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In Ireland we were very late to the postcode game and when we introduced them a few years back they actually uniquely identifies a single address. We also continued our "interesting" habit of renaming everything to make them sound more Irish so they are called Eircodes. In theory you could just put the single 7 character Eircode on a letter and it would be enough although our postal service has said we can't do that.
That is for renting a whole property. You will have to share with someone for €600 per month. Try the "Sharing" option in Daft for that.
I work in a smallish company (around 150 employees I believe) and we recently went through this career framework development and standardisation and as part of that we came up with standard levels and titles across the company but we had to make an exception for our USA office. They would all still have the standard titles internally for pay bands, career progression etc but because of customer expectations, everyone had to be a VP of this or Senior VP of that where VP elsewhere in the company was a very senior position. Kinda funny really.
One other use of political symbols such as bumper stickers or flags etc is to "mark your territory" to make sure that people know whether they are welcome or not.
As an Irishman driving through some parts of Northern Ireland the best/worst case of that was some small towns and villages that more or less literally, had every available space covered in the British flag. I mean every building and many windows had a flag on or it it, every lamppost was covered in both flags and bunting of even more flags. It looked like there was some sort of British flag bomb that had coated the town.
Do you think me with my Irish reg car, and Irish accent stopped in that town while I was driving through?
Another related American tradition that I think is really wrong is the "Perp Walk". For the police to purposely work with the media to cause as much public humiliation for a presumed innocent suspect as a form of pre-conviction punishment is really twisted in my opinion.
Obviously not really adding much real help to the conversation but I watched a sketch only a few days ago that seems pretty applicable:
Isn't Germany on of the countries that at least had plans on making social media companies responsible for what their users post on their sites. If I remember correctly they were even proposing massive fines if content that they deemed illegal was not removed within an hour and even holding the executives criminally responsible for the content that any of their users post? I'm not sure did they actually go that far but they were at least proposing it.
So on the one hand they are saying that companies need to strictly control what users say on their platform and if they get it wrong they are criminals, but on the other hand they shouldn't control what is said on their platform?
In Ireland there is a charity called Blood Bikes (http://bloodbikes.ie/) where people volunteer to quickly transport somewhat urgent medical supplies including blood (hence the name), test samples, medication, medical files etc. They don't do organ transport though. I presume that is still generally done by the ambulance service.
I think Ireland is champion of euphemistically naming things to greatly play them down. We referred to WW2 (you know that little conflict that killed like 70 million people) as "The Emergency" while we still call the conflict in Northern Ireland as "The Troubles".
I realise that it's a completely different country (Ireland) but I remember back when I was in university and found out that most tenants in student accommodation aren't in fact tenants but rather are licencees. Basically means that most of them pesky tenant protections don't apply. It means that they could get away with so many things that landlords of actual tenants wouldn't.
I remember hearing some super cliched but kinda funny saying one time:
"Knowledge is knowing that tomatoes are a fruit. Wisdom is knowing that you shouldn't put it in a fruit salad."
This option is brought up alot and while cost is probably one consideration I think that the main problem is for when (not if) one of the launches has a rapid unscheduled disassembly as they call it, and basically become becomes a large dirty bomb.
I am always so surprised and appalled that these things are still legal. Can you imagine the reaction if they were designed to only hurt pretty much any other demographic other than young people?
Interesting thing about electricity bills in Ireland is that we pay a Public Service Obligation Levy on every bill. Part of that goes to subsidising investment in renewable energy to help reduce emissions. The other part of it goes to subsidising electricity generation using peat which is even worse than coal for emissions so the good and the bad might cancel each other out.
In their defence, they are phasing out using peat but I just am annoyed at it.
Just read up a little bit and didn't know how controllable the output of a reactor is. I guess I was thinking more about spinning up from zero.
Gas is often used for load balancing, even before renewables became more widespread. Some types of gas generator plants can be spun up to full capacity in a matter of minutes. Nuclear on the other hand is the opposite. It takes considerable time to spin up or down but is great at providing a very high, very steady baseload.
