Every single non-industry-funded study on GMOs has returned absolutely horrifying results about what their consumption does to, specifically, the digestive system and the immune system.
And guess what? All of them have been debunked. Furthermore, they're mostly done by people like this guy:
In other words, people who have an ideology they want to push, so they use borderline fraudulent tactics and gross scientific misconduct to try to push their "studies".
What do you mean by "borderline". They've been caught deliberately lying.
I have no issue with labelling GMO foods, it's just a label and it's better to have overly stringent labelling laws than overly lax laws IMHO. However it should also go the other way. So called "organic" foods also should be labelled with something like "This item is known to be produced in conditions that may not meet Australian/FDA/other safety organisation standards and can cause illness."
The summary misleadingly forgot to mention that
"The display function only works when the car is parked. In drive mode, all the driver can see are the various meters and controls necessary to drive the car and any maps that might be needed. "
So this means we'll have more people putting the car in P at the lights, getting distracted and not realising the light has gone green until someone a few cars down the line beeps them.
Nissan, stop making gimmicks that will never be permitted on the road in most countries and give us what we've been asking for, for the last 15 years... The S16 Silvia (and possibly another turbo straight 6 whilst you're at it).
Say that to the auto industry that drove almost everything overseas. Right now, the IT industry is having it bad. Unionizing under the current paradigm would be WORSE!. It would be like "fuck it, ALL IT goes overseas, and the US as a nation is but a client purchasing all IT services overseas. There's nothing than can stop that happening now, but unionizing would definitely hasten that to occur.
I'm all about getting organized and having proper representation as a single unified voice to be heard, but unionizing as it's currently known as isn't the answer.
Explain why the highly unionised German auto industry isn't suffering?
Same with Japan that also has very strong worker protection.
Next.
Unions didn't kill the US (or Australian) auto industries, it's the companies. Germany realised that it cant make shit cars in Germany and profit on it, so they make them in Spain, the Czech republic and other places that are less expensive than Germany. Good cars that can command a premium are still made in Germany. The US didn't want to do this so in order to compensate for making cars that they cant profit on, they declared war on their own workers for daring to ask for a liveable wage.
The auto union in Australia has been nothing but helpful to the auto industry in Australia, often offering concessions to keep jobs in Australia but because we ultimately made crap cars that we couldn't export there every concession and subsidy only delayed the inevitable destruction.
So if unions are the problem, explain why highly unionised Germany has one of the strongest car industries in the world.
I was going to ask how many pilots in the whole US Air force weigh less than 135 lbs, and then it occurred to me that this was just a way of keeping women out of their "no girls allowed" fighter jock club.
135 pounds is 61 KG. You would have to be a pretty small woman to weigh that much. I'd say that 61 KG would be small for an average height Caucasian woman. Probably a bit on the high side for many Asian sub races (particularly SE Asian). For a western woman who's gone through military training, 61 KG would be unusual (muscle is pretty dense making it heavier than fat).
OTOH, how much does Tom Cruise weigh?
When people drink soda, they don't blow toxic and disgusting smelling fumes into people's walkways, they don't leave butts all over the ground, and they don't return from a smoke break smelling like an ashtray.
Chuck, I'm going with, "No, drinking soda isn't the new smoking."
I rented a huge U-haul on a Citibank card. Day of the move, I was buying gas at gas stations every few hundred miles in a line across the US's major interstates. Citibank cut me off after 4 gas stations. Good thing I had a backup.
I've had a Citibank (Australia) card for a few years. I've used it in a variety of places in SE Asia without an issue but I made one withdrawal at an ATM at LAX (this was airside as well) and they immediately suspended my card. It doesn't seem to be that consistent. Especially as I think that the Philippines is a bit more dodgy than the US when it comes to card fraud.
I absolutely agree. They have THE WORST programmers/statisticians working on this.
How about adding a simple two-factor authentication? Instead of rejecting the payment outright and freezing the card, text message my phone IMMEDIATELY and I can read a 6 digit code to the cashier to allow the transaction. It isn't perfect, but that one simple step would make it about 90 percent better, more secure, and cut down on false positives. I swear this would increase customer satisfaction and increase the amount of money the credit cards make because they would then accept a higher number of legitimate transactions. What is wrong with that industry?
They'll never implement 2 factor auth because all the mouth breathing idiots will complain about it. Look at how many whinged when they talk about switching from signature to PIN (this has already happened in my country but the laggards still have a big cry about it). Its just too inconvenient.
I think the big players already have tried this (IIRC: Verified by Visa was the product name for Visa) but I haven't seen it in years because no-one wanted to use it.
The second issue with this is, if you make people jump through hoops to buy things, people will make fewer impulse purchases. A lot of the credit addled will go back to using cash because their bank has made it "too hard" as well.
You're right that 2 factor auth would kill 99.5% of credit card fraud, however it would kill a percentage of purchases and that cant be allowed. Right now it's cheaper to eat the costs of fraud than to lose a percentage of their fees. That is what is wrong with the industry.
