Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I agree njh... It annoys me when people say "drugs and alcohol"... Just because society decided at some stage in the past which drugs it would demonize and which would be accepted, doesn't mean we should live by that nowadays..

Does it make me uncool that I don't even know what "ice" is referring to?

NO! 'ice' is what the bikies make over here.
No doubt you have crew making it there too...
ice, crude form of meth amphets....
unfortunately we have a few cussy bro's making it here but would they use it, no way, because it phckz *potty mouth* (a bit late) your brain!

The cops are too dumb to catch them or they are on the take !!!!

I cannot speak to anything but what I know. Does it amke sense that I would sell only to people who cannot afford my services or products? Capitalists by nature are looking for new markets that are capable of paying fair market value for the product they are selling. Of course when they give things away they will do it in kind because that is what they have. In business, inventory is cash and many times takes the place of cash. That is why when I seek donations from the local phone company, tey are more likely to give me free calls on a cell phone for a given period of time than to write a check. Contrary to what people may think, businesses are in business to make money, not to provide jobs. In the process of making money they can create jobs and people benefit. Sure businesses can get greedy and yes people do abuse the systems. but you EB are lumping everyone in to one clump. I and many many other people are not doing what we do to make money, to climb on top of others so we can get ahead. In spite of having made mistakes, we do what we do with the best of intentions and more often than not, with the best of results.

It is ludicrous to think that we should never have influenced cultures in the world be cause they have lived an "idyllic" existence. Show me a mother that is not grateful that her child lived through chicken pox or mumps or measles. These diseases are now considered minor but they used to be deadly. We have built hospitals in Kenya that have treated tens of thousand of patients every year. Tell those people we have imposed on their idyllic existences and have brought more harm than good. Tell Travis to come home and not bother those people giving them a better source for veggies and protein.

You complain about what corporations and governments are doing to people but I submit there is far more good being done the world over by private individuals contributing their grain of sand. Take the Tsunami relief. Of the billions given by private America, over 65 percent was given by people like you and I who give sacrificially, out of the goodness of their hearts. The question now is, how were those funds handled?

I belong to a faith giving organization. That means that everything I do is paid for by py donors who give as a result of their faith in God and faith in me to be honest and efficient with that which they have entrusted to me. Over my career, people have entrusted millions to me, both for my salary and then for me to use how I saw fit to help others. I could be making more money doing what others do, but I chose to do this. I am not alone. There are tens of thousands of us all over the world, making a difference in households, communities cities and countries. We just don't capture the headlines.

I don't say any of this to bash anyone's ideas nor to squelch discussion. But the picture is not as bleak as the media portrays. For us to accept as truth the statements the media is putting forth is the epitome of laziness. Don't let others do the research for you. Go and find out for yourselves. For every bad corporation and government, there are thousands blooming where they are planted (getting back to AP)

Please accept this in the spirit it was given. I love to argue.

Yep, I'm making generalizations, and many of the points you've made here relate to the message I was trying to get across, but probably not very well. It's not a country, a religion belief, large corporations, or a political system that is doing the constructive work to help others. It's individuals like yourself, Travis, and others small time individuals doing it from the goodness within themselves..

My point was that it's not always good to give people what we think they might need. What suits us in our society does not suit everyone be it a different climate, culture etc.. Basic medical needs, and the knowledge that allows others to help themselves are most important... The old "give a man a fish" saying.

But shackling them by forcing them into the grind of having to contiunuously buy seed, or basically convincing them to buy a product that does them no good in the long term is purely taking advantage of them....

If it was not for the fact that we can take advantage of them (third world countries) then our economies whould not have been able to expand and grow at all...

either that or our costs would have imploded our economy...

Western economies or based on the concept of taking advantage of others... without that premise we would have to turn our whole way of thinking around....

either that or bomb the snot out of them.... all in the name of democracy of course... or religion... or just "the greater good"...

i.e ... our good that is

chicken pox or mumps or measles... where did those disease come from I wonder? Or the common cold. I bet the Aztecs really appreciated the 'help' they recieved from the spanish. Or the various islands which are currently inraged in yet another cival war. It is in humans nature to explore and conquer everything it can, but we can refain from screwing up a whole civilisation every now and then... Take Iraq and Afganistan for example. They are no more better off then when this all started.

Well, not entirely true TimC....

The opium crop looks like being a bonanza this year... bloody Taliban blokes kept ripping it up and shooting the growers....

Least now they have US Marine protection LOL

DT you make some interesting points, but one that i must comment on is that western health care is to be far from put on high.

