Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to Tom Semmens,
For example, in winter many cyclists (for understandable reasons) festoon themselves with so much flashing, pulsing and static lights in orange, red and white that they look like a Hindu festival on acid. Much of that light is probably illegal.
Is it legal for trucks? Sometimes on the highways at night I've wondered if a few of the giant christmas trees driving towards me might be more likely to distract or (worse) attract oncoming drivers than alert them.
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People will make mistakes and poor choices. The idea is to get to a point where the penalty for making a mistake isn’t death, and where the “correct” route isn’t too risky to countenance.
It doesn’t directly involve cycling, but I found it telling browsing the YouTube comment thread under the LTSA’s latest “Mistakes” TV ad (which went viral globally).
Many people who comment, particularly among those who think it’s a stupid or pointless ad, seem to be very strongly of an opinion that it’s all the fault of either driver X or driver Y, and that all of road safety’s problems would be solved if either Driver X/Y hadn’t been such an idiot, or allowed to have a licence to begin with.
It’s really no wonder that the vehicle/cyclist thing riles up so many strong vocal and inflexible opinions.
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Hard News: Lowering the Stakes, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
I can’t even ride a bike, so all this feels like it’s from another planet, but it seems to me that cyclists running red lights are totally different from motorists.
I’m also not a cyclist, but I’m a frequent pedestrian (and I drive when I need to). To me it’s always seemed that the only logical reason we’ve ever had road rules is to create structure and predictibility of highly lethal privately owned and operated juggernauts with substantial momentum, in order to protect everyone else. You can look at old street photos of places like Wellington and Auckland, and people are milling around and socialising and going from place to place all over the road, often betwen trams. eg. Lambton Quay in 1905, Oriental Parade in 1915, and Queen Street of 1919. Nearly all this social transit space has now been lost to highly structured motorised vehicle channels, and for decades now we’ve been designing stuff that’s widely spread ages apart from everything else, merely (and ironically) to accomodate people’s ability to drive between them.
That can only now exist in rare places by design (like pedestrian malls or cycle trails), because the imposed structure makes simply going direct from A to B very inefficient for anyone who’s not driving. Especially when stopping and starting on a bike takes so much effort, as does (for pedestrians) walking significant lengths to designed safe crossings, only to have to wait for ages for nothing to happen, then walk all the way back.
So I’m all for chasing and dealing with cyclists and pedestrians when they carelessly interfere with other traffic that has a right-of-way. But if they’re actually being careful, and ensuring there are reasonable gaps and stuff before intervening in a road-space, then it seems silly to me to prosecute a cyclist for running a red light that primarily exists to enforce structure on motorised traffic, and when they’re inhibiting nobody, or to prosecute a pedestrian who doesn't bother to wait for an electronic sign to say it's safe to cross. Really, though, the more separate we can keep motorised vehicles from our living and working spaces, the better.
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Hard News: We need to talk about Len, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
If you really want to get conspiratorial, it might be some cunning Labour ploy
If I did, I'd think it were more likely that it were an effort to convince waning Len Brown supporters that there's a potentially electable leftie candidate who could take over as an alternative, to convince them to pull their support for him.
Re-reading those links, the Herald does seem to be the only one to report/repeat the rumours without also printing Phil Goff's outright denial. It's a pretty weak conspiracy at this point, though. :)
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What's the deal with "rumours" that Phil Goff might be interested in the Auckland mayoralty? Or did Fairfax and TVNZ and the Herald simply and arbitrarily decide to publish stories today which say that he had absolutely no interest... for no obvious reason?
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Speaker: TPP: Nearing Endgame, in reply to Matthew Poole,
He’s not making it up, though I don’t have a supporting link.
I'm not familiar with this but here's a press release from the Aussie Fair Trade and Investment Network (whatever that is) which more or less repeats what you've just said, after a speedy search:
"The Philip Morris tobacco company is currently suing the Australian government over its tobacco plain packaging legislation, using an obscure 1993 Hong Kong- Australia investment treaty. Philip Morris is actually a US-based company, but could not sue under the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, because public opposition kept this clause out of the agreement. Philip Morris rearranged its assets to become a Hong Kong investor in order to use an obscure treaty. This shows how giant global companies can abuse such clauses in trade agreements," said Dr Ranald.
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Speaker: TPP: Nearing Endgame, in reply to Russell Brown,
"But they’ll never ratify it!” isn’t all that reassuring …
Fortunately New Zealand’s parliament is very compact, efficient and effective at getting legislation passed when compared with some of these other ones, so we can be sure to uphold our side of the bargain no matter what problems the US and other governments might have in pushing their own sides through.
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Australia though is the US’s closest ally.
I’m not finding this totally surprising. There are obvious similarities with NZ, but it always felt like a much more Americanised culture than NZ during the few years I was living there. Maybe something about all the levels of government, the tax return process (heaps of people pay someone else to do it for them), aspects of the health system and the insurance industry, the list goes on. My experience probably varies from others.
Let’s be clear about something: signing the TPP in its current form is letting a foreign country (the US) and the foreign companies that lobby it write the law in this country.
In my head I now keep wanting to compare this with the SkyCity arrangement, except for the difference between corporation and foreign government (acting as an agent for its corporations). Is it a fair comparison? In that sense signing the TPP in its current form would not necessarily seem to be without precedent for the current government, but agree that it would be a more demonstrable sell-out if the leak of our current position is anything to go by.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to BenWilson,
Pissed off people call them all the time, and they just get cut off. Then they give much much longer air time to angry conservative dad who agrees with them.
I agree. Willie and JT were given an elevated level of speech by a radio station owned by a company that controls a large proportion of New Zealand’s radio spectrum with a specific design of selling audiences to advertisers.
Giving these guys such prominence had nothing to do with free speech or nobly representing views, even if they might coincidentally represent some people. They’re given it specifically because it’s known to generate a destructive and antagonistic form of controversy, and keep it rolling, to generate an audience that’s primed for sale to advertisers who often buy purely on numbers. People could call in saying anything they like, and whatever’s said will still be framed by the host(s) to generate more controversy, because that’s what they’ve been hired to do.
I appreciate what Graeme is saying and I agree there’s a wider risk with a boycott for some of the reasons he’s mentioned. But when that’s the game that MediaWorks and RadioLive are playing, I have trouble being offended by a boycott. I know it’s petty reasoning, but enough damage was already done when they started it.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to ,
What would be the advantage of using G3 instead of FM?
I guess in an age where there are probably reasons to have internet in cars anyway for any number of other reasons (both useful and ominous), it (a) means it's unnecessary to install a separate reception device-instead you could have a radio station or other audio running off your phone or other portable device and plug it straight into the vehicle when you show up.. or just have it embedded in the vehicle, and (b) makes it possible for people to receive radio stations from pretty much anywhere in the world if they don't like the local broadcast options, at least as long as they have internet. You can already find radio streams from all over the world pretty easily through services like this one. Smart people probably know better places to look than I do.
I'm not yet sold on the ~90 second delay when I stream Radio NZ, but it's getting there.