Greg Boyles

Perhaps because it was more cost effective to work with the existing shape of the stone and just flatten off existing approximate faces rather than square the whole block. Perhaps John, who knows.

Yeah well these english classes tend to process them like a sausage machine and when they come out the end they may be able to speak fairly rudimentary english but they are still difficult to communicate with. As far as I am concerned it they are not worth the hassle of employing them.......having to teach them the job while trying to make your self understood and understanding them........forget it! Yes governments are negligent at providing increased infrastructure and services. But increasing the population through immigration will not make them any less negligent. Ordinary Australians or Britains or what ever end up the meat in the sandwich between negligent governments and influxes of immigrants. Australia is the flattest continent on Earth! And we do not have all that many areas that dams of an economically viable size can be constructed. Clearly you are not looking at the bigger picture. Screw more humans, I would rather save the lungfish. There are plenty of humans but very few lungfish left. Yes the governments are very efficient at selling of the silverware, whitegoods and furniture to generate cash flow. But your children and grand children will be left with an empty house when they reach adulthood. Reduce the population and keep some of the resources in the ground for future generations. If they can speak fluent english and there are no suitable Australian citizens, then I would hire them too. My compassion is finite. One hard luck story is matched by a million others. Australia can't save them all and nor should we try. We also have obligations to future generations of our own. And continued colonisation facilitated by white Australians will do nothing to improve the economic lot of aborigines. Quite the reverse.....it diverts resources away from aborigines in remote communities and towards noisy immigrants in the major cities.

All this assumes that all humans act with intellgence and rationaility at all times, which is clearly (to me) not the case. We are far more subject to are base instincts, that are focused on short term survival, than we care to admit to ourselves. Education is of course a great enabler, allowing us to transcend our base instincts at times, but it clearly does not free us entirely from them. I suspect that if a truly sustainable human civilisation is to arise, and it is a very big if, then it will have to be from the ashes of our current civilisation. But bare in mind there have been countless major human civilisations throughout our history and not one of them has survived to the present. In all likelihood future archeologists, if there are any, will examine the buried ruins of our global civilisation and wonder what caused it all to collapse........and similarly ignore the environmental and over population indications.

From a man who obviously does not live on that island and knows little about it other than what he sees in the media. According to recent statistics and all the pronouncements from business leaders and economists who want population growth, even without immigration Australia's population would rise to 30-40 million by 2050 even with zero immigration. So your above assessment of Ausralia's fertility is not based on fact. Your derogatory attitude toward my 'smallish island' suggests that you are a pommy. I could retort with some deragatory comments about the expenses rorts perpetrated by a number of your mps and the rioting and looting in your capital city......but I will resist the temptation From http://www.aph.gov.a...tlement.htm#set Immigrants impose signficant costs on the host society. Humanitarian immigrants impose the greatest direct costs on government through welfare and support services. But all immigrants, and population increase due to fertility, impose even greater indirect costs on society through their demand for increased infrastructure and government services to maintain living standards. Costs that governments are failing to meet regardless of any marginal increase in economic output that population increase in general brings. We will stick with immigrants here because it is the major source of population growth in Australia, USA and Britain. If immigrants do indeed bring so much economic benefit to the host society that they impose no net cost on it, then logically governments would be awash with revenue and have absolutely no problem in keeping up with infrastructure and services such that there are no significant complaints from the populous. That is demonstrably not the case in Australia and hasn't been since Howard massively increased our skills immigration intake about a decade ago. Free ways and major roads or more severely congested for longer than they were in the 80s and 90s, hospital waiting lists have blown out, the number of people unable to purchase property without significant government handouts has grown, water restrictions have been imposed for the past decade, public transport is not adequate to meet demand,...........

