I worked in the schools library service for many years. Female dominated profession. Often I was one of the few men. All ticked along nicely in the places I worked in, quiet days, deadlines, whatever.
Could be a reflection of the industry you're in, the country/ culture you're in, who knows...
Cultural differences my friend. I'm told that in some parts of the world people think that driving an SUV is considered cool. In my country you'd be laughed at unless you have a good reason to do so, e.g. construction industry or park ranger.
I don't have any statistics to hand but the marketing here in Europe seems to focus on a>space and energy efficiency and b>'image'.... the marketing is aimed at young urban professionals and these seem to be the people who are mainly driving them, you see them round towns and cities rather than rural areas on the whole. My housemate noted he bought one at least in part because of its looks and image (rather than one of the many other small form cars we have available here in the UK).
"Why would someone spend that much on a car when they can get 4 door Toyota Corolla for around the same price with the same fuel efficiency?"
Because people think they look cool and hip and fun. People buy cars as an expression of their personal taste as much as anything else, projecting an image, etc, not just on rational aspects like price/fuel efficiency. If that was the case we'd be following Henry Ford's line about having any car we want as long as it's black, we'd all be driving identical vehicles. Just go into a car showroom or auto shop and see how much money gets spent on accessories which do nothing but change the look of the same model cars.
Smart cars are purchased as much as a fashion statement as anything else in Europe, just as much as any other car.
In the UK the road tax on them is much lower than most cars because they have a smaller engine (0.7 litre), and they are pretty handy for urban parking as well:-)
No, I'd say the biggest threat to America comes from it's looming economic crisis coming from transition from gas to alternative fuels. If gas hits $5 or $6 a gallon, inflation may be too high for low income people to buy food and gasoline. A similar threat is losing jobs to overseas.
Gasoline is currently 8 dollars a gallon in the UK (and similar round most of Europe). Probably was ten years at least since it was 5 dollars a gallon.
Me, I cycle 8 miles to work in the morning (and obviously about the same back in the evening unless there's a diversion for shopping or an evening out). Laptop goes in one cycle pannier and room for 2 carrier bags of shopping in the other. I suppose we've got more of a public transport infrastructure here as well?
Your expression "just out of the protective reach of civilization and into something a bit terrifying" might be a bit apt indeed..... speaking as a white 40 year old university researcher, a British guy whose lifetime criminal record is one parking ticket I guess I should have nothing to fear about your customs officers. Nevertheless your procedures and government rhetoric conspire to make the whole process slightly nerve wracking and cumbersome enough that I tend not to apply to attend conferences in the USA, and psychologically feel the idea of coming to visit my friend in Boston to be a much bigger deal than seeing my friends in Cambodia.
You guys have told the world you maintain the right to disappear anybody you want, keep them out of contact with anybody else as long as you want, and if you really want to turn the screws on them, you are happy to ghost them off to a third country where you'll torture them. This is a bit frightening. It does put me on edge that I am visiting a country that considers this activity legitimate and is in 'siege mentality'. You just never know if the authorities might just lash out and do something scary and irrational to you too. And as you note, there is the sense of entering a country which believes itself to be answerable to nobody but itself and can do what it wants when it wants and get away with it. Umm, easier just to give it a miss, go somewhere safer instead.
"One is a helluva lot more likely to be robbed or assaulted in London than one is even in the worst parts of DC or Detroit"
Stats on this please? Can I confirm, your statement is "the number of people robbed or assaulted in any part of London is higher than in any given part of Washington DC, or Detroit"?
Hmmm..... I take it you are not too familiar with the diversity that is London? I'd be surprised if the crime figures for Kew Gardens or Chelsea are the same as for 'the worst parts of DC'. I'd be interested to see a comparison of the worst parts of the UK vs the worst parts of the USA. I think they will probably be similar. Your hypothesis is that the level of gun ownership in DC and Detroit leads to a lower robbery and assault rate than in London?
I'd say for a decent piece of research we need to find a place where gun laws have changed and see what happens. Easier to make a stronger conclusion than picking different countries where different cultural issues may come into play. Take the shooting in Dublane in Scotland where a lunatic got into a primary school and killed some children. The UK reaction was that all pistols should be banned - even our Olympic pistol shooting team then had to train in another country. A very different reaction to the shootings in Columbine where we heard some US commentators responded that the solution was to arm all teachers. One poster has noted that gun crime levels are very different in Canada and the USA but ownership levels are similar. Suggests cultural factors may play a role to me.
Going back to London, in the turn of the 20th century, police would only come into East London in pairs carrying shotguns. Having lived in a so-called "dangerous" part of London for ten years (Hackney) I can only give you my own witness, that I have seen individual police walking around and without firearms. So something's changed in the last 100 years.
Regarding Mao's statement - I always find it ironic that right wing Americans hold dear Mao's sayings (though to be fair it shows an open mindedness) - and maybe it raises the question - do all countries with more limiting gun laws than the USA therefore count as dictatorships with an essentially powerless people in your eyes? How do you explain the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe which brought down the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s? The USSR could have sent the tanks in but decided not to - the unarmed people won against military might. Read up on "The Singing Revolution".
