Bruce

I remember when it took 2 days to see Uluru properly. One day you climbed it, the other day you walked around the base. BOTH these things are now banned by the aborigines who have control. They are free to destroy the income-earning nature of the place , I guess with no financial risk to their siddown money. Of course desert aborigines would have a culture which was against unnecessary exertion, gosh they were calorie-deprived all their lives. But to extend this to others is just nasty.

This internet is really something... I typed in "Heinrich August Haebich blacksmith " and got a site that gave lots more stuff than ever I was told as a kid. Photos too. Apparently he went by the name August, and there is an old reference to him as " Henry " which was obviously an anglicised Heinrich. At one time, the name of Hahndorf was changed to Ambleside, due to stay-at home patriots during ww1, so this was par for the course. Across the road lived auntie Alma Miller, nee Haebich. I always wondered if uncle by marriage Clarrie Miller was actually Muller but don't know to this day. Anyway, old August Haebich was a substantial and successful man. Blacksmith Shop and Cottages - Hahndorf - Adelaide Hills - LocalWiki

Rangeland meat, rain-fed, does not use resources which would otherwise be used for crops or horticulture. Without rangeland meat, there would be a lot of famines occur. Consider most of outback Australia, the land and climate are suited to grazing but not cropping. I bet there were no vegan aborigines years ago. They could not have survived. Here on the farm in the West Wimmera, some paddocks could be sown to crops. But there would be a terrible environmental cost to pay in turning pasture land into monoculture cropping. Thousands of small animals would die, including the birds which greet you with a cacophany of sound every morning. Biodiversity would crash. Inputs of chemicals and fertilizers would soar. Here's the message... be careful to differentiate between feed-lot animals fed with irrigated grain and range-land animals. And be careful even with the feed-lot animals to exclude the food that people don't eat. For example, the "corn " fed to feed-lot animals may consist of the stripped cobs, where the actual grain has been removed.

There is a great book by that atheist biologist Dawkins called " the ancestor's tale". Do you know that your great ( repeat about 500 million times) grandmother was a fish? She looked a lot like a coelacanth.

I read that educated Chinese don't think we have a democracy here in Australia for exactly that reason. Political " donations ". But I like Yenn's idea as a way of allowing donations as long as there is no way that the recipient could know from where the money came. It would have to be pooled and handed out to all pollies. I bet donations would dry up.

Well they TELL me ( with menaces ) how much tax to pay. And for this money, I get their services. So they charge me for their product. I couldn't believe it when they ( the government ) indemnified the banks FOR NOTHING when it looked like there might be a run on them. What an opportunity it was to make a deal with them for certain behavior in the future. This is called a contract. Permitted even with small capitalist governments.

What makes me angry about the carry-on is that compliance is obviously voluntary. We should extend this voluntary system to road speed limits and paying tax, says me. Why is it voluntary?

I go to senior's exercise classes and wear earplugs because some of the younger instructors think that louder is better. They have early signs of hearing damage but they wouldn't listen to me. They sometimes ask me about the earplugs and are a bit interested when I explain. But not interested enough to tone down the volume. A couple of the older instructors are better.

I wonder if the mine will ever go into production ( should be called extraction ). The kids protests are demonstrating that law-abiding protests are not effective and I suspect that the mine will not be so profitable that it can afford much disruption. But that is still a horrifying bit of news, if it really means that the qld govt gets no royalties.

Afraid I'm slow and didn't understand the motion card. If the security number changes every 20 mins, how does the vendor know what the right number is unless they have some way of communicating with the card itself?

I like the idea of hemp instead of cotton. Is this not already possible at a farm level?

We sure do waste a lot of water... I once called my wife Dame Washalot and my daughter Princess Showeranhour. I blamed them for destroying the Murray-Darling system. Years later, I made sure that the farm we got was outside the Murray-Darling basin.

This mate wagged his finger at his daughter who had just bought a second hand Falcon. There was an after-market oil pressure gauge in it. "don't you drive it with no oil" he said. Well the daughter drove off, but the gauge only went half way, so she put more oil in. It still only went half way, so she kept repeating this until the engine destroyed itself. They never told the father just what happened.

Two items of current news have prompted this gripe. Firstly, certain NSW towns are having such severe water shortages that the fire-fighters can't fill their tanks. Secondly, the Collins Class submarines are due for scrapping. SO what if the billions spent on those submarines had been used for water infrastructure? Associated questions: How much did those submarines cost during their whole lives? What did they achieve? ( My answers are 150 Billion and nothing ) What could we have done with water infrastructure? ( my answer is implement a Snowy type scheme where coastal water was pumped with solar power over the Great Divide. this would have been way cheaper I reckon). Feel free to criticize.

Well it confused me. I said to the wife about how they would need a time machine to pay the ancestors.

The only bad thing a dam would obviously do is take a lot of drowned trees out of the oxygen business. I find it hard to believe that this could be 10 times worse than a coal station. What am I missing here? Are they counting the carbon cost of all the concrete?

My problem pm is that I would like for you to be right. Who wants the planet to become uninhabitable? But what about insurance companies? They would be pragmatic for sure and only interested in profits. Are they charging higher premiums for the effects of sea-level rise? I think they are. And what about that island near PNG where the population have already left because they get inundated? Were they insured? And, if there was no sea-level rise, why are Tuvalu etc getting so worried? Why not just tell them to take out insurance? I know that tectonic effects can be involved, but surely not for so many places. What evidence would you personally find compelling one way or the other?

I'm looking to buy some cordless headphones so the wife can watch TV as loud as she wants it without annoying me. I think that what works depends on the actual TV. Anyway, it must be a common problem, what with teenagers sharing an apartment. Years ago, we had a nephew stay with us and we got him a headphone setup and it worked great. Then when my father-in-law came down south for an operation, he refused to use the headphones.

Space, since I had not heard that a climate change killed the wooly mammoths, I looked it up on google and your assertion about scientists is not accurate. The mammoths died out for more than one reason. The last group died of thirst, and that could be climate change I guess or the mammoths damaging their drinking water supply by browsing the lake shores. There is a dishonest argument technique called " the straw man " where you attribute incorrect stuff to an imaginary opponent before demolishing it. Have another look at your post.

I like Dick Smith's idea that only those under 30 should have a vote on climate change matters. The rest of us will be dead when the worst of things happen.

One of my great-grandfathers was the Hahndorf blacksmith. He was a successful man, with 11 children, and he had a poorer mate who lived nearby and painted pictures. The mate's name was Hans Heysen. My great-grandfather was August Haebich.

I notice that kids are going to start protesting about climate change. Good on them, say I. If they are prepared to make some sacrifices to save the planet, we should support them. Personally, I would do anything to save the planet as long as it didn't cost me money or stop me doing things I like. I hope the kids are better than me.

As for CO2 causing warming, the physics is so simple that ( for a dry planet ) you could expect a senior high-school physics class to do the maths. It is the fact of clouds which makes it a difficult problem. About 50 million years ago the planet had a lot of CO2 in the air and had very high temperatures. The evidence for all this is in ocean sediments, so there is nothing very new going on.

They used max/min thermometers even in the 1950's. These thermometers left an internal pin at the extreme point for the day and after you read it, you would shake the thing to reset the pin.

Here's a debating point in the climate change discussion... Climate-change opposer are doing more harm to the future lives of our kids than the jailed pedophiles ever did. Therefore climate-change opposition is worse than pedophilia and should be punished accordingly.