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Reposted from John Ward's blog, at his open invitation...
Why electing defaulters to power is the only way left
On Thursday, Canadian bloggers cottoned on to the plans of their government via the annual budget statement. On pages 144 and 145 of "Economic Action Plan 2013″ (already submitted to the Canadian House of Commons), it openly proposes 'to implement a 'bail-in' regime for systemically important banks' there.
The second wave of evidence about what's coming I referred to yesterday: the banks hastily sending out acres of fly-shit to their customers to blame any future disappearance of money-substances from their accounts. The general line of defence being offering by these creeps is "ve are only obeyink orders". The first one out of the blocks appears to have been Santander. Yesterday, the one from HSBC started landing on Slogger doormats. Guess what? The wording and headings are exactly the same as the Santander mailshots.
In short, the entire operation is being coordinated and run by the Treasury. Any chance of Ed Miliband – our friend in tough times – asking a PMQ about this next Wednesday? Don't hold your breath. Our MPs these days simply do as they're told, or what they want – whichever is the easiest and most profitable route at the time.
What we are seeing come to pass at the moment is what those previously nutwhack sites from three years ago were screaming at a deaf audience: in the end, they'll confiscate our money to bail out the lunatics. But where will it end?
There's a Radio 4 audio clip of Michael Winner at his best in the BBC archives, grumbling two decades ago about how restaurants steal from their customers. Winner says:
"I called a waiter over and said look, you've added an obligatory 15% service charge to the bill and a cover charge of 10%. Now my credit-card slip has arrive and you've left a blank space so I can add a further gratuity on top. Should I just undress so you can have my clothes as well?"
Bizarrely, we now have to ask ourselves the same about Djisselbloem Plan…and where it will end. After all, there's plenty to go at.
For example, behind the guise of us "all being in this together", George Osborne could painlessly announce an emergency Budget in the UK, and slap a 5% levy on all houses valued over £250,000.
"The rich must help depress house prices so the young can get on the bandwagon" the Squeaky Draper would allege. If nothing else, this would please Vince Cable, who has been demanding a 'mansion tax' for two years already. Note the use of 'mansion' there, to suggest 'a tiny minority of the rich'. But it wouldn't be of course: a good 60% of all houses in London are now worth over half a million, and the average British house price is currently about £160,000. So at least 40% of property owning Brits would have to cough up £10,000.
How they'd raise it is another matter – which is why thus far the emphasis has been on theft via a willing intermediary. There, the government takes what it already knows you've got available….without taxpayers having to bother the poor banks for a loan, they too having no money either, allegedly. The increasingly vicious nature of this circle is mind-blowing.
But such complications about property are seen by Treasury nomenklatura (and their accountancy advisers) as merely obstacles needing some creative thought applied to their removal. One said to me earlier this week, "It would actually be remarkably simple: the tax would be declared, payable with interest on the sale of the house. It would simply be a disguised way of bringing the Stamp Duty further downmarket". Easy when you know how innit?
The problem for the Brussels-am-Berlin rapists in Greece was that they were (and still are) forced to demand tax monies from those who haven't got any left. When one gets to the same stage of madness as Louis XVI, it's time for a rethink. Cyprus was it, and this is now – quite clearly – going to be the future for all of us. But care must be taken not to turn a depression into a slump, so direct takes on future purchases have to be avoided: even the FinMin mobsters can grasp that much.
So the next stop could be property. But how much further could they go after that? I would say "not much"…because again, it is a classic case of taxing the sans coulottes and raising the price of their bread: you don't collect any tax, and it results in Bastille-storming. Greece is, I would say, very close to this stage now, as is Italy. I suspect that only Tsipras and Grillo can stop it. Who might come after them, however, doesn't bear thinking about.
For what it's worth, here's my two-pennorth: I suspect that what we'll get is banks being 'rescued' worldwide, the quicker to empty them of SME and private deposits. It would be Communist seizure spun as national necessity.
Take the situation with Britain's RBS. The Treasury has been trying to flog it for eighteen months without any success, and its CEO Stephen Hester has tried to rape his SME customers but been caught, stupid boy. Along the way, to save its subsidiaries the bank has had to inflict several 'glitches' to avoid paying some £80 billion by a certain date. But the situation inside the bank remains as dire as ever.
The official date suggest that 'the taxpayer' already owns 82% of the Royal Bank of Skullduggery, which is of course bollocks because all we own is a ginormous debt. The Establishment owns and runs it as a means of trying the fleece the taxpayer. But it would be a matter of two days work to nationalise ("save") the bank completely, and then enact a Laika-style assets freeze. The rules having been changed already (see mailshots previously spotted) the Treasury would simply say to everyone – "the rich" – with monies over £100,000 in the bank that they they were no longer insured. Money is then printed by Carney the Canuck in Threadneedle Street to amortise the RBS debt into a 'Bad Bank', and the rest goes into the freezer….aka Her Majesty's Government. What's left – smaller savers and investment banking – is then given to another disaster like HBOS, thus making their balance sheet look better. Sorted. Until HBOS goes tits-up.
Of course, in the end you run out of things to
It isn't going to work.
The answer is that there is no "what" to happen "then". The strategy is so obviously doomed, it cannot possibly get that far. Once the wealthy have all the 'glitz bricks' property and the gold, the global system will ban gold sales to the public. FDR did it, this mob wouldn't hesitate to. For real people, there will be nowhere to invest, no way out of being levied, and in the end, nowhere to work.
But this still has no, zilch, zero and f**k all chance of monetising the debts, derivatives and other insurance calls sitting out there in the ether. What the Eunatics are doing today – and the other leeches will do the day after tomorrow – is a pointless waste of time, a last few yards along which to kick the battered can before it finally rolls over the cliff, has a string attached to it, and they all promise that hanging onto the string is the only way, and thus represents our socio-patriotic duty.
Wake up Dumbos, it isn't going to work.
You've tried taxes, you've tried austerity, you've tried levies, you've tried asset freezes, and you'll try every sneaky-snakey trick in your little black book: but it isn't going to be enough. More and more money will go to Asia, more and more worthless fiat money will be printed, more and more debt will accrue in the West, and then one day when nothing is being produced and bond markets, stock markets and commodity markets are going through the floor, we will end up with what I identified years ago as Indeflation – inflated Sovereign demands, deflated goods value, and zero demand.
You will I'm sure all be bored by this by now, but as I have been saying since Spring 2009, debt forgiveness is the only way out.
The current asylum inmates will never do that: never never never. Be they BamBers promoting their euro, Wall Street running Washington, Beijing exporting crap and owed trillions by its buyers, globalist bankers, multinational producers, politicians, tax accountants or corporate lawyers, they will never relent. They can't: if they do, the problems will be horrendous but soluble. Their downside is that there will no longer be any place in it for them.
While we still have the democratic electoral power to do so, the one and only way now to force debt forgiveness globally is for we, the People, to elect politicians who promise to default on all debt the day after they are elected. Yes, I know this will evoke a crisis via immediate capital flight from that country, but they're just going to have to live with it. The alternative is, as I've tried to outline above, an unthinkable can-strewn road heading towards mass lemming impressions.
The first country to do this, I imagine, will be Italy. Greece may well be next, but I think Spain could still beat them to it. Without doubt, the nation that can do it with the least pain is France – given its relatively sparse population sitting on a huge amount of food-producing land. For Britain – dependent on services and hugely overpopulated – it would the the end.
But once such things happen, the game really will be up for mercantilist globalism. 'Siege economies' need be no such thing: self-sufficiency by nation – with judicious trade in surpluses – remains the best way forward: and the only way to avoid a cataclysmic thermo-nuclear conflict in the end.
Too many visitors to this site see me as 'doom-mongering', but they rarely leave anything in the way of rationally argued support for their opinion. My prediction is very simple:
1. Global Looting is coming and it will be self-defeating.
2. The people at the top are mad and stupid.
3. They will not countenance debt forgiveness, so they must be replaced by those who will.
4. The mercantilist model of global economics and Friedmanite econo-fiscal ideas are a busted flush.
5. Self-sufficient Sovereigns trading in surpluses represent the best future for the human race.
Tell me why I'm wrong – with the facts to support it – and I'll happily listen. For me, it's Page One sanity compared to what we have now. Over to you.
And for the rest of us who know the self-styled élite will wind up killing us all given half a chance, I'm making a special appeal for you to forward and repost this essay in as many places as possible. Hits are of absolutely no importance to me beyond the raising global awareness of the need to do something before it's too late. Thanks.
All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.


