Posts by Cavanuk 22 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Sep 2012
"their TAX-PAID-FOR health service that is the NHS "
But they aren't paying for it. Your taxes fund your right to health care while you live in the country and you continue to pay tax, in one form or another (VAT) for as long as you are there. Claiming the benefit of the NHS after you've been decades out of the country is like damaging your car and expecting a previous insurance company to pay out because you paid them premiums years ago. Can you just move back into a house you once paid rent on?
The idea is ludicrous. Take it to its logical extreme: if everyone paid in for twenty years and then buggered off for 30 years but came back when they needed the NHS, it would collapse through lack of resources. No one would have paid adequate amounts of tax.
The only ex-pats who should be able to vote or use the NHS are those who continue to contribute substantial amounts of tax while living abroad.
And I'm excluding myself from the vote or NHS because I am one of those ex-pats. I don't pay into Britain, haven't for years, and even though I paid tax for 30 years, I should have no say on how it is run NOW, and no access to the NHS NOW, because I haven't contributed for years!
"David Cameron promised to extend the right to vote to ex-pats beyond the 15-year limit imposed by Tony Bliar, but he never did so."
Why should he? I'm also in this position. I emigrated but I don't then want a say in how the old country operates. It you want to influence the country after 15 years away then bloody well move back. Even 15 years is too long. If you haven't lived there for 15 years you should have no say.
"BTW, the usual definition of the word "stack""
No, it isn't. The idiom "stack the deck" comes from cards, of course, and means making arrangements for unfair practice. It says nothing about adding additional "cards". Any mechanism which unfairly influences the outcome is "stacking".
"But this would be very unpopular with voters and the petrolchemical industry so they don't."
You countered your own argument.
It isn't the government controlling the people but the other way around. This happens precisely because people are too stupid to weigh real risks and so don't support more regulation of road traffic or pollution but blame the government for failing to prevent terrorist attacks.
"They now employ a machine, which is programmed to assume that all people are guilty until found to be innocent"
Which is not even a close description of reality. The machine is simply identifying people or, as it is at the moment, not identifying people at all. Questions of guilt or innocence don't even arise.
Such an accusation is itself lazy thinking. How do you determine who is the threat in the first place? Many recent terrorist attacks have been carried out by people unknown to security services.
You can object to mass interception on privacy grounds but it is not lazy. It's the logical way of catching those who may be viewing extremist material online and communicating with extremists overseas.
Some years ago, I worked for a government agency that had an informational website that didn't require login and so was not HTTPS. Someone started intercepting our pages so that the page visitors saw was not what we were hosting. The interception took the form of the text "(a**hole!)" being inserted after the name of every senior staff member. Switching to HTTPS solved the problem.
The purpose of HTTPS is not solely to encrypt data so that bad actors can't see your password. It tells your browser that you are communicating with the entity you think you're communicating with. It prevents tampering with the data in transit.
"a) Doesn't require any major effort to obtain. i.e. I should not have to pay money or submit government documentation, or undergo a rectal exam just for a cert.
b) Has an expiration period that I can choose. Maybe some people like their certs to expire every 12 months. Personally I'm happy for my cert to go years, decades unless I explicitly revoke it myself. IMO the main reason they expire so quick is repeat customers.
c) Doesn't cost any money. CAs are basically a tax on trust."
So you want certificates that anyone can get, with no effort or being subject to stringent checks? What would be the point of those certs? The cost results from maintaining a certificate authority that, theoretically, checks that someone actually is who they say they are. Even if they are just checking documentation, those carrying out the checks have to be paid.
"but in fact in cases such as Yemen they are replacing soldiers on the ground."
Thereby preventing them from being killed and maimed.
Perhaps instead of targetted drone strikes that unfortunately also kill some civilians, we should just take out the entire village, town etc? No, then ground force invasion must be your solution?
Some of the comments here are ridiculous. No one in the West wanted the ISIS caliphate to be set up and start terrorizing populations. Should we have let them just commit genocide against the Yazidis? Not our business? Charming attitude. Drone killings are a much better option to random bombing or ground invasion.
As was said above, if you don't want your civilian family killed, don't shelter with them.
There is nothing wrong with the basic concept of weaponized AI, if it helps to more accurately target the other side (yes, "the other side". It's a valid concept). The alternatives lead to higher casualties and threaten our own military.
Your arguments are unscientific. You are arguing that, because there was one cause in the past, the same is true now. Not so. People died long before cars were invented. That does not mean that cars do not kill people.
There is no detectable natural cause for the current warming. Simply saying that it did in the past and so it just does, is irrational. Solar activity, the arrangement of the continents, the area of space that the solar system is passing through, all have an impact on the temperature. None of those things is relevant at the moment. The sun is actually in a relatively cool phase, we have a lot of land toward the poles - allowing the formation of highly reflective ice and snow surfaces and there is no indication that we are passing through a particularly dusty region of space. What we are doing is pouring billions of tonnes of a known greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. We know the physical mechanisms by which CO2 causes warming in the atmosphere.
So, there is no evidence of any natural reason at all for the currently observed warming and we know that we are filling the atmosphere with a heating agent. The logical conclusion is that we are the prime drivers of current warming.
It matters because we are warming the planet faster than it has warmed in the past and our presence also restricts the ability of other living things to migrate to different environments. The effects on other living things will be drastic but they will also be terrible for humans. Much of the world is already too arid to grow crops. If heat and evaporation rates rise then many will suffer as crops fail and fresh water runs out.
"when all of humanity's emissions for decades is outdone by a single volcano in a week, tanking the income of a thousand families is stupid."
Completely wrong. The global CO2 production of all volcanoes, in one year, is around 200 million tonnes of CO2. Human production of CO2 is around 30 billion tonnes a year.
Volcanic eruptions are negligible compared to human CO2 production.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
