Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
There are two secret hidden sex doors in the Oval Office
I was fairly sure there were three. Also, John Key has had a secret tunnel built from Premier House to the nearby US embassy. They did this at the same time as painting the gates grey.
Based the work I’ve had done, I’m pretty sure that $10k is a very reasonable deal to convert a room that isn’t a bathroom into one that is, in a high-rise block and to code.
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Exactly.
I'm sure the most financially efficient arrangement would be to abolish all local councils and have a Ministry of Local Services run it all.
But we have local councils because the attitudes of people in Wellington City are different to those in Eketahuna.
(I'd actually favour a smaller council that covers the CBD and inner suburbs. Why is Tawa part of Wellington, it's a suburb of Porirua? Also, no more directly elected mayor - a leader elected by a majority of councillors. But that's by the way).
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Sacha,
Counterexamples?
Anyway, just for you: http://lawschool.unm.edu/nrj/volumes/14/3/03_juergensmeyer_common.pdf
When English common law property concepts migrated to
America, the common lands concept barely managed to survive the
voyage, arriving in a drastically weakened conditionFrom an 1833 judgement:
In this country [USA] such rights [of common] are uncongenial with the genius of our government, and with the spirit of independence which animates our cultivators of the soil
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Steve Curtis,
I hadn't forgotten, that was one of the factors driving British people who'd lost their land to migrate overseas (often with the promise that they could in turn steal land from indigenous people). To my knowledge the concept of common land was not replicated in any settled country, with the possible exception of 17th century North America.
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someone whose family were not even NZers at the time of Gallipoli
More British people were killed at Gallipoli than NZers, though.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to BenWilson,
peak usage [for golf] would be around 84 x 4 = 336 people per day
On that basis, maybe we should encourage sports like cheese rolling or folk football, with several hundred or even thousand players active on a playing area that while large in area, requires little preparation.
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Mr Key said if the Government was to send troops, “it would be in part to try and pay tribute to the service and sacrifice of the ANZAC forces that lost their lives in Gallipoli”.
Kind of gives the lie to those that argue that the "remembrance" narrative isn't designed to promote acceptance of current and future wars.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to stever@cs.waikato.ac.nz,
Well, yes. Traditionally in most of Europe, land isn't seen as something you have exclusive possession over. When you go walking in the Lake District, or skiing in Switzerland, you are for the most part on somebody's farm, or on remaining common land.
I think traditional Maori attitudes were similar, at least if you were part of the local iwi or their allies.
A tragedy of settler society was that it held out a promise that everyone could be a "laird" and take exclusive possession over their domain. Of course, this couldn't work and you wound up with a tiny minority controlling much of the land.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Alfie,
Maybe they should just rename the award "best use of click fraud"?
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Also, how about building over the playing fields of all those high decile schools in Epsom? That'd probably fund the education budget for a few years.