Humanitarian immigrants in Australia, particularly those who can't speak English, get unemployment benefits and health care cards because they can't get jobs even many years after they have arrived. No one will employ them if they can't speak english. There have been studies that have found this on a number of occasions and regular complaints by them in various media. I run a small business and there is no way in hell I would employ an immigrant over an Australian citizen, let alone one that could not speak English. They also get government funded English lessons, they are supported in the community by ethnic support organisations that are partly funded by government grants, they get public housing. Many of them impose a significant cost on the rest of society for a significant period of time and Australia would not have the economic capacity to sustain a signficantly larger humaniotarian intake. I am not suggesting that there is necessarily anything wrong with all this for a reasonable and economically sustainable number of humanitarian immigrants. All immigrants, humanitarian or skilled and english speaking impose costs in the way of infrastructure and services - freeways to ease increased traffic congestions, more buses and trains to ease public transport congestion, more police to cover a larger area of suburbs, expanded water distribution networks, expanded electricity grid, greater electricity generation capacity to cope with increased peak demand, more water collection and generation capacity (dams and desalination plants),............. All this costs a great deal of money and has pushed up the cost of living across eastern Australia in particular - water bills, electricity bills, property prices and mortgages, council rates,........ The locals then demand more tax breaks and welfare payments in order to cope with it. Local charities like the Salvos etc are experiencing unprecedented demand.

Agreed. That did cross my mind but I didn't end up posting it.

In you opinion.......you sound more like some one dismissing a hypothesis that offends you anthropocentric sensibilities! There can never be to many humans therefore anything that suggests that humans are at the centre of our problems is false and not worth considering. Spherical Earth deniers and evolution deniers all did much the same thing but in the end they were consigned to the fringes. The figures you quoted assume that each 1,000 head of population economically supports the X immigrants as far as welfare goes. But that is clearly a false assumption. Some of those 1,000 will themselves be recpients of welfare. And it also depends on how much tax each of those 1000 head of population generate. So in and of themselves they prove nothing either way as far as my hypothesis goes. All I said is that they are consistent with, but does not prove, my hypothesis that because the USA has a large population, and immigration intake, it has debt and economic problems. OK then please elaborate on why the factual basis of my hypothesis is wrong! Your say so that it is wrong is not good enough I am afraid.

Australia also exports a significant amount of grain to third world countries. And with the global population expected to peak at at least 9 billion, third world countries are going to be even more dependant on any surplus that we can produce. By world standards our coastal fisheries are meagre and that is primarily due to our low rainfall, scant run off from our rivers and low nutrient levels in our soils that results in low nutrient levels in that run-off. And as I said that production is only possible due to the heavy use of unsustainable fertilisers and it cannot and will not be sustained indefinitely. Sooner or later fertilisers will run out due to peak oil and farmers will not be able to sustain those sorts of yields based on the natural productivity of our soils. Regular droughts bankrupt many farmer and they are expected to grow longer and more frequent due to global warming. It is not an unfounded view John. It is a view expressed by Tim Flannery and many other respected environmental scientists in Australia. Rubbish! That defies common sense. The fertiliser and pesticide load in the water clearly increases as it it gets closer to the sea, due to multiple users of the water eaching adding their bit to the water they use that then returns to the river, and this has been demonstrated by many scientists on many occassions. Salinity of river water demonstrably increases as the river gets closer to the sea. Or is your contention that the salination problems in the Murray River, due to irrigation schemes, is all a fallacy?

Point taken. But wasn't pretty much all major art associated with religion and temples in ancient times. Perhaps except for brief periods of time such as the Ionian awakening. If the Nazcas were going to engage in art or art's sake then surely it would have been around their homes, palaces and settlements rather than on a remote plain in the middle of no where.

Well it is certainly easy to determine the ecological threshhold. If there is ongoing environmental damage and biodiversity loss, despute using arguably best agricultural practice, in any country then the population has clearly exceeded the ecological threshhold of sustainability. In that respect Australia has been over populated for decades and our long term ecological sustainable threshhold may well be around 12 million as many respected environmental scientists have suggested. As for optimal size for economic and sustainable purposes in the short term, that is more difficult to determine. I am surprised that no anthropologists have attempted this. What ever figure they come up with, it has to be reconciled with the ecological threshhold.

And you seem just as determined to refute my hypothesis without reasonably considering it. Not very scientific! The immigraton figures you posted prove nothing other than the USA and Britain have large populations than Australia, which is in fact consistent with my hypothesis. You folks that refuse to acknowledge that humans, or more precisely the large number of us, are a major part of the problems (environmental, political, social, racial) we face amuse me as much as the climate change deniers. You will twist, contort and misconstrue ad norseum in order to avoid facing the fact. I did not say that it is fact that it is fact that economic problems are caused by large populations and immigration intakes, merely that it is my hypothesis. Put your biases and emotions aside and test the hypothesis rationally.

