The first update for Gallery Only is now available.
It makes some minor changes to the layout on both the HTML and CSS side which means that anything appearing below the gallery is spaced out a little better.
We’ve added a new class, .go_clear which adds this spacing and could be edited for the purposes of customisation if needed.
I’m pretty excited to demonstrate by new Gallery Plugin for WordPress. It’s the first one I’ve generated from scratch and uploaded to the WordPress site.
The plugin replaces the default gallery with clean looking gallery Carousel which utilises the Moodular jQuery plugin
To demonstrate it here are some photos taken by Ariane Barton on our recent holiday:
I’ll update this article once you can download the plugin from the WordPress Site.
Update: You can download the plugin from here.
Update: and it’s now up on the WordPress Plugin Directory site.
I was lounging by a friend’s pool in the South of France a couple of weekends ago, enjoying a last minute surge of summer.
The issue of our energy future was raised and our gracious host stated in a matter-of-fact manner that nuclear energy was clearly the only option left available to service out energy needs. What struck me more than anything else about the statement was that there was an assumption that I had naturally adopted this position – it was the only logical conclusion.
My gut reaction to nuclear is a steadfast ‘no’. You just don’t mess with something that has the potential for destruction on the level that nuclear does. But the problem with nuclear goes beyond that.
To be able to produce as much energy as we are currently producing then our choice is basically either coal or nuclear. But we in the west need to reduce our carbon emissions my something in the order of 90% to 95% of 1990 levels by yesterday at the latest which would naturally lead us to the conclusion that nuclear is the only answer. After all, Global Warming is probably the most serious issue humanity has ever faced so we must stop emitting greenhouse gases immediately.
I’m not sure that I entirely agree with the assertion that nuclear could meet all our energy needs, or that coal and nuclear are our only two choices, but it is certainly fair to say that we cannot produce the amount of energy we are currently using use of renewables. There’s just no way.
The issue for has always been, not how the energy is produced, but how much we use. In a sense I don’t care if we’re using coal or nuclear providing we reduce our energy consumption by 90% to 95% (possibly even more). However if we only need to produce 5% of what we are currently producing then sourcing our energy from renewables is suddenly feasible and should be done for a wide range of health and environmental reasons.
Needless to say, such a drastic change in energy consumption means massive changes in the way the world operates going far beyond major infrastructural changes.
To create a low-carbon world we need to continue to produce enough energy to do the work necessary to reduce the amount of energy we use, keep as many people as possible from starvation and start building the required renewable energy generators. Activities such as the construction of a wind farm requires time and energy which is why we’ve left all this far too late. For now, the only way we can generate that energy is through existing sources of energy, ie coal (or nuclear if you’re in the USA, Japan or France).
Which is why all this nuclear business bothers me. Even if we could, hypothetically, mine uranium in a manner that doesn’t destroy the environment and had a genuine solution to the storage of nuclear waste, the lead time for a nuclear power plant is at least a good 15 to 20 years, probably more. And the lead-time only gets longer when you start talking about wide spread rollout. In 15 or 20 years, it’s all too late.
Where are you going to put all these plants? I don’t want them in my backyard and I’m pretty sure you don’t, but they need to be close to urban centers where most of the energy is consumed. They also need to be near fresh water supplies. Similar problems exists for the storage of nuclear waste. Sorting all this out takes time – lots of time – and then you have to actually build a nuclear power plant which is a time consuming task unto itself.
The pro-nuclear argument also seems to assume significant technological advancements in the breakdown and storage of nuclear waste – technologies which may be available but remain largely untested because very few nuclear power plants have been built of late.
But ultimately what bothers me about nuclear is that it is very 19th Century, industrialist thinking. It’s a ‘science will save us’ or ‘we command nature’ sort of position. It’s a technological fix to a problem caused by an over reliance on technological solutions.
Our energy future has to be low tech. Windmills are reasonably low tech. Mirrors focusing the sun’s rays to heat something up is low tech. We need to use the technologies that are available to us now and nuclear just isn’t one of those.
This leaves me in the awkward position of supporting a coal fired renewable energy future.
It’s the late 50s/early 60s, things are good! Taxes are high, wages are high, inflation is high unemployment is almost non-existant and everyone is happy. We’ve never had it this good.
Oil is cheap, the population is booming, there is disposable income and the war is a distant memory for a young generation who are enjoying a level of prosperity with a wide base – the likes of which we haven’t known before. Take off your clothes, smoke lots of weed, go on a road trip with no money, it’s a revolution you know.
Working class people can own a house and a car, health and education are free, there is a massive expansion of the welfare state. And it’s all affordable because everyone is earning a good wage, the population is still quite diminished (although rapidly growing) so less people are placing demands on the service.
Tax and government are highly centralised thanks to the war effort, the top marginal income tax rate is just below 70% and there is loads of money to throw around. Lets make tertiary education free!
Then the mid-late 70s happen. The brutalised and over simplified version of Keynesian economics
we’d grown so used to fails us. Stagflation! And just when it couldn’t get any worse: Oil Crisis!! God damn it, it’s expensive to drive places now. How am I going to get to work if I am lucky enough to even have a job?
Quick, someone pick up that book written by Hayek, something about surfing, he said this would happen!
Roll on the 80s, a time of excess. Business is booming but everyone I know is still unemployed.
Globalisation! Deindustrialisation! Off shore the shit out of that industry! I’m rich!!
So on through the 80s and 90s: cut spending, lower tax rates and flatten them out while you’re at it. How did we get so bloated, sell everything! Business can run telecommunications infrastructure more efficiently than a government. Business is good, government is bad. Oh look, selling everything has meant that we’ve now got a pile of cash. We can still afford schools and hospitals, especially since we’ve cut all their funding as well.
Come to think of it people should really pay for the services they use, let’s cash in our future and start charging for a tertiary eduction. All these Art’s Degrees are just costing us money. Everyone I know got a free education, why should I care if ‘the kids’ get one or not – particularly kids whose parents didn’t go to university and can’t pay for their kids to attend. How did we get so carried away with upward social mobility in the first place?
Fast forward to the last five years: Debt crisis! The pursuit of growth has left the economy significantly over stretched. There are skills shortages. Our universities are propped up buy foreign students whose parents undergo extraordinary financial hardship to send one child to university in Australia giving Australian Universities enough revenue to function.
Unemployment rates spike, there’s a housing bubble created by baby boomers that decided to cash in on the 1960s boom period they grew up in and spend our inheritance investing in the now bloated property market. And who can blame them?
The population keeps growing at ever increasing rates despite birthrates being below replacement level. As it turns out it is much cheaper to have people in the majority world absorb the cost of training a doctor and then letting them immigrate to Australia. Poor countries pay for their education, we reap their fruitful and taxpaying years!
And we can do this for any trade with a skills shortage! I knew it was a good idea to cut spending on education. Importing the future of other countries is much easier.
So tax rates a low, the population is growing faster and faster – we need it to, how else do we ensure that the economy keeps growing. But how do we pay for the growing demands on public services? We can no longer afford to fund the services that people have become so accustom to.
Austerity measures! Cut public spending, it only benefits those that are still reliant on public services anyway. Pass on the burden of debt to those that struggle to get by while the wealthy hid behind tax loopholes. Come to think of it, the rich wen’t paying much tax in the first place, so why don’t we cut their taxes some more – that’s sure to stimulate growth.
So now the people are getting angry and taking to the streets. They’re occupying Wall Street! Their rioting in Athens!
Where to from here?
Tax the rich.
