"I've noticed this when presenting too many options to a customer for a solution to a dilemma."
Yes, not just customers, but even colleagues. I learnt this long ago in IT and development, if there are multiple compromise solutions to a problem that a decision maker needs to give the go ahead and sign off to on solving, then just present them with the single one that most suits you or that you feel best suits the business. Only offer alternatives if asked, otherwise you're just asking for pointless meetings, probably only to end up that the choice you would've presented in isolation in the first place anyway.
Most people wont care if there are multiple alternative choices if the one you chose got the job done well enough and you'll be far more respected if you focus on getting the job done this way rather than spending half your life being stuck in unproductive meetings about a problem and do very little productive work as a result.
I'm not sure how logistically they could attack via Spain. Britain was the only staging post in Europe available to the allies, so why would you travel at least 420 miles across open water where it's hard to stretch fighter cover to give decent air support alongside the coast of Nazi occupied France and where you'll easily be spotted when you can just sail across the 20 to 80 mile stretch of the English channel and hit them before they can even rally the troops to your landing location? I suppose they could've used North Africa as a staging post, but they'd still have to get everyone there and a buildup would be far easier to spot than the already built up "Fortress Britain".
To attack Spain they'd have been able to send far less equipment (some of the boats that crossed the channel weren't seaworthy enough to make it to Spain) and it would've been far more vulnerable and far more prone to discovery.
I'm intrigued to know why you asked the question though, do you see some reason why an attack via Spain would've made any kind of sense as opposed to say Greece, Italy, Southern France etc.?
I'm surprised given it's geography that Japan isn't a fantastic candidate for a combination of wind (onshore, and off), hydro, tidal, and geothermal.
Anyone know why they're more interested in building coal than harnessing more of their renewable resources? Does Japan have masses of cheap coal or something? I'd have assumed it has to import a lot of it?
I agree with you about nuclear over coal, but I'm struggling to see why Japan would need either. For such a high tech country it seems to be resorting to an insanely low tech sub-optimal and dirty solution.
Honestly, I find religion to be a profound waste of time, so I sympathise with your criticism of it, but I don't think this is a fair statement all the same:
"And every Muslim shares the guilt for promoting a religion which is unremittingly theocratic. It's not the religion of peace, it's the religion of submission, and promoting it is the same as opposing religious freedom."
This simply isn't true, by saying every muslim you're simply tarring them all with the same brush, yet Ahmadiyya muslims explicitly believe that religion should be a choice rather than something forced onto people. Their whole brand of islam is built around trying to compromise it's conflicts with other faiths with the goal of peaceful interaction between religions.
You really can't just blanket paint everyone with the same brush, no matter how hard you may wish to try. You're allowing your understanding of a group of people to be based entirely upon the media image of those people- and of course the ones who make the headlines will be the ones who do things that are shockingly evil because "Guy goes about his daily business without interfering, hating, or planning to harm someone" just isn't newsworthy.
"Just being technically not illegal isn't really much of a moral defence, even if it is a legal one."
It's not even that, the tax dodge apologists are wrong to pretend no laws are being broken because as we've seen time and time again, people and companies engaging in forms of tax avoidance ultimately get pulled up on evasion. The problem is that it's so pervasive, and the companies put so much time and effort into it that it takes HMRC years to investigate and fight past the lawyers to finally prosecute.
So what tax dodge apologists are actually saying is "Have they been caught yet? No? Well it's fine then!". Obviously that's nonsense, if you kill someone, it doesn't matter if you've been caught yet, it's still wrong both morally AND legally.
There's a reason so many authorities are investigating these issues - if it was all legal, above board, and acceptable, then there would be no grounds to even investigate.
Tax evasion in this manner is basically the corporate version of personal movie/software/music piracy - it's illegal but so widespread the authorities don't stand a chance in hell of finding the resources to deal with it. Global agreements on dealing with it that are being sought, and law changes like Osborne's so called "Google Tax" are just mechanisms to make investigation and prosecution easier, less costly and less time consuming - i.e. by making cross jurisdiction financial record transfer far easier so that investigators don't get caught up for years even simply trying to access information about offshore accounts.
I don't even think the tax dodge apologists even understand what it is they're defending. I don't think they realise that when they argue that it's all okay, that they're standing up to the man against intrusive government that what they're actually doing is making sure that they have to pay more of their income to make up for the tax revenue that corporations aren't paying to their governments for the services they consume (roads, police, fire, etc.). Instead these corporations they're defending are moving money to other countries that don't play ball in the globalised world so that their citizens don't have to work as hard. I don't think they realise that by justifying tax dodging by large companies like Facebook they're basically saying they're happy with working harder so Irish folk don't have to, and being poorer so that rich folk in Luxembourg can get richer without doing anything for it. The problem with countries like Luxembourg and Ireland is that they're lazy - they want the wealth of the US whilst being as lazy as Greece. That's not acceptable - why should I work harder and pay more tax so that they can get a free ride? Who is Facebook to decide I should have to participate in an undemocratic wealth redistribution plan to the Irish and citizens of other tax havens?
Perhaps if the apologists understood what the effect of tax dodging was they wouldn't make such absurd and self-defeating justifications for them in the first place.
Right but that's the problem - you're talking about how much it costs them when you die, but how much it costs them is not a measure of how much it costs society as a whole. A $300,000 payout to your widow does not mean you were only worth $300,000 if you were also personally responsible for another $500,000 of income for your company (and hence contribution to GDP).
So how much you impact on a health insurance company's profits, is not directly relevant to how much your life was worth overall - it is only a fraction of total costs. When you pay for life insurance, you're not paying to insure against the cost of your death to society as a whole, only to cover your cost to your surviving relatives to make sure they can still afford to live, and even that isn't necessarily directly related to how much you were actually worth to them, but is instead a function of how much you were willing to pay for life insurance in the first place. If you took two people earning the exact same salary doing the exact same job, and one paid half of what the other did in life insurance contributions such that one's family only gets a $150,000 payout, whilst the other gets a $300,000 payout then it doesn't make sense to argue that those are valuations on those people's lives- why is one worth half what the other is when their contribution to both society as a whole, and to their families via their identical incomes was identical?
So AmiMoJo is right when he says it's difficult to figure out how much a human life is worth. It goes beyond simple direct contribution to GDP and that's where the real complexity lies - if a scientist isn't earning much, and isn't selling much directly but is churning out important papers on nano-materials that create a billion dollars in additional industrial productivity then it's easy to see how their relative low wage, low life insurance payout doesn't remotely reflect their actual value.
You can't measure worth of human life objectively in terms of only life insurance costs.
"It's the smaller US companies that are probably going to take the brunt of this - the one that don't currently have any servers in the EU."
Actually I'm not sure that that's the case. If a company operates only in the US (e.g. is headquartered there, only makes money there, only has staff there), but an EU citizen gives them their data, then the EU citizen is effectively accepting that their data will be held under the US' weaker data protection regime.
The problem here is that Google, Facebook et. al have set up European subsidiaries for tax dodging purposes and so EU citizens are interacting with EU subsidiaries who are held to EU data protection standards. Those subsidiaries cannot make the decision for users to send their data to weaker data protection regimes - only the users themselves can opt to do that.
It's not even that, if this crop gives a real edge to a business then other farmers are going to have to use it too, and then we end up with a monoculture whereby we lack the diversity in our crop system and any disease impacting Monsanto's variant will rapidly spread and wipe out the crop. It could be years before they can get another variant that's resistant to the newly adapted disease in widespread production to satisfy global demand and so we're stuck without this important staple crop as you suggest.
