And on that note, it is a post by my good friend James on Tumblr that has prompted me to make a post. As someone who is well known for being left leaning, when it comes to the environment, I am not necessarily. You can view James’ post at the following URL: The James Blog, which discusses how humans are “slowly and surely we are destroying our planet”. Make sure you keep following his blog, it is awesome!

Most of it is manmade destruction like the Gulf Oil Spill or the wars we have been involved in.

Now we can’t deny the damage the oil spill has done to the environment, however it can be compared to a volcano erupting. Engineers did not know that the well was going to burst, and after the burst the surroundings were covered by a thick and dangerous liquid, much like what happens when a volcano explodes. Sure, the catalyst for constructing this well was man-made, for his need for oil, however is was not man made destruction as it was not the neglience of an Engineer or other worker that caused said well to explode.

North Korea announced that it will go to Nuclear War with the USA and South Korea very quickly if they try to mess with the North Korean navy.

I have seen this being discussed on ABC News 24. What we fail to remember is the comparitive size of the arsenals of both the USA/South Korea “coalition” and North Korea. Most people would assume that the cold war mantra of “mutually assured destruction” would prevail, but put simply, North Korea has too much to lose. A first strike by North Korea would cause them to be obliterated by the “coalition”, would have diplomatic and non-nuclear weapon methods to counter. We can consider the wellbeing of North Korean citizens, but in a country where 25% of government spending is on defence, they are well prepared.

To put this simply, even if in the least probable case where the crisis escalates, the effect on the Earth and its citizens would be localised to a very small area. There is no way that this conflit would grow into World War III, involving the entire world. Having friend in South Korea, I know that these threats do happen often, with the relationship between the North and the South always tense. It is probably no more than another empty threat, no matter how frightening and scare-mongering it is.

There is one area where I do agree, however:

It’s sad to think that peoples egos will destroy this earth.

Now, this is true, however not via the environment, rather inaction on other important social issues that will lead to a change in the status quo of which many people live in. Finally, to finish off:

Global Warming is real as well, none of this bullcrap about it being a government conspiracy.

Sadly, no one can be sure either way. The science is iffy at best, especially when we look at graphs like the following:

Carbon Dioxide concentration in Antartic ice core. From Wikipedia under CC-BY-SA.

To be sure though, I guess it is best to act. As once famously said “it’s better to be safe than sorry”.

Summing up, I’m not saying you are wrong. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, however it should be pointed out that in many areas, the science is very iffy – hence logical arguments either way are valid. However it should be pointed out how iffy this science is. This post isn’t a personal attack, either, so don’t get that idea.

http://meetsp.in/

Round?

Yet another gem from Google Suggest, however I don’t think it is good enough for Autocomplete Me.

Crap picture of iPhone

Hello, and welcome back. Being busy and lazy after the partying to bring in 2010, I haven’t posted anything till today (although you’ll see a few posts backdated soon). So what better way to start a new year, and a new decade, with a new style of post – a proper opinion piece. So, sit back, and enjoy the first post of 2010.

Over the new year, needing to contact myriad people due to wanting to wish them a happy new year alongside organising certain events, I realised how much of a ripoff  now more than ever Australia’s mobile telecommunications system is. Calling it “Australia’s” system however is a bit of a misnomer – of the four major providers, only Telstra is majority Australian-owned (with SingTel Optus being owned by the Singaporean government, 3 by the Chinese and Vodaphone by the British).

Yes, if we look back historically at the pricing of calls and short messages (SMS) over the last few years, not much has changed. I remember first buying a mobile phone in 2004 on Virgin pre-paid with it costing around 25c to send a short message and around $1/min to place a call. Now on a Optus plan, I still pay around the same figure. Although over time you wouldn’t expect prices to stay stationary – like all things in economics they will either go down if the cost to provide the service drops (assuming not too much extra profit is laid on top) or the price will go up if the cost to deliver the service increases – a very basic principle of the telcos passing on costs and costs savings.

Phone Tower

So, since the price of mobile services has stayed stationary over the last few years, this should technically mean that there are both pressures which take the price up and take the price down to even out at a stationary level. This can be realised in the increased cost to implement 3G services, which require the installation of a lot of costly equipment. However, the cost to operate such services has decreased, namely due to more efficient technologies which allow more data to be transmitted in less spectra – in other words, more income from subscribers (since the number of subscribers has risen over the past few years) yet less costs in spectrum licences. These efficiencies are mainly realised through the use of 3G however the cost of operating 2G has come down with cheaper-to-run equipment and by squishing more subscribers “onto the same equipment”.

However, it isn’t all doom and gloom. The implementation of HSPA (high speed packet access) 3G services (“mobile internet” to you and me), unlike the implementation of UTMS (used for short messages/voice), has increased the speed of mobile internet exponentially whilst reducing the price at the same rate. In fact, a few months ago, I could have got a better deal (at a similar speed) by using mobile internet instead of DSL for my main connection. This begs one big question, however, which is the crux of this article.

VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has revolutionised the way people communicate via a land line, and reduced prices exponentially due to the cheaper cost of transferring the data as packets over the Internet. So, why don’t we do this with mobile phones? The reason is not technical, it is very easy to do so. The real reason is due to the telcos prohibiting such a thing in their contracts to save their own asses. They all know if we all used VOIP we’d be able to save a heck of a lot of money, and send it somewhere else as the telcos don’t have the infrastructure to support VOIP, as they kept their heads in the sand when the technology matured. To illustrate the savings encountered, I’ll show you some maths below.

Telstra Phonebooth

For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to ignore Telstra who have archaic plans with little to no data (Telstra, for the most part, are a ripoff who make their money from people who are too lazy to switch, who require their extensive coverage due to location, or people who believe that since they are the biggest they are the best – such as a lot of businesses). 3, Vodaphone and Optus all offer 1GB of data for around $15 (usually included however in other plans with other services, or “computer-only” mobile broadband with extra money for the modem – again, increased costs on the “mobile mobile” network for the above reasons).

A friend of mine, who is quite annoyed at having a $400 bill for sending 1850 SMS messages, could have saved a lot of money if the telcos would have been fairer. If we encode the messages in a standard transmission format, and based on each message being the maximum length of 160 characters, she would transfer 160 x 1850 = 296000 bytes or 296 kilobytes. Now, that is raw data, and overheads would increase that size but no more than around 50%. This would, in effect, cost less than a cent (although she’d need to buy the $15 pack).

So despite these advances, is she spending less? No, instead, more of her treasure is being spent thanks to the greedy telcos.

The reason for the choice? This random picture I made with Mr. A-Ngoi-Ing.

I bet you are thinking WTFITS?

So, over the next few days right now, I’ll bring you the best of the decade. I was intending to make a video with all the events that have happened to a modified version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, but this guy beat me to it, which saves me two days in time. Anyway, enjoy!

This video needs no explanation. Sheer shock value was the reason we sung this song. And for all you cheapos heading out to the sales to get a bargain: good luck. Maybe next time buy it earlier and don’t be so cheap!