Places where you have to try really hard to get guns if you want them? Sadly there are mentally unwell/ emotionally distressed people all over the world but they really shouldn't be able to just walk into a shop and buy lethal weapons. That would reduce a certain percentage of crimes of passion ending up in multiple deaths. It's harder to go on a rampage like that when the most lethal thing your local Wal-Mart sells are chef's knives.
I know you guys are keen to keep hold of guns because the Founding Fathers of your country said it was your right to do so, but times change you know. They were quite happy with the idea of slave ownership, and didn't think women should vote. You've changed your minds on those issues. Really, we (the UK) are not going to come and try and invade any more. We're ok with you running your own country these days. Honest. You don't need a handy militia to stop Prince Charles coming over the horizon at the front of a cavalry brigade....
Jokes aside and my political bias up front, can you get right down to the core of it, why do you think gun ownership is such a big deal? is it the philosophical bed rock identifying characteristic of being an American citizen, or is it just practicality - there are so many million guns in your society that you just couldn't bring them all back in? (or perhaps a combination of the two?)
In the UK it's called 'red diesel' due to the dye they put in it. Basic deal is that all fuel is taxed, but red diesel is taxed at a much much lower rate. This is intended to help sectors the government feel need preferential treatment, such as for farm machinery.
Verrryyyyy approximately, red diesel is about 50p/ litre (about 4 US dollars / US gallon) and normal diesel is about just under one pound/litre (about 8 US dollars / US gallon)*. Unleaded petrol (gasoline) is about the same, yes, in the UK, fuel is about 8 US dollars to the US gallon.
so that's 100% price difference. I am guessing you folks in the USA have a similar system, is the price difference the same kind of scale? You can understand that inspectors get very upset if they find you're running red diesel in a road car.... serious fines for sure.
They are jumping on people running biofuels here as well, people have worked out you can run a diesel car with a high percentage of cooking oil, and despite car manufacturers saying this invalidates your warranty, your car will break down, your daughter will run away with somebody from the circus and your chickens will stop laying eggs, quite clearly a lot of people are doing just fine and word is spreading, tax inspectors are trying to work out what to do about it here.
*For the pedantic, one website I checked says diesel is 95.7p a litre and another site says one pound sterling is 1.9689 dollars, and one litre = 0.26 US gallons so we'll go for one pound/one pound=2 dollars/4 litres to the gallon/ in the maths, eh? but feel free to work out a precise figure, I think it's an ok generalisation...;-)
We're currently testing the Ricoh 500SE for geology students' field trips, wandering around sand quarries, mountain areas, with wireless networks to connect them back to base or over the internet to a field studies centre. Last year's project here. So would be of interest to us. Right now we're looking at ruggedised kit for tough environments but we're working towards coming up with a generic solution that could help schools and universities build their own off-the-shelf field trip kit. So a card that could be fitted into the school's own more standard digital cameras would be great. The last thing you want to be doing in 'the field' is popping open cameras and fiddling around with tiny cards, all sorts of comedy potential for the cards to get lost in the mud/sand to get into the camera etc. Wireless beaming the data back to a laptop in the school bus parked down the road or straight back to the field studies centre, a much nicer solution indeed.
umm, ease up on getting too hemp-fundamentalist there man. Useful form of paper for sure (and yup hemp's useful a whole lot of things as well as a nicer smoke than tobacco and it's mainly for socially constructed reasons we're not growing so much of it these days)... but there are lots of other issues as well if you want decent conservation of written texts.
(Professional conservationists jump in at this point, I am a professional librarian who's had the pleasure of working in archives occasionally, that's my experience).
How you construct the raw material for your substrate is an issue, lots of industrially produced papers in the 19th century had way too much acid so are now breaking down, earlier hand produced methods were more stable. But there are some fine industrially produced archival papers these days now folks have worked out better production methods. It's just that Joe Public doesn't want to spend that kind of money and goes for the cheapest paper they can get their hands on. People have been able to make books that last for a long time for many years and they still can, its just you have to pay for it. Would you pay 100,000 dollars for a new book? That's probably the equivalent value of some medieval books (or more) when they were produced, the price of a decent house. You pays your money and you gets what you paid for.
Also it might be worth remembering lot of the really fine papers which have survived until today were written on vellum, i.e. calf skin, so that might be your luxury writing base of choice, keep a herd of cows handy and kill as required...
Inks are also a big issue, it wasn't all fine and dandy in some Arthurian medieval world till the evil industrialists came along (though they were bastids for sure). Lot of older inks were based on chemical compositions which have etched their way into the paper and do degrade over time. A lot of those earlier inks were environmentally pretty nasty as well. It's just that these days we expect heads of state and few more people besides to be able to read and not just 1000 people or so per country being able to write, so there's a much higher volume of printing products being turned out:-)
No worries. I understand where you coming from now. It's just your original post suggested that there is no folk mythology in England, which is clearly not so. England is a country which has gone through successive waves of invasion and migration so there are few clear cut lines drawn under each successive migration or power change, you'll find cultures mixing and strands being followed through each wave, so folk stories and mythologies have mixed over the years. The population of England didn't wake up in 1067 and all start speaking Norman French and drawing from Norman culture. For many people it was just another set of bosses to pay taxes to, get your head down and dig another muddy field...:-)
Probably it would be fair to say there is comparatively little Anglo-Saxon mythology available to us because literacy was very limited in the Anglo Saxon period and folk stories would not have been a priority for transcription. A lot of the mythologies of the time were probably handed down orally apart from a very few examples like Beowulf. I imagine there were many more stories but these have only survived as they've mutated down the years. Folk culture has been seen as low status in many places so only recently have we had free access to mass recording methods and a sense of their importance.
cheers for the context. We had a similar sort of scene on am uch smaller scale for mad art films and stuff banned in Britain (like Clockwork Orange).
The historical geographical bit, that's ok, I was a teenager living in the UK at the time, I remember my geography lessons. We were pretty worried in Europe at the time, we had the Soviet army a few miles away not 3000 miles away and your president was going on air and cracking jokes about declaring war and the bombs starting to drop in 5 minutes when he though the mike was turned off... sure we were worried, we were between two of the mightiest forces in history and they both appeared to be run by lunatics.
I'd guess there weren't many US films in Spain not because of fear of Russians but because there was less of a demand for foreign language films (e.g. English), and the foreign language subtitling and dubbing business was less well established then. Can any Spanish folk comment? Certainly in the UK in the mid 80s the only place you'd get a foreign language film was an arthouse cinema, I was at university and thoroughly got my mind opened up in Newcastle's wonderful Tyneside Cinema.
There's vast tracts of English myths and legends and Tolkein clearly draws on them in his work, as well as drawing on mythologies from other areas as well.
"Once when in high school, when living in Europe, the only way we got to see some movies was camcorder rips of U.S. screens"
Ah yes, Europe, that mystic medieval land in the East, where people gather together to watch glove puppet shows of an evening in the public squares by the castles...
So what were these movies you couldn't see when you were here? you mean you have secret US only releases of the good movies and you just ship the crap over to us? Damn I knew there was a yankee conspiracy going on but I just couldn't place it...;-)
Sorry, Friday afternoon. I am sure you meant something different but the phrasing was nice and funny...:-)
I'm excited because it's so mundane, and actually disappointed because they are making a big deal out of it... I think we're making progress in spaceflight when it *isn't* a big deal to be launching spacecraft, and when the mission is just a construction job. Guys going up there not to undertake groundbreaking science but to bolt on some bits of steel. That's when I believe we're making progress and it might just succeed.
That's why I've always loved the Russian/ Soviet space programmes. In the USA, everything seems to be one-off, hand crafted. Soyuz capsules seem to get produced like tractors. Feels like the USA is in the early days of hand crafting cars. When we get to the Ford of US spacecraft, a production line just rolling them off, that's when we might have a chance of actually getting into space and expanding from this planet (philosophical/ecological issues aside). Right now I think the Russians are closest to that model.
just out of interest, which old days? 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s?
In my country it's the lunatic right wingers we had in power for 18 years who kept on going on about mythical old days of warm beer and cricket on Sunday afternoons on the village green.
The past is a different country. They do things differently there. Some things better but also some things a lot worse. I had a great childhood too but while I was messing around making camps in the woods the big cities had signs in lodging houses which said "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs". Things weren't all wonderful.
Except that British and English are not the same. Try going into a bar in Scotland or Wales and telling everybody in a loud voice how it's great to come and visit England....
I think everybody in the world respects the sacrifices made by people in the USA and their entry into the war in 1941 certainly changed the outcome. I think the American experience of WW2 was quite different to many other participating nations though and I'd agree this affected the post-war capacity of the USA compared to other places -my understanding is that there was little or no interference of the country's infrastructure and this enabled rapid development. Many European countries for example had their industrial centres heavily bombed and utility infastructures greatly damaged - whole cities destroyed in firestorms, road and rail networks, ports, water pumping stations, power generation plants and other places were reduced to rubble. Millions were made homeless and severe starvation was rife. Clearly it was easier to invent, market, and produce new products in the USA than many other countries in at least the decade following the war.
Many thanks to the Americans for the loans to get things back into shape- the Marshall Plan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_plan - these helped get post war countries back on their feet though loans still affected economies for sometime (apparently we in the UK paid our last WW2 loans to the Americans off about 2 years ago, something like in 2005).
The question contains its own answer. Most people - even most technically adept people - are not interested in installing "the movement" on their PCs. They want an operating system.
Well said, but I'd go further than this. I'd say the majority of people don't want an operating system, they want to complete tasks. They want to write an email to their friends, buy an airplane ticket online, write a letter to their mother, upload the images of their kids from their digital camera so they can print them out and post them to their grandparents, play the latest fun computer game that everybody says is fantastic, share a work spreadsheet via email or a USB pen drive with one of their office colleagues.
If they can do these kind of tasks, I really don't think they care about what operating system they've got, let alone joining any movements. If their partner/ best friend / neighbour who knows a bit about computers says "yup, ComputerX that you can buy down ShopY will do those jobs" then that's as far as I think they want to engage with the issue.