But I'm not sure about the wiseness of insect killing crops in the first place. Insects exist for a reason, and it's unlikely they can make this target only invasive species across the globe, as what's invasive in one place, will be native in others. Killing off a key part of the ecosystem is an insanely bad idea, because it wont take long before it filters through to the parts of the ecosystem that actually matter to us (just as with bees and CCD).
Well I was intrigued by the $15,000 annual average salary figure for the year, because yes, that's a shit salary in the US, but we all know these things are relative.
From what I could find in terms of statistics in Mexico on this, $15,000 is almost double the average annual income for Mexico as a whole, so they surely aren't be that poor relative to the rest of their country.
Are they poor compared to countries with some of the highest personal average incomes in the world? Yeah, sure. But if this spaceport is even partly responsible for making this area twice as wealthy as the average across their country as a whole then I don't really see what the complaint is the much higher levels of income in this area compared to the rest of the country imply that something is definitely going better for them than elsewhere in Mexico.
Yeah, it may well be. I'm intrigued to know what's in this for Google. Are Android phones still being artificially inflated in price by Microsoft's frivolous patent shakedowns against all Android manufacturers?
The whole reason Google retaliated was because of that idiocy, and if Google is ceasing it's retaliation to halt Microsoft's counter-retaliation then Microsoft has won, and Google has lost hard. Anyone know if Microsoft is giving up on the billions it rakes in from those Android shakedowns? If it isn't then it's hard to see how this is anything other than a humiliating defeat for Google.
"Simply learning C or C++ won't point out exactly why those languages are so much faster than managed languages. You can write nearly the same code in C++, Java, and C#, and you'll see C++ win performance benchmarks - at least in all but the most contrived examples."
And that's really part of the problem. Too many people who vehemently defend C/C++ against managed language performance are doing so having just written or run a brief managed language application and said "See!".
But it's not a fair comparison, talented C++ developers can write good, performant C++ applications because they understand the language, they understand the compiler, and they understand how it all interact so that they can write that performant code in the first place.
Managed languages aren't magic, if you want an optimised application you still have to understand the platform - in something like.NET that means understanding GC generations, the impact they have, what should reach gen 2, what shouldn't pass gen 0, and how to make sure it doesn't pass gen 0. Unless you understand your runtime, be it the CLR, or the JVM as well as you understand your C++ compiler, you can't rationally compare the two and claim one is better than the other.
That's where you're going wrong - you're suggesting that code written to be optimal in C++ should be inherently optimal in Java, or C#, and that's a completely false assumption. It's also why you're right about something - that the GP is completely wrong. Learning C wont make anyone a better programmer in a managed (or even interpreted language), it's a different platform, and the rules are different. Probably what someone means when they say they should learn C first is actually that people should understand their platform first - they should understand the intricacies of the JVM, or the CLR, or their C++ compiler, or even the underlying OS and hardware. I disagree though, I think you learn those things best through programming, though some people certainly never really learn them, and that's a problem.
"Among the more significant differences are that C++ compilers are extremely good at optimizing, and C++ code generally compiles down to better cache-coherent structures than other languages. The difference is in the language itself, which adheres to a zero-cost principle, in that you don't pay for features you don't use. A lot of C++ abstractions are eliminated *entirely* at runtime, and are only used to protect the code's integrity during the compilation phase."
But even then they're not as good at optimising as JIT compilers, simply because additional compile time information always inherently means better optimisations can be performed - this is an inescapable fact, the more information a compiler has, the better it can optimise, and a JIT compiler on the specific execution machine will always have more information than a C++ compiler compiling for a target architecture (rather than a specific machine) - the JIT compiler has full hardware and OS information (and not merely rough architectural information - something pretty broad like x86, or x64), and it can also gather runtime information to optimise around runtime patterns. Yes, C++ compilers have gotten very good over the years, but unfortunately it's an inescapable fact that JIT compilers will always inherently be able to do better - it's just the nature of the beast, and there's no getting away from that bar C++ applications being able to self-optimise at installation or runtime.
"We were told for years that native-equivalent performance was just around the corner or even already here, and it just never really happened outside of small, contrived benchmarks."
It's been here for quite some time, but if developers don't know how to achieve it then it might as well not be. Great developers are doing great things in managed languages - many of the big boys have those staff on board, companies like eBay, Amazon, Google, and just about all the banks et. al. but similarly they also have great
Your professor may well have been a time traveller, as in 1997, Java was still interpreted, and it was only in 1999 that they switched to JIT compilation.
Also, Javascript has nothing to do with Java other than being a hastily cobbled together PoS designed to cash in on the hype surrounding the Java name in its early days.
In 1997 Java WAS slow, but it was also a completely different platform back then.
When the UEA was hacked and the "Climategate" e-mails leaked, it was just before and important global warming conference involving pretty much every country in the world.
Rumour at the time was that it was either Russia, or Saudi Arabia, both significant petro states with a firm interest in trying to keep everyone consuming oil and put a stop to this talk of moving to renewables and green energy.
If true, it's possible that Saudi hacking actions and ambitions reach far beyond merely oppressing their own populace and subverting their human rights. Such a purchase could've been as much about crippling their arch enemy Iran's critical digital infrastructure, carrying out actions to manipulate oil prices as much as dealing with people internal to the state.
I don't think your pet theory really matters, at the end of the day by just about every metric I'm doing better than most members of society (whether it's a purely selfish metric like salary, or a more philanthropic metric like charity giving, or socially beneficial metric like net tax contribution). If I had to reach that point in spite of the teachers, rather than because of the teachers, then the odds are there are a lot of people who didn't do it in spite of the teachers. That is, objectively, failure on their behalf.
But I don't really need to argue it, god only knows the amount of businesses and universities unhappy that schools are churning out drones that are capable of A* grade repetition and incapable any kind of actual thinking for themselves are pretty well documented. Similarly, the idea that learning by repetition is the only way to learn, much less the best way to learn is also very widely rubbished by people who have actually been successful in improving teaching.
So like it or not, it really doesn't matter if I was or wasn't lazy (I doubt I was given that I also studied another degree full time whilst working full time- that's not something a lazy person manages), it doesn't change the fact that the teachers in question failed all the same, and it doesn't change the fact that this is a problem that's being repeated by universities and businesses all across the West.
But perhaps you're one of those hopeless teachers, and you just don't want to admit failure, because that'd mean you'd have to do something more than just turning up at 8:30am and going home at 4:30pm in between your 13 weeks off a year and throwing down a textbook to each of the kids, telling them to get on with it whilst you get back to dicking around on Slashdot rather than, you know, actually teaching.
"You let me know when one F-35 can out compete four A-10's for air to ground combat."
I'm a massive fan of the A-10, but I can think of one situation - when they're up against a fairly modern radar guided missile battery. In that scenario the F-35's stealth is going to let it survive when the A-10s fall out of the sky like rain.
Now I think the A-10 still has it's place. It's exactly the type of aircraft, alongside the Harrier that we needed over Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 15 years precisely because it hasn't been up against modern missile batteries there. But if say we hypothetically had to hit an Iranian nuclear program, bomb Assad in his compound, or wanted to help Ukraine destroy some of those "Rebel" Buk missile batteries, then the F-35 is the jet you want in play.
