Sometimes to get your point across you have to temporarily sacrifice your principles short term for a massive improvement in gain long term.
An environmentalist burning 1 barrel of oil in fuel to do the necessary travelling to raise awareness of and put a stop to thousands of barrels of oil in spillage in a part of the Niger Delta isn't ironic, it's a net gain in their cause to the tune of thousands of barrels of oil no longer being spilt and the rational thing to do.
I'd like to think it's just that you're not grown up enough to understand that sometimes short term pain is worth the long term gain or something, but let's be honest, when people like you make such facetious arguments what you're really saying is "I disagree with the point these people are making so I'm going to suggest they should be silenced by insisting that they do something that wouldn't advance their cause in the slightest".
These points of determining merit and relative gain of an action are a necessary evil of furthering any cause, whether you're a staunchly right wing NRA member that accepts that the worst criminals should be banned from having guns to protect the principle of well meaning people to continue to be able to have them to defend themselves, or whether you're a left leaning flower loving hippy that blows a barrel of oil to go and buy an electric car and some solar panels or a wind turbine that means you'll never have to use any more oil in your vehicle ever again - whatever portion of the spectrum you sit on, compromising your underlying morals for a greater long term gain is a fact of life and there's nothing ironic about it.
I doubt there's a person on this earth that's ever achieved their political goals without at some point having to sacrifice their principles to at least some degree.
Thousands of people isn't exactly a worthwhile population though is it? We're not talking about a few thousand people, we're talking about finding room for another 4 or 5 billion.
"That still makes it a dumb comment since your example was of colony-based insects who are notoriously colony-focused. They are far more racist than humans, viciously competing with even with their close kin in other colonies."
Oh dear, you realised you made a stupid comment and are one of those folks that would rather talk nonsense than back down? starting to declare species with colonies as racist? what kind of crack are you smoking? it must royally mess you up as it's apparently obliterated your ability to partake in a sensible adult conversation.
The fact that you've extended to such absurdities tells me one thing - you realise you had no idea what you were on about, felt the need to vomit out your opinion anyway, and have now resorted not only to reframing the discussion but to also talking complete and utter nonsense. The only sane conclusion therefore is that you know full well my points were valid, and that you were stupid to try and argue against them with arguments that are completely and utterly stupid and nonsensical.
So I shall walk away knowing that you had nothing worthwhile to challenge my points with, the absurdity you've descended to is perfectly ample evidence of that.
Well the 16 and 17 grouping voted 72% for yes, but the 18 - 24 bracket voted by a majority for no so they were in fact just a bunch of yes bots- when the reality of personal finances, seeking full time work, having a family etc. really comes into play at age 18+ the result massively swung back towards no.
The problem with letting them vote is that by and large pretty much none of them have experience of mortgages and so forth so don't understand the impact increases to cost of borrowing and so forth could have- they may understand the outline issues but they haven't much been involved in any of the things that they impact- mortgages, cost of living, finding work and so forth.
Aside from the 16 - 17 group, the other place the bulk of yes votes came from according to the demographics released is from the lower educated working class folks (and I mean lower educated statistically, not as a jab- lower levels of schooling completion) FWIW. Those in jobs requiring higher levels of education were against independence.
The reason it was rigging the game is because it was unprecedented and whilst they could vote in the referendum Salmond had no will to let them vote in the general election- this is because he knows full well that it's easy to make 16/17 year olds succumb to nationalism, which isn't a problem for a referendum where he's pro-nationalism but more of an issue at a general election when they could be swung to the farther right parties and their more ugly breed of nationalism.
But he was allowed the vote on his terms in other ways too which shone through in the campaign. He chose the question which forced his opposition to sell a negative proposition the "no" vote which is always much harder than selling a positive proposition- this was obvious in the campaign where he was consistently accusing no of being negative and bullying even though his own campaign was being negative with fear mongering about the Tories etc. and similarly yes campaigners were attacking no campaigners- there was easily as much negativity from his side but it was easier to sell that it was a no thing because they were on the negative side.
He also chose the date, towards the end of a British political term when serving politicians are least popular- again this was used in his favour during campaigning because he consistently harped on about the negative policies the current government had made that were really little to do with the referendum or just made up- he talked of NHS cuts for example but the Scottish parliament already controls the Scottish NHS so it was just fear mongering.
Finally, he also managed to stop the 1 million Scottish people living in the rest of the UK, outside Scotland - i.e. 20% of the Scottish vote from voting in the referendum at all. That's very unusual as ex-pats can still normally cast a vote in their home elections, countries like France even have a minister specifically for ex-pats.
So the whole thing was done massively in Salmond's favour, yet he still lost, and contrary to the comments above it wasn't the old people that swung it- as I say even the 18 - 24 range favoured no by a majority. Were this referendum run under "normal" rules - i.e. no 16/17 year old vote, all Scots allowed to vote on the future of their own national identity, a more fair question like "How should Scotland be governed? a) as an independent nation, b) as part of the United Kingdom", and run at a time which was more neutral then it seems realistic that the actual tally would've been closer to no 70%, yes 30%, which, for what it's worth, is roughly the background level of support that was registered over the last decade before the prospect of a referendum was involved.
Or in other words, they only even achieved 45% because they were allowed to rig large important portions of the vote in their favour, without that the SNP in general would probably have been obliterated as a political movement by the landslide preference for no that would have ensued.
GDP is of relevance to everyone, the fact you don't understand it does not change anything. GDP is a measure of the size of the economy, and if the economy is growing then that means there is more money in it. You're correct that that does not mean that as soon as the economy grows people will see instant benefit from it, levels of inflation play in too and companies will not start handing out pay rises left and right the second the economy shows signs of growth, so yes you can see GDP go up, but no people wont instantly see benefit.
I don't know why you say Ireland has a high GDP, no it doesn't, it has a smaller GDP than countries like Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, maybe you meant GDP per capita? If you want to know why Ireland's GDP per capita is high but the people aren't seeing the benefit of it then it's simple- Ireland is a tax haven and like all tax havens they have a high GDP per capita, there's a reason Apple has many tens of billions sat in banks there - it's a low tax regime, but that money sat in banks isn't in the real economy, it doesn't feed down to employees because it's being held in banks simply for the purpose of being kept off shore. This is the price of running your country as a tax haven, you get a lot of income, but it wont be productive money for the economy - it wont be used to pay higher wages or any such thing. The UK is not a tax haven so is not in even a remotely similar situation.
What we have in the UK is healthy growth because it's sustained, and the fact it's sustained means companies can start increasing wages, and guess what? contrary to your parroting of now obsolete memes that's exactly what's happening. Throughout last year wage rises started to track with inflation, and through this year they've finally started outpacing inflation.
Yes there have been big issues with zero hours contracts and self-employment over the last few years, and this has been key in Carney not increasing the bank of England's base rate, but as bank of England minutes have shown over this last year it's now clear that even that trend is in decline- those zero hours contracts, and that self employment is now being replaced by real sustained employment. It's for this reason that a rate rise now looks likely next year, instead of in 2016/2017 as originally planned. I suggest you catch up on this years monthly BoE meeting minutes if you want to get an updated view of the situation of the healthiness of employment in the UK rather than the outdated view you currently hold.
The things you cite were true a year ago or just over, but in the last year it's become clear that this is real growth and as a result even salaries are increasing (they're certainly not decreasing as you claim- go check the ONS stats on the issue, or see here for example: http://www.theguardian.com/bus... - this is from April just as above inflation wage growth started, the pace has improved even more since then).
So I hate to say it but your whole argument is wrong, it's based on a lack of understanding of economics on a national level, it's based on a naive belief that improvement should be instant, and it's based on a simple lack of knowledge about what the underlying trends actually are in our economy.
Our GDP is growing, our wage rises are outpacing inflation, zero hours contracts are no longer growing, debts are not soaring, bailiffs are not doing record business. That's what I consider healthy growth- you're right, your theorised claims would not be healthy growth but they're not what's actually happening in the country right now, they stopped being true at least a year ago, your information is now completely out of date and incorrect.
"But that's not the case. There's nothing magical about living in Antarctica that would cause millions of people to lose their homes elsewhere."
Of course there is, human activity generates heat, and heat melts ice. You can't melt ice in Antarctica and have it magically not increase sea levels, where do you think it goes? or do you think the ice in Antarctica is magical and immune to melt from heat? or that we can create a magical device that just vanishes every single bit of heat humans might generate? When that sea level rise happens there are many people living in coastal areas whose current homes would become flooded. You then have to find somewhere else for them to go.
"No, those species are quite notorious for exhibiting behavior that strongly favors their own species at the expense of pretty much everything else aside from a few symbiotes."
Ah, but now you're changing the parameters of the discussion to suit your argument- I wasn't talking about selfishness that benefits the species as a whole, I was clearly talking about selfishness of the individual making the point that individual humans will look after themselves over the rest of their species - this is why we even have things like racism in the first place.
Yeah, and aliens could land too, and there will be nuclear war, and the world will end also!
Oh wait, you were being serious? You used the words "the way things are going" but that's not actually the way things are going. Based on current trajectories the UK is showing the healthiest growth of just about all rich Western economies and it's doing so whilst maintaining a reduction in deficit too.
