Posts by George Darroch
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Oh, it's worse than that...
[It was] empirically determined that the effective damage done to the road is roughly proportional to the 4th power of axle weight .[37] A typical tractor-trailer weighing 80,000 pounds (36.287 t) with 8,000 pounds (3.6287 t) on the steer axle and 36,000 pounds (16.329 t) on both of the tandem axle groups is expected to do 7,800 times more damage than a passenger vehicle with 2,000 pounds (0.907 t) on each axle.
While the RUC does increase at greater than a linear rate per axle and takes into account the number of wheels per axle (which relates to road footprint) , it certainly isn't an exponential function (PDF). If this was the case, I suspect heavy trucks wouldn't be economic. And they'd be marching on Parliament with guns, rather than just driving slowly. Now, we might have reasons to subsidise truck transport over other forms, but lets be clear and realistic here. We're subsidising trucks by a huge amount. And that's before we include the externalities, which are quite substantial.
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Mind you, living in a country where this was the norm would make me happy too. Only a matter of time before Aotearoa catches on, surely.
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Denmark is the happiest, and also has the lowest Gini Coefficient (measure of inequality) in the world. Perhaps they're related?
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The reporting surrounding drug survey once again shows the perils of "ranked x in the world" type statements. Very often the "world" is the OECD, a smaller number of countries, or simply whatever countries data could be found for.
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Which is coincidentally right next to APNs offices. If they sent their people across the road...
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I'd have to look again, but i think that was a retail strip.
It's that block or two between Richmond Rd (beside the Foodtown) and Trinity St.
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Deprived of "what"? This season's Issey Miyake?
There are still pockets of poverty there. Small, but real.
I'm disappointed that this current index is all in red. I found the red/green of the last one much easier to understand. I can see why they've changed - red/green would be a nightmare for the colourblind, but would find another two colour gradient easier to take in. A minor quibble with an otherwise excellent visualisation of data.
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New Zealand the way I want it? They can have New Zealand, I'm not moving back there. But that Aotearoa place sounds nice....
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Been fun, but this really is like Kiwiblog
I hope you don't leave. Sincerely.
If PA System has become a punching bag for National it's intensified lately, and I'd rather this was a forum for "debate" (whatever that means) than an echo chamber.
That said, National has an ideological position. All parties do. If they form a Government, they get to enact that agenda. They've been fudging on issues since before the last election so legitimate doubt remains on what that agenda might be (what is their plan for ACC, I want to know). That's hardly shit-slinging.
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genuine dialogue doesn't happen through dishonesty and rank dog-whistling.
Pointing out policy is not dog whistling.