On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
Ahh, I'm beginning to see where Beta went so horribly wrong.
UX is the HCI equivalent of homoeopathy. A horrible pseudo-science that kills.
If you want to fix bugs, fine. If you want to add features, good. If you want to wreck an interface that works and that your readers like, well that's not fine.
Your readers have spoken, you should be out the back burning all traces of Beta as I type this, including the people who designed it. When Gawker changed it's UI in 2011 it lost 80% of it's audience practically overnight. Considering that the majority of./'s content is user generated the loss of any significant portion of the user base will, for all intents and purposes kill the site.
Get rid of beta, go through the office with a torch and shotgun, target anyone who uses the term "UX".
BTW, I know that SoulSkill probably doesn't have any say in this and it's coming from the corporate overlorads at Dice, so this is not directed at him. Although he might enjoy the torch and shotgun part.
They (BMW) already have a lower-end model, it's called the Mini Cooper.
At the low end, BMW have the 1 series, which I don't think are available in the US.
Mini is a completely different badge altogether. Same with Smart (the cheap Merc's are the A class).
And the analogy falls apart when one considers that Apple isn't really a premium brand anyway.
This.
Apple is a luxury brand in the same way that VW is a luxury brand, it isn't. However this does not stop lot of people who buy a Golf GTI from pretending they have a European luxury car.
The Victorian police publish the locations of their cameras, they have done so for a number of years under both left and right wing state governments. Also every cop car is fitted with mobile radar that can record the speed of oncoming cars. As for flashing lights, it's almost mandatory these days, I do it myself to warn others to check their speed but few drivers would warn someone who is recklessly speeding, personally I only do it to "hoons" when there are no cops ahead;).
At the end of the day advertising the locations via the web (or flashing lights) increases the effectiveness of cameras, and adds weight to the claim that the goal is to prevent speeding. The road signs we have here that say "red light camera ahead" make people think twice about racing the amber, a secret red-light camera merely records who caused the inevitable pile up.
The state of Western Australia goes one step further, not only do we publish speed camera locations (both fixed and mobile) the money from speed camera fines doesn't go to the government, it goes to the Road Trauma Trust Fund, which is used to fix and upgrade roads. Its worth noting this is only for speed camera fines, if a cop pulls you over it's still goes in the general revenue bucket.
Personally I have no problems with people warning others as it does encourage people to slow down.
I also have no problem with speed cameras and speed traps. I'm smart enough to know how to avoid them (not speeding is the most obvious) so I consider it a tax on dumb drivers. Realistically my choices are speeding fines or road tax, I'll take the fines as I cant legally avoid road tax.
I don't see how this is different from warning people not to break other laws.
In order for speed cameras and speed traps to work, they have to be visible. So realistically, warning people about speed traps are accomplishing the objective, slowing people down.
What I hate is the fact most drivers are so stupid, they slow down to 10 KPH under the speed limit as soon as someone flashes their lights. I'll happily drive past speed cameras doing the speed limit, haven't ever received a fine. Then again I don't speed either, I'm too busy watching for animals or pedestrians entering the road, cars changing lanes, suicide cyclists or just pain old idiot motorists to worry about looking for speed cameras.
Nothing is free, not least of all when you are obviously paying for it.
I can go to a doctor and not be out of pocket. That's free.
Now as for the taxation cost, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than private systems and better quality, I don't have to worry about the triage nurse having to do a credit check before stopping the bleeding.
Assertion without evidence. Correlation is not causation.
And you use the exact same assertion without evidence, except you're also using an appeal to authority.
There's plenty of evidence that prices rise after the privatisation of public utilities.
And I'm not. But do I get a choice in the matter?
You can leave. Farewell and I wish you luck in your libertarian paradise, if you can find one that isn't a despotic nightmare.
Otherwise you can accept the fact that you dont always get what you want, especially when the majority of the people in a democracy would rather have it differently.
If I don't like the way a business operates, I stop buying its products, and it ceases to affect me.
LoL, many businesses are set up that you cant do that. Especially in the US. Don't like the way petrol companies are colluding, erm... Public telco's, well they're the only one operating in your area.
If I don't like the way the government operates, I have to continue paying taxes to it anyway.
As above, you can leave. Even getting off the grid and living in some cabin in the woods would get you out of it. However you simply dont want to because it would require you to give up too many creature comforts you've grown accustomed to.
This is less of a case of the GPP being wrong and more of a case of "waaahhhhh the world is not as I would like it". Well grow up and get over it.
The idea of paying a subscription for word processing is stupid.
That depends. Assuming you are going to pay for an Office suite vs use open source or free products, it can make very good financial sense for some people. If you need licenses for more than one machine and/or you like to upgrade often, then the 365 subscription can be a less expensive option. Yes, if you stop paying you can't keep the software but again, but that is something you need to consider before buying.
For example, I use 365 for Office Professional Plus and Visio. I have it installed on 4 PCs at the moment. I pay 12/mo for Office and 13/mo for Visio Pro. I use both of these for my job (Consultant). I use the business version ($12 vs $9/mo) because I use PowerPivot quite a bit. So, Office Pro is $399 per machine (Pro, not Pro Plus, which is not available retail). That's $1,596 for all four machines. Visio Pro is $589, so $2,356 total. It would take 133 months and 181 months respectively on 365 before I go into the red on rent vs buy. Now, with 365 I get all of the updates during that time, while I would have to purchase additional upgrades if I buy the software outright. I also don't have to deal with re-activating my software as I move from machine to machine. I just deauthorize it in my account settings and it free's up the license from that machine.
Uh huh.
I got Office Pro Plus for A$15 through work. If you're paying full retail prices for Office, you're doing it wrong. Also the full retail pro allows installation on three machines.
If that's the case, then it looks like GOG isn't actually doing any work that's worthy of protection.
If my mechanic were to rebuild an engine for me, should I have to pay the mechanic once for his time and materials or every time I use the engine in the next 25 years?
So GOG's work is not worthy of protection, but it is worthy of payment as they are providing a service which has value (not everyone wants to buggerise around with DOSBOX settings).
Brand protection MATTERS. It's worth hundreds of billions in the US alone. And that's a lot of jobs and a lot of livelihoods, which the government would be idiotic to ignore, especially if the only real opposition is flocking to torrents regardless the legal outcome.
Ignoring the idea that protecting brands are more important than advancing culture and the arts.
Brands aren't really protected by copyrights, they're protected by trade marks. The most valuable brands like Coca-cola or McDonalds don't really have that much copyrighted (in fact they benefit from a lack of copyright, locking up the use of McWhatever only harms the brand because to remain relevant and valuable, the brand has to remain on people's minds).
99 out of the top 100 most valuable brands sell products or services, only one was entertainment (Disney at #26). Copyrights don't really help brands.
4) can't run any other OS practically. Oh sure you can install linux, but then the whole machine goes to crap. It won't autoupdate chomeos any longer once you install linux. And it will erase the linux partition if you touch the wrong key at boot time. Some nut jobs have told "just reflash your roms so doesn't do that". Which sort of proves my point.
If you can replace the storage with something larger, this makes a perfect, if not basic media player. Great if you don't want a bulky mATX box sitting under the telly.
However something tells me they used an internal SD Card for storage (like so many bare bones ESXi servers I get these days) so the upper limit on storage is pretty low ATM (IIRC, 128 GB)
The character was created in 1962, which puts it just over 50 years of existence. But the character is still being used in new and ongoing works. I expect that 100 years from now, the character will continue to exist in some form.
The problem is, the 60's spiderman comics are not in the public domain. As for Spiderman himself, that's a trademark which is different to copyright. You can have works in the public domain that are still protected by trademarks.
Copyright prevents me from publishing a copy of a 1964 spiderman comic, trademarks prevent me from making my own spiderman comic. The only thing is, trademarks need to be maintained (as you said, new Spiderman works are being created).
You say Orwellian, but it's also what everybody on Star Trek lives with. The computer keeps track of every person on the ship, their location, and their vital signs, and never seems to require command-level authorization to dispense information. Any kid can query the computer and it'll respond "Counselor Troi is in Commander Worf's quarters. Her heart rate is accelerated and her pulmonary system is taxed." And we think of Star Trek as a utopian ideal.
The difference is, in Star Trek no one really cared what you were doing, let alone what you were doing for every minute of every day. You could essentially get on with whatever you wanted. Thats why we think its a utopian ideal, an information of total information availability that was free of micro managers.
Also the Enterprise was essentially a military vessel, but if you didn't like it you could leave.
This isn't hypothetical. Company towns in the past were owned by a corporation which provided essentially all government functions. Quite the libertarian paradise.
