This weird inability to reflect reality I see day-to-day coupled with the insistence on anti-patterns of behaviour for those cancelling their subscriptions has prevented me from taking out a sub to the NYT. That's a shame, as some of the articles are great.
The second reference you gave lists four opinion pieces, one culinary review whose tongue-in-cheek comment it misinterprets, and one actual news article about the impact of austerity in Britain.
That one news article was a subject of intense discussion at the time which quickly became politicized. A decent overview of the discussion can be found at
For what it's worth, I wholly subscribe to the OP's viewpoint that the NY times' reports from France have been subpar in recent months - in my view they have been too Americo-Centric and do not sufficiently recognize the different value system in France. But I have often been positively surprised by the paper's reporting on UK issues (and on Brexit in particular).
You have to admit that Great Britain has a long-term reputation for boiling food to death. And their sporting culture seems even more Leroy Jenkins than that in the US.
Our Scottish and US families have long running jokes about one another’s cultures, and the food part was a long one. Until the matriarch on the Scottish side was here with a larger amount of the family and said “well our food is kind of pish in comparison”
Why wouldn't they cut the blade up in situ for transportation at the end of its working life? Seems better than having huge convoys to take them away for recycling.
I built an Alexa skill that sits in front of the local council's website (South Worcestershire, UK) and tells me which set of bins go out this week. Have already probably saved myself more time from looking up the website manually than it took to build the skill. Code at https://github.com/morgan-murray/bin-day
You have completely misunderstood the UK market - note that the OP talked about London. Perhaps as a way to get past the recruiting problem, UK corporates pay a premium for exerienced programmers on the basis that if they cannot do the job, they are let go immediately without severance. Most contractors are 30+, don't want to be 'in charge' (at meetings, giving interviews, being trained in the latest corporate 'values') and are happy to be given a product to build or maintain.
Every contractor I know resigned from a permanent position in their early thirties to go contracting and make 1.5x-2x as much money as a contractor. Businesses regularly offer contractors full-time positions and are regularly turned down.
Contractors may not be particularly special technically, but they will focus on doing what they're told in the team and not attending training, seminars, workshops or HR meetings. I'd much rather build a product with a team of suitably incentivised and managed contractors than a team of permies.
True, when I was contracting I did attend less meetings although it always felt like too many and the pay was good (not so much now).
But I always found it a little bit of a lie when the idea of a contractor coming in and working on a problem from day 2 or 3.
Granted this usually was because the problem was poorly defined and/or limited but even when I joined teams that had really good project managers it still was not as simple as "work on this in isolation".
I have since ditched contracting in UK, too much of a mess with the taxman.
Well, there are very few projects where someone can make a real difference from day 2 or 3. But given that there are numerous permie developers who want either to be a) Product Owners, b) Software Architects or c)professional Youtube viewers, getting a contractor in means you can cut your losses at the end of a 4 week period if you want to and firms do. While it's possible, I've never seen a permie cut during the probation period.
What did you do instead? There is a wave of people looking to get out of contracting in the UK right now exactly because of the messes HMRC keep making.
In case anyone else is confused, the term "en banc" refers to a case which is heard before all the judges on the bench for that court, rather than just one. En banc hearings are generally made in cases deemed of extreme importance. As such, this is a fairly strong finding.
You are somewhat close but a little confused on the meaning of en banc. From my brief scan of the link, the trial judge was Judge Alsup of the Northern District of California (San Francisco) which awarded fees. Judge Aslup reduced the fees. The case was appealed to the 9th circuit to a three judge panel on at least the fees issue (presumably other issues as well). The three judge panel (normal appellate practice) sided with Judge Alsup.
At that point, the only option legally to appeal the appellate court is to ask for an en banc hearing with all (or eleven judges pointed out below) the appellate court judges in the 9th circuit or go to the supreme court (which is unlikely for the issue). en banc is not necessarily a case or issue of extreme importance but another appeal mechanism and also a way for the appellate court to clarify a rule of law or reverse course on a rule of law. en banc happens often in the appellate courts.
