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Are they serious?
Topic Started: Jan 1 2007, 09:09 PM (154 Views)
Eral
Kopi Luwak
Here are three of the pieces in the paper today that caught my eye.

1. The reason the bushfire season has been so severe this year is because there are too many trees. If those loony greenies hadn't hijacked government policy and stopped the logging of National Parks and state forests, the forests wouldn't be so big and over-grown and those fires would have been put out straight away by the loggers, who do that as part of the logging agreements. We should immediately return to chopping down as many trees as possible, thus making our forests more manageable.

2. The reason we have cultural conflict in Sydney between convict stock Australians and Lebanese Australians is that Malcolm Fraser let in refugees from Lebanon here in 1976. He was warned they wouldn't integrate, but would he listen? No. It's all his fault.

3. The PM is funding the Catholic Church to provide abortion counselling. Gee, I wonder what they will suggest.

I invite you to either discuss these absurdities, or add more from your own place of residence.
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lara
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Kopi Luwak
Well, as for the first, it's not that simple and in Canada, anyway, there is some validity. When you make forests into parks, you start to control the environment in different ways - the most visible being with fire control. There are huge swaths of parkland here that haven't had fires for decades, where, if truly wild, there would have been uncontrolled burns now and then. The old forests, where bugs have killed or hurt trees, would burn - usually smaller fires, occasionally conflagrations. It was part of the natural death and regeneration cycle. By supressing fires, we allow more unhealthy forests, more deadfall to gather, more standing dead trees, etc., but eventually, a blaze will spark that will be incredibly difficult to stop.

Here, we have controlled burns in parks to try to replicate the natural cycle with something we can keep from affecting our camgrounds and residential areas. Sometimes, they allow some logging, first. Either way, it's never quite wild, is it?
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Eral
Kopi Luwak
Perhaps I should mention that we are in our 7th year of drought, some people say 10.
If the article had been suggesting that forests haven't been managed well, with not enough undergrowth being cleared, and not enough back burning/controlled fires, I'd have paid that as commonsense. But the idea that the problem was caused by too many trees is, well kind of funny.
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Krazy
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I haz powah!
Well I'm going to say tube/bus fares in London.

Risen to £2 minimum bus fare, £4 for minimum tube fare :blink:

If you get their Oyster pre pay card they drop to about £1 and £1.50 respectively - if you are a regular traveller fine, but casual use or tourists will get clobbered. London is now the most expensive city in the world for public transport.

They are just rubbing their hands with glee come 2012 and the Olympics, as the fares go up above inflation ever year, I wouldn't be surprised if it was around £5 for bus and £10 for tube then.

Of course our London congestion charge for cars going into town have gone up from £5 to £8. They are also increasing the size of the zone to encompass a greater area despite their public survey iniviting opion polled over 70% against the change.

Anyone want to guess why I don't use public transport or go into the centre of town?
"Well, ‘course dis one’s betta! It’s lotz ‘eavier, and gots dem spikey bitz on de ends. "
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Eral
Kopi Luwak
Is that 2 pounds minimum if you are just going a few stops? :huh: Is it run by private companies?

And how do they get the money? Electronic tollway?
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Krazy
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I haz powah!
Yes, that's £2 min if you only go 1 stop.

Fares on buses are collected by the driver or you swipe your Oyster card on the device, the same things which are present at tube stations and it then deducts your fare.

For the tube stations it deducts the fare based on where you get off when you swipe the card at the destination station.

If your wondering why don't I get one, well these Oyster cards have had lots of technical troubles, and even when people swipe the cards it is not being registered and by default you get charged the maximum fare if it does not register properly. Wonderful. I'm sure like everything else in Britain these days the system was set up on the cheap.

The Buses and Tube are what is known as a Public/Private Partnership. They fall under the name "London Transport" but private companies own the trains and buses and the drivers. They receive buckets of of public money and then give it to shareholders.

And for the record or overland train system fares are also horrendously priced, that is now cheaper for people to fly then take a train. They said in previous years (10+) the fare rises where necessary to improve the train service and they are still using the same excuse to increase fares way above inflation and providing a dreadful service.

"Well, ‘course dis one’s betta! It’s lotz ‘eavier, and gots dem spikey bitz on de ends. "
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Eral
Kopi Luwak
http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/london...7777152910.html
Look what was in the paper today.

It sounds like the system we have here. (Probably where we got the idea from.) The transport companies get huge subsidies from the government: meanwhile you can't buy a ticket half the time because the ticket vending machines they introduced (cheaper than people) don't work, and the trains fall apart because of reductions in maintenance. I like the way we still get business people saying "private companies run public services cheaper and better", as if we don't know that means "I will make a lot of money if I take over this service." :rolleyes:

There was a story a couple of days ago about phone bills in America. The bill was for $19 of phone calls, and $250 of service charges. :o I thought that was pretty bad, until we got a water bill for our house in Phillip Island. $3 worth of water, $200 for service charges. And that's water you can't drink. :blink:
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