OT Boeing strike

I tend to agree with you Neil. It's a life style decision to stay in NZ.
I've been fortunate in the last few years that the majority of my work has
been for offshore clients. I guess I'm one of those cheap outsources, but it
suits me fine.

....and I'm voting for a change of government.

Cheers.

 

well I don't blame you at all Cam, really I wonder why I persist...oz has
looked very attractive to me quite often. I would like to think a wallpaper
change would be helpful but I think foremost we need to change our self
defeating culture and this is somewhat harder than ticking a box or two.
This would be about 25 years overdue....maybe there is still time but it had
better be soon or there will only be scraps to pick over.
regards
neil

 

My brother is actually a PHD physicist designing photonic test
equipment which get used to test & debug fiber optic lines.
http://www.photonkinetics.com/ His company he works for, though
small, brings needed higher tech jobs to an area very much like
Auckland.

I currently have bought a couple plastic molds from a company in
Auckland, with good success. Fair pricing and great service. I sold
an interest in one of my companies to F&P 20 years ago, and have good
memories of N.Z. I'm looking forward to more work (& maybe play) with
N.Z.

I see N.Z. as being in need of a real supercharged sales effort aimed
at both OEM products and finished consumer items, which can be targeted
to raise awareness in the U.S. Some slogan along with government and
trade groups presenting a united front would help: "NZ Now". NZ
government does need to promote its capabilities of its citizens, as a
part of helping to grow its economy.

It is difficult to do international trade promotion without
manufacturing trade groups that target specific niches, because the
costs are large, but the benefits can ultimately be there. F&P in
Auckland is large enough to do a good business on its own, and
establish both medical and consumer product lines in the U.S.

 

sorry, I picked up the wrong interpretation from your post re forestry....
yes NZ needs many things to happen...it is very frustrating...realistically
though we are not ready to promote ourselves - we need to get organised and
build capability and capacity first...in the mean time y'all better keep
seeing NZ films to keep us alive down here ;o)

 

That's not really the long term bad news.
Energy is. Nations will keep developing (much of Africa
remains, too, as a cheap source of labor) but oil will be
running out ..... we are probably at or near peak supply
now, worldwide.

Not to mention global warming and it's effects from burning
all that Carbon (there's lots more of that in coal & oil shales
and seabed methane deposits but even all of that would run
out someday).

Another problem is that cheap" labor. You need to measure
it in terms not of dollars but more in terms of kilos of foods,
etc. A kilo of rice in China = a kilo of wheat in the US. That
is real value while things like dollars (which are cheap to print
and even cheaper when they are just numbers in a computer
somewhere and the shrub's Enron accountants are watching the till)
get manipulated & falsely compared, just adding to the problems.

Was Long Island really worth all those beads?

 

It's nice, IMHO.
I've worked there (Australia, not NZ).
But immigration for work is really iffy. You'll have better luck if
you retire there and bring several million US dollars with you.

The lad that cleaned my apartment building had a PhD
in aerospace engineering, as an example. And he was
an Australian.

 

Cliff notes: "but oil will be running out ..... we are probably at or
near peak supply now, worldwide. " &
...."& oil shales".

OIL SHALE: Shell Oil just announced a successful "in situ" recovery of
oil & gas from shale in Colorado from a test plot which returned about
3.5 times the energy used to release the oil.

Short term is 20 years, and I think nuclear will have to do for the
intermediate, as no other demonstrated technical solution exists which
is that efficient or safe, engineering wise.

The industrialized world will see a MASSIVE uptick in production and
refining as a result of demand and cost pressures, which will improve
retail prices rather quickly from the details I read.

Bo

 

IIRC Much of Germany's oil needs (and they had a lot) were met
during WW-II by producing oil from coal.
What happened to THAT technology?

And remember Carter & the oil embargo? They funded
such research in the US then IIRC.

But none of this will help any with global warming.
IIRC Excess CO2 makes you stupid too <G>.