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subset: commoncrawl


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Saturday, January 5, 2013
The Rebels Strike Back, Part 2
Alac Carrel jumped at the opportunity to join a rebel fleet. Sadly, the text never came.
Another rebel boldly predicted victory, "when the time is just right". For resistance fighters, these guys can be very picky. The timing is never quite right.
After losing his ship due to a Code violation, Michael Loney recommended his fellow miners petition us to CCP for the crime of scamming.
Despite being as wrong as possible, Michael was absolutely confident about his interpretation of the rules: There's no scamming in EVE, you see. He lectured everyone in system about the finer points of the EULA.
If it only it were possible to bottle up a space lawyer's confidence and sell it.
Kendra Valen didn't think it was against the rules to gank miners, but she had faith that CCP would put a stop to it eventually. As I've always said, this is what carebears want. They're not interested in balancing game mechanics and all that other jazz. They just want highsec to be 100% safe for AFK mining. Oh, and it has to be highly profitable, too.
Meanwhile, Neckbeard TheFierce encouraged others to put a (bigger) bounty on me, though the bounty has had zero effect, since it doesn't make killing an Invincible Stabber any easier--or more tempting, given the bounty formula. I predicted this months ago, but that hasn't stopped the carebears from wasting money on ludicrous bounties for me and Agents of the New Order.
Then there's the phantom nullsec merc corp that never arrives. Part of the problem may be that nullsec mercenaries don't spend much time in highsec. And, to the extent the mercenaries exist, they know a bad deal when they see one.
A rebel sniper proudly trumpeted "his" Catalyst kills, which did nothing since it was Concord that did the work. Since snipers generally can't kill a Catalyst until faction police or Concord arrive, they have no effect on the gank. Even on the rare occasions that they do kill a Catalyst a second or two before the police show up, it shaves only a fraction of the DPS from one Catalyst, which itself represents only a fraction of the gang.
Perhaps that's why after participating in several dozen ganks, I have never actually witnessed rebels successfully prevent a gank. I'm told it's happened before, but basically they sit in the ice fields all day and watch helplessly as the miners die. If they linger too long, however, they occasionally find themselves in the crosshairs.
After seeing one too many ganks succeed despite rebel interference, Corrin Javalle throws up his hands. It's impossible to stop the Knights of the Order. Carebears, behold your champion!
In the end, the rebels have found themselves unable to do anything but cry--and suggest that other people stop us. Why? Because ultimately, the people who oppose us are people who support bots and bot-aspirancy. Their way of life in EVE is all about putting no effort into anything. It's hard to fight when you're AFK.
Those who do want to play EVE end up joining the New Order, where they belong.
15 comments:
- AnonymousJanuary 5, 2013 at 4:14 AM
Those who do want to play EVE go to low or null sec, where the there's actually a challenge.
Even if you're obsessed with pve, you shouldn't be in high sec... find a wormhole.RepliesMany of us are no strangers to lowsec and/or nullsec and/or w-space. That said, the challenge in the New Order's work is not just in killing individual NPC imitators (who are no more difficult to slay than NPCs), but in building a community around what we do. Under our banner, pilots of all persuasions work together for the betterment of New Eden - from the Agent to the Knight, from the logistics expert to the fleet commander, from the scout to the spy.
This is perhaps the highest form of MMORPG gameplay - engaging with other players to create something greater than the sum of it's parts (or participants), instead of shooting more difficult NPCs or exposing oneself to arbitrary, meaningless risk from player pirates.- AnonymousJanuary 5, 2013 at 7:35 AM
Miners should go to lowsec too, you know, for challenge.
Or are they somehow above your "honour scale", Mr. Anonymous.
- WhitehoundJanuary 5, 2013 at 8:39 AM
From the bounty notifications on some of the gankers can one tell who and when a ganker gets shot. So far do the notifications go as high as 3m ISKs.
Sometimes the notifications on a single character occur fast after another, which indicates a pod kill after a ship kill.
I don't really care if gankers shoot each other over the bounties, but if they do then it is actually quite entertaining, because it is an undeniable sign of madness.RepliesYou mean it's a sign of intelligence, recognizing that we can shoot each other to basically profit from you, while continuing to have tremendous amounts of fun at the expense of those who refuse to adapt.
Delete- AnonymousJanuary 5, 2013 at 4:23 PM
No, I mean it makes me laugh like two circus clowns who slap each other.
If the gankers shoot one round in the end of the gank each other they can collect the bounty for themselves, and only the guy who put the bounty in the first place it's the "village idiot".
I must admit i wasn't think about this tactic but seems douable and very effective in the end.
Madness; hmm i am not sure about this because clearly it's fun and lucrative.Replies- AnonymousJanuary 5, 2013 at 9:49 AM
I can imagine it gets boring fast. The payouts are still small as they do not yet fly anything much of value and it will take a long time until the bounties have disappeared. One should then never forgot that it always implies a 5 times higher loss in ISKs.
A miner who sits afk in a belt makes about as much ISKs only with his drones when they kill belt rats. First of all it's not abut isk, it's about fun. I wonder how fast a miner became bored? One of my eve acquaintances use to say this:
In order to make a small fortune from piracy you need to start with a big fortune.
Here it's the same: you lose isk but you gain alot of fun.
- AnonymousJanuary 5, 2013 at 11:56 PM
What is the difference between an Agent of the New Order and a Knight?
ReplyDelete I like how people describe such things
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Hearthstone reveals new Webspinner card
Hearthstone unveiled its final class specific Curse of Naxxramas card yesterday, the Hunter beast Webspinner. The 1/1 spider costs one mana, and upon expiring summons a random beast card into your hand. Senior Game Designer Ben Brode explained via Twitter that the range on the text includes any beast card, with the exception of tokens. That rules out the 1/1 hound summoned by the Unleash the Hounds spells. All other beasts (Including hunter legendary King Krush) appear to be fair game.
Webspinner can get any collectible Beast. Everything from King Krush to Captain's Parrot.
- Ben Brode (@bdbrode) June 19, 2014
In terms of viability, this card shows promise. The other turn one beasts available to hunter generally serve specific purposes. Stonetusk Boar exists almost exclusively to be used with Hunter's Mark, while Timber Wolf is utilized in conjunction with other beasts already able to attack. Webspinner could be a nice early game tempo play, while retaining value later on in the match because of its ability to provide the user an additional card. If that card ends up being a Savannah Highmane, King Krush, or even Core Hound, it's a great play. Really, so long as it doesn't draw you Captain's Parrot or Angry Chicken, it's a victory.
The hunter set currently sits right in the middle, as expert opinions go. It is nowhere near as crushing as it was prior to the most recent Unleash the Hounds nerf, but it definitely has a place in the metagame, especially against the all powerful Miracle Rogue deck. Webspinner doesn't look like it will unhinge the class again, so much as it will provide another early game option, something the class can definitely use. Moreover, it will provide the class another degree of trickery. After Webspinner dies, opponents will be forced to wonder if you have a giant dinosaur in your hand or not.


text: The exhibition is about 100 works of the most influential school of Japanese graphic art of the 19th century – the school of Utahava. Her representatives are known for works in the genre of some-e-pictures of the actors of the kabuki theater. The actors enjoyed tremendous popularity among the townspeople, which contributed to the development of artistic direction.


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Viswalingam is a former SBS TV presenter whose credits include Fork in the Road and Class. Having devoted a career to analysing culture and society, he says the symptoms of decay and decadence are unmistakeable.
Those symptoms include soaring suicide rates and the west's addiction to anti-depressants. They include rampant individualism, emptying churches and disintegrating families. And they include the west's obsessive devotion to money as the only true measure of worth.
The good thing about this is that Viswalingam is asking the right questions. He is concerned about what holds a society together and what allows it to continue as a tradition into the future. Liberals are relatively indifferent to this. They don't identify much with communal traditions and are more likely to worry about meeting the political aims of liberalism itself.
So a liberal might think of the West as progressing because it is becoming, say, more multicultural (i.e. more liberal), even whilst someone like Viswalingam sees signs of decadence that threaten the future of the West.
What's interesting is that we seem to have reached a point at which some intellectuals are beginning to look outside of the liberal framework and recognise that it's not just a question of progress toward liberalism. I've noticed that even in solidly liberal papers like the Melbourne Age, that the rise of China has started to focus some minds on the possibility of Western decline.
Some of the reviews of Viswalingam's film have also been surprisingly positive. The review in the Melbourne Age was even titled "Society is past its use by date" and included the following quote from Alexander McCall Smith:
"People have been talking about the 'broken society' for some time now," Smith wrote in a complementary article. "[The British] riots demonstrated just how broken. The broken society is a consequence partly of social change and cultural change.
"The social change is familiar: the destruction of the family as the fundamental social unit would be fine if we had replaced it with something. We have not. [And] it's a culture in which we seem to have abandoned many of the values on which we based our civilisation.
"We don't know what we believe in and are busy bringing up children who share our confusion ... We have created a strange culture perpetuated by television and other media that rejoices in and celebrates dysfunction, violence and anti-social behaviour."
It's even significant that Viswalingam pinpoints 1969 as the turning point. I think he's wrong here - the problems go back much further than 1969. But the fact that Western intellectuals are starting to talk about the 1960s as a source of decline shows how things can change. The 1960s were once held up by the left as a golden age of political radicalism.
And that's an important lesson to draw from this. There are some people who are sympathetic to traditionalism but who are too defeatist. They believe that things will just go on as before with a rock solid liberal orthodoxy. It discourages them from a more active participation in a traditionalist movement.
But politics can change. It's possible that there will be more favourable conditions for us to build a movement and to argue our politics amongst the intellectual/political class. We need to keep trying to push ourselves forward.
Finally, although many of the talking heads in the film come from the left, I was pleased to see that Professor John Carroll also has a role. He is the writer of "Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture" - one of the best of the recent books that could broadly be described as traditionalist.
So we have a major documentary film which actually has a traditionalist-leaning academic featured in it. That is not a common occurrence in the Australian film industry. It's enough to make me want to find time to go and see the film in the cinemas.


