Posts by mattgeeknz
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One good thing that could come of the sign not going ahead is that a large number of otherwise politically apathetic youngsters will see that vociferous protest and demonstration actually does have the power to change things they don't like. Because sadly most protests don't change a thing. This issue might be trivial, but the sign not going ahead would still be a victory for the will of the people. We don't have many such victories so when they happen they're worth celebrating.
Or we could just end up with a sign that we all hate as our city's welcome mat, a permanent reminder that we were powerless in the face of the interests of a single misguided company. Unfortunately that's the way these things usually play out.
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Claire having a baby in two minutes annoyed me too.
I'd suggest that Claire having the baby over the two hours would have annoyed you more. Two minutes of that woman whining about her baby is more than I can take.
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Does it strike you as something of a failure that even after the show has aired, it takes someone from the production co. to explain what happened?
Their relationship with the production company isn't verified. A failure would have been if no one watched it, or if we weren't talking about it. Flash Forward is headed that way. But I'm finding all this post-finale speculation a lot of fun.
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For anyone still looking for answers this forum post from a Bad Robot intern (Bad Robot is Lost's production company) claims inside knowledge, and lays out a pretty convincing case for how it all fit together.
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The characters all died in the initial plane crash.
I don't think they did. I'm with Jake: Jack died then, people like Boone and Locke died earlier, but Sawyer and Kate and the others (not The Others) escaped on the plane and died maybe years later. Everything not in sideways world was real, albeit strange, odd, and mystical at times. But they all met up in limbo/sideways world after their deaths, had a kumbaya in the church and happily moved on to blinding-white-light world.
I was a little bit confused by the ending to begin with but after reflecting on it for a while it sort of just fell into place for me. I thought the writers treated the weird stuff really well: they just put it out there for us to believe or not believe, and we were all 'wha?' but all along they were playing it straight, and that most of it wasn't a dream was a huge relief to me.
Keeping us strung along for six seasons only to have everything fall into place in the last episode, and for some, pretty neatly, was an extraordinary achievement. So glad I hung in there.
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The budget was pretty good in terms of delivering on their promises. We got the tax cuts they've been yowling about for the last 10 years. Higher GST means there's more incentive to save and invest rather than spend on consumer goods, which has got to be good for the country, but only for those people that actually have a disposable income.
I'm struggling to figure out how any of this is going to help pay for an aging population though: the universal pension and the suspension of payments to the super fund means that a less fortunate government is probably going to have to hike the tax rates back up within 10 years anyway. Look at their estimates for superannuation allowances over the next few years, they jump from 500 million to 1.9 billion by 2014. Those are some scary numbers.
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@BlairMacca
Similar things have happened in New Zealand with a flat closing time: Queenstown is given as an example in the report. I imagine the rationale behind a no-entry policy at 2am and a closing time of 4am is so that people have a period of 2 hours during which they will leave their final venue, and not everyone is turned out into the streets at once.
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@Tessa
The report suggests that during those hours there is a higher incidence of alcohol related crimes, involving young people in particular. Crimes have victims, and a large number of those victims happen to be young women: of sexual assault, of violence, etc.
I was wrong to imply that a justification for raising the drinking age for each sex was because a large number of young men cause crimes and a large number of young women are the victims of those crimes. You're right, that doesn't justify raising the drinking age for women, and it was badly worded on my part (not the report's, which doesn't make this argument as far as I'm aware).
What does justify the raising of the drinking age for both sexes is that alcohol clearly inhibits the decision-making processes of young people of either sex, binge drinking is a problem for young men and young women, and that this is clearly reflected in hospital and/or crime statistics.
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The relationship between opening hours and the incidence of alcohol-related crimes and injuries is discussed on pages 183-192. They cite a number of studies, including a World Health Organisation report and reports from the UK, Iceland and more that longer opening hours actually increases the number of incidents over a 24 hour period: it doesn't just spread out the same number of incidents over a longer period of time. Reduce opening hours, and you would expect to see less alcohol-related hospital admissions and crimes over the full 24 hours.
I do recommend reading the report if you have any interest in these issues. It is very approachable, and is designed to be read by the general public, not just ministers and their staff and policy wonks.
I don't agree with everything in it - I like a drink as much as the next person - but most of their recommendations are well supported by overseas and local studies. They're not try-it-and-see recommendations: it's stuff that has been shown to work in reducing alcohol related harm and the number of alcohol related incidents both here and overseas.
Disclaimer: my wife worked on some of the report.
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They're also disproportionately male -- why isn't the Law Commission recommending prohibition for APBs?
Actually, as far as hospital admissions go, the figures are about the same for males and females (3.59). Females don't get arrested as much as males - that's true - but younger women experience greater victimisation risks due to alcohol.