Posts by Bart Janssen
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I don’t like this argument.
I get that. Like I said your argument is correct. But I don't believe it is an argument that can result in a change in policy. Neither Nat nor Lab have shown any signs of doing what's right just 'cos. Instead they both respond to arguments that target revenue and/or cost, functionally both parties are simple minded accountants.
You're right my argument leaves adults more vulnerable to penny pinchers, assuming it's an either or and not a both.
one of them has a teacher aide ... Just check he stays alive
That does kind of help his performance :).
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
if you can show me how the right to education of one child is greater than the right to education of another child, then we’ll prioritise between them.
While I really do think you are right I also think this is the wrong answer to the question.
The reason is that every bit of education you can squeeze into a person makes them less expensive for society. It is CHEAPER for the country to spend extra money to educate for the dozen or so years that a person receives education than to have to provide more support for the rest of their lives.
The reason I wouldn't use your (correct) answer is that the people handing out money just don't think that way, they can't parse your response and hence ignore it.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to giovanni tiso,
would fake an intellectual disability in their children just so they can get a teacher aide
But the ONLY reason for wanting your child to have a teacher aide is to allow your child to perform better. Isn't that we want our parents to do? What possible personal gain is there for the parent?
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Emma Hart,
assuming ... aren’t fraudulent bastards
This won't happen. Most people assume other people will behave they would in any given situation. Hence the people making the rules assume everyone would rort the system for as much as possible.
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Reading these just makes you shake your head in disbelief. The constant driver for the system appears to be to save money. Somebody says "well if we do it this way then fewer people qualify and we will save money". The cynic in me would then say "and the manager concerned will meet his/her KPIs and get their bonus".
But if the point was to save money then why bother at all. Anyone who can't keep up fails and should get discarded. But evidence has shown that supporting people with disabilities allows them to contribute and society as a whole benefits. Supporting kids so they can learn as much as they possibly can pays off for the country --- even if it costs that particular government department more.
And thering lies the problem with cutting government expenditure the way this govt has done (and previous govts before them). The cost is long term failure of segments of society at enormous cost to society as a whole. Saving pennies at the expense of pounds.
What makes me most angry is that it always hurts the rich less and the poor more. So not only is it stupid, it's unfair and stupid.
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Also from Brand
but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most
Which seems awfully familiar.
I think asking people to be above celebrating her death is failing to acknowledge just how much harm she did ... individually to real people with real lives. I may not condone pissing on her grave but I understand the emotion that leads people to that.
She led a government that did very real personal harm to very many people. That some of them are genuinely still bitter ... that doesn't explain the block parties by folks were weren't even born then.
I was at university half a world away and focussed very much on getting full of knowledge, but even so I remember riots in Britain ... WTF! Britain was civilised, how could they have riots?
Yes some things were a mess, but it wasn't necessary to use the methods she and her government used in order to make the changes Britain did indeed need to make. They chose a path they knew would cause significant personal harm - and forty years later some of those people remember the very personal harm for which she was responsible. Yeah it's Ok that those people are still angry.
That might be a lesson that some of our current politicians might learn before they choose the path of most harm.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Emma Hart,
Would you ever use it to describe a man?
To be fair I have heard old very camp men sometimes described using that word. But yeah we even made a word expressly for this:
Twatcock FTW.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Russell Brown,
That is ,for someone from the left, a fair summing up of the Lady
Some people seem to have forgotten what a basket case the UK was then
I am sure it could have been do better but it had to be donePerhaps that’s a 20th Century lesson: don’t allow your economy to degrade so terribly that it appears that extremists are the only people who can fix it.
Also don't assume that because they created a solution that it was the only viable solution.
While it is true that some of the things disestablished by that govt were inefficient or just plain useless - the way they chose to do it was worse and what replaced some of those things was distinctly worse.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Margaret Thatcher did everything in her very considerable power to make greed fashionable and turn naked selfishness from a vice into a virtue
It is no coincidence that the 1987 financial collapse happened after those policies of greed.
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
reduced to a radioactive desert
Unlikely. There is no reason for the US to use Nukes. Far better for them to obliterate all manufacturing and military capacity using high precision conventional weapons. This demonstrates the superiority of the US weapons manufacturers thus guaranteeing significant upturn in sales.
The consequence of course will be a North Korea that is even more of a basket case than it is now and requiring huge amounts of aid to recover.
That said the consequences of a conventional obliteration are by no means “clean and green”. But don’t worry John Key will be happy to send in our boys and girls in khaki to clean up.