Further, a number of studies suggest it's likely to see itself increase in global rankings overtaking France, and maybe even Germany in the next 20 years:
So yeah, you may be right, maybe something drastic will happen and things will go into reverse again, but that's not what the current figures suggest so any such possibility is merely unfounded speculation.
Yeah, sure, Scotland could've chosen not to be part of that and that would've been their decision, but I think most Scots saw through the nationalist pessimism towards the UK and recognised that for all our faults, maybe things aren't so bad - we're growing faster than anyone else in the G7 and seeing drastic declines in unemployment to boot - find me a country without political issues, but as far as ours go they're pretty small fry compared to some of the issues some countries are having, we've been growing well for well over a year now and some of our neighbours are still slipping in and out of recession - right now and for the foreseeable future the UK is still a pretty good place to be.
Faster political change would be nice, many people think it's not happening at all, but it is. In recent years we've seen things like the exposure of the expenses scandal, we've seen the closeness of phone hacking and the political classes, we've seen an alternative voting system referendum that was lost, exposure of sexual abuse in parliament, we've seen a coalition for the first time in 60 years- now many people will view all these things are negatives, things that ended badly, didn't turn out well, but they're not, they're all part of a bigger picture- the tide is turning against entrenched Westminster, in the last 50 years most of those things listed above would've been unthinkable, the fact they're happening is evidence that the vested minorities that've had so much power for so long in Westminster are losing their grip. I'm normally a cynical, pessimistic person myself, but since I started to take a step back on this issue and piece it all together, rather than look at individual events in isolation, as well as looking at the wider world in general (i.e. the arab spring) it seems pretty clear that politicians are losing power to the people as part of a long slow, probably multi-decade process - it's slow but it's happening, and I'm optimistic that Westminster cannot and will not be able to carry on with business as usual for much longer- they're already faltering and I fully suspect that this independence referendum is another nail in the coffin for the old way of doing things.
God only knows I've hated my country long enough and thought about leaving enough times (thankfully I can easily obtain dual citizenship through my partner, or just make use of our EU membership to fuck off elsewhere in the EU) but right now I think the signs are good, I think change is happening, it's painfully slow but I'm not convinced this is something that you can fix overnight, I think it takes almost a generational change in politicians (which might explain why there has been some progress already- I believe last election that far more than half the MPs that were elected were completely new) but it's happening, and we're getting there.
"As a Scot living through the referendum, it has been a sea of optimism and YES flags and events. Many people, including myself woke up this morning very disappointed but also wondering how did this happen:"
I can explain it to you, but like most yes voters you probably wouldn't get it, but here, I'll try anyway.
Those of us sat outside of Scotland, not caught up in the sea of supporters here and there and who bothered to look at the polls - not just the headlines, and that paid attention to events not just in a single locale but across the country, especially in the last few weeks saw something slipping through. We saw the ugly side of nationalism finally shine through, and we saw the impact that was having.
You see dear rapiddescent, all those yes flags, all those events, coupled with the things you'd probably rather not hear about or deny ever happened such as militant yes voters physically attacking no campaigners and even splitting up families and neighbourhoods, telling people they weren't true scotsmen if they voted no. All those things - they weren't a sign you were winning, you'd overwhelmed the opposition sure, all anyone could hear was yes because they'd either silence or out-shouted no at every turn, no, they were simply a sign that you weren't letting people with opposing opinions have their say.
So whilst you were busy silencing and out-shouting the opposition you missed something important- the importance of actually winning the arguments.
Along comes polling day, and guess what? all those people you'd silenced, shouted over, and prevented from expressing their opinion as vocally as you did got to have their say in the ballot box, a place you couldn't silence them, couldn't harass them, and guess what? that's where your weakness of focussing on a a blitzkrieg of yes spam rather than actually putting forward good ideas and rational arguments let you down.
That dear sir, is why the streets were full of yes campaigners, why all you could see and hear was them in the streets, on social media, and in classic media, but why when it came to, you still lost. You militantly silenced the majority, but the silent majority still got to have their say in the end.
The media wasn't biased in it's reporting, most media outlets didn't declare a preference, and those that did largely only did so in the last week or so (it was actually the pro-independence media that declared and actively backed first). You may wish to tell yourself that you've been cheated out of something, that you've been hard done by, that the media was against you, that vested corporate interests stopped it, but none of that is true. You lost simply because a majority were smart enough to see that your arguments didn't stack up, and were put off by your vile nationalist tendencies that kept slipping out from under your mask (like say, when Jim Sillars stood alongside Alex Salmond said post-independence they'd nationalise foreign companies in a revenge act for not supporting independence: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.u...).
I suspect the biggest problem would be the cost and pollution of transporting it relative to other fertilisers that we can transport in a much more efficient manner, we can't really do what the Sahara does with it's mineral sands more efficiently than it already does it, though we can work more efficiently with other fertilisers. The Sahara though does a good job naturally, those global wind patterns do all the work for us with zero pollution.
Given that it's probably worth taking a step back and realising that actually most of the farming that's done today already works on your plan albeit with, as I say, different fertilisers. Much of the world's crops grown today are only feasible to grow precisely because we already do use artificial fertilisers in agriculture across the globe so your plant is already being done in a roundabout way, it's just more efficient for us to do it in our own way outside of the Sahara and more efficient for the Sahara to do what it does by itself.
"No, it doesn't. Just because there is a disadvantage to a choice, doesn't mean that it is "almost" zero sum. You still have to consider the advantages."
Well if you manage to move a few million people to Antarctica and the resultant increase in sea level means a few million people have to leave coastal areas then yes, it is. I did clearly say (and suggested potential examples) there are indeed some areas you could probably get away with spreading the population to with much more minimal disadvantage.
"What species would not be a selfish species in your sense?"
Many colony based species are, such as ants and bees work for the interests of the colony rather than for the individual, though I'm not really sure what the relevance of the question is- the fact that other species are selfish doesn't change the fact that humans are also.
"And this overpopulation problem isn't being caused by the rich. It's being caused by the teeming masses of non-rich."
You're mixing cause and effect, increased birth rates are a symptom of poverty where the per-child survival rate is low, overpopulation is simply a symptom of a bigger problem, not the underlying problem itself. If you take those poor people that you deem responsible for overpopulation and place them in a place where there are crops and water aplenty like the UK then I assure you they will start seeing higher survival rates and lower death rates - the problem is the people who already inhabit these areas and have already prospered as a result keep it for themselves, but you know what? I'm not even judging that - it is natural instinct to look after your own precisely because as I say we are a particularly selfish species, but it absolutely is simply a statement of fact about what does and would happen. The wealthy in the world would still inhabit the most beneficial places, and the poor would still be forced to the places where there is no scope to prosper and would still continue to overproduce children as a survival mechanism as a result.
I don't think it's worth arguing whether that's good, bad, or whose fault it is, or isn't, who is good, or bad, who is innocent or not - none of that really matters because it's just a description of the natural state of the human race and I'm not sure whether we could ever really do much to change that or not, but either way it also doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least recognise it for what it is.
That assumes that all those environments are pointless wastes of space, unfortunately that premise isn't true- those areas of land serve important purpose for example the sands of the Sahara blow across the Atlantic and fertilise the likes of the Amazon rainforest.
A lot of people say "Why don't we geo-engineer the Sahara to make it tropical forest again!" but it becomes almost a zero-sum game, as you grow forests in Africa you decrease the fertilisation of the Amazon and so growth is stunted there in turn.
We can only move into these territories (or even keep expanding in existing ones) if we can find a way to do so without impacting the underlying ecosystem, otherwise we find ourselves with a whole lot of people and not enough resources and you know what that generally means? war - winning side gets the resources.
So it's not just about making an area habitable, or comfortable, it's about doing so in a manner that doesn't have a knock on effect elsewhere - by regrowing Africa into a tropical jungle paradise you'd be slowly pushing ever more of South America into a poor inhospitable desert. Similarly if you start inhabiting Siberia and Antarctica with more human activity resulting in greater melting of these regions you'll simply be flooding coastal regions elsewhere and making them uninhabitable.
Long story short, you cannot make massive changes to large areas of land without there being an impact elsewhere. You can see this on many scales, whether it's the farmers that cleared the forests on the hills of South West England to give themselves more land for crops leading to widespread devastating flooding due to lack of trees to slow water down in the hills, or whether it's something much larger scale as with the Africa/Amazon connection above. For every sizeable environmental change we make there is an impact elsewhere.
For what it's worth, I suspect the place we could most likely inhabit on land with the least impact elsewhere is in parts of the sea but even this would require a lot of care so as to restrict ocean pollution from waste which may damage fish stocks and decrease food. Failing that it's to space we go I guess.
Which isn't to say that there aren't some areas of the planet we can inhabit with little impact elsewhere meaning there is some scope for population growth, but those areas are becoming ever less common and the effects of inhabiting them elsewhere are often subtle making it difficult to know when you have and haven't found a reasonable spot to settle more people. Thus fundamentally it's not simply a case of saying "Hey look that place isn't inhabited, let's inhabit it!" because in doing so you're causing destruction of environments elsewhere where people were inhabiting and now you have to find room for them too.
