people getting overpaid due to union support.
"On the other hand, we have newspapers regularly telling millions of people who to vote for. Considering your anti-union views, I'd imagine the Times is the paper which tells you how to think."
Yes, that's right. Wait what? Sorry, I didn't realise I read newspapers? Nice assumption- obviously everyone whose anti-union is a Conservative that reads the Times of course. No, you see, my anti-union views stem from being a member of Unison and seeing how utterly stupid the decisions it made were, seeing how it pushed the mindless agenda and how it protected and tried to seek rewards for incompetence. My political leaning is towards the Liberal Democrats, I would vote neither Tory nor Labour.
"Britain has the weakest and smallest unions in Europe, according to right-wing dogma this should make us extremely prosperous. Instead, we're actually worse off, still in recession when everyone else is recovering."
What? You do know the only country with a stronger economy than Britain in Europe is Germany and France right? I didn't realise length in recession was the only possible measure of a countries economic strength. You do realise Germany fell further into recession than us right? and that France is only ahead of us because our reliance on the banking sector which is not good in the current economic climate yes? You do realise France could be way ahead of us if it weren't for the heavy subsidies it had to pay industries like agriculture because of it's strong farmers unions threatening to bring the entire nation to a standstill each time right? Britain still has a stronger economy than every other single country in Europe bar these two by quite a margin. It's almost certain that Britain will in a few years move ahead of France again, and for a while we were even almost ahead of Germany. I agree our reliance on finance is a bad thing, but to suggest unions have any relation to our countries imagined lack of prosperity when we're still one of the top world economies is laughable. The only country that comes close is Italy, after that it's Russia followed by Spain, whose economies are almost half the size of ours.
"The Royal Mail staff might not be on strike if the management hadn't reneged on the deal. But as your only information on the strike comes from right-wing sources, it's no wonder you're so ill-informed. They can't be struggling that much for cash if they can afford to pay Crozier several million a year."
Obviously you're dead right about my sources, because after all the BBC and The Guardian are so utterly rig
"More power to them! In fact you could argue Unison is keeping the pay of private sector technicians from falling further."
No, the fundamental issue is that the type of technicians we're talking about are technicians whose ability doesn't reach much past being able to stick a Windows CD in the drive, boot off it and install it then maybe install a few apps- I would add network drives to the list, but one particular person I used to work with couldn't even do that. He spent 4 hours trying to figure out why he couldn't get a drive to map from another PC, the reason? He hadn't shared it on the other machine. How can we justify paying these people £29k? So what if private sector only pays them £16k - it's all they're worth. Skilled IT workers still get a decent wage in private sector, but the fundamental issue is that many IT workers simply are not skilled despite them believing otherwise because they built their last PC all by themselves. The person to which I refer was by no way unique either, at least 90% of IT workers on that wage level in the council were of similar low levels of ability to him.
Unions aren't part of the market because they require a lot of legal backing to support their effectively artificial existence. In a free market Royal Mail would not have to pay £20million a year to support a union that does not benefit it as a company. If people went on strike in a truly free market they would simply be sacked and replaced - especially in this climate where you have 70,000 Royal Mail workers whining that they don't know their companies future business plan, whilst 2.5million are sat jobless only able to dream of having the job, the pay and the benefits those workers have in the Royal Mail right now.
We have systems like the minimum wage, equality laws, and the industrial tribunal system to ensure workers aren't totally abused so the loss of unions altogether wouldn't be the end of the world, but as I say I don't totally detest the idea of unions. I just wish they stuck to their remit, and were capable of accepting when things are good rather than insisting on continuing to fight battles which really don't make sense to fight- again the CWU won a battle against the Royal Mail a year or two ago, and what's the result of that? It moves onto something else which is so loosely defined it shows they're just trying to justify their existence and it is to the detriment of society- we can't for example justify having a two tier system where the private sector employee getting paid what he's worth at £18k a year is paying taxes so the equally low skilled worker in public sector is getting paid £29k a year, all because the union will play havoc with society if anyone dares try to fix it.
To add to this, I don't know so much about animals, but in the plant world it's certainly possible to have hybrids from two separate genus also.
The issue is that even with DNA mapping where you draw the line between two species isn't always clear, and depending on who you ask, the response can be quite varied- some will say they're the same species, one merely a subspecies, others will go as far as trying to classify into different genus.
The problem from what I understand effectively arises because the evolutionary tree can be quite messy- if you have multiple closely related ancestor species that can interbreed to create a new species it maybe that one set of descendents of that tree is eventually say for example, comprised of 20% species A, 30% species B, 50% species C whilst the other is 70% species A, 10% species B, 20% species C. They would share the same common acenstory but possibly be quite different and so comes the decision as to whether they should be treated as distinct or not, and even a question then of how distinct.
The reality is we still don't fully understand how it fits together and as you rightly state, we have interbreeding between distinct species, and the rule that suggests distinct species can't interbreed isn't wrong simply because there is imperical evidence of such, but is wrong because species are defined by humans, and those definitions do not necessarily map to the genetic complexities involved- just because we call two species distinct doesn't mean they're really genetically distinct enough to prevent interbreeding. There have been many occasions where we've labelled two species distinct only to backtrack and decide that's not the case, then a couple of decades later decide that it in fact is. Effectively the definition of a species as distinct should not be treated as precise, only ever as a best guess from what we know and decide at the time.
I think there's another facet to it though, you have to look at the thinking behind the use of such take down notices.
Companies like the media companies do it because they think it's right, because they think they should be able to block and stifle fair use, groups like NPR most likely do not agree with that stance, however are embroiled in a battle where dirty tactics are used, and if the tactic is available then they might as well use it.
It doesn't mean they inherently support the existence of such laws. A good example that is similar is that if we were to create a list of restrictive software licenses then you'd have to include the GPL (because it restricts your ability to keep changes private etc.), however you have to look at why the GPL says what it does - it's not because it inherently supports the copyright/patent system we have, it's quite the opposite- it's because it disagrees with them, but recognises they exist so makes the most of them in the best way it can.
The test of whether someone is fit for the list should really be "Would this company support the creation of such takedown laws factoring in the damage they can have on fair use if they did not exist". It maybe that NPR would indeed support this stance, but then it may not- to include NPR but not Scientology for example is a bit silly. This is the problem with binary views of things like this, it is possible to do the wrong thing for the right reasons and there are a lot of grey areas. It may well be that NPR agrees with you entirely, but if they don't use it it wont just go away, so they might as well use it, just as their opponents would.
"Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out."
As someone who has worked public sector, was a union member, and even striked with the union I can say that this is not entirely the case, unions are dangerous and I would rather see them severely weakened in the UK.
Unions are okay if their power is kept small, but in the UK they go out of control- Unison, one of the UK's biggest unions claims over 2 million members, and despite the fact half the working population are taking paycuts right now, Unison is still pushing for pay rises, even though basic IT technicians are still getting paid £29k in some local authorities where their true market worth in private sector for the low levels of ability would be around £16k to £18k. Governments are powerless to say no though, because they simply can't deal with the damage caused by a union that can put a good portion of it's 2 million members on strike. The story is the same with teachers whereby you have teachers strikes because secondary school teachers are underpaid whilst the same union covers primary school teachers who hence get the same rises and who are hence now heavily overpaid for their job, but what can the government do? risk having an entire generation of kids education disrupted setting them back for life?
Similarly, unions have a habit of protecting people at work regardless of the merit of that. This makes it impossible to get rid of dead weight, because you can't afford the associated costs with doing so - it's cheaper to keep those useless people in the job, providing a shit service than it is to get rid of them.
We also have them acting as a strongly political tool, they mail out regularly to their 2 million members telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, in my opinion this type of political lobbying is far beyond the remit of a union, particularly one with 2 million members who have distinctly varied political views.
I agree a country entirely without unions really would kind of suck for workers, but on the same note, as someone who lives in a country with unions that are simply far too powerful, and as someone who now, looking back wishes they had not given any support whatsoever to such unions I disagree that you want unions to become more popular or more powerful. They can bring countries to a standstill even when their argument has no merit- you only have to look at the current UK postal strikes for evidence of that and note also that the Royal Mail is having to pay £20m a year to provide premises and time off work for it's staff to perform union activities. That's a hell of a burden on a company when the only result is for the company to get screwed over for that £20m it has had to spend. It's hard to tell what the Royal Mail strikes are even about as the official line seems to be changing daily from the union involved- originally they admitted job cuts were needed and that that was not the issue but now they are saying it is about jobs. The Royal Mail has lost a £25m Amazon contract because of this, you simply can't have a union holding a company to ransom like that at the expense of the company, particularly when the union doesn't even seem to be able to remain consistent in what it's actual demands are!