What I have read in the independant studies is that Uber drivers with their little GPS systems are just as good cost wise and in most cases drivewise as a full on London Cabbie who has studied "The Knowledge".
My personal experience tells me otherwise.
GPS knows nothing about shortcuts. longcuts, traffic patterns and driver habits that taxi drivers accumulate as part of their jobs.
For the most part, 95% plus of all drivers dont pick up these skills. Uber has been a demonstration of this. The last time I used Uber I used followed the GPS. It was my usual trip from work to home, I normally drive but had been drinking that day. As I knew the route I expressly told him not to take the freeway because the freeway is always jammed at 4:30 PM, I told him to take Wanneroo rd. The idiot took the Freeway because the GPS told him to. I ended up stuck in traffic for over an hour on a trip that usually takes me 45 minutes because I take Wanneroo rd. This is an example of a "long cut" because technically it's slower and longer, but in reality due to traffic patterns (meaning every idiot is on the freeway) its faster. Often I'll take a route that is 5-10 KM more if it avoids heavy traffic. Many such routes have been taught to me by Perth's taxi drivers (including a nice, low traffic exit from the international airport). A Perth taxi driver who doesn't know to avoid the freeway at peak hour doesn't stay a taxi driver for long.
Perth has a similar "knowledge" test as part of getting your taxi license. Its nowhere near as tough as The Knowledge but its enough to teach them how to avoid obvious traffic hot spots. The Perth taxi driver assessment also ensures they know how to deal with customers. A sat nav is no replacement for this and everyone who's relied on a sat nav over experience has demonstrated this perfectly.
Personally I've never used a sat nav system in my own city. In fact I've never had to use one in Australia at all. I've only used one when navigating foreign cities, even then only for long trips. After about 3 hours of sat naving around Las Vegas, I turned it off because I'd learned the lay of the streets (LV is a very straightforward city to navigate). I preferred not to navigate via sat nav as they usually forced me into situations I didn't like or preferred to avoid like an uncontrolled turn across traffic. When having to turn left across traffic I'd rather go up a street and back down again so I could take a right turn, this meant I wasn't stopping in the passing lane whist I waited for a gap in traffic.
If you need a sat nav to get around your own city, you're not a good enough driver to be a taxi (legal or otherwise).
Untill plane with 300 people crashes into ocean like Malasian one did, then everybody screams "regulation!"
This is pretty much how we ended up with taxi regulations.
With unregulated taxi services you quickly reach the problem of oversupply. There are only really two ways of dealing with oversupply, 1) regulation or; 2) violence. Having lived in both a well regulated developed, western city (in Australia) and a developing, unregulated city (in both Thailand and the Philippines) I can say that regulation with all its prices and pitfalls are better than armed taxi gangs enforcing their turf.
Western nations experienced the problems with taxi gangs many generations ago, this is why we have regulations and people who've never lived in place like Phuket have no idea how bad it gets. Thailand manages to do public transportation very well, from the highly organised system of Bangkok to the ad-hoc Baht buses prevalent in smaller cities and towns, however in Phuket there is practically no public transport because whenever the government attempts to set up any municipal buses. the taxi gangs (AKA tuk tuk mafia) stop them, pull them over and beats the shit out of the drivers (if they're lucky, it ends at a beating). This is the kind of system that exists without regulation.
Having experienced both, I'd definitely prefer an over-regulated system to a non-regulated system.
Uber however is a self correcting issue. In a place like Australia all we have to do is wait for them to have an accident. Regulations protect taxi companies from being bankrupted by insurance claims by limiting their liabilities, the government will extend no such courtesy to Uber as they have chosen to ignore regulations. So as soon as they have 1 serious accident in a place like Australia, England or Germany the insurance companies will tear Uber to shreds. Their war chest might be enough to survive one such encounter, but two will kill them.
You'd be a complete fool to try and return fire against a target that you have not identified in a crowd. You're just as likely to add to the problem as to solve it, and even might end up being mistaken for the active shooter yourself.
And this is why arming everyone will only result in more shootings and more deaths when they happen.
Bob loses his nut and shoots someone, Frank and Steve pull out guns, Steve sees an armed Frank but not bob, so Steve shoots Frank, Bob shoots another. In the confusion Ian saw Steve shoot frank, so he shoots Steve. Bob then shoots Ian.
The precession can only be described as a bloodbath and anyone who wants to create chaos and a body count only needs 1 shot to do it.
Arming teachers is an even worse idea. Teaching is a very stressful profession and it's not unusual for a teacher to go over the edge. Most teachers do it quietly and privately but there are some who will have an outburst in class. Usually this will involve shouting, every now and then one might strike a student. In fact given the media attention that a teacher hitting an unruly little shit generates, imagine what would happen if they shot them.
