Renewables are far more *energy* efficient, so yes, I do want reduced *energy* use.

If I drive a mile in a petroleum fuelled car, I get (say) 30 mpg, in an electric car, it's >100 mpg(e). So: lower energy.

And heating; it takes a lot less energy to use a heat pump than it does to heat a building with fossil fuels, or nuclear. So again, yes, lower energy.

Energy is NOT the same as comfort, or economics.

And I don't trust nuclear power; and I say this as someone qualified in physics; there's no known way to stop nuclear reactors that are sized for generating power from melting down at least sometimes. They've said that it was 'safe' too many times before, it's like the boy the cried wolf, in reverse.

But it doesn't really matter; renewables are growing far too fast for nuclear to ever see a resurgence. Renewables are growing with double digit growth, nuclear is basically shrinking overall.

Well they could ideally (from their point of view) go with an extraordinary rendition to America and put him through a legal process and then lock him up/shoot him to discourage others.

But I hope they don't; the guy is literally a hero.

Ridiculous why?

He explicitly said that that was what the cache was for; otherwise he would have been assassinated to silence him, but the existence of the cache meant they couldn't do that: presumably someone, somewhere would have released the key if he'd gone missing (i.e. a "dead man's handle").

Snowden deliberately filtered what was released to minimise the risks to agents. That cache is the really bad stuff.

Well, there's a way to know, if they really have cracked it Snowden would be assassinated/kidnapped and repatriated soon. That cache was what was keeping him alive.

Failing that he'd have to go into hiding; and the Russians will be able to tell him whether that's necessary or not.

If that doesn't happen, it probably hasn't been cracked.

So we just have to watch what Snowden does.

Still, maybe it has been, the security agencies would have to be pretty damn stupid to not realise that gaping whole in the plan. But if Snowden doesn't disappear one way or another, then yup; they're that damn stupid.

We hardly knew you!

You're completely wrong on every point, flu is fucking scary to epidemiologists. I had swine flu, that was *awful*; but that was only slightly worse than normal flu.

But flu killed more people in 1918 than the whole of WWI; and there's no reason to think that's worse case. The 1918 flu took fit, healthy soldiers and people and left them dead surrounded by blood they'd coughed up within a day. It had something like a 10% deathrate.

Nobody can even predict earthquakes right now. An accurate series of predictions that were within one on the Richter scale would actually be a great triumph.

And earthquakes don't mutate; the doctors were terrified that Ebola would become more infectious, and then it could have spread into the West. For example, it did reach the West, but luckily when it becomes infectious, it gives obvious symptoms. What if that changed? What if it became more infectious and less obvious symptoms? Then we'd be fucked.

And they thought at one point that the Ebola outbreak had been ended; but it suddenly came back. That also terrified the doctors, when you don't understand your enemy, your enemy can kill you in huge numbers.

You just have no clue what you're talking about.

Cars aren't a contagious disease that grows exponentially.

You might think there's a big difference between 20,000 deaths and 200,000 deaths, but with exponential phenomenon you have to take logarithms, it's the difference between 4.3 and 5.3; the models were only off by 20%.

If the international response hadn't been what it was, it could have been 6 or 7, tens of millions of deaths.

Really, this whole post is the most dangerously stupid thing I've ever read. The modelling didn't fail, and even if you live in the West, if you weren't scared rigid by the Ebola outbreak, you didn't understand what just happened, and if you think the modelling failed, you don't understand what modelling can, and does do.

The Ebola outbreak wasn't just a single disease, Viruses evolve very quickly, and some previous versions of Ebola seem to have been infectious by inhalation. If Ebola had evolved to better do that, it could have been a worldwide pandemic with a 50% death rate.

TWENTY THOUSAND PEOPLE died and you claim this as 'crying wolf'???

If the international community hadn't jumped on this, it could have been way, way, way worse.

I have to agree with this decision, since the trailer they did release looked amazingly bad and amateurish. They leads don't seem to be good actors, have no charisma and no chemistry, what little dialog seemed uninteresting and full of cliches, and the scenes seemed badly done.

I watched this with a friend, and at the end she went "Wait, that was a real trailer? I thought it was some sort of ad!"

If that was what the film was going to be like, then best it's dead.

Yes, the definition of 'middle class' is somewhat arbitrary, but the percentile distibution curve of wealth is not.

There's always rich and poor, but it's the proportions.

If the top 1% rich people own 99% of the country, then there's rich and... serfs; and there's a 99% chance you're in the latter category.

