Fucking ridiculous video hiding a somewhat significant point.

The human race can't break up with fossil fuels...

All the wonderful renewable tech we're banking on just isn't capable of supplying enough energy to support our modern post developmental lifestyle. Sure, solar thermal, PV etc are interesting, but unless you have some developing country (aka China atm, but might be India in the future) absorbing the carbon cost of building the panels and tech, the sums don't work out for people personally, and the return on energy invested doesn't work out for the planet.

If you've seen the current state of the Chinese air quality or general environment, you'll understand that for every clean tech device we set up in the west, there is a terrible hidden cost being dumped somewhere else in the world. Except "global warming" is global, so sweeping this shit under a foreign rug isn't going to save us..

With 1.8bn ppl with zero power and another 700+m with intermittent, unreliable power, and a bunch of countries switching off their nukes (and replacing the load mostly with gas/coal), no matter how much we want to break up with the lousy bitch, we can't and won't...

Your video, Don't break up with fossil fuels, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

"IF YOU BREAK UP WITH ME, I'LL TAKE EVERYTHING"

This doesn't sound like a healthy relationship...

It's not just slavery.

The bible is also big on stoning your kids to death, forcing rape victims to marry their rapists and cutting off the hand of a woman who breaks up a fight. Hell, if you're a dude who's had a really unfortunate accident, no church for you!

As soon as the bible is no longer a perfect guide to morality (which it's clearly not), it is rendered completely useless.

Nothing is good about this situation and there is no reason to think this will end in anything but Greek default.

Greece's government, elected by its citizens ran up a large and unsustainable debt which was masked by easy credit before the GFC and fraudulent accounting.

There were many contributors. Corruption, hugely wasteful state owned enterprises, joining the euro zone before they were ready to lose the ability to devalue their currency and lower interest rates, and flagrant tax evasion.

But as a country they're collectively responsible for not demanding the necessary reforms of their politicians to ensure they were not vulnerable to a credit crisis when the GFC hit and lenders began to look more scrupulously at individual European countries rather than Europe as a whole. Equally, Italy is responsible for voting Berlusconi into power for every year their economy recorded negative growth under his government. Spain is responsible for not providing sufficient oversight to bad bank lending leading a huge indebting bailout package.

Some of Syriza's reforms are reasonable. Tackling corruption and trying to break up oligopolies are worthy ideas, but they are unlikely to be easy and yield any immediate benefit. Raising the minimum wage and planning to hire back state workers as they have already promised will almost guarantee they will cease to receive EU funding/ECB assistance and later IMF funding.

The simple truth from the point of view of Germany and other austerity backing Nordic countries is if they buy their loans (and in effect transfer money to Greece) without austerity stipulations, there will be no pressure or guarantee that structural reforms that allow Greece to function independently will ever be implemented. These lender government and by extension its people have no interest in transferring wealth to Greece if it stalls its reforms.

Yes fire sales of state owned enterprises suck but the likely alternative at this point if the Troika lending is stopped is that all other lending stops and Greece defaults. At that point there would be mass loss of state sector jobs and sky-rocketing unemployment relative to what is now being experienced. It would take years of reform for the Greek government to be lend-worthy again. There is simply no trust for any alternative to austerity on the part of north Europe.

Currently Greece has reported positive growth in the past quarter and excluding debt repayments is running a budget surplus. Realistically, yes they cannot pay back the 180% of GDP. The likely way forward is after several more years of real reform they (+ Spain & Portugal) would get better terms from the EU as politically, leaders in Germany and elsewhere will be able to make the case that their objective has been achieved.

The ECB's QE package is in some ways already part of this. What I guarantee won't happen is electing Syriza to oppose bailout terms helping to secure that. Germany et al will quite rightly see that if they acquiesce to Greece they will encourage other populist parties in Spain, Portugal, Italy and France and stall reforms.

Could Germany and others in theory provide a huge cash infusion to Greece, Spain and Portugal now? Sure. And those parties would be voted out in the next election and the terms reversed. Even with the relative stinginess of current loan terms, the likes of UKIP and the National Front with their anti-EU stance, have gained political standing in the EU parliament and will likely see huge boosts in upcoming domestic elections.

I could say with the Hawaii case that it may not be what you think it is, at first. First, find out if you are on or near one of the very active volcanic regions in Hawaii. Then find out where the last couple of (and possibly even lava flows going back decades--as you never know what they plan to do with some of those roads) lava flow where.

If any of them came close to the road you were on, you have your answer. The road MAY have used to look far different in the past--possibly being four lanes, or even shifted 15-20 feet in another direction, etc... Then the lava came, covered some of the road here and there (after some time plants grow on it, as it is very fertile, and you have no idea you are driving right through a gigantic lava field/flow).

They may come back and put some asphalt down to allow residents and others to still get to various places on the island--but, they may not redo the lines and other things because the risk of the lava field increasing and further burying the road is fairly high. So they just leave the road as is, essentially a make-shift emergency road possibly not created for a long-term outlook.

But, that is just one guess. As for the video above...Narcolepsy? I have no idea what happened there (or why it would stay that way, unless the road is in an area like what I described and it is more of a "make-shift" road...as you DO see the road break up and start to disappear at the end, so it is possible).

hooooly crap!
turns out @shang married my ex!
never married the woman and we didn't exactly break up.

i escaped........

hmmm.maybe i am interpreting this video all wrong from my own subjective understandings.it offers nothing that relates to me,but it never occurred to me that i may be the exception,rather than the rule.

ok..upvote from me.

and i'll throw in a *promote for good measure.

Oops. He says he didn't blow up a Saturn. Never worked on the moon missions, unmanned missiles only.

I asked him why he blew up the Titan. He said it was breaking up so he "sent the destruct signal to disperse the fuel" in the safe zone.

I gotta find out what that other big missile he blew up was. Taller than an Titan. All these years I thought it was a Saturn....

My wife was a teacher at a middle school where several teachers were assaulted (pushed, punched, etc.) yearly and there were almost daily fights between students--no exaggeration. School policy is that teachers can't touch the kids for any reason, even to break up fights where one student is kicking another on the ground, due to threats of lawsuits in such cases. The police officer is there mostly to diffuse/stop such instances because they are allowed to get physically involved. They are also on hand to file charges against threats of assault, rape, or when drugs are found.

And this is all at a middle school where the kids range in size from pre-pubescent four footers to early-bloomer six foot plus and much larger than some of their female teachers.

The efficacy of this is obviously influenced by the individual cop, the school administration and how the students and their parents view police in general.

We've been on a bunch of dates
I weigh debates that this creates
And hate that state of forced introspection
We traded wit, we swapped some spit,
You fingered me a little bit
But we never really had a connection

You did nothing wrong, I have no excuse
Just my intuition telling me we shouldn't reproduce

I know I have to end it
But pretend to just suspend it
By contending that I'm busy all week
I let the foregone linger on
Text back with an emoticon
Withdraw from you by being oblique

Inside I know my tactics just delay it
But I'd do anything so I don't have to say it

I'll draw this out forever like it's Vietnam
Then one day I'll be gone like Bambi's mom Awww

Cause there's the right thing to do
Then there's what I'm gonna do
There's so much I should say
But instead... I do the fade away

Now I'm fading like chalk on a sidewalk
Or the polio virus after Jonas Salk
Like a Jewish guy at Sizzler on Yom Kippur
The Whig party post Millard Fillmore

The erection of a man on antidepressants
The cast of Diff'rent Strokes after adolescence
Reproductive rights below the Mason Dixon
Native Americans after the barter systems
Your thyroid gland after Hashimoto
The family in the Back to the Future photo
Yeah I fade away

We say that men are asshole who don't communicate
We revel in our victimhood and amplify our hate
We find ways to be indignant like it's a sport
Then dissect their malignance with the views we distort

The way men break up may be sloppy and terse
What they do is bad, but what we do is worse

We pretend to ourselves it's the nice thing to do
To let you down gently by just not ever telling you
And deep down we know it's the worst way to play it
But we are what we have... huge pussies

And women are hypocrites
Especially ones in comedy bands
We see your faults but not our own
Then we wonder why we're all alone

We fill you up with maybe's, excuses and stalls
But like a baby in China... it's better to have balls

Not the Good Wife type like Christine Baranski
So I'll pull out and leave like I'm Roman Polanski

Cause there's the right thing to do
Then there's what I'm gonna do
There's so much I should say
But instead... I do the fade away