The irony is, the teacher is likely to shoot the biggest shit in the class. This will improve things for other students but because the biggest shit is usually the most popular jock (therefore honoured in American society) it'll be a huge sob story in the media and no-one will talk about how much of an arsehole they were. But I digress.
Beyond this, what if a student finds their teachers gun and shoots themselves. You may not remember high school but I do and there was little you could keep hidden or secured from a bunch of bored 15 year old boys.
I own and carry guns responsibly, I am not "Rambo", and real life is NOT a movie.
This x 1,000,000
Some may not believe this, but I'm not against gun ownership in the slightest. However there should be rules to do it safely because they are dangerous (just like driving, so just like driving it can be done in a safe manner) and I dont believe guns are in any way, useful for defence. If you believe you can justify having a gun for defence, you're living in the wrong area.
Israel has very low rates of gun violence too, but many people are packing. And soldiers always carry their rifles — even when going to beach for R&R — with two magazines each. It is not uncommon to see a girl in a bikini guarding a gun-pyramid, while her girlfriends are swimming, for example...
Whatever the reasons for lower gun-violence in Japan or Israel or what have you, the ban on weapons is certainly not the only reason. Whether it is even a contributing factor is not at all obvious.
Israel is in an active war zone, this tends to change things a lot.
Japan, Australia, the UK and other countries with sane gun laws have murders, but almost no mass killings. The reason for this is the lack of firearms, whether you like to admit it or not, the abundance of guns is directly correlated with a high number of shootings. This is true for a lot of countries where guns are abundant (whether they're legal or not).
When are they planning to roll this out. I dont want to have to have my lawyers on retainer for too long.
In my country, like most sane countries we have very strong deformation and libel laws, some would say a bit too strong but I'd rather err on the side of caution given the number of dodgy people around these days.
If I got in first, I could take this "Yelp" to the cleaners for defamatory and libellous activities.
t least with blacks, I can see how they could have a legitimate claim of generational racism. But Hispanics? Are Asians somehow "whiter" than Hispanics despite the fact that Hispanics (meaning from the Ibernian peninsula) have European blood in them? Why didn't the racist policies of this country put Asians at the bottom of the economic and academic ladder?
Mate, stop trying to apply logic to racists.
Yep, Mexicans are Caucasian, they draw most of their lineage from Europe.
This doesn't matter to racists and xenophobes as they're the wrong colour, from the wrong country or born to the wrong parents.
Even though signature is the main problem there (chip or magstripe, signatures are easy to fake and PIN's are not easy to guess) new cards in Australia are not being issued with Magstripes any more. Europe/UK have probably been like this for years.
It's even harder with NFC, since the customer never lets go of their card.
Actually, NFC is what is making card skimming even easier.
NFC transmits the card number, expiry date and name to any device that asks for it. This is all you need to start making transactions online.
Chip and PIN reduced in store card fraud to nil in Europe, however the fraudsters just switched to making online transactions instead.
Studies in europe showed that when chip and pin nearly eliminated point-of-sale (in store) fraud, that within a year or so the fraud moved to card-not-present sales (that is, the fraud occured by european cards used on the internet, phone, and also countries where the Pin network was not integrated back to europes clearinghouses like brazil, the US, and off-the-grid stores). The total amount of fraud was roughly the same as it had been (one can argue about details or if it's less than it would have been).
Basically came here to say this.
Chip and PIN has decreased fraud. However people are still stupid and put their cards into anything that looks like a slot, so they still get skimmed (this is even easier with NFC transmitting everything you need to do an online transaction to anything that asks for it).
Credit card fraud will be a growing problem until we start enforcing security rules onto end users. However banks are reluctant to do that because people will just start using cash because it's easier and safer. They'd lose more in the reduction of merchant fees (yes, the bank charges the merchant for accepting cards) than it currently costs to put up with the fraud.
I had to ask Google in order to know what is a reshipping scam...
To summarize, criminal found stupid people on craiglist that will accept to have goods paid with stolen credit card shipped to their home in order to reship them to a foreign address.
And the idea is that you can disrupt credit card fraud by targeting this.
Which is ludicrous because you're relying on people being more sensible than they are stupid and greedy. Hoping the world runs out of idiots is like hoping the sky will be red tomorrow.
There are already several methods that would cut credit card fraud significantly but banks and the general public refuse to use them.
1) 2 factor authentication. This alone will kill a lot of card fraud as it would require the purchaser to enter in a code generated by an RSA device or sent to them via SMS when buying things online.
2) Using cash. Yes I know the card addled hate this suggestion, but a lot of the time people get their card compromised by sending it through a skimmer. Using cash for a lot of day to day purchases will cut down your risk of this happening significantly.
3) Keeping most of your money in offset and savings accounts. If you want to spend more than say $50, you need to log onto your net bank and transfer the funds.
Banks hate both of these ideas as they cant charge the merchant for accepting cash and they dislike 2 factor authentication because it kills a lot of impulse purchases.
