Posts by Rich Lock
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Without being overly conspirational
A late entry for word of the year?
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Keir, I don't disagree that I'm being wilfully blind (deaf?). However, the devil is in the detail, and I just can't work up any enthusiasm for it. Suits are just not something I even bother noticing unless it was (is) compulsary.
Anyway, since this thread is careering (ahaha) off the rails, here's something to drag it back on topic: Welfare to work in the UK. Coming to New Zealand soon?
A little googling of A4E and Emma Harrison throws up some interesting reading material.....
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There is not, however, a defence against incoming artillery fire that doesn't rely on many metres of dirt and concrete between you and the shells. So ROK is very seriously at risk, both its infrastructure and citizens.
Sure, but unless it has a nuclear warhead in it, a rocket isn't really that much of a threat. But massive concentrations of artillery with range of a densely populated city is a very frightening prospect indeed.
Certainly not a direct and physical threat in the same way that artillery is - in that sense, the threat to Japan is insignificant compared to the threat to S Korea. But a couple of tons of metal landing at high speed in downtown Tokyo would certainly present a threat to the political stability of the region.
I don't think it's very likely. At all. But given that the N Korean leadership seems a little unstable right now, who knows?
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More or less.
Ever tried working on an office wearing a suit that wasn't of an entirely sober and neutral colour and cut? A shade of red, for example? You might be able to get away with a very subdued green, but otherwise, it's black, blue or grey on high rotate all day. When a discussion of 'radical' changes in working fashion is, in effect, reduced to a discussion of pinstripe spacing, excuse me if I have trouble working up any enthusiasm.
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Saying that suits all look the same is like saying that pop music all sounds the same.
Well, it does if you're not interested in it enough to absorb yourself in the detail. Which is the point here, right?
But the other point is that pop music is not the only musical genre, but it's the only one you can wear to work. Or something along the lines of a hideously twisted metaphor,,,
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I am obviously an evil pinko, but I wonder why it's deemed necessary for us to wear a particular *type* of boring shitty clothing to be 'professional'.
I'd prefer not to get started on that particular we-do-it-because-we've-always-done-it-if-it-ain't-broke-why-fix-it nonsense. I occassionally have to flick through various professional inductry journals (Actuary Monthly, Lawyers and their Laws NZ Quarterly. The Professional Accountant, etc).
A re-occurring article is 'Best Dressed'. Which is generally won by.....A man dressed in a suit. That looks like more or less every other suit ever.
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nobody with any sense would trust the default settings.
A maxim you can apply to life generally.
You can change the default settings on general life? Man, how come nobody told me this, like, years ago? No wonder it's all felt so wrong for the last few decades!
There's about 10 seconds of "Hi, how's it going? What have you been doing?", then it's straight down to whatever you were last talking about.
Heh. Earlier this year, I caught up with a good mate I hadn't seen for probably six, seven years. On the drive over to his place, I was wondering how it would be: awkward? Odd? Would we have changed much? Would out lives have diverged? Would we still have anything to talk about?
Ten seconds after we met, we were talking about pretty much what we were last talking about. Music, since you didn't ask.
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the fact that North Korea is not a credible threat to anyone except South Korea rather hides the extremity of the threat that they do pose to South Korea.
Well, they did also test-fire a rocket over Japan recently, if I recall correctly.
And, if it's possible to leave aside the potential for thousands of S Korean dead, it's not as if S Korea, or Japan for that matter, are insignificant players in global economy. -
an outpouring of actual grief for a virtual persona.
In much the same way as the Prime Minister of the UK was moved to actual comment in the House of Commons on the plight of the entirely fictional character Deirdre Rashid of Coronation Street.
The flip side of this is that actual deaths will be treated more and more as something shallow. Entertainment, almost. The media’s response to Pike River had more than a whiff of that, as Craig's comment sort of obliquely notes.
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Some more analysis from a fairly respectable group of talking heads here:
China abandoning North Korea
Some coment on that here.
It's unfortunate that the current situation in N Korea is being treated by the media as something of a sideshow. It has the potential to get very nasty very quickly, I suspect.