SaintBobby

Having spent too much time reading the various skate sites today, I'd say the fan base is pretty split between the Trust bid and liquidation/Phoenix.

Peter Allen on Radio 5 suggests to Colin Farmery from the Trust that they should liquidate, wipe slate clean and start again. "That is an option" says geezer from the trust.

Could this be the end? (I'll miss this thread!)

Can someone confirm, is their bid based on 75% or 90% conversion? Clearly, both are total fantasy. I'd say c.50%?

So, if the Trust's bid is really as much of a fantasy as the smart people on here say, that really is the end for them.

Curtains?

So, am I right that they have 11 hours to register a squad in time for the Plymouth cup game?

I'm happy with the pre-season fixtures. Okay, Bristol City are a few grades below what we'll be facing this season (other than in Cups), but overall, the rest of the teams are a pretty fair representation of the sort of quality we'll be up against in the Premier League. Seems to me that the overall level of performance was just about satisfactory (except perhaps v. Udinese) - but results a tad disappointing (would look a lot better if we'd beaten Ajax, which we probably deserved to). I'd much prefer we played Ajax, Anderlecht, Arsenal etc, than Eastleigh, Bournemouth etc. In preparing for a Premiership season, I'd also prefer us to play at home more than away. The screw-ups have been two-fold: 1. Pricing was ridiculous - you can charge £15 for a one-off pre-season friendly, but if you have 4, surely drop it to £5. 2. We have tried out a system on the pitch which doesn't really seem to work. So, rather than us all coo-ing about how great a 4-2-3-1 looks, most people seem to think we're best suited to 4-4-2. Still, that's all part of the learning process, I suppose.

We're nowhere near being a top half team or challenging for Europe or any of that guff. And won't be even if we sign 3 or 4 useful new players. The height of my ambition is to avoid relegation - and I think we're about 50-50 to do that. Don't much care about Man City, Man Utd etc. Question is are we better than 3 of Reading, Wigan, West Brom, West Ham, Swansea, Norwich et al over 38 games? Touch and go, I'd say. So, should be exciting. We probably need only about 35 points to stay up - something like W 9 D 8 L 21 . It amazes me that pundits talk of 40 points being needed for safety (very rarely true). I'm annoyed about the CB thing - but not worried. I'd be amazed if we don't sign one or two by end of the transfer window.

I'm only following this on twitter....but it doesn't sound as if we'd hold our own in the Champions League just yet...

The match vs Udinese is many things. But it is not "a massive game".

I wouldn't want to be Trevor Birch. He now has to explain why to hand the club over to Chanrai. Many LOLs.

TBH off to Hapoel Tel Aviv? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2185649/Tal-Ben-Haim-close-reaching-deal-Portsmouth-nears-loan-spell-Hapoel-Tel-Aviv.html

It's all very quiet out there.....too quiet....

Hmmmm....which peer reviewed scientific paper is actually predicting a 60m rise in sea levels?

Surely, Chanrai takes them over and the only issue is how much of the PP is split between him, TBH and the football creditors?

Again, this highlights the problem with media reports. I'd hazard a guess that 60m is on the very high end of predictions - hence the use of the word "could". I'm not saying a rise in sea levels on that scale in the next couple of years would be a doddle to deal with- but is there any thought as to what engineering solutions might be possible and over what time frame? To give a very extreme (and very simplistic) example, if we have 1,000 years to build a 200 foot flood wall right round Britain, would it be impossible to do so? Another, rather less extreme, example put to me by some engineers is that we could create enormous trenches in certain uninhabited parts of the world (such as the Sahara) which would become (potentially salinated) reservoirs as sea levels rose. I can't remember the details, don't have the engineering knowledge to really know about feasibility and wouldn't have a clue on costs and benefits of such a project. But my point is we mustn't believe that we will have water lapping round our ankles in Southampton in the next few months and will suddenly be surprised a few weeks later that the whole city is under water. Our adaptability is so much better than that.

On the conventional side of the scientific argument http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_synthesis_report.htm On the sceptical side, Nigel Lawson's book - A Cool Look at Global Warming (if I remember the title correctly) On the outright denier side, anything by Fred Singer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer

Are you suggesting that China was a better place in 1978?

These would be very, very rough guesses by me, I'm not a scientist let alone a climatologist. 1. Is climate change happening? I'd say 85% YES. 2. Are man-made emissions a significant part of this? I'd say 70% YES 3. Are the consequences of climate change a net bad? I'd say 75% YES So, I'm a pretty clear YES to these questions. But the chance I'm right on ALL of them is .85 x .7 x .75 = 44.6%. So, overall, I suppose that means that the chance that these three things are not all true is higher than 50%. I don't accept that my questions 4 and 5 are "subsets" of point 3. 4, 5 & 6 are all about what we should do if 1,2 and 3 are all true.

