Comments on: The Green campaign launch

By: Sapient

Sapient — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:14:49 +0000

exactly.

By: BluePeter

BluePeter — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:57:25 +0000

>>or we could just knock off everyone with an IQ under 130

But who would be left to vote Labour?

By: Sapient

Sapient — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:43 +0000

oh yeah, and i forgot euthenasia, gotta have a social norm towards knocking yourself off instead of retiring

By: Sapient

Sapient — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:58:40 +0000

Janine,
I was wondering if anyone would bite.
Domesticly I would work on changing social mores so as to encourage safe sex and to ensure that children are familar with the concepts involved and that comprehensive sex education is offfered to all school aged children.
I would make all, chemical, forms of contraception and the emergency contraception pill availible to people of all ages free of chage.
I would scale back benifits slightly for females of fertile age on any benifit and then offer an enhancement to that benifit equal to two too three times the scale back for the period that the is under the effects of the a temporary infertility injection.
I would make abortions legal up to the end of the first trimester in normal cases with a leniancy of afew weeks and up to the end of the second trimster where severe abnormalities, deformities, genetici diseases, etc are present and make it well known that the governemnt will not pay for anything wrong with the child which is detectble during this time. I would make abortions free also.

Internationally I would supply food and money aid only for natural disasters and any aid outside of natural disasters would go only towards infrastructure, to be implimented by this country, in that way people over the carrying capacity would starve and die off until the population is sustainable and/or the infrastructure has upgraded sufficently. I would decrease immigration of unskilled workers. I would, in facilitating the construction of infrastructure, also encourage family planning facilities and the same things stated in the previous section.

The coming wars should help with the rest, that and the market forces of an enforcable market scheme, tourism, and depleting oil.

or we could just knock off everyone with an IQ under 130 as set by todays standards.

By: Janine

Janine — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:13:41 +0000

“kill off” some of the population? Whom did you have in mind Sapient? And how would you do it?

Greens generally favour prevention over cure - contraception, education, etc rather than euthanasia.

Some years ago I saw a rather chilling film called Soylent Green which presupposed an overpopulated world with gated rich communities and everyone else crammed into slums. The soylent of the title was the food doled out each day to the masses. Everyone over 60 was given the ‘opportunity’ to be euthanased. The hero discovers that these voluntary martyrs were in fact processed into - soylent to be fed back to the masses.

I agree that overpopulation is a big issue but how you deal with it is an even bigger one.

By: Valis

Valis — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:15:10 +0000

“Well gee, I think it was when Russell opined that “building an empire on oil is like building an empire on sand.”

wat, I’m sorry Russel’s metaphor was lost on you. He was referring to the humongous future road building plans of both Labour and National.

“Yet it appears that Russell doesn’t doesn’t eschew the benefits of oil any more than me. It seems he’s telling us to do as he says, not as he does.”

One does not need to eschew the benefits of past oil usage to want to change our future course regarding oil dependence.

By: Shunda barunda

Shunda barunda — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 06:16:16 +0000

nuclear war anyone?

By: Sapient

Sapient — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 05:52:33 +0000

oil isint a problem… population is.
If we kill off some of the population, localy or globally, we decrease demand for oil while at the same time freeing up more land that was previously used to produces food and cash crops for use in biofuel production. oil ‘problem’ solved, ethical ‘problem’ irrelivant in the first place.

By: wat dabney

wat dabney — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 04:54:25 +0000

Valis,

Well gee, I think it was when Russell opined that “building an empire on oil is like building an empire on sand.”

Yet it appears that Russell doesn’t doesn’t eschew the benefits of oil any more than me. It seems he’s telling us to do as he says, not as he does.

By: Kevyn

Kevyn — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:43:36 +0000

bb, 10% excise tax on petrol and diesel That’s only 15 cents a litre so I presume it’s meant to be in addition to RUCs and RUC-equivalent excise duty of 45 cents a litre. After all, the cost of doing road works doesn’t fluctuate with the price oil so it doesn’t make any sense for Transit’s cashflow to be dependent on the price of oil. The petrol tax is merely a convenient way of applying user pays to road users until someone invents the equivalent an electricity meter for cars, eg GPS-RUCs.

The other tens on the list all make sense. Some molecular scientists have argued that people in an economy behave like molecules in a fluid or gas - more random than rational. Thus the impact of the tax system can be modelled in the same way that mixing colour into a paint base can be modelled. That modelling shows that the most even and consistent distribution of wealth occurs when the tax rate is flat, and the tax revenue is paid in equal proportions to every taxpayer.

The tens don’t quite acheive that because too high a proportion of the tax revenue is still being paid to middle class civil servants. But the 10k threshold and 10k child payment may compensate for that.