Of course, I suspect none of it will matter- the rich will live where they desire to live and any knock on impact on anyone else? well they can go fuck themselves, because humans are an inherently selfish species.
Just about everything how will he get currency union? it takes two to agree and one side has ruled it out meaning it's a no go. How will he get EU membership? Spain's PM has said he'll veto.
The only thing Salmond will get are about 8.9% of the UK's assets,
I know you think the Bank of England is an asset, but it's not, well, the building is, and the walls are, but then so is Hollyrood as much an English asset in that respect, but no, everything else that "is" the BOE is employees, and political policy- you can't go independent and say you want sway over our public sector employees and our political policy as a sovereign nation - upon independence the policy splits and British currency is British policy, Scotland loses access to that on independence - if you want to retain a say in British policy it's simple, vote no, because what you're asking for is not independence.
Debt isn't the BOE, debt is a negative asset just like a bunch of fighter jets are a positive asset, on independence you only get to take your population share of each of all these assets, including the negative ones like debt. Now, you could leave the debt with the UK but then you leave equivalent value assets with the UK like fighter jets and leave yourself with no defence, no hospital equipment and so on, but that's upto Salmond and his Scots to decide whether they'd rather have assets and debt, or no assets and no debt, what he doesn't get is fantasy world assets and no debt because debt is just another asset (again, albeit a negative one). Other negative assets that are more tangible might be for example nuclear power plants that require decommissioning soon- assets come in both flavours and you don't get to pick and choose which you do and don't take unilaterally.
"Do you seriously think that England will erect a fence all along the border and place immigration checkpoints along it?"
Absolutely yes. That pro-UK rhetoric that's rife in the UK and that Salmond has been using to fear monger for independence will only grow stronger without Scotland and do you really think for one moment that any UK political party will be able to allow an open border with a country that has admitted it will have an extremely lax attitude to immigration because mass immigration is one of Salmond's plans (and one the easiest method of) to grow the wealth of Scotland?
I'm fairly pro-immigration but even I'd say we need a border there because whilst I'm fairly pro-immigration I still believe if nothing else we have to know who is and isn't coming in and out so we at least have some statistics on that - we can't do that with an open border with Scotland.
"Do you really think that the Spanish will lock themselves out of Scottish fishing waters by blocking their EU membership?"
Yes, because Catalonia brings far more money into Spain than Scotland's fishermen do.
"And then the rest of the UK will just watch as Russian soldiers arrive on their doorstep?"
No he was saying that's what would happen if the rest of the UK opted not to care what happened to Scotland, but the fact Scotland is basically sponging off the UK for security is rather galling given that Salmond's entire argument has been "We should become independent because we can go it alone and do everything better" - not defence it would seem at least.
"I don't see why Scotland would be rejected, especially since the UK has been a pain in the arse ever since it joined the EU. As a matter of fact, many countries in the EU would welcome Scotland just to piss off the Brits."
Yeah, one small problem with your nonsense fantasy- the Brits have a veto. So if any European nation decided to piss the Brits off the Brits can just screw their plans with a simple veto.
It only takes one country to say no, and Scotland's entry is automatically denied.
"The Euro is not the EU, and vice-versa."
It doesn't matter, that's not even what he said. The euro is controlled by the EU and that's all that matters, if the EU doesn't want Scotland in it then it wont get in it, the fact the two aren't completely aligned doesn't change that.
"You are not making any sense - again, the currency you use is totally independent from EU membership itself."
No it's not, all new member nations are put on a roadmap to joining the euro, you cannot join the EU anymore without also engaging in a plan to join the euro. This is even true for existing EU nations such as Sweden- they're obligated to join the euro at some point. The UK is the only exception because it's big enough to have been able to negotiate what Sweden couldn't - a euro optout. If a country with an economy over two times the size of an independent Scotland can't argue for an opt out then how the hell would Scotland do so do you think?
I don't think you have the slightest clue what the international rules are. If Scotland wants to argue for even anything in it's favour then independence has to be something that Westminster agrees to. If Westminster blocks independence then Scotland can go it alone and take it's case to the UN and obtain it that way, but international courts have consistently ruled that separation occurs with assets split based on population.
There is literally no way Salmond can achieve his demands- the UK is against them and will not agree to them and international courts will force him to accept a share of debt or default. This is not an argument he can win even at the ICJ or at a WTO tribunal, which ironically might not even be an avenue, because Scotland would have to get into the WTO in the first place.
The BoE belongs to Scotland in the same way that Hollyrood belongs to Westminster - all these things were purchased in sterling. Sure Salmond can argue that if they don't get the benefits of the BoE that they wont take the debt, but then the UK can argue that if they don't take the debt then they need to pay rent on the Scottish parliament buildings and similarly Scotland wont get to keep the eurofighters or frigates or NHS equipment it wants either because those are all similarly sterling denominated assets- you cannot take sterling denominated assets and not take sterling denominated debt, that will never be agreed to be anyone, whether the UK government, the people of the UK, or international courts.
Salmond's only hand is demand for faster removal of trident, but in turn the UK can veto Scottish EU and NATO entry so if Salmond plays that only hand then he is absolutely screwed by the response.
Post-separation the UK will still be the 6th biggest economy, yet Scotland will fall to 42nd. Given that economic way ties strongly to political weight (because no one wants to piss off the countries that are economically strong enough to also make them rich) do you still seriously believe Salmond has a strong negotiating hand? are you honestly that naive?
If Shetland and/or Orkney go their own way and become independent from Scotland or stick with the rest of the UK taking the oil with them then Scotland is even more screwed, it'll literally have nothing.
"Thatcher destroyed manufacturing and industry in the whole of the UK."
Christ, not this broken old meme. Thatcher didn't even come close to destroying manufacturing in the UK, the UK is still the 9th largest manufacturer in the world in spite of the trend towards manufacturing in poorer nations where labour is cheap.
That's right, the GDP value of UK manufacturing is about 4 times that of commonly cited manufacturing powerhouses like Taiwan.
So can this meme die already? It's not true, it's not even close to true, and it's never been true. The only manufacturing Thatcher killed was those industries that were unprofitable and being subsidised by the tax payer and hence were a drain on everyone's pocket.
There are plenty of better reasons to hate Thatcher like her overuse of military in civilian situations, her anti-European stance and her overly conservative views on almost everything else, but economic policy? she simply cannot be faulted there, she modernised our economy and made us as prosperous as we are.
The same is true of the Tories now, they've done fuckloads wrong such as being way too close to Murdoch and having helped derail press regulation but you'd have to be a special kind of idiot to argue their economic policy has failed- we're the fastest growing G7 nation, the nation most firmly into it's recovery and with the best trajectory on reduction of unemployment in the West.
This debate on Scotland, and too many others are being had on myths and legends like you just made and it's tiresome because as in this case the statistics paint the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The UK is still a global manufacturing powerhouse- you cannot claim a country in the top ten out of 203 to be anything else.
Objectively the UK is doing incredibly well relative to just about every other nation in a similar position right now, that's not something to bitch and moan about and yet you and the Scots are doing exactly that- frankly nothing will ever please you because you're unpleasable, even with our excellent growth and great reductions in unemployment it's still not good enough for you.
"This would leave Scotland with a new currency but with tremendous assets and no liabilities."
This is absolute stark raving nonsense. Debt is the opposite of assets, both things are valued in sterling currently. If you opt to leave the UK with no debt, you opt to leave with no assets that were paid for with that debt. This means that yes Scotland absolutely can vote to leave with no sterling debt, but it also leaves with no sterling assets - that means no frigates, no eurofighters, no hospital equipment, no public sector IT equipment as they're all assets valued in sterling, just as the debt is valued in sterling. You can't take one and not the other and I'm astounded so many of you Scots believe Alex's nonsense codswallop that's so easily disproven.
That blue book is like a kind of nationalist Bible - and like the Bible it's a book of fairy tales for gullible folk to believe and made follow you with.
Microsoft aren't trying to produce a magic controller that is perfect for everyone, because given the manufacturing constraints of producing a million different shaped controllers that'd be impossible.
What they're doing is targetting something that pleases the largest amount of people in a representative sample, this is real design testing and it's a shame you don't understand that.
This is why when you buy t-shirts or similar you have a choice between small, medium, large, and maybe extra large and xxl, but what you don't get is a thousand different shapes with a few millimetres here or there.
You apparently don't understand the reality of producing a product and the use of samples to provide a solution that's pleasing to the largest amount of people in a sample as possible. Sure they could've made it bigger all around for people with large hands and their cramping problem, but they'd be satisfying 1% of their user base whilst making it too big for the other 99%. Likely they've landed up with something that was preferable to a decent majority (like 80%) even if 20% preferred other designs.
You cannot design something like a controller around a minority, the fact you think you should shows that contrary to your early comments about HCI it's most definitely you that absolutely does not have the slightest clue about the combined topics of HCI and the reality of providing a manufacturable and marketable solution.
Bless, you've missed the entire argument about effective spying vs. blanket surveillance of targets it's illegal (under the US' own laws) to surveil. I'll give you a hint, since the US ratified the UDHR into law it's just as illegal for the US to spy on foreign civilians that have no threat dimension to the US (i.e. are not terrorists, criminals, or foreign spies) as it is to spy on your own people.
