Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Driving up to Chch tonight for a day and a half of meetings over the weekend. Was last there in April last year.
Can't say I'm looking forward to seeing the centre of town again, as an outsider it's just weird to see a city gutted like that.
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I disagree with the normal meaning attributed to that phrase. It’s a purely voluntary payment made in exchange for rule-breaking. You could campaign for the law to be changed, you could obey the law, or you could pay the fine. All are acceptable, and to suggest that enforcement is purely about raising revenue is IMO misleading.
Especially given that the police don't keep the revenue that they collect.
Wrongo.
Age-related and medical certification AND driving tests have been around for quite a long time here in ANZ.The age-related on road safety test is only if recommended by your doctor when you do your medical. See here. Also note that you just have to get 80% to pass it - that seems low!
Because for all the harping on about experience, being experienced does zero to make you well-behaved.
I haven't looked for any evidence relating to driving, but I know that in sports coaching, training time improves young sportspeople over game time by ridiculous factors - it's ice hockey it's estimated to be between 10x and 30x times as fast in improving your skills. I presume you'd see similar impacts in a skill like driving - people might drive for 20 years and never use their rear vision mirror, but a one hour driving lesson might fix that for them for life.
Of course driving experience will help - you'll encounter things that make you change your driving, you'll get better with the car. But if you're not doing something at all in your driving, driving hundreds or thousands of hours might mean that you're still not doing it.
I do find it strange that we have to renew our licences (and get a simple eye test at the time), but we never have to be re-tested. Even a 20 year retest would help catch people who had fallen behind new driver requirements.
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Decide the principle is worth investigating, then figure out the details and if it’s possible. Can do amazing things with GPS tracking these days.
I'm seeing a business opportunity for a cyclist - taking other people's GPS units for a bike ride, $5/pop.
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Of course I can acknowledge it, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let people use an incorrect interpretation to justify removing only one of a multiplicity of offensive posts.
Now we're microparsing Emma's indication of which facebook posts she'd remove on a facebook page that she has nothing to do with? Naughty theoretical facebook admin!
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the introduction of helmets corresponded to a massive decline in cycle usage here and in many other places, and that low numbers cycling is a major risk factor, it’s really silly to make mandatory yet another thing that will stop people getting on bikes.
If we're going to rightly put responsibility for drivers hitting cyclists on the drivers, then surely we also need to push responsibility for reducing numbers of cyclists and resultant changes in our public health on (now) non-cyclists. The idea that having to wear a helmet has led to people not riding their bikes is nuts. People's concern for their hair has affected their health and the safety of other cyclists.
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which is how both Stephen Fitzgerald and Jane Bishop died
Also likely what killed a lecturer in the school of dentistry down here last year - cycling on the one way north in the minuscule cycle lane, a parked car in front opened their door, he swerved to avoid and went under a truck. The truck driver didn't even know he'd hit someone until the police caught up with him at Waitati.
It's led to NZTA doing an audit on Dunedin cycleways (see here), but it's very much "what can we do quickly without spending any money, and then what can we do long term which will cost lots which we may get to eventually.
They're relaying the surface in the one ways in Dunedin and when they're repainting them they've widened the cycleway by about a foot and compressed the two lanes and car parks together a bit more, but it's not a problem of where the lines are, it's a problem of pretending that a cycle lane is safe by squeezing it in between parked cars and traffic, on an already narrow road. It's a pretty exciting ride in parts!
I submitted to NZTA that they needed to remove the parked cars on one side of one of the one ways from Gardens Shops to Queens Gardens to build a two way cycle way. Probably 250+ car parks. Can't see us caring enough about cyclists above the convenience of drivers having to walk for it to happen!
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I'm disappointed that no-one (that I know of) has challenged Prosser's assertion that "most terrorists are Muslim". It's a very myopic, quasi-US-centric, view and ignores goings on in all sorts of places, including Spain, Northern Ireland, the drug-war related terrorism in Mexico etc...etc...etc...
I read somewhere yesterday - and I forget where now - a news article which referenced an international research group indicating that currently this is true - they had a database of thousands of incidents. The data indicating that Muslims instigate most of the terrorist incidents doesn't necessarily lead to Prosser's conclusions however. For one thing, there's some pretty oppressed Muslim people in some parts of the world, so the response isn't out of left field.
I actually sympathised with him for having his knife confiscated.
Except it wasn't confiscated, he just had to check it into luggage destined for the hold.
Several years ago my son bought or was given a green plastic alien handgun style water pistol which I had to do the same thing with - not allowed to take it on as carry on, it'll go into the hold.
Given that it neither looked anything like a gun, nor actually had any properties of violence about it (it didn't even have water in it!), I'm sure I have a lot more to complain about than Richard Prosser who was carrying something that could certainly be used as a deadly weapon. The 911 hijackers used knives among other things in their attacks FFS.
Because they’re a shambles. I’m presuming they did little or no due diligence on Brendan Horan also. And because NZ First voters traditionally have no clue who the hell they’re voting in when they vote for Winston.
There's some interesting analysis there - which parties have managed to choose their more anonymous people down the list well enough so as not to look foolish in the coming term. Not even necessarily produce great MPs, just produce ones that don't look like dicks in some scandal.
NZ First seems to be last - Tukurangi Morgan got them off to a great start, and they've continued that form really well through to this term. Act have also been very competitive with them. National have had a couple - Clarkson was a buffoon, Nick Smith has had some issues, a couple of others have had financial conflicts of interest problems. Shane Jones scored at least half an own goal for Labour. Whatshisname and the naked young man more recently.
Greens? Last scandal I can think about an MP was Phillada Bunkle's residential allowance and that was Alliance.
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Not sure, to be honest. They need to be “given a space”, definitely. But that’s not the same as “given more space”. They get an extremely long space already, by comparison to practically any other kind of work.
I don’t think it’s too bad here, but the US 2 year congressional term, combined with the horrendous influence that money has in their electoral system clearly isn’t working for them.
Me too. There aren’t a whole lot of times I can think of when I’ve gone “If only they had a couple more years to slip that one through, things would be so much better now”. But quite a few times where I’ve gone “If only there had been an election looming, this wouldn’t have happened, and things would be better”.
The suspending/dismantlement/deposing of ECAN received assent in April 2010, well halfway into the electoral cycle. The outcry over it and any electoral impact has been nigh on embarrassing for a democratic first world nation.
Yes governments pass policies etc with an eye on people’s short memories and the electoral cycle. But like the US issue it is at least as much a problem of money as electoral terms, surely the problem here is that electors haven’t taken the suspension of democratic bodies seriously enough and punished the government for it.
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I agree with you Ben that any number is arbitrary. Of course it is – I don’t buy into magic number theory. But I think Representative Democracy does need to be given a space where representatives can actually be allowed to represent, rather than looking constantly to the polls and voters to see if what they are doing is ‘popular’.
That's the one valid argument for a longer term as far as I can see.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
More from the hot afternoon at the beach
What beach is that Nora? The cliffs remind me a bit of Torbay, but I presume it's further south than that.