Fair play, we all do this with tasks outside our domain expertise. I phone my dad if I have problems with my car, if he said "you need to try this kind of oil" I'd just go with what he recommended. Wouldn't give it a second thought, read review websites etc.
Why do you live 100 miles from where you work, why not live 5 miles, or ten miles? genuinely curious. I can understand folk in the really big cities saying up to 3 or 4 miles from where I work is too expensive to live, that's prime downtown property. But 10 miles? 20 miles? I guess your cities are very spread out, is it a planning issue of pressing councils and your government to allow higher density residential property?
I think a lot of it is higher expectations. As you say, look at what people expect in their cars now compared to 40 or 50 years ago. Plus there's air conditioning, armchair like seats, wider, bigger everything. People drove long distances 50 years ago, people commuted ten miles to work 50 years ago, but they didn't expect to haul all the weight, or need to drive in a pick up truck when they wanted to buy a pint of milk. I've been on holiday round Europe doing thousands of miles in a 15 year old 1 litre Peugeot hatchback - it sits at 70mph quite happily with two people and their camping gear, it pulls itself out of muddy fields no problem, does a lot more than 25 miles per gallon.
I think a lot of the big car issue is down to status and luxury (plus cheap gas). People want to sit in a new-ish auto, big fat armchairs with air conditioning and a huge motor roaring because it makes them feel like the big man. I think in the USA it's also because gas is still cheap compared to other car markets - we're paying close to 6 dollars a gallon in Europe and I am not sure about the Asian market.
"Problem 4: The Linux Flash players did not work with YouTube, and Adobe's Flash video player was extremely difficult to install. I have a 64-bit microprocessor, and installed 64-bit Ubuntu. Although 64-bit Linux has been available for more than five years, Adobe hasn't bothered to develop 64-bit version of Flash for Linux yet. My live-in geek tracked the problem down for me, and Adobe is reportedly working on 64-bit software"
I stopped reading after this point. I hope the conclusion was something on the lines of "it works if you have a live-in geek". That's a cop out - saying you've got a problem but it was resolved by the fact that your partner is a technical expert.
Imagine if copyrights and patents never expired. If Caxton had a good lawyer 500 years ago and nobody else could get involved with any form of printing without paying his family money. If any time a child was innoculated the nurse had to pay a penny to Jenner's family or company. My fear would be a tiny elite getting richer and richer by every generation, a hereditary oligarchy. Not good.
Here's my UK perspective: until recently we had hereditary peers in the House of Lords. This meant that laws passed in the UK were decided on by an unelected, unselected group of people who made the decisions about national law that affected us all. These people (the peers of the House of Lords) were not there because they were popular, or had any special skills. They made our laws because one of their ancestors did something that impressed the King or Queen at the time: could have been 900 years ago. Maybe said ancestor hit somebody with an axe in front of the King and the King thought that was cool or funny or bloody lucky and gave him a lordship as a result. Maybe said ancestor bailed out the King's gambling debts and got a nice little estate as thanks. Said ancestor became a peer of the realm as a result and decided on the laws of the time. And his children would make the laws for ever after. So until recently, ten years ago or so, you could have a peer who was a complete fool, his father was a fool, his grandfather was a complete idiot and his great grandfather couldn't be trusted to make a better decision than your average sh*t-shovelling farm hand. No matter. If one of their ancestors had been made a hereditary peer, hundreds of years ago, just one clever bloke amongst a whole family of idiots, then all the generations for ever after would make the decisions that controlled our land. The rest of us had no say, couldn't get rid of them, had to accept their decisions. That's how the feudal lords and ladies system worked. I say this system was terrible. In the 1990s in the UK laws were decided in some cases by people who had no special talents beyond having a single ancestor who had done something significant hundreds of years before.
So the proposal that if I come up with a good idea, and corner the market in a product, or a method (or hell, a natural resource - look up Basmati Rice - grown in India for thousands of years but apparently some Texan company claimed the patent on this foodstuff! http://www.biotech-info.net/basmati_patent.html) - and that forever after everybody has to pay my children and their offspring for the right to engage with that aspect of the world - no I think that's a really bad idea. Unless you like the idea of minority hereditary elites.
cheers, nice to chat and get a US perspective. Partly came out of a conversation I had with a friend a while back when we were chatting about the strength of feeling US citizens might have about them being "Irish-Americans" even though they might only have a couple of ancestors from 4 generations back. Interesting that somebody who'd only got this link would identify with their lesser heritage so strongly. I had this conversation in Scotland with my Scottish friend (I was born and raised in England) and we agreed people here would look at me as if I was daft if I claimed to be Anglo-Scottish on the grounds of my maternal grandparents being Scottish and my mum being raised for most of her childhood in Scotland. People would just say "you're English" because of my accent, where I was born and raised. Certainly we've always been a nation of migrants so if you want to say you're from here if you were born/raised here then that's valid. Curious. Maybe people are less interested in their heritage here, maybe its because in the USA/Australia etc people can say "you weren't originally from round here" and so folk are more interested to ground themselves and understand where they came from originally.
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I worked in the schools library service for many years. Female dominated profession. Often I was one of the few men. All ticked along nicely in the places I worked in, quiet days, deadlines, whatever.