Yes of course all countries spy, everyone knows that, you're stating the obvious and repeating something that's already been said. What most countries do though when spying is focus on threats, not snoop illegaly through the communications of foreign civilians that have no threat dimension.
Which is why when you support illegal spying of foreign innocents, you're supporting the exact same illegality that you're bitching about with non-foreigners.
But I get it, you're one of those crackpot American exceptionalists, you believe you're the master race and everyone else is irrelevant and that only you matter, which would also explain why you're not very smart and missed the entire point above- they're spying on you because you support and defend their illegal spying- you can't say it's okay for them to spy illegally in some cases, but not in others, you don't get to pick and choose, the law is the law and if you want them to break it then don't be surprised and don't bitch and moan when they do exactly that to you.
But we're not talking about 1946 - 1999, that's irrelevant to what's happening now. It's like going back 300 years and saying, well, look at the growth of the UK with it's empire, obviously that means it's kicking ass in the world! It's meaningless.
"China's overwhelming advantage over India and much of the rest of the world is its 5000 years of centralization, plans that would have been non-starters in a decentralized government and economy, like One Child and the open development of the Great Firewall, are acceptable there. Brasil is a special case, drastically underpopulated and resource-rich, while India is the exact opposite. You're not even comparing apples and oranges, more like apples and Barkaloungers."
If you think you can make India a special case by arguing that there is something different about the country then you're severely misguided. We all operate in the same world economy and all countries have their differences. Whatever differences you want to argue for India you can't hide from the fact that it has failed to take advantage of the same growth in largely ex-3rd world nations that China and Brazil have seen. We have evidence of why it's failed too - India's great outsourcing of services plan was too much of a leap and it failed because it didn't have the talent required to support those sorts of high
"Stand back and take the long view, look forward a generation or two. Other cultures do it, which is why Japan, China and India have repeatedly risen from the ashes like the phoenix."
What you're effectively saying is "Yes, we've fucked up in the short term but maybe it'll all be okay in the end!" that's nonsense, it's pointless speculation. Maybe India will also collapse and split into 20 different nations, predicting the future is a mugs game. What matters is the heard and now and the much more predictable near future - it's still clear that whilst India's neighbours like China have massively prospered, India has failed.
Your whole argument is based around "but the past!" and "but the future!", it's a pathetic attempt to hide from the reality of the recent past, the current, and the near future and it shows a profound lack of will to accept reality and instead make up a pretend future in the hope it'll come true and somehow absolve your nonsense arguments about why it doesn't matter that it's failed in the present.
That, and frankly, the FOSS community needs to make a choice - if they want the year of Linux on the desktop to stop being a joke and start being a reality there has to be a move towards this sort of professionality that gives corporations the confidence they need to roll it out onto the desktop - they need to know it will be supported for x number of years, they need to know there will be frequent updates to keep it competitive and so on.
There are a non-negligible number of participants in the FOSS community that want both global domination for their software, but just want to continue to developing in a laissez faire attitude - avoiding the responsibilities of creating something genuinely competitive and reliable enough to become dominant such as decent planning, professional efforts on documentation, design and UX stuff whilst also complaining that it doesn't get the attention they want.
IMO there are two choices developers have when working on FOSS projects:
1) Do it for fun and don't give a shit who or how many people use it, don't care how they use it, when they use it, just develop it because you like developing and because it's a good opportunity to showcase your skills and keep them sharp.
2) Care about how people use it, how successful it is, how widespread it is, but accept that there is a cost to this - the cost being that you have to expend effort doing the non-fun parts of software development like offering support, quashing bugs in a pre-agreed timeframe, providing documentation and so on and so forth.
Those who want the success and want to crush proprietary software without wanting to put in the effort of doing the boring stuff that makes proprietary software so successful in so many cases are living in fantasy land. Personally I have respect for people whatever decision they make above, what I don't have respect for are those who want to achieve the political agenda of 2) but simultaneously demand the lack of responsibilities of 1) - that's not realistic.
"Are you running it full screen at your maximum screen resolution with the highest graphical settings "
Yes absolutely, I think the laptop resolution is only 1366 x 768, but given the lower specs it shouldn't result in such a disparity. The laptop does struggle a little with Diablo 3 unless you turn the settings down a bit but certainly have never had any problems with Minecraft (it's actually the laptop my girlfriend uses to play - the system I play on is a 2.83ghz quad core with 8gb of RAM from 2008 with just the graphics card updated to a 650ti a year or two back and that easily gets 60fps at max settings on Minecraft and close enough on Diablo 3 too for reference).
"I'm pretty certain it's the game, not the drivers. It's the same regardless if it's on Linux or Windows."
Would it not be a universal issue if it was the game? This is genuinely the first I've heard of glaring Minecraft performance issues and I know of many people who run it at 60fps or more on far lower spec systems than you're running. I was going to suggest that maybe there's a problem with your Java install, but if it's effecting Linux and Windows equally that that seems unlikely (but not impossible of course) too. There must be something that Minecraft or Java/JNI doesn't like about your specific hardware configuration, but I really couldn't guess what.
The problem is you're taking that evidence and extrapolating it to "Asia" is a powerhouse. In doing so you're effectively feeding off the success of countries that have done exceptionally well like China when the reality is that different countries in Asia have had very different experiences. China has grown rapidly but Japan has stagnated, India has disappointed whilst in South America, Brasil has completely outflanked it.
Whatever India's policies, one thing is clear - it's not done very well compared to China and Brasil so those policies most definitely have not paid off. Starting from a low point with over a billion people India should've done much better than it has- it's policies have been largely a failure- not as big a failure as they could be sure, India is still growing well, but it's nowhere near it's potential, not even close, and it still has massive problems where little progress has been made despite neighbours like China making far greater progress on those issues (access to education, poverty).
Okay, let's make one thing clear - I am not saying that Java programs are always faster than C++ programs or any such thing. I am saying, correctly, that there are technical reasons why there are circumstances in which Java can outperform C++. Over the course of a large complex program these benefits will almost always be outweighed by the disadvantages. I'll address your points one by one:
1. "1. Java is faster than C/C++?! Citation fucking needed. Any time Java meets or exceeds C/C++ for speed is probably because the library that the Java program is leveraging is an extremely optimized, pre-compiled, native binary... probably written in C/C++."
Incorrect. When Java is faster than C++ it's because it compiles with more context than a C++ application does when it is compiled. This allows for things like better virtual function inlining and subsequently things like better loop vectorisation. Again, this has to be taken in context, this does not mean that these optimisations that Java can make but C++ can not always make Java faster, that's absolutely false, but in practice it does mean that contrary to the common myth that Java performance is abysmal that performance has in the last decade rapidly approached (and again, in specific circumstances, surpassed) C++ performance.
2. "2. JIT compilation doesn't magically transform inherently slow semantics into super-fast-omg-native-speeds. Guess what? New'ing up a bunch of objects, destroying them, checking the bounds on every array, boxing and unboxing, pausing everything to run a garbage collect, using linked lists instead of arrays, and other similar abuses of memory and cache are fucking slow. Guess what Java does a lot of? You can pull the same stupidity in C or C++, but at least there's the option not to."
You are partly right here, and partly wrong. Some of the issues you cite are reasons why, in practice, large Java applications rarely perform as well as C++ counterparts, but you are also partly wrong - a number of the things you cite are either not issues, or are regularly optimised away by the compiler in practice. The garbage collector is indeed an issue that is the bane of obtaining deterministic performance with Java, but it's not a beast that is impossible to tame, which is why Java has had many successful applications to HPC tasks.
"3. "Well just write your Java program with memory stuff in mind." So... write it like C++ and STILL pay the penalty of the GC kicking in at random times and trashing your frame rate? No thanks. There's a reason engines like Unreal, Crytek, and id's are all written in C++: they write their own stuff to handle memory in an efficient fashion instead of a random stop-everything-while-I-clean-this-mess-up GC."
Sure, and there's a reason indies are almost entirely using JIT'd languages like Java and C# through tools and frameworks such as Unity and MonoGame - because when you're not going AAA then these types of frameworks perform perfectly well for gaming as proven by so many brilliant indie games in recent years. I absolutely agree that if you're making the latest and greatest cutting edge 3D engine that is going to blow away people with it's visuals that you'll still want to do it in C++, but let's be clear - this isn't most game development, far and away most game development in recent years is being done with managed languages - even on mobile there is a massive slant towards things like Unity. Even big studios like Blizzard are using it sometimes for games like Hearthstone.
"4. Why pay the penalty of waiting while the JIT converts stuff to optimized machine code? Why not START with optimized machine code?"
Because there is an absolutely massive development overhead in doing so.
There are a lot of folk stuck in the past, believing that C++ is still the god language, the be all and end all that should be used for everything, just as there is an even smaller subset of folk who see those C++ zealots even as heathens and believe everything ever should be written in C, and I'm sure it
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes to get your point across you have to temporarily sacrifice your principles short term for a massive improvement in gain long term.
