Posts by strum 1172 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2009
A better solution would to acknowledge the damage that this asinine approach does to you, me and every 'decent' member of society.
Those convicts that you consign to inhuman conditions will, one day, be released into society. If they are then inhuman towards you - you have no-one to blame but yourself.
>I think it's a demonstrable fallacy that users get sufficient value from free products, such as Gmail or Facebook etc. The torrent of data generated has value far outweighing the service provided and it's time to balance the benefits .
Not necessarily disagreeing with you - but can you actually demonstrate that?
My location data has infinitesmal value to Google (it's only worth anything when aggregated with lots of other data). Only rarely does it have any value to me (where the hell am I?).
OK, it's a bit annoying when I get ads that purport to 'know' what I really want from life, but if that's the worst that happens to me today - I'll live with it.
I'd be much more concerned about 'down-the-line' users of my data - phishers, gummints etc. - so I'd be much happier if the gatherer of my data had a responsibility (to me) to protect it.
>I supported adopting the Euro.
Me too. What people miss is that the Euro+Sterling would have been a much, much stronger entity than the Euro alone. It would, almost certainly, have become the leading petro-currency, and replaced the USD as a trading currency in many parts of the world.
This heavyweight currency might still have suffered from the US-created Great Recession, but a combination of Euro strength and London nous might well have eased the pain.
> We might even end up with a trade deal with China before the EU get one!
Only if we're prepared to concede more to the Chinese than the EU is prepared to.
That's the thing with sovereignty fantasists - they don't realise that every international treaty is a loss of sovereignty, in which the lesser power loses more than the greater power.
>The ball is now in the EU's court.
The delusion with this one is strong.
The EU have laid out their position, unambiguously and in detail. The UK hasn't demonstrated that it has a clue.
There are a thousand and one issues on which the EU's position needs no review - they simply continue as they are. Every one of them needs re-thinking by UK - with no evidence that the UK has even started adding them up.
>expanding NATO right up to Russia's border
Here's the thing. Everything behind that border is his business. Everything on this side isn't.
NATO didn't wrest the Baltic states, unwillingly, from its Soviet masters; they were only too happy to be able to make their own decisions - one of which was to join NATO.
Hang on - just because a USB can contain malware doesn't mean we should ditch them entirely. As long as the sender takes reasonable steps to ensure that no malware is included, there's nothing wrong with sending out large chunks of data/progs on them.
What's the alternative? A heavy-duty website? Doncha know, there's malware on websites too!
>Public transport is conceptually flawed, based on the weird assumption that everybody has the same requirements
Yet there are traffic jams, all over the country, because huge numbers of people want to go from (roughly) the same place to another same place.
Increasingly, as autonomous(ish) vehicles can take public transport passengers the last mile or so, it will be private transport that fades away.
>if a retailer monitors competitors and sets prices to be the same as them, competition is removed
No. That's 'perfect competition', where competitors adjust their prices according to other competitors (and purchaser's actions). Competition is lost if the retailers agree a price they will all set.
>Everyone will be worse off
Except that, in the real world, everyone benefits (because those low-paid workers spend their new-found wealth, thereby boosting the economy). That's what happened in 1998, when the minimum wage was introduced (to choruses of doom-saying employers, predicting the opposite).
>It is about as onerous as running the electoral rolls and ballot papers through a scanner, followed by OCR and full-text search.
That would be running ~50,000 folded sheets of paper through a scanner (and re-loading every 20 sheets, as the scanner clogged up).
>But really, the complainant does seem to be splitting hairs. "We're not accused of criminal fraud, we're accused of investment fraud! Totally different type of fraud!
You demonstrate the problem. There's no evidence (here) that the company was accused of any kind of fraud. They might well have been the target of investment fraud. Yet you have jumped to a conclusion, based solely on the juxtaposition of a few words in a Google result.
>I gave up watching it over a decade ago
So, how do you know what it's like now? (I suspect you're fibbing.)
What people keep forgetting is that Horizon (and other science progs) aren't aimed at people who already know the science - but at people who might be interested, if they are suitably engaged.
>It's not particularly democratic
It's significantly more democratic than the British system.
The Commission are, effectively, the civil service, led by the equivalent of Cabinet ministers (except that the Commissioners have to be approved by the European Parliament).
The EU Parliament is much more representative than Westminster (and of course, we have the ludicrous House of Lords to explain away, too).
One factor - the likelihood of voting isn't just an abstract number. A major function of a party organisation is 'getting the vote out' - not just by exhorting them to do so, but my sending cars/buses round to take voters to the polls.
That was Labour's not-so-secret weapon - the largest party membership in the world, mostly enthusiastic, mostly mobile.
>each of the 650 constituences votes for someone to represent them , and that person votes on issues according to what his people want
They'll all happily vote for the goodies to be handed out - but they'll be less happy to vote to pay the bill for them.
That's the thing - government requires *both* - and that requires a plan, a manifesto (and party heavies to enforce it).
>I find it especially distasteful when they attempt to present themselves as caring people wanting to make a difference etc
In my experience, nearly all of them do want to make a difference. But they need to be (re-)elected before they can do squat.
If electorates responded to reasoned arguments, then that's what they'd get. But they don't - so they get Murdoch.
>A politician thinks of one thing only.
I think you'll find that they think about an awful lot of things. But most of them mean nothing, if not elected.
Very few of them are 'troughing at the public purse'. Mostly, they're just trying to get enough spondulicks to run a campaign - to get elected (which is where we came in).
>Multiple parties and entities within the US have been trying every way they could think of for decades to sway and skew elections.
Often successfully. But their actions have opened up avenues of approach and habits of acceptance which have made it much easier for a combination of foreign interference and the usual corrupt oligarchs to make the USA's democracy something of a global laughing stock.
Hillary:
1. Has been under Republican attack for 20 years. They hate her, even more than they hate Bill. The Lewinski affair only emerged because Starr was trying to skewer her for Whitewater (and failed)
2. Yet she won the majority of votes (by some margin).
Meanwhile, Trump has been in power for nearly six months, with a compliant House & Congress, and has achieved the square root of fuck all.
> That is just not how science is done.
Bollocks. Everyday science is all about consensus. No-one building a plane/rocket/artillery shell sets out to re-test Newton or Einstein. Instead, he/she relies on consensus amongst those who have studied these theories.
DOnald Trump is not Galileo.
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