Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Steve Barnes,
but meat hooks are S shaped, not C shaped. That cartoon is wrong!
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Have The Greens actually committed to any "clean politics" policies and actions? I recall No Right Turn asking them to declare all donations over the threshold they want, and promptly, then complaining that they didn't want to. Have they decided to do that yet? And ideally, to restrict political donations to voters (ie, not just ban corporate and trust donations, but donations from all non-voters).
Similarly, I'd like them to be asking for mandatory disclosures that would make the whaleleaks problem impossible, in some way. I'm not sure how, but I'd really like to hear their ideas.
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Hard News: In The Green Room, in reply to Bart Janssen,
there is no real evidence that shows that direct stimulus to business investment (i.e. tax breaks) does much to increase business R&D
Anecdotally (ie, the company I work for), the tax breaks are what make it worth keeping operations in Australia. We have a small assembly and shipping operation, and a repair/rebuild shop that exists almost entirely to service the R&D team. Basically, without them R&D would involve a lot of "wait for that to come back from China" which we can avoid by going downstairs and bugging the assembly/repair team to do stuff right now. So we get circuit boards made offsite (sometimes offshore), then SMD's put onto them in house. That's five "bonus" jobs from the R&D tax break, on top of 6 or 7 engineers actually doing the R&D. That plus two admin people (and a director who does design/marketing/production management) is it for the company, BTW, everything else is outsourced, some of it offshore. That seems to be a common model for high-tech firms, BTW.
I know people doing similar things in NZ, but it's very tempting for them to come to Oz and they don't have to get very big before it's costing them serious money to stay in NZ.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to tim kong,
The New Zealand Curriculum is a national curriculum. It sets the broad guidelines that every school must work from as they develop their own curriculum.
So a school can quite legally say "we don't teach scince" and the government will accept that? That is deeply scary to me. A few pathetic rules around exactly how they have to perform religious indoctrination are nothing compared to letting schools decide which subjects are worth teaching at all. I can only assume you're overstating how much latitude schools get here.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to tim kong,
concerned at the "no science" being taught in schools aspect, and that's worth a conversation with those schools as to why not.
Sorry, but I think that conversation needs to be of the form "please explain why you should not be deregistered, fired, have an external administrator run the school, and so on". The cirriculum is not something to be negotiated individually with each school like a blinking employment contract, or to the extent that it is, it should be exactly like negotiating a job contract with a government: "here's the deal, take it or we're not giving you any money".
Religious nutbaggery when I was in primary school was not optional, and the local Brethren kids got pulled out of school while it was applied by local Christian officials. I have no recollection of the details, none of it struck me as odd because it stopped before I quit sunday school so it was just more of the same. By the time I got to secondary school it would have been somewhat dangerous to try it, because I was starting to ask genuine questions. "Duty to God" at Venturers ended with the "teacher" in tears, put it that way.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to David Herkt,
the sheer contempt that was manifested about the public was just amazing ... and that marvelous e-mail from ex-pat legal-eagle Cathy Odgers
It's making me rethink my opinions of the rightwing people I know, that's for sure.
It reminds me of the deeply rascist people I've met who are perfectly fine with their black friends because their friends are not like the rest. Farrar is perfectly nice face to face (as ins Banks, for that matter), but the more I learn about his politics the more I think there's huge cognitive dissonance going on. Surely no-one could be that blatantly two-faced and not slip, ever? They have to be thinking "oh, that smart, sensible, rich greenie I know, he's the exception, the rest are barmy". Gritting his teeth and pretending to be nice just doesn't seem sustainable.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Russell Brown,
If all they managed was a couple of scripts that were handed out to call centre workers and read out over the phone to thousands of people, they were a really shit spy.
Hey, as a member of the international espionage elite I am offended by that. It takes considerable skill to swipe the newpaper from the tea-room at the end of the day, thank you very much. I feel rather proud of myself.
If I had to copy a script off a screen in a call-centre I'm not sure what I'd do. Perhaps use my secret spy smartphone (a maxwell smart phone?) to take a photo of the screen. Or, here's a thought, as I'm reading it out repeatedly over the phone, memorise it! Genie-Uz!
Hagar quite probably just got one of the call entre people to recite it. Repeatedly. While he transcribed it. It wouldn't be hard. Although he might also find he gets a carpet cleaning off and "have you tried turning it off and on again" mixed in there somewhere.
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Yeah, watch the wrinklies lose their shit. OMG, young people!
More than 10 years ago some Australian politicians were doing the same about The Herd singing "Burn Down The Parliament" (complete with drug references!), then NWA's "**** the police" springs to mind. And wasn't that Tane guy getting headlines recently doing a cover of said song? No wonder our elders and betters don't like the whole genre.
Has anyone asked John Key how he feels about his presumably previous support for disgraced former MP John Banks? I'm just going to say that again because I like the sound of it so much: disgraced former MP John Banks.
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Hard News: Steven Joyce: Prick or Treat, in reply to Rich Lock,
We spent three years learning hardcore maths, thermodynamics, etc, and a cursory 2-3 weeks at the end of the course at the local college learing how to weld, bend pipes, cast metal, etc.
In NZ we do a Polytech course in that normally at the start of an engineering degree, but it's not very useful. It's explicitly more a safety-around-machines course than trying to give any understanding of how stuff works. Unfortunately even for engineering a lot of that requires experimentation, which builds on using the tools rather than replacing it.
That said, even 25 years ago there were real problems with electrical engineering students not having basic lab skills (like soldering), so often first year labs were "can you make a simple circuit work at all". That meant students who could were often bored, and some labs really struggled to produce "experiments" that covered the range of abilities. I tried to make a point of doing additional work for every lab session but sometimes it was all a bit hard.
Then when we did the 6 week "intro to civil engineering" course (etc) the whole thing became a bit of a joke. Yes, I've used a fluid tank to see pretty waves, and I have a vague idea of how to measure water flow rates. But any appreciation for how structures work came from my experience on the shiny end of a welder at home, not from school. I vaguely remember some equations, but if I had to do structural modelling I'd be starting with wikipedia (or a pirated copy of SolidWorks)
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Hard News: The silence of the public square, in reply to ,
That true, I grapple with that as I decide who gets my vote.
I'm more concerned with people who actually associate with criminals and are comfortable with fraud being commited against the electoral system. I leave the Godwin to you.
Not that I'm suggesting that That Nice Mr Key{tm} would actually commit fraud to keep office, but the whole National Party edifice does seem too comfortable with corruption for my liking. From "airport security rules are only for the proletariat" to "oh, you mean this investment" they seem to like skating as close to the public acceptance line as they can get away with, legality be damned. It might be as innocent as shifting the Overton Window towards public officials enriching themselves at our expense, or as offensive as, well, that.