Comments for the spike

Comment on Fracking controversy by Henk Kleynhans

Henk Kleynhans — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:47:49 +0000

I think you misunderstand the precautionary principle - It simply states that an action should not be taken IF there is scientific consensus that there is the *plausible risk* of _grave_ consequences when taking the action.

Only if there is such plausible risk, does the onus of of proof (of non-risk) shift.

Obviously, some who subscribe to the precautionary principle may have taken it a step too far, insisting that we should block all action until non-risk is proven. And although such folks might call it exercising the “Precautionary Principle”, they’re abusing the term!

An example is the belief that TV/Radio/Wi-Fi/Cell signals are damaging to your health/heads/fillings etc. Believers readily bandy about “Precautionary Principle” to try and stop crucial communications systems from being built. As there is no scientific plausibility that EM waves with frequencies lower than that of visible light cause grave harm (unlike EM waves with higher frequencies, e.g. Gamma rays, X-rays, UV etc), you can’t apply the Precautionary Principle!

Comment on How to hire a hitman in SA by Merell Peters

Merell Peters — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:32:55 +0000

I need hitman for hire. Please contact me as soon as possible.

Comment on How to hire a hitman in SA by Sani Moyo

Sani Moyo — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 08:30:30 +0000

Best article I’ve read this month. You give Jeremy Clarkson a run for his money.

Comment on Golden handshake and golden gun by Kenneth McAlpine

Kenneth McAlpine — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 09:15:56 +0000

I’m right with you. I run a chain of restaurants and I’m sick and tired of the ridiculous food safety and fire regulations that government imposes on us. They should just get lost and let us get on with running our business. We can judge what is safe for our customers.

Comment on Lego production line builds lego cars by Fuel Treatment

Fuel Treatment — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 04:56:41 +0000

I was told by my friend that all diesel fuels have some amounts of gasoline in them and it’s okay as long as it does not exceed a small amount. Is that true? And how much concentration (percentage) of gasoline in a diesel fuel in a typical diesel truck will stall the engine and what is acceptable?

Comment on The life and death of Kevin Carter by LDH

LDH — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:55:26 +0000

Regarding Kevin Carter’s photo of the starving girl in Sudan with the vulture. She was at a UN feeding station and all the parents had run off to meet the plane delivering food, leaving their children temporarily behind. Whether she even had parents present in the camp is an unknown. As they distributed aid, the UN had dropped press photographers off for a 30 minute photo op, with the strict directive NOT to approach any of the famine victims out of fear of disease spreading through the weakened population. Somehow this fact is rarely mentioned in any discussion of the ethics behind the image.

Nevertheless, could I as a photographer and having achieved my desired photographic result, then walked off to join the plane, leaving the child to her fate with the vulture still in the vicinity? Personally, no. However, if she had then contracted a communicable disease, which had spread through the entire stricken camp and was later traced back to my physical intervention, ethical questions would arise again. I would be held accountable, and as a photographer never given access to work in that area again. These are all things to consider. I am sorry that Carter never managed to reconcile himself to that terrible day and the other atrocities he witnessed during his brief career. To attack him personally for taking that photograph was unfair as it achieved its intention, which was to inspire people to help the starving Sudanese people. Something you should all be considering again, as the situation is again dire in that region.

Comment on If we disagree, one of us is wrong by Doug Barbieri

Doug Barbieri — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 23:27:20 +0000

Someone above brought up legacy code. I worked on a project that was so poorly designed that any attempt to add any new features or even to correct bugs would introduce a significant number of new bugs. It was so unstable that they finally decided to scrap the thing and start over.

The application suffered from so many typical problems that trying to introduce some basic good design (proper data abstraction, etc) was impossible. Going into the code, you could see why. A basic feature would have parts spread out over many modules, and it was actually difficult to figure out what module did what, the lines were so badly blurred.

This is where I think government is today. The lines are so blurred by the aggressive effects of government, that you can’t tell what was free-market inspired and what isn’t. This is an unstable system at its core, and in my opinion needs to be scrapped and we start over.

