I tend to agree with this in general. The computer market certainly did split in the 90s into the console market and the serious computer market. It wasn't really until near 2000 that PCs became gaming machines in the way they are now.
The Amiga sort of tried to be both at the same time - in Britain, where I am familiar with the Amiga, it utterly failed as a serious computer, and only really existed as games machine. It struggled against the Sega Megadrive/Genesis (Sonic was killing it in every way) and would have utterly failed had it had to compete against the PS1.
The fundamental trouble for the Amiga, in my opinion (I used one as my primary computer up to 2001, I did most of my first year university coursework on it), was the lack of modularity. Even in the early 90s you could swap out hardware in PCs to take advantage of new releases (e.g. the release of Soundblaster did not require you to by a whole new computer), and manufacturers/retailers could mix and match hardware to meet different needs.
But with the Amiga you were stuck with maybe 5 or 6 different computers (in the 90s - 600, 1200, 3000, 4000, CDTV, CD32) with a fixed and unchanging hardware. Had they been more modular, and had it therefore been possible to swap out the bitplane graphics system for a pixel based graphics by simply swapping out one card for another then things might have been different.
I know you could install a Piccaso card and other such graphics cards, but due to built in nature of the AGA and related hardware no mass consumer software would dare support anything else, and there was no real hardware abstraction layer to overcome this. Since none of it was abstracted through anything like OpenGL or DX or anything even remotely similar, no one would write software for any plugin card, preferring instead to target the bigger market for the built in hardware*.
* After Commodore's death there were some games that started to target plugin gfx cards (Doom and Quake clones, etc. such a Alien Breed 3d) but by then it was clearly too late, and the problem of a lack of a standardised abstraction for hardware was still present anyway.
So the Amiga was stuck with what was, by the early 90s, crappy bitplane based graphics and crappy 8 bit, 4-channel sound, and no way to move away from this. Without any standardised abstraction system to allow modular hardware (and without virtual, or at least protected, memory) it was just stuck with inadequate hardware.
Why bother simulating the pixels? Simply simulate the mental state of having read the pixels.
The pixels don't actually have to exist (in simulated form) - nothing needs to be simulated in this example of a solipsistic simulated universe except for mental states (which you would have to simulate anyway whether you simulate the pixels or not).
This is in fact true whether you are being solopsistic or not. Even if your simulated universe contains billions of minds it is still easier to simply simulate the mental states only, and to not bother doing all the real world physics of what all the particles are doing. You will have to simulate the mental states anyway, so you might as well just use a very simple approximation for what the physical stuff is doing (and only for those things actively being watched by a mind - why bother simulating the whole universe when no one is watching it) and just simulate the mental state of "that thing over there moved" rather than have to bother simulating the physics of the 100 billion trillion particles that make up "that thing".
All you need then is some routine to detect if a particular mind is really paying attention the details of the physics they are observing (i.e. a simulated scientist doing an experiment, an simulated engineer testing a design, etc.), and then you switch from the rough approximation method to the real physics simulation for the local environment and for the duration.
In my opinion there are two differences when comparing the USA and the EU on this issue.
Firstly is the political - the USA has a central, and quite powerful central government, which sit above those of the states. This government has fiscal and legislative responsibility for the whole country, and so can enact things like fiscal transfers between richer states and poorer ones, and can enact nationwide policies such as the Affordable Care Act.
The EU does not have this status or these powers over the constituent nations.
Secondly, the culture of the USA is such that the great vast majority of the people consider themselves to be Americans. They feel a sense of national pride, swear allegiance to the flag, etc. I'm sure that some feel a strong allegiance to their state, but for most people their primary loyalty is to the USA first and their state second.
In the EU by contrast, most people feel a strong national identity - they feel first and foremost that they are Polish, or French, or Greek, or British, and only as a secondary issue might they feel themselves to be a citizen of Europe. Again, there are certainly some people for whom this is not true, but for the vast majority the national allegiances are much stronger than the supra-national ones.
In my opinion again, the economic situation in the EU is going to keep failing because of the lack of a central government with fiscal tax and spend powers. I agree with another poster on this thread that given enough time (decades? centuries?) the cultural issues will probably fade away to nothing.
The purpose of punishment is deterrence, to make future perpetrators think again about their intended criminal intentions.
I agree that this particular murderer was not deterred, as demonstrated by their having committed murder. But that doesn't mean that other (maybe less dedicated) potential murderers are not going to be deterred by the punishment of this murderer.
Different potential criminals are going to have different thresholds of deterrence, and the punishment of a higher threshold criminal may well deterred the potential crime of a lower threshold potential criminal.
Trillions of dollars are not being "parked" outside the USA. They may be being put into bank accounts in companies outside the USA.
I'm British, so I don't know too much about USA dependencies (or territories or whatever they are called), but I am certain that the situation will follow one of two sets of logic:
1) The dependency will not use the USD as their currency
2) The dependency will use the USD as their currency, but their domestic GDP is significantly lower than the value of their financial services industry's USD trade.
In either of these cases you have a country which is holding significantly more dollars than it can use. It will have to do something with these dollars. The only place that these dollars are useful is the USA, so this basically means it must send these dollars to the USA.
