Forgot your password?

typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Incomplete science... (Score 1) 291

They are grown by cut-rate farmers....These trees are destined to fail.

Bullshit, my brother owned a wholesale nursery for almost 20yrs, the Aussie mega-drought killed it a few years ago. Plants sold in department stores and supermarkets are grown on contract, often the buyer supplies the patented seed/rootstock via a third party to the contract. At harvest time the buyer's insurance company sends out an assessor to make sure the crop is in good health. The plants leave the "farm" in excellent condition, from that point onwards they start to die unless they are properly taken care of in terms of light, temperature, and moisture. Warehouses, the insides of shipping containers, vans, etc, are normally dark, dry places, there's also a limit as to how long you can keep an outside plant displayed inside a supermarket, which (unlike the insurer) the store generally ignores until the leaves start falling off. I've found that supermarkets that sell poor quality plants also tend to sell poor quality fruit and veg, most likely for similar reasons.

Besides, buying from a local garden center is so much more of an enjoyable experience.

Agreed, but they get a lot of their stock from the same wholesalers, just like the local fruit and veg shop gets their stock from the same wholesale market the big supermarkets shop at.

Comment: Re:pfftt... (Score 1) 543

Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting barefoot was superior, did you notice the guy in the video is wearing synthetic joggers? Also, wolves, dogs and hyenas ARE persistence hunters but they generally do it tag team style, apes and lions are not built for it. The video shows them targeting a healthy bull because it's horns slow it down, but in prehistoric times the kills were more likely weaker members of the heard, ie: the young, old or sick.

There are fossils of tall hominids in Africa, the species is said to have been capable of 30mph+, it's though that it practiced persistence hunting with nothing more than a fist sized rock for a weapon, they were obviously superior at that type of hunting but died out? - Thing is there is no "silver bullet" for survival, humans survived over other hominids not because we were "experts" at anything, rather it's because we were well adapted to many forms of hunting, fishing, sheltering, gathering, territorial defense, etc, etc.

Comment: Re:pfftt... (Score 1) 543

Apparently DA anointed Mark Cox as his successor when accepting some lifetime achievement award, but his real achievement is the production company, he often calls the behind the scenes talent that work with him the "heroes", he has a current series that uses his old and new footage to demonstrate the technological changes as well as changes in our understanding of the rock we live on. My dad is 80 and has started to walk like Attenborough, but nobody is immortal and you simply can't replace a beloved role model who has been with you for all of your personal eternity.

Comment: Suffer no fools (Score 1) 154

by TapeCutter (#43749931) Attached to: How To Talk Like a CIO
You make a good point, some individuals wake up one morning and find themselves owning a thriving business, they built it from the ground up and pride themselves on being able to competently perform any and every role (yes, in many cases these people are delusional). However....

Here's another anecdote along similar lines..

I drove taxis for a few years, the guy I worked for had one of the biggest taxi fleets in the city (Melbourne), his personal wealth was around $AU30 million, he also sat on the board of the city's taxi directorate. He was normally at the depot 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, he and his son did all the repairs and servicing of the cabs, his standard attire was a pair of oily green overalls and steel cap boots. New sales reps often wandered in and asked him where "his boss" was.

His work ethic set a great example, he worked harder and longer than anyone else in the company, consequently he knew the industry inside out and top to bottom. The only job he would no longer do was driving. Unfortunately the rest of his personality was that of a complete *arsehole, he used his depth of knowledge and experience in the industry to bully his son, his workers, other board members, the local council, basically everyone on his radar. Any driver with half a brain avoided the old man and dealt with the son for shift changeover, but if you wanted your overheating cab back on the road fast then you went to the old man with the big screwdriver hung on his right thigh like a six-shooter.

*arsehole - He was a smart, honest, hard working guy, if these traits had been weaker I suspect he would have been "top dog" in a prison somewhere. I'm now roughly the same age as he was when I knew him, the "suffer no fools" attitude has its uses but it just doesn't scale to accommodate people who firmly believe everyone else is a fool.

Comment: Re:Wait, what? (Score 1) 154

by TapeCutter (#43749609) Attached to: How To Talk Like a CIO
Ditto, I have 15yrs blue collar experience and 20+yrs white collar, never had to ask about wages during an interview. If they are unwilling to ask/tell me about remuneration upfront then I'm unwilling to talk to them any further. I prefer them to ask me what I want rather than tell me what they are offering, but the headhunting heydays of the 90's are gone forever.

The way I see it is: If you turn up to a "pig in the poke" interview, you have already told your future boss that you're desperate and/or naive.

Comment: Re:Seems fair (Score 1) 200

by TapeCutter (#43726849) Attached to: In Germany, Offensive Autocomplete Is No Laughing Matter

Their feelings were hurt after all.

