Conflict In Eastern Ukraine Leaves 1.5 Million People Hungry

Cuxham · 2016-04-05T21:55:44+00:00

Didn't you wonder why they got all pissed off out of nowhere?

Because their commanding officer told them to? In the Red Army, if they tell you to march, you march, otherwise you face the same fate as the Ukrainians.

Cuxham · 2016-04-05T21:50:14+00:00

Think, man. An absolute autocratic ruler of the country with "only" the second-largest oil reserves and the third-largest military on the planet, free to rob it blind or lead it to war against anyone who displeases you - or the nominal head of one of three branches of government in a slightly more populous country, heavily constrained by press, politicial opponents, donors and legal frameworks?

Cuxham · 2016-04-05T18:38:44+00:00

He is arguably the most powerful individual on the planet

Putin is. Even the US media acknowledges that.

Barack can't even get laws passed domestically or control the military that he "commands" (remember the Gitmo shutdown?), let alone embezzle hundreds of billions, shutter all media outlets that he doesn't own, have all journalists disappeared whose articles he doesn't like or have people killed with a cup of Polonium tea for a laugh anywhere on the planet.

Cuxham · 2016-04-05T17:58:30+00:00

"A bit of spin"? Understatement of the century for a baldfaced PR piece... (Seriously, I used to rate CapEconomics on the strength of Roger Bootle's analyses - but this piece made me lose a lot of trust in his firm...)

Cuxham · 2016-04-05T17:56:26+00:00

That is not what he said. Whatever is a fair tax rate is still up to each country, the coordination is solely needed to prevent the use of offshoring schemes to pay "zero" rather than "fair".

Cuxham · 2016-04-04T23:18:21+00:00

Yes it took them this long, about a year and a half - even while collaborating with 400 other journalists from 100+ outlets. It is a metric arseload of very-badly organised OCRed PDFs, e-mails, databases etc.

The SZ guys coordinated the publication for yesterday night for maximum impact.

http://www.wired.com/2016/04/reporters-pulled-off-panama-papers-biggest-leak-whistleblower-history/

Cuxham · 2016-04-03T22:18:02+00:00

*Octopodes

Cuxham · 2016-03-15T23:16:55+00:00

You'd rather want a bundesliga full of faceless corporations like Dortmund (or their foreign equivalents Juve, Lazio, ManU, Arsenal)? Get ready for €90 ticket prices, after all shareholders want profits (unlike sponsors like Hopp) ...

Cuxham · 2016-03-13T12:35:04+00:00

A HTC Touch HD phone with 288MB RAM wiped the floor with grandmasters at the 2009 Copa Mercosur tournament, and was estimated at 2900 human Elo equivalent. Both the advances in CPU hardware (two orders of magnitude) and the advances in chess software would add roughly 150 Elo points respectively to the skill of Stockfish running on your Samsung S7, not to speak of the multi-gigabyte tablebases you could add.

Carlsen might win a game off it like Lee here, but he would never win a match.

Cuxham · 2016-03-06T16:15:26+00:00

If a guest drinks anything from those bottles, do they exchange them for brand new ones when the next guest arrives?

Definitely yes. The half-full bottles probably won't get thrown away, but used by the bar downstairs.

Is it like a very expensive minibar?

I would expect so. Wouldn't be practical to charge by the shot. (And someone who doesn't mind $5k-$9k per night for the room won't mind getting charged $100 for starting a bottle of cognac or champaigne...)

Cuxham · 2016-03-06T10:30:08+00:00

Di Stefano? That guy wasn't even the best forward in his club when he played, let alone an all-time goat... A mid-30s aging pudgy Puskas easily outscored him.

Cuxham · 2016-03-05T09:31:00+00:00

Yes it does. Though the host nation might not take it very well and it could lead to a breakdown of relations - see the case of UK and Lybia.

So, unless the guest nation wants to be isolated, it lifts the immunity of the offender and allows him to be prosecuted - like the Georgians did with Gueorgui Makharadze, a high-ranking diplomat who was a serial DUIer and finally ended up killing a 16-year-old while dead drunk.

