Posts by linger
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Cyclepath: the prevailing attitude of Auckland motorists toward cyclists. (See also hosking above: encouraging cyclepathic tendencies.)
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(Unkind cuts all round.)
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Serco-cision. The result of insufficient serco-spection when deciding to contract out government services in the hope of cutting both costs and direct accountability.
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One from the world of linguistics is David Carkeet's Double Negative, set in an institute for research into child language.
Oh, and has anyone in this thread already mentioned the Peter Shandy books by Charlotte MacLeod (e.g. Wrack and Rune )?
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And as I/S points out, Serco’s prison (mis)management contract for Wiri is set to run for 25 years!
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Polity: Cold, calculated and cynical, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
John Key’s assurances
i.e., what he’s issued from his ass.
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Up Front: Reading Murder Books, in reply to Sam F,
One of my colleagues was reading that during yesterday’s interminable department meeting: partly as an ironic comment on said meeting.
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(Actually, generic series title is Insert-Noun In Death, which kind of makes my point about the non-memorability of the individual titles.)
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Up Front: Reading Murder Books, in reply to Emma Hart,
I always get all them classics mixed up. Is Jane Ayre the one what goes,
“I wish I’d looked after me wife, and not locked her upstairs for life…”?@Bart – See also J.D. Robb, aka Nora Roberts in SF mode (generic title Death in Insert_Noun_Here ). Not always entirely convincing, the future world created has all-too-convenient gaps in technology to facilitate the plot,* but if you’re running short of Stephanie Plumb novels, it’s in the same ballpark.
* in much the same way as one of Asimov’s SF whodunnits had a plot requiring camera film as a medium of information storage.
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Tom was arguing for different kinds of mind refinement –
though the frame “many people are unable to benefit from university” was admittedly a clumsy way of introducing the premise “the present expensive time-consuming degree-oriented tertiary qualification system doesn’t work for many people” and an even less apt lead to the intended conclusion “there should be other types of training available too”.Yes, there should be. Different training methods can reach different people more effectively.
But the choice of training should be up to the individual. It should be noted that dropout from tertiary qualifications is not merely a matter of “some people aren’t suited to it”, but also, and rather more importantly, “some situations – such as not having enough money to pay fees over a long period – aren’t conducive to it”. Equality of access matters too: that’s what is in Fraser, and that’s what has been lost.