ithika | Bumper stickers.

I think that generally, bumper stickers make you look like an idiot. I saw this bumper sticker today which said "Stop Mining" and a subtitle that I couldn't read because they turned a corner. So it could have been an ironic statement I suppose, but I doubt it. It was some political sticker for Labor or something.

I mean, a bumper sticker like that is clearly only there to irritate people who disagree with you. The people who agree with you don't care, and you clearly aren't trying to instigate reasoned conversation about this thing.

For that matter, saying "Stop Mining" is incredibly retarded. I don't know why you would even want to promote a concept that stupid and poorly thought out. "No Uranium Mining" I can get, because the idea of nuclear power is obviously very controversial. I'm not sure what I think about the issue. I haven't really read up on it at all. On the one hand, when executed safely and responsibly, Nuclear Power is kind of good. However, nuclear waste is really bad. We can't just shoot it into space or drop it in the ocean or bury it in the desert, and I'm sure that one of those three options would be employed in the event of nuclear power coming into use. So I'd have to say that while Nuclear power is cleaner than say, burning coal, it's not as clean as tapping into the sun. I really, honest to God can not figure out why people are even considering developing better ways to use nuclear power when we have a resource like solar power at our disposal.
* Trent said some things. It seems like Nuclear Power isn't as bad as I had thought. So yeah. Stuff.

So solar panels are "ugly"?
So what?
Hire an architect?
Toughen ~~the fuck~~ up?
Design a better, smaller solar cell?

So anyway, back to saying "Stop Mining" on the side of your car. I mean, does that person even realise what would happen if all mining was banned? I mean what the hell? For one, and this is the flimsiest of reasons to not stop mining, the mining industry is currently generating hundreds (at least, I think it would probably number more in the thousands but I'm not entirely sure) of well paid jobs in Western Australia alone. Hasn't this person heard of "the mining boom?" Maybe they're just angry that they didn't get in on the high salary two weeks on one week off life? Maybe they're actually angry about something else (I wouldn't doubt it, political bumper sticker people seem to always be angry about something) like.. high interest rates?

But really, saying "Stop Mining" is as stupid as saying "Stop Farming." In fact, stopping mining would effectively stop farming sooner or later. So in a way, it's a stupider statement to make. Where do they think the fuel that runs their car comes from? The electricity in their house? The ring on their finger? The plastic wrap on their sandwich? The fuel and metal that allowed the machine that harvested the crop that made their sandwich to be built and operated?

Sure, recycling would allow us to make better use of some things, and then mining would be less necessary. But it would still be necessary. In fact, unless we are able to become a society which produces no waste (completely recycles every single thing that we use) and gives up the oil and starts using power sources which are actually sustainable (Ha! It would be nice but I think it's quite laughable with the state of things, and the attitudes of people in general) But even if we were able to use solar power for everything, we would still need to mine the materials used to make the things. And to be quite honest, solar technology is not good enough yet to replace fuel based power. We would still need to have something else for cloudy days, winter, night. I mean it's getting there, but unfortunately I think the only way that "dirty" power sources will be replaced entirely in our lifetimes is when we suck the Earth dry of all usable fossil fuels. And I don't think that's going to happen in our lifetimes.

And I don't care that I don't know the entire context of the statement any more, because thinking about it, that's the entire point behind bumper stickers. They are a one or two line statement of your beliefs. So if it can't be summed up in one or two lines, it probably shouldn't be on a bumper sticker. Because that's how it's going to be interpreted.

I mean, the whole idea is retarded. I don't like some things about farming, but you don't hear me going around with bumper stickers on my car saying "Stop Farming," because I know that without farming I don't eat. And several other things, too. And you can't say something like... err... well actually I don't really have any problems with farmers or farming overall (the thing I was thinking about earlier is actually quite unrelated to farming, really - people complain about how mining damages natural environments all the time, but they have to go through lengthy and complex rehabilitation after mining out an area. To my knowledge, which again is limited, farmers don't have to fix the water table if they or previous farmers have caused an area to develop salinity problems because they cut down too many trees. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure this is correct.). I'm going to pretend that I... hm, I really don't have a problem with this, in fact I think that the animal rights activists were stupid to do this, but let's say that I was against the practise of cutting away skin from a sheep's rear end to stop them from getting flyblown. I can't put that on a bumper sticker, so I'd... get off track. I mean longpost is long already.

My point is: ~~if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all~~ um, you're stupid, random bumper-sticker wearing white four wheel drive¹. And I hate you.

¹ HA! How ironic for a big city four wheel driver to have a sticker saying "stop mining". Wow, that makes this whole thing even more stupid.

Also if this post makes it sound like I'm against green power or whatever, I'm not. I am very much for it. But I think that mining is important, needed, useful, not as harmful as most people think, and not the cause of the world's problems, by a long shot.

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