 

2 dozen ice ages in less than the last 2 million years or so in North
America coupled with a lack of knowledge about what puts the Earth into
those ice ages, and then lack of knowledge about what it is that brings
the Earth out of the same ice age is a severe deficiency in
understanding what human society is up against.

China consumes the most coal and cares less about whether they are
releasing pollution of any type, though they are being politically
pressured.

No one knows how to avoid the next ice age or predict when it will
come, though the Greenland ice cores show an ice age can start in a few
years to a decade. Humans do not have enough knowledge to understand
what is natural in cycles, what is possible and what society can do or
afford to do. Thinking that reductions of a fraction of 1% difference
in CO2 over a century without understanding critical Earth climate
cycles is trogolite thinking.

The U.S. can't fix anything, when China and the rest of the world just
consume coal and wood at gluttonous rates, and that I suspect may
overshadow oil consumption.

Kyoto is pure politics, with just window-dressing science as a dressing
on top.

Bo

 

ok this is getting well off an off topic but Kyoto is an example of the US
playing hardball but with the environment - it affects the pocket so the US
won't do it - we know bad weather is coming but it actually has to get here
and do damage before we do anything...freedom of choice, someone else is
causing it and all that..
apparently everyone who is a well conditioned consumer wants a SUV and a
V8 - GM toyed with electric cars but made a sports car to go as fast as a
gas model...about 30 years have gone by since the oil shocks and nothing
happened - it takes the Japanese to actually do the sensible and make
something practical and efficient.
the 'US' can make a large difference but it would rather be self serving and
philosophically aloof and contemptuous of everyone else...same sort of
attitude as to the UN...as a foreigner I can't really get my head around
what is at the root of this mentality - it seems like the war of
independence lives on in the American subconscious....
BTW I understand the US itself is a large consumer of coal.
anyway better get back to SW topics.
neil

 

Yeah this is way off SolidWorks, but it is labeled "OT", so everyone
knows going in.

Kyoto is a virtual political buzz word at this point, and I doubt 1 in
100 people have read and studied the proposal and what it posits. How
much would it do and not do and how much it would cost? In the end,
the question is if anything meaningful, not just figurative, could be
done, and if that would actually help the original issue, which is
global warming?

Everything I see in science portends climate change being most likely
due to solar output of the Sun and other long term cycles which are not
yet known well enough to predict. I have looked at the last ice ages &
CO2 level fluctuations:

http://www-class.unl.edu/geol101i/images/climate images/Glaciers/CO2
Vostok with Ice Ages.gif

It looks like to me, the prior cycles are getting ready to repeat, and
the world will thus likely reenter a cooling period, just like the last
4+ cycles of glaciation. That will destroy Canada, the entire northern
half of Europe, & most of Russia, etc.

We certainly have a lot of political wackos in the U.S., and I doubt
any sane person of either major party is likely to deny that.

Unfortunately this society (& likely other 'wester' countries) have
devolved their political members into semi-celebreties constantly
seeking face time in the media, so they can issue 20-60 second sound
bites & get reelected.

U.S. politicians want to duck the hard questions and problems, and
approve spending money on what we in the U.S. refer to as "Pork"
projects in their own home states or districts to get a park, or
bridge, or some other project funded.

The real hard difficult and sometimes critical infrastructure items are
ones our congress & sometimes president doesn't want to tackle, which I
refer to as the 6 E's:

1. Entry into the U.S.: Immigration & borders (hindered by a
political correctness factor)
2. Energy: Capacity and delivery methods for ALL SOURCES
3. Emergency planning and response (Katrina anyone; and that is
primarily state and local)
4. Education: The next generations of citizens WILL run the entire
country & select its politicians.
5. Environment: All the way from substances used in everyday life,
water, air, land, food, & fuel, there is no doubt the U.S. congress has
wiggled around some real solutions on some issues.
6. Enemies: The nature of an enemy country today has switched from
emphasis on military issues to one of commerce and intellectual
property, and there are now 2 large countries, Russia and China, bent
on stealing by any method they can use, the information they want, so
they can use it to profit against not only the U.S. but Europe and
other developed countries, but I do not see recognition of this from
politicians, and instead I see them giving away the farm.

