nisakiman

1 minute ago, robertthebruce said:

 

Say what you like about "Starbucks" , but at least you get Zero percent fat Milk, and a Skinny Muffin...

 

 

 Can't think of anything worse. Zero percent fat milk? Skinny muffin?

Why bother? Might as well just buy a bottle of water. It'll cost a lot less, and taste about the same.

Starbucks is just overpriced garbage anyway, whatever you buy.

3 hours ago, Shawn0000 said:

 

Yes, that is an old one and debunked a million times.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/12/what-anti-smoking-evidence.html

This article explains quite well how you have been mislead into believing those studies demonstrate that there is no link between ill health and smoking.  Quite amusingly some actually believe there is a conspiracy against smokers, I guess it never occured to them that there are so many people with a financial interest in misleading people into continuing to smoke, but none into quitting.

 

Ha!

Of course, the multi billion dollar NRT industry doesn't count, does it!

Nor does the incredibly well funded (to the tune of hundreds of millions) anti-smoking gravy train count, either, naturally.

And of course, the fact that the biggest three pharmaceutical industries went into 'partnership' with the WHO to finance their FCTC which rolled out worldwide smoking bans (sign the FCTC treaty or you will find our sister organisations, the IMF and World Bank less than helpful if and when you need them), thus paving the way for their hugely overpriced and useless nicotine patches and gums is just coincidental, no? Gosh, what a stroke of luck for them that their financing of the illiberal FCTC just happened to generate massive profits. No conspiracy there, I'm sure. The motivations of Big Pharma were purely altruistic, obviously.

Right, pull the other one. It's got bells on!

3 hours ago, Shawn0000 said:

 

The evidence that tobacco causes diseases stands up to epidemiological scrutiny, there is a massive amount of evidence that has already stood up to epidemiological scrutiny supporting that tobacco causes lung cancer as well as other cancers, heat disease and strokes.

In 1968 fourteen hundred British civil servants, all smokers, were divided into two similar groups. Half were encouraged and counselled to quit smoking. These formed the test group. The others, the control group, were left to their own devices. For ten years both groups were monitored with respect to their health and smoking status.

Such a study is known as a randomised controlled intervention trial. It has become increasingly the benchmark, or as it is often referred to, the "gold standard" of medical investigation. Any week you can open The Lancet or British Medical Journal and you will likely find an example of such a trial to determine the benefits or harm of some new therapy.

.......

So what were the results of the Whitehall study? They were contrary to all expectation. The quit group showed no improvement in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rates due to heart disease, lung cancer, or any other cause with one exception: certain other cancers were more than twice as common in the quit group. Later, after twenty years there was still no benefit in life expectancy for the quit group.

Over the next decade the results of other similar trials appeared. It had been argued that if an improvement in one life-style factor, smoking, were of benefit, then an improvement in several - eg smoking, diet and exercise - should produce even clearer benefits. And so appeared the results of the whimsically acronymed Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial or MRFIT, with its 12,886 American subjects. Similarly, in Europe 60,881 subjects in four countries took part in the WHO Collaborative Trial. In Sweden the Goteborg study had 30,022 subjects. These were enormously expensive, wide-spread and time-consuming experiments. In all, there were 6 such trials with a total of over a hundred thousand subjects each engaged for an average of 7.4 years, a grand total of nearly 800,000 subject-years. The results of all were uniform, forthright and unequivocal: giving up smoking, even when fortified by improved diet and exercise, produced no increase in life expectancy. Nor was there any change in the death rate for heart disease or for cancer. A decade of expensive and protracted research had produced a quite unexpected result.

http://members.iinet.com.au/~ray/TSSOASb.html

5 hours ago, Wilsonandson said:

Risks of marijuana :-

1/ Studies show cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, other psychoses, and social anxiety disorders. It can also raise the risk of depression, studies have found.

2/ Heavy marijuana users are more likely to report thoughts of suicide and heavy use of the drug can worsen symptoms of bipolar disease.

3/ Learning, memory and attention are impaired after using cannabis and there's some evidence that they are damaged even after people stop using it.

4/ Studies have found some evidence cannabis use can raise the risk of unemployment, and users earn less than non-users.

5/ It can impair driving.Use may raise the risk of testicular cancer.

6/ Smoking marijuana may trigger a heart attack.

7/ It can worsen bronchitis and chronic cough.