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Michigan also must consider reform of its somewhat unique county road commission system, and the way it interfaces with city and highway related organizations. Should such commissions even exist? While MDOT contracts with 63 road commissions for maintenance work, there is still extensive duplication among MDOT, county road commission and city public works functions, and it is not at all clear that the current system leads to cost effective construction and maintenance.
For instance, few counties and cities have sophisticated productivity and cost control measurement systems in place, and compared to private sector operators, very little is done to benchmark operations against other providers. Nor are there aggressive "continuous improvement" management programs in place to increase productivity and efficiency. Nor are county road commissioners always known for their roadbuilding expertise. Possible reforms include elimination of separate county road commissions with elected commissioners and integration of such operations into county government, increased MDOT use of road commission staffs and/or facilities for plowing and general maintenance of state highways in lieu of state garages and staff, and turning over major county construction design projects to MDOT design staff.
While there are many exceptions, the commissioner positions and the entire commission organization are often patronage machines at their finest. A recent effort by county commissioners to have the legislature pass a bill (H.B. 5080) to allow county road funds to be used for commissioner insurance and retirement programs points out some of the potential problems.42 Recent stories about delays in spending Detroit Department of Public Work monies for road repairs, and the $70 million in funds which have accumulated unspent primarily from state user taxes, are more evidence of potential problems.43
It may be possible to reduce duplication between county highway operations and city public works departments by providing legislative incentives for cities and counties to contract with each other to reduce costs. County road commissions and city public works departments are also suspected of being highly patronage-oriented, and it would appear that many of their functions could be privatized with major savings on maintenance expenses. A careful evaluation might well find out that counties should limit their operations to design and procurement functions, with all snow removal, maintenance, repaving and new construction functions carried out by private contractors. With the state and federal governments providing the bulk of money for county and local operations, there is little incentive for local government to consider changes to an age-old system that offers many public employment jobs and tolerates poor performance in maintaining roads.


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The Internet may touch all corners of the globe, but for millions of people it still remains frustratingly out of touch. The URL—that web address that connects users to content—has long remained limited to a handful of Latin-based characters.
Until now.
This year, we are witnessing the emergence of full-length URLs in non-Latin scripts, known as internationalized domain names (IDNs). Here are three working examples:
- правительство.рф (https://правительство.рф)
- παράδειγμα.δοκιμή (https://παράδειγμα.δοκιμή)
- 례.테스트 (https://실례.테스트)
To give you an idea of just how many different scripts can be supported, the following exhibit includes the top-level IDNs that have, as of May 2011, received formal approval by ICANN. The IDNs are displayed next to their country code equivalents.
The regions represented here constitute more than 2.5 billion people, most of whom do not speak English as a native language. The regions also represent where most of the growth in Internet usage will occur over the next decade.
IDNs promise to improve the Internet for millions of people, but they also face obstacles to widespread adoption. This article provides an overview of IDNs as well as these obstacles, and the challenges that web developers will face as IDNs become more common.
The Year of the IDN
An IDN is a domain name that supports one or more non-ASCII characters. This means that any accented character (e.g., ä or é) would turn a conventional domain into an IDN. For example, the German liqueur Jägermeister uses the IDN jägermeister.com. But IDNs are getting the most attention these days for their support for non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, and Chinese.
IDNs have been around for a number of years, but mostly limited to functioning as partial IDNs—a name that's only partly composed of non-Latin characters. For example, президент.ru (the home page of the Russian President) is a partial IDN. While the second-level domain name (президент) is in Cyrillic, the top-level domain name (.ru), is still in ASCII. The Internet protocol strings such as "http" and "ftp" remain in ASCII.
Although partial IDNs function perfectly well, they're not very practical because they require the user to switch keyboard inputs midstream. That's why the recent introduction of support for non-ASCII top-level domain names is significant.
What About IDNs and .com?
The .com domain name is the world's most popular top-level domain (TLD) name. In June of this year, ICANN gave the green light to the expansion of generic TLDs (such as .com and .net) in different scripts. VeriSign, the owner of .com, has made it clear that is intends to offer language-specific versions of .com in the years ahead. Given VeriSign's market power, it's safe to say that many people will become aware of IDNs once .com goes multilingual.
How IDNs Work
The Internet was not designed to be multilingual. The domain name system (DNS) was intended only to support the characters a through z, A through Z, 0 through 9, and the hyphen. Upgrading the DNS to support upwards of 100,000 characters is no trivial feat.
In fact, the DNS has not been upgraded. The name servers scattered around the world—the servers that translate domain names into their numeric IP addresses—still only support ASCII characters. But what has changed is the addition of a sort of multilingual translation service at the front end (the user's browser) to supplement the DNS.
When an IDN is input, the web browser algorithmically converts it into an odd-looking combination of ASCII characters (known as punycode).
For example, the IDN for McDonald's Russia (макдональдс.рф) is converted to the punycode equivalent https://xn--80aalb1aicli8a5i.xn--p1ai/. It is this punycode string that is sent to the name server. When an IDN is initially registered, it is this punycode address that is stored within the name server.
Why Is There Punycode in My Browser?
Users of IDNs may notice punycode showing up their web browsers, such as this example from Chrome:
This is usually intentional. With Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox, the IDN is generally displayed in punycode format unless the language preference of the browser matches the language of the IDN.
There are real and perceived security fears that IDNs may be used to trick users into visiting phony websites. For example, рayрal.com and paypal.com are actually two different domains (the first uses the Cyrillic character "р"). To minimize this risk, some IDNs, such as the Russian IDN, do not permit mixed-script domain names. Of course, it's important that registries enforce these limitations, which remains to be seen.
For the time being, expect inconsistencies in how different browsers handle different IDNs.
Russia's IDN Land Grab
In late 2010, Russia opened its top-level IDN, .Рф (the Cyrillic abbreviation of Russian Federation) for registration. In less than a year, nearly one million IDNs have been registered, making .Рф not only the most popular IDN, but also one of the world's most popular country codes. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, one the chief advocates for IDNs, said last year: "We taught the World Wide Web to speak Russian."
Today, Russians can access a small number of government and corporate websites by inputting Cyrillic-only URLs. And a number of companies have gotten onboard as well; Yandex, Russia's leading search engine, can be reached at https://Яндекс.рф, and Russia's largest mobile carrier is at https://МТС.рф.
India: One Country With Multiple IDNs
India has more than 20 official languages, which use a range of different scripts. Needless to say, one IDN won't easily support all of these languages. ICANN recently approved seven IDNs, as shown in the graphic to the right.
It's far too early to know how adoption of IDNs in this country will unfold, particularly since English is still widely viewed as the informal official language of the country. However, companies that are serious about winning the consumer market should also be serious about speaking the native languages of consumers.
Obstacles to IDN Adoption
While IDNs are in many ways a natural evolution of the Internet, most Internet users are completely unaware that they are even a possibility. And companies have largely been slow to promote them. In some cases, executives are concerned that promoting an IDN address may conflict with existing efforts to promote the Latin-based addresses. The thinking goes: Even if the current URLs are not ideal, why confuse users any more than we have to?
In addition, the emergence of social networking platforms also may hinder the growth of IDNs. For example, Twitter doesn't currently recognize IDNs (though Facebook does).
There are also a number of technical and logistical challenges still to overcome. For example, there are concerns over how best to manage domains that may be represented by "variant" characters. For example, China has two distinct IDNs, as shown to the right.
One IDN is in simplified Chinese script while the other is in traditional script. The question that must be resolved still is whether or not a domain registered with one IDN should be aligned with the other. This is just one example of numerous variant issues that must be resolved by ICANN in the coming months (it has working groups studying the challenges right now).
Challenges to Supporting IDNs on Websites
Although IDNs are a long way from becoming commonplace, web developers should begin to consider the implications of supporting IDNs. Looking ahead, one can no longer assume that a URL will support only ASCII characters. Here are some challenges to keep in mind:
- In a world of multilingual URLs, web developers will need to balance security with usability. URL input fields that automatically block non-Latin characters may need to be modified.
- How should IDNs be promoted? For instance, McDonald's in Russia still displays its Latin URL on its home page instead of the Cyrillic equivalent. Should companies display both URLs, and which URL should be the "front door?" There are no easy answers here, but the questions need to at least be asked.
- If the domain is in a different script, should subdirectories also be in the same script? As you can see below on the home page of the Egyptian government, the top-level and second-level domains are in Arabic but the subdirectories are in Latin characters. If a company is going to ask users to input long URLs to go directly to subdirectory sites, usability needs to be taken into account.
With the emergence of IDNs, we are inching closer to a more linguistically local Internet in which users no longer have to leave their native languages to get where they want to go. And though there are many obstacles ahead, this is a positive step towards making the Internet truly accessible to the world.


