50 years of the Mini!

After 50 years why do people still love the Mini? What was the thinking behind Alec Issigonis’ ground-breaking design? How can you fit four full-sized adults in a car with an overall length of just 10'? This short documentary (just under 16 minutes) answers these questions – and others. Well worth a look (well, I think so anyway)...

Exams

It’s that time of the year again... more words of wisdom from Mr John Clarke, AKA Fred Dagg...

I suppose there are some of you out there working up to sitting exams of one sort or another and I’d just like to say that all my sympathies go with you, in fact I even had to sit an exam myself once. I didn’t do particularly well because I had a bit of a headache - the night before I’d been rubbing a bit of brandy into my brain to settle the nerves a bit and I think it might have got away on me.

I thought the questions were very difficult, actually it was a maths exam and I never was very smart with numbers. In fact I wasn’t even supposed to be doing the maths exam, but I’d fronted up on the wrong day and once I was through the door they wouldn’t let me out for a few hours.

The first question was all about calculating the compound interest travelling at the speed of light past three men who took four days to mow a lawn of six acres. Well, as you can understand, I didn’t see the answer leaping off the paper and hitting me between the eyes, so I sat back and delivered my old favourite, an essay on what I did in the holidays. Then I got down on the floor and snuck off home. I got four percent for that exam. They said I’d got the answer wrong, but they gave me a couple of points for my reasoning, which was interesting because when I sat the English exam I wrote the same essay and got three percent.

So it’s really just a matter of luck, so keep at it and try to avoid getting headaches of the kind I mentioned before.

Global Warming - some more key facts

This post is about the evils of Global Warming, the impending doom of the planet Earth and the New Zealand Government’s much-debated Emission Trading Scheme.

From my (limited) perspective there are three main considerations:

• The global climate is definitely changing. Polar ice sheets are retreating, glacial melt is accelerating and there are more extreme ‘weather events’.
• The extent of man’s contribution to this has not yet been determined. There have been other great climactic changes in Earth’s history. It is possible that man made activities are making things worse, or not.
• A lot of people are getting set to become extremely rich because of global warming.

The people that are going to become extremely rich are those people that are, at this very moment, busy establishing the global Carbon Trading markets. To offset our impending doom, along with the destruction of the planet and the end of life on Earth as we know it, all global citizens involved in activities that produce carbon emissions will very shortly need to purchase ‘carbon credits’ to offset the alleged ‘damage’ that their activities cause. Just how these individuals purchase these carbon credits depends upon their individual governments. For instance you might pay for your Carbon Credits through a direct tax on carbon emitting activities (such as a levy on the price of a litre of petrol when you fill your car). Or Governments themselves may choose to part-subsidise these activities, in which case you will pay when you pay your income tax or any other tax they choose to apply it to. Either way, it’s the individuals that will end up paying for this.

The thing is, when the New Zealand Government brought into the Kyoto protocol, they thought they were onto a winner. With our small population New Zealand contributes a minimal amount to global carbon emissions. And don’t forget about the acres of forestry throughout the country. Trees are ‘carbon sinks’ – which meant that other countries should have been paying New Zealand to offset their own carbon emissions. But the New Zealand Government very stupidly forgot about the local livestock. The ruminants found in rural environments throughout the country fart and belch methane – a ‘greenhouse gas’ that makes up roughly half of New Zealand’s total emissions. And so, having read the small print, we now have to find a way to pay for these livestock emissions as well. At the time a direct ‘fart tax’ on farmers was considered, but is has since been pointed out that ruminants tend to belch methane rather than fart. However ‘belch taxes’ have not yet been ruled out.

So with the current downfall of the Global Financial Markets and the requirement some of the big wheels formerly working there to find alternative employment we now have a new industry of global markets specialising in the trading of carbon credits, and vast sums of money are about to change hands. But what I’d really like to know, and if I play my cards right I might get to the point sometime, is once the taxes have been paid, and the carbon credits have been purchased and you’re all set to crank up your coal-fired power station, stoke up the old barbie or let rip with the V8, what happens to the money?

I have a sneaking suspicion that it will end up earning interest for these Carbon Exchange Traders in a Cayman Islands or a Swiss bank account.

Just how is this supposed to save the planet? I have absolutely no idea. Presumably this small detail is still being figured out. But my gut feeling at this point in time is that we’ve all been had!