Could be a reflection of the industry you're in, the country/ culture you're in, who knows...
Cultural differences my friend. I'm told that in some parts of the world people think that driving an SUV is considered cool. In my country you'd be laughed at unless you have a good reason to do so, e.g. construction industry or park ranger.
I don't have any statistics to hand but the marketing here in Europe seems to focus on a>space and energy efficiency and b>'image' .... the marketing is aimed at young urban professionals and these seem to be the people who are mainly driving them, you see them round towns and cities rather than rural areas on the whole. My housemate noted he bought one at least in part because of its looks and image (rather than one of the many other small form cars we have available here in the UK).
"Why would someone spend that much on a car when they can get 4 door Toyota Corolla for around the same price with the same fuel efficiency?"
:-)
Because people think they look cool and hip and fun. People buy cars as an expression of their personal taste as much as anything else, projecting an image, etc, not just on rational aspects like price/fuel efficiency. If that was the case we'd be following Henry Ford's line about having any car we want as long as it's black, we'd all be driving identical vehicles. Just go into a car showroom or auto shop and see how much money gets spent on accessories which do nothing but change the look of the same model cars.
Smart cars are purchased as much as a fashion statement as anything else in Europe, just as much as any other car.
In the UK the road tax on them is much lower than most cars because they have a smaller engine (0.7 litre), and they are pretty handy for urban parking as well
No, I'd say the biggest threat to America comes from it's looming economic crisis coming from transition from gas to alternative fuels. If gas hits $5 or $6 a gallon, inflation may be too high for low income people to buy food and gasoline. A similar threat is losing jobs to overseas.
Gasoline is currently 8 dollars a gallon in the UK (and similar round most of Europe). Probably was ten years at least since it was 5 dollars a gallon.
Me, I cycle 8 miles to work in the morning (and obviously about the same back in the evening unless there's a diversion for shopping or an evening out). Laptop goes in one cycle pannier and room for 2 carrier bags of shopping in the other. I suppose we've got more of a public transport infrastructure here as well?
Your expression "just out of the protective reach of civilization and into something a bit terrifying" might be a bit apt indeed... .. speaking as a white 40 year old university researcher, a British guy whose lifetime criminal record is one parking ticket I guess I should have nothing to fear about your customs officers. Nevertheless your procedures and government rhetoric conspire to make the whole process slightly nerve wracking and cumbersome enough that I tend not to apply to attend conferences in the USA, and psychologically feel the idea of coming to visit my friend in Boston to be a much bigger deal than seeing my friends in Cambodia.
You guys have told the world you maintain the right to disappear anybody you want, keep them out of contact with anybody else as long as you want, and if you really want to turn the screws on them, you are happy to ghost them off to a third country where you'll torture them. This is a bit frightening. It does put me on edge that I am visiting a country that considers this activity legitimate and is in 'siege mentality'. You just never know if the authorities might just lash out and do something scary and irrational to you too. And as you note, there is the sense of entering a country which believes itself to be answerable to nobody but itself and can do what it wants when it wants and get away with it. Umm, easier just to give it a miss, go somewhere safer instead.
"One is a helluva lot more likely to be robbed or assaulted in London than one is even in the worst parts of DC or Detroit"
Stats on this please? Can I confirm, your statement is "the number of people robbed or assaulted in any part of London is higher than in any given part of Washington DC, or Detroit"?
Hmmm..... I take it you are not too familiar with the diversity that is London? I'd be surprised if the crime figures for Kew Gardens or Chelsea are the same as for 'the worst parts of DC'. I'd be interested to see a comparison of the worst parts of the UK vs the worst parts of the USA. I think they will probably be similar. Your hypothesis is that the level of gun ownership in DC and Detroit leads to a lower robbery and assault rate than in London?
I'd say for a decent piece of research we need to find a place where gun laws have changed and see what happens. Easier to make a stronger conclusion than picking different countries where different cultural issues may come into play. Take the shooting in Dublane in Scotland where a lunatic got into a primary school and killed some children. The UK reaction was that all pistols should be banned - even our Olympic pistol shooting team then had to train in another country. A very different reaction to the shootings in Columbine where we heard some US commentators responded that the solution was to arm all teachers. One poster has noted that gun crime levels are very different in Canada and the USA but ownership levels are similar. Suggests cultural factors may play a role to me.
Going back to London, in the turn of the 20th century, police would only come into East London in pairs carrying shotguns. Having lived in a so-called "dangerous" part of London for ten years (Hackney) I can only give you my own witness, that I have seen individual police walking around and without firearms. So something's changed in the last 100 years.
Regarding Mao's statement - I always find it ironic that right wing Americans hold dear Mao's sayings (though to be fair it shows an open mindedness) - and maybe it raises the question - do all countries with more limiting gun laws than the USA therefore count as dictatorships with an essentially powerless people in your eyes? How do you explain the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe which brought down the Soviet Union in the late 80s and early 90s? The USSR could have sent the tanks in but decided not to - the unarmed people won against military might. Read up on "The Singing Revolution".
Kind regards.