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I have already discussed about this in my JSLint: The Bad Part post but I have never gone deeper into this argument.
Falsy Values
In JavaScript, and not only JavaScript, we have so called falsy values. These are respectively: 0, null, undefined, false, "", NaN. Please note the empty string is empty, 'cause differently from php as example, "0" will be considered truish, and this is why we need to explicitly enforce a number cast, specially if we are dealing with input text value.In many other languages we may consider falsy values even objects such arrays or lists:
if (array())
echo 'never'
if []:
print 'never'
Above example will not work in JavaScript, since Array is still an instanceof Object.
Another language that has falsy values is the lower C, where 0 as example could be considered false inside an if statement.
Falsy values are important to understand, specially if we would like to understand coercion.
About Coercion
This is the scary list newcomers have probably never read, directly from the even newer ECMAScript 5 specification, just to inform you that coercion will hopefully always be there, and nothing is evil.
The comparison x == y, where x and y are values, produces true or false. Such a comparison is performed as
- If Type(x) is the same as Type(y), then
- If Type(x) is Undefined, return true: undefined == undefined
- If Type(x) is Null, return true: null == null
- If Type(x) is Number, then
- If x is NaN, return false: NaN != NaN
- If y is NaN, return false: NaN != NaN
- If x is the same Number value as y, return true: 2 == 2
- If x is +0 and y is −0, return true: 0 == 0
- If x is −0 and y is +0, return true: 0 == 0
- Return false: 2 != 1
- If Type(x) is String, then return true if x and y are exactly the same sequence of characters (same length and same characters in corresponding positions). Otherwise, return false: "a" == "a" but "a" != "b" and "a" != "aa"
- If Type(x) is Boolean, return true if x and y are both true or both false. Otherwise, return false: true == true and false == false but true != false and false != true
- Return true if x and y refer to the same object. Otherwise, return false: var o = {}; o == o but o != {} and {} != {} and [] != [] ... etc etc, all objects are eqeq only if it's the same
About last point, this is the object coercion we are all scared about ...
var one = {
valueOf: function () {
return 1;
toString: function () {
return "2";
alert(one == 1); // true
alert(one == "2"); // false
If we remove the valueOf method, we will implicitly call the toString one so that one == "2" or, more generally, {} == "[object Object]".
null == undefined And null == null, Nothing Else!
99% of the time we do a check such:
function something(arg) {
if (arg === undefined) {
We are asking the current engine to check if the undefined variable has been redefined in the current scope, up to the global one, passing through all outer scopes.
Even worse, we may end up with the most silly check ever:
function something(arg) {
if (arg === undefined || arg === null) {
which shows entirely how much we don't know JavaScript, being the exact equivalent of:
function something(arg) {
if (arg == null) {
with these nice to have differences:
- null cannot be redefined, being NOT a variable
- null does NOT require scope resolution, neither lookup up to the global scope
The only side effect we may have when we check against null via == is that we consider for that particular case null and undefined different values .... now think how many times you do this ... and ask yourself why ...
Once again I send you to this simple benchmark page, where if you click over null VS undefined or null VS eqeq, or one of the lines showed under the header, you can realize that while it's usually faster and safer, it provides even more control when compared against the ! not operator.The only way to reach better performances when we mean to compare against an undefined value in a safer way is to declare the variable locally without assigning any value, so that minifiers can shrink the variable name while the check will be safer.
// whatever nested scope ...
for (var undefined, i = 0; i < 10; ++i) {
a[i] === undefined && (a[i] = "not anymore");
There Is NO WTF In JavaScript Coercion!
if (typeof variable === "string") ...
being typeof an operator we cannot overwrite neither change, and being sure that typeof always returns a string there is no reason at all to use the strict eqeqeq operator since String === String behavior is exactly the same of String == String by specs.
Moreover, as said before, coercion could be absolutely meant in some case, check what we can do with other languages, as example:
# Python 3
class WTF:
def __eq__(self, value):
return value == None
# Python 2
class WTF():
def __eq__(self, value):
return value == None
# in both cases ...
if WTF() == None:
While this is a C# example:
using System;
namespace wtf {
class MainClass {
public static void Main (string[] args) {
WTF self = new WTF();
Console.WriteLine (
self ?
"true" : "false"
class WTF {
static public implicit operator bool(WTF self) {
return false;
Can we consider some sort of coercion latest cases as well? It's simply operator overloading, virtually the same JavaScript engines implemented behind the scene in order to consider specifications points when an eqeq is encountered.
Have fun with coercion ;-)


text:
The Battle for Superb CX: Reasonable Vs Memorable
You know it's Salesforce World Tour when a legion of exuberant mavens native to AI, omni-channel and the IoT pack the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Midtown Manhattan to inspire and innovate. And just like in December of 2019, we brought together a group of thought leaders to exchange ideas over a breakfast about customer service in the context of inherently connected and demanding customers.
Given that 85% of customer interactions will be online by 2020, the conversation naturally gravitated towards the interconnectedness between employees and customers, the importance of engineering experiences and listening to customer feedback to achieve set goals.
"It's going to be all about engineering moments," says Jeff Grosse, Senior Director of Service Transformation at Traction on Demand, who believes that highs and lows tend to stick with customers and that's what needs to be crafted.
"Think about that first experience the customer has with you, and the last: those are the two encounters we tend to remember," he argues.
Patricia Lee, Service Cloud Account Executive with Salesforce and others echoed the prospect that putting in the minimum is no longer enough to get businesses there. The battle now becomes what's reasonable versus what's memorable.
A trip to Disney World comes to mind. Picture that moment when an employee goes an extra mile and saves the day when a child accidentally drops his / her ice cream by giving them a new one. That is a perfect example of a policy that empowers employees ($50 per cast member) to create that magical moment. And the phrase you leave with, "Have a magical day", actually makes sense. And that's what brings people back – personalized, enjoyable, memorable, human moments. A failure to listen to this demand is rather pricy: Forrester estimates the cost of customers switching brands will have an impact of over $1.6 trillion.
Building a solid communication foundation
Wyndham Hudson, VP Product Management with NewVoiceMedia, summarizes the phenomena of customers demanding a superb experience as an "Experience Economy", a term first coined in 1998 by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore.
"It's no longer about just purchasing a product or a solution or a service or getting a job done," says Wyndham, who is a loyal music service customer due to its superb customer service. "It's about the moment you are creating, it's about the experience you are providing, and customers are really looking to work with those services, providers who can deliver on that kind of memorable experience."
Per Walker Study, by year 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product
as the key brand differentiator. And for a long time, it was believed that the three main components of experience – goal, effort and emotion – are attributed equally. That is changing rapidly with emotion taking over. Today the breakdown is as follows:
- Goal 25%
Did you manage to achieve what you set out to do?
- Effort 25%
What steps and how much time did it take you to achieve your goal? How many levels of IVRs did you have to navigate?
- Emotion 50%
How did it make you feel? Did it fit your brand expectations?
The role of engaged employees
Engaged employees can make it or break it. "Happy, engaged employees deliver the level of customer experience," says Wyndham. "Give them the right tools and they start to shine and deliver on the customer experience you want to give as a brand."
Weather it's employee to employee or customer to employee, businesses need to build a solid foundation of communications. And as customers are increasingly connected and the communication is omni-channel, the communication you provide is underpinning the experience you deliver.
Listening to your employees and customers
Shonnah Hughes, Product Evangelist of GetFeedback, wonders what if businesses knew the moment the employee or the customer had a bad experience? What if businesses could immediately intervene and make things right?
"That action—showing you're listening—influences if someone stays or goes," says Shonnah. Per Future of CX report, 32% of customers will stop doing business with a brand after one bad experience, costing $136.8 billion annually. An alarming figure that makes businesses reach out to their marketing and executive teams for solutions.
Listening, measuring, creating memorable moments, keeping track of experiences, adjusting and engaging in a dialogue with employees and customers on channels they prefer, sounds overwhelming, however an unavoidable future businesses need to prep for now.


