Posts by I ain't Spartacus 10158 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009
I bet they wouldn't.
If you own your house, then knock yourself out. But I've got a mortgage, and I'm sure that the bank won't allow me to transfer the ownership on the land registry (which protects them from me defaulting) until they've got their grubby little hands on their money. Or at least a solicitor they approve of is holding it in escrow for them, in a sterling account.
No. The banks were bailed out by the taxpayer because they had taken secured risks, but due to the nature of banking their asset book contained lots of long-term debt they were unable to call in. But their debts were all in the form of short-term loans to their customers or slightly longer maturity bonds on the markets.
This is called liquidity transfortmation, and is one of the main social purposes of banking. It's what turns all our small savings accounts into money that can be invested for the long term in businesses and us buying mortgages.
Becuase of this we require Central Banks to loan the banks vast amounts of cash at no notice, to stop bank runs. All that cash was paid back within about a year (most much quicker) as that infinite backing is what stops the system collapsing an causing another 1930s great depression.
2 UK banks were so fucked that they required actual taxpayer bail-outs. For which the government took a matching stake in shares, and has sold off one of those holdings at a profit. Just RBS still to go.
I don't get it. Doritos flavours are universally horrible - except for the lightly salted ones. But they are conveniently shaped like shovels. Hence their use for getting guacamole, sour cream and/or salsa into my mouth. Which conveniently then requires it to be washed through with some reviving liquid - preferably blended from 3 parts tequila, 2 parts lime juice and 1.8 parts triple sec.
so spherical trigonometry is a mystery to them. Orbital mechanics, therefore, is "right out".
Well, to be fair, trigonometry is a mystery to me as well. What I finally managed to learn at school (not all of it) is now a long-forgotten memory. And so for me, orbital mechanics is also right out.
I helped with my nephew's homework last year, and realised that I've completely forgotten how to do long division.
Don't tell anyone that I do water system design calculations for a living...
Don't be ridiculous! Clearly Australia is fictional!
Every so-called Australian that you meet or see on telly has been on Neighbours. I mean, I know they claim it's a documentary, but we all know it's really one of those scripted-reality shows like TOWIE. It's a show about a drama school, like Fame, only with less singing. They all leave that for when they come over here and go on Top of the Pops.
Basically transportation was a con. They really just loaded them on ships, sailed off, and chucked them over the edge. It was only introduced because juries wouldn't convict in many death-penalty cases - and this was the only way to persuade them.
Transportees had been sent to America before, but that was massively unpopular, and they revolted. They couldn't send them to real colonies (like India) for the same reason, so they had to invent Australia and New Zealand. Hence faking the ridiculous Duck Billed Platypus.
For further proof, who would willingly drink XXXX? And why would anyone share a country with all those snakes, spiders, crocodiles, drop bears etc? I mean - giant stinging nettle trees!?!?
If the other newspapers' articles are linked to on Facebook and yours aren't guess what happens to your readership?
In an ideal world people bookmark their favourite websites and check each one every few days - depending on speed of content turning up. In reality, most people don't use the web like that.
Hence even good journalists are reduced to fishing for scraps from Facebook's table.
Nah. I just can't see the tomato going with the gravy. Or the cheese.
Perhaps if they went a bit different. Base the pizza on Fiorentina. Which is spinach and egg, but add sausage.
So you half bake your yorkie, then quickly open the oven and top with spinach and a couple of raw eggs. Oh, plus some sausage, make it Italian if you want to pretend authenticity. I'd argue that ship sailed long ago... Then back in the oven for them to cook. Then top with lots of lovely onion gravy.
Admittedly what I've basically done here is add eggs to toad in the hole, and hidden a few sad vitamins in it with the spinach, that nobody is going to notice.
If you're in Belgium, stuff the boring moules-frites. Have at the lovely lamb, with dauphinoise potatoes (yummy!) and nice red wine. Then some sort of chocolatey monstrosity for pudding. Only once fortified with that lot, do you then approach the serious business of necking some beer.
Ah, nostalgia...
Well the US hasn't really tried diplomacy with NK have they?
Incorrect. There was a deal done for food and oil aid in return for a moratorium on nuclear development done in the 90s, by Clinton. The US and South Korea provide the aid, and the North comprehensively broke the terms of the deal on nuclear.
Bush (Dubya version) had a go at putting this agreement back together. There were long 6 party talks to try and resume the same deal, but with a few more safeguards, given North Korea had broken the last deal. These eventually broke down and the DPRK continued with their nuclear program.
Late era Bush and Obama decided to tell the Norks what they wanted, but not to accept offers of talks, as what usually happened was the Norks would demand something, then escalate by sinking a ship, having a nuclear/missile test or attacking the South with artillery when they didn't get it. So they went for the increased sanctions approach instead.
The DPRK are again making peacful overtures, such as the joint Winter Olympics team. It may be that China finally deciding to apply serious pressure might be working. Or not.
But to say the US hasn't tried diplomacy is bollocks. Trump hasn't been diplomatic of course, but the US policy has been relatively consistent under both parties. They tried aid for concessions and got screwed, then they tried to re-negotiate that in hopes of a better result, then tried sanctions. Trump has added making an arse of himself on Twitter to the mix, but broadly US policy hasn't changed much in the last decade.
Voland's Right Hand,
This is a normal deployable AA missile. This was a test of the SM3, as deployed by the US and Japan on their Aegis equipped destroyers and (US) cruisers. The test in Hawaii was on a shore-based version of it, instead of ship-based, but it's basically the same system.
I don't know the details of the test, but the Aegis is tasked to do 2 different jobs. Japan and the US deploy them off the coast of North Korea in order to intercept missiles in their take-off phase. That should be relatively easy, as they're bigger targets, going slower. But obviously that means opening fire on a missile launch that might only be a test.
This test was against something incoming, and air launched. Obviously we don't know if it was simulating a missile still in space in its coast phase, or an incoming warhead. So we don't know what they failed to do.
Israel's system is designed to deal with smaller incoming missiles and mortars. It has a very limited area of defence, and mostly doesn't engage targets that are expected to fall outside residential areas. But it's not an ABM system - and is dealing with much slower targets at lower altitudes.
As I understand the US system they've got 3 components. Aegis ships at sea, to shoot at Nork missiles as they go up. Aegis on land stations designed to intercept warheads in space at the mid-course stage. Then THAAD (terminal high altitude area defence), which is the anti ICBM warhead system that's probably not all that wonderful, but has worked in some tests. It's designed to be the last line of defence against incoming warheads and I think is only deployed in Alaska, with some interceptors promised to South Korea. Nothing can stop a saturation attack, but North Korea don't hae that many warheads, and even fewer missiles.
So what they've done is to build a layered defence of imperfect technologies to deal with the lower threat of Iran and North Korea, who they felt less able to deter with mutually assured destruction - while also working on the diplomatic channel to try and get those countries to cease their nuclear programs.
While you can't say that's a perfect policy, it's broadly worked with Iran, and at least means they've got some hope of dealing with a few missiles if the North Koreans prove capable of producing any, and decide to use them.
This is why the Bank of England are looking at it. There's a relatively small number of banks in London who borrow off each other on the repo market for short periods. They do so using collaterol (usually things like government/corporate bonds they own as part of their capital reserves). But there's a worry that one bank might use the same bond as collaterol more than once, should they ever get into trouble, and nobody could easily know.
So there could be a system that would make this trading easier, more transparent, and if run/supervised by the BofE would also mean they could have a good old nose at what assets the banks are holding and how much they're borrowing.
Whether they can make that actually work in practise is another matter entirely. But it's a plausible use of some kind of blockchain technology.
In general I'm sceptical of how useful it'll turn out to be. But I can imagine there being a few uses.
Tsar Bombas are quite expensive to construct. I think they'd strain even Microsoft's deep pockets.
Also, I feel this policy might just fail when it comes to doing the envionmental impact statement.
Surely a fleet of drones equipped with hellfire missiles would be cheaper, more practical, within Microsoft's budget and quieter...
Alpy,
If the product was more than £100 - your credit card company are jointly liable with the now bust company that didn't ship your goods. So they aren't legally allowed to just say, we couldn't get your money back sorry - they have to pay you and eat the losses. It's called your Section 75 rights.
However, that might not be the case with an Inidgogo campaign. This judgement suggests that if they've got the wording wrong, then you're entering a sales agreement. But if the wording is right, then it probably is a speculative investment, where the actual goods are counted as a reward (or some other such weasel terminology) rather than a product. In which case you're probably out of luck.
Wasn't the C5 the one product he was able to make enough of - and that wasn't delayed. Admittedly that was because nobody wanted them...
I drove one a few years ago, and it was amazing how unstable they felt, for something so low to the ground. The thought of taking one on actual roads is terrifying.
It's an interesting judgement - though not binding on other courts. As I think some of these Kickstarter / Indigogo schemes look little better than scams. So it's nice to see that you can't promise to ship some vapourware real-soon-now[TM], then run away giggling with the money - and fob everyone off with getting nothing as they were only backing your R&D project.
As I understand it videogames have recently bombed on Kickstarter, because so few ever got produced, after taking the money. Oddly the boardgame industry have become their biggest growth area, because a lot of the stuff is being produced by existing companies, who are simply using it as interest free credit.
I'm not complaining, as this is clearly a good policy. Just surprised that Facebook care. I guess it's because the public crash and explosion of the bubble is looking increasingly likely to happen any-day-now - and they don't want to look like they were helping.
Whereas whenever I sign on to Facebook I get the lowest quality ads. I only log in a few times a year, to look at family photos, and have filled in little info. So they've not got much info to go on to target ads, and so it's brides from Ukraine and Win a Free iPad crap.
As 90% of those are scams, why aren't they also banned?
Is that because he was found guilty of This (link to Youtube)
Charles Calthrop,
NASA wrote loads of stuff down - they had whole books of procedures. Whether that's the right stuff, and whether that's all the required stuff is another matter. Also how much of it was kept, but there are lots of archives, including recordings and transcripts of the radio and mission control chatter for entire missions.
They'd have to start from scratch, because rebuilding the Saturn V and Apollo capsules, that they've still got the blueprints for, would mean retooling factories and retraining engineers to use old tech we no longer have. So you'd have to re-design them to some extent anyway, using modern methods. You'd certainly want to use modern computers - given that Apollo 11 had various computer errors when trying to land - as the poor pooter didn't have enough RAM to cope with the radar data and the landing data at the same time. The radar should have been switched off, if I recall correctly.
At which point you'd use NASA's SLS and Orion - that've been tested once, or SpaceX's cheaper Falcon Heavy and Dragon II (due to both test this year?).
You're still going to need a lunar lander - or a refuellable Dragon II. And I'm not sure if either SLS or Falcon Heavy can get sufficient mass to lunar orbit that you can do all this with one launch, rather than 2 and having to rendevous in either Earth or lunar orbit.
Now at a computer. A decent summary of the arguments here:
Blog of UK ex-ambassador to Charles Crawford - who seems to enjoy baiting Craig Murray
Or, linky to a barrister's blog discussion with another UK ex-ambassador
I posted a link above to my reference. Which isn't so easy to do on this phone.
The short version is that the Vienna Conventions allow the receiving state to refuse to accept an ambassador totally. But all other mission staff cannot be refused before they take up their post, and thus our only recourse is to declare him persona non grata and he gets to leave the country.
However there are a few other clauses that can be used to maybe argue against this. Plus the barrack-room lawyers arguing from the text of the convention ignore the UK legislation that brings it into force in our law. And also ignore any legal precedents, which is the reason you have to pay proper lawyers in cases like this.
The FCO challenged Ecuador to lawyer-up. What's telling, I think, is that they haven't. Also Assange is trying some crap about retrospectively letting him off bail, and isn't claiming diplomatic immunity.
Asterix the Gual,
Ecuador did make him a diplomat a couple of weeks ago.
The UK Foreign Office refused to accept his status - which is apparently a legal grey area. They didn't declare him persona non grata, because that would technically accept that he had the status, and therefore had the legal right to leave the country. Instead they challenged Ecuador to lawyer-up and try their luck in court.
That's a case that would got all the way to the Supreme Court, and maybe off to Europe (ECJ or ECHR?) or even the ICC in the Hague. So Assange could probaby sit out the rest of the statute of limitations on his case for alleged rape. Of course Ecuador would have to put up with him in their embassy all that time... Not to mention all that cash funnelled towards m'learned friends.
Vote down, because bollocks is bollocks.
He's accused of rape. He should stand trial for rape. All that the UK system has done is to try to get him to Sweden, where he fled those accusations. If our system was less fair-minded, we'd have fucking locked him up while he was on bail, and avoided all these problems. Those women would have had their day in court, and he'd have either been found not-guilty, or probably been released by now if he was guitly.
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