A very few of these will be used to buy goods from the the USA (cars, TVs, etc.). But we are talking about billions of dollars in a tax haven, where not much import activity happens. So most of the trade flow is going to be in investment products - stock, bonds, real estate, etc.
To summarise, in reality these tax issues simply add to the USA trade deficit. The same is true of the UK with its slightly weird dependencies - what else are they going to do with a load of pound sterling other than dump them back in the UK, where else can they spend them.
I know, I wish all those bloody children and retired people would find jobs. I'm fed up with them not being employed and hence being unemployed.
Same too with all those members of the Royal Family who have so much money they don't need a job - I'm fed up with them inflating the unemployment numbers.
Most people are not idiots and do not think that "unemployed" = "everyone who is not employed". Most people can quite happily understand that some people are not part of the labour market.
It is quite reasonable to question the details of how the employment figures are worked out. One particularly questionable issue is the timeout period - a person who has been unemployed for a long period and has stopped looking is by some measures counted as not part of the labour market, and so neither employed nor unemployed. But this person could quite well want to work and would take a job in a second if offered, but is just so disinclined to keep trying - are they part of the labour market or not?
But to claim that all people in a country are either "employed" or "unemployed" is naive - there are plenty of states that are neither of these.
Surely the point of the unemployment figure is to record the number of people who are participants in the labour market who are not employed. In an ideal world we want effective and comprehensive employment of all resources, including labour, so we want effective and complete employment of workers.
But the point is to count people who are active participants in the labour market - people who are working, people who are looking for work, people who have work but not enough of it, people who have work but the work is drastically below their abilities, etc.
What is the virtue in counting people who are not participating in the labour market in a measurement about the labour market. If a women with young children chooses not to work so as to stay at home for 5 years to raise her children then what is the virtue of counting her as unemployed?
If a member of the British Royal family (god bless 'em) chooses not to work and just lives of their civil list income, what is the benefit of counting them as unemployed?
Surely the point of the unemployment figures is to give us a measure of how well our labour market resources are being allocated (i.e. we would like to have everyone in the labour market in work and that work to be well matched to their abilities). What is the virtue of counting people who are not part of the labour market?
"no immigrants, resurrection of the British empire, no gay rights, and all that kind of nonsense"
I'll grant you that lots of the Tory right want to drastically reduce immigration, but can yo ushow me any evidence at all for the other claims in this statement.
"A sane Conservative leader right now would be one that that told the hard liners to fuck off, and instead worked with the majority of moderates in their party to form consensus with other parties in the UK to solve pressing issues"
It only takes around 10 of the Tory right to rebel for the Tory government to be unable to get its agenda through parliament. You have claimed that the Tory right is 120 strong. If the Conservative leader to them to fuck off it would take about 5 minutes for them to make government impossible. If you think they haven't made this clear to May and the other cabinet members then you're mental.
This is why the current government is behaving the way they are. They know that Tory centrists are very unlikely to rebel and threaten the parties position, and they also know that the Tory right know exactly how strong they are and that they will exploit their position.
I agree with you that it would be morally better if the government were in a position to work with the centrists and Labour and the Lid Dems more closely, and find a better compromise position, but it is simple not in a position to do so - it has to look to its own survival first.
No, but they (law enforcement) can get a warrant from a court to search you and your vehicle, and thus become informed about your identity and the contents of your vehicle.
With the current setup of technology the same cannot be said of internet traffic. With encrypted communication no court order can allow law enforcement to become informed about the identity or content of the communication.
Obviously certain encryption systems have a weak point - usually when the communication goes through a central server owned by the company providing the service (who will decrypt and analyse it for various commercial reasons), and so a simple subpoena to the company will do the job.
But with end to end encryption the analogy to road traffic does not work. The only working analogy is if the road traffic in question is a tank or APC, and so law enforcement cannot gain access even with a search warrant. (the analogy breaks down pretty quickly, as the army would be called in pretty quickly in such a case, which would not happen if I happen to send an S/MIME encrypted email).
German autoworkers don't earn any US Dollars at all, they earn Euros, which are a different currency.
If you use market exchange rates then yes the figures are probably true. If you use purchasing power parity rates then the difference reduces by about 30 - 40%. (PPP indexes currencies by what they will actually buy, rather than by what rate they are traded against eachother on the FX market, and so takes into account differences in the cost of living in each country).
It is of course fine to use market exchange rates, but then you have to add some caveats to explain that not everything in the German economy costs the same as it does in the US (e.g. petrol/gasoline)
May had no mandate - she inherited the job after Cameron resigned. She was entering the Brexit negotiations with no mandate and only the slimmest of majorities. This would mean that she was at the mercy of the outliers in her party, in particular the right wing who wanted (and have always wanted) a complete withdrawl from Europe. They knew and she knew that they could make life hell for the government unless she went for a full on hard Brexit policy.
At least in part her hope was that by winning a larger majority she would have more flexibility in the negotiations. She would be able to make concessions without being threatened by a small minority of her party.
Of course it is in part political greed. But there were also perfectly reasonable political explanations for why calling an election was a good idea for May the Conservatives.
