Posts by Lucy Stewart
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That's f*&*#ng appalling - we sold out our climate change response just to get free insulation for "our" people?
Hope it was $430 million worth.
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To pick that apart a bit, if there is a car outside every flat, that falls well short of every student having a car.
And most still don't; I'd be giving far less lifts if it were otherwise. It's often not the cost of the car, it's the warrant (and generally repairs, if it's your general student-quality car) and rego and fuel. OTOH, at my last flat two out of the three cars were acquired by parental gift, for whatever that's worth.
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Sure, not everyone can afford a university education, but referring to these students as white, rich and privileged only seems to vent anger against a strawman stereotype.
Fair criticism.
Worth remebering, though, that it does take a bit of cash to send your kids to a hall, where most first-year Otago students live - you can't do it on even the full student allowance, for instance, not without some serious saving first. The discussion has been around students who have moved away from home to go to uni, and by and large that is the reserve of people with resources.
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The only hope we have is to develop sequestration tactics and examine ways to artificially cool the planet.
As someone who has to answer an exam question in three hours on precisely this topic: yes, and then again, no, because there are plenty of ideas out there but none I'd touch without at least having a serious go at emissions reduction. It's not that it can't be done, it's that there is *massive* potential for global-scale screw-ups - and no-one is seriously suggesting sequestration can replace emissions reduction. It might be a part of the solution, it will never be the whole thing.
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Frankly, on cloning: what's the big deal about differently aged twins?
Nothing, but until we solve the issues with epigenetic marking and severely shortened lifespans, it's not okay. And it would need some very tight regulation, because there is huge potential for abuse.
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Foam rubber cushions make a hell of a lot of black smoke.
My parents scared me off any furniture arson early with a precautionary story about a friend of theirs who'd fallen asleep smoking on a vinyl couch and died of asphyxiation from the toxic fumes. Not that normal smoke can't kill you (or that I was ever going to be inclined to couch-burning), but it left an impression.
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The guys running Ensoc are pillars of the community already; the chair of Ensoc is an ex officio member of the Canty IPENZ branch c'ttee, they organise charity events, etc, They aren't your idiot dickhead students exactly.
Well...exactly. They can on occasion do quite a good impression.
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just in case you hadn't noticed, the "rich" western countries have transferred most of the polluting industrial activity to the "poor" developing countries.
Yes, and that needs to be taken into account when developing emissions trading schemes. OTOH, China also can't electrify the whole country on coal-powered plants.
Regulation or taxation, take your pick, because there is no market solition.
Maybe it won't be the entire solution, but it seems mad not to try.
I live in an American town that doesn't fluoridate its water
Plenty of places in New Zealand don't...anyway, tooth decay is largely a random function of genetics, eating habits, and dental hygeine; no urban population is going to be unvarying enough one way or the other to make fluoridation either requisite or unneeded (though it's far more likely to be the latter than the former).
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Every day we see Western pricks applying pressure to adopt an ETS, so the West can exploit the worlds poor. It is going to take a long time to change the greedy, self-centred, self-absorbed, arrogant, exploitative instincts of the West.
Yes, and carbon emitted by the downtrodden poor is magically sequestered before entering the atmosphere by the special carbon angels.
It is not fair that the environment is in this state before most of the world has had a chance to industrialise and raise their standard of living. It is manifestly sucktastic.
But it is also manifest that we cannot continue to emit carbon dioxide - and nitrogen, and methane - at the rapidly rising rates we are doing so. We need to find ways to let developing countries industrialise without raising carbon emissions. We need to cut our own. Just saying "the evil West wants to keep everyone down" is not going to solve the problem. If there's no incentive to reduce emissions, no-one will do it. China and India might not want to; doesn't mean we don't have to try. We don't really have a choice.
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4. The fact everyone seems to have got it into their heads to hype up the event as a riot before it happens- I remember several years, close to a decade in fact, of Undie 500s without incident. Now it seems that it's going to be this way every time.
It certainly passed without incident (that I remember) in my first two years at uni - that was why the 2007 riots were such a big deal; no-one expected it to end like that. Stupid way to end an otherwise entertaining tradition.
- I wonder whether a high proportion of those who engaged in the antics were exactly those sorts of people. I would put good money on it.
I know for a fact some students of that description were arrested and charged in the 2007 goings-on. For exactly the kind of behaviour Russell described, and likely the reason.