An economy needs productive investment to grow, and too much unproductive investment is a drag. The infuriating fact is that the public purse is now burdened with a crippling load of debt incurred mainly by badly run banks. The citizenry did not deserve this. The purpose of urgent bank bailouts was to provide them with working capital, not to replenish bank assets, and certainly not to preserve the plum jobs of those to blame for losing their shareholders' money. The governments who have bailed out banks should insist on a much bigger say in their management, and never hesitate to slaughter top banking executives in the way. (Any fool knows they are expendable.) The new owners may take the sword to remaining 'bonuses', too. More suggestions: let banking staff be shifted into cheaper premises and lose their perks, such as company cars. As Churchill would have liked to put it, bankers should be forced to taste and gulp, in ever increasing amounts, a share of the misery they have brought on the world. (check my quote) Finally, as you may have guessed by now, I am no admirer of overpaid bank johnnies.
A country as wealthy as Britain is (or was before 2009) can support a ‘safety net’, but maintaining a lifestyle by public welfare is both unaffordable and unjust, especially at the present fiscal juncture. Excessive welfare usually leads to a taxpayer revolt (Conservative reaction) or a union-led campaign of aggressive wage demands (Labour reaction). One stealthy way to deal with the problem is a little inflation and a lot of tax-bracket creep. Provided, that is, welfare itself is not indexed.
"Unless you arrive by plane, right?"
Wrong.
The same conditions apply to plane arrivals as boat arrivals. In the unlikely event that someone can board an international flight without valid passport, or missed out on the initial visa check, he would be detained on arrival at the airport by Immigration and taken to the closest immigration detention centre. (or else, put on a plane out, if administratively possible) That is the law.
In fact, The bulk of illegal immigrants in Australia (maybe, everywhere) would be legally arrived tourists who overstayed their visas. Yes, the authorities do, indeed, try to find them and deport them.
Did you think otherwise? Methinks Malcolm Fraser has a bit to answer for. After excoriating immigration detention as imprisonment, Fraser now tells us that a detention centre run by the UNHCR is OK. Fraser has the track record to deliver lectures in hypocrisy, all right.
coloured language watch:
"dumped on Nauru";meaning: looked after, given food, clothing and shelter, along with the best medical attention they ever had, incidentally on a small tropical island, amid palm trees. In quality of accommodation, the "camps" on Christmas Island, if not the others, would compare very well with many youth hostels.
"...no limit on the time that people could be held there." Either they will be held there or held on the mainland. Or they could be deported to where they came from, or taken in as migrants. "Held" does not mean imprisoned. It means the Minister takes responsibility for the vagabonds of spurious origin. They are at liberty to leave, whatever their motives. What is the meaning of a time limit? Do persons being rescued from the sea merit the right to set time limits on their satisfaction?
They are not being detained because they "boarded boats", as you loosely put it, but because they made landing without travel documents, passports or papers. Increasingly, they are also being picked up from distressed boats. There is no human right to breach borders.
The article does not explain well the Pacific Solution and the fact that in Howard's time, the rights to access Australian courts were not available on Christmas Island et al., but are today.
Hence, there will be no shortage of work for lawyers, as long as budgets are big enough.
whatever their age, it is very hard (no, impossible) to feel any sympathy for double-income households, especially those unions whose members are driven by “career ambition”. They made their own beds to lie in. I would spare far more concern for the unemployed out there- is it 75 million now? - in the OECD alone.
You do not explain why or how the UK should dishonour its obligations to uphold an extradititon order on behalf of Swedish authorities. Those are binding obliations, according to treaty. If the Swedes ticked all the boxes, the UK has no choice but to enforce the order. To resist extradition, Assange reportedly has already exhausted his legal processes but the UK courts have not found in his favour. Assange had his chance to state in Court all the arguments you and others present here.
Oh, probably some covert back-room deal done over a whisky and a bribe quietly passed across to the right official. But why not call up Assange on the consular phone number, and ask him if he has something on it in his 400,000 confidential files?Surely, he must be able to find something, whether accurate or not. As Assange noted, the truth will win in the end.
I agree with your hypothesis, though I lack the science for it. The human alimentary canal is an adaptive organ, and is capable of coping with recolonisation of its bacterial population. One is tempted to theorise this explains diversity in human diets and must have something to do with food allergies. Some medical writers, such as Doctor Mercola (see website), believe in metabolic typing, and argue that individuals need to consider their positions on the spectrum between vegan and carnivore.