Well gods and religions in one form or another did rule the lives of the vast majority ancient people until perhaps until the late 1800s or so. So I would have thought that it is not unreasonable for archaelogists to assume that structures had a religious function when there is no obvious daya to day practical function discernible. What practical function could a drawing in the dirt possibly serve anyway?

Why would you......pardon my french.......pi$$ fart around with a highly complicated electrical system, whose effectiveness is highly questionable, when you could just over spray the lawn with Yates Zero Bindii & Clover at about $8 for 500ml of concentrate that is guarenteed to work. The dicamba and MCPA in this product are entirely biodegradable, both in the soil and in the human body. Unless you wash your hands in it, drink it, inhale the mist or use it 24/7 it is not damaging to your health or that of your garden. Until weed specific biological controls are available selective systemic herbicides are the best tool we have to combat weeds.

And as I have said........ The problems do not arise due to the population exceeding a universal absolute threshhold. The threshhol will be specific to each nation and dependant on ecological factors, the resource base and the size of the country....which I failed to mention. But put it to you that the immigration intake of all western countries is universally unsustainable what ever the absolute figures are, but particularly so in the US and Britain. It goes some way to explaining why they are both becoming economically and politically unstable.

Well I disagree with you on that. That 200,000 tonnes of beef comes at considerable environmental cost on this ecologically fragile continent - dry land salinity, weed infestation, biodiverity loss,..... Compared to other countries of a similar size but geologically younger and more fertile, our grain production is very low. And it is only possible through massive use of fertiliser that is expected to decline due to peak oil. And if we do expand our population so that all our surplus food is consumed locally, what about those third world countries that are critically dependant on our food exports???? If the river are prevented from running out to see then you will reduce or eliminate our already meagre fisheries. They are dependant on the nutrients that rivers dump into the ocean. Nothing personal , but clearly you are not all that ecologically literate and have not properly thought your position through.

It was facinating. The idea was that the pictures and geometric shapes were part of rituals aimed at getting the gods to make it rain. There was also a certain amount of clan rivalry in creationg of them and hence they gradually got bigger and more elaborate over time. Entire clans walked along them and arranged themselves along them while performing the rituals. Shards of pottery baring the same picture or pattern were found along some of them. The region was undergoing desertification and their civilisation was collapsing. In the end they were forced to abandon the region and move to central America and Mexico etc. where they may have founded the Incan empire.

How do you think life arose?

Take it from some one who works in the Australian conservation sector and has considerable experience controlling weeds on a medium scale - bigger than urban gardens but smaller than broadacre farms. It is not a cost effective way to control weeds. There has been some trials using sugar, recently featured on ABC Catalyst. The sugar acts as an immediately available source of carbon for soil bacteria that bloom, reduce soil nitrogen levels and starve many annual weeds to death. This opens up an opportunity to introduce native grasses that then prevent the weeds re-establishing by keeping soil N low. Use of fire is an important part of the process to permanently eliminate the excess soil N. The researchers sprinkled solid sugar over their trial plots every 3 months (1kg per square metres) but this not commercially practical over a medium scale nor will it result in even distribution of sugar over larger areas. And it does not work for all weeds, e.g. Romulea. We are intending to run a trial based on spraying a concentrated sugar solution more frequently instead to acheive the same rate of application. But even this will only be practical for small areas and specific circumstances where spraying herbicides is problematic, e.g. annual weeds among native perennial herbs and grasses.

You appear to be agreeing with me that original poster of these normalised figures was attempting to use them is as a way to minimise the immigration intakes of the USA and Britain in an attempt to make it appear that immigration is not related to debt and economic problems.

My hypothesis is that there is a population threshhold, unique to each country and related to its ecological productive capacity of the country and its resource base, beyond which the economic productivity decreases and welfare dependance in western countries or poverty level in third world countries increases for most individuals. Not including a the rich ellite that is always present in all countries. Similar thing with the size of cities. There is a sweet spot where economic paramaters are perfect and sense of individual well being is and availability of opportunities is optimal. Beyond this sweet spot cities become increasing dysfunctional and politically unstable. Increasing population eventually starts pushing up the cost of living, driving down wages and conditions and increasing welfare dependance. Economics 101......... I just told you in clear terms why objected to the use of normalised figures, but you have chosen to ignore it. "they are supported by more than 300 million" Of course by this you have made the clearly false assumption that none of the 300 million are already significantly welfare dependant. According to these figures: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_welfare_spending_40.html The USA has a welfare bill, including pensions which is also a form of welfare or income support, in 2011 of just over 1.5 trillion dollars. And they add at least 1 million additional recipients each year through their humanitarian immigration intake. Clearly all 1000 Americans are not supporting each additional 2-3 immigrants.

