Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Joe Wylie,
As if we aren’t already plundering the 3rd world to care for our elderly.
From the two Filipina rest home workers I know of who decided to return home rather than stay on in shaky Chch, I suspect that NZ’s a borderline prospect anyway.For immigrants not intending to stay in NZ (or substitute America, Britain, large cities in China, etc) the fundamental bargain has always been that they'll put up with low pay and dubious living conditions if and only if the pay is sufficient to improve their standard of living or their family's standard of living back home. It relies on a significant gap in pay and living standards between the two places. Once third-world standards of living rise - and if we keep going the way we're going for the working poor - that bargain no longer holds.
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Muse: Postcard from London: Lines…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I've heard it's also a bit like that in New York or Tokyo - 4 days is way too short. 4 days in Los Angeles, on the other hand...
You can just about hit the highlights in New York in four days, although that depends very much on your own personal tastes. I reckon it's always better to leave a city regretting you can't stay longer, though - the other option is usually regretting you stayed that long, and that colours the bits you did enjoy.
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Given how the bonus is paid, it's unlikely that it'll take effect until the end of this tax year - 31 March 2013. At the very earliest it won't take effect until Monday, realistically 1 June, and that would be law-making at its most incredibly rapid: a speed not normally associated with something so trivial.
The change has been signalled, but because it's got tax implications and a bunch of other things tied in I would be stunned if it kicks in earlier than the end of this tax year. It's only a saving of a few million dollars, really not worth the out-of-cycle changes to how IRD handles student loan repayment calculations.We're expecting it to kick in April next year - that's when the shortened repayment holidays for people on OE also kick in - and going to try and sock away as much as we can to take advantage of it. Won't make more than a couple of thousand dollars' difference in the scheme of things, but that's not nothing.
Re: the "borrow to pay off and make money on the difference" scheme - I've engaged in a version of it, I suppose, when I started pulling the living costs loan about six months before I actually needed it (when I was still subsisting on a combination of parental support and part-time work) to build up some rainy-day savings. I think that was before the interest-free thing started; it was worth doing when I still had two or three years as a student ahead of me, essentially a free loan of a sum of money that wouldn't be hard to repay when I was working full-time but had much more utility when I was living off a lot less.
I heard of quite a few people doing that through their whole time at uni - this was when interest rates made it worthwhile - but it was only doable if your parents or a ridiculously lucrative part-time job made you able to afford your living costs. That's not a lot of people. The $1K costs allowance wasn't really rortable in the same way because you had to submit receipts for everything you bought. That didn't mean that there wasn't some smart bargaining of costs allowances as cash advances, but that's about as far as you can go with it. In the larger scheme of things these are all *very* minor shufflings-about - don't think there's anything you could do to stop them without major repercussions to other users (or, really, any need to.)
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to TracyMac,
On a slight tangent, why is it that epic fantasy is nearly always based on quasi-Saxon or medieval societies with more-or-less retrograde sexual politics? The only exception I can think of is the Kushiel books (which won't be TVised anytime soon).
Part of it is What People Expect. I was at a con last month with a great panel on SF v. fantasy, and what everyone agreed on was that *epic* fantasy had to have horses and swords and visiting every country on the map, trappings which lead to a medieval world, which people inevitably endow with medieval sexism. I can think of other counter-examples, but they're either not well-known or have somewhat mixed results. The Wheel of Time series, which is definitely well-known, attempts to depict a world with a reversed gender balance and...actually doesn't do too badly a lot of the time, but is far from flawless. Same with Melanie Rawn's Ambrai books.
Largely, it's because a lot of SFF fans will accept any magic you like, but the idea of a low-tech world with gender- and sexual-identity-egalitarian politics drives them batty. Whereas a sexist and homophobic future setting is often accepted as normal...it's a massive problem with genre fiction. At least we *have* series like the Kushiel books to make up for it a bit, but I'd be surprised if they see any sort of film treatment in the next half-century.
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Emma Hart,
Our 16 yo son watches GoT, but not with us, by himself. I'm not really happy with the concept of "gratuitous sex": that buys into the idea that you can only have sexual content if it's somehow 'justified', if it's made acceptable by necessity.
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No, but I think sexual content should be subject to the same limitation of all content in a fast-paced TV drama, i.e., it needs to advance story or character development in some way, and GoT fails in that regard more than once. They were also guilty of using essentially the same sex scene with different characters to deliver infodumps enough times that it was noticeable, and that just got tedious.
The thing with GoT is that there's an awful lot of sex that makes sense from a storytelling perspective, on a scale from "necessary" to "intelligent scene framing". Which is why it's obvious when a sex scene is in there in case they fall below their episode's topless female quotient, and I get irritated they're wasting screen time on nameless extras fucking in a brothel instead of telling the story. (The gender nudity ratio is also a thing, obviously.)
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Paul Rowe,
I too am broadly in favour of boobs, but here they are just gratuitous.
I do wish that it wasn't notable when a whole episode goes by with nary a bared bosom or monologue-laden sex scene, but it's not a deal-breaker for me - though I'd flatly refuse to watch it in the same building as my parents, if it ever came to it.
The source material is sorely lacking though, which may be where it falls don for me.
I think the source material's not bad. Not up to the hype levelled at it - the "American Tolkien" thing is wrong in so many ways - but enjoyable enough. My main problem with it is the way shock value is sometimes mistaken for intelligent storytelling - a problem I suppose the TV series has inherited in its own special way.
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Danielle,
I have an extremely low hey-nonny-nonny threshold, so I was wary, but basically what it reminds me of is I, Claudius, which can only be a good thing. I am a real sucker for evil political machinations and family plots. And boobs. ;)
At the end of the day, it's both epic fantasy, which is not everyone's hot beverage of choice, and specifically a deconstruction of epic fantasy, which requires some familiarity with the conventions of the genre to appreciate fully. I actually remain surprised it's become as popular as it has. But fingers crossed the success it has had proves there is an audience for this sort of show - TV doesn't have to be universally appealing to be successful.
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Karen Hester,
He dismisses Americans downloading his shows after the British broadcast as greedy people not willing to wait, but I think there's more to it than that.
Ah, yes, the "How dare you be so emotionally attached to my creative output?!" argument. I've never understood the logic behind that one.
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Hard News: Disrupting the Television, in reply to Paul Brislen,
I have to believe that yes it would - I don't steal TV because it's free, I steal it because I can't get it any other way.
My downloading has effectively dried up since I came to the US. That's partly because our household income has multiplied, and mostly because pretty much anything I want is available online for a fairly reasonable cost. It's basically my favourite thing about the place.
Which isn't to say I haven't downloaded anything since we came here, but it's been restricted to things I absolutely couldn't get over here or that weren't available on any of the many, many paid/ad-included content services. I suppose that's the caveat; when you can get nearly anything for a reasonable price, it becomes that much more annoying when one thing is inexplicably not available without waiting for the DVDs. Hence the Oatmeal GoT comic.
Relevant, I think, is this discussion on Forbes - check out the linked articles at the bottom, too - on the whys and wherefores of HBO's decision to not make their shows available for legal download. Short version: they don't think it's economical (yet).
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Okay, I've worked out why this thread is getting to me: I'm getting the feeling of a couple of familiar internet arguments, the ones that go "I don't work in your field, but I can tell you all about how it works" and "Because you don't have the blueprints and cost analysis, your solution is invalid". And those being arguments that raise my blood pressure in a way quite unsuitable for my age, I'm done.