Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Where is the money in telling people to stop consuming and poluting? When encouraging others to consume and polute less for the sake of the global environment, then yes, money is lost from the business person/countries pocket. But it doesn't end up in the pocket of anyone except the consumer who hasn't spent it.



Most consumer goods are now produced in developing countries, so it's easy to have a clean backyard when all of the dirty work is done overseas in a less developed country. But then it's a bit rough to turn around and accuse those less developed countries of being the big polluters. The pollution is an end result of western consumerism. Most people in china or indonesia can't afford a tv, dishwasher, talking robotic doll, nike shoes, etc, etc ,etc....

So far as nature being able to clear up our pollution, well yes, it does do a damn good job.. But does that mean you should abuse the fact and push things to try and find the limits. The human body is rather similar in a number of ways, very resilliant, able to process and deal with toxins, wastes, etc. That doesn't mean that you should eat junkfood, consume lots of drugs/alcohol/cigarettes etc, just because your body will be able to deal with it... As the human body only has a reasonably short life span, we have been able to study the long term effects of these "toxins" on the human body, and we've found that they shorten life spans and lead to general poor health. The earth we're not so sure about, yes, it's been resilient to the abuse we have thrown at it so far but what are the long term realities of our actions.. Just because no one can possibly know what will happen to the earth in the future, because no one can prove it, does that mean that you abuse it?




Guilt is something that you feel yourself, not something that other can make you feel.. Do you cut off your nose to spite your face, just because you're annoyed with someone that they have different views?

Your confusion between ozone depletion and GHGs harms your case rather. Ozone depletion is well understood, and the efforts to control CFCs would have been quite effective if china hadn't decided not to outlaw freon-12.



A popular claim amongst those who consider themselves smart, but unsupported by evidence.



Do you have evidence to support this claim? The british energy ministry found otherwise.


I agree.

Having worked in education for over 10 years, and therefore with the children from a wide range in our socio economic groups, I concur that the so called 'dumb' people are breeding much faster than the more conservative, educated people.... But weather that trend will continue into the future I can not say, I will get back to you on that in 10 year or so

It was not whether they bred faster but whether their children were less smart.

What annoys me is the constant and I consider deliberate attempt to dumb people down by the media and politicians...

... then again as the greediest bunch of self-obsessed money grubbing baby-boomers ever to have inhabited part of this planet, I guess we here in the western world (particularly) really only have ourselves to blame...

What a gutless legacy we leave though... the first generation in history to potentially leave our children worse off than we ourselves have been.

yeh not bad eh! all *potty mouthed*up in 20 years
Imagine if we worked for the good...

Could be looking at the greatest ever legacy...for our kids..

Had this conversasion the other day, he was saying he can not make a difference -I say, I choose to make a difference ... pick up the lolly wraper! there are heaps of us all making a difference...
C1

its called evolution

Evolution traditionally implies an unplanned, random sequence of growth...

I believe that politically and economically the last 10-20 years has been a deliberate and structured "mutation"....

design to leave the majority of humankind weakened and impotent...

forgive me if I am wrong but I had always thought that evolution was a trend changing for the survival of the species...
seems to me we are getting closer to the end of a trend that is
un-sustainable... perhaps another trend needs to start before the other one is signalled as over.
my rant over
C1

mmm....

Many "evolutionary" trends result in dead ends... literally.

Even a "mutation" is a form of evolutionary change.... sometimes beneficial, sometimes detremental.

Yep that being my point ROZ-\
Though the species continued baring mega catastrophy

not necessarily random....."adaptation" is evolution, adapting to your surroundings.....the evolution of society, we are all dumbing down , slowly going the complete circle returning back to our caveman ancestry where we dont need to be clever to move rocks.......coz thats all thats gunna be left

Wow, such nteresting reading to come back to.............

my 2 cents................................

HC refrigerants have been around for ages (literally millions of years ) they have an ODP (ozone depleting potential) of ZERO and and GWP (global warming potential) of 20

Compare this to the new fan-dangled HFC R-410a (our saviour..........) specially developed by the companies that pull the refrigeration strings.......ODP=0 GWP=1610!

And please don't go there with the "oooh" its gonna blow up my house when we all have natural gas appliances fitted, or the oooh its gonna blow up my car when there was an indepth Uni of NSW research on that fact. they tried minor and major leaks both in-cabin and in enginebay..............surprise............. mixture was either too rich or too lean......worst they got was a non explosive flah out from under the engine compartment........and they tried real hard to get it to blow.

SO, where is the money trail.....................

steve: we've talked about this - we agree 100% on using HCs. Anyone that argues it is going to explode should stop filling their car with petrol or LPG .

Evolution will not lead to a dumbing down of people in any realistic time period. Why? compare the appendix. It has not been used for longer than we can measure, yet it is still forming quite readily and given a return to that older diet, would become completely functional within maybe 20 generations. Genetic evolution doesn't throw things out, it just disables their expression. Intelligence is a very useful asset - even if parents are dumb and the world is encouraging dumb people to breed faster firstly, their children after a number of generations seem to show no variation from the standard distribution of intelligence (remember that we have found no evidence of differences in human intelligence between any races) and secondly, people can be smarter at being dumb.



Remember, only invoke principles that you actually understand.

Far more important is social genetics (some call memetics) which is why I'm bothering to have this conversation -- otherwise I'd need to breed with my dissenters to make any progress. Neanderthal man has been suggested to be smarter (larger brain etc), but its poor adaptability killed it. (also consider that once you have encouraged a drug resistant bacteria, the resistance in children may be not expressed in the drug free environment, but the resistance rapidly returns when the drug returns. That's why our antibiotics wear out after some years, and one important reason why taking antibiotics without good cause is a very selfish and stupid thing to do.

I suspect we'll either wipe ourselves out, or build a better intelligence that will replace us.