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Is that what happened to you?

In Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Ireland. And, obviously, in the Sloman household.

John

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Stupid - if predictable - reaction. One might identify the protestors against the current Greek government, which is economising on a large scale - as a "free lunch" crowd, but they aren't protesting out of any socialist sense of entitlement so much as out of a conservative nostalgia for the time when they could get away with not paying their taxes.

If the protestors had enough sense to know what they were protesting about, they'd probably be most critical of the irresponsible US bankers who gave us the GFC and drastically cut back tourist spending in Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Ireland.

Meanwhile the Sloman household is doing very nicely - even if I'm retired - and is in no need of any free lunches.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'm not eligible. I was still working full-time until June 2003, and was collecting unemployment benefit and seeking full time work until November 2007 when I turned 65.

And why would I submit a theoretical question to the totally experimental Large Hadron Collider? And what kind of connection do you claim have to it that would let you talk about them as "us"?

In principle I could put the question to Robbert Dijkgraaf - whom I've met (once) - before he heads off to run the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.

He's got a web-site designed to field that kind of question

but I'm sure he already gets enough silly questions from amateur physicists.

I'm afraid your cognitive defects are becoming a little too obvious. You want to pose as an expert on General Relativity? Then answer the questions or admit that you can't.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Ah, now you're blaming the US for not spending more money in sunny Europe. Next, you'll be blaming us for pulling troops out of Europe.

Hell, you're tempting me to cancel our vacation in Italy this summer.

John

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I don't think that the American tourists were all that important - the Germans were ubiquitous, and the Japanese and Chinese tended to be particularly visible. The Global Financial Crisis was global, and it cut back tourist spending by people all around the world.

I can understand why you'd want to subsidise Berlusconi - he's your kind of politician - but he's no longer in power there, replaced by technocrats more interested in getting the economy back into shape than in keeping Berlusconi's commercial empire profitable. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if you cancelled your vacation.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They're not veiled. You just don't understand insults that aren't full of fecal references.

John

One male child.

John

There's some real science, not nearly enough, but even good science is helpless against chaotic systems. It's like economics: the more expert an economist becomes, the less able he is to draw useful conclusions.

John

What's Berlusconi? Some sort of fizzy water?

John

You're a goddamned idiot. They ARE veiled, and YOU *think* you are over folks, but you are, in fact, beneath contempt. The fact that *that* kind of retarded behavior appears to be what makes your little pathetic world go 'round, is a bigger tell than anything you claim or declare having knowledge of.

And we come back to the simple fact that YOU ARE A GODDAMNED IDIOT!

^^^^ =A0 Political!

John has this idea that calling a system chaotic makes it unpredictable. The solar system is chaotic, but the sun keeps on rising and setting every day, and the weather is chaotic, but farmers keep on planting seed at the same time every year, and collecting harvests (admittedly of varying size) at more or less the same time every year.

Chaotic systems are unpredictable - in detail - over a sufficiently long period (about 100 million years for the solar system) but their variation tends to be constrained by conservation laws of one kind and another.

Von Neumann was bright enough to realise that while weather is chaotic, climate isn't - and insight that John Larkin seems to be perfectly incapable of absorbing, no matter how often it is pointed out to him.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The Prime Minister of Italy, until recently. He's notorious, but you really don't know much, do you.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Unites States Ship Europe? Ken doesn't know what he is talking about.

At least Europe's politicians recognise that they have a problem - Greece and Italy have now got new governments who were installed to fix their economic problems.

The US political system seems to have been designed to let the Tea Party prevent any sensible government intervention until after the next presidential election - the thinking seems to be that if the Republicans can prevent the Democrats from repairing the US economy, the US voter will reward the Republicans for this public-spirited activity by voting for them in huge numbers.

Granting the opinions of the right-wing nitwits who post here, they may even be right. Lincoln claimed that you can't fool all the people all the time, but the Tea Party may be able to fool enough of the people for long enough.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The Dutch are not at all bigoted, but they do go in for age- discrimination in a big way. The UK wasn't nearly as bad. I can't speak for the rest of Europe - my wife's secretary's husband got work in Germany when he was too old to get work in the Netherlands, so presumably the Germans aren't as bad either.

What happens at the Large Hadron Collider - which happens to be in Switzerland - is anybody's guess. I was relying on your criterion "retired in 1990" and pointing out (in the section of my post that you snipped - without marking the snip) that I couldn't claim to have retired until 2007.

If your doctors offer you a brain implant, go for it. What you've got left doesn't work too well.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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I pay those rates on those items too. Anyone over the minimum brackets does.

It's amazing that even this commonplace--a simple, objective, verifiable fact, with references given, fully and rationally explained in multiple places--should be surrounded by such fog, mystery, and controversy that it becomes a matter of opinion, whereupon anyone has to resort to people they imagine to be experts, and then presume to be qualified to interpret what they've imagined such experts might have said.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

ROTFLMAO!

-- "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." (Richard Feynman)

Sez Ken "Greeks and wops" Tucker?

Not the message that I ever got, and the chance that you could actually find someone to ask is negligible.

I had some acquaintances who did work for CERN, so you may be right. They didn't regard me as a crazy nutcase back then, but I didn't interact with the likes of you back then either.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen