Posts by Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner 11 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2008
So now when you see a woman on a panel, you'll wonder if she is there because she has anything to contribute, or was picked just to satisfy the new policy.
If you wanted to undermine female panel members' credibility, is there a better way to do it than this?
Re: "Instead of punching hippies..."
We've been about 5 years away from irreversible catastrophe for my whole life, apparently. When I was a teenager this sh*t scared me; I mean, the argument sounded convincing at the time, and there was the illusion of evidence. 30 years later and I'm still waiting for the sky to fall in. Reckon I'm still scared?
These damn hippies any more? They deserve rather more than the metaphorical punching you accuse Lewis of giving them.
Life (and the maximum post length allowed here, whatever that is) is too short to catalogue the absurdities in full, but someone mentioned "peak oil": this has been predicted for nigh on 90 years now... you *did* get the point of the story of the boy who cried "Wolf!", didn't you..?
To paraphrase Dawkins: "good people do good things, and evil people do evil things, but to get good people to do evil things, you need the Green Movement".
We've just had a year of unusually low road accident stats. We can expect that next year the figures will, most likely, go up again to something closer to the long term average.
At that point you can jump up and down and screech about how scrapping cameras has cost lives.
Google "regression to the mean". It's the trick where you wait for something bad to happen -- like too much rain, or too little rain, making the crops fail -- and tell the tribe you can placate the Angry Gods and make it all OK again if they give you lots of virgins. Of course the weather will go back to normal (otherwise it wouldn't be "normal", would it?) like you knew it would, but you're better off with all your new virgins, and best of all, the ripped-off thickos in the rest of the tribe think you're great. This trick works just as well with a spate of nasty accidents, speed cameras, and a fat salary for running the quango that "solves" the problem.
Roger Kemp at Lancaster pointed this out about 5 years ago. See http://www.engineering.lancs.ac.uk/research/download/Transport%20Energy%20Consumption%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf
This shows how politicians can get whatever greenwash they want by altering a few assumptions. The high speed rail lines they want to build are as bad (in CO2) as modern aviation (unless of course they power the trains by building nuclear power stations). And as a general rule, 3 or more people travelling together could produce less CO2 by taking a reasonably economical car than the train (see also http://www.co2balance.uk.com/ if you don't want to accept Kemp's figures; try Edinburgh-London by train, or 296 miles by car).
If your pointy haired boss wants to reduce your company carbon footprint from travel, I have a simple 3 point plan:
1: three or more staff travelling together should go by car
2: one or two staff should pick the most crowded train service available, which can easily be found by comparing fares and buying the most expensive ticket
3: if it is not convenient to take a crowded train, staff should fly
Smith's actions have ensured that this guy will never turn up in the UK where, I should think, we'd have all ignored him completely, in the unlikely event any of us had actually noticed he was here.
On the other hand, she has also ensured that we have all now heard of him and gone and read what he has to say on the web. How many thousands or millions more people have now been exposed to his ideas?
Can't see what effect exposure to his ideas has, though. So we know the name of one more f****ing moron in the world; big deal. Is there really anyone out there who doesn't know some people don't like gays muslims and/or immigrants? Or who can't manage to locate these opinions on the web?
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