A report by the watchdog Natural England says many farmers responded to impeding grassland protection laws by digging up their meadows before the tighter rules could be introduced. Some 98% of English meadows have already been lost to intensive farming and the rate of loss nearly doubled after announcement that rules would be changed. Rules …
Continue reading Regulation doesn’t work, but what else is there when people don’t care?
Category:2 Geopolitics
Socialism for the rich. Capitalism for everyone else.
Well that’s an unexpected idea, but it makes some sense. Banks and big business benefit hugely from the state, through subsidies, bailouts and privayisations. That’s like socialism. Everyone else deals with market forces and have little chance to influence the law or regulations or taxes. That sounds a lot more like the truth, although it …
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Another billion poor people arrived on earth today.
According to the Asian Development Bank, 1.5 billion people live below the poverty line, not the “official figure” of 0.5 billion., so the Asian poverty rate is 41.2% not 12.7%. The explanation is that the officially set poverty line of $1.25 a day is too low and by increasing it by 25 cents, to $1.50 …
Continue reading Another billion poor people arrived on earth today.
Even big brother thinks big brother can be dangerous.
The UN has warned against the dangers of too much data and too much surveillance. In a report, the UN body said more needed to be done to ensure that surveillance was balanced against its harm to personal privacy, noting that: mass retention of data to aid surveillance was “neither necessary nor proportionate”. “disturbingly little” …
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“You might want to stay off the internet for a while”
Mmmmmmmm. That doesn’t sound good. Especially since its from a credible source whose enterprise is entirely concerned with privacy and anonymity on the internet. From the Tor website: OpenSSL bug CVE-2014-0160 Posted April 7th, 2014 A new OpenSSL vulnerability on 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f is out today, which can be used to reveal memory to a …
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Weird weather is a symptom of worse to come.
The IPCC released the second report on climate change. It is more very bad news, but even so might still be insufficient to stimulate action from leaders or followers. Last September a summary on the physical science of climate change showed that climate change is real, and humans are the “dominant cause”. Now the IPCC …
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The list you don’t want to be on.
Capital punishment is a sign of failure. Failure is a part of learning and improvement, but if you continue to fail in the same endeavour, there is a problem indicating that the system needs to change. So, capital punishment should have long been expunged from a system that is “civilised”, “advanced”, “modern”, “space age”, “rich”, …
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Sad but true: Violence against females is pervasive.
A broad based survey indicates that 1/3 of women in the EU are affected by violence. That should surprise you, but if you’re female, maybe it doesn’t. Clearly unfair prejudices still dominate modern, rich cultures. For example, it is saddening to still see and hear behaviour which puts down women. Clearly there are economic differences …
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The troubling word is “doomsday”.
As the weather plays games with us, blowing, freezing, heating at the wrong times of year, it is somehow reassuring to read about a vault for seeds now preserving 800,000 species. It is dubbed the “Doomsday Vault”. The preservation vault, started 6 years ago, was built in the Arctic and requires little intervention to do …
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Sex, drugs, rock and roll, while we play with nuclear weapons.
It’s not that people should be restricted from making lifestyle choices, but there’s a time and a place for everything. And boozing in the nuclear silo is not one of them. Sadly, the story is not even that funny. Senior employees responsible for nuclear weapons were found to be dealing drugs, gambling and cheating on …
Continue reading Sex, drugs, rock and roll, while we play with nuclear weapons.