Posts by Moz
-
One ugly part of the fixed repayment is that there's no flexibility. If you go overseas to find work, or become unemployed while there the IRD doesn't care. They'll happily ask for money you don't have and charge you penalties for not supplying it. Which means you're often better off on the dole in NZ than overseas working for minimum wage while looking for work. I'd like to think that's not the design intention, but I am afraid that it is.
-
OnPoint: Budget 2013: Bringing Down the…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The student loan issue is an ugly one. Not least because of the huge sovereign risk that's been demonstrated (viz, you have a legally binding agreement where one party can, and does, change the terms at will... it's as though they're taking tips from FaceBook).
I went through the process a few years ago because I could see that it was just going to get worse. It was better to borrow off a bank (who can't easily change the rules mid-loan) and focus on paying that back quick smart. In the end the process of arranging payment was so slow that I had saved enough by the time the IRD could give me a straight answer about how much I owed.
the likely defeat of the Australian Labor government this coming September
I expect an austerity program like the ones currently failing everywhere from the UK to Queensland. Which could easily send a flood of unemployed kiwis back across the Tasman. Those who can afford it, anyway - there are quite a few unemployed, homeless kiwis here with no entitlement to welfare. The ozzies are disturbingly happy to deny even the most basic sustenance to foreigners and aborigines. I got citizenship* a few years ago when it became clear that whipping up xenophobia was a blight that was not going away.
* for what that's worth - the ozzies are also happy to strip citizenship from dual citizens then deport them. They dumped a heroin addict into eastern europe a few years ago despite the fact that he'd lived in Australia since before he was five years old and didn't speak the language or know anyone there. From memory he slept in the embassy doorway and begged for food until the local media shamed someone into doing the absolute minimum necessary to make the problem go away.
-
Wow,there's actual Ministry of Compulsory Joy in the interwebs! OMG.
At one stage I wanted to paint up a friends house truck/bus as "MoCJ: Official Funbus" with the slogan "You WILL enjoy yourselves". Owner vetoed it.
-
Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Martin Roberts,
The ‘old Chinese gentlemen’ demographic.... Are they considered by planners and advocates? Have they ever been engaged in cyclist community building?
Yes :)
In Sydney a number of councils go out of their way to find people like them and work out what they want. It can be hard when their native/only language is not English (Fairfield council does community surveys in 12 languages, for example). Usually they do stalls and info days rather than surveys, because grabbing whoever happens to have 10 minutes spare as they ride past is nearly worthless. But that reaching out is expensive, and often produces results that the powers that be do not like. Hence the "reforms" That Nice Mr Key{tm} is currently putting through, for example.
I've been paid by councils to do everything from bike counts to route design to sitting on stalls badgering cyclists. Stapling strips of paper to handlebars works really well, BTW. Just put a one-sentence request ("tell the council where you want a new bike path") URL and phone number of it, plus the council logo. Or in Fairfield, 12 sentences...
Discovery is also difficult because counting "cyclists not using this route" is hard, and many cyclists don't think about planning issues much. So asking "what routes would you like" can be pointless or meaningless. The bicycle user groups (BUGs) over here do a lot of this work for council, at some risk of the interests of engaged cyclists dominating. I'm a BUG member, and we try to cover all cyclists, but we're really ad-hoc (inevitably).
What seems to work really well is general obstacle awareness. We try to get the railway, road and motorway people thinking about the scale cyclists work at (they'll ride further than pedestrians, but dislike hills more, for example) when building or modifying obstacles (railway lines, main roads, pedestrian malls etc). Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it works well but the planners are unhappy (cyclists riding on pedestrian overbridges being a big one... like anyone is going to dismount and walk 100m over an otherwise-empty overbridge). So some BUG work is just educating both sides, and some of it is post facto infrastructure adjustment.
-
Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I cycled to work over in summer in steel caps and fluoro vest, because that was what I had to wear
Way back when I was a student that seemed common in the working classes (I was, of course, in the non-working class :)) A surprising number of truckies rode to work, and ~10% of the bakery staff.
From working in a bike shop in a gentrifying area the poorer people generally bought bikes that could be ridden in street/work clothes, it was the richer people who were excited about our lack of lyrca (it's expensive to stock). But with gloves and especially lights we made a point of stocking cheap ones as well as good ones. Because cheap-but-usable beats not having them at all, no matter how much we didn't like them.
Also, self-adhesive reflective take by the metre in red and white. Buy 50mx25mm rolls for ~$100, sell it at $5 per "metre" (always be generous). It looks a bit hideous unless the bike is white or red, but it's amazingly effective. My current commuter bike is white for that reason - it's about 30% covered in reflective tape.