Places where you have to try really hard to get guns if you want them? Sadly there are mentally unwell/ emotionally distressed people all over the world but they really shouldn't be able to just walk into a shop and buy lethal weapons. That would reduce a certain percentage of crimes of passion ending up in multiple deaths. It's harder to go on a rampage like that when the most lethal thing your local Wal-Mart sells are chef's knives.
I know you guys are keen to keep hold of guns because the Founding Fathers of your country said it was your right to do so, but times change you know. They were quite happy with the idea of slave ownership, and didn't think women should vote. You've changed your minds on those issues. Really, we (the UK) are not going to come and try and invade any more. We're ok with you running your own country these days. Honest. You don't need a handy militia to stop Prince Charles coming over the horizon at the front of a cavalry brigade....
Jokes aside and my political bias up front, can you get right down to the core of it, why do you think gun ownership is such a big deal? is it the philosophical bed rock identifying characteristic of being an American citizen, or is it just practicality - there are so many million guns in your society that you just couldn't bring them all back in? (or perhaps a combination of the two?)
cheers
In the UK it's called 'red diesel' due to the dye they put in it. Basic deal is that all fuel is taxed, but red diesel is taxed at a much much lower rate. This is intended to help sectors the government feel need preferential treatment, such as for farm machinery.
/litre (about 8 US dollars / US gallon)*. Unleaded petrol (gasoline) is about the same, yes, in the UK, fuel is about 8 US dollars to the US gallon.
;-)
Verrryyyyy approximately, red diesel is about 50p/ litre (about 4 US dollars / US gallon) and normal diesel is about just under one pound
so that's 100% price difference. I am guessing you folks in the USA have a similar system, is the price difference the same kind of scale? You can understand that inspectors get very upset if they find you're running red diesel in a road car.... serious fines for sure.
They are jumping on people running biofuels here as well, people have worked out you can run a diesel car with a high percentage of cooking oil, and despite car manufacturers saying this invalidates your warranty, your car will break down, your daughter will run away with somebody from the circus and your chickens will stop laying eggs, quite clearly a lot of people are doing just fine and word is spreading, tax inspectors are trying to work out what to do about it here.
*For the pedantic, one website I checked says diesel is 95.7p a litre and another site says one pound sterling is 1.9689 dollars, and one litre = 0.26 US gallons so we'll go for one pound/one pound=2 dollars/4 litres to the gallon/ in the maths, eh? but feel free to work out a precise figure, I think it's an ok generalisation...
We're currently testing the Ricoh 500SE for geology students' field trips, wandering around sand quarries, mountain areas, with wireless networks to connect them back to base or over the internet to a field studies centre. Last year's project here. So would be of interest to us. Right now we're looking at ruggedised kit for tough environments but we're working towards coming up with a generic solution that could help schools and universities build their own off-the-shelf field trip kit. So a card that could be fitted into the school's own more standard digital cameras would be great. The last thing you want to be doing in 'the field' is popping open cameras and fiddling around with tiny cards, all sorts of comedy potential for the cards to get lost in the mud/sand to get into the camera etc. Wireless beaming the data back to a laptop in the school bus parked down the road or straight back to the field studies centre, a much nicer solution indeed.
umm, ease up on getting too hemp-fundamentalist there man. Useful form of paper for sure (and yup hemp's useful a whole lot of things as well as a nicer smoke than tobacco and it's mainly for socially constructed reasons we're not growing so much of it these days) ... but there are lots of other issues as well if you want decent conservation of written texts.
:-)
(Professional conservationists jump in at this point, I am a professional librarian who's had the pleasure of working in archives occasionally, that's my experience).
How you construct the raw material for your substrate is an issue, lots of industrially produced papers in the 19th century had way too much acid so are now breaking down, earlier hand produced methods were more stable. But there are some fine industrially produced archival papers these days now folks have worked out better production methods. It's just that Joe Public doesn't want to spend that kind of money and goes for the cheapest paper they can get their hands on. People have been able to make books that last for a long time for many years and they still can, its just you have to pay for it. Would you pay 100,000 dollars for a new book? That's probably the equivalent value of some medieval books (or more) when they were produced, the price of a decent house. You pays your money and you gets what you paid for.
Also it might be worth remembering lot of the really fine papers which have survived until today were written on vellum, i.e. calf skin, so that might be your luxury writing base of choice, keep a herd of cows handy and kill as required...
Inks are also a big issue, it wasn't all fine and dandy in some Arthurian medieval world till the evil industrialists came along (though they were bastids for sure). Lot of older inks were based on chemical compositions which have etched their way into the paper and do degrade over time. A lot of those earlier inks were environmentally pretty nasty as well. It's just that these days we expect heads of state and few more people besides to be able to read and not just 1000 people or so per country being able to write, so there's a much higher volume of printing products being turned out
No worries. I understand where you coming from now. It's just your original post suggested that there is no folk mythology in England, which is clearly not so. England is a country which has gone through successive waves of invasion and migration so there are few clear cut lines drawn under each successive migration or power change, you'll find cultures mixing and strands being followed through each wave, so folk stories and mythologies have mixed over the years. The population of England didn't wake up in 1067 and all start speaking Norman French and drawing from Norman culture. For many people it was just another set of bosses to pay taxes to, get your head down and dig another muddy field... :-)
Probably it would be fair to say there is comparatively little Anglo-Saxon mythology available to us because literacy was very limited in the Anglo Saxon period and folk stories would not have been a priority for transcription. A lot of the mythologies of the time were probably handed down orally apart from a very few examples like Beowulf. I imagine there were many more stories but these have only survived as they've mutated down the years. Folk culture has been seen as low status in many places so only recently have we had free access to mass recording methods and a sense of their importance.
cheers for the context. We had a similar sort of scene on am uch smaller scale for mad art films and stuff banned in Britain (like Clockwork Orange).
