attrayant

I brought a soda stream with me from the states eight years ago but threw it away after several years of trying and failing to find replacement cartridges.  Now I use a seltzer bottle that just needs a small cartridge, and mix drinks one at a time. 

 

2 hours ago, Sir Swagman said:

The governor signed this into ‘law’ and immediately stated it was unenforceable, based on the fact that it is direct contravention of the laws of the land (I am guessing). Should there not be, or is there not, some law preventing an authority from issuing or proclaiming a ‘law’ that is known to be illegal?

 

Elected officials are generally indemnified from liability resulting from carrying out their duties as they see them.  The checks against elected officials are political (recall/impeach), censure (if they are an attorney they could be disbarred as Manafort has been) and electoral (vote the bastards out).  

 

 

2 hours ago, Jerry787 said:

this is even worst of being a bigot red neck, its simply stupidity.

 

It's put-your-foot-in-your-mouth-and-then-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot stupidity.  Rowe v. Wade has something like 80% favorable public support.  If this Alabama nonsense goes to the supreme court, then regardless of the outcome it will be a huge democratic electoral magnet in 2020.

5 hours ago, peterrabbit said:

If the Government really wanted to solve this problem why don't they just levy a 1000b charge when renewing the visa/extensions and put that money directly into the health system?

 

38,000,000 x 1,000 = 38,000,000,000 baht or 10 times what they say they are losing from foreigners not paying.

 

While this seems like an appealing idea, more foreigners would simply use this as an excuse to skip payment of hospital bills.  I can see somebody going in for heart surgery and then when he gets the bill for 500 thousand, screams "WHAT? I already paid my 1000 baht at immigration!"

 

 

 

36 minutes ago, pedro01 said:

You don't set the rules by the exceptions.

 

I really don't know what you mean by this, because you go on to say:

 

 

40 minutes ago, pedro01 said:

by all means have an exception for the remaining 1.5%

 

So which is it?  Should there be a rape/incest clause or not?

 

 

36 minutes ago, pedro01 said:

The rape/incest argument is used only by people that want abortions in all cases. It's a total strawman.

 

I favor a rape/incest clause and yet I don't want "abortion in all cases", so your statement is wrong.

2 hours ago, Wilsonandson said:

What do they do? Where do they work? Is there a giant warehouse with thousands of these workers in? Like some Tesla mega factory. The education ministry has more workers than there are teachers.

 

 

Push papers around.  Workflows in Thailand are mostly manual and productivity is largely measured by how many reams of paper are consumed.  Managers are expected to sign lots and lots of forms.  Signing things is a show of status in the org chart.  This river of paperwork gives rise to lots of support personnel from the supply chain to the recycling staff.

 

Business process automation will make lots of schools more efficient and reduce their budgets, but it will also make a lot of staff superfluous.  That means it's not going to happen.

 

As to the OP, each province should have control over its own educational services.  I'd also like to see the TCT dissolved.  Schools should be able to evaluate the quality of candidate teachers on their own.

1 minute ago, lannarebirth said:

I don't care one way or the other but for kicks I tried spelling it correctly and got 1.56 million hits. But on the other hand, who cares?

 

I get tired of people here just being non-stop fountains of BS, so this kind of thing is useful for revealing posting sleaziness.

 

You probably searched without the quotes.  Doing that returns hundreds of thousands of hits but the two words can appear anywhere on the page and don't need to be next to each other.

4 minutes ago, lannarebirth said:

 

But if you spell douche correctly about 1.5 million.

Nope, only five results and they're all in French except for the 5th hit which is this very page. 

 

 

So it's a French term, which would mean... I guess... enlightened shower?  Trumpists need to do a better job of coining insults.

I'm a little curious as to what prompted you to look into an issue that you perceived was due to insufficient bandwidth.  Are you trying to pull a file over the internet and expecting its transfer speed to match your service bandwidth?  Because that's unlikely ever to happen.

 

My brothers inlaw all like to connect to some Japanese/anime provider in [I forget what country] and they always complain that "the internet is slow".  They demanded their father upgrade from a 20Mbps package to a 50M fiber.  There was, of course, no change in performance because the perceived slowness is due to latency, not bandwidth.

 

Now I've got this 50Mbps pipe to my desktop, and literally nothing I could do on my computer that would ever come close to making use of all that.  

 

Having said that, have you looked into possible latency issues between you and the target server?

7 hours ago, Henryford said:

Same here i have an Onkyo receiver which has a fault (after 3 years) It only cost 10,000 baht so probably not worth a repair, unless it is @ 650 baht. Anyone want a dead one?

 

I used to fix these monsters, so I'm tempted.  Where are you?

1 hour ago, canuckamuck said:

The uniforms are a good idea, but why five different uniforms a week? That's the expensive part.

 

I don't see anything about five different uniforms in the OP.