Company towns didn't just provide all the government functions, they provided all the commercial functions too. You worked for the company, you bought everything you had from the company, you paid tax to the company, the entire system was designed to funnel as much money back into the company as it could. Prices were easily adjusted to ensure that living expenses exceded wages, but that's OK because the company owned bank was there to give everyone a loan.
As an Australian with some ability to read and the knowledge that this "waste" is sand sucked up from the seabed a short distance away
As an Australian with quite an ability to read, the ability to think and quite a bit of understanding on the subject, the "waste" is called silt and being quite fine (extremely fine sand) tends to travel quite a distance when dumped... This is why it cant be dumped closer to Abbott point, because it'll go straight back into the channel they were dredging.
So dumping it on the great barrier reef is easier as transporting it to a safe dumping zone is expensive.
You seem to think it's OK because it's sand, this is where your understanding of the subject ends, coral you see doesn't do too well when sand gets dumped on it and 25 KM away is definitely not far enough to ensure the silt does not reach the reef. Realistically the expansion at Abbott point should never have been approved.
Since the purpose of the dredging operation is to move the shit from one spot on the floor of the ocean to another, in its entirety, it is NOT "waste".
No, the purpose of the dredging operation is to expand the coal port at Abbott Point.
The problem is that they're ignoring legitimate environmental concerns (and to the barrier reef, silt is waste) for financial convenience because it would cost more to dump it somewhere else that isn't right next a fragile ecosystem.
They are using scare words to get you whipped into a righteous frenzy
You are attempting to oversimplify things because you cant understand the real concerns here.
You are also attempting to prevent legitimate rebuttals of your point by attacking the person and using thought terminating cliches because your point isn't strong enough to stand on it's own merits.
You do know that if I said I was dumping a million tonnes of rubble on your house, and then actually dumped it 25km away, your house wouldn't be crushed, right?
Only a tiny amount of the crap you dump needs to get to my house in order for it to be damaged and become unliveable.
There's a good reason they don't dump a million tonnes of rubble near residential zones. the dust kicked up alone would play havoc with local residents.
As for Tasmania, almost 50% of the entire state is currently world heritage listed. I don't think de-listing a fraction of a percent of that is going to cause much damage.
Again, there are good reasons for this. There isn't another environment like Tasmania in the world.
But developing sustainable forestry is hard and cutting down old growth is easy. No point in even trying sustainable forestry (not like we're running out of old growth now are we).
And by "reef", they mean a patch of silt 25km away from the actual reef.
You do know that 25 KM is not a long distance, it's only 17 miles if you're not competent with metric measurements.
25 KM will easily be covered by currents.
The federal Australian government is also attempting to have the old growth forests in Tasmania de-listed as a world heritage area so they can log there.
Well, the recession was so short exactly because the payout helped - you can't expect such policy measures to act immediately. And no, tougher banking regulations were not the reason - Europe in general had similar regulations, yet they didn't help. Public debt also has no direct relation to recovery - Spain had very little public debt (and it was running surpluses for many years), for example.
Actually it didn't help in the long term. It was a short term fix that did nothing to address the fundamental problems (which was the fact if a banker in New York farts, the markets in Australia panic). It was a short term boost to sales which doesn't do anything in the long run (I kept my $900 in the bank). The US tried doing the same three times and it didn't help them.
Also, Europe did not have similar regulations, they may have had tougher regulations but they were the wrong regulations. Australian banks had limits about how much they could lend vs how much they had in assets as well as rules on how much they had to keep in liquid assets (again relative to how much they could lend) which made the conditions that created the sub prime crisis in the US and Europe impossible to have in Australia.
If you don't understand this, you have no idea how the banking regulations in Australia work.
The reason that Australia went through a brief period of recession is because our market is interdependent on other markets (most notably the US market) so when things went belly up there, it had a huge effect here. But because the same conditions weren't replicated here, nor in China we were able to recover very quickly.
I dont disagree with Labor's stimulus package, it helped out a lot of Australians in a time of extreme uncertainty, but don't kid yourself that it had any lasting effect on the economy as a whole.
Technically US banknotes are made out of cloth more than paper.
But the GP has a very good point about durability. Polymer banknotes last up to 4 times so the reserve bank (RBA) has to print fewer notes (one of the RBA's jobs is destroying old notes and replacing them with new ones).
