Bruce Tuncks

The carrying capacity of the planet is way too vague a notion to use it for population control, even though I believe in the idea to the extent of supporting " Sustainable Population Australia" as a political party.

Spacy, please don't bump yourself off.... I like your posts too much

Of course we have less life in front of us than the young have. If a day of life is worth say $1000 dollars, then our old carcasses are not worth as much. But it's not how we feel.... I reckon that my life is better now than before and I doubt that I would go back ( memory wiped) if I could... well maybe to the start of retirement, but not before too much. I was very lucky to retire young, and I reckon life has been wonderful ever since, and I actually had a good job!

I have half a recollection that suicide is common among educated oldies, and this is correct I reckon..... in fact, suicide should be encouraged and enabled for oldies. They are completely different from youngies. The only problem is how to stop impatient inheritors from bumping off the oldies who don't want to go.

I reckon that your life sure is worth less than those teens OME. Yet we value our old carcasses just the same... silly huh. We should all be trying out for hitmen, on account of how we will die anyway soon enough.

My father-in-law was an aircraft armourer in the north of Australia in 1944 and 45. He was never sent within 1000km of a live Japanese, but that didn't stop him from being a war hero. My own father ran the Alice Springs power station on nightshift after trying to join the airforce. They had learned from WW1 that you didn't accept all the "volunteers" and then get the town drunk to run the power station. My strong observation was that the father did more for the war effort than the father-in-law.

When I was at engineering school last century, the value of a life was $50,000. This was never explicitly stated but you could figure it out from how much extra you should spend on a road to save a life. One of my fav discussion subjects is the value of a life to a ww1 general. I reckon it was much less than $50,000. In fact I reckon they had to lose a lot of soldiers every week to stop their logistics from failing.

OME, I sometimes watch " border security" on TV and it seems they are trying hard. But, with chemicals, you can't seem to have effective and safe at the same time. With termite treatments these days, the current approved and safe chemicals don't seem to work.

I always thought that the life of a battery was well known and not a subject of lies.

Personally, I reckon you guys are weird.What could possibly be wrong with adding a small amount of fluoride?

I have studied the matter Nev and believe that the more sources an info thing has, the more likely it is to be true. Just because ( say) a Murdoch site is unreliable with right-wing stuff, it does not mean that it should be always disbelieved. I know a guy who thinks that the whole media is full of lies, and he seriously thinks Russia is the only country telling the truth. Personally, I reckon he has descended into nonsense on account of not applying the same standards to Russian propaganda as he has to western propaganda.

I reckon lots of "studies" on how bad alcohol was were funded by the wowsers. But I have to agree how the alcohol industry is now big enough to fund its own "research".

Getting back to crops, the figure of importance is the root-zone salinity. This of course varies with the irrigation water salinity and the leaching fraction.

Nev, it is very difficult to ascribe an effect where the sample is small and the numbers are small too. " Lower IQ" would be hard to measure and I would need lots more details to take it seriously... But thanks for trying.

Please correct me if this is wrong... Seawater is 30,000ppm , the mixture of salts is largely NaCl but there are all sorts of other stuff. Sheep can drink 3000ppm salt water, and they are tough animals in this regard. Human blood is about 9000ppm which was likely the ocean figure when out ancestors left . Crops.... a sensitive crop is french beans which don't like irrigation water more than 900ppm.

Don't feel bad, I just looked it up.

It's about half n half nomad. The fluoride which becomes part of the teeth n bones is not excreted. How could it make these things stronger otherwise?

My understanding was that fluoride was discovered by the fact that some kids in Australia just had good teeth... I am open to argument about this nowadays.

Our kids grew up with no fluoride, so we added it in the form of pills. The kids are both 50 now and have ZERO teeth problems. I personally never studied the issue and always thought that being anti-fluoride was like being a flat earther, But these days I just live on rainwater and reckon its fairly safe, depending on what wild animals have pooped on your roof.

Spacy, why don't you get a rainwater tank?

What religion were the Irish?

thanks spacy, I never knew.

Good onyer Nev. I hereby bet a bottle of red that he ( trump) will not win. Mind you, I also didn't think he would have beaten Hillary Clinton but he did. I think he had Putin's assistance. Anyway, I have been reassured by a book I just read where he gives lots of examples where : 1. you needed to be a trumpist to get republican endorsement most of the time. 2: being a trumpist caused you to lose 5% of the real vote at an election. Personally, I can imagine a "respectable" republican lady secretly voting Democrat after wondering what would happen if her 12 y/o daughter got pregnant from a rapist. Of course she would never admit to this. I have also been impressed by the drop in women applying for the armed services. They can easily be got pregnant and they are unable to choose their place of abode.

I like the definitions you come up with OME. I associate "sectarian violence " with the Irish protestant vs catholic stuff, and this is proof to me that we, as a species, seem to need an enemy all the time. Personally, while I did notice some anti-catholic stuff among the older generation, it died out before I got any. I wonder how those old bigots would have coped with the 800,000 moslems we have imported...

Kg has it right.... I can't help wondering why the religious never seem to blame their ridiculous deity on misfortunes like earthquakes. My best guess is that they don't really believe their own stuff.