Posts by Stephen Judd
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I honestly would like to know how our beloved welfare state,burdened as it is by oldies taking out more than they put in, is going to survive without a lot of nice young immigrants to fill out the tax base.
(We could make all the boomers work until 70, it looks as though we youngers will have to anyway...)
A colleague and I were talking the other night about this. Bugger letting in rich old migrants who make token investments and contribute bugger all. Bring in the young and keen and poor, especially the ones a couple of years out from starting a family.
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Apropos the Elias speech, some more food for thought.
"For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold," says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay, a professor of psychology, pediatrics and psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center.
The research team sought out boys from kindergarten who were at risk for delinquent behavior and who were enrolled at 53 schools from the poorest neighbourhoods in Montreal. Some 779 participants were interviewed annually from the age of 10 until 17 years. By their mid-20s, some 17.6 percent of participants ended up with adult criminal records for infractions that included homicide (17.9 percent); arson (31.2 percent); prostitution (25.5 percent); drug possession (16.4 percent) and impaired driving (8.8 percent).
"The more intense the help given by the juvenile justice system, the greater was its negative impact," Dr. Tremblay stresses. "Our findings take on even greater importance given that the juvenile justice system in the province of Quebec has the reputation of being among the best. Most countries spend considerable financial resources to fund programs and institutions that group deviant youths together in order to help them. The problem is that delinquent behavior is contagious, especially among adolescents. Putting deviant adolescents together creates a culture of deviance, which increases the likelihood of continued criminal behavior."
"Two solutions exist for this problem," adds Dr Tremblay. "The first is to implement prevention programs before adolescence when problem children are more responsive. The second is to minimize the concentration of problem youths in juvenile justice programs, thereby reducing the risk of peer contagion."
Lord knows what Bob McCroskie and the SST would make of that.
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Defunct Companies of New Zealand.
Much more to be added, I'm sure.
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Rik: I'm one of those who likes Whittaker's Dark Ghana, and one of the things I particularly like about it is the coffee note! So I suspect that if you were to produce something with actual coffee in I might find it irresistible.
I've come to terms with the fact that I am probably a "low taster". I enjoy the potentially philistine dark choc/scotch combo too.
I feel we ought to cross-pollinate Mr Slack's latest thread. After all, Whittakers are locally owned, aren't they?
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Regarding the Palm Oil thing, the guy from Cadbury's was claiming their Palm Oil is "sustainably sourced". Is that possible ? Bit like the Kwila decking issue ? How would the consumer "really" know.
I did a bit of googling on this the other day.
Cadbury get their oil via people who are certified through an industry group, the RSPO. Said group appears to be a voluntary, loosely regulated and badly inspected organisation with no teeth. cite.
Money quote:
"... the RSPO is failing to enforce even its own minimum, and from Greenpeace’s point of view, insufficient criteria.
The certifiers have ignored several issues including land conflicts, operations in breach of Indonesian law, development without High Conservation Value assessments and continued clearance of forests and peatlands, even though some of this land clearing took place on peat more than 2 m deep and is therefore illegal under Indonesia law.The granting of the first sustainability certificate by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to United Plantations seems little else but a cover up of business-
as-usual including land grabbing, deforestation, peatland conversion, and the violation of Indonesian law." -
OMG surplus apostrophe.
/me kills self in shame.
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Which reminds me, is Moore's Lost Girl's available in NZ?
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“If we did, inevitably some people would visit them in the interim, effectively facilitating further offending and making the Department party to the further exploitation of children,”
That implies that at some point in the future the list would be made available, which would be good.
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Any international proxy server will however. Relatively easy to arrange.
I agree. That's why I followed that paragraph with:
"Alternatively, if the filtering isn't robust and is easily evaded, the whole thing is pointless. Unless it's a way to collect potential offenders' information for later investigation..."
I mean, I understand that the point of filtering is implement a legislative responsibility to censor -- in other words, it is to stop you seeing stuff.
Perhaps I didn't express myself very well. What I wanted to point out is there is a contradiction between the implicit claim that filtering works to stop people seeing stuff, and the claim that a list of said stuff cannot be circulated lest people use it to see stuff.
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Although I must admit I quite like the idea of bafoonery.
The bafoon is an over-rated instrument of limited range. Better to take up the strumpet.