 

One "uniform" might be gym clothes, but these could be simple shorts & t-shirt.

 

 

It doesn't get much cheaper than that.

 

The argument that uniforms blind students to each other's social status is ridiculous.  Students know each other outside of school, and there are lots of other clues to wealth and status besides clothing.

 

And just because we get rid of uniforms does not mean there will be absolutely no dress code at all.  Just keep it simple.  No flashy jewelry, heavy perfumes or high heels.

12 minutes ago, roobaa01 said:

1. years ago the nytimes reported about the trump losses, so obviously they dont know their own archives.

 

That's hilarious.

 

NY Times a few years ago: "Trump was deeply in debt back in the early 90s."

 

Trump: "Fake news from the failing NY Times!"

 

NY Times in 2019: "Here are the tax returns to prove it."

 

Trump: "So what?  You reported that years ago!"

 

 

12 minutes ago, roobaa01 said:

2. trumpy boy himself revealed in the 90s on tv his losses

 

so what is the news then ???

 

I went looking for the source on this, and was not surprised to see it came from Breitbart.  They say he mentioned the losses 15 years ago on his reality TV show.  In that clip, his lines was "about 13 years ago I was seriously in trouble.  I was billions of dollars in debt."  This is not the same thing as $1 billion in losses.  So at best he merely hinted at the losses - on a TV show.  

 

The news is that we now have documentary evidence confirming earlier reports of Trump's ham-fisted business ability.

17 hours ago, VincentRJ said:

I'm surprised you're having difficulty in understanding these concepts of clear, clean and odorless, although perhaps I shouldn't be surprised if you are a 'climate change alarmist'.

 

I did not say I don't understand what those words mean, I said I don't know why you're using them as if you were CO₂ salesman.

 

Quote

I use the term 'clear' to indicate that CO2 does not cause the haze and cloudiness of smog which is associated with the burning of fossil fuel without adequate emissions controls. 

 

 

So what?  The same could be said about poisonous carbon monoxide. 

 

 

Quote

I use the term 'clean' because CO2 does not result in any lung infections or harmful contamination that unclean substances might cause, such as dirt, bacteria, poisonous chemicals, and smog.

 

 

A substance does not have to be immediately harmful to health to be considered a pollutant.  The plastic bottle on my desk is causing no immediate harm to me, but plastic is most certainly an environmental pollutant.

 

 

Quote

Calling CO2 a pollutant is sheer nonsense.
 

 

Who here has done that?  If you are calling out somebody for making an inaccurate or silly statement, why don't you quote them?

 

Having said that, it sounds like you have a naïve understanding of what "pollutant" means in the context of ecosystems and the environment.  A pollutant can be anything that has deleterious effects on the environment and impacts the health or well-being of the organisms living in it.

 

Just skimming over random ecology studies in Google Scholar, I can see a dozen papers that have words to the effect of "A pollutant generally refers to a substance or energy that has undesired effects in the environment".

 

Environmentalists and resource economists differentiate between fund pollutants and stock pollutants.  Throughout most of human history, CO₂ traditionally has been a fund pollutant, because the Earth has mechanisms such as chemical deposition (the formation of accumulating limestone and mineral carbonates), photosynthesis and oceanic dissolution. 

 

But when emission of a fund pollutant exceeds the environment's ability to absorb it without harm, it becomes a stock pollutant.  This is clearly the case with CO₂.

 

CO₂ is a pollutant according to the US Clean Air Act:

 

(g) The term “air pollutant” means any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive (including source material, special nuclear material, and byproduct material) substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air. Such term includes any precursors to the formation of any air pollutant, to the extent the Administrator has identified such precursor or precursors for the particular purpose for which the term “air pollutant” is used.

 

Greenhouse gasses dumped into the atmosphere clearly fit that definition.  Thus legally in the USA, CO₂ is an air pollutant which must be regulated since it may "endanger public health or welfare".  

 

Where else can we go to get a definition of what a pollutant is?  How about the Encyclopedia Brittanica?   According to them, pollution is:

 

the addition of any substance (solid, liquid, or gas) or any form of energy (such as heat, sound, or radioactivity) to the environment at a rate faster than it can be dispersed, diluted, decomposed, recycled, or stored in some harmless form.

 

Brittanica continues:

 

Modern society is also concerned about specific types of pollutants, such as noise pollution, light pollution, and plastic pollution. Pollution of all kinds can have negative effects on the environment and wildlife and often impacts human health and well-being.

 

I bet you didn't know that noise, light and plastic can all be pollutants.  Or is that "sneer nonsense" too?

 

To continue, CO₂ is a pollutant of the oceans because it acidifies the water and makes it a less hospitable environment for aquatic life.  Some coral reefs are dead or dying because of too much CO₂ in the oceans.  So yes, it's a pollutant.

