Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Looking at recent polls, reports of the demise of Labour seem to be a bit premature.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There's a clear definition of a Bachelors degree here: http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/assets/Studying-in-NZ/New-Zealand-Qualification-Framework/requirements-nzqf.pdf
Are you saying that that's too broad, that it doesn't cover what a degree used to be, that it isn't actually being measured against by NZQA, or that degree holding should be limited to institutions that were universities in 1965 or whenever because tradition?
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Speaker: How StuffMe looked from the regions, in reply to Nick Russell,
I think Zurich is fairly well sorted.
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Hard News: Media Take: We need to talk…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
the widespread use of alcohol [in the 19th century] ... for a whole host of ailments
They knew almost nothing about physiology or biochemistry, and nearly everything they did know was wrong.
Consequently, anything that produced an effect, any effect, was a drug candidate. Alcohol is an anaesthetic, an emetic, increases blood pressure, and a bunch of other effects. That would have been enough "evidence".
A bit like alternative medicine today.
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Here come the hippies....
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don't think we'll run out of restaurants and cafes, somehow. Maybe we could be like Switzerland, where eating out, even McDonalds, is quite expensive, so people just have to think about whether they cook for themselves more?
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the Syrian civil war as being the first war triggered by climate change
I'd consider the causes stem from the west and Russia historically supporting dictatorial government in development countries in order to keep them under "control".
Then the US got fed up with one of these clients (Saddam) and invaded Iraq, creating a radicalised islamic insurgency in the region. They then compounded this by encouraging popular revolts against their former autocratic clients, which were then largely usurped (in Syria at least) by those radical islamists.
I don't think this has much to do with climate change. If anything, if the US cared about climate change, they'd structure their economy to not use (imported) oil and thus would no longer care about the Middle East and would refrain from involvement there?
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Russell Brown,
And our primary competitive advantage in "educating" foreign students isn't that we have better teaching, or we're cheap, or we're such an amazing place to study in.
It's that we aren't assholes and we try not to treat paying customers as criminals (as our principal competitors in the Australia, the UK and US tend to).
It's not a bad crop. We can pasture students in less space than the equivalent herd of cattle or sheep, and the income per head is a lot larger, I suspect.
They even don't need to be fed and watered - they buy their own noodles and beer. -
Some years ago I had a startup in London. We needed people to do a fairly low level data entry job, and we found that NZers and Aussies were best for that job, mostly because it wasn't going to be their life, they were just earning money to be in Europe.
When we hired UK people for that, they were usually hopeless in some way.
Talking to people who own bars and the like, it's often a similar thing here. People who aren't lifers are more likely to have a positive attitude to the job, precisely because they wont be doing it forever.
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The whole Sinn Fein thing is interesting (and the use of the term Sinn Fein/IRA is telling - it's a Tory/Unionist meme to conflate the two).
Northern Ireland came into being through the threat of anti-constitutional violence. The Asquith government was elected on a promise to grant home rule to the whole of Ireland. This was opposed by, in addition to the votes of Tory peers, the formation of an illegal armed militia (the original UVF) in Ulster and the threatened mutiny of the British Army's officer class.
Subsequently, the Six Counties were separated from Ireland and given their own protestant majority government, which proceeded to repress the majority catholic population.
By the 1960's tolerance for this had evaporated and the catholics, inspired by the US civil rights movement, embarked on initially peaceful protest, which was violently suppressed by the protestant forces. This led to the emergence of the Provisional IRA, of various protestant/unionist terrorist organisations and the introduction of the British Army into the conflict.
All three sides engaged in atrocities, with the overt or covert backing of their political supporters, including the unionist parties and British mainland politicians, as well as Sinn Fein.
After around 30 years, a settlement was reached by which unionist and nationalists share power (mostly) in a devolved government.
Because of this, there is no real moral difference between NI politicians of the unionist/protestant tradition, who have enjoyed the enthusiastic support of various Conservatives and those of the republican/catholic tradition, who it is considered the height of extremism for Labour to engage with.