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Comment Re:Free market (Score 2) 396

Even if you are allowed to buy from overseas, you are not, strictly speaking, operating in a free market. You are relying on 'anti free-market' government measures and protections in the target jurisdiction. Carry idea of free market to it's ultimate logical conclusion, medicine from overseas will still be expensive if certain people had their way and this loophole would definitely be closed to you. Using Australia as an example, it is actually illegal to export government priced/subsidised medicines from Australia. It is supposed to be for Australian citizens only. Citizens leaving australia need to demonstrate any medicine they are carrying is for their own personal use.

All this reveals one of the many faults and limitations of libertarian-ism / small government ideology. It assumes that in all transactions all parties have equal agency. Which is never ever the case when your life and health are part of that transaction. Sometimes people need to organise help protect themselves from the ruthless practices of greedy arseholes. At least as far as medicine is concerned, the rest of the developed world gets it...

Comment Re:That's a known issue (Score 2, Insightful) 145

Rushing off and blaming every adverse environmental outcome on climate change is in itself a religious belief system.

All sorts of stressors on environment such as polluation from agricultural/catchment runoff. Land surface temp increase of around 0.7c over last 60 years or so + recent El Nino, may or many not be a contributor but no shortage of people falling over each other to lay blame principally at the feet of AGW

Comment Re:Australia is breaching international treaty (Score 4, Insightful) 117

What treaty precisely hmmm? Australia is a soverign nation and we will make our own gorram civil laws thankyou very much. We have strong consumer protection laws, unlike the dsytopian hellhole where I assume you reside. One such law is the restrictive trade practices act. Restrictions on who trades with who are not permitted and it has far reaching implications in terms of preventing monopolistic and predatory retail practices. For example it prevents restricting franchisee holders from being compelled to source from a restricted list of 3rd parties. Geolocking is arguably a violation of this law and I would personally hope that this law will generally override any attempts to justify such practices under guise of copyright, though I imagine that is for lawyers and judges to sort out on a case by case basis.

Comment Geolocking shakedown (Score 3, Interesting) 98

Step 1: try to acquire content via one of my PAYG preferred streaming services legally
Step 2 : torrent (or wait for physical distribution and borrow the discs off someone else)

I don't mind paying for content and 90% of content I do consume is paid for. I don't even mind too much if rights holders try and charge me significantly more than what they charge other regions as long as it is accessible and the price points are reasonable. What fkn shits me is having to deal with and enrich elusive rights digital arbitragers although they provide little value add in the supply chain. Also tracking down an old film that is 20+ years old, finding it is digitally accessible elsewhere but not where I live. I feel no ethical qualms about opening torrent under those circumstances.

Music is rarely geolocked. Why is film/TV treated differently?

Comment Re:Meta study? (Score 1) 795

Thanks, yeah I meant ECS. My understanding is that IPCC pegs it between 2 and 4.5 with likely value of around 3? Observational papers are biased low (likely less than 2), while model ones are generally above 3. My understanding is that discussions around policy heuristic of mitigate or adapt blur significantly when value is 2.

Comment Re:Meta study? (Score 2) 795

All for phasing out fossil fuels: many good reasons for doing so beyond any AGW impacts that can actually be mitigated by any sort of realistic and achieveable migration pathway. But cannot just phase them out, we have to replace them with an alternative that actually works. Renewables capacity to scale to meet global need is dubious, poor EROEI, excessive land use requirements, no storage solution to provide base load. If people are truly serious about the dire need to phase out FF ASAP then nuclear needs to be on the table.

Comment Re:Meta study? (Score 3, Informative) 795

As much as I hate rewarding lazinness. Plenty of papers out there that argue TCR is well south of 2deg per doubling of CO2: a position that surely will get you labelled as a filthy denier. What value TCR/ECR actually is is the ultimate 64 trillion dollar question that heavily influences what is a sensible policy response to CO2 caused global warming (mitigate, adapt or do SFA)?. Be careful handling subversive materials not sanctioned by your tribal elders...

http://link.springer.com/artic...

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