Because it is patently clear that the person posted those figures for the express purpose of discrediting my hypothesis from the get go....... because the USA and Britain were below Australia in that list, i.e. less immigrants per 1000 head of population than Australia, when my hypothesis is that their economic problems and debt are partly a result of the fact that they both have a vastly larger annual immigration intake than Australia and therefore vastly more people dependant on government welfare. So now that we have established that this list does not discredit my hypothesis from the start, can we move on! Yes precisely! A smaller population means less people dependant on welfare! A large population does not necessarily mean more economically productive and entirely financially independant citizens or residents. And Half a million immigrants per year would lead to greater economic problems than Australia currently has but less than the USA currently has! But we also need to remember that, due to the ecology of our continent, Australia has far less capacity for productivity particularly when it comes to fresh water supply and food production capacity. We currently have a surplus of food that we export. But if we increase our population to take up that excess then our export earning will be significantly reduced with little capacity to replace them. Not to mention the third world countries that are dependant on our excess food. And water availability also restricts mining activites. If it is taken for mining then less is available to support large local (to the mines) populations.

Oh let us not pretend that Gillard is any better than Abbott on this. Both of them, or at least the parties they represent, are equally gung ho for endless population growth to supply big business with slave labour and clients. Nor are the greens any better - they see limitless humanitarian immigration as adding to our culture.

Here is the documentary: http://www.sbs.com.au/documentary/program/secretsofnazca/about/synopsis But I can find any where that it lists the archeologists inolved.

Because quite clearly quoting the immigration figures in terms of 1000 head of population distorts the picture, because the USA have substantially larger populations than Australia does. Hence the immigration intake of both those countries is 'diluted' when you quote them in terms of 1000 head of population. It is patently clear that Australia DOES NOT have a larger total immigration intake than Britain and the USA. Those figures clearly have some statistical purpose but they are not useful, in that form, for determining the validity of my hypothesis. We need to estimate the total social welfare bill vs the number of immigrants taken in annually. Clearly not all social welfare recipients will be immigrants but it is also clear that the vast majority third world humanitarian and illegal immigrants don't end up as entirely self funding citizens high up on the social ladder when they land in a western country. Clearly we would also have to examine how much each country spends annually on social welfare, what proportion of illegal and legal immigrants receive some sort of social welfare from the government and how much that social well fare bill is contributing to the country's debt. Immigration per 1,000 head of population does not provide an intuitive indication of ranking on annual immigration intake. The USA, for example, has between 10 and 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the country - 3-4% of the total population. The USA very clearly has almost uncontrolled illegal immigration and an enormous illegal immigrant population. Then of course the USA has an equally large legal immigration intake added to that. The presenter in the youtube video 'population and gum balls' (or something like that) quotes the legal annual immigrant intake at about 1 million. The reason why I have proposed this hypothesis is that there is barely a new report from the US about their debt without a republican politician complaining that medicare and social welfare spending is to high and the cause of the debt. Apart from African Americans, who would be the major recipients of all forms of welfare..........espanic and other third world immigrants of course. And the USA takes in at least a million third world immigrants per year.

"This article's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information" I think this list strains credibility when it lists Australia as having almost twice the immigration intake of the USA and 3 times the immigration intake of Britain. Based on these figures the USA would currently have an immigration intake of..... 300,000,000 / 1,000 = 300,000 x 4.31 = 1,293,000 Ahhhhh I see. Quoting the figures as number of immigrants per 1,000 head of current population is misleading. You appear to have cherry picked some figures in a format that gives the appearance that my hypothesis in immediately invalid. If you examine the figures in terms of total immigration intake by country, as above, then both the USA and Britain are well above Australia and the list, in terms of out three countries that have well developed social equity programs, fits my hypothesis.