Posts by Chris Waugh
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Before Lust, in reply to Samuel Scott,
It’s pretty unusual to see a top less man even. Why have we become so fearful of our own nudity?
Or, perhaps, fearful of melanoma?
-
Up Front: Choice, Bro, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
whose brand of conservatism is very much “leave me the fuck alone, and I’ll repay the courtesy.”
Maybe I'm missing something, but that's what I thought conservativism was supposed to be.
-
Last night’s torrential rain, that slowly faded out over the course of this morning, was most welcome after three days of mid-summer style “sauna weather” (as the local press has come to call it) – oppressive heat, humidity, and PM2.5 shooting off the scale (a rather depressing headline of a couple of days ago said it had doubled the limit). And the result of that rain? Tonight’s sunset, first looking north, then looking southwest. This is a beautiful sight.
-
Hard News: Leaf and Tips, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
People buying 20 tablets for a cold or 100kg for export, labelled as something else?
Good question. The original article is here (Chinese language). It mentions ephedrine cold medicines being used to make crystal meth (locally known as ice. I guess this sentence gives you the best answer:
国家药监局表示，销售含麻黄碱类复方制剂的药品零售企业应当查验、登记购买者身份证
The State Drug Administration says that retailers selling cold medicines containing ephedrines will have to check and register the ID cards of buyers.
Original text so you can check my translation (which is rather loose, I admit, but that's the basically what it says), just please don't use Google misTranslate or any other machine translation. So I expect to be asked for a passport next time I try to buy cold medicine containing ephedrine.
This fits with our experience of Immigration, When my wife picked up her NZ tourist visa she was given a pamphlet explaining that cold medicines containing ephedrine were illegal and the penalties for importing such things. Seems part of the problem really was people stocking up on medicines you can't get in NZ and flying over with them in their luggage. I'm sure some was "legitimate" (Mum, I can't buy this medicine in NZ, can you bring some over? - expats are weird like that), but I'm sure some was just as equally using those legitimate-sounding reasons to ship some over to be cooked up into P or whatever.
Now off to collect my prescription - Chinese herbal stuff for asthma, no epehedrines.
-
Up Front: Choice, Bro, in reply to Steve Parks,
And for Craig’s latest bit of bigotry:
I found the Herald's note that Key was wearing a pink shirt a little odd, but I liked how they ended their piece:
Helensville local Jools Topp, from lesbian comedy duo the Topp Twins, was not impressed either. "Helensville is a cool town and I have never had a problem there," she said. "We could do without hate-fuelled opinions being thrust into our mailboxes."
And Colin thinks Key is too gay?
-
Hard News: Leaf and Tips, in reply to Chris Waugh,
And I wonder, if this particular reform is what it seems, it is actually carried through (a very big if), and I'm getting my pharmacology right, what effect, if any, it'll have on supply chains in the NZ meth industry.
-
hmmmm.... on the subject of drugs, I see on the front page of today's The Beijing News a headline announcing that people buying cold/flu medicine containing epedrines will have to register their ID card. Ephedrine is one of the precursors of meth, isn't it? I believe that's the kind of medicine Chinese people getting an NZ visa are given a brochure by immigration warning them about.
-
Legal Beagle: Alcohol Game Theory, in reply to Yamis,
I was actually in favour of the split age.
The former split age (we must've been at university at fairly similar times) didn't make any sense to me - 20, but 18 at certain sports clubs, with a meal or if you purchase a meal ticket (from memory $3 at the Loaded Goblin but no compulsion to actually claim, let alone eat your meal, but a stamp on your hand to limit the time you can buy booze and/or claim your meal) or with a spouse or other family member over 20 struck me as being unnecessarily complex and fairly easy to abuse. But 18 on licence/20 off licence seems like a fair way to do it if we must have a split age. Still, one flat drinking age that just happens to be the same as the age for all those other adult things like joining the army and going to war, voting, criminal responsibility, and so on makes by far the most sense to me. After all, the problem is not the drinking age but the drinking culture.
As long as the purchase age is 18 from a liquor store then the drinking age will basically be 16-17 (and lower) and that’s the reality.
I'm not convinced it has to be that way. We can change our cultural attitudes towards booze and we can improve law enforcement.
-
-
Did anybody else see this? (And: Does every radio station do online news as badly as Newstalk ZB?) On the one hand, no surprise. But on the other hand, how are we to reconcile this:
Trust in media organisations appears to be dropping as a result of the rise of social media use.
with this:
"As you might expect, news that they receive via social media is at the bottom of that list, they trust the information from there the least."
Seems on the face of it to be a tad contradictory.