text:
"Black Tears in Heaven" Art Print by Casey Robin
Illustration for "Black Tears in Heaven" from Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things, Volume 2, Issue 2. Buy the book!
Illustrator Casey Robin created this set of perfect illustrations to accompany stories and poems in the fourth issue of Ember: A Journal of Luminous Things. Each high-quality print is reproduced on your choice of 8½″ x 11″ (small) or 13″ x 19″ (large) Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper printed with an Epson R3000 printer, which means exquisite detail and an archival print that will last and last. Your artwork will arrive in a stay-flat photo mailer with a plastic protective sleeve and is suitable for immediate framing.
As with all Casey Robin art prints, "Black Tears in Heaven" prints are lovingly made and signed by the artist—Casey Robin! Casey is a freelance visual development artist working out of Southern California. She studied art and animation at CalArts, Studio Art Centers International, the Illustration Academy, and more. She has worked for Disney, Zondervan, KlickNation, and the Pac-12 Convention. More prints of her work can be found at the CaseyRobinArt Etsy shop.


text:
Randy Pond is Cisco Executive Vice President of Operations, Processes, and Systems
Today is the United Nations' Human Rights Day and it was not so long ago that we witnessed the role of the social media revolution in the Arab Spring. This example of Internet-enabled communication in driving change illustrates the evolving impact of technology on human rights, and casts light on both the opportunities and the challenges the industry will face — the world celebrated the flow of information that facilitated change, while at the same time showing concern over efforts of governments to use the very same infrastructure to try to shut down and control communications. Over the past 20 years, we have transformed from a world communicating through paper and face-to-face interaction into communities that can share information within seconds — and innovation continues at a dramatic rate.
At Cisco, we embrace innovation, and the opportunity to expand use of the Internet as a positive force for human development. We do this primarily by working to build each of our products on open, global standards — standards that we believe are critical to overcoming censorship and keeping the world connected — and by developing architectures for using our products aimed at particular needs, such as healthcare, education, and energy efficiency.
We are also committed to not customizing our products in any way that aids repression or censorship. To provide a consolidated view of our approach to these issues, we have included a new human rights policy and roadmap in this year's eighth annual Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report. With the help of Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and in conformance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council, the roadmap was developed to concentrate on our human rights policy, and also establish a governance model, provide training, and create an effective mechanism to review our actions on an ongoing basis.
In addition to the new policy and roadmap, Cisco's commitment to human rights includes several additional initiatives and partnerships, such as a successful engagement with the Business and Human Rights Resource Center; our continued work with the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (which we helped to found) to promote a common code of conduct among electronic manufacturers, software firms, IT firms, and manufacturing services providers; and engagement with NGOs concerned with human rights.
As we approach 2013, it will be important to continue addressing the impact of technology on human rights. Challenges to global freedom of expression through the Internet will continue, and will become more complex as innovation advances. Our long-term view and ongoing implementation of Cisco's human rights roadmap will guide Cisco's human rights efforts going forward and will help drive a safe Internet well into the future.


text:
We were playing chutes and ladders on the floor and Lydia's piece landed on a "naughty square". Instead of sending her piece down the chute, she decided both pieces needed a time out.
Now that it is spring, I am always getting special little flowers, picked by Lydia. Or at least the heads of flowers. Ignore the nail polish. I read that this season, coral was the color and that anyone can pull it off. Not true.
I asked Lydia to go get dressed and she came down like this. She was a bride of course.
Thanks to Shane for bringing me home a dinner made up of two king size chocolate bars and a 44 ounce soda, and thanks to Rachel for the fantastic "Swap Package". Had it not been for both of your efforts, I probably would have called my doctor for a Xanax prescription by now.
The winner of the Rock City/Ruby Falls giveaway is Beth. Congrats! Don't forget to enter the Dollywood Giveaway. Ends Thursday at midnight.


text:
When Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique — the now classic book that turns 50 next week and is generally credited with launching the modern women's movement in America — unmarried women in more than half of the U.S. weren't allowed access to contraception. Married women in some states couldn't sit on juries, get a job without their husband's permission or keep control of their property and earnings.
Today that world seems almost quaintly remote: an exotic, long-lost era we revisit with love-hate fascination by watching Mad Men. The "happy housewife heroines" of those years are grandmothers now, and a great many, having found new lives beyond their homes in the 1970s (whether by choice or necessity), bear little resemblance to the "sweet, simpering and sort of stupid" femininity that Friedan once described as the ideal of her day.
(MORE: We Have to Stop Talking About 'Having It All')
And yet, as Friedan herself knew full well and wrote and said countless times before her death in 2007, the revolution she championed for women — and for men, she would undoubtedly interject — is only partly accomplished. Over the past half-century, women left their homes and marched into the workplace. They left the secretarial pool to become Secretaries of State, Supreme Court Justices, astronauts and more recently combat soldiers. They now earn not only more college degrees but more advanced degrees than men, and they make up half of the U.S. workforce.
But this flowering of female potential in the world of work and economic self-empowerment was only part of what Friedan envisioned when she dreamed of a day when women would reach their "full human potential." She understood that work — with the mental engagement, self-empowerment and sense of autonomy and accomplishment that it brings — is only part of what goes into being fully human. We, men and women alike, to paraphrase Freud, to whose legacy The Feminine Mystique is deeply (and often regrettably) indebted, also have to love. We exist in a web of relationships that require time and care and nurture. And when it comes to achieving the goal of allowing everyone to create a fully realized human existence, we have miserably failed as a society over the past 50 years.
The inhuman pace of American family life today is not at all what Friedan had in mind when she wrote of the need "to change the rules of the game to restructure professions, marriage, the family, the home." We work more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world, whether because of the high demands of upper-middle-class extreme jobs or the need of low-wage workers to hold down multiple jobs in order to keep their family afloat. Those of us fortunate enough to have vacation days don't take them. Fueled by the fear of losing our jobs, we jump to the demands of the 24/7 economy, leaving no off-the-clock respite from work. Having a home that feels like home — a place where you relax and connect with your loved ones — is an increasingly rare occurrence, a luxury item we glimpse in the pages of shelter magazines. Reality, for most families, is a crazy treadmill of getting by.
(MORE: Warner: Will Family Issues Finally Get Addressed?)
This is to a large degree about policy. Unlike the rest of the developed world, we've never adopted measures like paid family leave or benefits-guaranteed workplace flexibility to try to make work and family more compatible. It's partly about our national ethos of valuing moneymaking over care, and it's partly about the fear that after decades of stagnating wages and rising costs in health, housing and education, we'll see our families fall fatally behind.
Friedan saw this coming. In 1997, reflecting back and thinking forward, she predicted that the greatest threat to the unfolding future of the women's movement wouldn't be age-old sexism, persistent stereotypes, gender expectations or unfairly shared caretaking duties. Those would be impediments, but the larger danger would be the tilt in our national values that occurred in the last decades of the 20th century: "the culture of corporate greed," the downsizing and downgrading of formerly solid middle-class jobs and "the sharply increased income inequality between the very rich … and the rest of us, women and men." She worried that the increasing difficulty of the lives of all but the richest men would fuel a backlash and make "scapegoats of women again."
Whether the popular (and much contested) "End of Men" narrative is a sign of that backlash remains to be seen. Yet I feel hopeful, for now, that the callousness with which American working people have been left to their own devices to balance the unbalanceable demands of work and family has actually brought men and women closer together. (Indeed, men now report more work-family conflict than women do.) The fact, for example, that the need for a solution to the disaster of American childcare made it into this week's State of the Union address indicates just how much the unfinished business of the women's movement has become everyone's business, a matter of economic policy, of real political concern.
(MORE: Is It Really the 'End of Men'?)
If only we had a voice like Friedan's now to raise the national consciousness, to translate the "strange stirring … sense of dissatisfaction … yearning" and sense of struggle felt by both men and women into a rousing demand for change. We need "a vision of what life should be like," as Vicki Shabo, the National Partnership for Women & Families' director of work and family programs, recently put it to me. Looking to the past won't give us a workable model. It's time to find a new set of answers to Friedan's silent question: Is this all?
MORE: Women, Money and Power