I'm more worried about what we're doing in the UK, than what the US is doing. Even if your Air Force fucks up you still have a Navy and Marine corps with substantial and sensible air assets. In the UK we seem to be getting jammed into a two plane setup across all services, Eurofighters, and F-35s. Both are ridiculously expensive aircraft to be throwing out on missions destroying individual ISIS fighters firing mortars from the middle of an empty undefended desert. Losing the Tornado as we're due to, and selling our Harriers for less than the cost of a single F-35 (We sold 72 Harriers to the US for $180million, whilst a single F-35 now has an average cost of over $400million) are both absolute travesties in ensuring we have what we need to fight the type of wars we're primarily fighting - those against insurgencies.
We can still do it with the Eurofighter and the F-35 of course, but the cost of doing so would be drastically more than the price we sold our entire Harrier fleet for, which is frankly fucking absurd.
"Some rich parents have this attitude, that if their children don't do well in school, there must be a problem with the school. They can't accept that their children just don't do well in math, biology, Latin, or whatever. "
I'm not sure it's necessarily wrong though. My parents aren't rich, but I didn't do well in math at school. I did however end up getting a first class honours degree in maths all the same though.
The problem is that there was a massive disconnect between how the school taught and how I learnt. Throwing a textbook at me and telling me to solve 40 meaningless problems achieved nothing and I learnt nothing. When I eventually sat down in my own time however and wanted to figure out how to build me a 3D engine, suddenly all the calculus and stuff had a purpose, it meant something, it could achieve something.
I'm not saying schools should teach 3D engine programming, but the point is that schools do very often get it wrong, they do an incredibly bad job of teaching for lots of kids. Mindless repetition of meaningless equation solving works well for kids who are capable of doing boring, repetitive tasks without asking, but some kids have a thirst for understanding and explanation, they want to know that what they're doing has some meaning, what it's for, where they'd use it. Statistics is an obvious one - teach boring stats for the sake of teaching boring stats and you'll have a problem getting through to many kids. Create a scenario whereby they're running a business selling shirts, and they need to figure out what sizes are going to optimise profit letting them know how much the overhead penalty is for creating additional sizes, and give them a bunch of data on measurements of people and you'll teach them not just the stats, but about business, about problem solving, and optionally even about team working.
So I do agree with what you're saying, but I think we should also be careful not to give bad schools and bad teachers (which for subjects like Maths is the vast majority of them in my experience) a get out clause for their incompetence. I did well in maths in spite of my teachers at school, not because of them. It was only at university where the teachers really seemed to get how to teach, and even that wasn't a universal truth.
I'd be surprised it's an issue given that the UK has seen many such projects over the years, one which has had a succesful view years and is now at it's end is the Vulcan to the Sky project.
I imagine if they can get permission to dick around in a cold war era nuclear V-bomber that first flew in 1952, then the slightly more modern Concorde wouldn't exactly be too big a deal.
The Civil Aviation Authority in the UK is fairly pragmatic about this sort of thing, and if there are concerns usually deals with it with restrictions rather than a blanket ban. For example, the Vulcan was allowed to fly with the stipulation that it could only be flown by RAF/ex-RAF personnel who had flown it as part of their service in the RAF - i.e. no one previously untrained in handling it was allowed to fly it. If there is a concern about it going supersonic for example, they'll just stipulate that it can fly, but not break the sound barrier.
".. however, when it is used by ARCHAEOLOGISTS in an ARCHAEOLOGICAL context, that is not what it means. (Incidentally, "context" is another term that has a noticeably different usage in archaeology to common English.)."
So maybe that's the problem? that archaeologists have invented their own language that isn't English because it has completely different definitions for words? Again though, that's clearly a problem with archaeology than everyone else if it insists on making up it's own definitions. You can't blame everyone else for wondering why you use terms like ritual all the fucking time even when it's unfounded and meaningless to everyone else. You can't blame TV that has to broadcast to a general audience for talking in the language of the general audience rather than yours.
"Your surveying protocol. Let's start with a field. You do not have a compass. You do have an abundance of string, and as many sticks as you want to drive into the ground. And as much astronomical ingenuity as you want. What is your first step?"
You don't even need that, just stick a bunch of reasonable sized stones in a field - large enough that the wind can't blow them over, small enough to carry or at least with a couple of people. Place them in a field in a rough circle, put enough in for whatever base you want and that is natural to you, maybe 10 like your fingers and thumbs, or 12 like a 12 hour clock, 24 like a 24 hour or whatever seems to make sense to you. Whatever feels natural. Watch how and where the sun hits throughout the day and even through the year, and adjust them round depending on where you want the sun to hit. With enough adjustment you'll be able to get it appearing at certain points against your monolith as and how you want it. You can even etch marks vertically to measure height of the sun through your rocks to help determine time of year. Eventually, you can replace with much larger stones if you really want to.
Why do you think you need any complex geometry for a problem that can be solved trivially with a bit of trial and error over time?
"Look up "metaphor". It's a Greek word, so you may not have hear it before."
No it's called hyperbole, and it was unnecessary hyperbole in an attempt to distract from the point. It's also a word of Greek origin, but it's also firmly entrenched English now, but perhaps you also have your own pointless definition that makes no sense to anyone else, hence why you didn't call it what it is. If it was a metaphor then I'm intrigued to know for what, maybe your academic mate believes they had an alien clock instead or something?
"At this moment, they align with some astronomical phenomena"
Yes, and back then too. Neither the sun nor the earth have adjusted suitably for that to not be the case.
"Incidentally, what is the fucking use of marking a solstice?"
But it doesn't just mark the solstice does it? Knowing when you've reached the high point of the year, and the low point of the year in terms of daylight is incredibly useful, because you know you have half the time remaining until the worst of it, or have finished the worst of it and that it'll soon be improving. Other markers allow you to determine points through the rest of the year.
"And if your neighbours, literally two hours walk away come up with a completely different answer to the same question, that raises one weird circumstance. Or if they were answering a completely different question, that's another different set of questions for interpreting the sites. (how far apart are parishes in your community? Here they're about miles in the country, and a few hundred metres in town. There are 4 parish churches between my house and the supermarket, of which three are abandoned and derelict, or deconsecrated and up for rent.) "
I literally have no idea what tangent you're rambling off on, you seem to be creating a pet theory and trying desperately to fudge reality to fit your theory whilst missing the blindingly obvious, which is exactly the sort of poor quality hi
I know he is, but that still doesn't mean we need to get rid of our nuclear deterrent altogether - it was just making the point that Trident is relatively cheap compared to some of the projects we've done and have planned over the years - even it's £100bn cost is spread over 40 years (so £2.5bn a year - we spend more filling the gap in statutory maternity and sick pay every year - you could save that cost simply by legislating companies to always pay this cost, pay for Trident, and still have £50 million left over each year. For reference we spend £650bn on benefits every year), and it's not clear that cost is even remotely plausible - it was created by Corbyn and his friends at the CND and takes into account things like staffing costs of military personnel over the same time period, whilst not being terribly clear that we wouldn't still have those personnel anyway but in different roles.
The actual cost of the proposed submarines and deterrent is in the £15bn to £20bn range, which is peanuts compared to HS2, and not even double what the Olympics cost at the low end and that was ultimately just a 2 week entertainment event.
So again as I said, I'm not saying there aren't cost savings, I'm also not saying we should definitely keep a deterrent, but I think the probable most sensible solution is to keep a deterrent, whilst scaling it back. My point is simply that Trident isn't that expensive - we happily blow far more and get far less for our money elsewhere - it's not the absurdly unaffordable thing those who are adamantly for complete unilateral disarmament claim.
Hence, my suggestion is, if we're going to put forward an argument against it, it needs to be something other than simply cost - i.e. more compelling evidence that we wont ever need it than mere "We wont, because I say we wont". At least some effort to liaise with other nuclear states and get a broad ranging agreement that they will at least reduce their arsenal also if we disarm - if CND folks at least offered disarmament as a condition of a global nuclear reduction programme it would be something but most the arguments seem to be the same paranoia over the word "nuclear" as we see against nuclear power plants, and those arguments simply aren't based on a firm understanding of the issue.
Put simply, I think we can get a far better deal or solution than simply disarming because some people vehemently go after anything with the word nuclear in it due to paranoia.
As opposed to the US system where she wouldn't have been able to afford to pay and the insurance company would've found an excuse to void the policy she'd been paying into for a decade and so she couldn't even get on a list in the first place?
Great. That's much better.
Sacrificing an individual to keep costs down is exactly how the US healthcare system works, that's exactly what happens when you throw capitalism and profit into the mix - you have to grow profits by maximising the amount of people who pay and how much they pay and minimising the amount of people you actually treat in practice.
I'm actually for consideration of a reduction, or cancellation of Trident, but I'm fairly on the fence with it, I don't think what you say is inherently true:
"* We can't maintain one-boat-at-sea at all times, because they're falling to bits - they can't even complete readiness drills reliably"
That's why we're talking about replacing them, they're nearing the end of their life time.
"* We can't use it anyway : From the House of Commons Defence Select Committee (in 2006)"
This isn't established fact though, it's merely one opinion from almost a decade ago. People made the same argument about the Eurofighter "It's useless in Afghanistan bombing people in caves, what a waste of money!" but it wasn't built to fight the conflict of the day, no weapon necessarily is, it's built for preparedness, and that means anticipating potential future threats. It ended up being quite effective in the open against Gaddaffi's military, and has put a big dent in ISIS armour in Iraq. Similarly now that we're intercepting Russian Bears and Blackjacks off our coast, and participating in Baltic air policing missions against Russian MiGs and Sukhoi's it's suddenly looking quite relevant. The world isn't static, we can't assume that we wouldn't use something, or at least hold it up as a defensive threat, people have always made that argument, and it's always been proven short sighted and wrong. People similarly called the Harrier jump jet a laughable pointless boondoggle that would never be useful in practice, yet it's one of the most combat proven and successful fighter jets of all time and was key to victory in the Falklands.
I think in reality we need to accept that nuclear weapons are a thing, and that proliferation is more likely than reduction regardless of what we do as we see more nuclear states come online all the time (North Korea, Pakistan, India) and others trying (and sometimes failing - e.g. Syria). In light of that acceptance the real decision we need to make is do we want to be a part of the global nuclear MAD shield or should we leave it to someone else. If Argentina joined the list of nuclear weapon states and invaded the Falklands threatening to attack us, or obliterate it should we attempt again to retake it could we count on our allies to back us up and counter that threat? I know from Jeremy's point of view this is a non-issue because he's fine with people not being able to determine their own future and believes places like the Falklands should be handed over to a near failed foreign state like Argentina against the will of the people there, but I'm not and most people aren't. Jeremy is a believe in appeasement, that if you give everyone who is nasty to you what you want that it'll all be fine, but all he's really doing is sending a message that if you want something under Jeremy, all you have to do is start a campaign of killing civilians or just take it by force, and then he'll give you what you want and be your best friend. That has never worked, it's pure fantasy- it'd work if everyone believed the same, but they wont, and without some magical global enlightenment probably never will.
But the decision is complicated further by the fact that if we're willing to be one of those nations that pushes for global treaties that are adhered to it's a one way street - once we're rid, it'll be hard (and more expensive) to justify bringing them back.
In terms of wastage though Trident is positively a bargain compared to HS2 which is costing way too much (for some reason it has a price tag higher than 1.5x the entire cost including salary, transport, munitions, food, first aid, base building (a base the size of Reading), air traffic control, training of Afghan forces, infrastructure projects such as hydro dams in Afghanistan and so on of a 13 year war in Afghanistan) so if you're concerned about finance then infrastructure projects in themselves can be an even bigger waste of money and shift to private individuals, that is after all exactly what HS2 is.
""ritual" is a label for things which are organised, consistent and repeated, but whose purpose we don't understand. That is where it's meaning ends. Full stop, end of logical construct built on top of the label"
I suggest you have a look at the dictionary definition of ritual. It very much has a religious intent to it. So I'd hold off on your need to attack TV interpretations, when they're using the exact interpretation the vast majority of the population use. If you've determined your own definition then that's fine, but you can't complain when people question it. Why not just use a term like "activity" instead of ritual which has a clear religious slant to it?
"Do we know that? It is a much-repeated idea on TV, but not given much detailed credence within the profession. I was talking with Clive Ruggles (Professor of Archaeoastronomy at University of Leicester) a couple of years ago when I bumped into him with my father (they've known each other for several decades) on the subject and he's considerably more dubious of the astronomical utility of such constructions. The processes necessary to work out where to put the stones would have required exactly as much astronomy and time-keeping, but these constructions are archaeologically invisible, and by implication were far smaller in scale and cheaper (by whatever metrics you apply to a non-monetary society). The actual keeping of time was done by the Neolithic equivalent of a caesium atomic clock in a basement somewhere, while Stonehenge served the "ritual" purposes associated with the equivalent of the Edinburgh Hogmanay street party."
Aligning the stones when the site was built over such a long period wouldn't even remotely need any kind of complex knowledge. Simply moving the original much smaller stones each year until the position was known and well established before the bigger stones were eventually moved in is a pretty obvious way of dealing with it. It's not like they just turned up one day with these massive fuck off stones and just plonked them down whilst happening to know where. Talk of need of an atomic clock is laughable - perhaps yes, if you've worked in academia all your life and have no real world pragmatic, practical competence whatsoever.
And yes, we do know they align astronomically, I don't know why you'd question that, we know this because we can observe it on the summer solstice every fucking year. You may disagree on why it does (even if you believe it's just a profound coincidence), but to pretend it doesn't is rather ignorant.
The fact that some other circles fail miserably doesn't really tell us much, other than that other people got this type of system not quite right, which begs the question of whether it even needs to be - simply realising that when the sun hits stone about 3/4 of the way down the left hand stone of arch A is probably sufficient for most communities in an "Oh well, we didn't get it quite right but that tells us what we need to know" kind of way. Stone henge was refined over a few hundred years from what I understand so the fact it does align is merely evidence of the effort expended over that period at that site.
Knowing roughly where you are in the year in a country like the UK where most of our summer has felt like autumn, much of last Winter felt like Spring, and snow can turn up as late as April/May is probably good enough if you just want to know when the fuck to stick your crops out. If in one case they decide to refine it to track the peak of summer and trough of winter perfectly then why do you still feel the need to seek magic? I'm a perfectionist too, it'd probably be the sort of thing I'd do also, because it would bug me if it didn't align perfectly.
Slashdot Mirror
"I've noticed this when presenting too many options to a customer for a solution to a dilemma."
Yes, not just customers, but even colleagues. I learnt this long ago in IT and development, if there are multiple compromise solutions to a problem that a decision maker needs to give the go ahead and sign off to on solving, then just present them with the single one that most suits you or that you feel best suits the business. Only offer alternatives if asked, otherwise you're just asking for pointless meetings, probably only to end up that the choice you would've presented in isolation in the first place anyway.
Most people wont care if there are multiple alternative choices if the one you chose got the job done well enough and you'll be far more respected if you focus on getting the job done this way rather than spending half your life being stuck in unproductive meetings about a problem and do very little productive work as a result.
I'm not sure how logistically they could attack via Spain. Britain was the only staging post in Europe available to the allies, so why would you travel at least 420 miles across open water where it's hard to stretch fighter cover to give decent air support alongside the coast of Nazi occupied France and where you'll easily be spotted when you can just sail across the 20 to 80 mile stretch of the English channel and hit them before they can even rally the troops to your landing location? I suppose they could've used North Africa as a staging post, but they'd still have to get everyone there and a buildup would be far easier to spot than the already built up "Fortress Britain".
To attack Spain they'd have been able to send far less equipment (some of the boats that crossed the channel weren't seaworthy enough to make it to Spain) and it would've been far more vulnerable and far more prone to discovery.
I'm intrigued to know why you asked the question though, do you see some reason why an attack via Spain would've made any kind of sense as opposed to say Greece, Italy, Southern France etc.?
I'm surprised given it's geography that Japan isn't a fantastic candidate for a combination of wind (onshore, and off), hydro, tidal, and geothermal.
Anyone know why they're more interested in building coal than harnessing more of their renewable resources? Does Japan have masses of cheap coal or something? I'd have assumed it has to import a lot of it?
I agree with you about nuclear over coal, but I'm struggling to see why Japan would need either. For such a high tech country it seems to be resorting to an insanely low tech sub-optimal and dirty solution.
Honestly, I find religion to be a profound waste of time, so I sympathise with your criticism of it, but I don't think this is a fair statement all the same:
"And every Muslim shares the guilt for promoting a religion which is unremittingly theocratic. It's not the religion of peace, it's the religion of submission, and promoting it is the same as opposing religious freedom."
This simply isn't true, by saying every muslim you're simply tarring them all with the same brush, yet Ahmadiyya muslims explicitly believe that religion should be a choice rather than something forced onto people. Their whole brand of islam is built around trying to compromise it's conflicts with other faiths with the goal of peaceful interaction between religions.
You really can't just blanket paint everyone with the same brush, no matter how hard you may wish to try. You're allowing your understanding of a group of people to be based entirely upon the media image of those people- and of course the ones who make the headlines will be the ones who do things that are shockingly evil because "Guy goes about his daily business without interfering, hating, or planning to harm someone" just isn't newsworthy.
What makes you sure the employees are paying tax? £96,000 is plenty enough to ensure you can pay an accountant to also dodge tax.
"Just being technically not illegal isn't really much of a moral defence, even if it is a legal one."
It's not even that, the tax dodge apologists are wrong to pretend no laws are being broken because as we've seen time and time again, people and companies engaging in forms of tax avoidance ultimately get pulled up on evasion. The problem is that it's so pervasive, and the companies put so much time and effort into it that it takes HMRC years to investigate and fight past the lawyers to finally prosecute.
So what tax dodge apologists are actually saying is "Have they been caught yet? No? Well it's fine then!". Obviously that's nonsense, if you kill someone, it doesn't matter if you've been caught yet, it's still wrong both morally AND legally.
There's a reason so many authorities are investigating these issues - if it was all legal, above board, and acceptable, then there would be no grounds to even investigate.
Tax evasion in this manner is basically the corporate version of personal movie/software/music piracy - it's illegal but so widespread the authorities don't stand a chance in hell of finding the resources to deal with it. Global agreements on dealing with it that are being sought, and law changes like Osborne's so called "Google Tax" are just mechanisms to make investigation and prosecution easier, less costly and less time consuming - i.e. by making cross jurisdiction financial record transfer far easier so that investigators don't get caught up for years even simply trying to access information about offshore accounts.
I don't even think the tax dodge apologists even understand what it is they're defending. I don't think they realise that when they argue that it's all okay, that they're standing up to the man against intrusive government that what they're actually doing is making sure that they have to pay more of their income to make up for the tax revenue that corporations aren't paying to their governments for the services they consume (roads, police, fire, etc.). Instead these corporations they're defending are moving money to other countries that don't play ball in the globalised world so that their citizens don't have to work as hard. I don't think they realise that by justifying tax dodging by large companies like Facebook they're basically saying they're happy with working harder so Irish folk don't have to, and being poorer so that rich folk in Luxembourg can get richer without doing anything for it. The problem with countries like Luxembourg and Ireland is that they're lazy - they want the wealth of the US whilst being as lazy as Greece. That's not acceptable - why should I work harder and pay more tax so that they can get a free ride? Who is Facebook to decide I should have to participate in an undemocratic wealth redistribution plan to the Irish and citizens of other tax havens?
Perhaps if the apologists understood what the effect of tax dodging was they wouldn't make such absurd and self-defeating justifications for them in the first place.
Right but that's the problem - you're talking about how much it costs them when you die, but how much it costs them is not a measure of how much it costs society as a whole. A $300,000 payout to your widow does not mean you were only worth $300,000 if you were also personally responsible for another $500,000 of income for your company (and hence contribution to GDP).
So how much you impact on a health insurance company's profits, is not directly relevant to how much your life was worth overall - it is only a fraction of total costs. When you pay for life insurance, you're not paying to insure against the cost of your death to society as a whole, only to cover your cost to your surviving relatives to make sure they can still afford to live, and even that isn't necessarily directly related to how much you were actually worth to them, but is instead a function of how much you were willing to pay for life insurance in the first place. If you took two people earning the exact same salary doing the exact same job, and one paid half of what the other did in life insurance contributions such that one's family only gets a $150,000 payout, whilst the other gets a $300,000 payout then it doesn't make sense to argue that those are valuations on those people's lives- why is one worth half what the other is when their contribution to both society as a whole, and to their families via their identical incomes was identical?
So AmiMoJo is right when he says it's difficult to figure out how much a human life is worth. It goes beyond simple direct contribution to GDP and that's where the real complexity lies - if a scientist isn't earning much, and isn't selling much directly but is churning out important papers on nano-materials that create a billion dollars in additional industrial productivity then it's easy to see how their relative low wage, low life insurance payout doesn't remotely reflect their actual value.
You can't measure worth of human life objectively in terms of only life insurance costs.
"It's the smaller US companies that are probably going to take the brunt of this - the one that don't currently have any servers in the EU."
Actually I'm not sure that that's the case. If a company operates only in the US (e.g. is headquartered there, only makes money there, only has staff there), but an EU citizen gives them their data, then the EU citizen is effectively accepting that their data will be held under the US' weaker data protection regime.
The problem here is that Google, Facebook et. al have set up European subsidiaries for tax dodging purposes and so EU citizens are interacting with EU subsidiaries who are held to EU data protection standards. Those subsidiaries cannot make the decision for users to send their data to weaker data protection regimes - only the users themselves can opt to do that.
Oops! I missed the New and simply read it as Mexico.
In that case yes, it obviously paints exactly the opposite picture.