Consumers hate 1 and 3 because it means they have to do something and are lazy bastards who will happily give their card details to any old Russian scammer if it means they dont have to do one extra thing to get their McLard and coke. Banks have also addicted people to imaginary rewards in order to prevent them from using cash. They do this because they charge the merchant for taking your card (its basically all profit for them).
Ultimately, stopping card fraud starts and ends with better practices by the card user... Yet another reason card fraud is nothing but a growth industry.
a great deal of street grade marijuna is very poor quality, may be pesticide or herbicide contaminated, and is very occasionally still laced with PCP in the US
You lie. Not only is this not happening, your little tale doesn't even pass the smell test. Dealers selling bad marijuana are not lacing/spiking it with PCP. The dealers are in this to make money and buying PCP so they can sprinkle on their weed seems like a bad story from a 1982 DARE program speech. What's next, the kid who took LSD and thought he could fly?
How about this instead: a great deal of street grade marijuana is sold because marijuana sells itself. Nothing else needs to be added.
Even in the extremely unlikely off chance that some dealers are cutting marijuana with some other substance (why, I cant fathom, there aren't really any cheaper drugs that are more powerful) this is just a huge argument for decriminalisation. If the quality of the product is an issue, regulate it or at the very least allow it to be produced openly and let the market weed out dodgy products.
Also as a previous Marijuana smoker in my youth, I highly dispute the notion that THC is as addictive as tobacco or even alcohol (which I also dont class as highly addictive). I dont smoke every day... I dont even smoke every month. I might have a cone 2 or 3 times a year. You dont see many smokers who only have three or four cigarettes a year.
Spoken like someone who's never even spoken to a real musician.
To musicians and their fans, the record labels are robber barons. Taking pounds from the fans and giving pennies to the musicians.
Again: cry buggy whip makers all you want
Again your analogy is fail.
Uber is not a new and superior technology. Its just an illegal taxi service and that never turns out well. This is akin to people selling moonshine along side legitimate liquors, the difference is the legitimate liquors pay tax and comply with safety laws where as the moonshine is cut with mentholated spirits.
In the end, Uber will service as a reminder as to why we have such onerous taxi regulations.
They should be making their living legally, not illegally - the same would happen in any other circumstance where you are earning money through illegal means...
This.
Driving a taxi is already a very low paying job in Oz., Uber is making it worse by transferring as many costs onto the driver as possible.
I'd like to see taxi laws and regulations changed to favour owner/drivers and allow minicabbing in Australia but Uber is doing everything they can to reinforce current regulations by demonstrating exactly why they should exist.
Are corporations people in NSW? If so, like in the US, this violates their rights.
To answer your question, no, in Australia corporations do not have the same rights as people.
A corporation doesn't break laws in Australia, individuals do and they are charged as individuals (if a company tries to hide behind a corporate identity, the board and CEO can be charged). This is why the Uber X drivers had their licenses suspended. A corporation can pay a fine, but they can't give them back their licenses.
The corporations have an incentive to be trustworthy because otherwise they will lose my business.
Here's where your point falls apart.
History has demonstrated that this is completely false. Union Carbide, Exxxon, BP, even the recent VW scandal in case you haven't been paying attention. Corporations know that you'll never stop buying from them after a scandal. You'll wait 2 weeks and forget, that's if you dont actively defend their wrongdoings to begin with.
If you look around the world today, people live better lives in countries with powerful corporations and weak governments
Thats why Thailand has the highest quality of life and Norway has the lowest. Oh wait... they dont.
Awaken from your dreamy state Libertarian. The truth is the complete opposite, strong governments protect their citizenry. Weak governments allow corruption to take hold.
I have more trust for the government than I have for a benefits-dodger like Uber. The company shows hate by using contractors as a dodge against benefits as well as implying a second-tier status.
The government responds and answers to me without regard to stock ownership, while Uber responds primarily to some faceless individuals.
This, Uber aren't just dodging giving their workers their fair due, they're also dodging tax as they're not even registered for GST (sales tax in Oz, for the uninitiated).
I don't want to go out on a limb here, but if I read between the lines I seem to be picking up that you may be pro-PC?
But he's right, the PC market is huge as the PS4/XBONE continue to lose money hand over fist.
Mobile games are a threat to consoles as they're attacking the consoles bread and butter, the casual market. This isn't the case for the PC. Casual games just dont sell on the PC because people expect them for free on the PC (see: Farmville). Without casual players the consoles will flounder. Nintendo will be the only one left standing as Sony and Microsoft are selling their consoles as loss leaders (Nintendo isn't) so if they sell a console but dont get subscription fees or sell lots of games then the loss from the hardware will bury them (even though both Sony and MS have deep pockets, they can only keep this up for so long).