Nope. US Fed did what is required from the start, so the recession in the US turned out to be far more shallow than in Europe (where the ECB blundered for several years). In Japan it's the contrast is even more stark - after a decade of slow stagnation and deflation (or near-deflation) they started growing almost immediately after the central bank and the government decided to be 'irresponsible'.
And yet Australia, which gave cash to tax payers instead of bank managers, did even better. But even though Australia completely avoided a technical recession, all they have done is delay the inevitable.
The $900 payout to people who earned less than A$90,000 didn't stop the recession in Australia. In fact nothing did. We had one, but we recovered in less than 12 months because of sensible banking regulations which meant none of our major banks needed public money. That combined with a sensible economic policy (which has remained virtually unchanged since the early 90's) and low levels of public debt meant that we rode out the GFC in a very short time.
The $900 "stimulus" was about boosting consumer confidence, which it did for a very short time but it wasn't a real fix.
HAHAHA. You don't understand the difference between statutory regulations and criminal law. Go look up the difference between the two and come back and have an informed discussion.
So regulations can be ignored.
By the sounds of it you are the one who needs to go and look up what a regulation is and how not following them can become a criminal offence.
The city of Rome do have a right to determine how people park, it's not a free for all. Above this, think about a persons business and having some arsehole park where customers usually sit/stand or in parking space that business has reserved (read: paid for) for his customers. Because that's where the majority of these complaints are coming from.
What are you 7 years old?
I'd say "What are you, 6 years old" but that would be an insult to six year olds, not only do they have a sense of right and wrong you seem to lack, they're also more considerate.
Last war the US military won was WW2 if I recount correctly.
I believe there was Granada.
Desert Storm (1) and the actions in Bosnia achieved their objectives. But these were limited conflicts that had end points defined well in advance (and in the case of Bosnia, had the backing of the entire European continent) unlike the current quagmires the US has got itself into. Kind of like Sun Tzu said, a victorious general wins first and then goes to war, a defeated general goes to war first and then tries to win. Afghanistan and and Iraq 2: Iraq Harder were not planned very well and had nebulous objectives, basically they went to war and then tried to win.
Slashdot Mirror
On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
Ahh, I'm beginning to see where Beta went so horribly wrong.
./'s content is user generated the loss of any significant portion of the user base will, for all intents and purposes kill the site.
UX is the HCI equivalent of homoeopathy. A horrible pseudo-science that kills.
If you want to fix bugs, fine. If you want to add features, good. If you want to wreck an interface that works and that your readers like, well that's not fine.
Your readers have spoken, you should be out the back burning all traces of Beta as I type this, including the people who designed it. When Gawker changed it's UI in 2011 it lost 80% of it's audience practically overnight. Considering that the majority of
Get rid of beta, go through the office with a torch and shotgun, target anyone who uses the term "UX".
BTW, I know that SoulSkill probably doesn't have any say in this and it's coming from the corporate overlorads at Dice, so this is not directed at him. Although he might enjoy the torch and shotgun part.
They (BMW) already have a lower-end model, it's called the Mini Cooper.
At the low end, BMW have the 1 series, which I don't think are available in the US.
Mini is a completely different badge altogether. Same with Smart (the cheap Merc's are the A class).
And the analogy falls apart when one considers that Apple isn't really a premium brand anyway.
This.
Apple is a luxury brand in the same way that VW is a luxury brand, it isn't. However this does not stop lot of people who buy a Golf GTI from pretending they have a European luxury car.
The Victorian police publish the locations of their cameras, they have done so for a number of years under both left and right wing state governments. Also every cop car is fitted with mobile radar that can record the speed of oncoming cars. As for flashing lights, it's almost mandatory these days, I do it myself to warn others to check their speed but few drivers would warn someone who is recklessly speeding, personally I only do it to "hoons" when there are no cops ahead ;).
At the end of the day advertising the locations via the web (or flashing lights) increases the effectiveness of cameras, and adds weight to the claim that the goal is to prevent speeding. The road signs we have here that say "red light camera ahead" make people think twice about racing the amber, a secret red-light camera merely records who caused the inevitable pile up.
The state of Western Australia goes one step further, not only do we publish speed camera locations (both fixed and mobile) the money from speed camera fines doesn't go to the government, it goes to the Road Trauma Trust Fund, which is used to fix and upgrade roads. Its worth noting this is only for speed camera fines, if a cop pulls you over it's still goes in the general revenue bucket.
Personally I have no problems with people warning others as it does encourage people to slow down.
