Posts by George Darroch
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Via Lyndon Hood on Twitter: Nation Runs Home To Check What Rest Of World Thinks Of All Whites Draw
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My impression differs but, hey, maybe it's just me. Hard to describe, but for one thing, it never tastes like it's been leavened properly. Also, has no texture, and doesn't toast right.
Which is right. As I'm sure you know, proper breadmaking involves leaving it to rise and then stretching the flour, yeast and water mixture, producing sugars (glutens). It takes a while, and is effort intensive. Most commercial bakers, large and small, tend to make bread which is hardly leavened at all.
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There were specific government decisions there, in the 1970s and 80s, to favour an overwhelming focus on soy and corn crops that can be made into very cheap food products. That's more the problem.
Substitute soy and corn for dairy, and very cheap for export, and you have New Zealand's agriculture policies of the last 20 years.
I've been heartened to see the shift in public consciousness towards agriculture in the last two years, and I think that the Greens have had a fair bit to do with that. A move to a more holistic system considering all the inputs and outputs and their true costs will happen sooner or later. The only question is what we spend before we level that ledger.
For that reason simply throwing technologies at these problems won't make them go away - it might lessen their impacts but I fail to see how it can change things fundamentally.
Neither WOO!!! Science!!!, nor woo-science, please.
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It's up there with Bag Pipes, you hate them or you've got them.
Scotland must never host the World Cup.
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Yeah, also what Grace said.
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No complaints on the Slovak goal then?
I haven't got any reason to. I actually thought NZ's was ever so slightly offside, but not enough for anyone to complain.
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Ah, the pleasures of arguing about specialised knowledge that goes beyond the heads of all of us. Ultimately, the debate becomes an appeal to authority.
Which frustrates the fuck out of me. Because science does have limits (by definition, we don't know everything). We have to deal in reasonable probabilities, and those who ask for perfect knowledge will always be able to claim the right to veto action, and delay for decades until such perfect knowledge is available. Sound familiar?
There is a need to uncouple society from a purely instrumentalist view of our environment, and for scientists to show a bit more humility about the limits of their knowledge. People who refuse to admit a middle-ground between absolute knowledge and pure doubt annoy the hell out of me.
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Frankly, the feminisation of rugby has some catching-up to do.
Ahem, Dan Carter.
I have to say that I've been a little underwhelmed with the presence of women in the whole FIFA media-show however. Apart from Theron pulling names out of a hat, and Shakira shaking her thing on stage, I haven't seen women anywhere. It's like they don't play football.
Do they?
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@Emma -- gosh, you're a hussey, Emma.
Oh, come off it. There is nothing wrong with admiring hot naked men.
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All that credibility on AGW leaks away when things like this come up. They love evidence, except when they don't.
More batfuckery here. Their appeal to doubt, and selective use of evidence in the service of their favoured issues, is exactly what those who attack climate science do.
onsanto's "Roundup Ready" crop, whereby GM seeds unaffected by an accompanying herbicide, make up for 90 percent of the soybean and 80 percent of the corn grown in the US. The rise of Roundup more than a decade ago eclipsed herbicides of other agrochemical companies...
And this is where almost the _entire_ anti-GE movement has its genesis. One of the worlds largest chemical companies, involved in seriously nasty pesticides, decided to develop GE crops that would suit their purposes. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s they were far and away the leaders in commercial application of GE. They still dominate. And thus, the anti-toxics movement (which I have great respect for, when it is respectful of evidence - both clinical and epidemiological) took on GE with great force, and the environmental movement took it as an intrinsically harmful technology.
We're still left with that stunted position over a decade later.