> The blast, which French newspaper L'Equipe said ripped through the floor of the vehicle before setting it alight, was not related to racing, the organisers added.
> Meanwhile Saudi authorities indicated there was no criminal suspicion.
Saudi Arabia is a joke, and the US is sustaining that joke.
Yup, the faster we can get away from oil as a primary energy source, the better things will get in many areas.
(& no, I'm not really concerned about people, companies, and countries who have been making their living off fossil fuels for the last century+; they've received already great benefit and they can find other sources of sustainence, preferably sustainable sources.)
I am not sure if trading petrodollar for lithiumrenminbi is an overall gain.
Industrial civilization, at least until some really advanced stage where asteroids can be mined economically, will always have a shortage of some important resource.
Did you mean to say helium? The Earth is 75% covered with hydrogen-rich raw material, so I’d expect it to be plentiful, with the mines for it needing energy, but otherwise be straightforward.
Fair enough. By mass hydrogen is rare, but by accessibility easily obtained. But prising it away from Oxygen would probably make it uneconomical, not that space mining is much better.
There is a significant difference between buying units of usable energy, and buying capital goods that produce and store usable energy. In the former, price increases are felt almost immediately, with at most a month reprieve while old stocks are used up (unless one has specifically paid a premium to hedge for lower prices). Whereas in the latter it affects the cost of new buildout first, and spot prices as only a secondary effect. Of course there's also Jevons paradox.
That is such a non comment, dollar is the currency used to buy and sell because is the easiest one trade in the international market, not because it has some mystical power. They can sell it for euros, pounds or whatever.
Oil is currently being used to keep dictatorships and regimes afloat within the OPEC.
The United States does not control how many barrels of oil SA, UAE or other countries can push to the market.
Poverty exists only within industrial societies (and those that interact with industrial societies).
Outside of that scope, poverty doesn't exist. It's a made up concept to describe the relative lack of material compared to some arbitrary, and ever-changing standard.
Did hunter gatherers live in poverty? Or were they plenty content with their lot in life -- spending some of their time on survival in food-resource-rich geographies, and the rest on socializing and primitive leisure?
How about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon Rainforest? Are you going to label them as "living in poverty" so they can be "saved" and "enriched" by Western Industrial Society's values?
"Lifting people out of poverty" is slowly becoming "think of the children"; or even "housewives with nervous ailments should be treated with sedatives and lobotomies. Their conditions are quite saddening, so we should help them post-haste. We know best."
I'd rather argue that poverty only exists in societies developed enough to exhibit stark contrasts between individuals' estates. There was what we would perceive as poverty in e.g. the Roman Empire or Middle-Age Europe.
I'd say it's wishful thinking. You can easily apply the "Petrodollar->US supports SA who is a joke" model to other country, e.g. "Ydollar->US supports X who is a joke". I guess you already see the common part in both models.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive/inflammatory comments like this. We want thoughtful conversation here, and comments like this point threads in the opposite direction.
I don't follow the Paris-Dakar rally very closely, but the one thing I do know about it is that you stay the course or you risk running into landmines.
This is notable because the explosion happened on the way from the hotel to the race course. I was confused until I read it happened on the way TO the race.
> I don't follow the Paris-Dakar rally very closely
It shows :P It's now called only "Dakar rally", and hasn't had anything to do with Paris or Dakar for years. It had stints in South America and is now in Saudi Arabia, precisely because of the precarious security situation in Subsaharan Africa.
Neither do I, as an example i thought the start and finish was fixed, but apparently the Paris-Dakar rally does not have to visit either city.
A landmine sounds plausible, but i guess the knee jerk reaction is to assume terrorism.
Even though it has been rebranded as the Dakar Rally, the current 10-year deal with Saudi Arabia all but guarantees that Dakar won't be a destination anytime soon.
Depends what you do with them. If you drop them everywhere for the fun factor, sure. If they are but a part of a fortification complex, they are neither better nor worse than other military ordinance delivery systems.
That does seem the kind of thing that upsets religious people. It wouldn't bother me, an atheist, except it's part of a broader targeting of muslims that occurs across western europe and at every level of society.
It is, of course, a total coincidence that most muslims are brown.
> it's part of a broader targeting of muslims that occurs across western europe and at every level of society.
Except of course it isn’t. Caricatures poking fun at various religions are common, have been for quite a while, and people complain about them regularly. Yet we’ve somehow accepted that we can make fun of a big guy with a beard. Somehow nobody has been killed over the Life of Brian.
There are a couple of fundamental human rights to which everyone is entitled. These include freedom of conscience, the right to live in peace, and freedom of expression. Religion is fine as long as it does not interfere with the rights of other people, which includes the right to laugh at beliefs. Humans have rights, ideas don’t.