-
Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Gareth Davidson,
Heh. I sometime think I should get a fake beard and suspenders to go with my recumbent. Just to fit in, you know :)
But honestly, it's not the lycra, it's the attitude I collect from some lycra louts that puts me right off. I know that bunch riding is dangerous and requires discipline and care monitoring of the riders around you. Great. But I *don't* ride in a bunch specifically because I'm not that disciplined and I'm not willing to accept the danger. So lycra louts that try to apply peer pressure to me on the basis that all cyclists are pack cyclists... fail. Slow down, spread out, accept that you're sharing a road or path with other commuters.
Todays eBay shopping is a pile of 0.5W surface mount LEDs and a battery pack so I can light up my helmet. thermal glue them to a strip of aluminium, wrap that round the helmet. I'll use a small arduino and a couple of driver transistors to give me more control over light output than is really necessary, but that's actually simpler than making a timer circuit to flash them (and $25 for the circuitry). It will also make most video cameras unhappy, hopefully even in full sunlight :)
-
Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to BenWilson,
I’ve got induction-powered Reellights on the Archi bike,
How are you finding them? I've got friends who use them but I have not been impressed. They seem more vulnerable to failure than hub dyno lights (ie, I see a lot that are not working) and they're not very bright. But they are a lot cheaper than a hub dyno.
-
Also, enjoying being back in Sydney, I seem to know so many more people here. Went to a bike festival in the park today, lots of fashionable cyclewear and decent utility bikes, from dutch bikes though to lightweight mudguards for fixies. The Clover Moore “bike lanes everywhere” project is starting to pay off in getting past the 5% who will ride regardless. Which is excellent.
Sydney is undulating, a bit like Auckland. Electric assist seems to be key for breaking a couple of barriers – the unfit and the mommy riders. But it also allows you to do 10km or so without sweating. And that’s now quite practical, albeit at the $2000 price point rather than the sub-$1000 point that most people want to start at. But $2000 seems to be pretty affordable, at least going by the number of ebikes I see and the crowds around the ebikeshop stalls. There’s a lot of longtail bikes with baby seats and motors, including one owner with two kid seats and a kiddie trailer.
Plus my new job interview had a few rounds of “you’re going to ride your bike? In the rain? In the winter?” But they have ample parking and a shower, so it was just a mental block.
-
For commuting I too bought some of the floppy shorts with bike knicks inside, and decided that I love them. Bike knicks FTW, obviously, by the nylon shorts have pockets! Pockets! Plus they separate from the knicks, and outlast them, so now I have two pair even though I'm on about my 3rd and 4th set of knicks since buying them. On a recumbent the chamois is usually worse than useless, because I'm not sitting on it it sits out from my crotch and chafes. Plus the shorts mean Tess doesn't have to stare at my crotch for ten minutes before announcing that she doesn't like to look at it.
I wear cheap yellow high-vis shirts because they're cheap and have a ridiculous SPF - us pasty white people need that.
Also, SPDs. I have the shitmano street shoes with SPDs in them and double sided SPD pedals on all my bikes. Being actually attached to the bike is something I'm so used to that I struggle when I'm not. And single sided pedals... never buy them new, ask around, someone is bound to have a set they want to get rid of.
For short trips I'll wear whatever I happen to have on, and for touring I go long sleeves and a full-coverage hat-helmet cover thing, because sunscreen is a very ugly thing when you don't have a hot shower waiting for you at the end of the day.
-
Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Patrick Morgan,
We once ran the workshop with Wellington Police. It was enlightening to see Police take shortcuts like the ones RB writes about. They turned without indicating, wandered through Stop signs, and overtook queues of slow moving traffic. Not strictly legal
Strictly illegal, as you know. I used to collect helmet cam footage of velocops breaking the law, specifically so I could use it in court if I ever did get a ticket. The idea of saying "so I'm accused of doing this...", play video of velocop doing it, video of a different velocop doing it... repeat until asked to stop... "I was merely following the example of the Police, yeronner".
I've had some amusing off-the-record chats with velocops about this stuff, and they invariably talk like cyclists rather than law enforcement when it comes to a: some of the sillier road laws that only work for motorists and b: treatment by motorists. Some of you will be shocked to hear that a reflective jacket with "POLICE" in big letters on it is no more visible than a black cardy, if worn by a cyclist. The one that surprised me is that flashing red/blue bike lights and a clearly visible pistol are apparently not visible either.
I wonder why bank robbers don't use this amazing invisibility as well (maybe they do, and we just don't hear about it because they're never caught?)