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"Kaure". Did you mean Kauri?

You forgot the wind, and the Tsunamis, and asteroid strikes

Sorry, safety is an illusion.

There are twenty-two species of native freshwater fish and they are delicious..

I love how these things are all "you simply have to do..." Like one goes out and collects the atmosphere with a butterfly net and splits it with a butcher's knife. Or like just goes and "gets a smelter and a foundry going".

Do these people have any clue how complex these sorts of industrial systems are? They have hundreds of thousands of components, all of which can break, and some of which are massive. The more you scale it down, the less efficient it becomes. And systems engineered on Earth don't just magically work on Mars too. You can't just dump heat into a river or the air, your gravity is significantly lower, and you've got electrostatic dust that clings to everything. And everyone output feedstock you want requires half a dozen or so input feedstocks, not counting all of the parts that can break - and they will break. And not all of these feedstocks can be gotten from the same location.

Let's just pick one little part of what you just wrote. "pass the CO over iron oxide dust" (we'll ignore everything leading up to getting and transporting that CO2). First off, if you literally do just that, you'll get nothing. The reaction needs to be done *hot*. And it can't be just "passing it over", it has to be thoroughly mixed. But then you get ready-to-use steel right? Wrong. Because you don't have "iron oxide dust". First off, you don't have any fine "dust" in mineable quanties, the blowing surface dust is spread over overthing, not accumulated in big pits ready for you to dig up.You at best have sand; at worst, solid rock. Most sands are not going to made of a majority iron oxide (if they have any sizeable quantities at all). Iron ore deposits are places where iron has been *concentrated* by geological processes, it doesn't make up the majority of basalts. And even cementations of iron-rich clay concentrates aren't 100% iron oxide. Whatever you mine (which means mining equipment, which means big, expensive, complex devices), you need to break it up, which means rock crushers, (which mean big, expensive, high wear devices), transport (haulers - more expensive devices), etc. At the mill it's going to go through a range of hoppers, conveyors, etc, all of which will wear and break. In addition to your ore and CO, you need a wide range of fluxing agents to separate out the stuff you don't want and to produce a usable product. The most critical of your fluxing agents is limestone, which on Earth mainly comes from deposits of marine microorganisms. Fat lot of luck finding that on Mars. So you need to mine less common calcium carbonate sources like travertine. More mining equipment. Hey, do you expect to find your travertine ten feet from your iron ore? Yeah, best of luck finding that, you've got to drive! Just hope you don't have to drive hundreds of kilometers, eh? Of course that's just one of a variety of fluxing agents you'll be wanting to add, there are many, for varying purposes. Anyway, once you've got your big molten mess (consuming ridiculous amounts of energy, orders of magnitude more than we've ever fielded offworld), you need to do something with it as you stream it out. Okay, then of course you have your slag skimmers. Hey, how long do you think that parts dripped in a stream of molten iron last? And you need to do something with your slag, so get your equipment to haul it away (after you've cooled it) ready as well. Speaking of cooling, normally we'd use water for that and just let it boil off for cooling, but on Mars it's a precious commodity, so go add more complexity for recapture and cooling! So now we've got a stream of mostly pure steel, but we're not even CLOSE to having usable parts.... (I'll stop here, as I don't want to spend all day on this).

I get it, you have a basic understanding of the chemical formulas for making a couple products. Well, here in the real world, a simple chemical formula is not enough. Real world processes are far more expensive and complex. They don't just pop together by waving a magic wan

There are two sides to the coin. All those loopholes and exemptions make the tax gathering system inefficient.

By simplifying the tax system, goverments can lower taxation rates whilst increasing their net take, due to lower compliance costs.

Fantasy? No: It's been done. http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/ta... - The Taxation system in New Zealand is one of the most efficient in the world.

It takes a strong govt with the necessary cojones to NOT give in to vested interests. New Zealand in 1984 was in an unusual position in that the incoming govt went in on a massive landslide and the previous decade's worth of vote-buying policies had effectively bankrupted the country, so the govt was able to undertake drastic reforms.

I does happen and can be not so serious. I know these people however and they where a little freaked out about it.

You totally forgot New Zealand's only native land mammal, the bat. There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.

The native bat is not flightless. It does a funny scamper thing along the ground but this does not make it flightless.

But, the Haast Eagle was unconfirmed before this? I've been brought up and it's always been a fact to me.

Haasts Eagle bones were identified in 1870 by Julius Von Haast. This thing preyed on the Moa, a 12-foot tall 500lb flightless bird. There is no question that a human would have been a much easier much more defenseless snack than a Moa. It would be unlikely that they didn't eat the occasional human.

When the first polynesian settlers showed up they would have climbed out of their Waka http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/waka-canoes and on to the lunch menu.

Freedom of speech is not a positively enforced inalienable right in New Zealand. If he thinks his right to freedom of expression has been breached, it's possbily correct, but there are other laws which supercede it. He'll be glad to know however, that the maximum period of imprisonment without parole in New Zealand is ten years. No matter what, he can still attempt parole in 2018...

Don't assume geothermal energy production has no environmental footprint. Personally I still think Nuclear is the way to go.

link: http://www.teara.govt.nz/