On the other hand, nobody has a right not to be upset, and certainly not to kill people and plant bombs over it. It really should be a no brainer for anyone supposed to be supportive of any kind of enlightenment values.
This ”they should not do it, but” is just as bad as “I am not racist, but”. That we are arguing whether people have a moral right to violence where the rule of law prevails, over something as trivial as hurt feelings, is absolutely disgusting.
Try to substitute “Islam” for any philosophy or belief to see how patently absurd that is. Republicans are upset when you tell them Biden won. Should we censure that from public discourse?
>> it's part of a broader targeting of muslims that occurs across western europe and at every level of society.
> Except of course it isn’t. Caricatures poking fun at various religions are common...
Oh come on, his statement is clearly not just about caricatures, but about a general trend, not only in french society, which is especially toxic towards religious people, but especially to Muslims. The evidence is abundant and anyone who has not an axe to grind, like yourself, will have no issue in acknowledging these facts.
> There are a couple of fundamental human rights to which everyone is entitled.
Really, is that so? Can you provide scientific evidence for this or do we have to take you word for it? Can we discover those 'fundamental human rights' under the microscope or are 'enlightened' individuals going to dictate to others what are and aren't 'fundamental human rights'?
> On the other hand, nobody has a right not to be upset
Rights are just arbitrary inventions of the human mind so any society has the power to implement whatever rights they like. Not that I am in favour of that, just trying to make it clear that those platitudes you acquired in your circles are farcical. Apropos farcical, there are enough cases which are evidence that people apparently are entitled to be upset, because whenever powerful individuals in french society are mocked or ridiculed the consequences are very different e.g. Charlie Hebdo fired Maurice Sinet (who had been drawing political cartoons since the 50s!) for mocking Sarkozy's son.
Again I expect no concession from you whatsoever, you clearly have a big axe to grind, just putting this out there as a reference for neutral observers.
> Charlie Hebdo fired Maurice Sinet ... for mocking Sarkozy's son.
want he fired on suspicion of antisemitism? He won a unlawful termination suit so why do the newspapers actions (versus the courts) represent western values?
It's obvious to me jewish a special case, rightly it wrongly, because of WW2.
You don’t need a fair democracy in order to establish one. I’m currently sitting a couple of blocks away from where Nicolae Ceausescu held his last speech.
I used to say that too but 2016 is an example of the internet made manifest.
We tend to forget that children and young minds live on the internet now and they will be influenced by Reddit and Twitter posts. It's a real problem that I think we make for a more radical younger generation.
You could argue that cesspools where you see that stuff are what people "really" think. Sure, you get some sub-set of trolls and people there just to cause discontent between groups. But the rest genuinely believe that stuff, whatever that "stuff" may be.
Yes, the laws that the French government has been passing dont target any particular community. They make sure every community has the freedom to express themselves at any beach/pool, as long as they are wearing a bikini. Everyone is allowed to wear a religious symbol as long as it is smaller than a particular size.
And you can get one day off a week so long as it is Sunday. Good luck being Shomer Shabbat if that was the law. These burden people with particular religious beliefs.
I'm an atheist, but I disagree. Religion is needed by some, imo. This is how I view it:
There are ethical frameworks, secular moral frameworks, and religious moral frameworks. In my observation people love moral frameworks, because moral frameworks have the output of righteousness. They're useful for hegemony, they provide some sense of justice through outcasting, and they allow people to see themselves compared to others. They're also quite dynamic and can have modified interpretation by an individual.
Ethical frameworks are a little less fulfilling because their intended outcome is fairness. Users may have to sacrifice their own perspectives for the ethical framework to remain fair.
The issue is unregulated moral communities. We, as humans, think freedom to moral communities, whether they be religious or secular, is the right thing to do because of generations of religious warring. There are some amount of moral community people that will never switch to an ethical framework because of that strive for righteousness. While it'd probably be healthier to get away from morals altogether, the mean time would be filled with a lot of strife, imo, where righteous people would act on their righteousness.
The irony of complaining about demonisation while demonising a diverse group of more than a billion people of different races and cultures based on some twitter or reddit posts, what a joke. Furthermore it's only freedom of speech when minorities are also able to speak their minds freely otherwise it just becomes a tool of tyranny by which the majority can legally bully and harass the minority.
Treating millions of jews as a 'monolithic' group in order to discriminate against them was the beginning of something very disturbing, something which you probably missed in history class.
> Look up what r/Islam and Islamic twitter have to say about France.
Not only there; this line of reasoning is seeping into mainstream media like the New York Times or the Guardian, who really should know better. This is really disturbing, as progressives really should fight for things like the right to blasphemy, the freedom to caricature and the complete secularisation of the law instead of fighting for religious loopholes on behalf of fundamentalist theocrats.