But like the marketing people proposing new features, and QA people pointing out instability and bugs, normal people just can’t understand why a quick fix (like minimum wage or single-payer health care) can’t just fix the problem.

This comparison I think is really accurate. An excellent article!

Comment on If we disagree, one of us is wrong by Kyle Bennett

Kyle Bennett — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 21:17:53 +0000

“And, surprisingly, the libertarians tend to give the same answer in most cases.”

That’s because we’re all part of a monolithic, brainwashed cult parroting the same talking points handed down by the Grand Libertarian Poobah whom we blindly follow. I think his name is Ayn Murray Koch.

Oh wait, I wasn’t supposed to tell anybody that,

Comment on Oh, how Vodacom angers me by nkosi

nkosi — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:22:45 +0000

earlier today I was trying to make a call but my number keep on saying I’m not allowed? I don’t know what heppened to my no.1 network in SA.

Comment on Under construction by Akanyang Merementsi

Akanyang Merementsi — Tue, 10 May 2011 17:41:59 +0000

See you there, broer…

Comment on If we disagree, one of us is wrong by Jeff M

Jeff M — Fri, 06 May 2011 21:43:24 +0000

Another interesting parallel is the Software Version 2.0 pattern… when you get a group of programmers together and tell them to build something, they trip all over each other and collectively contribute to a big messy outcome, they will then start talking about Version 2.0, “Oh don’t bother fixing that, we’ll correct it when we write version 2.0″… the 1.0 software gets more and more bloated and unmaintainable. Version 2.0 would be a break-down/revolution in the political sense.

Comment on Fracking controversy by enegene

enegene — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:04:53 +0000

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/us/series/drilling_down/index.html?ref=us

Comment on Fracking controversy by Patrick Madden

Patrick Madden — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 06:28:18 +0000

That’s a good argument, Aragorn.

Also, thanks for directing me to Andreas Spath’s article.

Ivo, have you read this piece? I think it’s something we’ve both been waiting for: a cool-headed, rational, on-point response to your article from someone with expert knowledge in the field:

http://www.news24.com/Columnists/AndreasSpath/Much-ado-about-fracking-20110420

Comment on Fracking controversy by enegene

enegene — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:38:33 +0000

This is truly ridiculous.
It is one thing having Ivo and Aragorn endorse opposite sides of the debate, and another to have the standard detractors and commentators, but Patrick, you form a whole other category of patronizing pontification.
The debate is not about whether the writers conform to your particular taste in delivery, there will be a million “well-informed opinions” on “how do write well”.
Please spare us the junior school level didacticism.
On the debate,
Inexplicably, to me anyway, debates about the environment, sexual preference and abortion all end up split across the liberal/conservative divide.
This debate is simply a case of Aragorn being sympathetic to the hunanitarian/eco sector and Ivo being sympathetic to the conventional/corporate/conservative/often religious sector. The “greens” and the “not greens”.
The only analysis i could ever bring to this phenomena is the possible issue of literalism. Some people are brought up to look at things in a 3 dimensional way, often expecting ( especially in corporate/political matters ) to find “the truth” about a subject somewhere fairly distant from its cover display.
Others, who are inherently literal, that may believe it’s a sin not to read a certain book in the most literal way are subsequently unable to look at any information without going with the dominant/word-of-god sort of interpretation.
In this case, Shell is good for their word, according to Ivo.
It may be simple primate relations, Darwinian if you will.
In short, some of us are made to kiss the big monkeys rear end, and others are a little less compulsive and tend to want to address the big monkey face to face.
Ivo is the former, Aragorn and myself are the latter.

Comment on Fracking controversy by Aragorn Eloff

Aragorn Eloff — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:02:55 +0000

@Patrick: I agree that I could have been more factual and less emotive.

There’s a reason why it’s ‘frack off full stop’ though: natural gas is a fossil fuel, hence non-renewable (and yes, I know that neodymium isn’t truly renewable either). At some point we will have to place a full stop on our fossil fuel usage. Given the ecological implications, sooner is probably better than later, especially given the rapid maturation of viable, ecologically friendlier mixed renewable solutions.