There were stories that he wasn't a very good house guest. Didn't clean up after himself or his pet, wasn't very hygienic himself too. Don't know if they are true but wouldn't surprise me to be honest.
My Googling skills mustn't be what they used to be.
There is a brilliant picture illustrating this. I tried to track it down but couldn't find it anywhere. It is actually three "different" pictures. The first is a soldier (I believe it was US soldier) giving a drink of water to a very tired or distressed looking man (I think he looked Middle Eastern). The second was a very tired or distressed looking man (the same one in the same pose) with a soldier (different to the first one) pointing an assault rifle a the unarmed man's head. The third was actually just the full pulled out picture i.e. a soldier giving water to a very tired or distressed looking man while another soldier held an assault rifle to his head. It very powerfully shows that you can be reporting on facts but depending on how you frame it (in this case literally) can completely change the message behind the "facts" that you are reporting on. One picture showed the US army as a generous saviour to this poor man. The other showed the US soldier as a monster that was pointing a rifle at a poor distressed man's head. The third showed that is was actually both or maybe neither. Really wish I could track that one down.
They have applied for a banking license, but that was like a year ago and haven't heard anything much since then.
The ECHR is completely separate from the EU so no matter what way the actual Brexit goes, they will still be a member of the ECHR. Whether they might want to leave that as well is another matter.
Would a better way of describing it be: "People Used Facebook to fuel Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany." You could say that Facebook isn't doing enough to prevent people fuelling attacks but you could also say that the police aren't doing enough either.
It might (completely guessing here) also mean that lungs that wouldn't be suitable for normal transplant due to health or condition, might be suitable to be used in this way.
While I don't really know much about the area, one option that I hear has possible potential is forests and then convert them to biochar. Downside is that you obviously need huge quantities of land that some would want to use for farming etc.
True, that bit is a bit annoying, but again, not being able to switch out or uninstall default apps is much worse than just not being able to uninstall default apps.
Very slightly off topic but I actually think how Android handles default apps is the best of both worlds. It comes with very very good default Google Apps that work well together but it is very easy to switch out whatever you want for an alternative. How iOS handles it is the opposite. For their default apps they either straight out not allow competitors, severely limit what their competitors or (if I remember correctly) they even removed apps when a newer iOS added Apple's own version so they were now "competing".
I know that anti-trust laws are probably not applicable as Apple does have a dominant position based on total market share, but to me this practice seems far more anti-competitive. Banning competitors seems worse than fully allowing competitors but providing your own as default that can easily be changed.
Yeah I had to read Google's cached version.
I remember when I moved away for college I was so shocked at how quite a few people basically couldn't look after themselves at all. I ended up teaching one guy I lived with how to do the most basic things. I actually had to show him how to put a duvet cover on, how to boil rice, how to use a washing machine, the fact that if a chicken fillet is 50% pink on the inside is not yet finished. He had never done any of these things himself before. I should have seen the warning signs when he moved in and his mother was unpacking and folding his underwear and putting them in his wardrobe for him. He was the worst that I seen but there were plenty more that weren't that far off.
Again, the fact that the court made a decision for the patient has nothing to do with how the healthcare system of the country is funded. Courts and the legal system make decisions about children's lives against the wishes of parents all the time. Courts remove children from parents that they deem unfit. Courts decide that one parent or the other should have sole custody of the child against the wish of the other and many more examples.
Quite frankly I'm much more scared of a system where a parent has complete and absolute control over a child no matter what than one where a court can step in and overrule a decision of a parent. The doctors and courts owe their duty of care to the patient not to the parents.
The fact that the healthcare was paid for by the Government had absolutely nothing to do with that case. A healthcare decision had to be made for a patient that was not able to make the decision themselves. When the doctors thought that the decision that the parents were making on behalf of the child was against the best interests of the patient they asked the courts to make a judgement of what should be done. The same thing can happen in countries with private healthcare and the same thing would have happened in the UK if they were in a private hospital.