Welcome back pollution :(
 

I knew the clear sky in HK (ultimate oxymoron!) recently was too good to be true :( Enjoyed the past few months while it lasted :(

Apparently pollution levels yesterday in Central were the highest since March this year.

Oh for Gawd's sake, one slightly hazy day and you are off wingeing again!

Max make that 2 hazy days now ;)

During the 2008 Beijing Olympics the Chinese government shut down all polluting factories in order to "improve" the air quality enough to host the games.

Well guess what, the Shenzhen Universiade ended on 23rd August 2011....

Stop whinning, it's why we get paid the big bucks, fly new shiny jets, get quick commands, great pension plan.......NOT

...met two of my best friends because of that: my childrens asthma doctor and dermatologist :sad:

Fac6, the not so funny thing about the " clear skies " is that even when it looks clear, the sulphur dioxide, PM 10, and nitrogen dioxide levels are all around or above the WHO limits.
Now that the really crappy air ( 8-10 times WHO levels the past few days ) is lasting 9-10 months, I wonder how much money is enough to poison your loved ones ? Even if those loved ones are yourselves .
Just keep in mind once you have damaged your or your families respiratory system, it is IRREVERSABLE, simple as that.
So I agree with max, quit whining and do something.
Enjoy

List of countries by life expectancy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See who is number 2.

Life Expectancy
 

Ah yes DMN, that old chestnut. Hong Kong residents in denial keep pointing to that. When people like you scurry to this statistic I am reminded of Donad Tsangs's infamous quote:

"The life expectancy in Hong Kong is among the highest in the world ... you can come to only one conclusion: we have the most environmentally friendly place for people, for executives, for Hong Kong people to live."

You just have to look out the window and/or do a modicum of research to realise how stunningly stupid this comment actually is.
How long did it take HKG to establish this life expectancy? Over that time what was the air quality like? What is the magnitude and rate of the change in air quality like in the last decade? What effect is this having to the health of HKG residents? Where will HKG place in your coveted rankings in 5/10/20 years? Maybe you should do some light reading...but I bet you knew all this already. How's that denial going?

Life Expectancy Increased by Clean Air - Air Pollution and Life Expectancy
Air pollution in Hong Kong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pollution reducing visibility, life expectancy | Clean Air Network
Hong Kong roadside air pollution hits record high | Environment | guardian.co.uk
MMS: Error

jizz man, get a life. Just sell your overpriced shoebox and get out while you still have your health. Or are you staying a while longer for CX/KA to pay off another property for you? Oh yeah, and all that economic development in China (mainlanders with lots of cash) is also driving property prices in HK through the roof.

DMN,
Nice nonsensical rant to someones quite logical arguement against your 'life expectancy' post. If you had come back with something else, maybe some facts and debate, you would gain much more respect than that outburst.

Santa, he can't because there is no credible debate " for " pollution. It's killing roughly 1500 people a year in HK, millions in China, and take your guess at how many people lead a reduced quality of life because of it, including all the poor kids coughing and hacking their guts up for most of the year.
It still startles me that people put money before health because let's be honest that's what it's all about, the money.

If you really want to understand why humans make poor long term decisions, then have a look at the 'evolution of rationality' theory. The basic concept is that we have evolved as short term decision makers and are geared towards making poor long term decisions. I'll quote a biology professor from the University of Indiana as he has said it better than I ever would.

"Humans stay out in the sun too long. In the short term, it has rewards, but in the long term, it's harmful." He adds, "That seems to be a problem with a lot of human behavior, that the scale over which humans make decisions is too short. I argue that we evolved from food-gatherers under conditions where food was probably spatially auto-correlated (concentrated in location) and that long-term pooling, or retention, of information in a hunter-gatherer society is not very adaptive."

In other words evolution has geared our brains to making decisions on short term evidence, mostly visual. If we don't see a short term effect from pollution, than our brains give that threat a low weighting against the marginal utility of making money in the short term. So it doesn't matter how much we quote statistics on however many people are dying of respiratory illness, the natural human reaction is too undervalue the information. The power of visual short term evidence is what works. Hence the use of graphic images in some Western countries anti smoking campaigns. A similar campaign in HK might be a start. Put a billboard up of a person who has died from pollution induced respiratory illness, possibly an autopsy photo, and you might get greater effect than the occasional newspaper article.

I often find that reminding oneself that the development of the modern human mind is but a blip in our evolutionary history, helps bring into clarity why we think(or don't think!) about certain things. In the end we are only a historical moment from the primates.

What complete rubbish MrClaus. Perhaps the reason people make the choices they do is because of our fallen human nature and personal choice. The whole evolutionary explanation is based on the assumption of naturalism, first we assume naturalism is true, then we look for answers based on this naturalism and when we find them we consider our naturalism confirmed, rather circular if you ask me.

If human behavior is nothing more than the result of random movements of electrons in our brains then we can't be held responsible for anything, in fact we may as well throw out the whole criminal justice system as to hold anyone responsible for anything would be grossly unfair. This is the absurd place that this kind of thinking takes us. It never ceases to amaze me that the same people who claim this kind of evolutionary explanation are the very same people who jump up and down about injustice in the world! For goodness sake you can't have it both ways, we are either evolved and no one is truly responsible for their behavior or there is some other explanation that makes sense of morality and justice.

Luckily there is another explanation that doesn't resort to explanations based on naturalism or humanist's creation myth stories.

What Santa is quoting does seem to make some sense, if humans really looked carefully and rationally at the possible long term effects of living in Hong Kong, or say, smoking, would any rational thinking person actually do it ?