An environmentalist burning 1 barrel of oil in fuel to do the necessary travelling to raise awareness of and put a stop to thousands of barrels of oil in spillage in a part of the Niger Delta isn't ironic, it's a net gain in their cause to the tune of thousands of barrels of oil no longer being spilt and the rational thing to do.
I'd like to think it's just that you're not grown up enough to understand that sometimes short term pain is worth the long term gain or something, but let's be honest, when people like you make such facetious arguments what you're really saying is "I disagree with the point these people are making so I'm going to suggest they should be silenced by insisting that they do something that wouldn't advance their cause in the slightest".
These points of determining merit and relative gain of an action are a necessary evil of furthering any cause, whether you're a staunchly right wing NRA member that accepts that the worst criminals should be banned from having guns to protect the principle of well meaning people to continue to be able to have them to defend themselves, or whether you're a left leaning flower loving hippy that blows a barrel of oil to go and buy an electric car and some solar panels or a wind turbine that means you'll never have to use any more oil in your vehicle ever again - whatever portion of the spectrum you sit on, compromising your underlying morals for a greater long term gain is a fact of life and there's nothing ironic about it.
I doubt there's a person on this earth that's ever achieved their political goals without at some point having to sacrifice their principles to at least some degree.
Thousands of people isn't exactly a worthwhile population though is it? We're not talking about a few thousand people, we're talking about finding room for another 4 or 5 billion.
"That still makes it a dumb comment since your example was of colony-based insects who are notoriously colony-focused. They are far more racist than humans, viciously competing with even with their close kin in other colonies."
Oh dear, you realised you made a stupid comment and are one of those folks that would rather talk nonsense than back down? starting to declare species with colonies as racist? what kind of crack are you smoking? it must royally mess you up as it's apparently obliterated your ability to partake in a sensible adult conversation.
The fact that you've extended to such absurdities tells me one thing - you realise you had no idea what you were on about, felt the need to vomit out your opinion anyway, and have now resorted not only to reframing the discussion but to also talking complete and utter nonsense. The only sane conclusion therefore is that you know full well my points were valid, and that you were stupid to try and argue against them with arguments that are completely and utterly stupid and nonsensical.
So I shall walk away knowing that you had nothing worthwhile to challenge my points with, the absurdity you've descended to is perfectly ample evidence of that.
Well the 16 and 17 grouping voted 72% for yes, but the 18 - 24 bracket voted by a majority for no so they were in fact just a bunch of yes bots- when the reality of personal finances, seeking full time work, having a family etc. really comes into play at age 18+ the result massively swung back towards no.
The problem with letting them vote is that by and large pretty much none of them have experience of mortgages and so forth so don't understand the impact increases to cost of borrowing and so forth could have- they may understand the outline issues but they haven't much been involved in any of the things that they impact- mortgages, cost of living, finding work and so forth.
Aside from the 16 - 17 group, the other place the bulk of yes votes came from according to the demographics released is from the lower educated working class folks (and I mean lower educated statistically, not as a jab- lower levels of schooling completion) FWIW. Those in jobs requiring higher levels of education were against independence.
The reason it was rigging the game is because it was unprecedented and whilst they could vote in the referendum Salmond had no will to let them vote in the general election- this is because he knows full well that it's easy to make 16/17 year olds succumb to nationalism, which isn't a problem for a referendum where he's pro-nationalism but more of an issue at a general election when they could be swung to the farther right parties and their more ugly breed of nationalism.
But he was allowed the vote on his terms in other ways too which shone through in the campaign. He chose the question which forced his opposition to sell a negative proposition the "no" vote which is always much harder than selling a positive proposition- this was obvious in the campaign where he was consistently accusing no of being negative and bullying even though his own campaign was being negative with fear mongering about the Tories etc. and similarly yes campaigners were attacking no campaigners- there was easily as much negativity from his side but it was easier to sell that it was a no thing because they were on the negative side.
He also chose the date, towards the end of a British political term when serving politicians are least popular- again this was used in his favour during campaigning because he consistently harped on about the negative policies the current government had made that were really little to do with the referendum or just made up- he talked of NHS cuts for example but the Scottish parliament already controls the Scottish NHS so it was just fear mongering.
Finally, he also managed to stop the 1 million Scottish people living in the rest of the UK, outside Scotland - i.e. 20% of the Scottish vote from voting in the referendum at all. That's very unusual as ex-pats can still normally cast a vote in their home elections, countries like France even have a minister specifically for ex-pats.
So the whole thing was done massively in Salmond's favour, yet he still lost, and contrary to the comments above it wasn't the old people that swung it- as I say even the 18 - 24 range favoured no by a majority. Were this referendum run under "normal" rules - i.e. no 16/17 year old vote, all Scots allowed to vote on the future of their own national identity, a more fair question like "How should Scotland be governed? a) as an independent nation, b) as part of the United Kingdom", and run at a time which was more neutral then it seems realistic that the actual tally would've been closer to no 70%, yes 30%, which, for what it's worth, is roughly the background level of support that was registered over the last decade before the prospect of a referendum was involved.
Or in other words, they only even achieved 45% because they were allowed to rig large important portions of the vote in their favour, without that the SNP in general would probably have been obliterated as a political movement by the landslide preference for no that would have ensued.
FWIW though I believe they were allow
GDP is of relevance to everyone, the fact you don't understand it does not change anything. GDP is a measure of the size of the economy, and if the economy is growing then that means there is more money in it. You're correct that that does not mean that as soon as the economy grows people will see instant benefit from it, levels of inflation play in too and companies will not start handing out pay rises left and right the second the economy shows signs of growth, so yes you can see GDP go up, but no people wont instantly see benefit.
I don't know why you say Ireland has a high GDP, no it doesn't, it has a smaller GDP than countries like Iraq, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, maybe you meant GDP per capita? If you want to know why Ireland's GDP per capita is high but the people aren't seeing the benefit of it then it's simple- Ireland is a tax haven and like all tax havens they have a high GDP per capita, there's a reason Apple has many tens of billions sat in banks there - it's a low tax regime, but that money sat in banks isn't in the real economy, it doesn't feed down to employees because it's being held in banks simply for the purpose of being kept off shore. This is the price of running your country as a tax haven, you get a lot of income, but it wont be productive money for the economy - it wont be used to pay higher wages or any such thing. The UK is not a tax haven so is not in even a remotely similar situation.
What we have in the UK is healthy growth because it's sustained, and the fact it's sustained means companies can start increasing wages, and guess what? contrary to your parroting of now obsolete memes that's exactly what's happening. Throughout last year wage rises started to track with inflation, and through this year they've finally started outpacing inflation.
Yes there have been big issues with zero hours contracts and self-employment over the last few years, and this has been key in Carney not increasing the bank of England's base rate, but as bank of England minutes have shown over this last year it's now clear that even that trend is in decline- those zero hours contracts, and that self employment is now being replaced by real sustained employment. It's for this reason that a rate rise now looks likely next year, instead of in 2016/2017 as originally planned. I suggest you catch up on this years monthly BoE meeting minutes if you want to get an updated view of the situation of the healthiness of employment in the UK rather than the outdated view you currently hold.
The things you cite were true a year ago or just over, but in the last year it's become clear that this is real growth and as a result even salaries are increasing (they're certainly not decreasing as you claim- go check the ONS stats on the issue, or see here for example: http://www.theguardian.com/bus... - this is from April just as above inflation wage growth started, the pace has improved even more since then).
So I hate to say it but your whole argument is wrong, it's based on a lack of understanding of economics on a national level, it's based on a naive belief that improvement should be instant, and it's based on a simple lack of knowledge about what the underlying trends actually are in our economy.
Our GDP is growing, our wage rises are outpacing inflation, zero hours contracts are no longer growing, debts are not soaring, bailiffs are not doing record business. That's what I consider healthy growth- you're right, your theorised claims would not be healthy growth but they're not what's actually happening in the country right now, they stopped being true at least a year ago, your information is now completely out of date and incorrect.
Sources:
- Wage increases: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/...
- Reposessions:
"But that's not the case. There's nothing magical about living in Antarctica that would cause millions of people to lose their homes elsewhere."
Of course there is, human activity generates heat, and heat melts ice. You can't melt ice in Antarctica and have it magically not increase sea levels, where do you think it goes? or do you think the ice in Antarctica is magical and immune to melt from heat? or that we can create a magical device that just vanishes every single bit of heat humans might generate? When that sea level rise happens there are many people living in coastal areas whose current homes would become flooded. You then have to find somewhere else for them to go.
"No, those species are quite notorious for exhibiting behavior that strongly favors their own species at the expense of pretty much everything else aside from a few symbiotes."
Ah, but now you're changing the parameters of the discussion to suit your argument- I wasn't talking about selfishness that benefits the species as a whole, I was clearly talking about selfishness of the individual making the point that individual humans will look after themselves over the rest of their species - this is why we even have things like racism in the first place.
Yeah, and aliens could land too, and there will be nuclear war, and the world will end also!
Oh wait, you were being serious? You used the words "the way things are going" but that's not actually the way things are going. Based on current trajectories the UK is showing the healthiest growth of just about all rich Western economies and it's doing so whilst maintaining a reduction in deficit too.