Intriguing!
pleased to see someone takes a stand for quality writing. I hope a proof-reader would also detect the 'attenuating circumstances.' (said Ms Samutsevich) Whatever the original was in Russian, it definitely makes better sense as 'extenuating circumstances."
If you want to protest at the political establishment and state of democracy in Russia, there must surely be more promising ways and better targets than upsetting a religious congregation. That being said, I hope the defendants get off with a suspended sentence; - if the Russian legal system allows that option.
Funny that no mention is made of gender. Are men in USA more likely to be obese than women? Maybe the statistics are gathered in the full survey. As a sweeping generalisation, men are far more complacent with being big in all directions than women are. Women - even when not overweight- seem to be more willing to talk about dieting than men, and definitely get more upset when chided about their weight than men do.
If those cheap solar panels can be made in India, then the proposition is probably feasible. But one doubts India would want to import billions of watts of solar panels from China. Hm, village solar power stations: I do not know what Indians pay for electricity, but by the time solar panels become that cheap, they will be predominant in the OECD (not to mention China). At present solar panels supply scarcely 1% of total demand in the rich man's bloc. Careful analysis of the proposal will reveal other debatable assumptions, including the one that supplying much solar-generated electricity during daylight hours will do anything to alleviate night-time shortages, or help the stressed 'macro' system cope with peak demand spikes. Renewables are best seen as a fuel saver.I would not panic about the situation.
'chose to live closer to where they worked'...
All good in theory. If only we always had the luxury of choice. A former employer was located quite close to my home, but then pulled out all its offices to an industrial park 20 km away. No choice there. A friend of mine worked within walking distance of her home, but recently lost that job, when the company retrenched. The upshot is that she is now forced to travel for an hour by car to get to work. Not her choice, but better than unemployment.
What is the answer? Move house and relocate, trusting your employer stays put? Cars provide a worker some independence from mass transit. Hence they will be valued.
This problem is bigger than Angela Merkel. If one can be permitted an(other) extravagant metaphor, then Euroland is a crumbling structure just holding up - for now. We can identify the unsound bricks and sagging beams making up the structure. We can perceive its obvious weaknesses, but we are fearful of extracting those weak supporting bricks, ere the whole building comes crashing down. Thus, we throw more precious resources into maintaining the unsound bricks to stave off collapse. Meanwhile, even as we see that collapse is increasingly likely, we waste our time and energies on analysis paralysis. Is that a fair picture? (I ain't European by the way)
"Necessary" does not mean sufficient. Provided a student has a sense of direction, sound ambition and pesonal dedication, university can be a great benefit. Trouble is, all those attributes would be uncommon in a 18- year- old freshman. There is an element of consumerism in a university education now. It is being sold like an investment to those who have to pay for it. One argument, specious, but common among academics with vested interests, is that "everyone has a right to a tertiary education and should not be denied the chance owing to inability to pay". Hmm. Convinced now? Just hand over your money and shut up then.
The subject is radiophobia. Radiation, like electricity, is an invisible, insensible hazard. You can't detect it by the senses, but must rely on technology to be aware of it. That observation itself justifies a certain amount of fear. By the same token, about 200 (or so) Japanese die annually of electrocution, but this does not disturb politicians or the public. Anyone who suggested banning electricity would be called a crackpot. Certainly, many more die of electrocution than from radiation poisoning.
Radiophobia also makes people uneasy when they know that the hazard is lingering over many years, and the health effects could also take years to manifest themselves. Those fears are valid.
As at Chernobyl individual exposure to ten or twenty times normal background radiation may be less harmful than smoking, but those who are told to be frightened about it would rather not take their chances.
I do not take sides; I merely make observations about radiophobia.
I happen to straddle two disciplines- the technical and the literary, holding two engineering degrees and working for some years as a professional technical writer.
Some time ago, my studies of artificial intelligence and expert systems stimulated my interest in natural language computer programming, which I once predicted could soon become a game-changer in the IT industry. It was not to be, and this article helps to explain why.
Natural languages, such as English, pay for their versatility with a loss of precision and clarity. Additionally, natural languages impose overhead charges for meta-data (punctuation, etc.) Further, they operate in a different world from the world of computer languages. Redundancy, as you point out, assists the reader of prose to overcome errors. But error-tolerant computing has absorbed much research energy for rather little benefit to the end-user. Every mistake must be painstakingly rectified.
