Kindle winners:
Crikey writes: As if a subscription to Crikey isn’t inherently valuable enough, there’s a reasonable chance you could pick up your very own Amazon Kindle 3G+Wi-Fi, too. We’re giving away 10 over 10 days. Tuesday’s winner is Fiona Nixon. Three to go now — get your entry in today.
Pokies:
Les Heimann writes: Re. “The conflicts of interest muddying the anti-pokies campaign” (yesterday, item 1). I have been to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Monaco, Macau … but don’t bother, Australia has it all, and more so.
Sure, Australia has casinos in every capital city but we have pokies in every suburb of just about every city. And, if the pokie barons had their way, there’d be pokie machines in toilets, airports, train stations, trams, and automobiles.
Isn’t gambling is part of Australian culture; so what’s the fuss, people? Aren’t we still the bronzed and rugged “barbie shrimp” demographic with a beer in each fist? We can take it, can’t we? Isn’t gambling is in our blood?
Australia is being r-ped and pillaged of billions of dollars ripped mainly out of the pockets of the lonely, elderly, poor, wage-slave battlers who have been purposely courted and seduced by the unscrupulous pokie barons and vested interests. Those who make money out of poker machines know full well that without the “problem gamblers” they would likely make much less money.
Good Australian practice is to provide a helping hand. The first step in that direction is to put some gentle hurdles in the way of those who rush to destroy themselves, thus pre-commitment of large denomination machines. Harmless to the occasional punter but a reminder to those who are fixated.
Argue with those who support the freedom for anyone to destroy themselves because they only care for themselves.
Rundle and climate change:
Tamas Calderwood writes: Re. “Rundle: no making light of the stupid party riding again” (yesterday, item 14). Guy Rundle has a spray at climate sceptics, saying we are either “genuinely stupid … delusional, or … malign and nihilistic”. He also frowns on “grabbing a 10-year section of a 50-year period and claiming there is no warming”.
Actually Guy — if you grab the most recent 14 years of temperature data you’ll see just 7/100ths of a degree warming, despite record human CO2 emissions. In the past 50 years; about 0.4° of warming. The past 150 years: 0.7°. All while sea levels are rising at their long-term average of about 2mm per year.
I guess Guy has never done that kind of simple data analysis. Perhaps he doesn’t have the maths. Nonetheless, he concludes that global warming is a crisis and we should therefore take “decisive action”.
The funny thing is that Guy comes so close to understanding the whole climate caper when he states; “The capacity to never question the whole deal can only be achieved by a certain thickness, since such stupidity ensures that any evidence that disturbs one’s worldview will be treated not as invitation to think critically about that worldview, but as wrong”.
Yes, Guy. Yes indeed.
Highly amusing to see Tamas shifting his goalposts from “No warming since 1997/8” to “Only 7/100 of a degree warming since 1997/8”. Tamas can’t actually refute anything Guy says, just claim that it hasn’t warmed as fast as he apparently thinks it should have. On what basis he thinks this (if you call it thinking) is, as always, unclear, since an OLS regression on Tamas’ preferred data set over the last 14 years shows a clear warming trend of 0.1 degree over the 14 years, even given that it started with an El Nino and finished with a La Nina. o.1 is not 0.07, as he claims. Perhaps he doesn’t have the maths.
Tamas also notes that “All while sea levels are rising at their long-term average of about 2mm per year” as if this somehow supported the claim that the globe isn’t warming – an impressive act of doublethink, to be sure. Perhaps Tamas thinks sea levels just like rising for fun, or that all that water is being displaced by the steady rise of Great Cthulhu from R’lyeh – it would make as much sense as anything else he’s ever written and possesses that vital “certain thickness”.
Luckily, Tamascan embrace both the data and his own contrariness by accepting that the short-term levelling of temperatures was due to a surge in piratical activity in Somalia. Now that the pirates have been suppressed by better naval patrols, warming will resume as scheduled.
Tamas Calderwood, Crikey’s resident pseudo-sceptic = ecocidal greed merchant.
@ Les Heimann – “Harmless to the occasional punter”
That is no doubt quite correct; but no harmless to the pocky industry and that is part no doubt of their hysteria.
Consider the psychology of the average gambler (not just the addicted). You lose X dollars, the real temptation is then to attempt to recoup your losses.
Precommitment removes that temptation ergo lost revenue to the machines owner.
My heart bleeds for them!
But it isn’t only poker machines, what about the “Sport of Kings”; now you don’t have a punt on your local meeting, the races run every day of the week, and their are kind bookies to help you dispose of your spare cash, and of course the TAB is there to also assist.
How often do you read of trusted employees embezzling from their employers to fund their addiction, and not just small amounts either.
And even more amazingly this “industry” gets government subsidies of various knids.
Tamas’ latest missive? Love it, reminds me of http://denialdepot.blogspot.com/2011/04/staggering-drop-in-global-temperature.html
Tamas’ latest missive? Love it, reminds me of http: // denialdepot . blogspot.com/2011/04/staggering-drop-in-global-temperature.html (remove some spaces from that. Wtf no links without moderation?!)