Also, no, I have no issues admitting I'm part of the PCGMR. PC gaming has always been superior to consoles. From the Atari vs Commodore 64 and SNES vs 486 to today. Up until the PS1, consoles were happy to admit this and were more casual, since then they've tried to be cheap PC knock offs and ultimately that will be their downfall.
Slashdot Mirror
Every single non-industry-funded study on GMOs has returned absolutely horrifying results about what their consumption does to, specifically, the digestive system and the immune system.
And guess what? All of them have been debunked. Furthermore, they're mostly done by people like this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In other words, people who have an ideology they want to push, so they use borderline fraudulent tactics and gross scientific misconduct to try to push their "studies".
What do you mean by "borderline". They've been caught deliberately lying.
I have no issue with labelling GMO foods, it's just a label and it's better to have overly stringent labelling laws than overly lax laws IMHO. However it should also go the other way. So called "organic" foods also should be labelled with something like "This item is known to be produced in conditions that may not meet Australian/FDA/other safety organisation standards and can cause illness."
The summary misleadingly forgot to mention that
"The display function only works when the car is parked. In drive mode, all the driver can see are the various meters and controls necessary to drive the car and any maps that might be needed. "
So this means we'll have more people putting the car in P at the lights, getting distracted and not realising the light has gone green until someone a few cars down the line beeps them.
Nissan, stop making gimmicks that will never be permitted on the road in most countries and give us what we've been asking for, for the last 15 years... The S16 Silvia (and possibly another turbo straight 6 whilst you're at it).
Say that to the auto industry that drove almost everything overseas. Right now, the IT industry is having it bad. Unionizing under the current paradigm would be WORSE!. It would be like "fuck it, ALL IT goes overseas, and the US as a nation is but a client purchasing all IT services overseas. There's nothing than can stop that happening now, but unionizing would definitely hasten that to occur.
I'm all about getting organized and having proper representation as a single unified voice to be heard, but unionizing as it's currently known as isn't the answer.
Explain why the highly unionised German auto industry isn't suffering?
Same with Japan that also has very strong worker protection.
Next.
Unions didn't kill the US (or Australian) auto industries, it's the companies. Germany realised that it cant make shit cars in Germany and profit on it, so they make them in Spain, the Czech republic and other places that are less expensive than Germany. Good cars that can command a premium are still made in Germany. The US didn't want to do this so in order to compensate for making cars that they cant profit on, they declared war on their own workers for daring to ask for a liveable wage.
The auto union in Australia has been nothing but helpful to the auto industry in Australia, often offering concessions to keep jobs in Australia but because we ultimately made crap cars that we couldn't export there every concession and subsidy only delayed the inevitable destruction.
So if unions are the problem, explain why highly unionised Germany has one of the strongest car industries in the world.
I was going to ask how many pilots in the whole US Air force weigh less than 135 lbs, and then it occurred to me that this was just a way of keeping women out of their "no girls allowed" fighter jock club.
135 pounds is 61 KG. You would have to be a pretty small woman to weigh that much. I'd say that 61 KG would be small for an average height Caucasian woman. Probably a bit on the high side for many Asian sub races (particularly SE Asian). For a western woman who's gone through military training, 61 KG would be unusual (muscle is pretty dense making it heavier than fat). OTOH, how much does Tom Cruise weigh?
When people drink soda, they don't blow toxic and disgusting smelling fumes into people's walkways, they don't leave butts all over the ground, and they don't return from a smoke break smelling like an ashtray.
Chuck, I'm going with, "No, drinking soda isn't the new smoking."
Just apply Betteridge's law of headlines.
I rented a huge U-haul on a Citibank card. Day of the move, I was buying gas at gas stations every few hundred miles in a line across the US's major interstates. Citibank cut me off after 4 gas stations. Good thing I had a backup.
I've had a Citibank (Australia) card for a few years. I've used it in a variety of places in SE Asia without an issue but I made one withdrawal at an ATM at LAX (this was airside as well) and they immediately suspended my card. It doesn't seem to be that consistent. Especially as I think that the Philippines is a bit more dodgy than the US when it comes to card fraud.
> The "fraud detection" is completely broken
I absolutely agree. They have THE WORST programmers/statisticians working on this.
How about adding a simple two-factor authentication? Instead of rejecting the payment outright and freezing the card, text message my phone IMMEDIATELY and I can read a 6 digit code to the cashier to allow the transaction. It isn't perfect, but that one simple step would make it about 90 percent better, more secure, and cut down on false positives. I swear this would increase customer satisfaction and increase the amount of money the credit cards make because they would then accept a higher number of legitimate transactions. What is wrong with that industry?
They'll never implement 2 factor auth because all the mouth breathing idiots will complain about it. Look at how many whinged when they talk about switching from signature to PIN (this has already happened in my country but the laggards still have a big cry about it). Its just too inconvenient.
I think the big players already have tried this (IIRC: Verified by Visa was the product name for Visa) but I haven't seen it in years because no-one wanted to use it.