Now, as it happens the trouble with calling an election is that you have to actual win it, and she has barely scraped through. So, her problem is worse than it was before. Going into the Brexit negotiations she will be at the mercy of every special interest in her party and in others. Especially given the power she has had to give to the DUP.
Changing leaders wont change this situation. Given the way British government works, a different leader will still face the same situation in parliament and the country.
The only thing that could change this is the one thing that cannot happen: a new election - either a new general election (which wont work, people are fed up with elections and will vote out of anger) or a new EU referendum (which would break the country apart).
Here in Britain we have our general election tomorrow (Thursday 8th) and it is absolutely fascinating in its own kind of way, and it ties in very strongly with the AC's comment above in my mind.
10 years ago Britain was in much the same position as the USA - a mostly leftist party (Labour) and a mostly rightist party (Conservatives) took turns to have a go at being in power for a few years, pissed everything up after a while and then the other party had a go. It had been that way since WW2.
But in the 2010 election it all changed, and the smaller parties took a massively more prominent position. We've always had a small third party in the Liberal Democrats (a sort of left-centre party with a small component of what Americans would recognise as Libertarianism, but much more tame than the US variety). For 5 years from 2010 they were part of the government.
I now live in a constituency with the country's only Green MP. UKIP, a minor party who have only ever had 1 MP, essentially forced the EU referendum.
In Scotland the previously minor third party is now the Government.
It always seems slightly odd to me that a country as vast and diverse as the US, with your federal system where each state is like its own country, that you don't have any significant third parties, even as far as I can really tell at the state level, let alone the federal. I wonder if any Americans feel like giving me their opinion on why this is?
All nation wide referendums in the UK are non-binding, on the principle that no other body can dictate to parliament. All referendum results are subject to a confirming vote in parliament. The EU vote was no different than others in this regard.
"There are two types of referendum that have been held by the UK Government, pre-legislative (held before proposed legislation is passed) and post-legislative (held after legislation is passed). To date the previous three UK-wide referendums in 1975, 2011 and 2016 were all post-legislative. Referendums are not legally binding, so legally the Government can ignore the results; for example, even if the result of a pre-legislative referendum were a majority of "No" for a proposed law, Parliament could pass it anyway, because parliament is sovereign." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Teresa May (our current PM) has been pushing for this sort of thing for about the past ten years. Prior to her becoming PM she was the Home Secretary (responsible for policing, prisons, border security) and this has been on her agenda for her whole tenure.
I certainly take William Baric's point about the use of insults in arguments like this, rather than trying to use reason and debate. This whole page does seem very similar to a Guardian page in that regard - starts of for the first 5 minutes with an attempt at a well constructed debate (I say that regardless of what side anyone might take on any side of any debate), but then quickly everyone interested sincere debate is forced to flee because it gets taken over by insults and partisan childishness.
Specifically addressing this particular issue (which I must if I wish to avoid being ignored) - I am British and I voted to leave the EU last June, and I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with my, there was strong feeling on either side of the debate (I'd feel annoyed if someone called me an idiot, but I feel I could live with it, I'm not given to much self-doubt). I have felt the we should leave the EU for around 15 years, and was glad to have chance to vote on it, but it was obvious obvious that as soon as the referendum neared it would get taken over by politicians and campaigners and crappy arguments such as the bus slogans.
It doesn't mean that we all have to join in. William Baric's point above was essentially expressing his indignation about being called a idiot for his choices in a democratic vote. He expressed it with a certain emotional stance that has cased you Barsterward to reply in kind.
Why? Why not address the points at stake and not the people. Who cares if William Baric is or is not an idiot? There is a much more interesting issue in this sub-thread about Britain's choices about surveillance, online and offline, and whether we should continue these policies and what we can do about it (I imagine this applies quite well the US too, 1st amendment notwithstanding). Why so quickly resort insults?
Voters are voting on whatever they choose to vote on. It is up to them.
If they want to vote on manifestos then that is their choice. If they want vote on who is most telegenic then that is their choice. If they want vote on whichever leadership team seems the most competent then that is their choice.
It is the job of the political parties to win the election. They can do this in many ways - by closely following public opinion so as never to upset anyone; by trying to change public opinion by being persuasive; ignoring public opinion and focusing only on their exist base.
It is their job to win the election in whatever best way balances cynical electioneering against sincere policy positioning.
But constantly moaning on about the media as the reason why a party will lose is childish and achieves nothing, and if your best election strategy is to blame the media then you are going to lose. You can complain that the game is rigged, fine, but it is your job to win the game.
If been thinking this while reading this whole page. What sort of software are people running or writing that is being broken so easily by a Windows Update process? And why are they purchasing or writing better software that isn't so fragile? Repeatedly it seems, since many people are claiming this is a constant problem for them.
There's an outrageous amount of exaggeration going on in this thread. I have Windows 10 installed on a few machines at home, and the update process is almost invisible. There is no trouble or hassle involved in it at all.
Basically, once a month the computer asks to restart. That's all there is. I can choose to do it manually, or it claims it will do it automatically at a quiet time. There is nothing else that I have ever noticed, no intrusion, no taking over the computer, nothing. Just a restart request once a month. I have one gaming desktop with some good specs, I have an old laptop with some fairly low specs, and a couple in between, and this holds true for all of them.
