I think it does: HLY numbers in the east rose at the same time they fell in the west. (There's no pre-2003 data for these countries, of course, so we're missing part of the trend, but the pattern agrees with my hypothesis.)

But in looking at the data in more detail, there's another issue I noticed: it appears that Eurostat changed its method for calculating HLY in 2004! If so, that would make comparison before and after the switch impossible.

Yes, that's where migration comes into it. Once these countries joined the EU, many of their residents moved into Western Europe, changing the health statistics of those countries.

So what else happened to the European Union after 2003? Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary joined the E.U. in 2004. These countries have huge numbers of elderly people in relatively poor health as a result of mediocre Warsaw Pact health and nutrition. This will obviously lower the overall health of the EU average, but I'm willing to bet a bunch of them migrated to other EU countries and depressed the stats for individual nations.

Don't think I'm arguing against immigration here: the effect is to increase the health of the European continent overall, which is a good thing.

Pythons: Python owners love 'em, so why are sales still low?
Erotic fursuits: Furries love 'em, so why are sales still low?

Because the enthusiasm of enthusiasts has nothing to do with appeal to the public.

Wind power generation is an extremely high maintenance activity. I mean ridiculously costly and time consuming to keep the damn things running. Now multiply that by 2000. Worst Idea Ever. Wind power is fail.

As far as I can tell, an individual turbine isn't so bad, but wind is high maintenance because you need a lot of them. The "times 2000" factor is already in there, so no fair putting it in twice.

As for high maintenance, have you been inside a nuke plant recently? It's not exactly a one-man operation.

My point is, if you're going to claim something is high maintenance, you have to say "compared to what?"

"Your numbers are more than double the actual number of turbines required"

Total output of all Fukushima nuclear plant units = 460+4*784+1100=4700 MW
Output of turbine currently installed = 2 MW
Turbines needed to match nuke plant output = 2350, when all are operating at full capacity.

My 500 figure was assuming 7 MW turbines, but those haven't actually been installed yet.

"Anyway, so what if we need a lot of them? There is plenty of space and the total cost is still lower than nuclear, including all maintenance etc. It's not like anyone will be fishing there any more. I don't see a problem."

Oh, I'm all for building another thousand turbines, I hope they do. But nobody's ponied up the money to build them yet: my point was that what's been done so far has negligible impact.

Oh, that's nice. Add another *five hundred* turbines and you'll come close to matching what was lost when the nuke plant shut down. On a windy day.

The public tends to vastly underestimate the energy output of wind turbines. I'm not arguing that wind is pointless -- far from it! But two wind turbines is just an empty symbolic gesture. Two thousand wind turbines ... now you're talking.

Crawl back into your caves, you fucking troglodyte shitholes. How the fuck do you think fire was invented? How about the fucking stone knife? Some dude pounded on some rocks to see what would happen. I'm sure he should have been gathering berries for his tribe instead, but no, he decided to fuck around with rocks. And what happened? Civilization happened, you barbarian asswipes.

The summary talks a lot about gas tanks in the trunk, but If they were driving for all but 46 minutes of the trip, I'm guessing they had some storage tanks for other fluids up in the passenger compartment...

Here's a proposal to try on for size. All covert surveillance with any domestic component must be approved by a secret court, with the decision made not by a professional judge, but by a citizen jury in an adversarial court setting. Now clearly the jury can't just be random dudes off the street, so how do you make sure they can be trusted with government secrets? They're selected by another jury, and if they agree to serve, they consent to total surveillance for a period of time during and after their service. These juries also select a people's advocate, who acts as a defense attorney and is required to argue against whatever the state is trying to do.

Fine. Cloud computing *will be* a commodity. *eyeroll*

Cloud computing is a commodity, not a stock or bond. And the answer is yes.

The main obstacle is the lack of a common standard for cloud resources. It's only a commodity if it's interchangeable: wheat is wheat no matter where it's grown, but AWS and App Engine are very different things.

... and so he chose a super-risky crime, and now he's busted. QED.

If you think that guy you knew from high school who gets arrested isn't going to rat your ass out for a sentence reduction you are fucking stupid.

True, but at least you know when he's about to narc on you, and you and your buddies can make him regret it when he does.

Crime's like any other job: the high-paying, less risky jobs all require tons of skill and training, or family connections. If you haven't got a crime education or a crime pedigree, your only choices are super high-risk jobs like mugging or super low-paying jobs like corner drug sales.

http://freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excerpts/chapter-3/