Defamation is a deliberate untruth spoken for the purpose of harming your reputation, it causes material harm by diminishing your capacity to earn, your feelings about it are irrelevant. You cannot accidentally defame someone, you cannot defame anyone if you or they do not have a reputation to protect. Google does not deliberately defame until it refuses to take down a defamatory association, if they leave it up then as the publisher with a reputation to protect they have deliberately endorsed .the defamatory association. As it is now a competitor with enough money can hire someone to game the system and get whatever association they want to appear in autocomplete, be it good association for themselves or bad associations for their competitors. Stronger defamation laws would help remove some of the most egregious propaganda currently plaguing the MSM.

Comment: Re:Is it bribery? (Score 1) 310

by TapeCutter (#43715831) Attached to: Did Internet Sales Tax Backers Bribe Congress? (Video)
Corporations pay tax and the people who own the corporations make all of its decisions, corporations do not have a vote since that would be "double dipping" for the owners. I'm not from the US but it makes me sick to see the FF industry can buy a lying sack of shit like senator Inhofe and put him in charge of a federal environmental committee, but social organizations such a businesses, churches, unions, special interest groups, private watchdogs, mass media, suicide cults, etc, etc, are what makes us a civilization as opposed to a tribe, silencing one particular type of organization won't fix anything. What needs to be done in the US has been pointed out by others - cap campaign spending and force political ads to comply with "truth in advertising" style laws. Taking the megaphones and amplifiers away from groups that can afford them allows others to be heard. Drowning out a speaker is one of the oldest political tactics in existence, we should not be making it easier for wealthy groups to use it.

It's not all bad in the US, "town hall" style politics is still alive and kicking and with modern communications it's much easier to see what a particular politician is telling different audiences. The US also has many of the worlds top scientist, engineers, etc, working for (or with) their public service in support of evidence based policy.

Comment: chocolate coated ants (Score 4, Funny) 622

by TapeCutter (#43709653) Attached to: UN Says: Why Not Eat More Insects?

If they don't taste good, or if you can't gin up appealing recipes for them, nobody'll eat'em

I accidentally ate chocolate coated ants once. My wife had left half a mars bar neatly wrapped in the console, I spotted it while driving and with one deft movement popped the whole thing into my mouth without taking my eyes off the road. At first I thought I had hair on my face but it soon became apparent some ants were also feasting on the chocolate. I wound down the window and spat the ball of half chewed insects and toffee out the window. For the next half hour if felt like I had hair stuck at the back of my throat.

Comment: Re:350ppm (Score 1) 690

by TapeCutter (#43707857) Attached to: "Dramatic Decline" Warning For Plants and Animals

The long term trend for our planet, human influence aside, appears likely to be a virtual elimination of atmospheric CO2 as it becomes trapped in landmasses.

You really should study WP in a bit more depth, the following is mainly from Attenbourough's documentaries but the terms are all in WP. Between 450 -500mya we went from a near dead "snowball earth" to the advent and explosion of multi-cellular life that lead to you, me, and every other animal alive today. What melted the ice was a build up of volcanic CO2 that could not be subducted due to the global ice coverage. Melting glaciers carved nutrients off the continents and (re)-formed the oceans, algae sucked up CO2, incoporated the carbon into their body and spat out O2 - collagen (the stuff that hold cells together in animals) can only form in an O2 rich environment. Our O2 rich environment is a bi-product of plant life.

The long-term fate of the Earth's climate is fairly well established science (humans or no humans), it's similar to that of Venus, our magnetic field will decay, H will be stripped from H2O in the upper atmosphere and bleed into space, the O2 will bond with C to form CO2 warming the planet, the oceans will start to steam, then boil, eventually even the limestone will burn off the surface- it's called a "runaway greenhouse" and it's not due for another 500million years but when it does all traces of life will be obliterated. On the bright side, a billion years is not a bad innings for we animals.

Disclaimer: I've been interested in reading this sort of science since the 70's, I'm not an expert but I do think there is way too much ignorance of how our life support systems operate and way, way, too much hypocrisy when it comes to accepting the results of Science (with a capital 'S'). This entire thread is a prime example, right now at least 2/3 of the comments look like they were written by drunken teenage trolls wielding crayons.

Comment: Re:Here's the evidence you're looking for (Score 1) 690

by TapeCutter (#43707689) Attached to: "Dramatic Decline" Warning For Plants and Animals

He believes that global warming has something to do with desertification, but doesn't have a model that explains the data

Yes cutting down trees can exacerbate the problem but land use is not the primary cause of AGW, it's not even in the top three. It's also true that AGW is expanding the subtropical deserts via convection currents known as "Hadley cells", scientists call this phenomena "positive feedback". The feedback simultaneously increases monsoonal rains and broadens the sub-tropical deserts. The entire thing is driven by warmer tropical sea surface temps which is a direct result of increased CO2 concentration, in this situation scientists call increased CO2 a "forcing".

CO2 has a somewhat unusual property in that it can be both a forcing (industrial/volcanic emissions) and a feedback (melting permafrost, larger forest fires).

Fortune favors the lucky.

Working...