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Comment Slow down... (Score 1) 82

I don't mind the idea of 24/7. I object yo the speed of trading and the short-term thinking it encourages. The big traders aren't "investing", instead they are playing some sort fcweird casino-like game. Only, they made the game, so the odds actually are in their favor.

How about a tax on transactions: any stock held long-term (say, over a year) is tax free. Graduate down to transactions where the stock is held less than - say - one hour are taxed at 100% of their value.

Comment Heat wave? (Score 0) 190

Sure, the climate alarmists predicted a massively hot summer. Problem is: this is the heat wave that wasn't. Sure, June was warm, but not unusually so. May was cool. July is very cool, with frequent showers.

Yet we still get to read about the heatwave? Must be in some other Europe, because it isn't in this one. High today, where I live, is 20.5, with light showers predicted for this evening, and every evening this week.

Comment Takes actual, competent IT personnel. (Score 1) 122

I've worked with a lot of small businesses. Two stories.

I was at a new customer site, installing software on their server and setting things up. They had a sweet setup with an automatic tape backup. Thing is, they were supposed to swap out the tape (and take it offsite), but no one had done so in ages. The current tape - broken. So there had been no backup in over a year.

In another case, they had an IT savvy employee who handled everything for them as an extra duty. When he left, no one picked up the tasks. They had a server crash a year later. The only thing that saved them was the accountant, who insisted on printing everything out. Shelves and shelves of paper - customer orders, transactions, everything - all got reentered by hand. They now have an external IT company managing their systems.

Comment Wannabe dictators (Score 1, Troll) 53

Sadly, lots of European countries have wannabe dictators in their governments. Those in the EU get it twice, because the EU commission is the worst of all.

Encryption backdoors, data retention, hate speech (especially insults aimed at politicians), outlawing political parties that don't toe the line. There isn't a totalitarian ides they don't love.

Comment Not news (Score 1) 83

When OpenOffice/LibreOffice were on the verge of winning major contracts, due to their open formats, Microsoft invented their own XML-based format. Anyone who has looked into it knows that it is an abomination. This is not news.

Add in some of the abstruse specifications, for example, requiring apps to reproduce an early Excel bug where it screwed up dates (because it thought 1900 was a leap year).

Comment Re:Unicornia is the land of Net Zero (Score 1) 55

Absolutely this: pure greenwashing.

I've looked into several carbon-capture scheme from an engineering POV. Once you account for all the ancillary costs, every single one of them was a net generator of CO2. Just as an example, I remember one that wanted to gather straw from fields, compact it into blocks, and bury it. Their numbers didn't account for the farm machinery needed to gather the straw, the trucks to transport it to the block-making factory, or the fact that farmers would need to add some other biomass to the fields to replace the straw (which otherwise gets plowed under).

Comment Re:I mean no shit Sherlock (Score 4, Insightful) 55

Christopher Columbus was a product of his times. As for how he and his successors treated the natives they met, well, have you heard of "conversion by the sword"? The catholic priests coming to the battlefield, shouting to natives a chance to become Christian (in Spanish or Portugeuse, of course), then blessing the slaughter when the natives failed to do so. For that matter, do you have any idea how sailors - on literally all ships of the time - were treated?

It doesn't make a lot of sense to judge historical figures by today's standards.

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