 

National Geographic:

 

Air pollution is a mix of particles and gases that can reach harmful concentrations both outside and indoors. Its effects can range from higher disease risks to rising temperatures. Soot, smoke, mold, pollen, methane, and carbon dioxide are a just few examples of common pollutants.

 

Scientific American: The Worst Climate Pollution Is Carbon Dioxide

 

CO2 outranks soot, methane and even hydrofluorocarbons in terms of long-term global warming

 

You may personally disagree with the classification of CO₂ as a pollutant, but your opinion is meaningless since environmentalists and ecologists have a rigid definition of what pollution is, and CO₂ clearly fits that definition.

23 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

Social justice warriors have this inordinate fear of catastrophe, which is why they are always claiming that doom is just around the corner.

 

Okay, social justice whatnow?  What does that have to do with the topic?  I had to go look that up, since it appears to be a slur du jour.

 

"Social justice warrior is a pejorative term for an individual who promotes socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism, as well as identity politics."

 

So I ask again: relevance to this topic?  Or did you just need a boogey man to knock down?

 

 

23 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

They can never celebrate the tremendous successes of the last 40 years in improving the environment, and preventing poor people from dying of a variety of horrible diseases.

 

They can't?  Why not?  In this very discussion I have celebrated the advancements of science in both agriculture and medicine.  So I think you missed your target.  Here's the problem:

 

Subject: A million species are at risk of extinction.

Your point: But poor people are healthier!

 

It's not that healthier poor people isn't a good thing, it's just that it's a non sequitur for this discussion.

 

23 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

The UN itself has celebrated reaching its poverty reduction goals faster than expected; more than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990. But I suppose you wouldn't celebrate that, either.

 

That's presumptuous, but entirely expected.  Anyway, you suppose wrongly.

 

 

23 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

Biodiversity is something we should take seriously, but it is not an imminent catastrophe, and should not blind us to all the good things going on in the world.

 

Nobody is being blinded to "all the good things going on in the world".  It's just that they don't have much to do with the subject.  Start a discussion about all the good things going on in the world and I will be the first to start polishing up my trumpets and pom-poms.

18 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

Do you not think that a huge increase in the wonderful natural fauna of our planet is something to celebrate?

 

 

Assuming you meant to write "flora", no - not at the expense of a planet that is habitable by our current human population along with all the coastal infrastructure it has erected.  I refer you back to the title of this discussion.

 

 

18 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

By the way, you should probably leave off the attempts at humor - you're clearly not cut out for it.

 

 

No, it just means I need to add closed-captions for the humor impaired.

12 minutes ago, ThaiBunny said:

I've always assumed that sea water, containing salt, isn't pure water

 

Just like CO₂ is in the air, which is full of impurities.  You underscore my point exactly: why say something as foolish as "pure CO₂"?

5 minutes ago, RickBradford said:

Who is Mrs. Lincoln? Apart from being the wife of Mr. Lincoln, of course.

 

That is exactly who she is.  The phrase is a sarcastic attempt meant to reveal a superficial distraction that downplays the broad significance of fundamental events.  Talking about how green the planet could be because of climate change is akin to a used-car salesman telling a potential buyer "nevermind all that technical stuff under the hood, look how shiny it is!"

 

 

 

37 minutes ago, rabas said:

Chemically pure CO2 is ultra clean.

Carbon and oxygen are the most abundant atoms in the universe outside big bang H and He.

Carbon is uniquely able to form 4 covalent bonds, infinitely complex chemicals, and stereoscopic isomers required for life.

Carbon is thus the miracle of life itself and CO2 its food.

You eat carbon compounds every day.

Carbon is a girls best friend (man, not so much)

CO2 is  invisible to 99% of the infra-red spectrum except for 3 very narrow bands.

These 3 bands allow atmospheric CO2 (your friend) to prevent the Earth from freezing and killing off all life.

 

That reads like satire.  I honestly can't tell if you're trying to be slapstick-funny or make some point.  All of these statements can be answered with "so?" because you haven't used any of them to support a thesis.

 

Chemically pure water is ultra clean, so I guess we shouldn't mind that sea levels rise 1.5 meters, right?

9 minutes ago, VincentRJ said:

Yes. It's a real tragedy that so many people seem unable to distinguish between that clean, clear and odorless gas called CO2, which is essential for all life, and the harmful pollutants which can harm our health and the environment.

 

By what standard is CO₂ a "clean" gas?  CO₂ is more than 27% carbon by weight.  That's clean?

 

And why does it matter that it's odorless?  So is carbon monoxide.  I guess that's a "clean" gas too? 

 

And as for being "clear", it's opaque at infrared wavelengths.  You are basically saying that since humans can't see it, CO₂ must not be a big problem.

 

 

These are statements I would expect to hear from Senator Snowball.