Posts by Brent Jackson
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to izogi,
I really just meant to allude to how invested New Zealand is in this one sport.
My son commented after we listened to the radio news the other day, "Things are a bit screwy when they talk twice as long about a possible foot injury of a player, than a plane crash that killed 28 people". Very astute of him, I thought.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to George Darroch,
But you forgot to mention the atheism ...
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Legal Beagle: Now it's up to you, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I think that analysis is based on the faulty premise that the proportionality of second preferences is equal to that of the first. This is unlikely to be true. A left leaning voter will go through all the left leaning parties before they would vote for National. I'd suggest that a significant proportion of Labour voters would have Greens as their second preference, and vice versa. This is, I believe, the principle benefit of STV - reducing the effects of a split vote.
Also, knowing that your vote will count in the end would make people much more likely to give their 1st preference to the party that they like the best. Under current systems people avoid "wasting" their vote on a party that won't make the threshold, so they vote for a party they don't especially like, just because it's better than the other one(s).
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Sacha,
Does that make Western Springs College a hippy school then ?
I was well impressed when my son started doing Philosophy at High School in year 9.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Carol Stewart,
When we were trekking in the Andes with various Spanish, Dutch, English and French people, without realising it, our speech had modified to be slower and clearer. We shared a meal with another group which also had a kiwi in it and got to talking. The Europeans couldn't follow our conversation - it was too fast, with too many missing sounds. They were very surprised. One of the Dutch women (who spoke excellent English), initially thought we were speaking a different language.
For Asians even with moderately good English, this must be very hard.
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I found the Chimney Stories audio-visual presentation deeply moving. It gave me the urge to immediately go home and tell my kids I love them. Thank you Blair, for sharing.
Cheers,
Brent. -
Great photos David. How did you manage to not leave any footprints for the photos looking back at the house ?
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Yeah, my first thought was a boycott (which is what I did for 6 months when I first read about the case years ago). Then I read the last line of the news article :
Costs were awarded to DB, however Morgan [DB's marketing manager] said it would not be asking for SOBA to pay up.
Which I thought quite fair-minded. I still think that radler should not be trade-marked, but it's more IPONZ's fault than DB's.
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OnPoint: Why Rightwingers Should Support…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Sigh I’m left with hoping the ABs lose the RWC because that is about the only thing I can see able to damage the National Party halo at the moment.
I would really like to do something to try and stop National from getting into power again. But I don't like any of the alternatives enough to proselytise for any other party. So all I am doing is mentioning some of the appallingly undemocratic things that National has done while in office, in those very few instances when politics comes up in conversation.
It just doesn't seem like enough ...
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to Jeremy Eade,
Hear, hear.