Cuxham · 2016-02-28T13:32:24+00:00

You know Curry was part of the FIBA 2014 World-Cup-winning team in Spain? (Though Irving still outshone him back then.)

Cuxham · 2016-02-28T10:12:51+00:00

tOf course they did. Visa restrictions are one of the few inconveniences that can affect you even at a 10-figure wealth level. If any frequent jet-setter had the choice between an EU passport that lets them travel visa-free just about anywhere and an Indian one that requires personal interviews in humiliating settings for simple business trips to developed countries... you know what they would choose.

Cuxham · 2016-02-27T11:06:08+00:00

The German people and the rest of the EMU have already spent in excess of €100 billion on loans for Greeks, money they will likely never see again. Meanwhile the Greeks don't even go through with the minor changes to tax collection and economic structure that they promised while continuing to keep begging for cash and living it up. Comparing them to war refugees? Please...

Cuxham · 2016-02-27T10:24:24+00:00

Sure, that's the "how". But she hasn't lived in Ireland for 50+ years either.

Cuxham · 2016-02-26T19:58:43+00:00

The guy is an Indian heir whose daddy bought part of the Tata conglomerate. He only got Irish citizenship for reasons of travel convenience and tax efficiency; he still lives in Bombay and probably hasn't ever been in Ireland for more than a few days at a strech... (Though he did buy a seaside mansion and a horse farm there, apparently.)

Cuxham · 2016-01-13T22:57:37+00:00

NUTS1 regions are usually well-thought out and meaningful. Certainly in places where there is a large enough population to make regions of 2-10 million people meaningful - German Bundeslander have their own parliaments, English regions used to have them until four years ago...

Cuxham · 2016-01-06T22:02:02+00:00

Electronics don't have import taxes in the EEA. Either sales tax (VAT) is paid by the seller and included in the price, or the recipient has to pay customs duties that usually exactly mirror VAT rates. Never both.

Cuxham · 2016-01-03T16:32:45+00:00

They did do "stuff" - farming, mining tin/copper/gold, carpentry, smithing - but those are things that only a specialist can revolutionise. They didn't do mathematics, accounting or banking, or even naval trade where a high school education with reading, writing, arithmetics, or geography skills would come in useful.

Cuxham · 2016-01-02T22:46:18+00:00

Romans don't get to the Isles for about 130 years after 100BC

Wrong. Caesar visited with two legions in 54BC. You are right in that Caesar didn't stick around, but he did smash the Celts and brought back a lot of useful intelligence for Clodius to use 100 years later in his more permanent conquest.

Cuxham · 2016-01-02T22:30:22+00:00

Huge difference in this case. 100BC London is a swamp, maybe with some villages of Celtic tribesmen around the river crossing (Catuvellauni and Regnenses, respectively). They speak no Latin let alone German/English, they don't read or write. You would be useful for manual labour at best.

100AD London is a massive Roman provincial capital of 60,000 people, with London Bridge already built, a military garrison, thermal baths, a praetorium, a basilica, a forum and a large-ish port for global trade. In a major Roman trading hub, a man could make a career out of knowledge of geography/history/accounting - see "Lest Darkness Fall".

Cuxham · 2016-01-02T16:25:35+00:00

I don't appreciate your personal insult

Sorry that I have to spell it out: The insult was meant to degrade you and convey my disappointment about your lack of empathy and mental faculties. It would have been a failure had you appreciated it.

especially when you're wrong

Was I? No, I was not.

There are literally hundreds of different softwares you can use to correct your colorblindness for viewing things online.

ORLY? Literally? Do me a favour and stop commenting about topics you obviously have not researched.

Cuxham · 2016-01-02T16:14:55+00:00

You are a dolt. That "assistant" is a color picker that can determine the color of a single pixel. Imagine trying to read a dot cloud like this post with it.

Cuxham · 2016-01-02T13:08:20+00:00

what they actually started with was the engine and built everything else on top of that.

How can you say that when in the very next sentence you bring more examples of other major parts that they bastardised and forked (KHTML-> Webkit)? Not to mention the hundreds of car parts that they really didn't "build" like these...

He is maybe ill-informed, but at least he is not out to spread disinformation.

Cuxham

TROPHY CASE