Posts by James 51

Re: Cooperation

Assuming every person who ever went into space was alive today, you could fit them all into a smallish conference room. To gather together every person who ever directly worked on getting them into space, you'd need a city. Possible several cities and if you go further down the supply chain, a small country. The supreme effort required to get a person safely into space is simply too great for it to be an option for the vast majority of humanity. We need new technologies which reduce the amount of effort required to get people and the stuff they need to survive into space.

The version I heard of that story was that the photos of Russian equipment were poor quality, long shots, blurry, that kind of thing and the photos of NATO equipment was in focus with good white balance etc etc. The system learned to tell if shots were in focus, not blurry etc etc, it ignored the miltary hardware in the shot.

Re: U S NAY

I know there's the straight mouth icon between the happy and unhappy emoticons but it just isn't meh'y enough for me.

Re: South China Sea? What?

The lights and heating won't go off if access to the South China Sea was somehow cut off but it contains important shipping lanes, mineral wealth and China's imperialist aggression (not to mention environmental vandalism) is threatening to destabilise the region. We’re sending freedom of navigation missions mostly as a favour to the US.

Re: Guardian 2.0

I spotted the their/they're mistake afterwards, too late for an edit but it does bother me.

Re: Guardian 2.0

It is which is why we can see the nonsense of billionaires saying their for brexit for the little man and not for themselves.

Re: What's the problem?

There are no tariffs on the food from the EU. You cannot go lower than zero and food from everywhere else is going to have higher transport costs and tariffs on them. UK farmers cannot produce enough food to feed the country so some will have to be imported no matter what it costs. If farmers here cannot produce food for cheaper than it is imported then that industry will collapse unless it goes up market and sells there products as luxury food worth the extra costs. Russia blocked a lot of food imports from the EU after the EU imposed sanctions on Russia after things like invading Crimea. The UK was a big driving force in that so I expect that we would be slapped with those sanctions too after we leave. Ironically the more authoritarian regimes in the EU were against the sanctions and might be able to get them lifted after the UK leaves, leaving the EU in the position that they can now sell their CAP subsidised produce to Russia but we cannot. Meaning that we have tariffs into the EU making our food more expensive there, cannot sell it to Russia and have to start shipping it further afield driving up costs. The alternative is to put tariffs on all imported food so people buy British first protecting British farmers but harms relationships with those countries, reducing the incentive for them to lower tariffs to our products and of course driving up the price of food for everyone.

While being able to decide to drop tariffs on products and drop immigration quotas allowing unlimited access to the rest of the world would be an example of exercising control, that is not how the tabloids would represent it.

BTW bleached chicken does not meet safety standards and is illegal in the EU and there are a number of papers by economists that highlight the fallacy of allowing a small number of people to sell their safety. Soon it drives down standards and therefore endangers everyone.