hackbinary

The Secret Life of Trees is also worth a read.

He defines a tree as "a plant with a stick up the middle."

Please can we call sex workers pleasure technicians? A pleasure engineer should require a degree ...

Wait, what? If poor people knew .... ?!

There were riots in England in 2011. There has been rioting in the US.

Usually this rioting is kicked off by police brutality, but it seems to me that it quickly descends into looting.

You'll pay more in taxes, but there is universal healthcare available free at the point of delivery. So taxes might be higher here, but you and your employees will access to some of the best healthcare in the world.

I do not think taxation should get singled out as a deciding factor where to setup a business, but could be considered in the round with all the other operational costs.

Low taxes might seem good, but if the key services are non-existent or corrupt, then your costs of operation will be significantly higher than in a place that has high(er) taxes, but civil society is run efficiently.

How do you measure the impact of John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith?

I do not think your argument fair. In fact I find it disappointing. Some things lend themselves to collecting numbers and figures and measurements, and other things quite simply do not. Philosophy, history, literature, and human languages are what first come to my mind as important fields of study that have significant impact on our outlook on the universe, but we can't scientifically measure them. Indeed it is philosophical thought and ideas that underpin our modernity. Moreover, much of our collective advancement is in significant peril because 'the arts' have been devalued so much. (Although William H. Miller just donated a significant sum to the John Hopkins philosophy department since he felt his degree in philosophy made him so successful.)

What you go on to speak of in your second paragraph is the art of rhetoric, and ironically you have unwittingly engaged in the very sort of ad hominem attack which you are complaining that you think that liberal arts scholars would use to defend their position.

An ad hominem attack is a classic logical fallacy and that is something that I suggest you research.

Isn't the Toyota's idea of Kanban supposed to alleviate this? As in if there is some problem with the production line, anyone can push the stop button, and everyone assists?

I like what you're saying, but now generally scan through the comments first to see if the original article is worth reading. Is this meta reading? It is all about the meta ...

No, the problem is that there are other drugs that might have been administered therapeutically, so animals that are in the food chain have to be managed differently than ones that are for companionship or racing. For example Bute is commonly used in horses, but is toxic for humans.

This in part was why the horse meat scandle was such a problem in the UK.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21455419

Animals that have to be euthenised for one reason or another cannot, and nor should they enter the food chain for humans, cats, dog, or otherwise. Firstly, there are the drugs they use to humanely put down the patient which would be toxic to down stream consumers of the meat products, and secondly there maybe concerns about zoonosis.

And I didn't think to include the time wasted by you 'shopping' around. That would be also be another drag on national productivity.

>> Is it really that much simpler in other countries to connect with the proper provider? I was under the impression countries like canada handle simple problems like mine much more gracefully

In Canada and in Britain, you simply go to your local GP and get a referral, or go to A&E (Emergancy).

>> but serious issues remain problematic.

No, generally treatment in Canada and Britain for 'serious issues' is very good as well.

We all hear about the well publicised failures of the NHS and Canadian Healthcare, but by and large it works very well. I have seen close relatives and friends have cancer, septicemia, strokes, severe bone breaks, a life changing injury that made a friend a quadrapeligic, and more. For the most post part, the level of healthcare in Canada and Britain has been excellent.

My friend who had septicemia was in a very remote location, and once diagnosed was airlifted to a major hospital.

All of this is covered by public healthcare. It is amazing.

It is even more astounding that the USA still has this Byzantine 'private' system that tries to claim that it is an open market, but it is not.

From a macroeconomic point of view, the USA pays 18% or 19% of GDP for its healthcare system, where as Britain and Canada, and pretty much every other western country pay about 10%. (These are OECD figures) The American healthcare system is horribly inefficient, and puting in a public system ought to be every American's politicial priority.

Imagine that, a universal healthcare system is cheaper to operate than the private system?

The rhetoric and hyperbole that comes out of those who are vested in the status quo is outright criminal.

>> ... get some Rust code in.

Maybe I misread it, but to me it sounded like Mozilla did not have Rust support in Thunderbird, but it seems that there is some already ...

Looks like rust is a requirement for the build process:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

I see fair number of comments on here suggesting how to fix Thunderbird, or what additional features and services it needs. Well, Thunderbird is open source. Time to contribute more than just a some good ideas.

