Posts by Rob Stowell
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Test readings on a pair of six-year-olds were favourable. All you need is ALA (American Library Association) to get on board- and given the positive- indeed, heroic- role of the librarian- that's a cinch. The snot fairy is not TM so full speed ahead! Just make sure that librarian gets a heroic role- perhaps the herm, pick the snot fairy out of a police line-up.
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Its a great story David. And I'm also looking forward to the snot fairy.
Publishers are wimpy weasels who only think about the market. And the problem there is that kids don't ahem, actually buy books themselves.
Thanks for the Christmas present! -
They don't need UF to pass the thing, with the Greens support, do they?
Still makes it look that much weaker. And of course Dunne will be looking at the next election, hoping for a few headlines, and chalking this up to a good look going tinot "talks" with National next November. -
Gareth: why would rents- adjusted to the reflect the current price of property- take up a significantly smaller proportion of people's income than mortgage repayments? (Unless owners are counting on capital gains, which we all know they are.) The issue is then that people simply can't afford to pay the rental price.
Since what has been happening is fairly clearly based on "hope" with regard to future prices continuing to go up, it's a bubble- encouraged by easy access to loans. Unless someone- Mr Key?- can significantly improve the average wage and salary take, it's gone past sustainable already. -
They have to be "associated" more than this, tho. The wealthy investors need a return on their money, and if rents can't pay the mortgage, and everyone's relying on capital gains, it's an untenable spiral. Which it is.
Of course wealthy off-shore investors make it worse. But buying into the current market is a bit too much like buying Brierleys shares in 1987 for most investors, I think. -
Sorry... Brent. Me = klutz.
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Bart- it's the flip-side of the placebo effect, isn't it. Anyone who says psychosomatic illness is not real has a limited understanding of what is "real". Illness caused by fear of spray- I can believe in that!
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oops, cross-posting!
yeah, i get the "nothing new" feeling myself. not since hume, who single-handed (heh, feel free to disagree!) drove a stake thru philosphy's heart!
then some bastard does something new with an old thing, and ahem we have to keep turning the compast to get rilly good dirt! -
I don't quite understand your point, Ben, but I'm ready to back carefully away from this, probably out the fire-escape door, not looking backwards, towards where the fire-escape used to be before they ripped it out to put up a post-modern "victorian" facade I can bounce off in my fall to the pavement.
Just to say, I wasn't actually positing empathy as a moral principle at all- it's a phenonmenon, one of our traits, that's all. I think it's an important one when we start doing this "moral reasoning thing". That doesn't mean I think there's a grand uniting moral principle out there, awaiting discovery by a moral Starship Enterprise, full of philosophy graduates and heinecken.
For me, it's a trait I find useful- certainly not infallible!- in trying to work out which of my moral intuitions are based on authority, habit, or the "yuck factor"- and which based on something I value more deeply. I don't think I'm alone there, but maybe we're all alone, eh?
Argggh! -
I accept a lot of what you're saying, Ben. If it was simple, cockroaches would do it. Ho hum.
But I wasn't trying to head down a Kantian path at all. By nature or nurture I'm more of a Humeanist sceptic, heh.
And calling most "murderer-suicides" "empathetic" is a stretch. ;-) Not minding if the whole planet kills itself seems like a grand definition for lacking all empathy. Empathy is precisely the key to pulling oneself away from thinking "I want that, therefore X must also want it."
However... I do think "experimental philosophy" is a truely new idea. I'm not saying it's a good one, just that what I've read (not much) involved trying to do something likeIf we think of morality as a science then that makes the observations/experiments equate to 'how we feel about example x'. That usually means we will have data inconsistent with most simple theories.
with some quite surprising results.