While we're waiting for this to become widely available, there's always:

http://www.newscientist.com/ar...

which also works via the vagus nerve!

That may be true at the moment, because they're plowing most of it back into capital expenditure, but in the long run, it would be expected to not carry on like that. And that's also why Amazon were the first to declare that they're doing this; it doesn't cost them much right now.

If they were making profits it certainly could.

Luxembourg is a tax haven, very low tax rates. But if they were declared in the UK, then there's a bigger tax take there. The UK would also probably claim tax on profits that wasn't paid in other countries like the USA that was due to economic activity in the UK.

I've been following the Greek debt crisis for at least five years, Greece's problem is that they absolutely refuse to stop spending money they don't have. Remember: Greece has never practiced real austerity (cutting deficits to match receipts) since they joined the Eurozone. Not once. (By contrast, Estonia did eliminate their deficit, and as a result started recovering from The Great Recession quicker than other EU economies.) Greece merely slowed the rate at which they were going more broke (or at least pretended to). Despite being right at the edge of complete national bankruptcy, Greece continues to insist that there will be “no wage or pension cuts” for government workers.

Greece lied about their economic situation to get into the Eurozone, lied about it before the crisis broke, lied after it broke, and continue to lie now.

Keep in mind that the past four years of bank loans from the ECB have not been to save Greece. What they were really designed to do was to keep the card game running long enough to let EU insiders and favored national banks unload Greek bonds, and to reduce their exposure to Greek default risks long enough to put European taxpayers onto the hook in the inevitable event of a Greek default. They pretended to save Greece, and Greece pretended to reform. And now here we are.

The adoption of the Euro hastened and deepened Greece's crisis, but was not the central cause, which was their refusal to stop spending money they didn't have to prop up their extravagant (even by European standards) welfare state. This modern welfare state has now become more sacred to voters than the capitalist economics that make it possible. As Mark Steyn put it, "People’s sense of entitlement endures long after the entitlement has ceased to make sense."

The problem is that with declining demographics, the cradle-to-grave European welfare state is unsustainable. Greece and the rest of the PIIGS are discovering that first, but birth rates are declining all across Europe, and modern welfare states are unsustainable without a new generation to stick with the bill. Most economists believe that Greece will never be able to pay back what they've already borrowed.

Syriza was elected on a platform of ignoring basic economic reality, but they've finally run out of people willing to loan them money to spend. The risk of a Grexit is already priced into all the European markets, But leaving the Eurozone doesn't provide relief for any of the Euro-denominated debt Greece already owes, and there's no guarantee European markets would even be willing to exchange refloated drachmas for real(er) money. And since it's hard to see any sane institution buying Greek debt after a default, Greece's government would undoubtedly start printing drachmas like mad and trigger hyperinflation.

If Greece was willing to pare back its welfare state to much saner levels, they might have a chance to slowly dig their way out of the crisis. Since they refuse to, they're in for a whole lot more economic pain...

> Yes, they do. It's called free trade and is generally seen as very desirable, as it reduces paperwork and leads to countries competing to be better places to do business than their neighbours.

With all due respect, if you actually believe any of that, as pertains to THIS topic, you're a fucking idiot.

This isn't any idea of free trade, nor have they been reducing the paperwork- on the contrary they've been filling a whole bunch of extra paperwork.

What they've been doing is performing most or all of the work in (say) the UK and then filling the tax in Luxembourg as if all the profit was magically done there; and this is purely and simply a tax fiddle.

By running two or more different companies in different countries you can "sell" things across the borders at artificial (fake) prices so that, no profit is made in the UK, and all of it is in Luxembourg or Ireland, on paper. There's no free market for those trades, it's all between two companies, controlled by the same people.

If they actually did everything in Luxembourg, that might well be fair enough, but that's NOT at all what's been going on.

This isn't some free trade utopia, it's essentially fraud, they're saying they made no profit in a country, when they really did. It's not totally dissimilar to the types of things that Enron got up to.

Yes, prices may go up somewhat.

But if you think about it, at the moment transnational businesses have an unfair tax advantage over national ones.

So companies like Amazon are creating and extending monopolistic positions; not because they're necessarily better companies, but simply because they're able to rig their tax positions; if you don't pay taxes, you can lower prices and take markets that you don't necessarily have any right to.

In other words, tax avoidance of the type they're legislating against is anti-competitive; and that too can raise prices in the long run.