Posts by Joe Wylie
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to ,
See here the man who invented the Segway is trying to get clean water to everyone on earth.
Given the Segway's track record - unaffordably overpriced, heavily restricted use, the guy who bought the company killed using his own product - that clean water might be a while coming.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Many shops and cafes seem to sell only Coke-owned beverages.
Also workplaces and educational institutions. Chances are, if there's a Coke machine on your campus, they'll have signed an exclusive deal to exclude any other manufacturer's product.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Moz,
roo here is a game meat, you can't farm them so the meat is all wild shot, it's the least unsustainable meat I can find. I'd welcome correction if I'm wrong, but that's what my literature search said
"Plastic wombat" was an expression I came across in Australia - someone who tries to live as far off the grid as possible while remaining in the city, e.g. solar panels and tank water on a Paddo terrace. Obviously you're not one of those, all the best with your ongoing experiments,
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Hard News: Friday Music: Good News, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I’m pretty sure I remember Willie Keddell editing The Maintenance of Silence in that space…
Spooky that you should mention Maintenance of Silence, just last week it came up in a discussion and I found it online. A pity that the print(?) is so dark, though the flying sequence has retained its edgy dream quality.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Good News, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
For the life of me I can't remember what any of the shops at groundfloor in that building were - apart from the Dickensian cobblers / shoe repair place in the alley that went under us...
Stones shoe store was right on the Darby/Queen Street corner. and went all the way along to the Darby Street entrance.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Rebecca Gray,
...because even the best-intentioned "experts" sometimes don't realise that they're conveying an offensive message about "if only YOU PEOPLE would make better choices". The realities of how and why we relate to our environments and eat certain things at certain times are more complex than that.
IMHE food can be up there with politics and religion as things we humans will flip into combat mode over.
Card-carrying scientist Dr Mike Joy posted this big-picture dietary link on his Facebook page yesterday. Would those who readily despair over the dietary intransigence of lesser mortals be prepared to modify their own eating habits for the greater good?
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
While I do describe myself now as a plant developmental biologist - I trained as a molecular biologist (gene jockey) which means I'm comfortable with most things about DNA and RNA but often less comfortable with the organism the DNA came from :).
Thanks Bart, that certainly rang a bell - and here it is, a few paragraphs into Chapter One of my very favourite science book, Colin Tudge's tour de force of taxonomy, The Variety of Life:
Indeed a breed of molecular biologists has grown up who actually cannot tell the difference between a frog and a toad—or, indeed, when you boil it down, between a toad and a toadstool—because, quite simply, the difference does not seem to matter to them. DNA is DNA is DNA.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Bear in mind also that while I've read widely I am a plant developmental/molecular biologist and not an expert on the gut microbiome so my opinion is my opinion.
So when you posted here a couple of years back about "Make cows burp less by making them more efficient (better grass or better bacteria) and the farmer gains", you'd have been speaking as one of the grass guys.
It also fascinates me that people are so happy to experiment on themselves. These are really experiments with a sample of one and huge observer bias. I get why people do it but then often those same people are very concerned about scientists or big pharma/business experimenting on them - it's ... odd.
Informed consent?
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Sam Bradford,
I guess I'm incapable of arguing with libertarians in good faith
Surely that's, as much as anything, because the likes of Jamie Whyte are inevitably stalking horses. They can only be seen as engaging in good faith so long as their intellectual vanity blinds them to the cynicism of their real enablers.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Don Christie,
I do find it strange that when I have suggested removing GST form certain common items I get told how impossible that is by many on this platform because we have such a "simple" tax system and that must be "a good thing". Only our "simple" tax system is extraordinarily unfair on the least well off sections of our society. Thanks Rogernomics.
Australia's exemption of food from the the GST introduced in 2000 came about thanks to the now electorally extinct Australian Democrats, who made it a condition of their support for what was an unpopular new tax.
From my recollection, the only casualties were the likes of boutique ice cream manufacturers, who found their products suddenly reclassifieed as confectionary, and therefore subject to GST.
While the Howard Government of the time made the usual noises about exemptions blighting the purity of a "simple" tax system, the GST-free status of food now seems pretty much set in stone.