arabsandals

Surely you mean Featherstonhaugh?

Evolution is not based on reason or logic, or some sort of intelligent design principles. Dumb **** often happens. Look at Panda bears and their carnivorous gut paired with a low nutrition diet of bamboo. Look at the laryngeal nerve of Giraffes. You can do whatever you like. If it keeps you alive long enough to propagate your genes, job's a good un. Evolution is a a dead end argument when applied to humans because we adapt our environment to us, not the other way around. I respect vegans for taking a stand against industrial farming and cruelty; I wish I was principled enough, but I'm too lazy, I like meat too much and viable alternatives are currently too expensive. But don't come with pseudo-scientific rubbish. It really leaves a bad taste in one's mouth, more so when you try to marshal your arguments on a scientific basis. This muddle headed, ignorant and low-effort approach is why we had idiots that support anti-vaxxers and think that Bill Gates is trying to implant people with microchips. You're part of the problem.

It doesn't make sense to speak of drinking milk in terms of whether or not we're "meant" to drink it; there's no set of universal laws around consumption that we must abide by. If you apply your "milk is for babies" logic, fruit is the seed bearing structure for plants intended to disseminate seeds so naughty humans can't eat them. Absolutism is stupid. Edit: forgot to add that you 100% introduced the notion that milk is a major factor in osteoporosis in a way which made it clear you meant it as a statement rather than a question. Don't play games. It's annoying.

My dude (dudette?). Seriously. There is some SUSPICION that proteins in milk MAY affect the amount of calcium being absorbed, but that is about as close as it is possible to get to being the OPPOSITE of your statement that milk consumption is a huge factor in osteoporosis. If you're going to post definitive statements just spend 5 minutes Googling to make sure they're roughly correct. Karen on Facebook will read this and stop giving her gluten-free, macro-nutrient kids the milk that they desperately need.

Aah, the dot com bubble. Good times. Good times.

No waste? The pods are themselves waste! Every cup of coffee has an accompanying plastic container!

This is the correct response.

Seems like you already know the answers to your questions. If you didn't have your dogs would you have jumped ship? Separate the emotions from the facts. Emotions can be dealt with and are subjective, but facts don't change no matter how you feel about them.

Vewy vewy quiet...

Just checking in to see how intern feels about the NZ lockdown being lifted...

Yeah...nah. I'm not an armchari epidemiologist. I just understand addition, multiplication and basic statistics. Here's a guy who is an actual epidemiologist who crisply outlines why every country in the world reacted the way they did. The CFR in his article is from early on so it's like just over three percent and I think it's now assumed to be around 2, but that doesn't significantly affect things. http://blog.deonandan.com/wordpress/2020/03/covid19-whats-the-end-game.html?fbclid=IwAR0NElofcQbtAsgv_TPhb6tlB5N7zwncI3zpWiqhVugQShTnbdtE9atf_Uk

yeah but...

No. That's not what I was getting at. We have robust models of infectious disease spread which rely on statistical methods. We can also make predictions about both the number of people a given disease will kill and also how much capacity health systems have. If you combine all of that with guesstimates about the number of people that are going to require some sot of clinical intervention you can work out whether or not a healthcare system is going to be overwhelmed. By overwhelmed, I mean hospitals so full they can't function and then everyone in there starts to die, not just the people that would have died anyway when they caught the disease. It's literally that simple. That's why pretty much every country is taking drastic measures instead of doing nothing. In other words, from any perspective, economic/social/health it's worse to do nothing. It's not an argument about some technical point about the nature of the disease. It's simple hard mathematical facts, not guesswork or hypotheses. They look at the numbers and then determine a cause of action at the time of measurement. It's the most rational behaviour one can imagine. Not doing so is political

I'm starting to think you're just baiting all of us for the lulz...

The science is based on a painstaking century long analysis of another great pandemic. Also epidemiology is literally the study of the spread of disease. Everything they're saying and suggesting has been tried and tested before. Scientists have been saying we're going to have a pandemic for decades. Come ON. You can do better. Apply some critical thinking.

If everyone carried on as if nothing was happening we'd be seeing tens of millions of deaths (if not more) and huge numbers of people with serious health complications; some permanent, some temporary. It's a very simple numbers game.The US alone has had almost 80000 deaths. There are currently 282000 deaths worldwide, in the space of about two or three months! And most countries have had a lockdown in place. I really cannot understand your attitude, it's really baffling. You keep on banging on about some mythical 2% mortality rate. To put that into context, that's close to the mortality rate of WWII relative to the 1940 global population (approx 3%)... The reality is that nobody knows. Even if you assume a really low mortality rate of like .1% (assuming figures have been skewed and there're way more infected people than are being tested etc.), using the current global population, that's still 7.8 million people. If you just use the 2% figure that's 156 MILLION people dead! If you don't think that is the basis for caution, then there's really no point discussing it with you. Also, if you think the economic damage of taking precautions is bad, it pales in comparison to what would happen if the world had just let COVID-19 run its course. Assuming that being infected confers lasting protection, then it would probably be over in a year or two, but the huge numbers of deaths and impacts on health and social systems would last for generations.

OMG. This again. Ardern is leading the charge globally. On track to sew up a pandemic that has felled just about every other economy. In the space of a couple of months. The economic windfalls are going to be enormous. NZ will be the only developed economy which will be operating largely normally. Everyone else will have COVID drag. Thank your lucky stars you have a leader that actually has some balls and leads using actual expert advice.

This is really the whole point. It's also why things are expensive. You could go live in Puntland and be completely free from regulation and taxes with very cheap housing, but it's probably not going to be a lekker lifestyle...

If you book well in advance you can camp down in the grand canyon. We went once and would have lved to but only found out about it when we arrived, which was too late; https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/camp/bright-angel-campground

Central Coast NSW is a conflagration. It was bad before today and will only get worse with the gale force winds and high temps.

A much higher proportion of the population owns cars in Australia, therefore more cars and more theft as the market is larger and easier to move units around. Australia has over 19 million cars on the road whereas SA only has 9 million odd. Re crime, I reckon it's largely a function of employment. Australia has a 5% unemployment rate, SA's is officially 29% but I think it's objectively closer to 50%, depending on how you measure it.

Need to be careful about that as cc Ts and Cs usually provide that the facility os only for residents of the home jurisdiction...

No. No. No. This is not a bigpharma issue. It's a health issue and tinfoil-hattery is not helpful. It's a combination of better data and longer life, mostly (as far as I understand it). Some lifestyle cancers are increasing, sure. But you're always one cell death away from cancer.

All of that, BUT... you can literally forget to lock your door and it's likely nothing will happen. You hear a noise in the night and think "Hmm, wonder what that was?" and then promptly fall asleep instead of putting on your Go! face and sneaking through the house with a golf club. Kids are safe, cops are professional, stuff works, blah blah etc. There's a reason it's expensive and it's not because everything's being funnelled into the back pockets of the current coterie of entrepreneurs/politically connected parasites. Also, you can leave your stuff in public places, come back a couple days later and someone will almost invariably have put it somewhere safe but in full view for you to come and collect. People will hand wallets in full of MONEY and new smartphones! IT'S CRAZY! Finally, you have a high degree of certainty around the way society functions on on the things on which life depends. Hospitals are properly staffed, streetlights are going to work, roads will be fixed and water supply will continue to be reticulated.

I'll just leave this here https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=South+Africa&country2=New+Zealand&city1=Johannesburg&city2=Auckland