The second issue with this is, if you make people jump through hoops to buy things, people will make fewer impulse purchases. A lot of the credit addled will go back to using cash because their bank has made it "too hard" as well.
You're right that 2 factor auth would kill 99.5% of credit card fraud, however it would kill a percentage of purchases and that cant be allowed. Right now it's cheaper to eat the costs of fraud than to lose a percentage of their fees. That is what is wrong with the industry.
My personal experience tells me otherwise.
GPS knows nothing about shortcuts. longcuts, traffic patterns and driver habits that taxi drivers accumulate as part of their jobs.
For the most part, 95% plus of all drivers dont pick up these skills. Uber has been a demonstration of this. The last time I used Uber I used followed the GPS. It was my usual trip from work to home, I normally drive but had been drinking that day. As I knew the route I expressly told him not to take the freeway because the freeway is always jammed at 4:30 PM, I told him to take Wanneroo rd. The idiot took the Freeway because the GPS told him to. I ended up stuck in traffic for over an hour on a trip that usually takes me 45 minutes because I take Wanneroo rd. This is an example of a "long cut" because technically it's slower and longer, but in reality due to traffic patterns (meaning every idiot is on the freeway) its faster. Often I'll take a route that is 5-10 KM more if it avoids heavy traffic. Many such routes have been taught to me by Perth's taxi drivers (including a nice, low traffic exit from the international airport). A Perth taxi driver who doesn't know to avoid the freeway at peak hour doesn't stay a taxi driver for long.
Perth has a similar "knowledge" test as part of getting your taxi license. Its nowhere near as tough as The Knowledge but its enough to teach them how to avoid obvious traffic hot spots. The Perth taxi driver assessment also ensures they know how to deal with customers. A sat nav is no replacement for this and everyone who's relied on a sat nav over experience has demonstrated this perfectly.
Personally I've never used a sat nav system in my own city. In fact I've never had to use one in Australia at all. I've only used one when navigating foreign cities, even then only for long trips. After about 3 hours of sat naving around Las Vegas, I turned it off because I'd learned the lay of the streets (LV is a very straightforward city to navigate). I preferred not to navigate via sat nav as they usually forced me into situations I didn't like or preferred to avoid like an uncontrolled turn across traffic. When having to turn left across traffic I'd rather go up a street and back down again so I could take a right turn, this meant I wasn't stopping in the passing lane whist I waited for a gap in traffic.
If you need a sat nav to get around your own city, you're not a good enough driver to be a taxi (legal or otherwise).
Untill plane with 300 people crashes into ocean like Malasian one did, then everybody screams "regulation!"
This is pretty much how we ended up with taxi regulations.
With unregulated taxi services you quickly reach the problem of oversupply. There are only really two ways of dealing with oversupply, 1) regulation or; 2) violence. Having lived in both a well regulated developed, western city (in Australia) and a developing, unregulated city (in both Thailand and the Philippines) I can say that regulation with all its prices and pitfalls are better than armed taxi gangs enforcing their turf.
Western nations experienced the problems with taxi gangs many generations ago, this is why we have regulations and people who've never lived in place like Phuket have no idea how bad it gets. Thailand manages to do public transportation very well, from the highly organised system of Bangkok to the ad-hoc Baht buses prevalent in smaller cities and towns, however in Phuket there is practically no public transport because whenever the government attempts to set up any municipal buses. the taxi gangs (AKA tuk tuk mafia) stop them, pull them over and beats the shit out of the drivers (if they're lucky, it ends at a beating). This is the kind of system that exists without regulation.
Having experienced both, I'd definitely prefer an over-regulated system to a non-regulated system.
Uber however is a self correcting issue. In a place like Australia all we have to do is wait for them to have an accident. Regulations protect taxi companies from being bankrupted by insurance claims by limiting their liabilities, the government will extend no such courtesy to Uber as they have chosen to ignore regulations. So as soon as they have 1 serious accident in a place like Australia, England or Germany the insurance companies will tear Uber to shreds. Their war chest might be enough to survive one such encounter, but two will kill them.
Or Microsoft has decided that Android cant be unseated and its easier to fight for second place.
You'd be a complete fool to try and return fire against a target that you have not identified in a crowd. You're just as likely to add to the problem as to solve it, and even might end up being mistaken for the active shooter yourself.
And this is why arming everyone will only result in more shootings and more deaths when they happen.
Bob loses his nut and shoots someone, Frank and Steve pull out guns, Steve sees an armed Frank but not bob, so Steve shoots Frank, Bob shoots another. In the confusion Ian saw Steve shoot frank, so he shoots Steve. Bob then shoots Ian.
The precession can only be described as a bloodbath and anyone who wants to create chaos and a body count only needs 1 shot to do it.