I agree it would be nice, in an abstract sort of way, to have the option of whether to install non-security feature updates. But honestly, in a practical rather than abstract way, it has never bothered me in the slightest. The only time I have ever noticed any changes was the recent 'creators' update, when a few basic options and menus got a bit easier to use (e.g. connecting to a VPN now requires few clicks).
All the hysteria going on here on this thread does not correspond in the slightest with my experiences - talking about it being a 'nightmare' and adding the 'suffering in the world' suggests either people haven't actual any experience of it, or they have a system so unusual that it can't possibly be used as being representative of anything.
While I can't speak for GP, I haven't really seen anybody who wants to ban all immigration, rather just illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration is already banned - that's why they call it illegal. The changes that people want to make are making legal immigration harder and enforcing laws against illegal immigration more strongly. The problem with these policies is twofold. The first is that the people who advocate them often benefit from low-priced labour as a result of illegal immigration. The second is that they're often using immigrants as a scapegoat for something else: For example in the UK, in the run up to the referendum, we saw that a lot of communities that were 1% or less immigrant were blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs: even if they deported all of the immigrants, it would make no meaningful difference to unemployment rates. But blaming the problems on immigrants is far easier for politicians than addressing the various root causes of inequality (in this case, that there's a huge amount of direct and indirect subsidy on companies in London, which pulls jobs away from the rest of the country).
Neither of the two points you make is a satisfactory argument for not properly enforcing immigration laws. The first is a good reason to believe that it might be more difficult than it appears because of some peoples' vested interests, and the second seems to be saying that because some other people made a bad argument about something we should not be allowed to follow obviously good arguments through to their conclusion. So what if some Brits made some stupid arguments during the referendum campaign, what does that have to do with this argument that immigrations laws ought to be properly enforced?
Your third (parenthetical) point about the influence of London might well be a valid argument in itself (I live in East Sussex, in the ghastly south east, and I would tend to agree that London gets too much attention) but again, what has it got to do with the argument under discussion?
Either way, it is the same argument whether you suggest God created the universe or it was created out of some non-religious origin.
If the big bang theory is correct, and the universe was created at a singularity from which was created both time and space, then the prior conditions to this singularity did not include a time aspect.
If God made the universe (i.e. setup the conditions of the singularity) then he did so outside of time.
If it was caused by some other process then this process operated outside of time, or necessarily violates some other form of basic logic (causality, infinity, etc.)
There is no origin of the universe theory that can be explained by recourse to standard logic, something has to give.
Essentially, there is basically no theory of origins that you can create (whether it be scientific, supernatural, religious, whatever) that doesn't ultimately decay into an argument for either infinite regress or acausality.
The best you can do is get one level above such arguments, but your explanation is always vulnerable to the question "yes, but what caused that to happen?" (e.g. OK, God made the universe, but what made God, and what made that? or, OK, we live in simulated reality, but what created the simulation, and what made them?).
The only alternatives basically come down to clever ways of saying "it started from nothing" which is equally as unsatisfying.
We use Thunderbird at work for all our emails, and I agree that it is a mainly mature and stable system.
For a mature product however it is odd to me that it still use 32 bit addressing for its POP3 storage - for a POP3 account it will store all the emails for a given mail folder as a single file and it will locate the particular email in that file using a 32 bit offset, which obviously means that the largest any folder in your email hierarchy can ever get is 4.2GB.
4.2GB is a ridiculously low limit on an email folder in our day and age (I have plenty of IMAP folders with 10s of GBs of emails). Why can't an upgrade tool be included in one of the many software updates to update your storage to 64bit files to overcome this problem?
I don't think that explanation works, and I'm not sure what the answer is.
If any interaction counts as an 'observation' (I agree that the concept is not well enough defined to be useful) then the electrons in an atom are being constantly observed (there are constant electromagnetic interactions that have effects on the nucleons and the electrons).
If observation is the process that collapses abstract quantum states into particular position/momentum observables, then an atom shouldn't be able to exist as it is in a constant state of being a particular observable rather than an abstract quantum state (and so we're back to an unstable solar-system model).
Since atoms do exist then it seems that the electrons must exists in their quantum form (i.e. standing waves rather than particulate) even though they are in constant interaction, so it raises the question of what counts as an 'observation' sufficient to change this situation, since pure EM interaction is clearly not sufficient?
In Britain all public holidays fall on weekdays, as a matter of design. If you have, say, Christmas Day falling on a Sunday, then the Boxing Day Monday will be a public holiday, and the Tuesday will be a public holiday in compensation for the Sunday.
All Brits (on a full-time contract at least) are entitled to the full 25 days holiday plus the 9 annual public holidays.
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I tend to agree with this in general. The computer market certainly did split in the 90s into the console market and the serious computer market. It wasn't really until near 2000 that PCs became gaming machines in the way they are now.
The Amiga sort of tried to be both at the same time - in Britain, where I am familiar with the Amiga, it utterly failed as a serious computer, and only really existed as games machine. It struggled against the Sega Megadrive/Genesis (Sonic was killing it in every way) and would have utterly failed had it had to compete against the PS1.