Further, a number of studies suggest it's likely to see itself increase in global rankings overtaking France, and maybe even Germany in the next 20 years:
http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...
So yeah, you may be right, maybe something drastic will happen and things will go into reverse again, but that's not what the current figures suggest so any such possibility is merely unfounded speculation.
Yeah, sure, Scotland could've chosen not to be part of that and that would've been their decision, but I think most Scots saw through the nationalist pessimism towards the UK and recognised that for all our faults, maybe things aren't so bad - we're growing faster than anyone else in the G7 and seeing drastic declines in unemployment to boot - find me a country without political issues, but as far as ours go they're pretty small fry compared to some of the issues some countries are having, we've been growing well for well over a year now and some of our neighbours are still slipping in and out of recession - right now and for the foreseeable future the UK is still a pretty good place to be.
Faster political change would be nice, many people think it's not happening at all, but it is. In recent years we've seen things like the exposure of the expenses scandal, we've seen the closeness of phone hacking and the political classes, we've seen an alternative voting system referendum that was lost, exposure of sexual abuse in parliament, we've seen a coalition for the first time in 60 years- now many people will view all these things are negatives, things that ended badly, didn't turn out well, but they're not, they're all part of a bigger picture- the tide is turning against entrenched Westminster, in the last 50 years most of those things listed above would've been unthinkable, the fact they're happening is evidence that the vested minorities that've had so much power for so long in Westminster are losing their grip. I'm normally a cynical, pessimistic person myself, but since I started to take a step back on this issue and piece it all together, rather than look at individual events in isolation, as well as looking at the wider world in general (i.e. the arab spring) it seems pretty clear that politicians are losing power to the people as part of a long slow, probably multi-decade process - it's slow but it's happening, and I'm optimistic that Westminster cannot and will not be able to carry on with business as usual for much longer- they're already faltering and I fully suspect that this independence referendum is another nail in the coffin for the old way of doing things.
God only knows I've hated my country long enough and thought about leaving enough times (thankfully I can easily obtain dual citizenship through my partner, or just make use of our EU membership to fuck off elsewhere in the EU) but right now I think the signs are good, I think change is happening, it's painfully slow but I'm not convinced this is something that you can fix overnight, I think it takes almost a generational change in politicians (which might explain why there has been some progress already- I believe last election that far more than half the MPs that were elected were completely new) but it's happening, and we're getting there.
"As a Scot living through the referendum, it has been a sea of optimism and YES flags and events. Many people, including myself woke up this morning very disappointed but also wondering how did this happen:"
I can explain it to you, but like most yes voters you probably wouldn't get it, but here, I'll try anyway.
Those of us sat outside of Scotland, not caught up in the sea of supporters here and there and who bothered to look at the polls - not just the headlines, and that paid attention to events not just in a single locale but across the country, especially in the last few weeks saw something slipping through. We saw the ugly side of nationalism finally shine through, and we saw the impact that was having.
You see dear rapiddescent, all those yes flags, all those events, coupled with the things you'd probably rather not hear about or deny ever happened such as militant yes voters physically attacking no campaigners and even splitting up families and neighbourhoods, telling people they weren't true scotsmen if they voted no. All those things - they weren't a sign you were winning, you'd overwhelmed the opposition sure, all anyone could hear was yes because they'd either silence or out-shouted no at every turn, no, they were simply a sign that you weren't letting people with opposing opinions have their say.
So whilst you were busy silencing and out-shouting the opposition you missed something important- the importance of actually winning the arguments.
Along comes polling day, and guess what? all those people you'd silenced, shouted over, and prevented from expressing their opinion as vocally as you did got to have their say in the ballot box, a place you couldn't silence them, couldn't harass them, and guess what? that's where your weakness of focussing on a a blitzkrieg of yes spam rather than actually putting forward good ideas and rational arguments let you down.
That dear sir, is why the streets were full of yes campaigners, why all you could see and hear was them in the streets, on social media, and in classic media, but why when it came to, you still lost. You militantly silenced the majority, but the silent majority still got to have their say in the end.
The media wasn't biased in it's reporting, most media outlets didn't declare a preference, and those that did largely only did so in the last week or so (it was actually the pro-independence media that declared and actively backed first). You may wish to tell yourself that you've been cheated out of something, that you've been hard done by, that the media was against you, that vested corporate interests stopped it, but none of that is true. You lost simply because a majority were smart enough to see that your arguments didn't stack up, and were put off by your vile nationalist tendencies that kept slipping out from under your mask (like say, when Jim Sillars stood alongside Alex Salmond said post-independence they'd nationalise foreign companies in a revenge act for not supporting independence: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.u...).
I suspect the biggest problem would be the cost and pollution of transporting it relative to other fertilisers that we can transport in a much more efficient manner, we can't really do what the Sahara does with it's mineral sands more efficiently than it already does it, though we can work more efficiently with other fertilisers. The Sahara though does a good job naturally, those global wind patterns do all the work for us with zero pollution.
Given that it's probably worth taking a step back and realising that actually most of the farming that's done today already works on your plan albeit with, as I say, different fertilisers. Much of the world's crops grown today are only feasible to grow precisely because we already do use artificial fertilisers in agriculture across the globe so your plant is already being done in a roundabout way, it's just more efficient for us to do it in our own way outside of the Sahara and more efficient for the Sahara to do what it does by itself.
"No, it doesn't. Just because there is a disadvantage to a choice, doesn't mean that it is "almost" zero sum. You still have to consider the advantages."
Well if you manage to move a few million people to Antarctica and the resultant increase in sea level means a few million people have to leave coastal areas then yes, it is. I did clearly say (and suggested potential examples) there are indeed some areas you could probably get away with spreading the population to with much more minimal disadvantage.
"What species would not be a selfish species in your sense?"
Many colony based species are, such as ants and bees work for the interests of the colony rather than for the individual, though I'm not really sure what the relevance of the question is- the fact that other species are selfish doesn't change the fact that humans are also.
"And this overpopulation problem isn't being caused by the rich. It's being caused by the teeming masses of non-rich."
You're mixing cause and effect, increased birth rates are a symptom of poverty where the per-child survival rate is low, overpopulation is simply a symptom of a bigger problem, not the underlying problem itself. If you take those poor people that you deem responsible for overpopulation and place them in a place where there are crops and water aplenty like the UK then I assure you they will start seeing higher survival rates and lower death rates - the problem is the people who already inhabit these areas and have already prospered as a result keep it for themselves, but you know what? I'm not even judging that - it is natural instinct to look after your own precisely because as I say we are a particularly selfish species, but it absolutely is simply a statement of fact about what does and would happen. The wealthy in the world would still inhabit the most beneficial places, and the poor would still be forced to the places where there is no scope to prosper and would still continue to overproduce children as a survival mechanism as a result.
I don't think it's worth arguing whether that's good, bad, or whose fault it is, or isn't, who is good, or bad, who is innocent or not - none of that really matters because it's just a description of the natural state of the human race and I'm not sure whether we could ever really do much to change that or not, but either way it also doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least recognise it for what it is.
That assumes that all those environments are pointless wastes of space, unfortunately that premise isn't true- those areas of land serve important purpose for example the sands of the Sahara blow across the Atlantic and fertilise the likes of the Amazon rainforest.
A lot of people say "Why don't we geo-engineer the Sahara to make it tropical forest again!" but it becomes almost a zero-sum game, as you grow forests in Africa you decrease the fertilisation of the Amazon and so growth is stunted there in turn.
We can only move into these territories (or even keep expanding in existing ones) if we can find a way to do so without impacting the underlying ecosystem, otherwise we find ourselves with a whole lot of people and not enough resources and you know what that generally means? war - winning side gets the resources.
So it's not just about making an area habitable, or comfortable, it's about doing so in a manner that doesn't have a knock on effect elsewhere - by regrowing Africa into a tropical jungle paradise you'd be slowly pushing ever more of South America into a poor inhospitable desert. Similarly if you start inhabiting Siberia and Antarctica with more human activity resulting in greater melting of these regions you'll simply be flooding coastal regions elsewhere and making them uninhabitable.
Long story short, you cannot make massive changes to large areas of land without there being an impact elsewhere. You can see this on many scales, whether it's the farmers that cleared the forests on the hills of South West England to give themselves more land for crops leading to widespread devastating flooding due to lack of trees to slow water down in the hills, or whether it's something much larger scale as with the Africa/Amazon connection above. For every sizeable environmental change we make there is an impact elsewhere.
For what it's worth, I suspect the place we could most likely inhabit on land with the least impact elsewhere is in parts of the sea but even this would require a lot of care so as to restrict ocean pollution from waste which may damage fish stocks and decrease food. Failing that it's to space we go I guess.
Which isn't to say that there aren't some areas of the planet we can inhabit with little impact elsewhere meaning there is some scope for population growth, but those areas are becoming ever less common and the effects of inhabiting them elsewhere are often subtle making it difficult to know when you have and haven't found a reasonable spot to settle more people. Thus fundamentally it's not simply a case of saying "Hey look that place isn't inhabited, let's inhabit it!" because in doing so you're causing destruction of environments elsewhere where people were inhabiting and now you have to find room for them too.