I've found the more I've read about it, the more it's obvious that there are very big disagreements amongst the experts - and an acceptance by the experts that there are enormous uncertainties and a universal acceptance that climatology is a science in its infancy. To continue with the shark analogy.... Even if the shark is out there (which is not universally accepted by any means), there is a huge area of disagreement about whether the shark is a 30 foot beast or a 6 inch tiddler. And even if it is a 30 foot beast, it isn't obviously a carnivore - it may be a coward which flees from mankind. And even if it is a carnivore, it might be fairly straightforward to set up nets or barriers that keep it away from from the area of water close to the beach which we want to swim in. And even if we can't erect such barriers, we might just be willing to accept that every time we go swimming there's a one in a million chance that we will be eaten by a shark. There are a lot of steps between confidently asserting "there is a shark out there" and concluding "we need to move to a world in which no human being ever enters the water again"

I'm not persuaded the highlighted belief is arrogant (I don't believe the planet was created for us btw...just that we are an accident of nature). I believe - morally - that human lives are almost infinitely more valuable than the lives of chickens, termites, mosquitos, jellyfish etc. And that humanity is, indeed, infinitely more important than non-sentient life - cucumbers, bracken, mushrooms etc. It is acceptable for someone to take a different moral stance. For example, that God entrusted the Earth to us and we will anger Him terribly if we pluck too many apples from the forbidden tree or that our management of the planet's resources should be arranged in such a way as to primarily benefit goldfish. I wouldn't consider either of these alternative positions "arrogant", just wrong. The case that we are "harvest[ing] whatever resources we care to without any fear of consequence" is a straw man argument. I can think of no human exploitation of the planet - mining, drilling for oil, making furniture out of trees which has been done without fear of consequences. That doesn't mean that mistakes aren't made or that visceral greed is never present. But our (often very brave) exploitation of the planet has been precisely what has driven civilisation forward. In any event, if Earth was an apple, mankind has yet to drill through the skin. And who knows what useful stuff we might eventually find in the wider universe, within which our own planet is not even a speck. The "we would need 3.5 as many resources" to all live like Westerners line, falls foul of a very common green misnomer. Namely, that scientific advancement has reached its zenith. In fact, we can be supremely confident that we will get better and better at the smart use of natural resources. I don't know if nuclear power will go on to provide the entire world with clean, cheap energy for everyone. Or if nanotechnology will lead to the almost total elimination of disease. Or if GM food will make human malnutrition a thing of the past. Or if someone will invent a supersonic helicopter that runs off tangerine juice. But I am supremely confident that human ingenuity will prevail. I think today is the best time to be alive for mankind on virtually any sensible criteria you care to pick. Average income and wealth per person. Access to running water. Life expectancy. Infant mortality rates. Amount of leisure time per person. Propensity to recover from illness, disease or injury. Access to electricity. Access to telecommunications. Ability to travel substantial distances both cheaply and quickly. Reduced prospect of being forcibly drafted to go to war. Greater equality for women and ethnic minorities. Longevity and health in retirement. The list just goes on and on. It is not true that this graph is a simple straight line of permanent human improvement (I think things were worse for New Yorkers during and immediately after 9/11 than just before it; the UK economy has not yet recovered to its 2008 levels; Zimbabwe is probably a worse place today even than it was under white supremacist rule etc), but the overall, basic trend is overwhelmingly positive. I think there are interesting and difficult moral questions about inter-generational equity. But if we in the West are even a tad concerned, just a mite worried about the environment we will leave to our kids and grandkids, we should be absolutely apoplectic about the financial debt we are leaving them.

That's 2 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back.

Deforestation may well constitute a human rights abuse of the indigenous population. It's their HUMAN rights which concern me, not deforestation per se. I don't agree with your implication that mankind has brought itself to be the very brink of disaster. 2012 is, pretty much, the best year to be alive in the history of humanity and 2052 will be even better. 3012 will be almost inconceivably better.

Species extinction concerns me very slightly. There may be biodiversity issues - with a knock-on impact, but in and of itself, it's not a disaster that the dodo is extinct, for example. I wouldn't say that one particular human group is more important than any others (for example, if banning X saves 100 lives in group A but causes 200 deaths in group B, then don't ban X)