Kindle winners:

Crikey writes: As if a subscription to Crikey isn’t inherently valuable enough, there’s a reasonable chance you could pick up your very own Amazon Kindle 3G+Wi-Fi, too. We’re giving away 10 over 10 days. Tuesday’s winner is Fiona Nixon. Three to go now — get your entry in today.

Pokies:

Les Heimann writes: Re. “The conflicts of interest muddying the anti-pokies campaign” (yesterday, item 1). I have been to Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Monaco, Macau … but don’t bother, Australia has it all, and more so.

Sure, Australia has casinos in every capital city but we have pokies in every suburb of just about every city. And, if the pokie barons had their way, there’d be pokie machines in toilets, airports, train stations, trams, and automobiles.

Isn’t gambling is part of  Australian culture; so what’s the fuss, people? Aren’t we still the bronzed and rugged “barbie shrimp” demographic with a beer in each fist? We can take it, can’t we? Isn’t gambling is in our blood?

Australia is being r-ped and pillaged of billions of dollars ripped mainly out of the pockets of the lonely, elderly, poor, wage-slave battlers who have been purposely courted and seduced by the unscrupulous pokie barons and vested interests. Those who make money out of poker machines know full well that without the “problem gamblers” they would likely make much less money.

Good Australian practice is to provide a helping hand. The first step in that direction is to put some gentle hurdles in the way of those who rush to destroy themselves, thus pre-commitment of large denomination machines. Harmless to the occasional punter but a reminder to those who are fixated.

Argue with those who support the freedom for anyone to destroy themselves because they only care for themselves.

Rundle and climate change:

Tamas Calderwood writes: Re. “Rundle: no making light of the stupid party riding again” (yesterday, item 14). Guy Rundle has a spray at climate sceptics, saying we are either “genuinely stupid … delusional, or … malign and nihilistic”. He also frowns on “grabbing a 10-year section of a 50-year period and claiming there is no warming”.

Actually Guy — if you grab the most recent 14 years of temperature data you’ll see just 7/100ths of a degree warming, despite record human CO2 emissions. In the past 50 years; about 0.4° of warming. The past 150 years:  0.7°. All while sea levels are rising at their long-term average of about 2mm per year.

I guess Guy has never done that kind of simple data analysis. Perhaps he doesn’t have the maths. Nonetheless, he concludes that global warming is a crisis and we should therefore take “decisive action”.

The funny thing is that Guy comes so close to understanding the whole climate caper when he states; “The capacity to never question the whole deal can only be achieved by a certain thickness, since such stupidity ensures that any evidence that disturbs one’s worldview will be treated not as invitation to think critically about that worldview, but as wrong”.

Yes, Guy.  Yes indeed.