... sure we were worried, we were between two of the mightiest forces in history and they both appeared to be run by lunatics.
The historical geographical bit, that's ok, I was a teenager living in the UK at the time, I remember my geography lessons. We were pretty worried in Europe at the time, we had the Soviet army a few miles away not 3000 miles away and your president was going on air and cracking jokes about declaring war and the bombs starting to drop in 5 minutes when he though the mike was turned off
I'd guess there weren't many US films in Spain not because of fear of Russians but because there was less of a demand for foreign language films (e.g. English), and the foreign language subtitling and dubbing business was less well established then. Can any Spanish folk comment? Certainly in the UK in the mid 80s the only place you'd get a foreign language film was an arthouse cinema, I was at university and thoroughly got my mind opened up in Newcastle's wonderful Tyneside Cinema.
"I am no Tolkien scholar, but I thought a big motivation for him to write was the lack of an English mythology"
I guess the humourous retort would be "you're a troll, right?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkein
Tolkein was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He knew his way round the myths. But you don't need to be a professor at Oxford to have come across Beowulf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf
There's vast tracts of English myths and legends and Tolkein clearly draws on them in his work, as well as drawing on mythologies from other areas as well.
"Once when in high school, when living in Europe, the only way we got to see some movies was camcorder rips of U.S. screens"
;-)
:-)
Ah yes, Europe, that mystic medieval land in the East, where people gather together to watch glove puppet shows of an evening in the public squares by the castles...
So what were these movies you couldn't see when you were here? you mean you have secret US only releases of the good movies and you just ship the crap over to us? Damn I knew there was a yankee conspiracy going on but I just couldn't place it...
Sorry, Friday afternoon. I am sure you meant something different but the phrasing was nice and funny...
I'm excited because it's so mundane, and actually disappointed because they are making a big deal out of it ... I think we're making progress in spaceflight when it *isn't* a big deal to be launching spacecraft, and when the mission is just a construction job. Guys going up there not to undertake groundbreaking science but to bolt on some bits of steel. That's when I believe we're making progress and it might just succeed.
/ecological issues aside). Right now I think the Russians are closest to that model.
That's why I've always loved the Russian/ Soviet space programmes. In the USA, everything seems to be one-off, hand crafted. Soyuz capsules seem to get produced like tractors. Feels like the USA is in the early days of hand crafting cars. When we get to the Ford of US spacecraft, a production line just rolling them off, that's when we might have a chance of actually getting into space and expanding from this planet (philosophical
just out of interest, which old days? 80s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s?
In my country it's the lunatic right wingers we had in power for 18 years who kept on going on about mythical old days of warm beer and cricket on Sunday afternoons on the village green.
The past is a different country. They do things differently there. Some things better but also some things a lot worse. I had a great childhood too but while I was messing around making camps in the woods the big cities had signs in lodging houses which said "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs". Things weren't all wonderful.
Except that British and English are not the same. Try going into a bar in Scotland or Wales and telling everybody in a loud voice how it's great to come and visit England....
I think everybody in the world respects the sacrifices made by people in the USA and their entry into the war in 1941 certainly changed the outcome. I think the American experience of WW2 was quite different to many other participating nations though and I'd agree this affected the post-war capacity of the USA compared to other places -my understanding is that there was little or no interference of the country's infrastructure and this enabled rapid development. Many European countries for example had their industrial centres heavily bombed and utility infastructures greatly damaged - whole cities destroyed in firestorms, road and rail networks, ports, water pumping stations, power generation plants and other places were reduced to rubble. Millions were made homeless and severe starvation was rife. Clearly it was easier to invent, market, and produce new products in the USA than many other countries in at least the decade following the war.
Many thanks to the Americans for the loans to get things back into shape- the Marshall Plan - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_plan - these helped get post war countries back on their feet though loans still affected economies for sometime (apparently we in the UK paid our last WW2 loans to the Americans off about 2 years ago, something like in 2005).
The question contains its own answer. Most people - even most technically adept people - are not interested in installing "the movement" on their PCs. They want an operating system.
Well said, but I'd go further than this. I'd say the majority of people don't want an operating system, they want to complete tasks. They want to write an email to their friends, buy an airplane ticket online, write a letter to their mother, upload the images of their kids from their digital camera so they can print them out and post them to their grandparents, play the latest fun computer game that everybody says is fantastic, share a work spreadsheet via email or a USB pen drive with one of their office colleagues.
If they can do these kind of tasks, I really don't think they care about what operating system they've got, let alone joining any movements. If their partner/ best friend / neighbour who knows a bit about computers says "yup, ComputerX that you can buy down ShopY will do those jobs" then that's as far as I think they want to engage with the issue.