"So you're expecting to see movies that aren't even available on DVD yet to be available on the on-demand service?"
I couldn't care either way as I'm not in the US and can't use Netflix even if I wanted to, but if the movie industry has any hope of beating piracy with legitimate on-demand services like Netflix then it has little choice.
"You clearly don't understand anything about the lifecycle of media then."
You're right. I don't understand the traditional lifecycle in a modern on-demand world that's for sure, because it doesn't fit and doesn't make sense, hence why piracy is so rampant because it's the only way to get such media on-demand.
Lifecycles aren't statically defined indefinitely, they can change throughout time, and in fact have to do so to keep pace (that's why although there is still disparity between US and European movie release dates, it is at least far shorter than it was 10 years ago). It's not unreasonable in this day and age where legal on-demand services are the best hope for making money from people who would otherwise pirate for them to be able to get films from an on-demand service before or at the same time as pirates can get them through other methods.
This was my thought actually, can Facebook really guarantee the layout of every single newspaper article in every single little town across the world to verify if a report of someone being "dead" is real or not?
People are going to get memorialised (sounds scary in itself) left right and centre. I wonder do they have an appeals process for this or do the dead not get appeals because, well, they're dead?
Imagine logging in one day to find you're apparently dead and half your friends are greiving over you, or even getting phone calls at work from people to see if you're really dead or not, or phone calls to your family from friends to confirm it. ...and all this, because Facebook's new UI gadget was recommended you talk to people you haven't spoken to in a while, which due to lack of forethought, included deceased people.
It could've been better to, you know, just fix/remove that feature? Facebook in general often seems to miss the point- if I haven't spoken to someone in a long while it's for good reason - I really can't be arsed to, or perhaps don't even want to.
I know you're joking but this seems as relevant a place as any to point out some points about this, swarm intelligence is really about emergent properties of largely random systems.
Ants for example will spread out randomly from the nest looking for food, when they find it they will return with a piece of it to the hive leaving a pheromone trail behind, other ants that are moving about randomly may cross this trail and follow it, they will reach the food too by following it and will also leave a pheromone trail as they return with the food. As more ants do this the pheromone trail will get stronger and stronger until all the ants have detected it and followed it, when the food source runs out they will stop dropping pheromones and the trail will decay sending the ants back to their random pattern until they find other food.
It is indeed quite arguably intelligence, but it's different from the idea of a brain- it's certainly not sentient thought for example.
I haven't yet read TFA but I'm not sure what exactly has been achieved as emergent swarm intelligence is not new, because that's what swarm intelligence is based on- emergence.
What is particularly interesting is that these patterns seen in nature can be witnessed to evolve in artificial systems as it reinforces the idea of Darwinian evolution, not just as a theory of how species come to be, but a theory about a large, more generic pattern that can be witnessed everywhere. This is not new of course, we have seen similar ideas applied to financial markets for example. We even have an understanding of this abstract idea- this is where chaos theory comes in, Wikipedia has some decent relevant articles, see these two for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality
But anyway, I digress. The point is that swarm intelligence is not really so much about producing things that can think for themselves and make concious decisions like a killer robot from Terminator would seem to be able to do, it's about exploiting emergence and self organisation to get the swarm to perform seemingly intelligent actions (like maybe arranging a puzzle correctly) even if there is no actual individual intelligence behind the agents involved in performing those actions.
Yes, media companies refusing to license the movies to places like Netflix for use outside the US, companies like Universal, Sony, Warner etc. are the problem with that.
I think it generally comes down to the issue that movie companies want to charge more in Europe as most companies do for most other things, but that would make the service prohibitively high for for the consumer such that companies like Netflix would get zero profits from it as they'd have to pay it all to the media companies, or the cost would have to be so high the consumer simply wouldn't pay for it and it'd flop. Historically these companies have also released films later in places like Europe than the US, sometimes films come out as much as 6 to 12 months in Europe after they do in the US and companies like Netflix generally wont want to deal with this either, particularly when there's no logical reason for it in this day and age.
