Hard News: No Friends of Science
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those bloody lying UN propagandists, they're always trying to save the planet with their facts. why can't they be more like the erudite, charming, rational and completely unbiased Leighton Smith or George Bush?
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8 years ago we were told planes would be dropping out of the sky when the Millennium Bug hit ...
Actually, I think this sort of scenario was touted as the worst case. The fact that there were almost no Y2K problems says more about the hard work that companies (including the one I worked for) put into their systems to make sure there were no worst case scenarios.
Just because nothing eventually happened doesn't mean that prophets were necessarily deluded. We found & fixed date related problems that would have seriously inconvenienced some of our clients.
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Oops spot the idiot.
I typed it out for you, but forgot that it will try to convert it.
But anyway see the instructions next to the reply text box.
url means the web pages address and link text means the title you wish to display.
The character between url and link is the one on the key just about the enter key on your keyboard. Usually means 'AND' for programming.
Don't for get the two square brackets at each end. -
nobody important:
if climatologists are so confident in predicting negative climate change in 50 years time, how come they couldn't get the forecast right for Easter Weekend?
do some reading about climate science. you'll then blame meteoroligists for bung weather forecasts.
climatologists do not predict tomorrows weather. but they often predict climate patterns decades out. weather does not equal climate.
meteoroligists aren't too much more qualified to pass "qualified" climate change comment than you or i.
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AL: <Just because nothing eventually happened doesn't mean that prophets were necessarily deluded. We found & fixed date related problems that would have seriously inconvenienced some of our clients.>
What about the conmen who persuaded little old ladies to buy new appliances because 'onboard computers' might blow up?
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garth george's column has been fairly well slammed by its online readers:
NZ Herald - Your Views
thank god (!) for that - i was getting the impression that all kiwis were greedy selfish pricks like him -
if climatologists are so confident in predicting negative climate change in 50 years time, how come they couldn't get the forecast right for Easter Weekend?
Paradoxically long term prediction can indeed be more accurate than short term prediction. I can predict with a reasonable chance of success that the Dow Jones will be higher in ten years time than now. But I wouldn't make the same call with as much certainty for one month’s time.
The short term can be dramatically effected by noise, long term trends are by definition not so prone. (Still, the scale problem is one reason that some scientists have remained skeptical of global warming).
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long term prediction can indeed be more accurate than short term prediction
as it is with the wildly misnamed chaos theory (haven't heard that term used for a while). hard for me to predict what the traffic around here will be like in the next 15 minutes but i will get pretty good accuaracy on what it'll be like around 5pm today, and 8am monday morning.
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garth george's column has been fairly well slammed by its online readers:
NZ Herald - Your Viewsyes that is good although the title should have read: Garth vs. Brain
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merc,
Just paste in the URL from YouTube (not the embed code). It's special geek magic.
Mawhaw, see I told you all, I am Tron! Actually I was quite scared I'd performed some sort of unnatural breach of copyright or netiquet or something. I love her voice in that song BTW, I'm so hip I just saw Mika putting eyeliner on at the gym and I just gave him the westie wave (eyebrows up bro).
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ouch, Garth really is getting fried in the Your Views section. i haven't seen so many criticised allowed through since the last time they were setting someone up for firing.
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garth george's column has been fairly well slammed by its online readers:
NZ Herald - Your Views
thank god (!) for that - i was getting the impression that all kiwis were greedy selfish pricks like himThere still seem to be at least as many people cheering him on. Wilful stupidity is clearly in fashion.
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setting someone up for firing
you reckon? he seems like a bit of an institution at the herald
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<quote>What about the conmen who persuaded little old ladies to buy new appliances because 'onboard computers' might blow up?/<quote>
Um... what about them?
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Bah! I hate those quote things!
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seems like a bit of an institution at the herald
yeah probably just wishful thinking. not the Herald cares much about its institutions, it sold its own masthead (i think to Standard and Poors) a few years back, then later bought it back. if you can sell that to raise a bit of cash then you can drop an arcane pain in the arse at the drop of an unfashionable hat.
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merc,
Bah! I hate those quote things!
Now that I AM MAGIC,
1. CTRL C the actual text you want to quote
2. CTRL V it into the Post a reply... panel
3. CTRL C the actual quote html from the left menu
4. CTRL V it into the Post a reply... panel
5. Select the quote text and CTRL X it
6. CTRL V it into the selected >text< portion of the quote html -
Thanks merc -my problem is that all those things have to be done in the correct order..
So you see my dilemma?
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that's why they call it Cut Copy Pray
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merc,
But, but I put numbers there and everything, follow the numbers, honest.
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Neil: The number you're looking for is that agriculture is responsible for 50% of export earnings. But those earnings come at a cost of around $600 million a year, which currently the rest of us are paying for, and which farmers effectively pocket as a subsidy.
All I am advocating is that they pay their own way, rather than having their profits supported by the rest of us. And if this causes some of them to go out of business, then they were never really economic in the first place.
Kyle:
The various forms of farming provide the vast majority of meat in our diets, and it would be a massive economic and cultural change if the price of meat suddenly greatly increased. There would also be a big impact upon dairy products, including milk.
Hardly. I don't know about meat, but I've done the maths on milk, and if farmers were required to pay for the cost of their emissions, and those costs were passed on to consumers, it would raise the price by 1.6 cents a litre - roughly 1%. That's not a big impact, and its hardly likely to lead to the serious health impacts you're insinuating.
(Meat has lower emissions per animal, but is complicated by the fact that they don't use the whole cow, and by the variable pricing of the bits. Sometime I'll look for some raw numbers and see if I can nut it out, but my initial estimate is that the impact will be just as negligible).
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Alanis [Morrisette's] version of My Hump rules!
I don't know if it's a testament to Alanis' performance skill or the power of music television BUT I was halfway thru the You Tube clip (page 7) when my 5 y.o. daughter asked "Is the Crazy Frog going to be next?"
Relevance you ask? Well, the Xmas before last I videotaped the Top 40 so she could see the Crazy Frog. The clip before it was Black Eyed Peas 'My Humps'. My daughter made me replay Crazy Frog a dozen times which invariably meant a rewind back to 'My Humps'. My daughter has just watched 20 seconds of the Alanis' 'My Humps' and presumed Crazy Frog must be next.
Which is why Music TV (unsupervised) is bad for our children! (Unless you want your sons to be muthafunking gangsta wannabees and your daughters to be booty shakin' hoes)
FYI - those replays of Crazy Frog were enough to traumatise my daughter. She now runs screaming if anyone plays it (or any song she deems similar ie George FM)
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Neil: The number you're looking for is that agriculture is responsible for 50% of export earnings.
I wasn't looking for the number, that was the information you left out when making the case that farming was of little econmic value any more -
And before anyone gets on their high horse about how valuable farming is, this isn't the nineteenth century anymore. Agriculture contributes only 5% of total GDP and 3.3% of total employment
The “agriculture contributes only 5% of total GDP" was a statistical sleight of hand. The important figure is how much agricutlure contributes to our exports, which you didn't include.
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merc,
Well, the Xmas before last I videotaped the Top 40 so she could see the Crazy Frog.
We should talk.
Unless you want your sons to be muthafunking gangsta wannabees and your daughters to be booty shakin' hoes
Already happened.
FM is very bad for everyone. -
You don't want to eat dairy cows, high butter/ fat. You do want to eat beef, which are usually steers.
Yeah, I use cows to mean males and females of the species, which is technically incorrect I suspect. But I also call members of the ape family monkeys, which I think is more than technically incorrect. Meh.
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