We in the U.S. including all of us good SolidWorks users need to elect
politicians who will deal with the "E's" to enhance and protect our
infrastructure.

Bo

 

/*
The U.S. can't fix anything, when China and the rest of the world just
consume coal and wood at gluttonous rates, and that I suspect may
overshadow oil consumption.
*/

Nobody is going to "fix" anything as long as all civilized socio-economic
systems rely on population growth and technological evolution for their health.
Just grab the handlebars and enjoy the ride if you can.

 

Jeff, unfortunately I agree with you that "growth" is at the heart of
so many issues, but it is politically untouchable on local to national
levels.

Start speaking of limiting growth, and large numbers of groups will say
you are advocating genocide, benefits to the "landed gentry" (those
that got), perpetuation of the "West's" economic domination or racial
discrimination, etc etc.

But no one denys that in the animal kingdom, that when you get too many
deer on an isolated island with no predators, that eventually they will
eat all the food, and the population will collapse. Jared Diamond's
latest book is indeed titled "Collapse" and talks about what has caused
societies to fail. Politicians are not likely to heed the lessons of
the past very well. Probably it is because they are politicians, not
scientists or engineers. In fact, I think the majority of politicians
are lawyers...enjoy fighting and such.

Oh well. I do what I can, and like you, enjoy the ride.

Bo

 

Oh, yeah, and it has been a slow weekend.

Bo

 

It's actually too minimal by far.
It only cuts CO2 emissions by a few percent, if adopted &
actually complied with.

It would be a bare start.

That's a spot of total rubbish.
You are confusing long term issues partially out of our control
at present, that function on a geological time scale, with things
that are a result of our actions that have effects in decades.

Don't pay much attention to that anti-science, anti-education
winger BS.

HTH
-- Cliff

 

On the bright side, we may well run out of oil & coal
a bit before the methane deposits boil ...... or not.
At what point does the greenhouse effect become a runaway?

 

I agree that pollution is a problem but being an armature astronomer do
you realize that the polar icecaps on mars are retreating at the same
rate as here on earth. Yes we can affect a change in the world but I
think the scale of which we have done it is greatly exaggerated.

Dont think I am a pave the earth and lets drive everywhere and make
steel trees kinda person but seriously, how bout we gather the facts and
make a educated decision.

Guess that the above makes me a scientific, anti-science, well educated,
anti-education wigner. Hummm

The scholar says the earth is round
The skeptic says its flat
The scholar says the earth is sound
The skeptic questions that
The scholar calls the skeptic fool
The skeptic calls the scholar an ass
Imagine how well they would get along
If the scholar just skipped school.


Ben

 

well I think actually your response makes you look like a dickhead...
and I bet you have an uncle who chain smoked and lived to be 102...

strip mining, toxic tailings
deforestation, loss of wetlands
erosion ,fertiliser contamination
nuclear contamination
heavy metals, toxic waste
acid rain
pesticide residues
smog, ozone depletion
raw sewage, leaking landfills, depleted aquifers
species jumping disease, superbugs
loss of biodiversity, habitat, extinction

really instead of saying pissing on the earth isn't happening you ought to
be grateful it has been as resilient as it has been until now.
how about we learn from the mistakes made already and avoid a very large
one...personally I am not interested in waiting until the facts are in...

 

Which they do on a seasonal basis.

The greenhouse effect follows from the properties of CO2.
The only questions are where the extra heat goes and it's
effects.

The facts are known fairly well. The problem is in the
decisionmaking.
Many say that they will be dead so why worry. Others say that
some "god" will fix it for them later if they thump properly. Many
are just in denial.

One of the things that we don't know about is that avalanche
effect ... AFAIK. If & when & how bad ....

Starting to sound .....

 

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html

A quick Google search will turn up much more.

Bo