if your wife left you

just have to "do ti your self" nuf nuf

No, I like the entry too

Though you do have a tendency to play the man instead of the issue too, so I don't find your reasons why you've deleted them all that excusable. It'd be much better even just to have a large list of elevator pitches with which to refute arguments you disagree with and fill one in every time you want to call someone a bedwetter or idiot or whatever the latest in insults is. Though fresh argument would still be preferred over canned argument.

If that is the case...

... then the basic problem is starting out with this ``making fun of'', and perhaps not bothering with the rebuttal at all. Which would be besides the point anyway because for some people it no longer matters; failing to be much funny at all here also means failing to make a point and thus losing the argument.

Great for building up a ``controversial'' reputation and attracting dissent regardless of rationality, not so great for moving a discussion along. If we're talking about the strength of arguments, those that can stand on their own merits and don't lean on non-universal ideas of ``fun'' tend to carry more.

Neither this nor the previous comment except its title was much about el reg's moderation policy. Though I dislike moderation in general I have few comments that ended up rejected or deleted though I've attracted my share of downvotes. I think el reg is doing reasonably well with the ``rationality'' filter, and as long as that stays the case and it doesn't become a ``morality'' filter, well, it's still a filter but corporate entities do need to cover their arse. And yes, though not my preferred method, moderation does help with the readable.

Thing is, calling a crank a crank in his face is a bit akin to cranking the crank up to eleven. Can't complain about the amounts of crank you're liberating then. Or, as the Germans put it:

Wenn man mit einem Narren streitet, solle man darauf achten, dass dieser nicht dasselbe tut

Need?

"If you want to use a Nokia 3310 you can still do so. Just don't cry about how you might also need to carry an mp3 player, video player, newspaper, laptop, photos in your wallet, etc

The more powerful a device becomes the less you need to carry around, and that is not only efficiency at work but also good for the environment."

I by no means agree with the greens on carbon, but I wonder if I'm even the same species as people like you. You use the word need in such a bizarre way it puzzles me. Why on earth does anybody "NEED to carry an mp3 player" or whatever. Nobody NEEDS an mp3 player. You don't NEED any of those things, you just want them.

People who think they NEED so many of the trappings of modern human existence actually need a reality check. Unfortunately so many of the worlds governments have signed up to the idea of a consumption driven economy being the best way to prosperity and over the years people have become convinced that they need the newest and best of everything. You don't need it and you never did, it's just become convinced that you do. The funny thing is that people who subscribe to this theory are very seldom really happy. Yes they are happy for a short while when they get a new gadget, but the rest of their time is spent being unhappy because they no longer have the newest and best. Happy people generally lead a simple life. Of course you can't enforce this way of thinking on people. It's taken a very long time to impose the current thinking on most of the populace and if we start now we might be able to convince people that they will be happy living a simpler life we might manage it by the end of the century.

To give you a simple example I have a friend who is constantly upgrading his bicycles. On his latest carbon (ahem) fibre confection he has spent around £7000 when you include the upgrades he has added in the last year. He just has to have the latest and best. He's seldom happy. His time on a 25 hasn't improved over the last few years, but at the end of every trial he's always telling us he would be faster if only he had the latest wheelset or whatever. I on the other hand have a bike from 1993 which I was given, I have spent very little on parts - just consumables and a saddle really. I'm perectly happy with the bike. My 25 time two years ago was slower than my friend by over a minute. Recently I have ridden over a minute quicker than him. I suspect my times have improved because I focus on my own performance rather than the bike. My friend is becoming even less happy because he's constantly looking for upgrades that will let him beat me, rather than concentrating on his own performance.

Plastering your trollop over it, you mean.

`` "I enjoy my internet access and a warm comfortable home but I don't believe in any way that they are rights."

If they weren't a right we could demand then you're saying it is OK to take them away from people.''

Plenty of people do not, in fact, have access to internet, comfy homes, or even much income at all. Yet, you say they're rights. Pensions and benefits are a right in that sense, and yet they're being taken away because nobody is around to pay for them. Clearly, that logic is flawed. I think we need to stop thinking that way.

What we have is incredibly privileged lives to the point that we can not now and likely not ever extend that ``right'' to everyone on the planet. Or at least not the same and incredibly wasteful way the Americans have it and as vociferously as you demand to keep it.

We could try and fix some of that through technology, but be prepares that some things must change before we can scale up further. As noted, we're currently scaling down as important components are *breaking* down. That's right, our precious rights are taking themselves away.