Put it another way :

Here is a gun with 4700 chambers and only one bullet in it, I will point it at your, or your childs head, and pull the trigger. In return I will pay you a modest wage over the next 10 years.
Sound like a good deal ?

Notes: 1 in 4700 people will die from pollution this year. Modest wage ? well I don't see too many pilots in Hk living in a 20 room mansion with 2 brand new Mercs parked out the front, so yes, modest.

Great description of Gen Y, no care and no responsibility.

No properly educated/informed/knowledgeable person thinks that evolution nor its power source, natural selection, has a goal or purpose: It's just the way it is. The same thing goes with purpose. Lots of people don't like feeling so unimportant in the Universe, but that's just the way it is. Just like gravity, light, atomic composition, tooth structure, skin pigmentation, Jupiter's density, etc.

With respect Skillet, any actual 'educated/informed/knowledgeable person' would know that natural selection can't power anything, it's a conserving force. This is why evolutionists claim mutations as the raw material that natural selection then acts on. The only problem is mutations have never been observed to make new information, biologically speaking, so the question remains, where did it come from in the first place?

The hypocrisy astounds me, on the one hand we love the evolutionary no purpose story as it allows us to avoid accountability to a creator, but then we demand justice when some kid gets beaten up by adults in China. If there is no purpose, and our actions are simply the result of our genes, why is it bad to beat up a kid???

More uninformed anti-evolution drivel (why aren't religious nutters ever "anti-relativity" or "anti-gravity"?!?).

Your nonsensical "biological information (a mysterious concept stunningly undefined by any creationist) doesn't increase as a result of mutation" argument is straight out of the Discovery Institute's "Guide To Takin' Down them Darn Evil-utionists YEE-HAW!" pamphlet.

As for your "conserving force" description of evolution, if you bring out the "it violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" argument I'm going to vomit on my Feynman's Lecture Notes. It's time to move on - accept we're not in the 14th century anymore and that tens of thousands of people, all of whom who are several orders of magnitude smarter than you and working in multiple scientific disciplines have produced a robust, mutually-buttressed, acutely verifiable and elegant theory that has been described the "single greatest thought in science".

If you can disprove evolution, or better still, you have a superior alternative theory (that is falsifiable - i.e. Not your "fairies did it!" one) then you can pickup your Nobel prize tomorrow.

Now, claim your fairy stories to your heart's content, because as Iron Skillet alluded to: nature (aka reality) cares not for your irrelevant world view, it just "gets on with it". If your entire basis of morality hinges on the need for a stern father figure threateningly overseeing your every move, then god help us all, pun intended.

Why can't you be good without being watched?!? It's really easy if you try - run this 'Gedankenexperiment' : close your eyes and imagine a discovery is made that conclusively proves there can be no supernatural entities, ergo, god disappears in a puff of ontological smoke. Now open your eyes, and review the world around you with this "new knowledge". How has YOUR morality changed with this new knowledge...?

(or to put it another way - The best teacher I ever knew once asked my class why we thought people once believed the sun went around the Earth, to which the first answer was: "because that's how it looks". "Hmmm", came his reply, "so, how would it look if the Earth went around the sun??")

Back on topic: it's polluted out there.

On topic, it's polluted. It's polluted alright but not just by the air pollution, Hong Kong is hell on earth, it's a materialistic hell hole. The Dawkins book "the God delusion" was probably written here. This fuzzy thinking is the only way some people can live with their shallow lives, safe in the knowledge that all personal accountability is gone out of the window. It probably explains why it's a haven for banker w@nkers, the most unholy bunch you would ever wish to meet. I fully agree with the bloke above.

Superfrozo, I'm sorry if this topic makes you uncomfortable, and clearly it does, but the actual facts don't support you I'm afraid. To answer you points:

1. Gravity and relativity can be observed and tested in the present, they are what is called operational science. No creationist has a problem with this 'real' science. Evolution is an interpretation of things that happened in the unobservable past so is not 'real' science in this sense. To compare evolution with gravity is simply not valid.

2. You can mock creationists all you like but at the end of the day mutations don't make any new information. If you are so sure I'm wrong then please explain, making an assertion by mocking creationists hardly proves your point. What you don't understand is that the DNA in living things is a language and you can't just scramble some letters, or copy extra bits of the same letters and create a completely new message both a sender and receiver can understand. I don't claim to be an expert, in fact this branch of science is only just beginning, but it is becoming apparent there is designed variability built into genomes so it will be interesting to see where this leads.

3. Sorry for your lecture notes but the second laws of thermodynamics is indeed not friendly to Darwinism. Having a source of energy in an open system does no good unless the organism can use that energy. Stand in the sun all day and see what undirected energy does for your biological system. You don't seem to actually have a logical answer to my point on natural selection so I guess I'll leave that one.

4. How exactly is the big bang falsifiable, or better yet, the idea that matter and energy just made themselves out of nothing for the big bang to happen falsifiable?

5. As far as morality goes I never said an atheist could not be good person. It's just that, based on your worldview, you have no logical reason to be. You say yourself there is no purpose to life so why don't people, and many do, just do 'what is right in their own eyes'? In your scenario, when I wake up with no God all I would see is no ultimate accountability.

With respect Superfrozo throwing around insults is probably not the best way to attempt to refute what I posted. The majority of humanist scientists believing in a particular theory does not make it right. There are many creationist scientists (which any intelligent and reasonable person could discover with a quick google search), educated in the same secular institutions as your 'thousands of people' who would disagree. Ultimately this is about one's worldview, and the average atheist is desperate to justify his rejection of a creator to whom he is accountable so unless you come back with something worth debating I think I will leave it here.

Sorry everyone else for the thread drift, yes the pollution is horrible again.