Edit: I scanned the en banc opinion - it was purely about fees calculation stating "We reheard this appeal en banc to clarify the standards applicable to awards of attorneys’ fees under the EAJA."
> In case anyone else is confused, the term "en banc" refers to a case which is heard before all the judges on the bench for that court, rather than just one.
Rather than just three, no? When I argued pro se in front of the 2nd circuit (which was a great time, btw - I highly recommend it), it was in front of three judges.
Generally a case is heard "en banc" by a larger panel only as an appeal -- at the discretion of the court -- from an inital decision of a 3-judge panel. In most of the circuits, en banc rehearing is before all the judges of that circuit. The 9th Circuit is so large and has so many circuit judges that even en banc appeals are haeard by only a subset of the circuit judges. An en banc panel in the 9th Circuit consists of 11 judges: http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2017/02/10/En_...
I suspect that this is a question of energy. At high energies, it's difficult/impossible to stop a particle, so you place a row of scintillators out, bend the charged particle path using a magnetic field and measure its displacement (and thus velocity and thus energy).
At lower energies, you can stop the particle in, e.g. an NaI detector which is known as calorimetry. Typically, of course, cosmic rays are quite high energy and given the low rate of muon interaction calorimetry is difficult/impossible. A HEP physicist may use both techniques, e.g. by using heavy-metal plates to cause an EM cascade and measure the resultant shower in a crystalline detector. But typically when one talks of scintillator devices (and almost certainly in the case of cosmic rays) one talks of tracking and measuring deflection in magnetic fields if wanting to measure the energy.
If you could find some undiscovered pattern in cosmic rays distributions, you'd be discovering something much more interesting than where to site your datacenter. If you could explain such an undiscovered pattern, you may be discovering what it's like to win a Nobel prize :-)
This won't work because all particle detectors are noisy. Pretty much all tracking detectors need to use multiple coincidences to determine that a muon has indeed passed by. Individual counts by themselves are not reliable. My past life as a particle physicist included design and build of muon detectors using scintillating plastic and (much more expensive) multi-anode photomultipliers to look at nuclear composition of volumes. Something like an underfunded British version of decision sciences http://www.decisionsciences.com/ :-)
> That's been the theory behind decades of such experiments in many countries. Worked out great, we all can see how the money keep s"trickling down".
Do you have an example? I don't know of any serious economist that backs trickle-down theory except as a strawman, but many point to lower and flatter taxes that can be used to support market-based economics as enabling high productivity. The obvious country that backs this - the US - has done pretty well from it, as have a multitude of smaller nations (Hong Kong, Switzerland, Singapore, the UK, Canada, Australia).
Some countries with higher taxes but also based around a free market economy have done well - Germany is the prominent example and Sweden and Finland. Some have succumbed to corruption and are failing, or on the brink of failure (Italy, Spain, Greece).
The opposite - high taxes, lack of a market and extreme governmental intervention - has certainly been tried in many, many countries. Most (all?) have failed badly in a way that has destroyed generations of productivity (North Korea, Cuba, The Soviet Union, Venezuela, etc.) and really fucked-up their societies that way - usually accompanied by secret police squads, the crushing of liberties and very low quality-of-life.
> That theory is actually very un-capitalistic: It assumes that only a few people know what is best for the majority.
That's actually very 'capitalistic' - the man with the capital makes the ultimate decisions as to where it gets invested. Perhaps you meant democratic?
I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument either. The capital owner usually employs many people to invest portions of the capital into smaller investment opportunities - it's not like Bill Gates has to invest all of his fortune into just one opportunity is it? If anything, this site is based around the idea of giving capital to the unexperienced to start businesses with promising ideas - that's pretty much the exact theoretical definition of angel investors, incubators and VCs.
One might argue that these institutions suffer from cronyism and don't do their job as well as they should, but their job is after all to re-allocate accrued capital to value-producers in a risk-balanced way across a broad portfolio which, I think, is what you seem to want to advocate.
A not too large and not too small and recent example - using the whole of the US is more muddled also because of larger timescales which include the ability to blame other developments - see Kansas.