The fundamental trouble for the Amiga, in my opinion (I used one as my primary computer up to 2001, I did most of my first year university coursework on it), was the lack of modularity. Even in the early 90s you could swap out hardware in PCs to take advantage of new releases (e.g. the release of Soundblaster did not require you to by a whole new computer), and manufacturers/retailers could mix and match hardware to meet different needs.
But with the Amiga you were stuck with maybe 5 or 6 different computers (in the 90s - 600, 1200, 3000, 4000, CDTV, CD32) with a fixed and unchanging hardware. Had they been more modular, and had it therefore been possible to swap out the bitplane graphics system for a pixel based graphics by simply swapping out one card for another then things might have been different.
I know you could install a Piccaso card and other such graphics cards, but due to built in nature of the AGA and related hardware no mass consumer software would dare support anything else, and there was no real hardware abstraction layer to overcome this. Since none of it was abstracted through anything like OpenGL or DX or anything even remotely similar, no one would write software for any plugin card, preferring instead to target the bigger market for the built in hardware*.
* After Commodore's death there were some games that started to target plugin gfx cards (Doom and Quake clones, etc. such a Alien Breed 3d) but by then it was clearly too late, and the problem of a lack of a standardised abstraction for hardware was still present anyway.
So the Amiga was stuck with what was, by the early 90s, crappy bitplane based graphics and crappy 8 bit, 4-channel sound, and no way to move away from this. Without any standardised abstraction system to allow modular hardware (and without virtual, or at least protected, memory) it was just stuck with inadequate hardware.
Everyone says how Commodore failed because they didn't develop the hardware enough, and didn't release AAA or Hombré hardware like they should have, but it wouldn't have made a difference - they would have released some fantastic hardware which would have been top of the line for a year or two but which would have quickly been overtaken by the competitive market for modular hardware which PCs could take advantage of.
(First thing I did when I finally ditched my A1200 and got a PC was to go and buy a better graphics board so I could play Giants: Citizen Kabuto)
You're still operating one level too high.
Why bother simulating the pixels? Simply simulate the mental state of having read the pixels.
The pixels don't actually have to exist (in simulated form) - nothing needs to be simulated in this example of a solipsistic simulated universe except for mental states (which you would have to simulate anyway whether you simulate the pixels or not).
This is in fact true whether you are being solopsistic or not. Even if your simulated universe contains billions of minds it is still easier to simply simulate the mental states only, and to not bother doing all the real world physics of what all the particles are doing. You will have to simulate the mental states anyway, so you might as well just use a very simple approximation for what the physical stuff is doing (and only for those things actively being watched by a mind - why bother simulating the whole universe when no one is watching it) and just simulate the mental state of "that thing over there moved" rather than have to bother simulating the physics of the 100 billion trillion particles that make up "that thing".
All you need then is some routine to detect if a particular mind is really paying attention the details of the physics they are observing (i.e. a simulated scientist doing an experiment, an simulated engineer testing a design, etc.), and then you switch from the rough approximation method to the real physics simulation for the local environment and for the duration.
In my opinion there are two differences when comparing the USA and the EU on this issue.
Firstly is the political - the USA has a central, and quite powerful central government, which sit above those of the states. This government has fiscal and legislative responsibility for the whole country, and so can enact things like fiscal transfers between richer states and poorer ones, and can enact nationwide policies such as the Affordable Care Act.
The EU does not have this status or these powers over the constituent nations.
Secondly, the culture of the USA is such that the great vast majority of the people consider themselves to be Americans. They feel a sense of national pride, swear allegiance to the flag, etc. I'm sure that some feel a strong allegiance to their state, but for most people their primary loyalty is to the USA first and their state second.
In the EU by contrast, most people feel a strong national identity - they feel first and foremost that they are Polish, or French, or Greek, or British, and only as a secondary issue might they feel themselves to be a citizen of Europe. Again, there are certainly some people for whom this is not true, but for the vast majority the national allegiances are much stronger than the supra-national ones.
In my opinion again, the economic situation in the EU is going to keep failing because of the lack of a central government with fiscal tax and spend powers. I agree with another poster on this thread that given enough time (decades? centuries?) the cultural issues will probably fade away to nothing.
I'm not sure this logic is correct.
The purpose of punishment is deterrence, to make future perpetrators think again about their intended criminal intentions.
I agree that this particular murderer was not deterred, as demonstrated by their having committed murder. But that doesn't mean that other (maybe less dedicated) potential murderers are not going to be deterred by the punishment of this murderer.
Different potential criminals are going to have different thresholds of deterrence, and the punishment of a higher threshold criminal may well deterred the potential crime of a lower threshold potential criminal.
Trillions of dollars are not being "parked" outside the USA. They may be being put into bank accounts in companies outside the USA.
I'm British, so I don't know too much about USA dependencies (or territories or whatever they are called), but I am certain that the situation will follow one of two sets of logic:
1) The dependency will not use the USD as their currency
2) The dependency will use the USD as their currency, but their domestic GDP is significantly lower than the value of their financial services industry's USD trade.