Fair play, we all do this with tasks outside our domain expertise. I phone my dad if I have problems with my car, if he said "you need to try this kind of oil" I'd just go with what he recommended. Wouldn't give it a second thought, read review websites etc.
Why do you live 100 miles from where you work, why not live 5 miles, or ten miles? genuinely curious. I can understand folk in the really big cities saying up to 3 or 4 miles from where I work is too expensive to live, that's prime downtown property. But 10 miles? 20 miles? I guess your cities are very spread out, is it a planning issue of pressing councils and your government to allow higher density residential property?
I think a lot of it is higher expectations. As you say, look at what people expect in their cars now compared to 40 or 50 years ago. Plus there's air conditioning, armchair like seats, wider, bigger everything. People drove long distances 50 years ago, people commuted ten miles to work 50 years ago, but they didn't expect to haul all the weight, or need to drive in a pick up truck when they wanted to buy a pint of milk. I've been on holiday round Europe doing thousands of miles in a 15 year old 1 litre Peugeot hatchback - it sits at 70mph quite happily with two people and their camping gear, it pulls itself out of muddy fields no problem, does a lot more than 25 miles per gallon.
I think a lot of the big car issue is down to status and luxury (plus cheap gas). People want to sit in a new-ish auto, big fat armchairs with air conditioning and a huge motor roaring because it makes them feel like the big man. I think in the USA it's also because gas is still cheap compared to other car markets - we're paying close to 6 dollars a gallon in Europe and I am not sure about the Asian market.
"Problem 4: The Linux Flash players did not work with YouTube, and Adobe's Flash video player was extremely difficult to install. I have a 64-bit microprocessor, and installed 64-bit Ubuntu. Although 64-bit Linux has been available for more than five years, Adobe hasn't bothered to develop 64-bit version of Flash for Linux yet. My live-in geek tracked the problem down for me, and Adobe is reportedly working on 64-bit software"
I stopped reading after this point. I hope the conclusion was something on the lines of "it works if you have a live-in geek". That's a cop out - saying you've got a problem but it was resolved by the fact that your partner is a technical expert.
Imagine if copyrights and patents never expired. If Caxton had a good lawyer 500 years ago and nobody else could get involved with any form of printing without paying his family money. If any time a child was innoculated the nurse had to pay a penny to Jenner's family or company. My fear would be a tiny elite getting richer and richer by every generation, a hereditary oligarchy. Not good.
Here's my UK perspective: until recently we had hereditary peers in the House of Lords. This meant that laws passed in the UK were decided on by an unelected, unselected group of people who made the decisions about national law that affected us all. These people (the peers of the House of Lords) were not there because they were popular, or had any special skills. They made our laws because one of their ancestors did something that impressed the King or Queen at the time: could have been 900 years ago. Maybe said ancestor hit somebody with an axe in front of the King and the King thought that was cool or funny or bloody lucky and gave him a lordship as a result. Maybe said ancestor bailed out the King's gambling debts and got a nice little estate as thanks. Said ancestor became a peer of the realm as a result and decided on the laws of the time. And his children would make the laws for ever after. So until recently, ten years ago or so, you could have a peer who was a complete fool, his father was a fool, his grandfather was a complete idiot and his great grandfather couldn't be trusted to make a better decision than your average sh*t-shovelling farm hand. No matter. If one of their ancestors had been made a hereditary peer, hundreds of years ago, just one clever bloke amongst a whole family of idiots, then all the generations for ever after would make the decisions that controlled our land. The rest of us had no say, couldn't get rid of them, had to accept their decisions. That's how the feudal lords and ladies system worked. I say this system was terrible. In the 1990s in the UK laws were decided in some cases by people who had no special talents beyond having a single ancestor who had done something significant hundreds of years before.
So the proposal that if I come up with a good idea, and corner the market in a product, or a method (or hell, a natural resource - look up Basmati Rice - grown in India for thousands of years but apparently some Texan company claimed the patent on this foodstuff! http://www.biotech-info.net/basmati_patent.html) - and that forever after everybody has to pay my children and their offspring for the right to engage with that aspect of the world - no I think that's a really bad idea. Unless you like the idea of minority hereditary elites.
cheers, nice to chat and get a US perspective. Partly came out of a conversation I had with a friend a while back when we were chatting about the strength of feeling US citizens might have about them being "Irish-Americans" even though they might only have a couple of ancestors from 4 generations back. Interesting that somebody who'd only got this link would identify with their lesser heritage so strongly. I had this conversation in Scotland with my Scottish friend (I was born and raised in England) and we agreed people here would look at me as if I was daft if I claimed to be Anglo-Scottish on the grounds of my maternal grandparents being Scottish and my mum being raised for most of her childhood in Scotland. People would just say "you're English" because of my accent, where I was born and raised. Certainly we've always been a nation of migrants so if you want to say you're from here if you were born /raised here then that's valid. Curious. Maybe people are less interested in their heritage here, maybe its because in the USA /Australia etc people can say "you weren't originally from round here" and so folk are more interested to ground themselves and understand where they came from originally.