I also have no problem with speed cameras and speed traps. I'm smart enough to know how to avoid them (not speeding is the most obvious) so I consider it a tax on dumb drivers. Realistically my choices are speeding fines or road tax, I'll take the fines as I cant legally avoid road tax.
I don't see how this is different from warning people not to break other laws.
In order for speed cameras and speed traps to work, they have to be visible. So realistically, warning people about speed traps are accomplishing the objective, slowing people down.
What I hate is the fact most drivers are so stupid, they slow down to 10 KPH under the speed limit as soon as someone flashes their lights. I'll happily drive past speed cameras doing the speed limit, haven't ever received a fine. Then again I don't speed either, I'm too busy watching for animals or pedestrians entering the road, cars changing lanes, suicide cyclists or just pain old idiot motorists to worry about looking for speed cameras.
But this is in England so it'll be:
"Oi Tubby, who ate ALL the pies"
Yes but the difference is, in Oxford it's much easier for your butler to make a healthy meal where as in Stokes, you have to go to McD's yourself.
Nothing is free, not least of all when you are obviously paying for it.
I can go to a doctor and not be out of pocket. That's free.
Now as for the taxation cost, that's a hell of a lot cheaper than private systems and better quality, I don't have to worry about the triage nurse having to do a credit check before stopping the bleeding.
Assertion without evidence. Correlation is not causation.
And you use the exact same assertion without evidence, except you're also using an appeal to authority.
There's plenty of evidence that prices rise after the privatisation of public utilities.
And I'm not. But do I get a choice in the matter?
You can leave. Farewell and I wish you luck in your libertarian paradise, if you can find one that isn't a despotic nightmare.
Otherwise you can accept the fact that you dont always get what you want, especially when the majority of the people in a democracy would rather have it differently.
If I don't like the way a business operates, I stop buying its products, and it ceases to affect me.
LoL, many businesses are set up that you cant do that. Especially in the US. Don't like the way petrol companies are colluding, erm... Public telco's, well they're the only one operating in your area.
If I don't like the way the government operates, I have to continue paying taxes to it anyway.
As above, you can leave. Even getting off the grid and living in some cabin in the woods would get you out of it. However you simply dont want to because it would require you to give up too many creature comforts you've grown accustomed to. This is less of a case of the GPP being wrong and more of a case of "waaahhhhh the world is not as I would like it". Well grow up and get over it.
The idea of paying a subscription for word processing is stupid.
That depends. Assuming you are going to pay for an Office suite vs use open source or free products, it can make very good financial sense for some people. If you need licenses for more than one machine and/or you like to upgrade often, then the 365 subscription can be a less expensive option. Yes, if you stop paying you can't keep the software but again, but that is something you need to consider before buying.
For example, I use 365 for Office Professional Plus and Visio. I have it installed on 4 PCs at the moment. I pay 12/mo for Office and 13/mo for Visio Pro. I use both of these for my job (Consultant). I use the business version ($12 vs $9/mo) because I use PowerPivot quite a bit. So, Office Pro is $399 per machine (Pro, not Pro Plus, which is not available retail). That's $1,596 for all four machines. Visio Pro is $589, so $2,356 total. It would take 133 months and 181 months respectively on 365 before I go into the red on rent vs buy. Now, with 365 I get all of the updates during that time, while I would have to purchase additional upgrades if I buy the software outright. I also don't have to deal with re-activating my software as I move from machine to machine. I just deauthorize it in my account settings and it free's up the license from that machine.
Uh huh.
I got Office Pro Plus for A$15 through work. If you're paying full retail prices for Office, you're doing it wrong. Also the full retail pro allows installation on three machines.
If that's the case, then it looks like GOG isn't actually doing any work that's worthy of protection.
If my mechanic were to rebuild an engine for me, should I have to pay the mechanic once for his time and materials or every time I use the engine in the next 25 years?
So GOG's work is not worthy of protection, but it is worthy of payment as they are providing a service which has value (not everyone wants to buggerise around with DOSBOX settings).
Brand protection MATTERS. It's worth hundreds of billions in the US alone. And that's a lot of jobs and a lot of livelihoods, which the government would be idiotic to ignore, especially if the only real opposition is flocking to torrents regardless the legal outcome.
Ignoring the idea that protecting brands are more important than advancing culture and the arts.