Of course, I suspect none of it will matter- the rich will live where they desire to live and any knock on impact on anyone else? well they can go fuck themselves, because humans are an inherently selfish species.
Just about everything how will he get currency union? it takes two to agree and one side has ruled it out meaning it's a no go. How will he get EU membership? Spain's PM has said he'll veto.
The only thing Salmond will get are about 8.9% of the UK's assets,
I know you think the Bank of England is an asset, but it's not, well, the building is, and the walls are, but then so is Hollyrood as much an English asset in that respect, but no, everything else that "is" the BOE is employees, and political policy- you can't go independent and say you want sway over our public sector employees and our political policy as a sovereign nation - upon independence the policy splits and British currency is British policy, Scotland loses access to that on independence - if you want to retain a say in British policy it's simple, vote no, because what you're asking for is not independence.
Debt isn't the BOE, debt is a negative asset just like a bunch of fighter jets are a positive asset, on independence you only get to take your population share of each of all these assets, including the negative ones like debt. Now, you could leave the debt with the UK but then you leave equivalent value assets with the UK like fighter jets and leave yourself with no defence, no hospital equipment and so on, but that's upto Salmond and his Scots to decide whether they'd rather have assets and debt, or no assets and no debt, what he doesn't get is fantasy world assets and no debt because debt is just another asset (again, albeit a negative one). Other negative assets that are more tangible might be for example nuclear power plants that require decommissioning soon- assets come in both flavours and you don't get to pick and choose which you do and don't take unilaterally.
"Do you seriously think that England will erect a fence all along the border and place immigration checkpoints along it?"
Absolutely yes. That pro-UK rhetoric that's rife in the UK and that Salmond has been using to fear monger for independence will only grow stronger without Scotland and do you really think for one moment that any UK political party will be able to allow an open border with a country that has admitted it will have an extremely lax attitude to immigration because mass immigration is one of Salmond's plans (and one the easiest method of) to grow the wealth of Scotland?
I'm fairly pro-immigration but even I'd say we need a border there because whilst I'm fairly pro-immigration I still believe if nothing else we have to know who is and isn't coming in and out so we at least have some statistics on that - we can't do that with an open border with Scotland.
"Do you really think that the Spanish will lock themselves out of Scottish fishing waters by blocking their EU membership?"
Yes, because Catalonia brings far more money into Spain than Scotland's fishermen do.
"And then the rest of the UK will just watch as Russian soldiers arrive on their doorstep?"
No he was saying that's what would happen if the rest of the UK opted not to care what happened to Scotland, but the fact Scotland is basically sponging off the UK for security is rather galling given that Salmond's entire argument has been "We should become independent because we can go it alone and do everything better" - not defence it would seem at least.
Cambridge isn't a Scottish university, it's English.
"I don't see why Scotland would be rejected, especially since the UK has been a pain in the arse ever since it joined the EU. As a matter of fact, many countries in the EU would welcome Scotland just to piss off the Brits."
Yeah, one small problem with your nonsense fantasy- the Brits have a veto. So if any European nation decided to piss the Brits off the Brits can just screw their plans with a simple veto.
It only takes one country to say no, and Scotland's entry is automatically denied.
"The Euro is not the EU, and vice-versa."
It doesn't matter, that's not even what he said. The euro is controlled by the EU and that's all that matters, if the EU doesn't want Scotland in it then it wont get in it, the fact the two aren't completely aligned doesn't change that.
"You are not making any sense - again, the currency you use is totally independent from EU membership itself."
No it's not, all new member nations are put on a roadmap to joining the euro, you cannot join the EU anymore without also engaging in a plan to join the euro. This is even true for existing EU nations such as Sweden- they're obligated to join the euro at some point. The UK is the only exception because it's big enough to have been able to negotiate what Sweden couldn't - a euro optout. If a country with an economy over two times the size of an independent Scotland can't argue for an opt out then how the hell would Scotland do so do you think?
I don't think you have the slightest clue what the international rules are. If Scotland wants to argue for even anything in it's favour then independence has to be something that Westminster agrees to. If Westminster blocks independence then Scotland can go it alone and take it's case to the UN and obtain it that way, but international courts have consistently ruled that separation occurs with assets split based on population.
There is literally no way Salmond can achieve his demands- the UK is against them and will not agree to them and international courts will force him to accept a share of debt or default. This is not an argument he can win even at the ICJ or at a WTO tribunal, which ironically might not even be an avenue, because Scotland would have to get into the WTO in the first place.
The BoE belongs to Scotland in the same way that Hollyrood belongs to Westminster - all these things were purchased in sterling. Sure Salmond can argue that if they don't get the benefits of the BoE that they wont take the debt, but then the UK can argue that if they don't take the debt then they need to pay rent on the Scottish parliament buildings and similarly Scotland wont get to keep the eurofighters or frigates or NHS equipment it wants either because those are all similarly sterling denominated assets- you cannot take sterling denominated assets and not take sterling denominated debt, that will never be agreed to be anyone, whether the UK government, the people of the UK, or international courts.
Salmond's only hand is demand for faster removal of trident, but in turn the UK can veto Scottish EU and NATO entry so if Salmond plays that only hand then he is absolutely screwed by the response.
Post-separation the UK will still be the 6th biggest economy, yet Scotland will fall to 42nd. Given that economic way ties strongly to political weight (because no one wants to piss off the countries that are economically strong enough to also make them rich) do you still seriously believe Salmond has a strong negotiating hand? are you honestly that naive?
If Shetland and/or Orkney go their own way and become independent from Scotland or stick with the rest of the UK taking the oil with them then Scotland is even more screwed, it'll literally have nothing.
"Thatcher destroyed manufacturing and industry in the whole of the UK."
Christ, not this broken old meme. Thatcher didn't even come close to destroying manufacturing in the UK, the UK is still the 9th largest manufacturer in the world in spite of the trend towards manufacturing in poorer nations where labour is cheap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
That's right, the GDP value of UK manufacturing is about 4 times that of commonly cited manufacturing powerhouses like Taiwan.
So can this meme die already? It's not true, it's not even close to true, and it's never been true. The only manufacturing Thatcher killed was those industries that were unprofitable and being subsidised by the tax payer and hence were a drain on everyone's pocket.
There are plenty of better reasons to hate Thatcher like her overuse of military in civilian situations, her anti-European stance and her overly conservative views on almost everything else, but economic policy? she simply cannot be faulted there, she modernised our economy and made us as prosperous as we are.
The same is true of the Tories now, they've done fuckloads wrong such as being way too close to Murdoch and having helped derail press regulation but you'd have to be a special kind of idiot to argue their economic policy has failed- we're the fastest growing G7 nation, the nation most firmly into it's recovery and with the best trajectory on reduction of unemployment in the West.
This debate on Scotland, and too many others are being had on myths and legends like you just made and it's tiresome because as in this case the statistics paint the exact opposite of what you're claiming. The UK is still a global manufacturing powerhouse- you cannot claim a country in the top ten out of 203 to be anything else.
Objectively the UK is doing incredibly well relative to just about every other nation in a similar position right now, that's not something to bitch and moan about and yet you and the Scots are doing exactly that- frankly nothing will ever please you because you're unpleasable, even with our excellent growth and great reductions in unemployment it's still not good enough for you.
"This would leave Scotland with a new currency but with tremendous assets and no liabilities."
This is absolute stark raving nonsense. Debt is the opposite of assets, both things are valued in sterling currently. If you opt to leave the UK with no debt, you opt to leave with no assets that were paid for with that debt. This means that yes Scotland absolutely can vote to leave with no sterling debt, but it also leaves with no sterling assets - that means no frigates, no eurofighters, no hospital equipment, no public sector IT equipment as they're all assets valued in sterling, just as the debt is valued in sterling. You can't take one and not the other and I'm astounded so many of you Scots believe Alex's nonsense codswallop that's so easily disproven.
That blue book is like a kind of nationalist Bible - and like the Bible it's a book of fairy tales for gullible folk to believe and made follow you with.
Microsoft aren't trying to produce a magic controller that is perfect for everyone, because given the manufacturing constraints of producing a million different shaped controllers that'd be impossible.
What they're doing is targetting something that pleases the largest amount of people in a representative sample, this is real design testing and it's a shame you don't understand that.
This is why when you buy t-shirts or similar you have a choice between small, medium, large, and maybe extra large and xxl, but what you don't get is a thousand different shapes with a few millimetres here or there.
You apparently don't understand the reality of producing a product and the use of samples to provide a solution that's pleasing to the largest amount of people in a sample as possible. Sure they could've made it bigger all around for people with large hands and their cramping problem, but they'd be satisfying 1% of their user base whilst making it too big for the other 99%. Likely they've landed up with something that was preferable to a decent majority (like 80%) even if 20% preferred other designs.
You cannot design something like a controller around a minority, the fact you think you should shows that contrary to your early comments about HCI it's most definitely you that absolutely does not have the slightest clue about the combined topics of HCI and the reality of providing a manufacturable and marketable solution.