The real challenge, in my view, is not syntax but semantics, and the article scarcely scratches the surface on that subject. Computers can't understand natural language because they lack a world view - common sense if you will. Another common-sense problem matters: the motive behind communication; to persuade, inform or merely entertain. How is a computer to guess which motive ?
A semblance of Artificial Intelligence, such as researched at MIT some 30 years back (Winograd et al), was achieved by limiting the world model to a strictly defined domain; - in one set of experiments, to a table full of blocks being moved by a robot. I was once inspired by science fiction and could imagine being able to effortlessly converse with a machine. But demonstrations of that type of man/machine communication tend to depend on a fragile illusion of “machine understanding”. Gimmickry, in other words. Many industry gurus would argue that talking naturally - and effectively - to a computer is impossible. I think they are probably right.
Returning from the computer realm to dry land, I agree with Wiens’ sentiments. Poor written expression is more irritating than poor dressing. Carelessness can't be disguised as creativity. Those who write carelessly should lose their poets’ licences.
I have never been to Brazil, so offer no special insight on the country. But I do take note of its recent transition from a struggling third-world economy to an emergent economy. That transition may well explain the rise in the status of Brazilian women, which is the theme of the article. It only shows the importance of continued economic growth as a way to dissolve these archaic obstacles.
Some of your other points require more study. Could the rapid promotion of women into high positions within the Brazilian bureaucracy be an astute policy antidote to corruption? You would be more surprised to find a woman convicted of serious fraud or grand larceny than a man, wouldn't you? Women's motivations differ from those of men and as one admirable US author, Irma Kurtz, put it, in business, women's capacity for satisfaction is less than men's, while her potential for regret is bigger.(if I quote accurately) [I am not writing a political essay but a brief comment, drawing on a lifetime of observations to conclude that men and women are different, at some important level.]
As if bankers did not already have enough to be ashamed of. Ridiculously over-rewarded commercial animals with warped values, unworthy of the trust placed in them; definition of banksters.
An economy needs productive investment to grow, and too much unproductive investment is a drag. The infuriating fact is that the public purse is now burdened with a crippling load of debt incurred mainly by badly run banks. The citizenry did not deserve this. The purpose of urgent bank bailouts was to provide them with working capital, not to replenish bank assets, and certainly not to preserve the plum jobs of those to blame for losing their shareholders' money. The governments who have bailed out banks should insist on a much bigger say in their management, and never hesitate to slaughter top banking executives in the way. (Any fool knows they are expendable.) The new owners may take the sword to remaining 'bonuses', too. More suggestions: let banking staff be shifted into cheaper premises and lose their perks, such as company cars. As Churchill would have liked to put it, bankers should be forced to taste and gulp, in ever increasing amounts, a share of the misery they have brought on the world. (check my quote) Finally, as you may have guessed by now, I am no admirer of overpaid bank johnnies.
A country as wealthy as Britain is (or was before 2009) can support a ‘safety net’, but maintaining a lifestyle by public welfare is both unaffordable and unjust, especially at the present fiscal juncture. Excessive welfare usually leads to a taxpayer revolt (Conservative reaction) or a union-led campaign of aggressive wage demands (Labour reaction). One stealthy way to deal with the problem is a little inflation and a lot of tax-bracket creep. Provided, that is, welfare itself is not indexed.
"Unless you arrive by plane, right?"
Wrong.
The same conditions apply to plane arrivals as boat arrivals. In the unlikely event that someone can board an international flight without valid passport, or missed out on the initial visa check, he would be detained on arrival at the airport by Immigration and taken to the closest immigration detention centre. (or else, put on a plane out, if administratively possible) That is the law.
In fact, The bulk of illegal immigrants in Australia (maybe, everywhere) would be legally arrived tourists who overstayed their visas. Yes, the authorities do, indeed, try to find them and deport them.
Did you think otherwise? Methinks Malcolm Fraser has a bit to answer for. After excoriating immigration detention as imprisonment, Fraser now tells us that a detention centre run by the UNHCR is OK. Fraser has the track record to deliver lectures in hypocrisy, all right.
coloured language watch:
"dumped on Nauru";meaning: looked after, given food, clothing and shelter, along with the best medical attention they ever had, incidentally on a small tropical island, amid palm trees. In quality of accommodation, the "camps" on Christmas Island, if not the others, would compare very well with many youth hostels.