``Yes, they were pretty ill, died easily and they committed genocide quite often for very minor things that today are in abundance and available to many.''

A point, though nowadays ``we'' just do UAV strikes on fuel trucks, killing indiscriminately over the internet. Saves washing out the blood from *your* uniform, to be sure, but still.

The medical improvements are welcome, of course, but we still have a contingent of people bringing the ``good news'' to where it wasn't before, incidentally also bringing other ``good news'', and, reducing child mortality but, uhm, not child birth rates--rates that are high exactly to counter high mortality. So you get an explosion of people that do to the land exactly what rabbits or locusts do to the land when their population explodes. Yes, you could argue hunger crises are caused by missionaries.

My point? Mostly that with greater power (better tools, knowledge, etc.) comes greater responsibility. You did it, you fix it. Or, rather, we did it, we fix it. We're still in this together.

Yes, we might possibly find ways to ``fix'' our use of oil, though at this rate it looks like it's going to be too little, too late, and worse, it's by no means certain we will. I don't think you quite grasp the time scales involved, but you're welcome to back your assertion up by some numbers. We've been busy burning up the oil for a hundred years or so, coal a bit longer, and forming that stuff cost what, couple million years? couple billion? I forget. I think the rates aren't as optimistic as you pooh-pooh them to be.

``The so-called harmful chemicals in petrol fumes are measured in the billionths parts of air and in real world terms would only harm your health if you were extremely weak or stuck your mouth on an exhaust pipe.''

This is a bit of a canard and a nasty one at that. Cities with permanent smog covers, anyone? And that's not just the soot-black east German ones before they got around to cleaning them up.

``If you have no self-interest then you're not interested in survival, by your own hard work at least. A person who gives up on their self-interest is a person who has given up their rights, even their life, to the authority of either a make-believe being, a megalomaniac political ideology, or the state.''

Of course! If we don't keep up the race to see who can out-consume each other, we lose our basic human rights! Why didn't we think of that sooner?!? *facepalm*

The self-interest you advocate is that of the American Individualist Consumer, with a God^WCorporation Given Right To Consume. Which incidentally is good for everyone else's bottom line, though you might need a second or third job to pay for it all. That's certainly not the only definition of self-interest. Another would be to have enough of the right things to get by, raise happy kids, and leave them a lush green earth to frolic and raise kids in. I'm sure that, if not you plenty others here, could come up with alternative definitions of self-interest.

For the record, I'm still using a nokia 6310 someone gave me years ago. Getting a replacement battery (which is, arguably, a consumable) is proving to be a bit of bother, and there's some things that its firmware could do better but won't ever be fixed.

Still, the new backup (a cheap samsung with a solar panel in the back) replacing a 6210 that only does single-band these days was a bit of a disappointment. It's new, shiny, has a colour screen and a find-the-keyhole LED, but has deliberately been cripled (no putting appointments in the calendar and a few other things), has clearly more bugs in the firmware --glaringly, many of those visibly increase energy use--, and, uhm, no updates.

I *so* want a phone that a) has all the hardware interfaces I care for and b) comes with an open-source OS plus open-source toolchain so that I can fix this kind of flaw myself. Might take me a year or more to get around to it, but I'll get to it eventually, or someone else will. Oh, and c) be as sturdy and long-lasting as or better than a 6310.

Come that time I'll happily spend another six to ten years using the same hardware. If enough people do that, there'll be a reasonable market for ``consumables'' too. This is more important to me than whether it's the latest model, most of which seem to be roughly the same to me anyway. But then, I'm not a connaiseur of ``fashion phones''.

@Mips

"I always though that when I died I would leave a better world for my kids."

Why?

" Not going to happen is it?"

Why not ?

answered

"The planet may be continuing to produce oil, it may not, but what happens if the rate it's being used is greater than the rate it's being produced? Answer: It runs out"

Pointless question and answer as nobody knows at what rate or in what quantities Gaia produces oil for us. But if you want to get close to an answer, take all the living organisms that died today, calculate the total amount of mass which would sink through the layers of Earth to form oil, multiply it by 365 for the days of the year, then multiply it by the number of years ever since organic life first appeared on the planet, then subtract the amount of oil used by humanity, then realise that ther rate of oil production should be increasing over time as we have more living and dying species today (in total numbers, not in diversity) than ever before due to industrialisation, domestication and farming.

I await a scientific answer without activist diatribe and vitriol.