Hornby and global warming

kim said the following on 21/02/2007 14:02:

Not for me it wasn't. I didn't have much quality of life. In fact, I wasn't :-)

Reply to
Paul Boyd
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"Born" I think you meant to say?

I genuinely feel sorry for you. 1950/60's Britain was the most beautiful and civilised country in the world. Parts of it still are. Anyone born after

1968 has never even seen a proper railway.

(kim)

Reply to
kim

Er, actually it takes about 10-30 seconds. If my observations of DDT's effects on flies apply to mosquitoes, too.

DDT is fat soluble, and accumulates in body fat. For the same reason, it's fed to babies along with mother's milk. It's a nerve poison. Studies on mice and such have shown that it affects fetal development, especially the central nervous system. There some evidence, but not much, that it had an effect on human fetuses and babies during the period when it was in wide-spread use. That information is not the kind governments and granting agencies want to pay for, so the question isn't settled one way or the other.

The insecticides that have replaced DDT also have nasty effects on people and other animals, so are not any better. Generally speaking, what kills one animal will at the very least have unpleasant effects on most other animals. Chemical control of insects is always a merely short term solution.

Both. DDT is known to interfere with shell production. DDT is not only a nerve poison, it's also a hormonal mimic (as are many carbon-ring and carbon-chain compounds with alcohol and ketone groups attached.) It interferes directly with shell production in birds. The raptors, which are at the top of the food chain, get an especially concentrated dose of the stuff. One victim in Canada was the peregrine falcon, down to a few hundred breeding pairs country-wide at one point. Since DDT was banned for mosquito control, the falcon population has rebounded. Latest count is around 2,000 breeding pairs in the populated part of Canada.

As to how many people have died because of DDT use, that's an ecological question, and the problem with ecology is that the connections between things are subtle, hard to trace, and often paradoxical. If you kill mosquitoes, you also kill other insects, which means you reduce the food supply of insect-eating birds, which means you kill off birds, which means you reduce predation on insects including mosquitoes, so you get more mosquitoes, so you get more malaria.... So you use even more DDT, so you get... Has this actually happened? To settle the question one way or the other would take a long term research project, which would cost miyyuns which would be better spent on mosquito control, right?

Reply to
Wolf

kim wrote: [...]

As Ford and Daimler-Chrysler have recently learned. The hard way.

Reply to
Wolf

Last I heard Africa was more concerned with sales of mobile phones than with tackling starvation and disease. 400 million mobiles sold so far.

(kim)

Reply to
kim

kim said the following on 21/02/2007 14:55:

No, I just wasn't. Wasn't anything at all, not even a wish :-)

I was born before 1968, but I really don't remember much of Britain's railways around then. I do vaguely remember my Dad's attempt at a model railway, but I'm told that as I was only two I can't possibly remember anything about that!

Reply to
Paul Boyd

Not for me it wasn't.

Reply to
Jane Sullivan

Are they?

Reply to
Jane Sullivan

Vandals broke into the engine sheds and splattered blue & yellow paint all over the engines then painted white swastikas on the sides. It was many years before the offensive graffiti was removed. Incredibly, some people actually collect models of the vandal-defaced locomotives.

(kim)

Reply to
kim

Jane Sullivan said the following on 21/02/2007 15:34:

Yes. Three years ago I bought a £150 motherboard. It failed a couple of weekends ago, so I needed a new one. The new one cost £30, and was higher specced than my old one. That's a hell of a price reduction!

Reply to
Paul Boyd

But if you were to buy a PC or motherboard at the same end of the performance scale, it would cost you exactly the same as before.

(kim)

Reply to
kim

"kim" wrote

You may well be right Kim, but the shareholders will at least be thrown more crumbs than the customers.

John.

Reply to
John Turner

Kim,

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but backing up Paul's argument, an HP150 with 256K RAM and a 15MB drive in the early 80s coast the best part of £4000 - that's what it cost my employer :-)

And in the early 90s I remember buying a Mac Quadra for my business for an eye-watering price in excess of £5000 - graphics monitor extra at almost £2000 :-)

Nowadays, I can get a machine with a spec light years ahead of the above examples for a few hundred pounds, including monitor :-)

Jim.

Reply to
Jim Guthrie

The problem with reducing prices is that it's a short-term loss in the expectation of long-term gain. If you're not planning to be around for the long term (eg, an MD who plans to retire soon), then it may not be that attractive an investment :-)

Mark

Reply to
Mark Goodge

"kim" wrote

I don't know about 'better' but it was different, probably safer, and on balance if I could choose between living my entire life in that or the present era, I think I'd choose the 60s - providing I could take my pc and digital camera with me! ;-)

John.

Reply to
John Turner

"Mark Goodge" wrote

I wonder if Hornby are planning on being around for the long term? They seem to have the same philosophy as the mentioned MD.

John.

Reply to
John Turner

The icecaps are melting! - the only people who care what happens with the weather in the UK are the Brits. It's the bigger picture that matters, not minor local anomalies.

Regards, Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

My IBM PC cost NZ$12,000- in 1982 and the maths-co-pro cost another NZ$14,000- (NZ$2- = circa UKP1-) It had 64k memory, no hard drive and no floppy. It did have a tape recorder socket added by the original owner, I have upgraded it to 384k so that DOS 3.11 will run :-) I have also added a full height 5 1/4" floppy and a 10k hard drive.

Regards, Greg.P.

Reply to
Greg Procter

An entry-level PC costs pretty much the same as it did ten years ago and a high end PC costs pretty much the same as it did ten years ago. Yes, both are a thousand times more powerful than they were back then but a decision was made to upgrade the specs rather than lower the price. If the price of a basic PC was any lower it would not be worth any dealer's while selling them.

(kim)

Reply to
kim

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More than suggested - pretty much proven. IIRC, the bald eagle was particularly hard hit. And birds are poisoned by a variety of insectis= ides when they eat the dead insects. As are other animals when they eat the=

birds.

But yes, as far as human effects go DDT is a good thing. But the effec= ts on the rest of the animal population is bad.

Anyone read Silent Spring by Carson?

--=20 It's turtles, all the way down

Reply to
Larry Blanchard

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