That behaviour, in the wake of the Charlie people killed for a couple of drawings, is as progressive as “she had it coming” blame-the-victim Bible thumpers.
Please don't take HN threads into religious (or nationalistic) flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it.
Did you happen to read the article and read about the severe injuries experienced by one of the victims? After reading it, do you still have the same priority of worries?
I doubt South America particularly wants it back - I worked on quite a few of the South America rallies and it was quite clear that many countries didn't want it and couldn't afford it towards the end.
It was particularly interesting driving through Bolivia one year with some of the locals in some towns literally hurling whatever they could at the service vehicles....
I saw the start of the Dakar in Buenos Aires in 2011, it's an amazing event, very sophisticated technology.
I was staying there with a friend who regularly ran ultra marathons - the marathon de Sable and other French events in Patagonia, China etc.
He told me a story about Africa where the runners were stripped naked as they ran through a village - all their expensive lycra, camelbacks, shoes etc stolen by locals resentful of western sports tourists.
The Dakar has a similar long history of expensive tech being stolen, held to ransom etc.
Never underestimate the risks around exposing the western world to people in the third world. Millions love what they see, make money out of it etc but...
>The Dakar has a similar long history of expensive tech being stolen, held to ransom etc.
It's not a « long history », it's a one time event, and one that very likely has nothing to do with the locals. The whole story around it is incredibly fishy, and a rally car isn't something you can just steal. It doesn't start or drive like a normal car, there's no key.
It's not just « a race car », it's a Group B car with a new body. It's one of the greatest cars in racing history. To start you at least need to action the general electric break, switch the electricity on, push another one or two buttons for pumps and then press the starter button. Depending on the temperature of both the engine and the surrounding environment, you might also need to change plugs for cold ones. And that's just to start, it can't be driven like a normal car. And that's the exact reason why the 405 T16 of Vatanen was found in a bush back in the days : whoever took it new enough to start it up but stalled eventually (which is one of the reasons leading everybody to think it was some mechanic who dun it).
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread> Meanwhile Saudi authorities indicated there was no criminal suspicion.
Saudi Arabia is a joke, and the US is sustaining that joke.
(& no, I'm not really concerned about people, companies, and countries who have been making their living off fossil fuels for the last century+; they've received already great benefit and they can find other sources of sustainence, preferably sustainable sources.)
Industrial civilization, at least until some really advanced stage where asteroids can be mined economically, will always have a shortage of some important resource.
Oil as an energy source has lifted billions of people out of poverty, so its value goes far beyond the industry insiders.
However, this is where nuclear power comes in: vast quantities of energy, with fuel sources not controlled by the United States.
Oil is currently being used to keep dictatorships and regimes afloat within the OPEC.
The United States does not control how many barrels of oil SA, UAE or other countries can push to the market.
It actually is a little (well, a lot) more complicated than you might think.
https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/
Outside of that scope, poverty doesn't exist. It's a made up concept to describe the relative lack of material compared to some arbitrary, and ever-changing standard.
Did hunter gatherers live in poverty? Or were they plenty content with their lot in life -- spending some of their time on survival in food-resource-rich geographies, and the rest on socializing and primitive leisure?
How about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon Rainforest? Are you going to label them as "living in poverty" so they can be "saved" and "enriched" by Western Industrial Society's values?
"Lifting people out of poverty" is slowly becoming "think of the children"; or even "housewives with nervous ailments should be treated with sedatives and lobotomies. Their conditions are quite saddening, so we should help them post-haste. We know best."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is notable because the explosion happened on the way from the hotel to the race course. I was confused until I read it happened on the way TO the race.
It shows :P It's now called only "Dakar rally", and hasn't had anything to do with Paris or Dakar for years. It had stints in South America and is now in Saudi Arabia, precisely because of the precarious security situation in Subsaharan Africa.
A landmine sounds plausible, but i guess the knee jerk reaction is to assume terrorism.
Even though it has been rebranded as the Dakar Rally, the current 10-year deal with Saudi Arabia all but guarantees that Dakar won't be a destination anytime soon.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1488041/saudi-arabia
"The Saudi Arabia Rally" would be the proper name for this sad version of the original.
Depends what you do with them. If you drop them everywhere for the fun factor, sure. If they are but a part of a fortification complex, they are neither better nor worse than other military ordinance delivery systems.
It is, of course, a total coincidence that most muslims are brown.
Except of course it isn’t. Caricatures poking fun at various religions are common, have been for quite a while, and people complain about them regularly. Yet we’ve somehow accepted that we can make fun of a big guy with a beard. Somehow nobody has been killed over the Life of Brian.
There are a couple of fundamental human rights to which everyone is entitled. These include freedom of conscience, the right to live in peace, and freedom of expression. Religion is fine as long as it does not interfere with the rights of other people, which includes the right to laugh at beliefs. Humans have rights, ideas don’t.