It's not even that, if this crop gives a real edge to a business then other farmers are going to have to use it too, and then we end up with a monoculture whereby we lack the diversity in our crop system and any disease impacting Monsanto's variant will rapidly spread and wipe out the crop. It could be years before they can get another variant that's resistant to the newly adapted disease in widespread production to satisfy global demand and so we're stuck without this important staple crop as you suggest.
But I'm not sure about the wiseness of insect killing crops in the first place. Insects exist for a reason, and it's unlikely they can make this target only invasive species across the globe, as what's invasive in one place, will be native in others. Killing off a key part of the ecosystem is an insanely bad idea, because it wont take long before it filters through to the parts of the ecosystem that actually matter to us (just as with bees and CCD).
Well I was intrigued by the $15,000 annual average salary figure for the year, because yes, that's a shit salary in the US, but we all know these things are relative.
From what I could find in terms of statistics in Mexico on this, $15,000 is almost double the average annual income for Mexico as a whole, so they surely aren't be that poor relative to the rest of their country.
Are they poor compared to countries with some of the highest personal average incomes in the world? Yeah, sure. But if this spaceport is even partly responsible for making this area twice as wealthy as the average across their country as a whole then I don't really see what the complaint is the much higher levels of income in this area compared to the rest of the country imply that something is definitely going better for them than elsewhere in Mexico.
Yeah, it may well be. I'm intrigued to know what's in this for Google. Are Android phones still being artificially inflated in price by Microsoft's frivolous patent shakedowns against all Android manufacturers?
The whole reason Google retaliated was because of that idiocy, and if Google is ceasing it's retaliation to halt Microsoft's counter-retaliation then Microsoft has won, and Google has lost hard. Anyone know if Microsoft is giving up on the billions it rakes in from those Android shakedowns? If it isn't then it's hard to see how this is anything other than a humiliating defeat for Google.
Nope, ad hominem still irrelevant and meaningless. Please try harder.
"Simply learning C or C++ won't point out exactly why those languages are so much faster than managed languages. You can write nearly the same code in C++, Java, and C#, and you'll see C++ win performance benchmarks - at least in all but the most contrived examples."
And that's really part of the problem. Too many people who vehemently defend C/C++ against managed language performance are doing so having just written or run a brief managed language application and said "See!".
But it's not a fair comparison, talented C++ developers can write good, performant C++ applications because they understand the language, they understand the compiler, and they understand how it all interact so that they can write that performant code in the first place.
Managed languages aren't magic, if you want an optimised application you still have to understand the platform - in something like .NET that means understanding GC generations, the impact they have, what should reach gen 2, what shouldn't pass gen 0, and how to make sure it doesn't pass gen 0. Unless you understand your runtime, be it the CLR, or the JVM as well as you understand your C++ compiler, you can't rationally compare the two and claim one is better than the other.
That's where you're going wrong - you're suggesting that code written to be optimal in C++ should be inherently optimal in Java, or C#, and that's a completely false assumption. It's also why you're right about something - that the GP is completely wrong. Learning C wont make anyone a better programmer in a managed (or even interpreted language), it's a different platform, and the rules are different. Probably what someone means when they say they should learn C first is actually that people should understand their platform first - they should understand the intricacies of the JVM, or the CLR, or their C++ compiler, or even the underlying OS and hardware. I disagree though, I think you learn those things best through programming, though some people certainly never really learn them, and that's a problem.
"Among the more significant differences are that C++ compilers are extremely good at optimizing, and C++ code generally compiles down to better cache-coherent structures than other languages. The difference is in the language itself, which adheres to a zero-cost principle, in that you don't pay for features you don't use. A lot of C++ abstractions are eliminated *entirely* at runtime, and are only used to protect the code's integrity during the compilation phase."
But even then they're not as good at optimising as JIT compilers, simply because additional compile time information always inherently means better optimisations can be performed - this is an inescapable fact, the more information a compiler has, the better it can optimise, and a JIT compiler on the specific execution machine will always have more information than a C++ compiler compiling for a target architecture (rather than a specific machine) - the JIT compiler has full hardware and OS information (and not merely rough architectural information - something pretty broad like x86, or x64), and it can also gather runtime information to optimise around runtime patterns. Yes, C++ compilers have gotten very good over the years, but unfortunately it's an inescapable fact that JIT compilers will always inherently be able to do better - it's just the nature of the beast, and there's no getting away from that bar C++ applications being able to self-optimise at installation or runtime.
"We were told for years that native-equivalent performance was just around the corner or even already here, and it just never really happened outside of small, contrived benchmarks."
It's been here for quite some time, but if developers don't know how to achieve it then it might as well not be. Great developers are doing great things in managed languages - many of the big boys have those staff on board, companies like eBay, Amazon, Google, and just about all the banks et. al. but similarly they also have great
Your professor may well have been a time traveller, as in 1997, Java was still interpreted, and it was only in 1999 that they switched to JIT compilation.
Also, Javascript has nothing to do with Java other than being a hastily cobbled together PoS designed to cash in on the hype surrounding the Java name in its early days.
In 1997 Java WAS slow, but it was also a completely different platform back then.
When the UEA was hacked and the "Climategate" e-mails leaked, it was just before and important global warming conference involving pretty much every country in the world.
Rumour at the time was that it was either Russia, or Saudi Arabia, both significant petro states with a firm interest in trying to keep everyone consuming oil and put a stop to this talk of moving to renewables and green energy.
If true, it's possible that Saudi hacking actions and ambitions reach far beyond merely oppressing their own populace and subverting their human rights. Such a purchase could've been as much about crippling their arch enemy Iran's critical digital infrastructure, carrying out actions to manipulate oil prices as much as dealing with people internal to the state.
I don't think your pet theory really matters, at the end of the day by just about every metric I'm doing better than most members of society (whether it's a purely selfish metric like salary, or a more philanthropic metric like charity giving, or socially beneficial metric like net tax contribution). If I had to reach that point in spite of the teachers, rather than because of the teachers, then the odds are there are a lot of people who didn't do it in spite of the teachers. That is, objectively, failure on their behalf.
But I don't really need to argue it, god only knows the amount of businesses and universities unhappy that schools are churning out drones that are capable of A* grade repetition and incapable any kind of actual thinking for themselves are pretty well documented. Similarly, the idea that learning by repetition is the only way to learn, much less the best way to learn is also very widely rubbished by people who have actually been successful in improving teaching.
So like it or not, it really doesn't matter if I was or wasn't lazy (I doubt I was given that I also studied another degree full time whilst working full time- that's not something a lazy person manages), it doesn't change the fact that the teachers in question failed all the same, and it doesn't change the fact that this is a problem that's being repeated by universities and businesses all across the West.
But perhaps you're one of those hopeless teachers, and you just don't want to admit failure, because that'd mean you'd have to do something more than just turning up at 8:30am and going home at 4:30pm in between your 13 weeks off a year and throwing down a textbook to each of the kids, telling them to get on with it whilst you get back to dicking around on Slashdot rather than, you know, actually teaching.
"You let me know when one F-35 can out compete four A-10's for air to ground combat."
I'm a massive fan of the A-10, but I can think of one situation - when they're up against a fairly modern radar guided missile battery. In that scenario the F-35's stealth is going to let it survive when the A-10s fall out of the sky like rain.
Now I think the A-10 still has it's place. It's exactly the type of aircraft, alongside the Harrier that we needed over Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 15 years precisely because it hasn't been up against modern missile batteries there. But if say we hypothetically had to hit an Iranian nuclear program, bomb Assad in his compound, or wanted to help Ukraine destroy some of those "Rebel" Buk missile batteries, then the F-35 is the jet you want in play.
I'm more worried about what we're doing in the UK, than what the US is doing. Even if your Air Force fucks up you still have a Navy and Marine corps with substantial and sensible air assets. In the UK we seem to be getting jammed into a two plane setup across all services, Eurofighters, and F-35s. Both are ridiculously expensive aircraft to be throwing out on missions destroying individual ISIS fighters firing mortars from the middle of an empty undefended desert. Losing the Tornado as we're due to, and selling our Harriers for less than the cost of a single F-35 (We sold 72 Harriers to the US for $180million, whilst a single F-35 now has an average cost of over $400million) are both absolute travesties in ensuring we have what we need to fight the type of wars we're primarily fighting - those against insurgencies.
We can still do it with the Eurofighter and the F-35 of course, but the cost of doing so would be drastically more than the price we sold our entire Harrier fleet for, which is frankly fucking absurd.
"Some rich parents have this attitude, that if their children don't do well in school, there must be a problem with the school. They can't accept that their children just don't do well in math, biology, Latin, or whatever. "
I'm not sure it's necessarily wrong though. My parents aren't rich, but I didn't do well in math at school. I did however end up getting a first class honours degree in maths all the same though.
The problem is that there was a massive disconnect between how the school taught and how I learnt. Throwing a textbook at me and telling me to solve 40 meaningless problems achieved nothing and I learnt nothing. When I eventually sat down in my own time however and wanted to figure out how to build me a 3D engine, suddenly all the calculus and stuff had a purpose, it meant something, it could achieve something.
I'm not saying schools should teach 3D engine programming, but the point is that schools do very often get it wrong, they do an incredibly bad job of teaching for lots of kids. Mindless repetition of meaningless equation solving works well for kids who are capable of doing boring, repetitive tasks without asking, but some kids have a thirst for understanding and explanation, they want to know that what they're doing has some meaning, what it's for, where they'd use it. Statistics is an obvious one - teach boring stats for the sake of teaching boring stats and you'll have a problem getting through to many kids. Create a scenario whereby they're running a business selling shirts, and they need to figure out what sizes are going to optimise profit letting them know how much the overhead penalty is for creating additional sizes, and give them a bunch of data on measurements of people and you'll teach them not just the stats, but about business, about problem solving, and optionally even about team working.
So I do agree with what you're saying, but I think we should also be careful not to give bad schools and bad teachers (which for subjects like Maths is the vast majority of them in my experience) a get out clause for their incompetence. I did well in maths in spite of my teachers at school, not because of them. It was only at university where the teachers really seemed to get how to teach, and even that wasn't a universal truth.
I'd be surprised it's an issue given that the UK has seen many such projects over the years, one which has had a succesful view years and is now at it's end is the Vulcan to the Sky project.
I imagine if they can get permission to dick around in a cold war era nuclear V-bomber that first flew in 1952, then the slightly more modern Concorde wouldn't exactly be too big a deal.
The Civil Aviation Authority in the UK is fairly pragmatic about this sort of thing, and if there are concerns usually deals with it with restrictions rather than a blanket ban. For example, the Vulcan was allowed to fly with the stipulation that it could only be flown by RAF/ex-RAF personnel who had flown it as part of their service in the RAF - i.e. no one previously untrained in handling it was allowed to fly it. If there is a concern about it going supersonic for example, they'll just stipulate that it can fly, but not break the sound barrier.
".. however, when it is used by ARCHAEOLOGISTS in an ARCHAEOLOGICAL context, that is not what it means. (Incidentally, "context" is another term that has a noticeably different usage in archaeology to common English.)."
So maybe that's the problem? that archaeologists have invented their own language that isn't English because it has completely different definitions for words? Again though, that's clearly a problem with archaeology than everyone else if it insists on making up it's own definitions. You can't blame everyone else for wondering why you use terms like ritual all the fucking time even when it's unfounded and meaningless to everyone else. You can't blame TV that has to broadcast to a general audience for talking in the language of the general audience rather than yours.
"Your surveying protocol. Let's start with a field. You do not have a compass. You do have an abundance of string, and as many sticks as you want to drive into the ground. And as much astronomical ingenuity as you want. What is your first step?"
You don't even need that, just stick a bunch of reasonable sized stones in a field - large enough that the wind can't blow them over, small enough to carry or at least with a couple of people. Place them in a field in a rough circle, put enough in for whatever base you want and that is natural to you, maybe 10 like your fingers and thumbs, or 12 like a 12 hour clock, 24 like a 24 hour or whatever seems to make sense to you. Whatever feels natural. Watch how and where the sun hits throughout the day and even through the year, and adjust them round depending on where you want the sun to hit. With enough adjustment you'll be able to get it appearing at certain points against your monolith as and how you want it. You can even etch marks vertically to measure height of the sun through your rocks to help determine time of year. Eventually, you can replace with much larger stones if you really want to.
Why do you think you need any complex geometry for a problem that can be solved trivially with a bit of trial and error over time?
"Look up "metaphor". It's a Greek word, so you may not have hear it before."
No it's called hyperbole, and it was unnecessary hyperbole in an attempt to distract from the point. It's also a word of Greek origin, but it's also firmly entrenched English now, but perhaps you also have your own pointless definition that makes no sense to anyone else, hence why you didn't call it what it is. If it was a metaphor then I'm intrigued to know for what, maybe your academic mate believes they had an alien clock instead or something?
"At this moment, they align with some astronomical phenomena"
Yes, and back then too. Neither the sun nor the earth have adjusted suitably for that to not be the case.
"Incidentally, what is the fucking use of marking a solstice?"
But it doesn't just mark the solstice does it? Knowing when you've reached the high point of the year, and the low point of the year in terms of daylight is incredibly useful, because you know you have half the time remaining until the worst of it, or have finished the worst of it and that it'll soon be improving. Other markers allow you to determine points through the rest of the year.
"And if your neighbours, literally two hours walk away come up with a completely different answer to the same question, that raises one weird circumstance. Or if they were answering a completely different question, that's another different set of questions for interpreting the sites. (how far apart are parishes in your community? Here they're about miles in the country, and a few hundred metres in town. There are 4 parish churches between my house and the supermarket, of which three are abandoned and derelict, or deconsecrated and up for rent.) "
I literally have no idea what tangent you're rambling off on, you seem to be creating a pet theory and trying desperately to fudge reality to fit your theory whilst missing the blindingly obvious, which is exactly the sort of poor quality hi
I know he is, but that still doesn't mean we need to get rid of our nuclear deterrent altogether - it was just making the point that Trident is relatively cheap compared to some of the projects we've done and have planned over the years - even it's £100bn cost is spread over 40 years (so £2.5bn a year - we spend more filling the gap in statutory maternity and sick pay every year - you could save that cost simply by legislating companies to always pay this cost, pay for Trident, and still have £50 million left over each year. For reference we spend £650bn on benefits every year), and it's not clear that cost is even remotely plausible - it was created by Corbyn and his friends at the CND and takes into account things like staffing costs of military personnel over the same time period, whilst not being terribly clear that we wouldn't still have those personnel anyway but in different roles.
The actual cost of the proposed submarines and deterrent is in the £15bn to £20bn range, which is peanuts compared to HS2, and not even double what the Olympics cost at the low end and that was ultimately just a 2 week entertainment event.
