Posts by Simon Grigg
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I'm sure both the Zune owners will be well pissed off with that ;)
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Paul, my experience is in Asia mostly, and, true, here one can top up although I rarely remember sadly. However my newish Indonesian on-account phone roams through the region so I'm going to be able to avoid the Vodafone charges and instead use my Telkomsel number to make my 6c an SMS international txts pretty much anywhere (including, they say, NZ) outside the US.
Makes me smile, as does my last cellphone bill, some NZ$8.
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I don't know about 'Vodaphone price gouging on roaming' - doesn't everyone buy a cheap local SIM card instead? I know I have a nice little collection
well, firstly they expire rather quickly so that collection may be worthless. Secondly there seems little point, sitting in an airport for three or four hours, which I often do, buying yet another number so one can send a text or two to ones family.
If one uses ones Vodafone card much of Asia now, the per-txt cost is 80c, via a local provider. If you buy a card for same said provider the local cost of the same SMS is in the cents.
Now, I'm no expert on the rates charged inter-company (or, often, intra-company as these sometimes are Vodafone opcos) but a sometimes 1000% differential does seem excessive, no?
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Sigh - $700 for something that costs US$400? - are they going to be plated in gold? at today's exchange rate that US$400 is NZ$505 .... I predict the "I'll unlock your iPhone for $50" people will do a brisk business
More than that..AT&T are planning on offering the 3G iPhone for US$199
With the price gouging on roaming, when did Vodafone decide that it was big enough to become greedy, to drop the 'cool' front that served it so well in NZ.
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Earlier even. "modern warfare" was largely invented by Oliver Comwell and his roundheads.
But missed the rapid fire weaponry that was available in 1864.
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and without both democracy and a realisation of the horrors of modern warfare, there was little to restrain them.
I agree but I think the age of modern warfare arrived a little earlier if they had cared to look and listen.
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The loss of monarchies all over Europe was a huge win, as was the disintegration of the Autro-Hungarian Empire.
Once again, inevitability comes into play. WW1 may have sped this up but it was going to happen and the roots of of WW2 laid. But surely the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian was more a root cause of WW1 than a result of it
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Well, the news is that China makes low and high end products - including luxury cars, iPods, plasma screen television and laptops.
And I wonder what percentage of those it actually consumes itself now. China is in a similar place to the USA in 1939 where it has a massive manufacturing base coupled to a massive internal market, and anything else is cream, albeit a large dollop. Americas cream came from WW2 and China's from the fact that the world's major market, the USA, no longer manufactures much. But in both cases they didn't / don't need the cream to survive.
Of interest is that many of the people i know who trade daily with China are reporting that invoicing is done and payment is now required in RMY rather than USD.
Funnily enough Gifford disputes this. It's a bit unfair on his wonderful book to summarise here but essentially he says corruption runs deep and in the rural areas still untouched by economic progress there are vast numbers of peasants now without the safety net that existed under Mao's communism.
i think that fascinating link of yours a few pages back touched on this, and the huge urban drift.
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But isn't that a bit like turning up in the UK during the 80s miners strike, spending most of one's time in the area of London inside the Circle Line and concluding that everything was wonderful and the strike was clearly an anti-British fabrication.
Living as I did in central London during the miners strike, and travelling daily on said line, it was pretty much in your face daily. Striking miners were collecting at every station as I recall and the division over it was national.
Also, if the government is so popular, why don't they just hold full-scale elections
They do hold elections on a local level and those who go to the Party Congress are elected. It's also worth repeating that China is not a one party state, it's a controlled multi party state....which in real terms means little of course.
End of tsarism.
although one would've hoped that there were better ways to achieve this than Stalinism, 25 million dead in WW2 and 70 years of Soviet Russia.
I'm not sure if the other positives you list can justify the Somme and the war's aftermath and I'd argue that some were inevitable, Turkey and suffrage for example.
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All the European powers were fairly authoritarian imperial states ruled by small and wealthy elites (this varied between Britain, which was probably the most democratic and Russia, which was about the least...........because it considered its vital national interest to be served by maintaining as close ties as possible to a distant imperial power.
No, I know all that, I've put a fair amount of time into reading about the war and it took many months of my life when at university but I still can't work out why it needed to happen beyond the arrogance and belligerence of the politicians of the day. It was the war that did not need to be fought and nothing positive came from it.
Historians have probably written more words and spent more hours on the origins of WW1 than any other topic.