On the other hand, nobody has a right not to be upset, and certainly not to kill people and plant bombs over it. It really should be a no brainer for anyone supposed to be supportive of any kind of enlightenment values.
This ”they should not do it, but” is just as bad as “I am not racist, but”. That we are arguing whether people have a moral right to violence where the rule of law prevails, over something as trivial as hurt feelings, is absolutely disgusting.
Try to substitute “Islam” for any philosophy or belief to see how patently absurd that is. Republicans are upset when you tell them Biden won. Should we censure that from public discourse?
Oh come on, his statement is clearly not just about caricatures, but about a general trend, not only in french society, which is especially toxic towards religious people, but especially to Muslims. The evidence is abundant and anyone who has not an axe to grind, like yourself, will have no issue in acknowledging these facts.
> There are a couple of fundamental human rights to which everyone is entitled.
Really, is that so? Can you provide scientific evidence for this or do we have to take you word for it? Can we discover those 'fundamental human rights' under the microscope or are 'enlightened' individuals going to dictate to others what are and aren't 'fundamental human rights'?
> On the other hand, nobody has a right not to be upset
Rights are just arbitrary inventions of the human mind so any society has the power to implement whatever rights they like. Not that I am in favour of that, just trying to make it clear that those platitudes you acquired in your circles are farcical. Apropos farcical, there are enough cases which are evidence that people apparently are entitled to be upset, because whenever powerful individuals in french society are mocked or ridiculed the consequences are very different e.g. Charlie Hebdo fired Maurice Sinet (who had been drawing political cartoons since the 50s!) for mocking Sarkozy's son.
Again I expect no concession from you whatsoever, you clearly have a big axe to grind, just putting this out there as a reference for neutral observers.
want he fired on suspicion of antisemitism? He won a unlawful termination suit so why do the newspapers actions (versus the courts) represent western values?
It's obvious to me jewish a special case, rightly it wrongly, because of WW2.
We tend to forget that children and young minds live on the internet now and they will be influenced by Reddit and Twitter posts. It's a real problem that I think we make for a more radical younger generation.
Besides, it’s not like the country has a way of changing its laws anyway.
There are ethical frameworks, secular moral frameworks, and religious moral frameworks. In my observation people love moral frameworks, because moral frameworks have the output of righteousness. They're useful for hegemony, they provide some sense of justice through outcasting, and they allow people to see themselves compared to others. They're also quite dynamic and can have modified interpretation by an individual.
Ethical frameworks are a little less fulfilling because their intended outcome is fairness. Users may have to sacrifice their own perspectives for the ethical framework to remain fair.
The issue is unregulated moral communities. We, as humans, think freedom to moral communities, whether they be religious or secular, is the right thing to do because of generations of religious warring. There are some amount of moral community people that will never switch to an ethical framework because of that strive for righteousness. While it'd probably be healthier to get away from morals altogether, the mean time would be filled with a lot of strife, imo, where righteous people would act on their righteousness.
Treating millions of jews as a 'monolithic' group in order to discriminate against them was the beginning of something very disturbing, something which you probably missed in history class.
Not only there; this line of reasoning is seeping into mainstream media like the New York Times or the Guardian, who really should know better. This is really disturbing, as progressives really should fight for things like the right to blasphemy, the freedom to caricature and the complete secularisation of the law instead of fighting for religious loopholes on behalf of fundamentalist theocrats.
That behaviour, in the wake of the Charlie people killed for a couple of drawings, is as progressive as “she had it coming” blame-the-victim Bible thumpers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It was particularly interesting driving through Bolivia one year with some of the locals in some towns literally hurling whatever they could at the service vehicles....
I was staying there with a friend who regularly ran ultra marathons - the marathon de Sable and other French events in Patagonia, China etc.
He told me a story about Africa where the runners were stripped naked as they ran through a village - all their expensive lycra, camelbacks, shoes etc stolen by locals resentful of western sports tourists.
The Dakar has a similar long history of expensive tech being stolen, held to ransom etc.
https://www.thedrive.com/accelerator/38650/that-time-ari-vat...
Never underestimate the risks around exposing the western world to people in the third world. Millions love what they see, make money out of it etc but...
It's not a « long history », it's a one time event, and one that very likely has nothing to do with the locals. The whole story around it is incredibly fishy, and a rally car isn't something you can just steal. It doesn't start or drive like a normal car, there's no key.
By the way, you can see Vatanen driving that car model in his legendary Pikes Peak Hill climb video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvXSXfL4XRc
>France's terrorism probe has been entrusted to the Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI)
someone in SA will wake up in a burning house, or accidentally blow himself up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_Rainbow_Warrior