In either of these cases you have a country which is holding significantly more dollars than it can use. It will have to do something with these dollars. The only place that these dollars are useful is the USA, so this basically means it must send these dollars to the USA.
A very few of these will be used to buy goods from the the USA (cars, TVs, etc.). But we are talking about billions of dollars in a tax haven, where not much import activity happens. So most of the trade flow is going to be in investment products - stock, bonds, real estate, etc.
To summarise, in reality these tax issues simply add to the USA trade deficit. The same is true of the UK with its slightly weird dependencies - what else are they going to do with a load of pound sterling other than dump them back in the UK, where else can they spend them.
I know, I wish all those bloody children and retired people would find jobs. I'm fed up with them not being employed and hence being unemployed.
Same too with all those members of the Royal Family who have so much money they don't need a job - I'm fed up with them inflating the unemployment numbers.
Most people are not idiots and do not think that "unemployed" = "everyone who is not employed". Most people can quite happily understand that some people are not part of the labour market.
It is quite reasonable to question the details of how the employment figures are worked out. One particularly questionable issue is the timeout period - a person who has been unemployed for a long period and has stopped looking is by some measures counted as not part of the labour market, and so neither employed nor unemployed. But this person could quite well want to work and would take a job in a second if offered, but is just so disinclined to keep trying - are they part of the labour market or not?
But to claim that all people in a country are either "employed" or "unemployed" is naive - there are plenty of states that are neither of these.
Surely the point of the unemployment figure is to record the number of people who are participants in the labour market who are not employed. In an ideal world we want effective and comprehensive employment of all resources, including labour, so we want effective and complete employment of workers.
But the point is to count people who are active participants in the labour market - people who are working, people who are looking for work, people who have work but not enough of it, people who have work but the work is drastically below their abilities, etc.
What is the virtue in counting people who are not participating in the labour market in a measurement about the labour market. If a women with young children chooses not to work so as to stay at home for 5 years to raise her children then what is the virtue of counting her as unemployed?
If a member of the British Royal family (god bless 'em) chooses not to work and just lives of their civil list income, what is the benefit of counting them as unemployed?
Surely the point of the unemployment figures is to give us a measure of how well our labour market resources are being allocated (i.e. we would like to have everyone in the labour market in work and that work to be well matched to their abilities). What is the virtue of counting people who are not part of the labour market?
Smug mode on.
"no immigrants, resurrection of the British empire, no gay rights, and all that kind of nonsense"
I'll grant you that lots of the Tory right want to drastically reduce immigration, but can yo ushow me any evidence at all for the other claims in this statement.
"A sane Conservative leader right now would be one that that told the hard liners to fuck off, and instead worked with the majority of moderates in their party to form consensus with other parties in the UK to solve pressing issues"
It only takes around 10 of the Tory right to rebel for the Tory government to be unable to get its agenda through parliament. You have claimed that the Tory right is 120 strong. If the Conservative leader to them to fuck off it would take about 5 minutes for them to make government impossible. If you think they haven't made this clear to May and the other cabinet members then you're mental.
This is why the current government is behaving the way they are. They know that Tory centrists are very unlikely to rebel and threaten the parties position, and they also know that the Tory right know exactly how strong they are and that they will exploit their position.
I agree with you that it would be morally better if the government were in a position to work with the centrists and Labour and the Lid Dems more closely, and find a better compromise position, but it is simple not in a position to do so - it has to look to its own survival first.
No, but they (law enforcement) can get a warrant from a court to search you and your vehicle, and thus become informed about your identity and the contents of your vehicle.
With the current setup of technology the same cannot be said of internet traffic. With encrypted communication no court order can allow law enforcement to become informed about the identity or content of the communication.
Obviously certain encryption systems have a weak point - usually when the communication goes through a central server owned by the company providing the service (who will decrypt and analyse it for various commercial reasons), and so a simple subpoena to the company will do the job.
But with end to end encryption the analogy to road traffic does not work. The only working analogy is if the road traffic in question is a tank or APC, and so law enforcement cannot gain access even with a search warrant. (the analogy breaks down pretty quickly, as the army would be called in pretty quickly in such a case, which would not happen if I happen to send an S/MIME encrypted email).
The suggestions are not mutually exclusive.
German autoworkers don't earn any US Dollars at all, they earn Euros, which are a different currency.
If you use market exchange rates then yes the figures are probably true. If you use purchasing power parity rates then the difference reduces by about 30 - 40%. (PPP indexes currencies by what they will actually buy, rather than by what rate they are traded against eachother on the FX market, and so takes into account differences in the cost of living in each country).
It is of course fine to use market exchange rates, but then you have to add some caveats to explain that not everything in the German economy costs the same as it does in the US (e.g. petrol/gasoline)
Partly yes, but that's only one interpretation.
May had no mandate - she inherited the job after Cameron resigned. She was entering the Brexit negotiations with no mandate and only the slimmest of majorities. This would mean that she was at the mercy of the outliers in her party, in particular the right wing who wanted (and have always wanted) a complete withdrawl from Europe. They knew and she knew that they could make life hell for the government unless she went for a full on hard Brexit policy.