Brands aren't really protected by copyrights, they're protected by trade marks. The most valuable brands like Coca-cola or McDonalds don't really have that much copyrighted (in fact they benefit from a lack of copyright, locking up the use of McWhatever only harms the brand because to remain relevant and valuable, the brand has to remain on people's minds).
99 out of the top 100 most valuable brands sell products or services, only one was entertainment (Disney at #26). Copyrights don't really help brands.
If you can replace the storage with something larger, this makes a perfect, if not basic media player. Great if you don't want a bulky mATX box sitting under the telly.
However something tells me they used an internal SD Card for storage (like so many bare bones ESXi servers I get these days) so the upper limit on storage is pretty low ATM (IIRC, 128 GB)
Consider Spiderman.
The character was created in 1962, which puts it just over 50 years of existence. But the character is still being used in new and ongoing works. I expect that 100 years from now, the character will continue to exist in some form.
The problem is, the 60's spiderman comics are not in the public domain. As for Spiderman himself, that's a trademark which is different to copyright. You can have works in the public domain that are still protected by trademarks.
Copyright prevents me from publishing a copy of a 1964 spiderman comic, trademarks prevent me from making my own spiderman comic. The only thing is, trademarks need to be maintained (as you said, new Spiderman works are being created).
You say Orwellian, but it's also what everybody on Star Trek lives with. The computer keeps track of every person on the ship, their location, and their vital signs, and never seems to require command-level authorization to dispense information. Any kid can query the computer and it'll respond "Counselor Troi is in Commander Worf's quarters. Her heart rate is accelerated and her pulmonary system is taxed." And we think of Star Trek as a utopian ideal.
The difference is, in Star Trek no one really cared what you were doing, let alone what you were doing for every minute of every day. You could essentially get on with whatever you wanted. Thats why we think its a utopian ideal, an information of total information availability that was free of micro managers.
Also the Enterprise was essentially a military vessel, but if you didn't like it you could leave.
This isn't hypothetical. Company towns in the past were owned by a corporation which provided essentially all government functions. Quite the libertarian paradise.
Company towns didn't just provide all the government functions, they provided all the commercial functions too. You worked for the company, you bought everything you had from the company, you paid tax to the company, the entire system was designed to funnel as much money back into the company as it could. Prices were easily adjusted to ensure that living expenses exceded wages, but that's OK because the company owned bank was there to give everyone a loan.
It was a libertarian wet dream.
As an Australian with some ability to read and the knowledge that this "waste" is sand sucked up from the seabed a short distance away
As an Australian with quite an ability to read, the ability to think and quite a bit of understanding on the subject, the "waste" is called silt and being quite fine (extremely fine sand) tends to travel quite a distance when dumped... This is why it cant be dumped closer to Abbott point, because it'll go straight back into the channel they were dredging.
So dumping it on the great barrier reef is easier as transporting it to a safe dumping zone is expensive.
You seem to think it's OK because it's sand, this is where your understanding of the subject ends, coral you see doesn't do too well when sand gets dumped on it and 25 KM away is definitely not far enough to ensure the silt does not reach the reef. Realistically the expansion at Abbott point should never have been approved.
No, the purpose of the dredging operation is to expand the coal port at Abbott Point.
The problem is that they're ignoring legitimate environmental concerns (and to the barrier reef, silt is waste) for financial convenience because it would cost more to dump it somewhere else that isn't right next a fragile ecosystem.
You are attempting to oversimplify things because you cant understand the real concerns here.
You are also attempting to prevent legitimate rebuttals of your point by attacking the person and using thought terminating cliches because your point isn't strong enough to stand on it's own merits.
You do know that if I said I was dumping a million tonnes of rubble on your house, and then actually dumped it 25km away, your house wouldn't be crushed, right?
Only a tiny amount of the crap you dump needs to get to my house in order for it to be damaged and become unliveable.
There's a good reason they don't dump a million tonnes of rubble near residential zones. the dust kicked up alone would play havoc with local residents.
As for Tasmania, almost 50% of the entire state is currently world heritage listed. I don't think de-listing a fraction of a percent of that is going to cause much damage.
Again, there are good reasons for this. There isn't another environment like Tasmania in the world. But developing sustainable forestry is hard and cutting down old growth is easy. No point in even trying sustainable forestry (not like we're running out of old growth now are we).
25 KM will easily be covered by currents.
Implying that the current flows from the dump site towards the reef?
