Humodour

Um... you can't just say that because people are investing in it, that it's coming. People can invest in the flying car, but the economic utility of both systems are pretty much unbending. certainly in the short to medium term which is when the green doomsayers are saying change has to happen. Solar is roughly 5 years away from parity with oil and solar can indeed produce baseload electricity (look up solar thermal towers). Anyway, governments around the world have been subsidising fossil fuels and nuclear for decades. It's no surprise that many will do the same for various alternative technologies.

Orogun, it is on average correct that children of poor parents grow up to be poor and unsuccessful themselves. Not all of them, obviously, but a far greater number than the children of rich or middle-class parents. You simply cannot look at this entirely from a capitalist "it's their own fault that they're poor" perspective. It does not work like that. EDIT: Oh, wait, sorry Orogun, you were spot on. It is Nepenthe who I am disagreeing with.

Australia's university education system works well: government subsidises a lot of it, but each student still has to pay about $20 to $40 thousand at the end, depending on their degree. The key thing, though, is that every student is allowed to borrow from the government (and usually does) to pay for all this debt, and no interest is charged on this debt (although it is indexed to inflation). The debt is automatically paid off through the tax system once a student's income reaches a certain level (maxing out at 7% of the student's income per year going towards repayment last I checked). So it's a stress-free debt for the student with essentially no risk of default for the government as repayment is compulsory. The system works quite well, and crucially the issue of poor students not having equal access to tertiary education doesn't exist due to the above-mentioned government loans. Universities in Australia also tend to generate huge amounts of money through R&D, while various chunks of government funding are performance-based. Although come to think of it, one of the main reason Australian universities balance their budgets so well is because they charge international students huge amounts to study here (and huge amounts of international students do study here, especially rich Indians and Chinese). So tl;dr version: you don't have to make education free to make it universally accessible.

What, so that their corrupt politicians could funnel large sums into secret offshore bank accounts and waste whatever is left? Catch-22 for Greece. But yes, based on what I've been reading Greece should never have been allowed into the Eurozone in the first place.

US military drones have now logged over 1 million hours flight time.

tl;dr

I actually agree with you, Orogun. I have a fundamental belief in the correctness and superiority of modern Western culture - specifically democracy, human and civil rights, market economics and the worth of the individual. I think we must continue to export these values and ideas to the rest of the world, albeit more intelligently then American neocons or British imperialists ever did. I like the direction European soft power is taking and I support the interventions in Libya and Afghanistan as just wars. Between the Taliban and the Gaddafi regime you've got some of the worst humans to have ever lived in recent memory. I don't think either war has ever been about oil, though. A lot of countries have oil - America, Australia, Norway, Scotland, Canada, Brazil, Russia all have large oil reserves for instance. It's not exactly a rare thing.

Bunch of little ****s ruining things for the rest of us. But China worries me. They are constantly hacking our government every single ****ing day to try and steal US defence secrets because they see Australia as a weak link. Which we probably are. Sigh.

I am going skiing for a week! See you when Greece defaults!

Tried taking a look at Spanish? It's a whole lot more enjoyable, logical, consistent and phonetic than French. And English.

The United States called... REALLY?! Because the 1990's called for you! Get with the times mi amigo.

To be honest, I think parts of the Eurozone concept are a bad idea (while the EU itself and free trade in general are good ideas). From what I know about inflation, unemployment, exchange rates (i.e. strong dollar vs weak dollar), and central banking by observing Australia and the fact that what is good for some of our states hinders some of the others: tying a bunch of countries together and making them all use the same currency and interest rate is ludicrous. At least for such disparate economies. Because when Greece needs to go one way, Germany needs to go another, and the biggest economies get to govern the direction in the end, to the detriment of the smaller ones. That is: centralisation and unification of currencies may not a good idea in general. Could have future ramifications for federations of states such as Australia, the EU, Russia and the USA. The USA for instance - what do you think is going to happen if California's population and economy keep outpacing the other US states (as is projected)? What kind of conversations will people start having? No surprise I read about a similar problem in Russia - Moscow's economy is beginning to warp things for everywhere else in Russia.

Has anybody noticed that Germany isn't getting any smaller or less important? I suspect European culture led by Germany (yes, this is a generalisation) is starting to supplant British culture as the dominant one in the world. All I can say is, Germany has an awesome language. It's so similar to English, but makes a lot more sense! And yet, it's so foreign in some ways because many of those amazingly useful Romance words are missing from the alien-looking vocabulary. No doubt English and German will start to strongly feed into each other yet again as they did hundreds of years ago, although interestingly this time I suspect it will be German which will have to accommodate a large number of new words and speakers.

Actually stats is just an application of logic and maths, usually to a science. You're rambling again dude.

Hahahahahahahahaha.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1CvW38cHA Your response to this is Bill Hicks? Man, you can fantasise all you like about all the great things people will experience on drugs. But I don't think it's wise to make policy based on wishful thinking. You have to take a worst case, and assume that you are going to see more people dependant on drugs, either psychologically or physiologically. The benefits aren't going to be felt in the first world. They're going to come in producer nations like Colombia, and trans-shipment nations like Nigeria and Mexico. Well, I disagree with that, because Portugal legalised all drugs in 2001 and it's now 2011 and their drug usage rates have all fallen. But furthermore, no you nitwit, that wasn't my response to you - I just found it humorous because he has the same stance on deaths attributed to drugs as you do, so I linked it.

Cocaine is extremely rare here in Aus. People take ecstasy instead and dance all night. Actually, come to think of it, I think Australia has the highest raw ecstasy consumption rate in the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1CvW38cHA

Depends how mellow they were after snorting!

My parties these days are catered to a mellow crowd, so I tend to bar heavy drinkers like my ****ing housemate who put multiple headbutt holes in my door when he was drunk on Jaeger (which is every Friday and Saturday night - pretty sure he blows his entire manual labour paycheck on bottles of Jaeger). But, you know, besides alcohol, I don't want to go anywhere near people who inject, snort, or smoke anything really. Not a fan of stimulants because they make people rude as a general rule, and opiates have an addiction potential matched only by nicotine (although I suspect this addiction profile changes significantly for oral consumption). Addiction = junkies. Junkies = things stolen. So wouldn't want these people at my parties. And if they want to get stoned they can vapourise. With me. Not a fan of getting lung cancer. Anyway this is mostly hypothetical. The only drugs I've been around people taking at parties are weed, alcohol, psychedelics and amphetamines. Amphetamines are boring stimulants which make people arrogant (they're the opposite of mellow), alcohol causes lots of verbal and physical fights (again, not mellow), psychedelics haven't caused problems and I've been to a few psychedelic-only parties, and weed... well, the day somebody overdoses or starts a fight on weed I'll eat this $10 note I just found in my passport.

I don't see the issue. It's pretty well known that sitting glued to the television is bad for your health. What worries me is if this also applies to sitting at a computer. From what I've read, sitting at a computer actually stimulates the brain a lot (unlike the TV) which improves cognition. However, physically speaking, it's just as bad for your cardiovascular health as sitting at a television. The worst thing is that this is true even for people who exercise a lot. It's not the lack of exercise that is causing this, it's the simple act of sitting in one spot for a long period of time. So that's **** because it would appear the healthiest way to use a computer is lots of short duration periods (e.g. 15 minutes) with exercise in between (if only walking around the house a bit perhaps).

If the islanders vote to be British then case closed.

Barrels are important.

How many crates are in this game? Here is an example of a crate: