Anya ,'Dirty Girls'
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I object to the difference in scale. Saying that a proportion of anything the size of a continent is directly comparable to a segment of another without accounting for scale is, to my mind, incorrect.
It's theoretically no big mathematical feat to bring European figures together to create a divisible figure for the whole EU.
Administration? Bwah.
If I turn out to have my head up my ass (excuse me, arse), I'm planning to blame it on the language barrier.
Heh, heh, heh!
Nou, I did some work on applying Neufeld et al to Australian socio-political arena, but removed the Australian specific stuff before I posted.
Other influences along the line of Neufeld,
I've replaced my computer three times over the past 5+ years, so my bookmarks and reams and reams of saved articles fill up boxes and boxes of disks. The last upgrade I was able to burn to CD so that was a lot easier. You've reminded me that many of those saved articles and the 4 drawer filing cabinet full of hardcopy articles are probably linkable now (some of these go back many years). Project for a rainy day - update cites from before internet explosion.
The United States are just that--a federalist system. It makes me laugh ruefully when unAmericans say that "America has the death penalty" or "America's gun laws are such and such" or "America spends x dollars on education" or whatever. All of those things are largely reserved to each state and can vary wildly depending on where you live.
Australia is a federation as well and some things are covered by states and some by fed govt. Gun laws are fed, education is states, defense and communications are federal, health and transport are state.
Aside from the distances involved for most people, that's another reason Americans are attached to the idea of the road.Much the same in Oz, with even less populations and towns in an area of comparable size to the US. You've got lots more people and towns spread right across the country whereas basically almost everyone in Oz lives around the edges of the continent with nary a soul in the middle. And even round the edges is a bit generous considering there are vast amounts of coastline that have no development.
Whatever happened to good ol' fashioned boycotts? Or DIY--that Mecca Cola thing sounds like a great idea if you want to make a point. Vote with your wallet and leave the Eeeeevil Companies alone--and unpatronized.
100% with you on this. But the difficulty arises in the area of superannuation, investment, and funds management, for example, when the investors are so far removed from the investment that they do not know what activities their money is funding and supporting. It is not unheard of for a little old grandmother to be unknowingly supporting child labour in a third world country because her retirement money has been combined with lots of other people's retirement money to fund shonky corporate activities both home and abroad. Again Enron is a perfect example of this.
Moonlit, those essays were really something. Sounds like somebody's been reading Z-Mag.If you're serious, thanks, and yes I have, as well as many other sources including Smith, Hume, Machievelli, Aristotle, and Hawking, as well the examples posted before.
Baby brother shipped out on Sunday morning. We got a call from him and he can't say where he is, but he's definitely not directly in harm's way, although that frontier does seem to move around a bit in this war.
Caroma, I am so glad that your brother is not too directly in harms way. I have no direct family who has ever been involved in military action, mainly because they weren't that many and never at the right age or whatever when Australia has been at war.
And I heard Moynihan being glowingly mentioned on another politics program sometime last week and seeing as he certainly seemed well thought of by the Buffistas I wondered if you ('cos you're the one with the tag and all) could point me to a few links on some of the more important/historic or just worth knowing things that he did/said or achieved.
to bring European figures together to create a divisible figure for the whole EU.
OK so I'm not sure that line makes sense in any known European language (gaelic perhaps?)
The figures for all the European states could be made into one figure.
The figure for the US could be divided by 52.
Then we'd have a set of roughly comparable figures.
But it'd be meaningless. Because the USA is a country, and Europe isn't. There are huge variations - I don't see what the value is of comparing "European" (whatever that means) spending with that of the US.
I don't understand the anti-globalization thing, I must admit. Sounds like a case of rich First World nations saying to the Third World, "We've got ours, so go away and toil in the fields your whole life. You're not bright enough not to be expoited even though our ancestors soon organized and got themselves better lives, so forget those factory jobs and upward mobility and all that, just stay stuck and isolated like you are." Kind of patronizing. Not all local culture is worth preserving--FGM, slavery, corruption--that kind of stuff.
Ja Tim, wie sachst du.
You know how Australia pays everyone to take a year of travel before college? (That's how I understood it from the Australian guy in the next airplane seat, anyway.)
Bwah! I think it's safe to say the guy in the next seat was taking the piss, mate.
Ja Tim, wie sachst du.
What does this mean?
Or compare defense spending as a proportion of GDP which is the only meaningful way.Or compare defense spending on per head of population basis.
The unit of comparison has to be sovereign territory, ie. nation states or countries.
Understanding Military Expenditure from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
UNITED NATIONS- - Breaking long-held traditions of confidentiality, an increasingly large number of developing nations have decided to voluntarily declare their military budgets to the United Nations. The world body has "recorded an unprecedented increase in the number of governments reporting their defense spending’, UN spokesman Fred Eckhard told reporters Monday. Of 191 UN member states, more than 100 have reported their military spending at least once, while 77 states have submitted their annual reports this year, up from 61 in 2001 and 35 in 2000.
The regular declarations have come mostly from Western nations, including the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Canada. But this year's annual report includes declarations from Malaysia, Romania, Belarus, Mongolia, Albania and Mauritius. Other developing nations who have gone public with their military budgets are Jordan, Lebanon, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nepal, Peru, the Philippines and Thailand.
The budgets detail money spent on aircraft, artillery, armored vehicles, the costs of building air and naval bases, of operating and maintaining military equipment and the costs for military personnel and reservists.
The world's biggest military spender continues to be the United States, whose defense budget for 2001 was 327.5 billion dollars, according to its declaration. The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies says the US budget has risen to an estimated 343 billion dollars in 2002, up from 300 billion dollars in 2000.
Other big spenders in 2001 include Germany (24.3 billion dollars), Russia (9.2 billion dollars), France (28.4 billion dollars), and Britain (36.8 billion dollars).
While transparency grows, military spending has risen to about 850 billion dollars per year, "an amount approaching average Cold War spending levels", warned UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala. The spending is "not only diverting precious financial, material and human resources from productive to non-productive pursuits, but was also jeopardizing humanity's common natural environment and the prospects for social and economic development of all nations", he said.
Table of military spending by country Table prepared by Center for Defense Information. Sources: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Department of Defense
"For 45 years of the Cold War we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. Now it appears we're in an arms race with ourselves."
Admiral Eugene Carroll, Jr., U.S. Navy (Ret.) Deputy Director. Center for Defense Information
moonlit - you need to close your link tag
Lalala - nothing to see here.
moonlit, just out of curiosity, do you have any stats on the size of the population of the US (and territories) vs Germany, and the area of the US (and territories) vs Germany?