Recent Comments

1. 32 minutes ago on Clay Bennett

   When I was a kid, there’d be old people saying “I keep my money under the mattress. I don’t trust banks.”

   How we laughed.

   Many of us are not laughing now

2. 34 minutes ago on Clay Bennett

   “The managers of the retirement funds are aware that their fiduciary duty is to the retirees and that they can be held accountable for breaching that duty.”

   Ha, ha, ha, you’re funny!

   Would you mind going back a few years and telling that to the b**stards at the pension fund companies that worked out the deal to move pensions back and forth between them, taking a huge ‘admin fee’ from them each time, thereby legally stealing thousands of people’s private pensions?

   The money I made from my best earning years went into one of those – now worthless – pensions.

   The duty of the pension fund managers is to their employer, and if they’ll get a bonus by wiping out or selling or stealing the pension funds, that is exactly what they will do correction: have been doing for many years.

3. about 1 hour ago on Rob Rogers

   This.

4. about 1 hour ago on ViewsLatinAmerica

   Which is, of course, sort-of what we are doing.

   The artificial fertiliser market is worth about $400 billion dollars. Those involved do not want to see that reduced!

   Over 50% of that market is production of 200 million tonnes of nitrogenous fertiliser each year.

   That fertilizer is required to feed our over-populated planet. Half the world’s population relies on artificial fertiliser.

   8 billion people on the planet, half needing that fertiliser. That is about 50 kilos each or 1 kilogramme of fertiliser per person per week.

   Each additional person increases the demand. When we have gone from 8 billion to 12 billion people, the fertiliser need will have doubled. The market will have doubled too. Ker-ching!

   (Oh, heck. We’re at 8.1 billion people already. I thought we only just heard it was 8.0 billion.)

   Production of nitrogenous fertiliser is energy intensive. It is responsible for 2.1% of greenhouse gas emissions. A 50% increase in the population will double those emissions.

   To feed our over-sized population, we are using artificial nitrogenous fertiliser, which is a carbon-industry product.

   For our population to keep growing we must increase our CO₂ production.

   This is why some people keep saying “WE NEED MORE PEOPLE TO, umm, thinks, there must be something, oh yeah, LOOK AFTER YOU WHEN YOU ARE OLD!!!!”

   The carbon industry would love there to be more people on the planet, because without the carbon-based fuels, they would starve to death. Ker-ching!

   Eat up your petroleum (and coal and gas) products people! Om, nom, nom!

   .

   Seriously, we are so doomed.

5. about 2 hours ago on ViewsLatinAmerica

   “The Great coral reef has grown back.”

   A partial, temporary (based on the previous minor recent regrowths), regrowth.

   “Pretty sure it’s bigger than ever right now.”

   That you have made up. It is between ⅓ and ¼ of what it was.

   “”Nah dude, they’re growing back"

   There is an annual cycle now, caused by the warming oceans, of extended bleaching, then a short period of limited regrowth, then bleaching again.

   If you a having a fantasy of coral reefs flourishing, no, it is more like listening to a dying person’s heartbeat fade away.

6. about 2 hours ago on ViewsLatinAmerica

   Guns and religion make some people very rich and very powerful.

   The environment? Less so. That’s just for eating and breathing. And while the rich and powerful can afford food and air purifiers and bottled water more than the little people can, where’s the problem?

7. about 2 hours ago on Jeff Stahler

   “I am sure that it is just a coincidence that there are more gun-related crimes in cities and areas where there are more gun laws.”

   I can’t be bothered to research that claim, but will take it as accurate because it makes sense. Speed cameras and traffic calming measures are put in where there are traffic accidents. Neighbourhood watch schemes and burglar alarms are put in where there are homes being robbed. I would expect there to be more gun control ordinances where there is more gun crime.

   Gun control does not cause gun crime. It is a response to it.

   You have the cause and effect the wrong way round.

   “Tell you what, if you are ever threatened by a mugger, I will not use my Second Amendment right to protect you.”

   Please, please, please do just that. I have no desire to be shot and injured or killed by ‘friendly fire’ from a well-meaning amateur responding to a confusing situation.

   Given the police can’t turn up to the right place, and, despite being prepared and trained, go in without killing innocent people, I’d rather not trust a random stranger to get it right either.

8. about 2 hours ago on Ted Rall

   It would be, if:

   (a) the data were building up exactly day-by-day as it happens, rather than being processed in batches during validation;

   (b) he had not specifically cherry-picked a 15 day period that most extremely does not conform to the average;

   © the graph had not been a x-y plot of deaths per date rather than cumulative deaths by date, which produces a misleading graph.

   Any data set has fluctuations, that is normal. He intentionally picked a few days from a months-long event where the data fluctuates the most, then implied the entire data set must be the same.

   There is no anomaly. Just a normal feature of a sata set and an (arguably deceitful) academic abusing his position to produce highly misleading (and arguably fraudulent) results.

   .

   An analogy: sometimes during the penultimate round of his boxing matches, Muhammad Ali rarely laid a punch on his opponents. Draw a graph of points being accumulated in those rounds, and his line is flat, while his opponent’s goes up in a straight line. Therefore, I conclude he could not have been winning fairly, or his wins were not true. I claim the results were dodgy, and that everyone who said he was a good boxer was wrong.

   Or I have cherry-picked some data and presented it in a misleading way. Which is what the academic did in that sole report about anomalous reporting.

   .

   It appears you have been misled by social media reports of a fraudulent academic’s deceitful conclusion spread by biased media using his results for propaganda purposes.

9. about 3 hours ago on 1 and Done

   I’ll just have a quick read of the cartoons while eating my breakfast…

   Then again…

10. about 23 hours ago on Jeff Stahler

    “I live in a peaceful community away from the theft and senseless murder from the demonrat pets.”

    Presumably, your Mum’s basement.