So again as I said, I'm not saying there aren't cost savings, I'm also not saying we should definitely keep a deterrent, but I think the probable most sensible solution is to keep a deterrent, whilst scaling it back. My point is simply that Trident isn't that expensive - we happily blow far more and get far less for our money elsewhere - it's not the absurdly unaffordable thing those who are adamantly for complete unilateral disarmament claim.
Hence, my suggestion is, if we're going to put forward an argument against it, it needs to be something other than simply cost - i.e. more compelling evidence that we wont ever need it than mere "We wont, because I say we wont". At least some effort to liaise with other nuclear states and get a broad ranging agreement that they will at least reduce their arsenal also if we disarm - if CND folks at least offered disarmament as a condition of a global nuclear reduction programme it would be something but most the arguments seem to be the same paranoia over the word "nuclear" as we see against nuclear power plants, and those arguments simply aren't based on a firm understanding of the issue.
Put simply, I think we can get a far better deal or solution than simply disarming because some people vehemently go after anything with the word nuclear in it due to paranoia.
As opposed to the US system where she wouldn't have been able to afford to pay and the insurance company would've found an excuse to void the policy she'd been paying into for a decade and so she couldn't even get on a list in the first place?
Great. That's much better.
Sacrificing an individual to keep costs down is exactly how the US healthcare system works, that's exactly what happens when you throw capitalism and profit into the mix - you have to grow profits by maximising the amount of people who pay and how much they pay and minimising the amount of people you actually treat in practice.
I'm actually for consideration of a reduction, or cancellation of Trident, but I'm fairly on the fence with it, I don't think what you say is inherently true:
"* We can't maintain one-boat-at-sea at all times, because they're falling to bits - they can't even complete readiness drills reliably"
That's why we're talking about replacing them, they're nearing the end of their life time.
"* We can't use it anyway : From the House of Commons Defence Select Committee (in 2006)"
This isn't established fact though, it's merely one opinion from almost a decade ago. People made the same argument about the Eurofighter "It's useless in Afghanistan bombing people in caves, what a waste of money!" but it wasn't built to fight the conflict of the day, no weapon necessarily is, it's built for preparedness, and that means anticipating potential future threats. It ended up being quite effective in the open against Gaddaffi's military, and has put a big dent in ISIS armour in Iraq. Similarly now that we're intercepting Russian Bears and Blackjacks off our coast, and participating in Baltic air policing missions against Russian MiGs and Sukhoi's it's suddenly looking quite relevant. The world isn't static, we can't assume that we wouldn't use something, or at least hold it up as a defensive threat, people have always made that argument, and it's always been proven short sighted and wrong. People similarly called the Harrier jump jet a laughable pointless boondoggle that would never be useful in practice, yet it's one of the most combat proven and successful fighter jets of all time and was key to victory in the Falklands.
I think in reality we need to accept that nuclear weapons are a thing, and that proliferation is more likely than reduction regardless of what we do as we see more nuclear states come online all the time (North Korea, Pakistan, India) and others trying (and sometimes failing - e.g. Syria). In light of that acceptance the real decision we need to make is do we want to be a part of the global nuclear MAD shield or should we leave it to someone else. If Argentina joined the list of nuclear weapon states and invaded the Falklands threatening to attack us, or obliterate it should we attempt again to retake it could we count on our allies to back us up and counter that threat? I know from Jeremy's point of view this is a non-issue because he's fine with people not being able to determine their own future and believes places like the Falklands should be handed over to a near failed foreign state like Argentina against the will of the people there, but I'm not and most people aren't. Jeremy is a believe in appeasement, that if you give everyone who is nasty to you what you want that it'll all be fine, but all he's really doing is sending a message that if you want something under Jeremy, all you have to do is start a campaign of killing civilians or just take it by force, and then he'll give you what you want and be your best friend. That has never worked, it's pure fantasy- it'd work if everyone believed the same, but they wont, and without some magical global enlightenment probably never will.
But the decision is complicated further by the fact that if we're willing to be one of those nations that pushes for global treaties that are adhered to it's a one way street - once we're rid, it'll be hard (and more expensive) to justify bringing them back.
In terms of wastage though Trident is positively a bargain compared to HS2 which is costing way too much (for some reason it has a price tag higher than 1.5x the entire cost including salary, transport, munitions, food, first aid, base building (a base the size of Reading), air traffic control, training of Afghan forces, infrastructure projects such as hydro dams in Afghanistan and so on of a 13 year war in Afghanistan) so if you're concerned about finance then infrastructure projects in themselves can be an even bigger waste of money and shift to private individuals, that is after all exactly what HS2 is.
My personal view right now is
""ritual" is a label for things which are organised, consistent and repeated, but whose purpose we don't understand. That is where it's meaning ends. Full stop, end of logical construct built on top of the label"
I suggest you have a look at the dictionary definition of ritual. It very much has a religious intent to it. So I'd hold off on your need to attack TV interpretations, when they're using the exact interpretation the vast majority of the population use. If you've determined your own definition then that's fine, but you can't complain when people question it. Why not just use a term like "activity" instead of ritual which has a clear religious slant to it?
"Do we know that? It is a much-repeated idea on TV, but not given much detailed credence within the profession. I was talking with Clive Ruggles (Professor of Archaeoastronomy at University of Leicester) a couple of years ago when I bumped into him with my father (they've known each other for several decades) on the subject and he's considerably more dubious of the astronomical utility of such constructions. The processes necessary to work out where to put the stones would have required exactly as much astronomy and time-keeping, but these constructions are archaeologically invisible, and by implication were far smaller in scale and cheaper (by whatever metrics you apply to a non-monetary society). The actual keeping of time was done by the Neolithic equivalent of a caesium atomic clock in a basement somewhere, while Stonehenge served the "ritual" purposes associated with the equivalent of the Edinburgh Hogmanay street party."
Aligning the stones when the site was built over such a long period wouldn't even remotely need any kind of complex knowledge. Simply moving the original much smaller stones each year until the position was known and well established before the bigger stones were eventually moved in is a pretty obvious way of dealing with it. It's not like they just turned up one day with these massive fuck off stones and just plonked them down whilst happening to know where. Talk of need of an atomic clock is laughable - perhaps yes, if you've worked in academia all your life and have no real world pragmatic, practical competence whatsoever.
And yes, we do know they align astronomically, I don't know why you'd question that, we know this because we can observe it on the summer solstice every fucking year. You may disagree on why it does (even if you believe it's just a profound coincidence), but to pretend it doesn't is rather ignorant.
The fact that some other circles fail miserably doesn't really tell us much, other than that other people got this type of system not quite right, which begs the question of whether it even needs to be - simply realising that when the sun hits stone about 3/4 of the way down the left hand stone of arch A is probably sufficient for most communities in an "Oh well, we didn't get it quite right but that tells us what we need to know" kind of way. Stone henge was refined over a few hundred years from what I understand so the fact it does align is merely evidence of the effort expended over that period at that site.
Knowing roughly where you are in the year in a country like the UK where most of our summer has felt like autumn, much of last Winter felt like Spring, and snow can turn up as late as April/May is probably good enough if you just want to know when the fuck to stick your crops out. If in one case they decide to refine it to track the peak of summer and trough of winter perfectly then why do you still feel the need to seek magic? I'm a perfectionist too, it'd probably be the sort of thing I'd do also, because it would bug me if it didn't align perfectly.