Better i'm good with, western farming methods are far from "better"

And western healthcare.............well there is what we think we know and what is......... western health care IMO tends to address the symptom rather than the cause...........but that is for another time and place. We wonderous westerners tend to gobble up all the bullshit that is fed to us, then ask for more. I personally know of two people that made it into the paper for "beating cancer" with western heathcare. Yeh, 5 year survival rate, on the 6th year they were both dead. u reckon the papers published THAT!

I guess that this post is not reall contributing too much, but i felt the need to make a point about us westerner thinking "we're all that".

anyhow.................here is something to bring us all a little back on topic.

cool, a governtment has formall accepted something that was first proposed when, the 50's?

Fantastic, yet inevitable

What was that, peak oil a coupla years ago wasn't it!!!

Just for a little spice...

IMO, the peak oil scenario neglects the reality of market based capitalism.

As we all know, supply will balance demand at the price point. A shift in price results from a shift in supply or demand or both. As prices rise, supply may contract or demand may rise, or both.

In an actual market rising prices induce entrepreneurs to enter a profitable niche, which creates more supply, which lowers prices. As an example, some of you may have heard a couple years ago about a professor in Colorado developing a technique to extract oil from shale in an economic fashion. Oil from shale is nothing new, Hitler ran his tanks on the stuff. What is new is an efficient mehtod for producing it. Still in the development stages to be sure, but given the vast amount of shale in Colorado alone it will come into play sooner or later.

Another great example is the "proven reserves" of oil. The last time Iraq was surveyed for oil was in the 70s! Whatever your political feelings about the situation there, it's likely that sooner or later one side will be running the country. With stability comes the opportunity to conduct business. The chances that modern developments have made surveying better as well as making formerly unprofitable deposits newly profitable. Supply goes up, demand goes down.

Just 2 examples of how market forces act to reduce shortage. In fact, most shortages are created by poor governmental policy. One such policy that hurts the oil market in particular is the US government's subisidizing of the oil market. Which is why we Americans only pay $2 (US) per gallon (4 L) of gasoline where the rest of the world pays twice that or more. Of course, we make up the payments in taxes, but it skews the demand curve.

With all that said, yes, crude oil is a finite commodity that is not renewable in a timely fashion. However, the same market forces will increase entrepreneurial activity in alternative energy supplies as prices rise. The average Joe on the street has actually heard of solar power, wind power, hydrogen fuel cells, and a host of other alternative energy sources. This is different than it was 40 years ago. At the moment such ventures have not proven out on the huge scale that gas, coal, and oil have, but that's just a matter of time and market forces.

Just thought of a great example. Back in the 19th century, women's corsets were made using whale bones. Although whales were a renewable resource (neglecting the ethical argument right now), they were not husbanded to that end. So we ran out. What happened? Substitute materials were found, and in the end corsets fell out of fashion. In short, society adapted.

To sum up, people have been predicting the apocalypse since the idea was created, and we're all still here because we are adaptable, resourceful, and creative.

It's not efficient. It's simply a way of converting stationary energy (such as coal or nuclear) into transportation energy. At a great cost in CO2.

The problem with peak oil is that it is currently not substitutable - we have no alternative that is remotely close to being available. It's easy to be glib and say that the market will switch over to alternative XYZ (oil shale, coal-oil, boron-oxygen engines) but these will take many years to build, even if we know exactly how to make them. In the meantime our standard of living goes down the tubes and wars break out.

corsets is not a very compelling example, perhaps you can find an example of civilisation which used up a resource that was used in every tool, every food, and which is involved in the powering of all transportation? Perhaps the easter islanders who converted all their trees to boats and firewood, or the mesopotamians, who converted all their farm land to salt, or the Maoris, who ate all the megafauna?



You only need to be wrong once... Furthermore, we are looking at a time when the one civilisation controls almost all the earths inheritance - we have mined all the easy resources and there will be no new great civilisation if this one collapses back to even the middle ages. We won't have the mineral wealth to start over. So unlike the mexicans or morocans, when our civilisation goes down that will be that.

Examples all over the world of extinct communities.
Here in Oz we are in the grip of drought, the answer from the goverment,
find another water source and bring it down-
how about adjust life to better reflect our water availability.
Or ah sacrifice a room in those massive houses and put in a rainwater tank, that will help with two fronts - to increase mass within the house to stabilize the tempretures meaning less requirement to heat/cool and to watch the level in the tank v use.
But no we go into debt on all levels to suit our lifestyles.
C1... rant over