Arming teachers is an even worse idea. Teaching is a very stressful profession and it's not unusual for a teacher to go over the edge. Most teachers do it quietly and privately but there are some who will have an outburst in class. Usually this will involve shouting, every now and then one might strike a student. In fact given the media attention that a teacher hitting an unruly little shit generates, imagine what would happen if they shot them.
The irony is, the teacher is likely to shoot the biggest shit in the class. This will improve things for other students but because the biggest shit is usually the most popular jock (therefore honoured in American society) it'll be a huge sob story in the media and no-one will talk about how much of an arsehole they were. But I digress. Beyond this, what if a student finds their teachers gun and shoots themselves. You may not remember high school but I do and there was little you could keep hidden or secured from a bunch of bored 15 year old boys.
I own and carry guns responsibly, I am not "Rambo", and real life is NOT a movie.
This x 1,000,000
Some may not believe this, but I'm not against gun ownership in the slightest. However there should be rules to do it safely because they are dangerous (just like driving, so just like driving it can be done in a safe manner) and I dont believe guns are in any way, useful for defence. If you believe you can justify having a gun for defence, you're living in the wrong area.
Israel has very low rates of gun violence too, but many people are packing. And soldiers always carry their rifles — even when going to beach for R&R — with two magazines each. It is not uncommon to see a girl in a bikini guarding a gun-pyramid, while her girlfriends are swimming, for example...
Whatever the reasons for lower gun-violence in Japan or Israel or what have you, the ban on weapons is certainly not the only reason. Whether it is even a contributing factor is not at all obvious.
Israel is in an active war zone, this tends to change things a lot.
Japan, Australia, the UK and other countries with sane gun laws have murders, but almost no mass killings. The reason for this is the lack of firearms, whether you like to admit it or not, the abundance of guns is directly correlated with a high number of shootings. This is true for a lot of countries where guns are abundant (whether they're legal or not).
What could possibly go wrong?
When are they planning to roll this out. I dont want to have to have my lawyers on retainer for too long.
In my country, like most sane countries we have very strong deformation and libel laws, some would say a bit too strong but I'd rather err on the side of caution given the number of dodgy people around these days.
If I got in first, I could take this "Yelp" to the cleaners for defamatory and libellous activities.
They do, they're called "Volkswagen".
And no, I'd never buy one.
Mate, stop trying to apply logic to racists.
Yep, Mexicans are Caucasian, they draw most of their lineage from Europe.
This doesn't matter to racists and xenophobes as they're the wrong colour, from the wrong country or born to the wrong parents.
Even though signature is the main problem there (chip or magstripe, signatures are easy to fake and PIN's are not easy to guess) new cards in Australia are not being issued with Magstripes any more. Europe/UK have probably been like this for years.
Actually, NFC is what is making card skimming even easier.
NFC transmits the card number, expiry date and name to any device that asks for it. This is all you need to start making transactions online.
Chip and PIN reduced in store card fraud to nil in Europe, however the fraudsters just switched to making online transactions instead.
Studies in europe showed that when chip and pin nearly eliminated point-of-sale (in store) fraud, that within a year or so the fraud moved to card-not-present sales (that is, the fraud occured by european cards used on the internet, phone, and also countries where the Pin network was not integrated back to europes clearinghouses like brazil, the US, and off-the-grid stores). The total amount of fraud was roughly the same as it had been (one can argue about details or if it's less than it would have been).
Basically came here to say this.
Chip and PIN has decreased fraud. However people are still stupid and put their cards into anything that looks like a slot, so they still get skimmed (this is even easier with NFC transmitting everything you need to do an online transaction to anything that asks for it).
Credit card fraud will be a growing problem until we start enforcing security rules onto end users. However banks are reluctant to do that because people will just start using cash because it's easier and safer. They'd lose more in the reduction of merchant fees (yes, the bank charges the merchant for accepting cards) than it currently costs to put up with the fraud.
I had to ask Google in order to know what is a reshipping scam... To summarize, criminal found stupid people on craiglist that will accept to have goods paid with stolen credit card shipped to their home in order to reship them to a foreign address.
And the idea is that you can disrupt credit card fraud by targeting this.
Which is ludicrous because you're relying on people being more sensible than they are stupid and greedy. Hoping the world runs out of idiots is like hoping the sky will be red tomorrow.
There are already several methods that would cut credit card fraud significantly but banks and the general public refuse to use them.
1) 2 factor authentication. This alone will kill a lot of card fraud as it would require the purchaser to enter in a code generated by an RSA device or sent to them via SMS when buying things online.
2) Using cash. Yes I know the card addled hate this suggestion, but a lot of the time people get their card compromised by sending it through a skimmer. Using cash for a lot of day to day purchases will cut down your risk of this happening significantly.
3) Keeping most of your money in offset and savings accounts. If you want to spend more than say $50, you need to log onto your net bank and transfer the funds.
Banks hate both of these ideas as they cant charge the merchant for accepting cash and they dislike 2 factor authentication because it kills a lot of impulse purchases.
Consumers hate 1 and 3 because it means they have to do something and are lazy bastards who will happily give their card details to any old Russian scammer if it means they dont have to do one extra thing to get their McLard and coke. Banks have also addicted people to imaginary rewards in order to prevent them from using cash. They do this because they charge the merchant for taking your card (its basically all profit for them).
Ultimately, stopping card fraud starts and ends with better practices by the card user... Yet another reason card fraud is nothing but a growth industry.
a great deal of street grade marijuna is very poor quality, may be pesticide or herbicide contaminated, and is very occasionally still laced with PCP in the US
You lie. Not only is this not happening, your little tale doesn't even pass the smell test. Dealers selling bad marijuana are not lacing/spiking it with PCP. The dealers are in this to make money and buying PCP so they can sprinkle on their weed seems like a bad story from a 1982 DARE program speech. What's next, the kid who took LSD and thought he could fly?
How about this instead: a great deal of street grade marijuana is sold because marijuana sells itself. Nothing else needs to be added.
Even in the extremely unlikely off chance that some dealers are cutting marijuana with some other substance (why, I cant fathom, there aren't really any cheaper drugs that are more powerful) this is just a huge argument for decriminalisation. If the quality of the product is an issue, regulate it or at the very least allow it to be produced openly and let the market weed out dodgy products.
Also as a previous Marijuana smoker in my youth, I highly dispute the notion that THC is as addictive as tobacco or even alcohol (which I also dont class as highly addictive). I dont smoke every day... I dont even smoke every month. I might have a cone 2 or 3 times a year. You dont see many smokers who only have three or four cigarettes a year.
Spoken like someone who's never even spoken to a real musician.
To musicians and their fans, the record labels are robber barons. Taking pounds from the fans and giving pennies to the musicians.
Again your analogy is fail.
Uber is not a new and superior technology. Its just an illegal taxi service and that never turns out well. This is akin to people selling moonshine along side legitimate liquors, the difference is the legitimate liquors pay tax and comply with safety laws where as the moonshine is cut with mentholated spirits.
In the end, Uber will service as a reminder as to why we have such onerous taxi regulations.
So you remove their only way to make a living?
They should be making their living legally, not illegally - the same would happen in any other circumstance where you are earning money through illegal means...
This.
Driving a taxi is already a very low paying job in Oz., Uber is making it worse by transferring as many costs onto the driver as possible.
I'd like to see taxi laws and regulations changed to favour owner/drivers and allow minicabbing in Australia but Uber is doing everything they can to reinforce current regulations by demonstrating exactly why they should exist.
Are corporations people in NSW? If so, like in the US, this violates their rights.
To answer your question, no, in Australia corporations do not have the same rights as people.
A corporation doesn't break laws in Australia, individuals do and they are charged as individuals (if a company tries to hide behind a corporate identity, the board and CEO can be charged). This is why the Uber X drivers had their licenses suspended. A corporation can pay a fine, but they can't give them back their licenses.
Here's where your point falls apart.
History has demonstrated that this is completely false. Union Carbide, Exxxon, BP, even the recent VW scandal in case you haven't been paying attention. Corporations know that you'll never stop buying from them after a scandal. You'll wait 2 weeks and forget, that's if you dont actively defend their wrongdoings to begin with.
Thats why Thailand has the highest quality of life and Norway has the lowest. Oh wait... they dont.
Awaken from your dreamy state Libertarian. The truth is the complete opposite, strong governments protect their citizenry. Weak governments allow corruption to take hold.
I have more trust for the government than I have for a benefits-dodger like Uber. The company shows hate by using contractors as a dodge against benefits as well as implying a second-tier status.
The government responds and answers to me without regard to stock ownership, while Uber responds primarily to some faceless individuals.
This, Uber aren't just dodging giving their workers their fair due, they're also dodging tax as they're not even registered for GST (sales tax in Oz, for the uninitiated).
I don't want to go out on a limb here, but if I read between the lines I seem to be picking up that you may be pro-PC?
But he's right, the PC market is huge as the PS4/XBONE continue to lose money hand over fist.
Mobile games are a threat to consoles as they're attacking the consoles bread and butter, the casual market. This isn't the case for the PC. Casual games just dont sell on the PC because people expect them for free on the PC (see: Farmville). Without casual players the consoles will flounder. Nintendo will be the only one left standing as Sony and Microsoft are selling their consoles as loss leaders (Nintendo isn't) so if they sell a console but dont get subscription fees or sell lots of games then the loss from the hardware will bury them (even though both Sony and MS have deep pockets, they can only keep this up for so long).
Also, no, I have no issues admitting I'm part of the PCGMR. PC gaming has always been superior to consoles. From the Atari vs Commodore 64 and SNES vs 486 to today. Up until the PS1, consoles were happy to admit this and were more casual, since then they've tried to be cheap PC knock offs and ultimately that will be their downfall.