Posts written by Vninect

Chomsky has something to say to Europe. I always appreciate his analysis. I hope you do too.

ETA: video ends at 3:50.

So in their eyes it was just the reckless benevolence of the government that prevented people being slaved out to corporations since 1911... Ok.......

I had not realized you had to pay a separate fee to receive the BBC.

Here in the Netherlands, we do not need a tv license to receive public radio and television - though there used to be a tax on having a tv a very long time ago. All you need is a working cable or antenna.

However, we do get commercials on our public channels. Not quite as many as on the commercial channels (which you have to pay for to receive), but still. Additionally, the public channels receive a public subsidy, though that is getting slashed more and more. That's unfortunate, because they really did provide better quality programming than the commercial alternatives.

It's hard being insanely rich.

http://www.alternet.org/10-hardest-things-...t=11&paging=off

I don't think it has disappeared in Holland - as far as I am aware.

Testing html tables:

sda		d
	d
	ds
w		sadads
ssdads	d

good to know that works..

On the topic of boycotts, I have heard of commercial boycotts effecting the ending of apartheid policies in South Africa. I am not sure it is exclusively the boycott: it seems multiple economic measures were taken. But at least it seems to have started with consumer boycotts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Apartheid_Movement So this might be a good place to look around.

I do not know of any action since then that has really made a difference. The track record for ineffective campaigns, however, is extensive.

We all know Apple is abusing Chinese workers for their products, and no boycott has been asked for. We know Nike and other shoe producers used to employ child labour. I think there was some minor hustle about it, but as far as I am aware, they have neither proven to have changed their ways, nor have they ever acknowledged the fact. Nike is still well alive. People in India would prefer widespread boycotts on Coca Cola, which is quickly draining their clean water supplies with pop-up temporary installations. Nothing of the sort has happened.

The fact that I know of more failed boycotts than successful ones might prove little: publications of successful anti-corporate actions are not readily duplicated in the corporate mass-media. And I suppose that is also part of the problem. Even though Coca Cola, Nike, Apple, all deserve fatal boycotts, a boycott relies on scale. The knowledge about their unethical behavior is at the surface, but it is not communicated through any large channels, nor are their boycotts coordinated with any wide reach. At the individual scale, it makes little sense. If I choose to boycott Coca Cola, can I be sure Pepsi is ethical? Or Dr. Pepper? You can't buy Dr. Pepper in many supermarkets, just Coca Cola and/or Pepsi....

Not sure anymore where this post is going. I am starting to repeat points already made. I might come back to it later.

But did their gdp increase?

(spoiler: yes)*

*source

Today in the Netherlands, SNS Bank was nationalized. On the one hand: Hurrah! On the other hand: EPIC FAIL.

Those who thought that the crisis was over, must have been quite surprised. I wasn't. I was a bit sad to read that the bail out money given to this bank was not repaid. In 2008 they received 750 million euros of emergency aid. No worries, the Minister of Finance at the time said: we will get it all back in time, with interest.

According to news articles, the main problem was their real estate branch "Property Finance", which they acquired in 2006. This purchase was worth 810 million euros, making them the largest real estate financier in the Netherlands. In 2009 PF was still dragging the whole ship down. In 2010 it turns out that it dragging even harder than estimated before. They are advised to write off 1.2 billion euros. They can't do this, and do half instead, postponing their downfall to 2012. At that point Goldman Sachs is one of the advisors, and they tell SNS to sell off their insurance branch. There are several offers, but none of them on terms acceptable to our current Minister of Finance Dijsselbloem. He had set a deadline today for any offers. When nothing serious came from the private sector, SNS' stocks were declared worthless and the bank was taken over. There are no negative backlashes to this, except that it costs the taxpayers 220 euros per person (average), with which guarantees are restored, bank capital is regained, and that money we would get back from 2008 cancelled.

The previous top managers of SNS have decided to step down because they disagree with the non-private solution as pressed through by Dijsselbloem, and do not wish to bear the responsibility for this new arrangement. And of all things that could bother me about this overdue nationalization, the fact that they are allowed to step down for their own reasons bothers me the most. These incompetent lazy bastards screwed up structurally, over the course of many years, and now that costs us all a lot of money. They don't get to dictate their own reasons to leave!! Well, at least they don't get a severance package.

What do we know about Mali? I don't know anything about the civil war going on there - I haven't followed it. All I know about Mali is that it has come up in this forum once, in the context of land grabs for foreign food production. But France has decided to jump in to aid one side in the conflict, and now America has decided to help them. Turning the civil war into an international event makes it more relevant to all of us, and probably also more complicated - complication which civil wars generally have plenty of already.

I don't know what they expect to happen. But since this is not the first time Western countries have intervened in the conflicts of other countries, I hope I may be forgiven for being extremely cynical right off the bat. Their "altruism" often comes with excessive colonial rewards.

Besides whether or not they have good intentions, the most curious thing about the decision of France and America to join in, is the apparent ease with which some countries seem to assume they have a role to play in other countries' conflicts. This is not universal: Syria seems to have been protected from overt "help", though we know equipment is being supplied by various countries to both sides of the conflict. With Libya we had a bit of a discussion. Each time the situation is very complicated, so jumping in for humanitarian reasons is not simply choosing the good guys over the bad guys - we don't really know who they are. Are other countries even capable of assessing the local situation and deciding what is best, ever?

Shocking.

The French right-wing is ridiculous.

Today, according to a French police report, around 340.000(!!) people publicly protested Francois Hollande's move to try to legalize gay marriage and adoption.

The president of the republic named this campaign "Mariage pour tous". The homophobic campaigners are waving flags of "Le Manif pour tous": A demonstration for everyone. The worst pun in every sense.

I somehow didn't expect so much support for such a cause in France - not that I claim to know anything about that country.

The press release I read about it (in dutch: link) suggests that it may be linked to an earlier move to try to secularize the remaining denominated schools in the country. I don't know how much power the church has in France, nor how tightly religion and homophobia are linked there (It is one thing to support your local church-school; it is another to deny the existence of gay people).

In any case, this demonstration is a national disgrace, and I have to suspect that there is more at play than only religious issues: the arrival of Hollande politically marks a bend to the left. Whatever the outcome of the debate on gay rights, this manifestation leaves a dirty stain on the president's reputation. So his opponents are already winners. Let's hope that the homosexuals get to share some of that sweet victory, at least, now that the damage has already been done.

ETA: during the elections last year, support for gay marriage was about 2/3rd of French people. Now, that has dropped to about half: Allegedly, because many people have come to doubt the adoption part of it. Still, the homophobes managed to mobilize a lot of people on this, indeed.

Took me a while to figure out that it is a chart showing the relative changes in housing prices across countries, compared to their 1975 values.

With ordinary beach sand, and ordinary snow, only the most simple shapes, like your snowman and sand castle, can be made. They don't have the cohesive strength of the kind of sand and snow they use for these sculptures. For the beach sand sculptures that you can sometimes see, they dump some special rough river sand on the beach first. The coarse river sand sticks much better than the polished rounded grains you find on a beach. For the snow sculptures, you need densely compacted snow; not the kind that falls loosely from the sky.

Anyway, that sloppy sand castle may be Camelot to kids, even though it doesn't look anywhere near it.