At least in part her hope was that by winning a larger majority she would have more flexibility in the negotiations. She would be able to make concessions without being threatened by a small minority of her party.
Of course it is in part political greed. But there were also perfectly reasonable political explanations for why calling an election was a good idea for May the Conservatives.
Now, as it happens the trouble with calling an election is that you have to actual win it, and she has barely scraped through. So, her problem is worse than it was before. Going into the Brexit negotiations she will be at the mercy of every special interest in her party and in others. Especially given the power she has had to give to the DUP.
Changing leaders wont change this situation. Given the way British government works, a different leader will still face the same situation in parliament and the country.
The only thing that could change this is the one thing that cannot happen: a new election - either a new general election (which wont work, people are fed up with elections and will vote out of anger) or a new EU referendum (which would break the country apart).
Here in Britain we have our general election tomorrow (Thursday 8th) and it is absolutely fascinating in its own kind of way, and it ties in very strongly with the AC's comment above in my mind.
10 years ago Britain was in much the same position as the USA - a mostly leftist party (Labour) and a mostly rightist party (Conservatives) took turns to have a go at being in power for a few years, pissed everything up after a while and then the other party had a go. It had been that way since WW2.
But in the 2010 election it all changed, and the smaller parties took a massively more prominent position. We've always had a small third party in the Liberal Democrats (a sort of left-centre party with a small component of what Americans would recognise as Libertarianism, but much more tame than the US variety). For 5 years from 2010 they were part of the government.
I now live in a constituency with the country's only Green MP. UKIP, a minor party who have only ever had 1 MP, essentially forced the EU referendum.
In Scotland the previously minor third party is now the Government.
It always seems slightly odd to me that a country as vast and diverse as the US, with your federal system where each state is like its own country, that you don't have any significant third parties, even as far as I can really tell at the state level, let alone the federal. I wonder if any Americans feel like giving me their opinion on why this is?
All nation wide referendums in the UK are non-binding, on the principle that no other body can dictate to parliament. All referendum results are subject to a confirming vote in parliament. The EU vote was no different than others in this regard.
"There are two types of referendum that have been held by the UK Government, pre-legislative (held before proposed legislation is passed) and post-legislative (held after legislation is passed). To date the previous three UK-wide referendums in 1975, 2011 and 2016 were all post-legislative. Referendums are not legally binding, so legally the Government can ignore the results; for example, even if the result of a pre-legislative referendum were a majority of "No" for a proposed law, Parliament could pass it anyway, because parliament is sovereign."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Teresa May (our current PM) has been pushing for this sort of thing for about the past ten years. Prior to her becoming PM she was the Home Secretary (responsible for policing, prisons, border security) and this has been on her agenda for her whole tenure.
I certainly take William Baric's point about the use of insults in arguments like this, rather than trying to use reason and debate. This whole page does seem very similar to a Guardian page in that regard - starts of for the first 5 minutes with an attempt at a well constructed debate (I say that regardless of what side anyone might take on any side of any debate), but then quickly everyone interested sincere debate is forced to flee because it gets taken over by insults and partisan childishness.
Specifically addressing this particular issue (which I must if I wish to avoid being ignored) - I am British and I voted to leave the EU last June, and I have no problem with anyone disagreeing with my, there was strong feeling on either side of the debate (I'd feel annoyed if someone called me an idiot, but I feel I could live with it, I'm not given to much self-doubt). I have felt the we should leave the EU for around 15 years, and was glad to have chance to vote on it, but it was obvious obvious that as soon as the referendum neared it would get taken over by politicians and campaigners and crappy arguments such as the bus slogans.
It doesn't mean that we all have to join in. William Baric's point above was essentially expressing his indignation about being called a idiot for his choices in a democratic vote. He expressed it with a certain emotional stance that has cased you Barsterward to reply in kind.
Why? Why not address the points at stake and not the people. Who cares if William Baric is or is not an idiot? There is a much more interesting issue in this sub-thread about Britain's choices about surveillance, online and offline, and whether we should continue these policies and what we can do about it (I imagine this applies quite well the US too, 1st amendment notwithstanding). Why so quickly resort insults?
Voters are voting on whatever they choose to vote on. It is up to them.
If they want to vote on manifestos then that is their choice. If they want vote on who is most telegenic then that is their choice. If they want vote on whichever leadership team seems the most competent then that is their choice.
It is the job of the political parties to win the election. They can do this in many ways - by closely following public opinion so as never to upset anyone; by trying to change public opinion by being persuasive; ignoring public opinion and focusing only on their exist base.
It is their job to win the election in whatever best way balances cynical electioneering against sincere policy positioning.
But constantly moaning on about the media as the reason why a party will lose is childish and achieves nothing, and if your best election strategy is to blame the media then you are going to lose. You can complain that the game is rigged, fine, but it is your job to win the game.
If been thinking this while reading this whole page. What sort of software are people running or writing that is being broken so easily by a Windows Update process? And why are they purchasing or writing better software that isn't so fragile? Repeatedly it seems, since many people are claiming this is a constant problem for them.
There's an outrageous amount of exaggeration going on in this thread. I have Windows 10 installed on a few machines at home, and the update process is almost invisible. There is no trouble or hassle involved in it at all.