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Total lunar eclipse next week, not visible in US
(AP) -- The year's first total eclipse of the moon will last an unusually long time, a rare celestial treat for a wide swath of the globe.
Except if you're in the United States and Canada. North America will be left out of Wednesday's lunar spectacle, which will be visible from start to finish from eastern Africa, central Asia, the Middle East and western Australia - weather permitting.
The period when Earth's shadow completely blocks the moon - known as totality - will last a whopping 1 hour and 40 minutes. The last time the moon was covered for this long was in July 2000, when it lasted 7 minutes longer than that.
The full moon normally glows from reflected sunlight. A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon glides through the long shadow cast by the Earth and is blocked from the sunlight that illuminates it.
As the moon plunges deeper into the Earth's shadow, the disk will appear to gradually change color, turning from silver to orange or red. This is because some indirect sunlight still reaches the moon after passing through the Earth's atmosphere, which scatters blue light. Only red light strikes the moon, giving it an eerie crimson hue.
It's difficult to predict the exact shade the moon will take, which will depend on how much dust and clouds are in the atmosphere during the eclipse.
Since the moon will pass close to the center of the Earth's shadow, the total eclipse phase will be longer than usual, said NASA eclipse expert Fred Espenak at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The entire eclipse will last a little over 5 1/2 hours. Observers in Europe will miss the first part of the show because it will occur before the moon rises. Eastern Asia and eastern Australia won't catch the final stages, which will happen after the moon sets. Portions of South America will be able see the moon entirely shrouded.
Unlike solar eclipses, lunar eclipses are safe to watch with the naked eye.
Keith Gleason, who runs the Sommers-Bausch Observatory in Boulder, Colo., is disappointed that he will not have a ringside seat to the upcoming eclipse. The last total lunar eclipse visible from the U.S. occurred on Dec. 21, 2010, which coincided with winter solstice and was widely observed. Some 1,400 people showed up for a viewing party at the observatory.
"We had an absolutely glorious time," he said.
The next total lunar eclipse will fall on Dec. 10 with best viewing from Asia and Australia. The moon will be completely blotted out for 51 minutes. Only parts of the U.S. including Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest will catch a glimpse.
The rest of the continental U.S. will have to wait until April 15, 2014 to witness a total lunar eclipse.
More information: Eclipse information: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html
©2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


text:
0You have 0 items in your basket.
VAT total | £0.00 |
Total Goods (inc VAT) | £0.00 |
At Machine Mart our range of tool chests and tool cabinets and boxes is second to none, from great value models for the home workshop, to professional tool chests and mobile tool cabinets with roller bearing drawers.
If you are looking for a tool chest, we have a variety of different ranges available: including the Clarke premium, professional, and HD ranges. Machine Mart also supply work benches and tool racks ideal for use in the garage or workshop. In addition, we supply a wide range of boltless shelving solutions, engineers benches, tool boxes, tool racks and tool cabinets, all designed to help you organise your tools and your workspace
As well as tool chests and other storage solutions, Machine Mart carries a wide selection of equipment and tools suitable for DIY enthusiasts through to professional tradesmen. We stock tools from all the top brands including Dewalt, Ryobi, Bosch and Clarke. You can buy online now, order by phone, or visit any of our superstores across the country. We provide a huge selection of tools at competitive prices.
© Machine Mart 2024, All rights reserved.
Machine Mart Ltd 211 Lower Parliament Street, Nottingham NG1 1GN


text:
"There have been various attempts in the past to curb detention and to hold customers accountable but we felt more needed to be done." –Tim Norlin, director of recruiting, Marten Transport
Ah, detention time: two of the ugliest words in trucking's lexicon, and they've dogged this industry for decades. For drivers, in particular, detention time remains particularly frustrating, hurting their wallet (as most don't get paid for sitting at a shipper's dock waiting to load or unload) while shredding their schedule to pieces, especially in terms of staying in compliance with hours of service (HOS) rules.
The debate over what to do about detention time is reaching a fever pitch of sorts of late, particularly as members of Congress propose to drive a legislative stake through the heart of this nasty issue once and for all. [You can click here to read more about the battle being waged over that particular strategy.]
Indeed, polls conducted by Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) indicate that drivers spend as many as 40 hours per week waiting to be loaded or unloaded.
Additionally, a survey conducted with 300 drivers this January by the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) found that 59% experienced detention time, with about 65% of them reported lost revenue as a result of detention time from either missing an opportunity to secure another load or paying late fees to the shipper.
OOIDA added that Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has estimated that the cost of detention time to the trucking industry is more than $3 billion per year and the cost to the public is more than $6.5 billion per year – and FMCSA is also proposing to conduct a more detailed study of detention time in 2012.
"Shippers and receivers have for too long gotten away with wasting truckers' time without any accountability for their role in the ultimate effect it has on highway safety," Todd Spencer, OOIDA's executive VP, told me back in May this year.
"But this is also an industry that can't seem to correct itself on this issue, as it remains totally willing to give away the driver's time," he stressed. "This isn't a new issue, either – it's been dogging this industry for 30 years and there doesn't seem to be a market-based solution to it."
Yet, for a brief moment (relatively speaking) the industry seemed poised to eliminate detention time once and for all back in 2004, when HOS rules underwent their first revision in over 70 years. My colleague and writing compatriot Larry Kahaner tellingly told a tale of carriers finally getting the upper hand against shippers on this insidious issue, slapping hourly fines of $60 or more on customers that unnecessarily waylaid their tractor-trailers and drivers at the dock.
Alas, however, the Great Recession in many ways put an end to that effort, as carriers of all stripes (not to mention owner-operators) found themselves struggling just to survive – willing to put up with dock delays as long as that meant getting paid to haul freight.
Yet the consequences of dock delays are far reaching – something David Heller, director of safety and policy for the Truckload Carriers Association (TCA), pointed out in an excellent column he wrote about this issue last year.
"Cost can also be an issue when dealing with wait times. Obviously, with wheels rolling, goods can move to their destination in a scheduled and on-time fashion," he explained. "When a driver is forced to wait to pick up or drop off a load, however, he or she is delayed in moving onto the next haul and can even 'violate' the terms of a contract by delivering late. In essence, delays cost everyone in terms of both time and money."
[As an aside, a lot of effort is being directed at reducing "freight delays" broadly across North America, and we're not just talking about those originating on the warehouse dock, either. Take for example a joint U.S.-Canadian effort to smooth out freight and traffic flows at the four Cascade Gateway border crossings between British Columbia and Washington State, begun at the end of last year.]
But now many carriers are stepping up to the plate once again to take a stab at dealing with the detention time issue on their own – one of them being Mondovi, WI-based refrigerated carrier Marten Transport.
Back in 2003 it started charging customers a detention fee if trailers were not loaded or unloaded in a set period of time. But now they're upping the ante.
Effective July 1 this year, Marten drivers who arrive on time and are delayed by a shipper or receiver for more than two hours beyond the scheduled appointment time will automatically receive detention pay: $12 per hour for company drivers, $20 per hour for independent contractors for every hour detained beyond a two hour "grace period," up to 11 hours.
"This eliminates waiting to see if the customer will pay for the detention before you are paid," noted Tim Norlin, director of recruiting for Marten, in a press release the company put out late last week. "You will receive the detention pay automatically no later than the time you are paid for that trip."
He added that with new hours of service regulations, the FMCSA's new Compliance Safety Accountability (CSA) program, and electronic logs, there is a lot of pressure on driver productivity.
"We understand that every minute the wheels are not rolling affects earnings for our drivers and our company," he said. "We also understand that certain customer locations have a history of long detention times that our drivers would prefer to avoid. We are flagging those customers for follow-up by our sales team to correct the detention issues there."
Norlin noted that until such delays at "flagged" customer locations are resolved, company drivers that are dispatched to flagged locations will earn $20 per hour and independent contractors will earn $30 per hour for detention. "Drivers will be notified at time of dispatch if their pickup or delivery location has been flagged for long detention times," he added
Norlin also said that "detention prone" customers are also going to see their charges calculated in quarter hour increments.
"For example, if you arrive on time for an 8 a.m. delivery and the receiver keeps you in the dock until 11:45 a.m., you will receive 1.75 hours of detention pay," he said, as a result of the total 3.75 hour delay minus the two hour grace period.
Yet Norlin – like many drivers, I would suspect – hopes to eventually eliminate detention time issues with shippers. Yet he remains very much a realist as well. "Our automatic detention pay is now in place to take care of drivers until then," he explained.
And frankly, it's up to the shippers to really solve this problem, anyways.