"...no limit on the time that people could be held there." Either they will be held there or held on the mainland. Or they could be deported to where they came from, or taken in as migrants. "Held" does not mean imprisoned. It means the Minister takes responsibility for the vagabonds of spurious origin. They are at liberty to leave, whatever their motives. What is the meaning of a time limit? Do persons being rescued from the sea merit the right to set time limits on their satisfaction?
They are not being detained because they "boarded boats", as you loosely put it, but because they made landing without travel documents, passports or papers. Increasingly, they are also being picked up from distressed boats. There is no human right to breach borders.
The article does not explain well the Pacific Solution and the fact that in Howard's time, the rights to access Australian courts were not available on Christmas Island et al., but are today.
Hence, there will be no shortage of work for lawyers, as long as budgets are big enough.
whatever their age, it is very hard (no, impossible) to feel any sympathy for double-income households, especially those unions whose members are driven by “career ambition”. They made their own beds to lie in. I would spare far more concern for the unemployed out there- is it 75 million now? - in the OECD alone.
You do not explain why or how the UK should dishonour its obligations to uphold an extradititon order on behalf of Swedish authorities. Those are binding obliations, according to treaty. If the Swedes ticked all the boxes, the UK has no choice but to enforce the order. To resist extradition, Assange reportedly has already exhausted his legal processes but the UK courts have not found in his favour. Assange had his chance to state in Court all the arguments you and others present here.
Oh, probably some covert back-room deal done over a whisky and a bribe quietly passed across to the right official. But why not call up Assange on the consular phone number, and ask him if he has something on it in his 400,000 confidential files?Surely, he must be able to find something, whether accurate or not. As Assange noted, the truth will win in the end.
Pro-biotics and pre-biotics are already on the shelves of health food stores. Spirulina and chlorella are the names of natural pre-biotics.
I agree with your hypothesis, though I lack the science for it. The human alimentary canal is an adaptive organ, and is capable of coping with recolonisation of its bacterial population. One is tempted to theorise this explains diversity in human diets and must have something to do with food allergies. Some medical writers, such as Doctor Mercola (see website), believe in metabolic typing, and argue that individuals need to consider their positions on the spectrum between vegan and carnivore.
Intriguing!
pleased to see someone takes a stand for quality writing. I hope a proof-reader would also detect the 'attenuating circumstances.' (said Ms Samutsevich) Whatever the original was in Russian, it definitely makes better sense as 'extenuating circumstances."
If you want to protest at the political establishment and state of democracy in Russia, there must surely be more promising ways and better targets than upsetting a religious congregation. That being said, I hope the defendants get off with a suspended sentence; - if the Russian legal system allows that option.
Funny that no mention is made of gender. Are men in USA more likely to be obese than women? Maybe the statistics are gathered in the full survey. As a sweeping generalisation, men are far more complacent with being big in all directions than women are. Women - even when not overweight- seem to be more willing to talk about dieting than men, and definitely get more upset when chided about their weight than men do.
If those cheap solar panels can be made in India, then the proposition is probably feasible. But one doubts India would want to import billions of watts of solar panels from China. Hm, village solar power stations: I do not know what Indians pay for electricity, but by the time solar panels become that cheap, they will be predominant in the OECD (not to mention China). At present solar panels supply scarcely 1% of total demand in the rich man's bloc. Careful analysis of the proposal will reveal other debatable assumptions, including the one that supplying much solar-generated electricity during daylight hours will do anything to alleviate night-time shortages, or help the stressed 'macro' system cope with peak demand spikes. Renewables are best seen as a fuel saver.I would not panic about the situation.
'chose to live closer to where they worked'...
All good in theory. If only we always had the luxury of choice. A former employer was located quite close to my home, but then pulled out all its offices to an industrial park 20 km away. No choice there. A friend of mine worked within walking distance of her home, but recently lost that job, when the company retrenched. The upshot is that she is now forced to travel for an hour by car to get to work. Not her choice, but better than unemployment.
What is the answer? Move house and relocate, trusting your employer stays put? Cars provide a worker some independence from mass transit. Hence they will be valued.
