Posts by Russell Brown
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And my source was pretty sure about it ... the Solictor General via the Attorney General's office will this afternoon decline permission for the police to charge the 12 with Terrorism Suppression Act offences. Firearms Act charges will be pursued, as they should, given my understanding of the evidence.
That understanding leads me to think I don't particularly approve of what at least some of these people were saying and doing. But the system appears to agree that it wasn't terrorism.
Ironically, much of the evidence presented in closed court is probably inadmissable on the firearms charges, so we may never get to hear it.
So: the right result; and a substantial embarrassment for the New Zealand Police?
PS: It may be that my source is wholly or partially wrong about this, and that will be a matter of my embarrassment. C'est la vie ...
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One more: I did actually once weigh the relative merits of pot and pokies in a post about Peter Dunne.
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Deborah:
Every night as I head to bed, I check on my three sleeping girls, tuck them under the covers, give them a kiss, and think how beautiful they are. A few years ago, I realised my mother must have done this for me when I was a child, and it made me feel so loved.
When Jimmy was little, he'd often wake up grumpy. A reliable way to chill him out and make him smile was to softly sing the refrain from Shabba Ranks' 'Mr Lover Man' -- "shabba, shabba .. shabba, shabba ..." But that's as far as my desperately limited singing talents should ever be allowed to go.
These days, we hug a lot. In theory, AS kids don't like physical contact, and it took Leo a while, but now he insists on coming out and hugging us both every night before bed. He still objects vigorously to my singing though ...
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You mean the buzz of risk taking, the sparkle of the lights, the agony of the miss and perhaps even the thrill of winning. What you term psychological deceptions, are what a lot of people do call fun. So no kidding, take the fun out and it will be less profitable.
Angus, honestly, have you actually spent much time around people playing pokies in pubs? They do not appear to be enthused with "the buzz of risk taking, the sparkle of the lights"; they're usually silent, fixated and excluded.
I can't imagine they go home and enthuse over the roller-coaster night they had on the pokies where they almost won big but then lost their money.
You earlier mentioned people socialising and chatting over pokies. I can honestly say I've never seen people socialise over pokies. It's not how they work.
Yep, they have a right to play the machines; and the people who operate the pokies have the right to take their money off them through whatever logic can be programmed into the machines, including the illusions of skill and hope. But don't romanticise it.
Anyway, we've got Ben over from "I don't hold with any of this harm reduction stuff" to "communities should have a choice" inside 24 hours, so perhaps that'll do me on this topic ...
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Oh - sorry. Got busy, missed the troll. Thanks to whichever person with moderator privileges did the deed.
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They say 3% of gamblers have a problem.
And in the gaming machine industry, they provide 20% of the revenue. Car manufacturers don't need people to die; pot dealers don't need people to be addicted. Pokie operators kinda do.
Why exactly are the other 97% not allowed their fun because of that? Was it a different number before the pokies?
Totally. The number of people who needed counselling for gambling addictions rose from 923 in 1997 to 4010 in 2004. Pretty much in line with the spike in pokie penetration, oddly enough.
Hell no. They're lame. But I wouldn't stop people doing it, so long as the communities concerned were OK with it.
I'm not quite sure why you're so against regulation at one level, but happy to let communities decide, but that would be fine with me too.
Although the half-dozen major pokie societies have major advantages in maintaining the status quo: for a start, $7-8 billion in annual turnover to campaign with. It's also problematic that most gaming machine licences are granted in perpetuity.
Anyway, the Gambling Act prohibits as well as permits different forms of gambling. I think there's a good case for saying that it's a damn shame pokies weren't left on the former list.
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As I just said at length, no. The small number who receive harm doesn't outweigh the large number who get net enjoyment.
It would be interesting to tot up the number of people who feel harmed by the proliferation of pokies in poor suburbs and compare that to the number who claim enjoyment.
But, let's put it another way. Say there are no pokies in New Zealand -- would you actively bring them in to enhance this public enjoyment you speak of?
Knowing, as you would with hindsight, that they create far more addicts than any other form of gambling -- whilst delivering a markedly worse return to even non-addicted punters -- and that the supposed community benefits are often a bunch of bullshit?
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Russell, I got that you don't like pokies. I don't either. What I don't get is why you think it's so different from other vices which you clearly do not have a problem with. So far the only argument you have presented is that they target the poor.
And I don't get why you think it's the same. Just because you choose to use the same word for them all doesn't make all those activities the same. As I said before, not even all forms of gambling are the same.
To take the most obvious example, according to the Problem Gambling Foundation, pokies now deliver more problem gambling referrals than all other forms of gambling combined: by a factor of four. This, from a form of gambling that didn't exist at the beginning of the 1990s.
This is a form of making money (for the operators) that is essentially based on psychological deception. If these deceptions weren't built in to the way the machines operate, there would be little or no profit in them.
What level of regulation would you favour? Would you rather not have had the Gambling Act 2003 and have double the number of machines again by now? Would you have no restrictions on the number of machines that can be placed in a community? No electronic monitoring? No compulsory notices telling people what the odds really are?
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Remember how we were sold the idea of casino's in NZ? Monte Carlo comes downunder! The international jet set were going to beat a path to our door, and everyone would look so debonair in their pearls or black tuxedo's ...
Whereas the reality looks more like an abattoir. But I'm not able to deny middle Auckland its night out at Sky City,however little it appeals to me. I just despise the low-rent versions that sprout like corner dairies where the poor people live.
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