8/ Babies born to women who smoke marijuana while pregnant can weigh too little.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/report-marijuana-users-risk-schizophrenia-drug-helps-pain-n706196

 

There seems to be an awful lot of 'likely', 'some evidence', 'can', 'may', and such; generally used when the people conducting those 'studies' don't actually have any hard evidence and when the incidences they have recorded are so rare as to be statistically insignificant. It's the get-out card for if they get pinned down on any of their claims.

It's an old trick that all campaigners who don't like something (or in particular, don't like other people enjoying something) use. They've been doing the same thing about tobacco for years. It 'can' cause this; it 'might' cause that; 'studies point to'; 'experts have said' etc etc. All with a view to convincing people that these are facts, when in reality there is only vague and tenuous correlation that wouldn't stand up to epidemiological scrutiny. It's the finger-wagger's charter, because they know most people are gullible enough to think that if an 'expert' (self-proclaimed or otherwise) has said it, then it must be true, regardless of all the caveats hidden away in the press release.

So you think we should all live our lives according to the diktats of those who think they know best?

The problem with all that cash is that it's getting increasingly difficult to spend it.

Fifteen years ago here in Greece, I bought a property, and to complete the deal, I had to go to the bank and draw out €100,000 in cash (the bank helpfully provided a carrier bag to put it in), walk it round to the notary's office, and then sit for half an hour while the vendor counted it. Once that was done, the papers were signed and the deal done. On the paperwork, for tax purposes, the price paid was €50,000.

These days (and I suspect it's now the same in Thailand), that isn't so easy, at least not for larger sums. The taxman has got wise to the sieve-like properties of cash deals, and wants to see a paper trail.

So it's all very well having 56m Baht cash under the bed, but if you can't show where it's come from, translating that money into solid assets like a nice house and/or car is just another problem. Even the laundering loopholes are closing fast.

One way to increase the work rate in class, I guess.

I really can't think of a more pointless exercise than banning the sale of alcohol near schools. All it will achieve is to cause huge problems for people who have shops or bars that sell alcohol that fall within this stupid 'zone'. Is this zone supposed to encompass all outlets? Including 7/11 stores? Because if so, it will also cause problems for people who live near a school if they want to pop down the local 7/11 to pick up a couple of beers.

The only people it won't cause any major problems for is the kids, as kids, being what kids are, will just organise to get their alcohol from outside the zone. I know that when I was a kid, a ruling like this would have made no difference at all. If a bunch of us were intent on getting hold of alcohol, zone or no zone, we would get it.

This is just virtue signalling that hasn't been thought through. They are going to punish the innocent just so they can be seen to be 'doing something'.

Utter stupidity.

9 hours ago, manarak said:

not a wise quote.

That depends on whether or not you like other people making your decisions for you.

Personally, I prefer to make my own decisions about how I live my life, so for me, that quote is a reflection of my own philosophy.

"Those of us who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make their own mistakes. If a man knowingly prefers to live for today, to use his resources for current enjoyment, deliberately choosing a penurious old age, by what right do we prevent him from doing so? We may argue with him, seek to persuade him that he is wrong, but are we entitled to use coercion to prevent him from doing what he chooses to do? Is there not always the possibility that he is right and we are wrong? Humility is the distinguishing characteristic of the believer in freedom, arrogance of the paternalist."

Milton Friedman.

The two main culprits are plastic supermarket bags and plastic water bottles. A small (say 2 Baht) charge for bags would dramatically reduce their use. As for water bottles, I'm not sure. They are, I believe, easily recyclable, so perhaps a deposit system like they used to have on soft drinks bottles when I was a kid would work. Given the number of bottles of water sold, a one Baht per bottle tax would probably cover the cost of setting up collection points, and the bottles themselves should go a long way to covering the cost of recycling. It just needs a bit of intelligent thought and the will to make it work.

If the majority of water / drinks bottles and bags were taken out of the equation, we would see a massive reduction in plastic pollution. Other plastic products can be addressed later, but those two items are the main offenders, and need to be dealt with ASAP.

"The whole problem with the world is that the fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts",

Bertrand Russell.

12 hours ago, JimmyJ said:

 

"The 'climate scientists' have really no more idea than you or I, whatever they may say."

 

An astonishing statement.

 

It is basically declaring that facts - demonstrable facts - are irrelevant.

 

 

It is impossible to have an intelligent discussion on any subject if that is one's belief.

 

 

 

 

On the contrary, I have no 'belief'; I'm completely open minded about it.

If there was convincing evidence of man-made climate change, I would be quite happy to abandon my scepticism. However, there is no compelling evidence to support the theory, only predictions of a computer model with incomplete data that is programmed by people with a vested interest in promoting the concept of AGW. (Let us not forget that AGW is a massively funded gravy train for those on board).