This problem is bigger than Angela Merkel. If one can be permitted an(other) extravagant metaphor, then Euroland is a crumbling structure just holding up - for now. We can identify the unsound bricks and sagging beams making up the structure. We can perceive its obvious weaknesses, but we are fearful of extracting those weak supporting bricks, ere the whole building comes crashing down. Thus, we throw more precious resources into maintaining the unsound bricks to stave off collapse. Meanwhile, even as we see that collapse is increasingly likely, we waste our time and energies on analysis paralysis. Is that a fair picture? (I ain't European by the way)
"Necessary" does not mean sufficient. Provided a student has a sense of direction, sound ambition and pesonal dedication, university can be a great benefit. Trouble is, all those attributes would be uncommon in a 18- year- old freshman. There is an element of consumerism in a university education now. It is being sold like an investment to those who have to pay for it. One argument, specious, but common among academics with vested interests, is that "everyone has a right to a tertiary education and should not be denied the chance owing to inability to pay". Hmm. Convinced now? Just hand over your money and shut up then.
The subject is radiophobia. Radiation, like electricity, is an invisible, insensible hazard. You can't detect it by the senses, but must rely on technology to be aware of it. That observation itself justifies a certain amount of fear. By the same token, about 200 (or so) Japanese die annually of electrocution, but this does not disturb politicians or the public. Anyone who suggested banning electricity would be called a crackpot. Certainly, many more die of electrocution than from radiation poisoning.
Radiophobia also makes people uneasy when they know that the hazard is lingering over many years, and the health effects could also take years to manifest themselves. Those fears are valid.
As at Chernobyl individual exposure to ten or twenty times normal background radiation may be less harmful than smoking, but those who are told to be frightened about it would rather not take their chances.
I do not take sides; I merely make observations about radiophobia.
I happen to straddle two disciplines- the technical and the literary, holding two engineering degrees and working for some years as a professional technical writer.
Some time ago, my studies of artificial intelligence and expert systems stimulated my interest in natural language computer programming, which I once predicted could soon become a game-changer in the IT industry. It was not to be, and this article helps to explain why.
Natural languages, such as English, pay for their versatility with a loss of precision and clarity. Additionally, natural languages impose overhead charges for meta-data (punctuation, etc.) Further, they operate in a different world from the world of computer languages. Redundancy, as you point out, assists the reader of prose to overcome errors. But error-tolerant computing has absorbed much research energy for rather little benefit to the end-user. Every mistake must be painstakingly rectified.
The real challenge, in my view, is not syntax but semantics, and the article scarcely scratches the surface on that subject. Computers can't understand natural language because they lack a world view - common sense if you will. Another common-sense problem matters: the motive behind communication; to persuade, inform or merely entertain. How is a computer to guess which motive ?
A semblance of Artificial Intelligence, such as researched at MIT some 30 years back (Winograd et al), was achieved by limiting the world model to a strictly defined domain; - in one set of experiments, to a table full of blocks being moved by a robot. I was once inspired by science fiction and could imagine being able to effortlessly converse with a machine. But demonstrations of that type of man/machine communication tend to depend on a fragile illusion of “machine understanding”. Gimmickry, in other words. Many industry gurus would argue that talking naturally - and effectively - to a computer is impossible. I think they are probably right.
Returning from the computer realm to dry land, I agree with Wiens’ sentiments. Poor written expression is more irritating than poor dressing. Carelessness can't be disguised as creativity. Those who write carelessly should lose their poets’ licences.
I have never been to Brazil, so offer no special insight on the country. But I do take note of its recent transition from a struggling third-world economy to an emergent economy. That transition may well explain the rise in the status of Brazilian women, which is the theme of the article. It only shows the importance of continued economic growth as a way to dissolve these archaic obstacles.
Some of your other points require more study. Could the rapid promotion of women into high positions within the Brazilian bureaucracy be an astute policy antidote to corruption? You would be more surprised to find a woman convicted of serious fraud or grand larceny than a man, wouldn't you? Women's motivations differ from those of men and as one admirable US author, Irma Kurtz, put it, in business, women's capacity for satisfaction is less than men's, while her potential for regret is bigger.(if I quote accurately) [I am not writing a political essay but a brief comment, drawing on a lifetime of observations to conclude that men and women are different, at some important level.]
As if bankers did not already have enough to be ashamed of. Ridiculously over-rewarded commercial animals with warped values, unworthy of the trust placed in them; definition of banksters.