Implying that things in the water will only go one way?
Along with currents you also have sea life and humans that will also move detritus quite easily.
You might not be familiar with water, but things dumped in the water (especially particulate matter like silt) rarely stays where you dump it.
And by "reef", they mean a patch of silt 25km away from the actual reef.
You do know that 25 KM is not a long distance, it's only 17 miles if you're not competent with metric measurements.
25 KM will easily be covered by currents.
The federal Australian government is also attempting to have the old growth forests in Tasmania de-listed as a world heritage area so they can log there.
I'd like to say I'm categorically not OK with dumping waste here.
Sadly the state and federal governments are completely ignoring what the majority of the people want.
Well, the recession was so short exactly because the payout helped - you can't expect such policy measures to act immediately. And no, tougher banking regulations were not the reason - Europe in general had similar regulations, yet they didn't help. Public debt also has no direct relation to recovery - Spain had very little public debt (and it was running surpluses for many years), for example.
Actually it didn't help in the long term. It was a short term fix that did nothing to address the fundamental problems (which was the fact if a banker in New York farts, the markets in Australia panic). It was a short term boost to sales which doesn't do anything in the long run (I kept my $900 in the bank). The US tried doing the same three times and it didn't help them.
Also, Europe did not have similar regulations, they may have had tougher regulations but they were the wrong regulations. Australian banks had limits about how much they could lend vs how much they had in assets as well as rules on how much they had to keep in liquid assets (again relative to how much they could lend) which made the conditions that created the sub prime crisis in the US and Europe impossible to have in Australia.
If you don't understand this, you have no idea how the banking regulations in Australia work.
The reason that Australia went through a brief period of recession is because our market is interdependent on other markets (most notably the US market) so when things went belly up there, it had a huge effect here. But because the same conditions weren't replicated here, nor in China we were able to recover very quickly.
I dont disagree with Labor's stimulus package, it helped out a lot of Australians in a time of extreme uncertainty, but don't kid yourself that it had any lasting effect on the economy as a whole.
*Paper* money will survive washing machines.
Technically US banknotes are made out of cloth more than paper.
But the GP has a very good point about durability. Polymer banknotes last up to 4 times so the reserve bank (RBA) has to print fewer notes (one of the RBA's jobs is destroying old notes and replacing them with new ones).
Nope. US Fed did what is required from the start, so the recession in the US turned out to be far more shallow than in Europe (where the ECB blundered for several years). In Japan it's the contrast is even more stark - after a decade of slow stagnation and deflation (or near-deflation) they started growing almost immediately after the central bank and the government decided to be 'irresponsible'.
And yet Australia, which gave cash to tax payers instead of bank managers, did even better. But even though Australia completely avoided a technical recession, all they have done is delay the inevitable.
The $900 payout to people who earned less than A$90,000 didn't stop the recession in Australia. In fact nothing did. We had one, but we recovered in less than 12 months because of sensible banking regulations which meant none of our major banks needed public money. That combined with a sensible economic policy (which has remained virtually unchanged since the early 90's) and low levels of public debt meant that we rode out the GFC in a very short time.
The $900 "stimulus" was about boosting consumer confidence, which it did for a very short time but it wasn't a real fix.
HAHAHA. You don't understand the difference between statutory regulations and criminal law. Go look up the difference between the two and come back and have an informed discussion.
So regulations can be ignored.
By the sounds of it you are the one who needs to go and look up what a regulation is and how not following them can become a criminal offence.
The city of Rome do have a right to determine how people park, it's not a free for all. Above this, think about a persons business and having some arsehole park where customers usually sit/stand or in parking space that business has reserved (read: paid for) for his customers. Because that's where the majority of these complaints are coming from.
What are you 7 years old?
I'd say "What are you, 6 years old" but that would be an insult to six year olds, not only do they have a sense of right and wrong you seem to lack, they're also more considerate.
Last war the US military won was WW2 if I recount correctly.
I believe there was Granada.
Desert Storm (1) and the actions in Bosnia achieved their objectives. But these were limited conflicts that had end points defined well in advance (and in the case of Bosnia, had the backing of the entire European continent) unlike the current quagmires the US has got itself into. Kind of like Sun Tzu said, a victorious general wins first and then goes to war, a defeated general goes to war first and then tries to win. Afghanistan and and Iraq 2: Iraq Harder were not planned very well and had nebulous objectives, basically they went to war and then tried to win.