longweekend58 wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 11:28am:

Agreed!

Dsmithy70 wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 11:37am:


It is amazing to watch government at all levels spend enormous amounts on projects that fail. The BER is a classic example of where anything the govt gets involved in costs 3 times as much as anybody else. The waste is astonishing but what is worse is when you see public servants having no problem spending 10 times as much to renovate an office than they would renovating their entire home and having no problem.

Sprintcyclist wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 11:52am:




The carbon tax would probably also capture the exhilation from our own population, as afterall we exhale about 1kg of carbon dioxide daily!

So Julia Gillard wants to tax our breathing!!!

Please delete wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 8:08am:



I was concentrating on Gravity.....

Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler and Galileo were the giants Newton was talking about, when he said "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"...

Please delete wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 8:27am:


That's the nub of the problem ernie, the Copenhagen Accord (which didn't pass) AND the Cancun Accord (which did) carry no provision to use the money to fund research...instead the money will be sent to developing nations, who will most likely use it to build factories, power stations and iron smelters, most of which will be coal or oil powered....

Please delete wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 12:35pm:



Yes it's an assumption, but a reasonably likely one.
The 3 things poor nations need most are Electricity, jobs and manufacturing..

The simplest,consistent, baseload power source is a coal/gas or oil fired power station (which can be built where the are no rivers).

The best source of jobs for unskilled or semi skilled workers is mining and iron smelting.

And the commonest manufactured goods that people want are appliances (fridges, stoves, washing machines etc) and cars.....all of which require metals to build..

I doubt the first thing a poor or developing nation is going to build will be a nuclear power station or solar thermal farm......because the educational levels don't exist for enough of the population, and a deisre for self-sufficiency would make it unlikely that the countries would want to hire a mass of westerners to build and run the facilities for them...

The "poverty line" in Australia is $33,000 pa (correct me if I'm wrong).

In China, the average annual income is $800 or so.

Why are you and Hicks so dead set against the developing world getting developed?

Please delete wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 12:52pm:


It doesn't bother me, I'd help the developing nations climb out of poverty any way I could.

But I'm still a realist, and I know that just shovelling money to them isn't the way to do it.
If we want to help them, instead of giving them cash, fund and build the technology ourselves, and train their people in the process..

You and I both know that with some of government system that currently exist in Africa, most of the money wouldn't be used to upgrade the lives of the poor, with infrastructure like water, power schools hospital etc, it'd be used to prop up the government regime and buy bigger and better guns...

As the old saying goes, 'Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day.....TEACH a man to fish, and you feed him for the rest of his life'....

Just throwing cash at poor nations is giving them 'a fish'....