Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Peter Graham,
Would you be happier paying the same price and not getting channels you don't want to watch?
I'm saying that's what I *had*, the first time around. And that was fine, I'd have paid the equivalent amount per episode if HBO had offered that option.
I would definitely be in favour of cable companies explicitly moving to a pick-your-channels model instead of decreeing what you get in various packages, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon for a number of reasons, mostly involving the distortionary effect of sports channels.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Peter Graham,
For the latest episodes? And is that full cost of basic pay tv + whatever premium channels you need to buy?
Yep. We've since got a bigger package, but at the time we had only basic + HBO. I note that this seems to be a special deal not explicitly offered to the public at large (I got it by ringing our cable monopoly - NZ is *not* the only place in the world that has to deal with monopolies in that regard - and telling them I wanted HBO, and I wanted it in the cheapest way possible, and if they wanted me to get a sixty-dollar-a-month package to qualify for it I wasn't getting cable at all.)
Basic cable is also cheap in our area, $6 a month or so; it's much more expensive in other parts of the country. It is not out of the question that some people would face paying close to $100/month to get HBO, and that *is* ridiculous. I don't object to subscribing to HBO to get the latest episodes of things. I object to paying for other crap I don't watch to get it.
(I also object to the fact that before we subscribed to cable we got the free-to-air channels in HD as well as regular by simply plugging the cable into our digital TV, but now we have an actual subscription the HD channels are blocked because we don't pay an extra $10/month for them. But such are monopoly cable providers.)
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to Peter Graham,
So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now. Or you could wait a year and buy the dvds for $60.
The are plenty of production companies that screw over their New Zealand customers. HBO isn’t one of them.
Given that I can watch Game of Thrones in America for $25/month - so, say, $75 for the three months it airs - whether it's HBO's fault or not, people in NZ are getting screwed, yeah.
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If you go to prison as punishment, it means that being subjected to someone else’s timetable and not having your liberty is the punishment. You don’t run your life, someone else does. The guards aren’t allowed to beat you, solitary confinement is for exceptional misbehaviour on your part and cannot be a long-term situation, no hard labour…
Which is the concept behind the modern prison system, or is supposed to be. We had a thread here two or three years back where a few people demonstrated a really astonishing inability to comprehend that loss of freedom was a punishment at all, rather than a sort of holiday.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Except probably the Howard League for Penal Reform.
Well, probably not.
Periodontal disease for example has long been associated with Heart Disease and mortality.
This seems, as Russell said, cruel and unusual punishment.
Forget the associations (which are strong enough) - untreated abscesses in the upper jaw can flat-out kill you, if they penetrate to the brain. At a minimum, they need to be offering basic preventative and reconstructive care.
Serious question - I wonder what they do about prisoners with worsening myopia, if they aren't doing dental treatment? Reading glasses are relatively cheap and accessible, even if friends or family outside have to buy them, but fixing short-sightedness isn't.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Armed robbery is dangerous, certainly, but let’s not kid ourselves that nobody has died directly as a result of the goings-on in our finance companies. We know for certain that there have been suicides amongst the victims, and a range of terminal health effects such as cancer and cardiac problems. Which makes the pitiful sentences dished out to the offenders that much more offensive.
As always, there is a beautiful (and grim) moment in a Terry Pratchett book where a financial fraudster, who lives with himself by assuming that he's not really hurting people, just taking their money, is told how many people's deaths, firings, and sundry minor miseries he must have contributed to over the years.
In any case, I don't think anyone's arguing that violent bank robberies shouldn't incur high penalties, but rather that the non-violent type should.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Islander,
Sacha – not wrong about karakia not being directed to ’gods’. It is a wonderfully complex matter, involving geanologies, natural forces, and both natural & enforced respect. Supernatural? Nope.
Although, as Sacha says, there is a strong tendency in some circles to substitute karakia involving phrases like "te Matua, te Tama, me te Wairua Tapu hoki", in much the same manner that my college Maori classroom had bible phrases all over the walls because they were in Maori, so that's, uh....cultural. And this often trips up people who don't know Maori. (Solution, of course: teach more people te reo.)
I think it's this sort of blurry cultural/religious line that some people are thinking of when they argue you shouldn't just accept religion as cultural. But the devil is in the details, and in the divide between personal observance and practices required from on high. Or, for that matter, bible verses that just happen to be in another language.
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Field Theory: Fight Club, in reply to Biobbs,
I never found that to be the case in Christchurch though. If I was needing to get through town quickly they were a godsend, but at the same time they were still comfortable and easy to negotiate and fed logically to most destinations if I was going somewhere in town.
There was a bit of a learning curve if you were new to town, though - I can understand that putting people off. Once you got down the pattern of north/south east/west direction, they were great. The only occasional hiccup was trying to get street parking - it wasn't always easy to go 'round the block.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
I always thought it was a bit dodgy that they were allowed into state schools and given a captive audience.
They let the Gideons show up at our school and hand out copies of the New Testament on a fairly regular basis. I was never sure how that was legit, either. Everyone always seemed a bit bemused by it.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And people wonder why I've got a fair amount of scar tissue on the inside of my bottom lip.
I'm not saying it was a *good* attitude for me to have. It's basically a manifestation of the classic human assumption that other people hold the same attitudes they do unless there are strong signals otherwise. A number of circumstances in my life have meant that this particular assumption was not a bad one most of the time, thus reinforcing it. But those are the sort of assumptions that trip you up the worst in edge cases, so it's better that it's taken a few knocks.
I was hoping Youth for Christ/Campus Life would come up. I went along for a little while at secondary school, mostly because some of my friends did.
It may be illustrative, now I think about it, that the people I knew to be religious during my NZ uni career basically fell, with a few exceptions, into three categories: a) Muslims b) people from Campus Life c) very non-practicing Catholics. Of course, there were probably a bunch more I didn't know about because it didn't come up and I assumed.