Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Legal Beagle: A war crimes inquiry; or…, in reply to Alfie,
Debatable, if you read the material I linked.
The Geneva Conventions were drafted and agreed as a lowest common denominator, covering desperate, 1941 type situations and attempting to provide something that would be accepted by states very far from being liberal democracies.
One issue here, which could be explored by an inquiry, is who sets the rules of engagement, military commanders or ministers, and what general principles do they start from in doing this.
Simply saying that a 'crime' has been committed and we're going to nail Corporal X to the wall for it make make some people happy, but doesn't get to the root of the problem.
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Seems to me that any prosecution would come unstuck on the "which are not military objectives" bit. Whoever in the chain of command found themselves in court could rely on the fact that they had information that the village was a "military objective".
Of course, what is defensible under the Geneva Conventions doesn't necessarily match with what we want our troops to do as a nation - especially when they've embarked on a conflict of no benefit to NZ.
Which suggests that maybe a public inquiry could look into what is really a matter of public policy rather than criminal law - why do we send troops to "other people's wars" knowing that any such action is likely to result in civilian casualties?
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to WH,
a short video of one of the ceremonies at the Independent
Are they trying to somehow manifest a reader?
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LED shows were a very expensive thing in the mid 2000s - I remember an awesome art piece at Burning Man with a cube of thousands of ping-pong balls with LEDs inside them forming 3D patterns.
Nowadays, with Neopixels, it's easier and cheaper to do.
As for Bono, pay yer feckin taxes, then I'll listen.
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it's now become commonplace for skiers and snowboarders to wear helmets, without any element of compulsion
A lot of skiers and snowboarders disagree with that. Recreational skiers (and even instructors) aren't at a particularly high risk of head injury. Wearing a helmet reduces your peripheral vision (which is more important when making turns downhill than it would be travelling straight on a road), it makes you a more solid danger to other skiers and it tends to encourage more reckless skiing.
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Hard News: What the wastewater tells us…, in reply to Moz,
To be more accurate, they aren't supposed to sell any weed they confiscate, and they certainly don't return any proceeds to the public purse.
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Hard News: What the wastewater tells us…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Ritalin isn't an amphetamine, it isn't even a phenylamine, so unlikely to test similarly.
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I'd assume that since typical LSD doses are physically about a thousand times less than most other drugs, then detection would be a substantial challenge.
What I'd be interested in is whether the researchers have considered using commonly prescribed drugs (ACE inhibitors, or antibiotics, for instance) as a baseline reference for dispersal levels in the sewage system - the usage levels should be obtainable from DHBs or Pharmac and could be compared with metabolite levels.
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Perhaps as bots get more prevalent and realistic, they'll undermine the (flaky) economic basis of social media - will companies pay to advertise to an audience of non-consuming computer programs?
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Hard News: Superannuation: Back to the Future, in reply to Rochelle Wilson,
Do you have a reference for those assertions about increased morbidity?