markalexwatson

Comment Threads

• Nojay commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Oil, probably. Seal oil and whale blubber contracts....
• Bellinghman commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Very plausible, given the supposed founding according to Wikipedia was in 1850. Since the current company is the result of innumerable mergers, any one of those predecessors could have been involved, and for all I know, may have gone back before 1850. (Short history - a Leeds and a Brum company merged in 1995. Several other mergers, including of a Scottish company last year (founded 1769 - so yes) who appear to have contributed Scotland, the Falklands and Qatar.) However, I've finally tracked down the information, and it appears that Falklands office opened in 1988. So yes, oil, but the...
• heteromeles commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Actually Noel, that's a great comment, but honestly I never thought of it. On the internet, I use ctrl+ to increase font size, and ctrl- to decrease font size. On my system (using Firefox) this works great to increase my blog font. It literally never occurred to me that people weren't resizing the blog fonts to suit their visual needs. ... Now, looking at what I can do with Wordpress, I don't see a control to increase the default font size. That probably explains why I never thought of it. If someone knows how to do that so that the...
• heteromeles commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  True, but we're talking about international waters. That does make the situation rather fraught with possibilities, does it not? If there's an oil field outside the official boundaries of any country, then basically, you can fight a war over who owns that bit of seabed and the minerals thereunder. For the Falklands, this appears pretty negligible. I suspect that, had that exploratory rig found lots of oil, the Falklands wouldn't be holding any national referendum. Instead, the UK would be beefing up their military presence in the archipelago. No, the real problem in this regard is the Arctic. When the...
• peter-erwin commented on Thinking the unthinkable
  Considering that we'd sold Saddam most of his weapons ... You've gotten your pronouns confused; with the exception of France, the "we" who fought against Iraq in the Gulf War were not the countries which sold Saddam "most of his weapons"....