Or is the Mozilla development and contribution process broken?

It looks like it is realitively straight forward to compile from source: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

>> Internet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new ...

Was this number calculated by the same people that calculated that media and software companies loose billions due to piracy?

I think what Intel is trying to say that this feature makes the chips insecure by design. It’s kind of like in Python where can get around the week protection for classes, methods, and variable to make them pseudo private by putting underscores in front of them.

Like 'cloud' coming to mean anything connected to the Internet.

I could not find the information directly, but I found some historical figures for GDP[1]

The figures I quoted above are in 1946 USD.

The figures quoted in the spreadsheet referenced are in "million 1990 International Geary-Khamis dollars" (IGKD)

So the spreadsheet in 1946:

USA: $1,305,357 IGKD Den: $23,690 IGKD

So Denmark's GDP was 1.8148% of the USA's.

Or in reference to the USA's GDP of 1946 being $228M, Denmark's was merely $4.14M.

$100M in 1946 would have been a staggering amount of money, especially in the context and aftermath of WWII. It should also be noted that Denmark was largely untouched by the war, and in 1946 their economy resumed prewar output. This is probably what the leading factor was in turning down the purchase offer, and I generally agree that it was the right decision.

[1] http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/historical_statistics/horizonta...

Inflation is not the only way to calculate the relative 'cost' of Greenland. I think a more accurate perspective would be calculate the offer in terms (a percentage) of GDP.

American GDP in 1946 was $228M [1] (in 1940 it was $100M). The USA essentially offered half of their GDP for Greenland.

American GDP in 2016 was $18,625M.

So in relative terms, the Americans offered roughly $9Trillion.

[1] https://www.thebalance.com/us-gdp-by-year-3305543

Also, YouTube.

Then how do you explain the successive insanely excessive right wing governments in the US, Canada, Britain, and Australia over the last 30-40 years?

Have you even read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky?

What do you even mean by conservative? Liberal?

You do realise that liberal and liberalism means keeping the government out of people's lives. The USA is a liberal nation by definition, for example 'The separation of church and state' and your 'right to bare arms, in a well regulated malitia'

The left has not taken over anything. We have lived in a very conservative, anti public services regime since the early 1980s. Rollbacks and defunding public schools, health and infrastructure has been on the basis that media has systematically attacked taxation and public spending as wasteful while military spending never seems to be targeted like other social programmes.

We have stop perpetuating this narrative that the media is in anyway 'left' leaning because it is not. When was the last time you read an opinion piece that called for the nationalisation of some private industry?

Wait, wasn't it the EU who took Apple to court over a special tax deal for Apple in Ireland?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/30/apple-pay-b...

I think it was the EU who took Apple to court over unfair trade practices and special tax deal in Ireland. Not surprising that Ireland cut a deal with Apple. We'll see if the EU lets this go through.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/aug/30/apple-pay-b...

No. Like Nancy Reagan said, "just say no."

Your likeness is your data.

>> It's way more complicated than that ...

I don't think so. The media (the 4th estate) is now basically a mouth piece for the corporations. Noam Chompsky has written extensively on this, and the west really does not have a diverse spectrum of opinion, information, and perspective in popular, widely distributed and readily available information sources.

Media and information sources have been consolidated into a few centralised corporate ownerships that are not interested in social justice and a fair distribution of wealth. Quite the contrary, the corporate interests are simply interested in generating shareholder profits and wealth. Indeed, the directors of media companies are duty bound to generate as much profit for their respective corporations. This naturally means that the media corporations are interested in consolidating and centralising as much wealth for themselves as possible, and will cater their information and direction of opinion to achieve that end.

I like the idea from the point of view of 'making things better', but from the philosophical perspective of publicly funded entities should not give benefit and preferential treatment to private and proprietary enterprises and systems.

I think if the USPO was capturing this data, then it should be available to everyone.

I don't think the opencore model works very well. The model that does work well is the Redhat/Fedora model of fast moving, and changing cutting edge of full features, with a premium being charged for the fully tested and integrated product.

While I can understand where he is coming from, his stuff is itself largely built on the free licensed software of others.

In the end, this seems to me like pulling up the ladder after himself, and ultimately quite selfish.