Like Verbal Kint fading into Kaiser Soze
The rights in Arizona for a guy named Jose
Opportunities for a college grad
The love between your mom and dad
Gonna Peter out like a gay Cetera
Iranian relations since the Regan era
Black Nike sales after Heaven's Gate
Summer Camp attendance at Penn State
The name Adolph after World War Two
Like Debbie Gibson's pop career, Out of the Blue
Yeah I fade away

Cause I don't wanna get to know you
I just want to blow you... off

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Conan Obrien, Garfunkle and Oates, break up, relationship, pussy' to 'Conan Obrien, Garfunkel and Oates, break up, relationship, pussy' - edited by eric3579

The Basel 3 accords are essentially doing this. Basel and its previous incarnations are essentially non-binding guidelines established by an international agency for banks that domestic regulatory agencies in countries then enact. Even if they don't, banks follow these anyway because it's effectively an international standard.

Basel 2 (which we had prior to the GFC), had 2 tiers of capital that could be held. The actual shareholder stock capital that is rock solid (tier 1) and various loose definitions (including at the time AAA rated mortage backed securities) - tier 2. The last I heard, that 2nd tier has essentially been done away with and the overall capital requirements (%) required to be held, has been raised.

The problems though are:

1 - Unless you raise capital to stupendous levels (like seriously inhibiting bank lending), you wouldn't have anywhere near the buffer to prevent another 2008. The problem then was not insufficient capital. It's that the industry as a whole made a large judgement error in valuing mortgage backed securities.

2 - This also highlights the problem that breaking up the banks wouldn't solve the issue of groupthink because availability of credit and economic conditions are a universal thing. An analogy is the oil price. Even though the US is a major oil producer in it's own right, events like Iraq recently still heavily impact prices in the US because global prices don't change in a vacuum.

3 - As far Glass Steigel, even if investment and traditional banks were separate, operating in the same field, if credit dries up (say because a investment bank made a bad decision), that will still affect the traditional merchant banks.

All banks work through fractional lending. You take a deposit, keep a buffer for capital. You lend out the rest. Some returns back as a deposit, again you keep a buffer and lend out the rest. In bad economic conditions, regardless of whether caused by them or other players in the finance industry, some of their lenders default and there is potential for their entire capital buffer to collapse and the bank to default if the crisis is bad enough. Even if it's purely a merchant bank.

-

What splitting the banks probably would do is increase competition, and lower banking costs as well as salaries, which is generally a good thing and I would agree here that this is something that banks have lobbied heavily against (as well as things like the Consumer Protection Agency, for the same reason, margins). Having said that, there are a lot much more monopolistic companies with lower risk and much more stable margins (e.g. Wallmart).

I didn't see one... but there was a lamp post which looked quite a lot like a man just as the bridge was breaking up.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Lots of cleverness in this video. Via: http://boingboing.net/2014/02/17/couple-breaks-up-with-help-fro.html

Ah, I can see you have a FORT in mind. There is no FORT, really. The whole area is the Fort, the land itself. The "blocking fort" ARE the bunkers -- on top of the bluffs and at water level. There are two other forts in a triangular shape -- one on Whidbey Island and one on Marrowstone Island. The idea was if any boat came into the waters of Admiralty Inlet, one of the forts bunkers' big guns could take them out.

The bunkers are all still there. They were going to jackhammer them away, but they were made from imported Belgian concrete and they just would NOT break up.

So you can go crawling around in all sorts of bunkers. Some of the rooms have had their doors welded shut, for safety reasons. But there are plenty to explore.

These three forts aren't on an estuary, however. It is ocean water, but not the ocean. The Pacific Ocean stops about where the Northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula is kind of south of Vancouver Island, in Canada. Things get narrow there, and the ocean waves can't reach. Or something. So there are bodies of water that ships and boats follow going east, then they turn south to Seattle, which is on the coast of Puget Sound.

It's all very confusing. I can never figure out which way is north. Port Townsend has water on three sides, fer pitys sake!

Oh, and they did remove the big guns, even as they left the bunkers. You can see where they were and get a good sense of how big those guns were.

None of the three forts ever shot in anger. Just practice.

Exactly! "Shop fronts" only.

So when are you coming to America? It is beautiful in my part of the country, albeit very young by European or even East Coast standards. We are very proud of our oldest building. I think it was built in 1875 or something. Maybe even later. Ha.