text:
Live the dream!!
We are offering a fantastic opportunity for a serious motorsport fan … a fully supported rent-a-drive in our newest G-Force Proto.
As was widely reported in the international press covering 2012 Silk Way Rally, team leader Boris Gadasin proved that in the right hands this hand-built, 7 litre V8 beast is capable of challenging the works teams … at a fpraction of the cost of renting a works car!!
This is not just an offer for someone who wants to compete to make up the numbers, the G-Force Proto is a vehicle suitable for someone wanting to make a serious impression in the world's premier off-roading events.
Base specifications:
- Maximum speed – over 200km/h
- 0-100km/h - less than 5 sec
- Engine step 2, characteristics :
- Volume 7000cc
- Power around 300 hp
- Torque about 600 Nm
Renting includes:
- renting the car
- servicing by the team mechanics
- servicing overseen by the team engineer
- services of the team trainer
- technical support of a truck and fast service car
- event logistics
- tyres
- fuel
- spares for mechanical failures
If you have any questions please contact us: +79219372847 Boris; + 380674665551 Bogdan; +79112986877 Marina


text:
Welcome, new major here!
This article will be pretty narrow-focused, so feel free to check the changelog as a more complete version with all the improvements and fixes mentioned. Milestone with 215 issues is also available.
Fixes cover several checks, but more things are new and improved!
There's a pseudolocale generation addon for easier in-app testing. A new upload method you can use for adding strings to any file, mono or bilingual is there, and the removing strings option can now be turned on for bilingual formats, too.
The main story today is glossaries
Weblate now stores them as components using TermBase eXchange file format by default. Thanks to this, you can share them between projects, sync them with your repositories, and use the same API calls you are using for other components. We also added features for forbidden and non-translatable terms, defining terminology, and a check to seal that translations match the glossary. It's a big change we are sure that you will like if you try it!
The best thing? You don't have to do anything to convert your existing glossaries, the process is fully automatic and worry-free.
It is clear it will start many conversations so feel free to do it in Weblate discussions on GitHub, or follow Weblate on Twitter!
If you like to do some peeking before updating, peek at Hosted. Extended support owners already got the message from us, and the update is on the way. Wanna feel the same comfort? Just ask the Weblate team to help you, not only with updates!
If you are a happy community translator on Hosted Weblate, consider checking the new checkbox in the Notifications panel. This will add all projects you contributed to as watched projects, so you'll receive the notification every time there's a new string for a translation!
That's 4.5, have a great day!


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Over at the New York Times, Matt Ritchel asks why we still have to take out our laptops at security screenings even though many of them are scarcely bigger than tablets. The TSA refuses to explain, citing security concerns. After rejecting a series of possible lines of reasoning, Ritchel finds an anonymous security expert who is willing to tell him that it is nothing more than "security theater," an effort to make us feel that something is being done to protect us.
The feebleness of this effort aside—after all, who really feels the TSA is effective at anything besides the catching the most primitive efforts, building long lines at the airport, and existing as a form of republican social welfare—it points to something that I allude to in the Situated Technologies Pamphlet I just completed with Helen Nissenbaum.
Network culture clearly has a drive toward openness and transparency. The freedom of sharing and ease of building upon information encourages that. At the same time, there are plenty of individuals and institutions with power who see that freedom as something for the Muppets of the world while they themselves hide behind the curtains. To them, our own haplessly naïve transparency is something to exploit from their citadels, be they in the government or in finance. In turn, we have to hope that those in power won't abuse it too badly, that taking out laptops at the security line as a ritual is the worst of it.
We're still early in all this and just as the Democrats adopted civil rights as a mission in the 1950s, one day these issues may be taken up by political parties. Until then, it's not just up to power to stay vigilant, it's up to us to stay vigilant of power.


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Fires in Brazil threaten jaguars, houses and plants in the world's largest tropical wetlands
POCONE, BRAZIL (AP) — Firefighters in Brazil's Pantanal wetlands earlier this month celebrated the end of the fire season on Facebook, saying in a Nov. 7 post that "it is a relief for everyone who lives in the region."
They spoke too soon.
In the first two weeks of November, fires fueled by unusually dry and hot weather destroyed nearly 770,000 hectares (1.9 million acres) of the world's largest tropical wetlands, preliminary figures from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro show. This accounts for 65% of the damage done by fires in the region this year.
Brazil's National Institute for Space Research, a federal agency, detected 3,380 fires in the Pantanal in the first 17 days of November, compared to just 69 in the same period a year ago, and well beyond previous fire season records dating back to 1998.
The Pantanal holds thousands of plant and animal species, including 159 mammals, and it abounds with jaguars, according to the World Wildlife Fund. During the rainy season, rivers overflow their banks, flood the land and make most of it accessible only by boat and plane. In the dry season, wildlife enthusiasts flock to see the normally furtive jaguars lounging on riverbanks, along with macaws, caimans and capybaras.
Much of the Encontro das Aguas (Meeting of the Waters) park, located at the border of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul states — known for its large jaguar population — had turned from emerald green to dark brown. A team of Associated Press journalists on the ground spotted a large jaguar licking its paws by the river banks, lying on a bed of burnt vegetation.
"If this continues every year, there won't be anymore (jaguars), they'll go away, they'll find a way, like people and run to the city," said Leonisio da Silva, a 53-year-old resident of the park. "It is going to end."
Jaguars in the park, which covers more than 1,000 square kilometers (over 400 square miles), are accustomed to human observation and have been a top ecotourism draw for more than 15 years. Their preservation and that of their natural habitat are essential in a region.
Firefighters, troops and volunteers are working night and day to try and stop the fires, which are threatening not only the region's rich fauna and flora but also houses and touristic guesthouses.
And there is little outlook for any near-term help from rainfall.
"This is so atypical," said Renata Libonati, who coordinates the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's alert system for fires in the Pantanal. The fire season usually ends in October, when the air gets more humid and it begins to rain. "What we're seeing is an extension of the fire season."
Libonati said the heat wave that swept through much of Brazil this week, combined with the El Niño phenomenon led to higher temperatures and drier weather conditions, both favorable to fires.
Firefighters and authorities in the Pantanal region are also faced with a logistical nightmare.
Angelo Rabelo, president of a local environmental group that oversees a protected area of about 300,000 hectares (1,160 square miles), runs his own fire brigade, currently comprised of eight members, working alongside a small team of national forest firefighters. "Access to some areas, especially the fire heads, necessarily implies ... the arrival of helicopters," he said.
The state of Mato Grosso do Sul launched on Nov. 14 a joint task force, mobilizing the state's entire fleet of aircraft to help firefighters, either dropping water on fires or flying out firefighters to the region's most remote locations. It also declared a state of emergency in four municipalities most affected by forest fires and where parks and protected areas were particularly at risk.
The neighboring state of Mato Grosso said it had also strengthened its workforce, with about 200 federal and state firefighters on the ground. The state's Secretary of Environment said it will invest an additional 6.4 million reais (1.3 million dollars) in the region.
Intense fires were reported around the main accessways to the biome, or area classified according to the species that live in that location. Videos shared on social media showed a car driving down the BR-262 highway, with flames on each side, as if passing through a corridor of fire.
Thick smoke emanating from the fires reduced visibility this week, with the Federal Highway Police closing the BR-262 at one point, and reports of a small private plane crashing, injuring four. Lack of visibility also hindered rescue efforts, firefighters said.
Some on the ground were also growing frustrated with authorities' seemingly slow response.
Enderson Barreto, a 25-year-old veterinarian in Porto Jofre, a small municipality close to the Meeting of the Waters park, said his and other colleagues' pleas for help weeks ago were left unanswered, until it was too late.
"We alerted several times in relation to the fires," Barreto said, adding that people told them they were being too alarmist. "Greater energy should have been put out when the fires were not in such large proportions. Today it is totally out of control."
When he is not rescuing animals from the fires, Barreto is helping firefighters combat the flames. He said the impacts were "unmeasurable."
Fires are frequent in the Pantanal and vegetation can regenerate quickly with rain. But when the fires are too intense, or attack more densely forested areas, the wildlife that survive are left stranded without habitat.
This year's fires, for now, are not as dramatic as those of 2020, when flames engulfed more than 3.5 million hectares of wetlands, or about 30% of the Pantanal, killing and injuring countless animals, including jaguars.
From where he was standing, Barreto said, small reptiles and amphibians seem to be the main victims in this year's tragedy.
"They are invisible victims, but they are the base of the chain, for the balance of this ecosystem," the young veterinarian said.
Jeantet contributed from Rio de Janeiro.
Follow AP's climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment


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Community land trusts are nonprofit, community-based organizations designed to ensure community stewardship of land. Community land trusts can be used for many types of development (including commercial and retail), but are primarily used to ensure long-term housing affordability. To do so, the trust acquires land and maintains ownership of it permanently. With prospective homeowners, it enters into a long-term, renewable lease instead of a traditional sale. When the homeowner sells, the family earns only a portion of the increased property value. The remainder is kept by the trust, preserving the affordability for future low- to moderate-income families.
The length of the lease (most frequently, 99 years) and the percentage earned by the homeowner vary. Ultimately, by separating the ownership of land and housing, this innovative approach prevents market factors from causing prices to rise significantly, and hence guarantees that housing will remain affordable for future generations. Today, there are around 277 community land trusts across the United States.
After traveling to Israel in 1968 and learning about the success of the Jewish National Fund, which had a long history of acquiring and then leasing land to planned communities and cooperatives, Robert Swann and several southern civil rights leaders developed the first land trust in the United States. Called New Communities, the land trust began on a 5,000-acre farm near Albany, Georgia in 1970.Community land trusts play a critical role in building community wealth for several key reasons:
- They provide low- and moderate-income people with the opportunity to build equity through homeownership and ensure these residents are not displaced due to land speculation and gentrification.
- Land trust housing also protects owners from downturns because people are not over extended; as a result, foreclosure rates for land trusts have been as much as 90 percent less than conventional home mortgages.
- Most commonly, at least one-third of a land trust's board is composed of community residents, allowing for the possibility of direct, grassroots participation in decision-making and community control of local assets.
- In addition to the development of affordable housing, many land trusts are involved in a range of community-focused initiatives including homeownership education programs, commercial development projects, and community greening efforts.
Community-wealth.org houses an extensive collection of resources focused on Community Land Trusts and their role in community wealth building. Below is a glimpse of the rich array of materials you will find as you explore our site:
Our Best Practices section showcases exemplary community land trusts from across the country working to affect positive, sustainable change. For instance, one such organization is Champlain Housing Trust in northwest Vermont. The largest community land trust in the U.S. with over $223 million in assets under its stewardship, the nonprofit also provides homebuyer education classes, offers loans for repairs and energy efficiency work, and develops residential and commercial properties—work, that in 2009 alone, provided 260 construction jobs.
Key Facts & Figures
Estimated number of community land trusts, 2020 | 277* | ||||||||
Overall homeownership rates by race* |
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Percent of CLT residents who are first-time homebuyers | 79% | ||||||||
Percentage of CLT residents with income less than 50% of area median | 82% | ||||||||
Percentage of CLT residents who are non-white | 31% | ||||||||
Likelihood of foreclosure proceedings for conventional households, as compared to that of CLTs | 10x more likely* |
Our Research Resources section highlights web-based resources focused on land trusts. For example, Policy Link's Community Land Trusts Tool provides a range of resources for those interested in learning more about the model and ways to facilitate its development, including three comprehensive case studies.
Our Articles and Publications section includes links to a diverse selection of articles, reports, papers, and books focused on community land trusts. One such paper is Greg Rosenberg and Jeffrey Yuen's Beyond Housing: Urban Agriculture and Commercial Development by Community Land Trusts (2012), which demonstrates that community land trusts can go beyond their stewardship role and successfully engage in other community wealth building activities.
Our Toolbox features resources designed to help on-the-ground practitioners working in this field. There you can access the individual chapters of John Emmeus Davis' 2007 manual, Starting a Community Land Trust: Organizational and Operational Choices, which provides practical guidance for those working to develop new land trusts.
And, lastly, our Policy Guide provides an overview of federal initiatives and programs that can help practitioners leverage resources and increase their impact. For example, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program could be an important source of funding for land trusts working to develop affordable housing.


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His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada is the Founder-Acarya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). Srila Prabhupada appeared in this world in 1896 in Calcutta, India. He first met his spiritual master, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Gosvami, in Calcutta in 1922. Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, a prominent religious scholar and the founder of sixty-four Gaudiya Mathas (Vedic institutes) in India, liked this educated young man and convinced him to dedicate his life to teaching Vedic knowledge. Srila Prabhupada became his student and, in 1933, his formally initiated disciple.
At their first meeting Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati requested Srila Prabhupada to broadcast Vedic knowledge in English. In the years that followed, Srila Prabhupada wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad-gita, assisted the Gaudiya Matha in its work, and, in 1944, started Back to Godhead, an English fortnightly magazine. Single-handedly, Srila Prabhupada edited it, typed the manuscripts, checked the galley proofs, and even distributed the individual copies. The magazine is now being continued by his disciples in the West.
In 1950 Srila Prabhupada retired from married life, adopting the vanaprastha (retired) order to devote more time to his studies and writing. He traveled to the holy city of Vrndavana, where he lived in humble circumstances in the historic temple of Radha- Damodara. There he engaged for several years in deep study and writing. He accepted the renounced order of life (sanyasa) in 1959. At Radha-Damodara, Srila Prabhupada began work on his life's masterpiece: a multivolume commentated translation of the eighteen-thousand-verse Srimad-Bhagavatam (Bhagavata Purana). He also wrote Easy Journey to Other Planets.
After publishing three volumes of the Bhagavatam, Srila Prabhupada came to the United States, in September 1965, to fulfill the mission of his spiritual master. Subsequently, His Divine Grace wrote more than fifty volumes of authoritative commentated translations and summary studies of the philosophical and religious classics of India.
When he first arrived by freighter in New York City, Srila Prabhupada was practically penniless. Only after almost a year of great difficulty did he establish the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, in July of 1966. Before he passed away on November 14, 1977, he had guided the Society and seen it grow to a worldwide confederation of more than one hundred ashrams, schools, temples, institutes, and farm communities.
In 1972 His Divine Grace introduced the Vedic system of primary and secondary education in the West by founding the gurukula school in Dallas, Texas. Since then his disciples have established similar schools throughout the United States and the rest of the world.
Srila Prabhupada also inspired the construction of several large international cultural centers in India. The center at Sridhama Mayapur is the site for a planned spiritual city, an ambitious project for which construction will extend over many years to come. In Vrndavana are the magnificent Krsna-Balarama Temple and International Guesthouse, gurukula school, and Srila Prabhupada Memorial and Museum. There is also a major cultural and educational center in Bombay. Major centers are planned in Delhi and in a dozen other important locations on the Indian subcontinent.
Srila Prabhupada's most significant contribution, however, is his books. Highly respected by scholars for their authority, depth, and clarity, they are used as textbooks in numerous college courses. His writings have been translated into over fifty languages. The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, established in 1972 to publish the works of His Divine Grace, has thus become the world's largest publisher of books in the field of Indian religion and philosophy. In just twelve years, despite his advanced age, Srila Prabhupada circled the globe fourteen times on lecture tours that took him to six continents. Yet this vigorous schedule did not slow his prolific literary output. His writings constitute a veritable library of Vedic philosophy, religion, literature, and culture.


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IT Trends | Research
The arrival of the "post-PC" era is leading users to turn to the cloud for their storage needs. In fact, by 2016, about a third of consumer digital content will be stored on cloud-based services, according to a new Gartner research report.
The report, "Forecast: Consumer Digital Storage Needs, 2010-2016," estimated that just 7 percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud last year; but that's expected to grow to 36 percent over the next four years.
The change in practice has several causes. Historically, users have stored digital content on their own computers. "But as we enter the post-PC era, consumers are using multiple connected devices, the majority of which are equipped with cameras. This is leading to a massive increase in new user-generated content that requires storage," said Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner. "With the emergence of the personal cloud, this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices."
The "personal cloud" is a term that the company uses to describe how the user will shift away from the personal computer and toward the use of multiple devices all syncing back to the same online resource.
Cloud adoption is also being carried along by a dramatic growth in the amount of storage users need. The research firm estimated that the average storage per household would grow from 464 GB in 2011 to 3.3 TB in 2016.
Whereas previously those storage needs might have been addressed by users adding new hard disk drives or upgrading to a larger capacity, floods in Thailand in the first half of this year have resulted in a shortage in the supply of drives and consolidation among HDD makers has resulted in greater producer control over pricing, driving up costs and inspiring users to try out cloud storage adoption as an alternative.
Also, users are simply becoming more comfortable with the use of the cloud by virtue of their social networking habits. According to Gartner, the bulk of the cloud storage needs of consumers in the near term will be met by social media sites such as Facebook, which offer free storage space for uploading photos and videos for social sharing. Verma noted that while online backup services such as Dropbox and iCloud may be the most well known cloud storage providers, the amount of storage they allocate to consumers is "small relative to that maintained by social media sites."
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.
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Thousands of islands renowned for gorgeous beaches, excellent water sports and wild partying
There's a lot to explore in a country that's often described as having spent '300 years in a convent and 50 years in Hollywood'. It's a reference to the long Spanish colonisation followed by the American occupation that ended in the mid-1940s, a history that explains the strong Latin influence in the country as well as its Western inclinations. No doubt you've heard that fiesta-loving Filipinos like to break out into lively song-and-dance performances, will cook up a storm for gatherings and can hold their drink — all ingredients for a great party, which is exactly what you can expect to find in the Philippines.
In the last couple of years, however, the archipelago of 7107 islands on the western rim of the Pacific has been making waves in a particular niche: as the hot new destination for tropical beach getaways. North to south, across the three major island clusters of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, you'll find stretches of sand each with its own personality, its own charm, and its own menu of things to do — swimming, snorkelling, surfing, scuba-diving and simply lying on the warm sand.