Re: I heard ...
That's joke is fowl. I am not emused.
333 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2008
"I personally disagree with sanctions, because they're indiscriminate: They affect (and punish) everyone in society"
This is just factually incorrect. The sanctions in relation to Russia are not country-wide sanctions. They are highly targeted against a couple of industries and then a series of key individuals and corporations. It remains entirely legal to trade with, lend money to, and invest in the vast majority of Russian businesses.
It is not true. The so-called "triple talaq" divorce was banned everywhere except India ages ago, and in India was found unconstitutional a couple of months ago.
There is no true confession app in the Catholic tradition, as confession requires a personal dialogue between the person making the confession and the person receiving it.
"The air temperature was below -10°C, and the urinal was a porcelain wall covered in a thick layer of ice. I'll never forget peeing onto that surface and seeing the trickle freezing before it reached the bottom."
As someone who grew up in a city where it regularly hit -20c in winter i feel confident in saying that detail of the story is absolute pish.
This is unfortunately wrong. American jails have large numbers of people in them (mostly poor people of colour) who have been charged with crimes that are not "very serious", and they're too poor to post bail. Prosecutors and public defenders are hopelessly overloaded, so people are kept in pretrial detention for absurdly long times. It's an outrage.
http://gothamist.com/2017/05/18/bail_still_wrong.php
"The total tax paid is the same, it may just be distributed differently. "
Not if the level of tax the person is paying is lower than the UK rate of tax. Income tax in Russia is 13%; it's zero in the UAE; it's 0-39% in Florida (based on federal income tax); all of those rates are lower than in the U.K. Making people who don't live in the UK pay UK income tax could substantially increase their tax payments. If it didn't increase their tax obligations, there'd be no point in doing it because it wouldn't raise any money!
"You can use the card to sign an electronic document in a legally binding way, for example. That's in itself is something many people might find very useful."
Not really in Britain, it's not. Documents "signed" by email or using e-signatures are already legally binding (in almost all cases - there are certainly some exceptions).
I don't know anything about Estonian law but I assume (!) it's a civil law country in which notaries public are used to record/formalise contracts, leases etc fairly regularly. If the electronic ID card replaces that need and they already have a mandatory ID card system - well, great, I suppose.
But in the UK, ID cards and electronic voting are solutions looking for a problem. We got on fine without them. Paper voting is cheap, easy and works pretty well. It's no surprise that the biggest proponents are like Malloch-Brown, who sells the machines!
but maybe close enough?
El Reg's original report noted that services across London were affected and "Holborn is home to a BT switching station".
OTOH, this is all premised on a comment by a retired cop who has never heard of an electricity network fire that large. I don't think he's lying, but would he have heard of it? I mean, it would be a bit more meaningful if a power network manager (or whatever) said they'd never heard of a fire that size. If a network engineer said he'd never heard of a diamond theft that big, no-one would pay much attention because her/his expertise isn't in that field...
But it's a load of bollocks. The organisation that publishes the most "health and safety myths" press releases each year is...the HSE.
It's nonsense that cheese rollers are restricted. Jump off cliffs, ride mountain bikes down steep hills, run through moors at night - it's all out there for you to do.
"The 1% are terrified of a similar situation that happened in the old Soviet Union in the early 90's happening elsewhere."
What, you mean a situation where practically the whole wealth of a state is transferred into the hands of a tiny number of people for nothing? Yeah, I bet they're petrified...
"the BBC offers no solution for the miners except take away their income..."
Your comment is like the section in the original article that said:
"And if we decide that we're just not going to buy our tin from there any more then this option won't exist and they'll have to fall back onto those worse ones. It's hard to see how this would make the world a better place."
Both of these suggestions are remarkably stupid. This is not a binary BUY/DON'T BUY situation; there is a third option, which is to keep buying but improve transparency, introduce monitoring, raise labour standards, raise environmental standards, remove the corruption, keep people employed. This is exactly the same process that is happening with textiles over the last two decades after the sweatshop campaigns, with diamonds after the Kimberley Process, with forestry and so on. There is nothing new or radical about this proposition.
You and Tim Worstall would, in 19th Century Lancashire, presumably be suggesting that if little Timmy is stopped from working at t'mill with a pretty good chance of losing a finger a week, linens won't get made and everyone will be out of a job. History shows otherwise.
To turn the question around - are you seriously suggesting that a supply chain with systemic labour abuse, environmental damage, theft and corruption is the best and only arrangement?
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(By the way, I don't think it's the BBC's job to offer solutions for fixing Apple's supply chain any more than it is their job to propose a solution to the war in Syria. Panorama is a news reporting programme - they report the news.)
"Maybe they should just commandeer those drones and use them for observation. "
In principle that's not a bad idea, but in practice I would have thought your average Rural Fire Service firefighter in the middle of a bushfire has better things to do (like stay alive and protect life and property) than firing up the ol' Acer laptop and trying to hack CSI-style into some inconsiderate person's drone.
I think you're off the mark.
On one hand, the person to whom you're responding has obviously completely misconstrued the "Dewey" joke. The joke is that the firm's name sounds like "Do we cheat 'em? And how!", which doesn't work if you pronounce Dewey with a J.
On the other hand, if you don't see how raking over tired Shylock and "media control" stereotypes is anti-Semitic, then you're bonkers (and probably haven't read much Shakespeare, either).
...I got so fed up with morons yelling that I now carry a large machete that I wave at people that whose behaviour I don't care for. It has a range of about 25m, and now I can travel on Public Transport in peace and quiet (once the initial screaming has subsided). it's also useful in meetings, at the cinema or theatre and so on. It's (sort of) antisocial I suppose, but a lot less antisocial than being assailed by the usual racket made by people going about their normal lives in public places.
It doesn't make sense because Brisbane isn't a heavily populated metropolitan area by any global standard - it's a poxy 2 million people that's a day's truck drive away from the next market of any significance, which is Sydney. In addition to being small, Brisbane also has high wages and high shipping costs - three things that are anathema to Amazon's model.