There has been a litany of lies and deception from within the AGW lobby, from the notorious 'J' curve to the University of East Anglia emails scandal to documented cherry-picking of data sets to suit the AGW agenda. And just recently, we have the executive secretary of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres, saying: “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”, which rather spills the beans on why AGW is being so heavily propagandised by those who are so keen to destroy nation states and establish the New World Order.

As I said in an earlier post, as soon as people start saying "the science is settled" and seek to shut down any debate, and excommunicate any dissenters to the PC narrative by labelling them 'deniers', then as far as I'm concerned, they have lost the debate.

As I also said earlier, the theory of AGW, if scientific, should welcome debate and open dialogue. The fact that debate and open dialogue are anathema to the proponents of AGW puts them into the classification of religious fanatics, ideologues.

The financiers of the AGW movement have no interest in climate. Their interest is in wealth redistribution and centralising power. Which is why it is the political Left and their backers who are most vociferous about crippling the industrial base of the west in the name of 'Global Warming'.

And no, I'm not a 'tinfoil hatter' conspiracy theorist. I've read a great deal from both sides of the debate, and I've taken note of political movements around the world and how they align (or not) with various modern global movements, not just AGW. And I'm not the only one to have noticed a pattern emerging.

Do you know anything about the Frankfurt School of thought? If not, look it up, read about it and then look around you at what's happening in the world today.

As I said, I'm quite prepared to change my mind if given compelling evidence. However, the evidence available points more to a propaganda exercise than a scientific reality.

On 22/01/2017 at 8:11 PM, Lancashirelad said:

Napier Deltic 2 stroke diesel:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Deltic

 

 

 

 

Back in the '70s when I was in Aus I used to drive a Kenworth K125 truck with a two stroke diesel. Detroit Diesel 8V92T. Great motor, and a unique exhaust note. They went like shit off a stick.

This is a really bad photo, but it's an old print I scanned. That's my oldest boy in the cab - he's 44 now!

15 minutes ago, 007cableguy said:

In the U.K. That would be written off but it will soon be back on the road ,Maybe crabbing a bit but ok!


Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect

Just a scratch, mate. Bit of filler and touch up the paint and she's ready to go.

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In certain conditions the rear end can lose it and its happened to me once on loose gravel. Is that bc it is rear wheel drive?

Not so much the fact it's rear wheel drive, more to do with there being no weight over the rear axle when it's empty. A mate of mine in London back in the '80s had a Dodge pick up with a big V8. He had to put several bags of sand in the back to stop it being too tail-happy.

“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”

Margaret Thatcher.

18 hours ago, Thian said:

I see, it's almost the same as our kitchen, massive teakwood. But we also have the same problem, the bin doesn't have a real place.

And my wife refuses to use the diswashingmachine...does yours use it?

When we were first married, my wife was also reluctant to use the dishwasher, but after a while (with a bit of pressure from me) she got used to the idea, and when our last DW died she went crazy until we got a new one! Maybe you should try bribing her. I bet after using it for a couple of months regularly, she'd become a convert!

When I design a kitchen, I usually try to incorporate an area at the end of a unit run to accommodate a medium size (70 litre or so) bin, and extend the worktop over it. I'm not keen on bins inside cupboard units, from a hygiene and odour point of view. After a while the cupboard absorbs the smell of rubbish, and it's very difficult to get rid of. Also, it's not very practical. A lidded bin in the open is much easier and cleaner.

I just this minute had a Viber text message from my daughter (both she and hubby vape) who just arrived in Ao Nang. She said that loads of people were using them in the bars there and nobody seems to be in the slightest bit bothered about it.

First time I heard this album (the original 'Doors' album) was in 1967, when I was living in a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. A couple of crazy New Yorkers turned up with an Alfa Romeo Spider (which they were planning to sell to one of the Afghan princes - there was still a king in those days - which is a whole story in itself I won't go into now), and they had a reel to reel tape recorder with them, with this album on it. We spent many a hash hazed evening listening to it, and it remains one of my favourite albums. I still play it regularly.

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The trouble was nisakiman I was in love with a woman at that time, very much so and I remember sitting in her car, I think it was the wonderful summer of 76 in the UK when you could drive at 9.00 pm at night with your windows down, it was that balmy, and she was singing along with this number, making sure I got the message! 5555

Still we've remained good friends to this day which is a good vibe.

Heh! I feel for you. Unrequited love is hard to take when you're young.

I think that track is one of the greatest love ballads ever. I'm not usually a fan of love ballads, but that one is particularly special.