Bless, you've missed the entire argument about effective spying vs. blanket surveillance of targets it's illegal (under the US' own laws) to surveil. I'll give you a hint, since the US ratified the UDHR into law it's just as illegal for the US to spy on foreign civilians that have no threat dimension to the US (i.e. are not terrorists, criminals, or foreign spies) as it is to spy on your own people.
Yes of course all countries spy, everyone knows that, you're stating the obvious and repeating something that's already been said. What most countries do though when spying is focus on threats, not snoop illegaly through the communications of foreign civilians that have no threat dimension.
Which is why when you support illegal spying of foreign innocents, you're supporting the exact same illegality that you're bitching about with non-foreigners.
But I get it, you're one of those crackpot American exceptionalists, you believe you're the master race and everyone else is irrelevant and that only you matter, which would also explain why you're not very smart and missed the entire point above- they're spying on you because you support and defend their illegal spying- you can't say it's okay for them to spy illegally in some cases, but not in others, you don't get to pick and choose, the law is the law and if you want them to break it then don't be surprised and don't bitch and moan when they do exactly that to you.
But we're not talking about 1946 - 1999, that's irrelevant to what's happening now. It's like going back 300 years and saying, well, look at the growth of the UK with it's empire, obviously that means it's kicking ass in the world! It's meaningless.
"China's overwhelming advantage over India and much of the rest of the world is its 5000 years of centralization, plans that would have been non-starters in a decentralized government and economy, like One Child and the open development of the Great Firewall, are acceptable there. Brasil is a special case, drastically underpopulated and resource-rich, while India is the exact opposite. You're not even comparing apples and oranges, more like apples and Barkaloungers."
If you think you can make India a special case by arguing that there is something different about the country then you're severely misguided. We all operate in the same world economy and all countries have their differences. Whatever differences you want to argue for India you can't hide from the fact that it has failed to take advantage of the same growth in largely ex-3rd world nations that China and Brazil have seen. We have evidence of why it's failed too - India's great outsourcing of services plan was too much of a leap and it failed because it didn't have the talent required to support those sorts of high
"Stand back and take the long view, look forward a generation or two. Other cultures do it, which is why Japan, China and India have repeatedly risen from the ashes like the phoenix."
What you're effectively saying is "Yes, we've fucked up in the short term but maybe it'll all be okay in the end!" that's nonsense, it's pointless speculation. Maybe India will also collapse and split into 20 different nations, predicting the future is a mugs game. What matters is the heard and now and the much more predictable near future - it's still clear that whilst India's neighbours like China have massively prospered, India has failed.
Your whole argument is based around "but the past!" and "but the future!", it's a pathetic attempt to hide from the reality of the recent past, the current, and the near future and it shows a profound lack of will to accept reality and instead make up a pretend future in the hope it'll come true and somehow absolve your nonsense arguments about why it doesn't matter that it's failed in the present.
That, and frankly, the FOSS community needs to make a choice - if they want the year of Linux on the desktop to stop being a joke and start being a reality there has to be a move towards this sort of professionality that gives corporations the confidence they need to roll it out onto the desktop - they need to know it will be supported for x number of years, they need to know there will be frequent updates to keep it competitive and so on.
There are a non-negligible number of participants in the FOSS community that want both global domination for their software, but just want to continue to developing in a laissez faire attitude - avoiding the responsibilities of creating something genuinely competitive and reliable enough to become dominant such as decent planning, professional efforts on documentation, design and UX stuff whilst also complaining that it doesn't get the attention they want.
IMO there are two choices developers have when working on FOSS projects:
1) Do it for fun and don't give a shit who or how many people use it, don't care how they use it, when they use it, just develop it because you like developing and because it's a good opportunity to showcase your skills and keep them sharp.
2) Care about how people use it, how successful it is, how widespread it is, but accept that there is a cost to this - the cost being that you have to expend effort doing the non-fun parts of software development like offering support, quashing bugs in a pre-agreed timeframe, providing documentation and so on and so forth.
Those who want the success and want to crush proprietary software without wanting to put in the effort of doing the boring stuff that makes proprietary software so successful in so many cases are living in fantasy land. Personally I have respect for people whatever decision they make above, what I don't have respect for are those who want to achieve the political agenda of 2) but simultaneously demand the lack of responsibilities of 1) - that's not realistic.
"Are you running it full screen at your maximum screen resolution with the highest graphical settings "
Yes absolutely, I think the laptop resolution is only 1366 x 768, but given the lower specs it shouldn't result in such a disparity. The laptop does struggle a little with Diablo 3 unless you turn the settings down a bit but certainly have never had any problems with Minecraft (it's actually the laptop my girlfriend uses to play - the system I play on is a 2.83ghz quad core with 8gb of RAM from 2008 with just the graphics card updated to a 650ti a year or two back and that easily gets 60fps at max settings on Minecraft and close enough on Diablo 3 too for reference).
"I'm pretty certain it's the game, not the drivers. It's the same regardless if it's on Linux or Windows."
Would it not be a universal issue if it was the game? This is genuinely the first I've heard of glaring Minecraft performance issues and I know of many people who run it at 60fps or more on far lower spec systems than you're running. I was going to suggest that maybe there's a problem with your Java install, but if it's effecting Linux and Windows equally that that seems unlikely (but not impossible of course) too. There must be something that Minecraft or Java/JNI doesn't like about your specific hardware configuration, but I really couldn't guess what.
The problem is you're taking that evidence and extrapolating it to "Asia" is a powerhouse. In doing so you're effectively feeding off the success of countries that have done exceptionally well like China when the reality is that different countries in Asia have had very different experiences. China has grown rapidly but Japan has stagnated, India has disappointed whilst in South America, Brasil has completely outflanked it.
Whatever India's policies, one thing is clear - it's not done very well compared to China and Brasil so those policies most definitely have not paid off. Starting from a low point with over a billion people India should've done much better than it has- it's policies have been largely a failure- not as big a failure as they could be sure, India is still growing well, but it's nowhere near it's potential, not even close, and it still has massive problems where little progress has been made despite neighbours like China making far greater progress on those issues (access to education, poverty).
Here, I explained it to this guy, maybe you'll learn something:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Okay, let's make one thing clear - I am not saying that Java programs are always faster than C++ programs or any such thing. I am saying, correctly, that there are technical reasons why there are circumstances in which Java can outperform C++. Over the course of a large complex program these benefits will almost always be outweighed by the disadvantages. I'll address your points one by one:
1. "1. Java is faster than C/C++?! Citation fucking needed. Any time Java meets or exceeds C/C++ for speed is probably because the library that the Java program is leveraging is an extremely optimized, pre-compiled, native binary... probably written in C/C++."
Incorrect. When Java is faster than C++ it's because it compiles with more context than a C++ application does when it is compiled. This allows for things like better virtual function inlining and subsequently things like better loop vectorisation. Again, this has to be taken in context, this does not mean that these optimisations that Java can make but C++ can not always make Java faster, that's absolutely false, but in practice it does mean that contrary to the common myth that Java performance is abysmal that performance has in the last decade rapidly approached (and again, in specific circumstances, surpassed) C++ performance.
2. "2. JIT compilation doesn't magically transform inherently slow semantics into super-fast-omg-native-speeds. Guess what? New'ing up a bunch of objects, destroying them, checking the bounds on every array, boxing and unboxing, pausing everything to run a garbage collect, using linked lists instead of arrays, and other similar abuses of memory and cache are fucking slow. Guess what Java does a lot of? You can pull the same stupidity in C or C++, but at least there's the option not to."
You are partly right here, and partly wrong. Some of the issues you cite are reasons why, in practice, large Java applications rarely perform as well as C++ counterparts, but you are also partly wrong - a number of the things you cite are either not issues, or are regularly optimised away by the compiler in practice. The garbage collector is indeed an issue that is the bane of obtaining deterministic performance with Java, but it's not a beast that is impossible to tame, which is why Java has had many successful applications to HPC tasks.
"3. "Well just write your Java program with memory stuff in mind." So... write it like C++ and STILL pay the penalty of the GC kicking in at random times and trashing your frame rate? No thanks. There's a reason engines like Unreal, Crytek, and id's are all written in C++: they write their own stuff to handle memory in an efficient fashion instead of a random stop-everything-while-I-clean-this-mess-up GC."
Sure, and there's a reason indies are almost entirely using JIT'd languages like Java and C# through tools and frameworks such as Unity and MonoGame - because when you're not going AAA then these types of frameworks perform perfectly well for gaming as proven by so many brilliant indie games in recent years. I absolutely agree that if you're making the latest and greatest cutting edge 3D engine that is going to blow away people with it's visuals that you'll still want to do it in C++, but let's be clear - this isn't most game development, far and away most game development in recent years is being done with managed languages - even on mobile there is a massive slant towards things like Unity. Even big studios like Blizzard are using it sometimes for games like Hearthstone.
"4. Why pay the penalty of waiting while the JIT converts stuff to optimized machine code? Why not START with optimized machine code?"
Because there is an absolutely massive development overhead in doing so.
There are a lot of folk stuck in the past, believing that C++ is still the god language, the be all and end all that should be used for everything, just as there is an even smaller subset of folk who see those C++ zealots even as heathens and believe everything ever should be written in C, and I'm sure it