Basically, once a month the computer asks to restart. That's all there is. I can choose to do it manually, or it claims it will do it automatically at a quiet time. There is nothing else that I have ever noticed, no intrusion, no taking over the computer, nothing. Just a restart request once a month. I have one gaming desktop with some good specs, I have an old laptop with some fairly low specs, and a couple in between, and this holds true for all of them.
I agree it would be nice, in an abstract sort of way, to have the option of whether to install non-security feature updates. But honestly, in a practical rather than abstract way, it has never bothered me in the slightest. The only time I have ever noticed any changes was the recent 'creators' update, when a few basic options and menus got a bit easier to use (e.g. connecting to a VPN now requires few clicks).
All the hysteria going on here on this thread does not correspond in the slightest with my experiences - talking about it being a 'nightmare' and adding the 'suffering in the world' suggests either people haven't actual any experience of it, or they have a system so unusual that it can't possibly be used as being representative of anything.
While I can't speak for GP, I haven't really seen anybody who wants to ban all immigration, rather just illegal immigration.
Illegal immigration is already banned - that's why they call it illegal. The changes that people want to make are making legal immigration harder and enforcing laws against illegal immigration more strongly. The problem with these policies is twofold. The first is that the people who advocate them often benefit from low-priced labour as a result of illegal immigration. The second is that they're often using immigrants as a scapegoat for something else: For example in the UK, in the run up to the referendum, we saw that a lot of communities that were 1% or less immigrant were blaming immigrants for the lack of jobs: even if they deported all of the immigrants, it would make no meaningful difference to unemployment rates. But blaming the problems on immigrants is far easier for politicians than addressing the various root causes of inequality (in this case, that there's a huge amount of direct and indirect subsidy on companies in London, which pulls jobs away from the rest of the country).
Neither of the two points you make is a satisfactory argument for not properly enforcing immigration laws. The first is a good reason to believe that it might be more difficult than it appears because of some peoples' vested interests, and the second seems to be saying that because some other people made a bad argument about something we should not be allowed to follow obviously good arguments through to their conclusion. So what if some Brits made some stupid arguments during the referendum campaign, what does that have to do with this argument that immigrations laws ought to be properly enforced?
Your third (parenthetical) point about the influence of London might well be a valid argument in itself (I live in East Sussex, in the ghastly south east, and I would tend to agree that London gets too much attention) but again, what has it got to do with the argument under discussion?
I agree with you.
Either way, it is the same argument whether you suggest God created the universe or it was created out of some non-religious origin.
If the big bang theory is correct, and the universe was created at a singularity from which was created both time and space, then the prior conditions to this singularity did not include a time aspect.
If God made the universe (i.e. setup the conditions of the singularity) then he did so outside of time.
If it was caused by some other process then this process operated outside of time, or necessarily violates some other form of basic logic (causality, infinity, etc.)
There is no origin of the universe theory that can be explained by recourse to standard logic, something has to give.
Essentially, there is basically no theory of origins that you can create (whether it be scientific, supernatural, religious, whatever) that doesn't ultimately decay into an argument for either infinite regress or acausality.
The best you can do is get one level above such arguments, but your explanation is always vulnerable to the question "yes, but what caused that to happen?" (e.g. OK, God made the universe, but what made God, and what made that? or, OK, we live in simulated reality, but what created the simulation, and what made them?).
The only alternatives basically come down to clever ways of saying "it started from nothing" which is equally as unsatisfying.
We use Thunderbird at work for all our emails, and I agree that it is a mainly mature and stable system.
For a mature product however it is odd to me that it still use 32 bit addressing for its POP3 storage - for a POP3 account it will store all the emails for a given mail folder as a single file and it will locate the particular email in that file using a 32 bit offset, which obviously means that the largest any folder in your email hierarchy can ever get is 4.2GB.
4.2GB is a ridiculously low limit on an email folder in our day and age (I have plenty of IMAP folders with 10s of GBs of emails). Why can't an upgrade tool be included in one of the many software updates to update your storage to 64bit files to overcome this problem?
Is it a problem for anyone else?
I don't think that explanation works, and I'm not sure what the answer is.
If any interaction counts as an 'observation' (I agree that the concept is not well enough defined to be useful) then the electrons in an atom are being constantly observed (there are constant electromagnetic interactions that have effects on the nucleons and the electrons).
If observation is the process that collapses abstract quantum states into particular position/momentum observables, then an atom shouldn't be able to exist as it is in a constant state of being a particular observable rather than an abstract quantum state (and so we're back to an unstable solar-system model).
Since atoms do exist then it seems that the electrons must exists in their quantum form (i.e. standing waves rather than particulate) even though they are in constant interaction, so it raises the question of what counts as an 'observation' sufficient to change this situation, since pure EM interaction is clearly not sufficient?
In Britain all public holidays fall on weekdays, as a matter of design. If you have, say, Christmas Day falling on a Sunday, then the Boxing Day Monday will be a public holiday, and the Tuesday will be a public holiday in compensation for the Sunday.
All Brits (on a full-time contract at least) are entitled to the full 25 days holiday plus the 9 annual public holidays.