I have two lessons, politics and history. In politics we won't be doing anything that I can't find out about and learn from the text-book, and in history I'll miss out on some information regarding various aspects of Nikita Khrushchev's leadership of the Soviet Union, which'll be more difficult to catch up on. I feel I'll be more productive at home, though, instead of spending three hours doing nothing at college for my free periods.

So, fuck it, your call.

how the UN works.

It doesn't.

Not gonna go anywhere.

Nobody's claiming it will.

They should include atheists in that acronym as well since it's as much an orientation as transgender is.

'I need to sit that way because of my balls' — and 5 other misguided defences of 'manspreading' on public transport.

If you're someone who manspreads, let me 'womansplain' why you should close your legs.

And that day, Your Honour, was the day I stopped fucking reading the Independent.

Because LGT doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

It does much better than LGBT.

I fucking hate the phrase LGBT, it's so fucking clunky and expositional.

I think I speak for all bisexuals when I say we'd be happy to just be dropped from the movement.

Bull fucking shit the US is not fucking transparent.

Not absolutely.

It's just more transparent than any other country barring the United Kingdom.

I'd have to say no.

The problem, of course, is confusing 'They're better off because of slavery' with 'We never should've ended slavery'. Only the first proposition seems to be true.

BBC

The UK government is the most open and transparent in the world, according to global rankings looking at public access to official data.

But web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, whose organisation compiled the table, says the country has "a long way to go" before it has a fully open government.

Eighty-six countries were assessed for how easy their governments make it for state information to be analysed.

The US and Sweden come second and third in the rankings.

The World Wide Web Foundation, founded by Sir Tim in 2009, accuses many governments of failing to honour their promises to ensure official data is available. It says that in more than 90% of countries surveyed, data that could help beat corruption and improve government services remained locked away from public view.

"There are a lot of countries that have promised to put this basic data out there, really valuable information to cement trust between the government and citizens, but a lot of them haven't followed up," says Sir Tim.

Kenya has fallen 27 places in the overall rankings, from 22nd to 49th position. The foundation says many had hoped the high-profile launch of an open data portal in 2011 would be followed by continuing commitment and a policy framework for open data. "No such framework has come into force," it says.

In contrast with the UK, the Republic of Ireland is in 31st position in the rankings, two places lower than last year and the lowest-placed European country. Mali, Haiti and Myanmar, also known as Burma, are at the bottom of the table.

"Despite coming top of the rankings, the UK has a long way to go. The release of map data is something where the UK has lagged behind, and you'd think postcodes would be part of the open structure of the UK, but they're not," Sir Tim points out.

"The Post Office holds them as being a proprietary format. So, ironically, just a list of places in the UK is not available openly, for free, on the web."

Central to the UK's place at the top of the ranking is the data.gov.uk website, launched by the Labour government in 2010. The coalition government expanded the government files released on the site, opening up £80bn of government expenditure to public scrutiny.

However, Parliament's Digital Democracy Commission has warned that transparency is not the same as true accountability.

"There's actually a big difference between dumping data that's not easily understandable and actually having open data that clever people can use to help you and me find out the information they want about the subject they want," says Meg Hillier, a Labour MP who sits on the Commission set up by the speaker of the House of Commons.

"One of the things that MPs are trying to get government to do is to make sure data is released in usable formats. Just dumping data is not the answer, it ticks a box but it doesn't do the job."

Nevertheless, Britain can certainly claim to be far more open and transparent than many other countries. There are now hundreds of Whitehall civil servants whose jobs are linked to the digital revolution - social media managers and digital communications teams responsible for websites, Facebook and Twitter pages.

Many government services, including the rollout of universal credit, are designed to be "digital by default", prompting some to warn about a digital divide opening up between those online and the millions of UK adults who have never been on the internet.

"If you are saving money by doing things digitally, that does free up money and resources to support those who need old-fashioned systems," Meg Hillier points out. "Even in Estonia where everything is on digital they allow people to do anything they want on paper. We must always remember the digital divided and make sure they're not neglected."

For all its problems and challenges, Sir Tim believes the digital revolution should usher in a new age of open and accountable government.

"It has been this massive international collaboration of people that's been really exciting," he says. "People come out of the woodwork doing things because they're just excited about the final world that they're building. Those are the people that I'm proud of."

