Posts by tussock
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War is Murder.
Occupation by a combative military force is War.
This one's all about the oil.
Though maybe, like the old, dying empires of old, they're just fighting wars to give their ever more costly armies something to do, to validate the crippling budgets for a few more years.
And you can't keep up a war footing, with the accompanying budget, if you stop shooting people, now can you. These guys would just be part of the quota, what with the "big push" on and everything. -
JT: enough of that playing tricks with medians.
We've 0.06% of the world's population, and 0.18% of the land area. So compared to the mean of 0.42% per nation, we're quite small and very sparsely populated, especially down south for the latter.
Places are a long way apart down south too, a lot of mountains to drive around the end of to get from A to B, once you get off the main drag.
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In the end what does it achieve anyway?
Reminds such folk that rewriting the law to stop themselves going to prison doesn't keep you free.
But, meh, as much as someone totally should have shot Hitler and Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and a dozen other guys long before they become entrenched genocidal megalomaniacs, I'm not sure the current Italian guy deserves the same.Blair, Bush? Yeh, metal to the face, too right, and happy with the prison time it would earn me, badge of honour. But Berlusconi? Really? Seems more like a Bainimarama than a Bush, and is certainly no Hitler.
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Ambitious.
You know, for nzld. Like what how I'm ambitious for your sister, eh.
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I can't believe that the same arguments are being had, over, and over, and over again, a decade later.
Climate change from coal burning was first predicted in the 1880's, it's pretty basic science. Back then they just didn't imagine anyone would burn coal quite this quickly.
Regardless, they're not genuine arguments, it's just plain old fashioned denial. People who are hurting others simply do not want to know if it is possible for them to avoid seeing it. It's the smokers, not the cigarette makers, the obese people, not the poison food.
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Ah, it's not the sea-level rise, the world is sinking!
Not /everything/ is climate change. Coral atolls only exist because they're on a sinking plate (all oceanic plates sink as they spread out from the central ridge, getting denser as they age), and storm surges will be markedly worse on any atoll that has suffered reef damage, and that can slow the rate that sand can build up over time.
But when all the tides come further ashore over time, it's /also/ because the mean sea level is slightly higher than it used to be, 20cm or so over the last century, IIRC, and getting faster. On a flat beach, that can mean a lot of extra land swallowed up. When your whole island is a flat beach that only just keeps pace with a couple cm per century level of natural sinking, that's terminal.
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Regarding facts for deniers, try the basics.
Our moon is -233 C in the shade, and +123 C in the sun, -55 C on average. Our atmosphere, and the darker surface, makes us about 65 C warmer on average than the moon, and 33 C of that warming is because of the greenhouse gases.
CO2 is a part of that, not as big as water vapour (you know how it gets real cold at night under a big high pressure zone, that's a lack of water vapour and other gases holding the heat in), but still important because it doesn't cycles in and out like rain, it just stays up there for tens of thousands of years.
There is no way around that. The atmosphere keeps us warm, some gases do it much better than others, and some gases stay up there much longer than others. CO2 does all of them pretty well.
The world burns billions of tons of carbon each year as oil, gas, and coal, and that all makes CO2. Over a century of that growing all the time we've added just one part in ten thousand to the atmosphere, but that's still about half again the original amount of CO2, and worth about another 1 degree, over the 33 C total greenhouse effect, in the 65 C total atmospheric and surface effect.
They measure that with satellites, it's true, it really is warmer.
Small change, right, but it turns out just a couple degree average change is enough to melt a lot of the ice (the heat goes up more at the cold parts of the world), change the ocean currents and weather patterns, change where the rain falls, change the seasons by a week or two, make the big storms a bit bigger, and all sorts of things that turn out to be pretty rough if they happen too fast.
We might add another 1 C every 20 years at this rate, and that's /way/ too fast, especially as most of the change is over the ice and snow, up to 8 C in places already.Hell, the CO2 is even making the oceans slightly more acidic, maybe enough to kill a lot of the plankton that feeds all the fish already (they're really delicate). It's bad stuff, when you burn off too many billion tonness of it every year.
4 billion tonnes a year might be OK. 30 billion's not, and we're at 30. We just need to cut back.
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That much is true, but Morgan has failed to include the Accomodation Supplement (which, I'd guess, almost all beneficiaries are eligible for) in his calculations.
Perhaps. Little story about the accomodation supplement, I was a poor student renter when it came in. Flats went from $40/room/week in my area to $120/room/week in a few years, and house prices tripled not long after to match the increased rent, mostly bought up by wealthy investors as some sort of tax dodge.
See, when you can flat in a high quality crapshack for $50/week for $50, or flat at $120/week with big screen tv, plush new furniture, free sky and all sorts of other shit we never needed, but only pay $14/week more, pretty much everyone took the plush on the government's tab. Didn't have much of an option after a while anyway.
I know the benefits were too damn low (still are) and things were bloody rough if you had a family, but really, if they'd put the damn benefits back up rather than subsidising the investment housing market, far more people now own their own homes, and rent would be a lot more affordable.
Typical bloody Labour under Clark. So scared to be seen helping the poor that they subsidise the rich instead, and take away a lot of chances for the less well off to get anywhere. Then get kicked out over the couple percent tax they needed to pay for the rent subsidies anyway.
And yea, until some government gets around to a massive construction project for genuinely affordable housing (like, under $120k in the main centres), that's going to be rough on a whole lot of people if anyone tries to put it right. -
Re: JBD.
What's with channel 7 getting a mention on a TV3 production? I checked, but the sky isn't falling. You even got to pimp your show, like, really obviously and stuff. Weird.
Going out with a DJ. Heh. First class social commentary, that.
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Re: cutting benefits and such, GM's proposal doesn't do that, he's just setting them all to the same number, $10k, and not making you prove that you're sick, retarded, pregnant, a young mother, or anything else other than a real person over the age of 0 (or 18, or whatever).
Sick people need more money? Bugger that, free healthcare, $10k's more than most are getting now to access it, and they'd get to keep it if they should pick up some light part-time work.