I suppose it depends how you define new, Wall-E is almost 18 months old for example so personally I wouldn't call it a new film, even stuff from the beginning of 2009 would be a push. I'd call things like District 9 new films - I guess it depends if you want the latest films or if you're content with the stuff people were watching over a year ago in the cinema and on DVD.
Yes, it seems that to you indeed. It seems to me they were just stating that it will be the only console to offer netflix, which was very true at the time.
They didn't say it will be true indefinitely, nor did they state it will be exclusive only for a limited time, the fact is there is no quantifier regarding period of exclusivity in that statement so you cannot possibly infer from that statement what period of time exclusivity will remain for or whether it's idefinite. Effectively it comes down to personal assumption and what your personal assumption is, if you cut away all the crap, basically boils down to whether you hate Microsoft and want to troll them, or like them and want to support them. There is a third camp of course- those who realise the summary is just a case of the former category, and the fact is this is a non-story because Microsoft haven't said anything wrong unless you make assumptions. The real story here is that the PS3 is getting netflix, not what Microsoft said and people did or didn't assume from those statements. Unfortunately, the third camp requires people capable of objective thought, which has become an ever more rare trait on Slashdot.
"Isn't that what exclusive usually means?"
In the normal world yes, but the mistake you've made is that we're talking Slashdot parlance here where anything pre-fixed or post-fixed with "Microsoft" must automatically have a negative connotation to it. For example:
"Microsoft employee is first to crash scene and helps save small child"
On Slashdot this means:
"Microsoft rapes small children"
Long term accepted real world definition and understanding of words goes out the window if it contradicts the negative Microsoft rule on Slashdot.
You're wrong, to provide some examples you often get TV stations claiming exclusive interviews on certain subjects, or radio stations getting exclusive access to play new songs. This does not mean exclusivity is maintained indefinitely.
To use your analogy, yes, you might have an exclusive relationship with your wife right now (at least you assume so), but you can't guarantee that under any circumstance she wont ever have an affair with someone else, because you simply cannot predict the future.
No, the issue is simply that they'll be ignoring hidden costs. You talk about meat production but you're looking at creation of product from raw materials. Creating the car is one thing but did they factor in mining the raw materials, transport of raw materials to facility to purify them for use or turn them into a material like say plastic for use, creation of basic components from plastic, transport of basic components to assembly.
Or did they just go with assembly?
Of course then there's the issue of the fact their figures simply don't make sense:
"It takes 43.3 square metres of land to generate 1 kilogram of chicken per year"
Sorry but what? What a load of utter bullshit. In 43.3 square metres you'll get far, far more than 1kg of chicken per year.
TFA also spouts shit like this:
"Then there are the other environmental impacts of pets. Every year, for example, the UK's 7.7 million cats kill over 188 million wild animals (Mammal Review, vol 33, p 174). That works out at about 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat. Similar figures have emerged from surveys in the US and Australia. There is also a knock-on effect because cats feasting on wildlife can leave wild predators such as hawks and weasels short of food."
Because of course, cars are never responsible for road kill are they? Let alone factoring in human road deaths which seem to go completely ignored.
But then, you assume that I'm just plucking figures from the air whilst suggesting that because they've done some math their figures are somehow more valid- I can do some random sums on some figures I've plucked from thin air to give an equal level of validity if you'd like? The biggest issue though with the numbers is not that they initially seem out, but also the conversions- suggesting a dog requires 1.1 hectares whilst ignoring those 1.1 hectares also feed multiple other dogs because chicken farming or whatever is sustainable, whilst suggesting an SUV requires only 0.41 hectares whilst ignoring that's 0.41 hectares of land stripped of natural resources, fossil fuels and so forth will be gone for good is a false comparison that arises out of a unit mismatch. Take the same comparison for the lifetime of a dog in relation to an SUV- say 15 years which is reasonable and you still only have 1.1 hectares for the dog yet you have 6.15 hectares for the SUV. Of course that's even with their figures and as I say, their figures are clearly out to start with. This is a fine example of cherry picking statistics to provide a desired outcome even if it does not paint the full picture and it's something people fall for every single day.
The fact is, this article is just another attempt at raking in book sales- statistics are useless if they're not actually based on reality. The article is biased from the outset, very clearly so- the fact they mention pets killing wildlife but ignore the amount of wildlife killed by cars is damn good evidence that the author had an agenda, if it was an objective look at the idea then a) he would account for these things, and b) he wouldn't have had anything to write a book about because he wouldn't have got the sensationalist story he wanted to get, again, balance his numbers across the life of the animal in comparison and you get a completely different story, even with his figures the SUV has just short of 6 times the impact.
Exactly, and of course, no other technology company would ever fiddle the tax system in their favour either.
No, only Microsoft would ever do that.
What is the story here? Simply another anti-Microsoft troll? or has someone been asleep for the last 18 months of the financial crisis and only just realised Microsoft fiddles the system whilst missing the fact every other major company in the world also does this.
Yeah it sucks, whinging about Microsoft wont fix it, you have to whinge about the system as a whole and get that fixed if you want it to stop! The problem is the way corporations are left to get away with murder through fear of them fucking off to the next country that lets them get away with murder if you clamp down on them. It needs fixing on a global level.
- A pet consumes a lot of resources
Relative to a lightbulb, or not having a pet at all? Yeah.
- It's so high that it can be compared with a car
Nope, this is still the problem. It's just not that high, you have to really stretch the numbers and miss some important factors in a biased manner to reach that conclusion, just as the article has. As I said, the only reason it'd be so high it'd be compared with a car is through human stupidity but then we have this fundamental issue where it's not actually the pet that's at fault for waste- it's really the owner being wasteful in the name of the pet.
To feed a dog, to get it it's vet checkups, to look after it, does not even come close to a car. Again, I have two dogs, I know what they consume including all the hidden costs and impact they have, and I also know what my car consumes, again, including all the hidden costs. There is just no comparison between the two without severely distorting numbers and figures in favour of a specific argument (like ignoring the cost of manufacturing and replacement components as TFA did), but biased conclusions like that are worthless.
"I think it's better to just take away from this"
It's not, because it's the entire premise of the article. A few people have made the point of the impact of going out your way to get dog food, but I wonder, who actually does that? Anyone in their right mind will just pick it up when they go and do their shopping, it's never something you have to go out your way for. Buying a car for your dog or a less environmentally friendly car for your dog is generally just human stupidity rather than an inherent cost of dog ownership.
The article doesn't seem to be trying to tell people the cost of pets in terms of financial impact and worry of abandoned pets- I agree with your point there. The problem is it's claiming that a pet dog is less environmentally friendly to own than a car. For what it's worth I do own two dogs, I also own a car and I can say for sure that even two dogs have less of an environmental impact than my car, the short annual trip to the vets, the big bag packaging of dog food that only has to be thrown away about once every few weeks and the transport of that just doesn't come close to the transport of petrol, the pollutants generated by burning the petrol, the manufacture of the vehicle, the disposal of the vehicle, the manufacture and disposal of replacement parts. There's just no real contest. My sister owns a horse and I'm not even convinced something that size has more of an environmental impact than a car.
I imagine perhaps those people who are stupid about owning a pet, the type who dress it up and insist it go and be groomed on a weekly basis cause high environmental impact from their pets, but even then they tend to be the type of people who drive things like gas guzzling hummers so I'm not sure it even holds in a realtive manner in the extreme cases.
Again I don't really disagree with the cost argument as you say, they do cost more than people realise. I still disagree however that pets should ultimately be less environmentally friendly to own than a car and that the only reason they would be is if their owner is stupid about pet ownership in the first place.
I'll admit I haven't read TFA (hey, this is Slashdot!), but I'd be inclined to bet that when they did their calculations they didn't factor in some important things also- if your average cat/dog lives 10 - 15 years, then over the same period a car is going to go through what, at least 5 tyre changes? How many parts are going to have to be replaced? What about the environmental impact of scrapping the old parts? specifically, what about the environmental impact of disposing of tyres? What about averaging in the disposal cost of cars that get written off in accidents in this time? A car that's written off early leads to increased waste, a dog dies early leads to relatively decreased waste.
All these things have to be factored in, which is why making comparisons like this are generally stupid, because it's a hell of a task to account for absolutely everything. There are also unquantifiable points that are entirely objective too- you can't quantify the cost of enjoyment that a pet brings. What about the security a barking dog at your house offers when you're out? There's just too many additional factors like this.
Apologies if they actually do cover all this stuff, but going on past experience of reports with such attention grabbing headlines I'm assuming not- headline titles like this seem to focus on grabbing attention and making a point, rather than actually focussing on making sure that point is solid.