Well fuck, credit where credit is due.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on January 21, 2015, 11:22:55 AM

Quote from: AllAmericanTragedy on January 21, 2015, 11:21:11 AM

yeah... but that requires a long transition period... Catalonia didn't have a transition...

Are you going to actually provide any logic or evidence for your position? Or are you just going to keep making vague statements?

ok... im gonna edit this response with actual evidence after school... i cant type a lot because i might get caught

I look forward to it.

yeah... but that requires a long transition period... Catalonia didn't have a transition...

Are you going to actually provide any logic or evidence for your position? Or are you just going to keep making vague statements?

This is an understandable trope in a lot of people's minds (even professional economists), but I think when the evidence is considered there's little support for such an idea.

I'd just like to say that, yes, predatory lending was a thing. Yes, Dick Fuld was a reckless man for leveraging Lehman Brothers to the extent that he did. Yes, we would've had a sub-prime mortgage crisis anyway.

So, estimates for the beginning of the financial crisis have varied. Some people place it as the failure of Lehman Brothers in late 2008, whereas some place it with the discontinuation of three of BNP Paribas's hedge funds. I prefer the second definition, since--as I will demonstrate--disintermediation as caused by a reduction in banking activity isn't that important and using the actions of BNP Paribas leaves a very uneventful year-long gap in which nothing significant seems to happen.

As for the Recession, we know it began in December of 2007, but was exceptionally mild for the first six-or-so months. Lee E. Ohanian points out that the Depression couldn't have been caused by the 'financial crisis of 1929', because there really wasn't a financial crisis in 1929. The 40pc declination of banks between 1929 and 1933 was because of un-diversification (because of size) and mergers. Indeed, the biggest year of bank failures was 1933--which was the beginning of the recovery, why? Because expansionary monetary policy revived aggregate demand.

AD is key here. Any disintermediation between banks can be largely weathered provided a stable growth of nominal income, which can be supplied by monetary policy. Ohanian goes on to note, regarding the 2008 Recession, that intermediation between banks didn't decline as much as you should expect if you believe the credit cycle primarily drives the business cycle. Bank credit relative to nominal income was at an all-time high by the end of 2008.

And it's only really until nominal income tanks in mid-2008 that the economy goes into a tailspin. The S&P 500 index (as well as house prices) demonstrate* that the economy only entered this tailspin when they had already lost over half their value. While, at the same time, household liabilities** only declined with the drop in nominal income. The same is true for rising unemployment***:

It makes sense in light of the financial crisis, too. Falling nominal income means less money, and would obviously cause or exacerbate any debt problems. I'll end it here, lest I bore you all to death.

Also, these graphs here show the relationship between nominal income and rGDP following recessions supposedly induced by financial crises. One through three, four and five. In other words, so long as the central bank maintains a stable level of nominal income growth (aggregate demand), then the producers will supply the output assuming no exceptional supply-side issues. Financial crises, really, are a non-starter when it comes to discussing downturns.

I've put this in the Bonfire specifically because this is very contentious (at least among economically minded people) and I'm not even sure about my own stance on the issue, so I can't consider it an authoritative guide in any way.

TL;DR
>financial problems don't matter so long as the government maintains spending in the economy

Quote from: Forgewolf on January 21, 2015, 08:55:32 AM

Quote from: Mega Sceptile on January 20, 2015, 11:20:38 PM

i like to think so, I mean, there has to be something inside this little brain of mine that makes me think and act as an individual.

It's called Neurons! Billions of them!



The average number of neocortical neurons was 19 billion in female brains and 23 billion in male brains.

Men have more than women!? 0_o.. So.. how can women be naturally smarter than men?

Well they aren't, are they? I thought on average we were about the same.

It's not just the number of neurons it's the connections between them.

^

Fewer neurons could lead to closer neuronal connections and activities, and thus improve cognition.

Anarchy isn't communism...

It is most of the time, and it was in Anarchist Catalonia.

2. and we don't know what would happen if we were communist/socialist at that time...

Well we know there really wouldn't have been an incentive to innovate to such an extent, and there's a reason that civilisation eventually evolved from it's prehistoric anarcho-egalitarianism and it's ancient proto-socialism.

We also know that the implementation of socialised economic policy can lead to a reduction in industrial activity, namely through Anarchist Catalonia.