Wrt. speedometers, mine reads optimistic by roughly 5%; I've tested it with GPS, and at an indicated 70mph the car is doing a GPS-verified 67mph. (Safer that way than the other way round.) So my current speed strategy on long motorway stretches in a vehicle with no cruise control and good visibility is to put my foot down when the needle drops to 70, and to lift off (or if necessary brake) when it hits 77 (which is actually more like 73-74).
The police allow a margin of error of 10% over the speed limit plus 1mph, at least in good driving conditions for a driver who isn't otherwise being a dick, so the threshold for prosecution/a fine on the motorway would be an actual measured 78mph.
]]>Which is, when you look at it, the way you would want it to be.
Part of the thinking about raising the motorway limit is that they are, per vehicle-mile, much the safest places to be despite the way that on some of them most vehicles are travelling at above the current limit.
There are places where GATSOs aren't about accidents: where they're trying to encourage smooth traffic flow (chunks of the London area motorway network).
]]>I avoid that road. It really wants cruise control, and that's something I don't have.
Its main problem is that it is heavily congested, and the way to get the maximum possible throughput is to constrict everyone to doing the same speed. The problem is that that road is part of several major routes: (a) Kent and the Channel ports to anywhere in England north of Birmingham. (b) Southern East Anglia (including Felixstowe Port) to almost anywhere north of London. (c) East London to anywhere north of Cambridge and east of the M1. (d) North Wales, Scotland and Ireland to the European mainland.
]]>Oddly enough, your first sentence seems to also apply to 5th century Greece . . . B.C., that is.
]]>My wife and I have gotten into screaming fights about who is supposed to do what on a given day . . .
Childhood family life also wouldn't be a socialist idyll- it was always clear that since my economic contribution to the family was basically zero, that while I was free to have and voice opinions on resource allocation and make persuasive cases, I had zero _authority_ about resource allocation.
Heh. If you disapprove of communism, family style, then you really won't like my family setup, which something along the lines of a benevolent tyranny. I make more money than the better half does, but every month I meekly hand over my paycheck in exchange for my weekly allowance of perhaps $20 and gas money. Oh, and a list of things to do of course, like digging out the leaves clogging the gutters this weekend.
This seems to be a common family model ;-)
]]>But the "good" countries (NL included) and supranational treaty organizations increasingly smile on activities more commonly associated with gangsters--market manipulation, loan-sharking, protection rackets, even gun-running. This not going unnoticed.
(Mafia clans don't scale as well as limited-liability corporations do, and don't have the same access to local, state and (inter) national police forces. Which is why Las Vegas is now a family-friendly simulacrum.)
Every system can be fiddled, and it's reasonable to tolerate some fiddling when (1) stopping it costs more than it recoups and (2) it doesn't threaten the perception of its fairness overall. A functional society needs a bit slack. The Dutch government goes by this, though less so than before. The UK and various US states, on the other hand, spend millions, mostly on private contractors, to recoup thousands, while giving the biggest cheats a partial or full pass. This gets noticed too. (And when governments talk about hunting terrorists and their money while making use of "black" funds, guns of uncertain origin, and the services of nasty regimes to do so, that also gets noticed, usually later.)
Every society has System D types. As noted, obedience to the law correlates weakly with harshness or even certainty of enforcement. But the most law-abiding and tax-paying people tend to live under the most honest governments, with laws that aren't very harsh. Greeks living in honest countries tend to pay their taxes, funny that.
The greater the proportion of System D types, the less successful the society. Their presence on an international scale is a sign of a planetary society that just isn't coming together.
To attain a halfway decent planetary society it is necessary to save the global economy. It is not necessary to save global business as usual.
Which is the point of the Occupy movement.
]]>There are more reasons to worry about wealth inequity than I can ever possibly list. They are social, economic, and historic; they have to do with both general and individual welfare.
When 1% of the population owns or controls 90% of the wealth (money, businesses, property), that level of concentration means stagnation. It means a very small number of people get to decide the future for vast numbers.
The best thing for an economy is a rapid exchange of wealth. Currency moving between as many people as possible. When 90% of the wealth is concentrated with 1% of the population, that doesn't happen -- that concentrated wealth tends to stay there.
The result of this is that the extremes widen. And that has been very visible: the shrinking middle class in the US, resulting in incomes dropping everywhere but the top 3 or 4% -- and even that's shrinking, and it will soon be the top 1% that have increase incomes.
It's an utter disaster in the making, and the results will be violence, collapse, or both.
provided that I've got enough for what I need
The reason you should care what the 1% make is because they are, very literally, deciding whether you get enough for what you need. And they don't want you to.
]]>Because I missed the comment. (I'm a bit busy with other things right now.)
NB: Krugman calls it, here. And it's not even the top 1% who are the real winners; more like the top 0.1%.
]]>The non-bowdlerised version of 'systeme d' (demerde rather than debrouille) is the most-commonly understood, and could be fairly translated as jury rigging, ie make do with whatever's at hand, starting under adverse circumstances. One has to be in it before they get to 'demerde' oneself (literally get yourself out of shit).
Debrouille, which means literally un-muddle/untangle also means manage/get by, but doesn't necessarily carry the subtext of "having to", and could apply equally well to 'cutting corners' or 'hacking' in the broadest sense.
]]>bjacques @ 119
NO
It really is not the point of the "occupy" movement..
Who claim to be "anti-capitalist" and "Anti-corporations" (Which are two entirely separate and different things, incidentally.
THEN one sees these ill-educated idots, drinking "strabucks" coffee, and using Mac iBooks.
And they are anti-corporation in what way, precisely?
And, of course, they are selling copies of stupid wanker "socialist worker" - and claiming that they aren't "stalinist" and it will be different this time.
Not three brain cells to rub together.
I'm not actualy sure this so-called movement has GOT a point, any point.
]]>Point taken. Actually half a point. The protesters probably don't care about saving the global economy, but the concrete demands that have arisen from the protests would go a long way to saving it.
The protests are actually quite focused compared to the usual leftist protests. Like the poor, Shitty White People, aka the SWP (h/t the Clash movie "Rude Boy") will always be with us. In the US, I've seen the same weedy types, the same boring black (or purple!) and white signs. They're tolerated but have no influence and everyone looks down on them.
The messages are indeed varied, but they boil down to:
Which leaves the "hypocrisy" of protesters drinking Starbucks coffee and using Macbooks. Where have I heard that before?
Maybe here? or here? How about here?
That wheeze was old well before Home Sec Theresa May and MP Louise Mensch got hold of it. Macs and overpriced but decent coffee are part of the landscape. But nobody's mentioned that, for all the faults of Apple or Starbucks--and they are many--at least the former's computers actually work and don't also blow out the house mains or destroy the internet, and my drinking the latter's coffee doesn't result in my family being poisoned. Compare and contrast with the practice--still going of predatory lending and repackaging the resulting unstable debt into complex financial instruments. What could possibly go wrong with that?
(OMG, I just found this. Wingnuts are all over the Starbucks Xmas holiday mascot, the Nutcracker looking too much like a certain 400-years-dead Catholic plotter!)
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