Posts by Tom Semmens
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"Anyone messing around in a boat?" What a load trivialising claptrap.
So I suppose Michael Schumaker just messed around in cars? And the Formula One circuit is a nothing financially?Losing the America's Cup cost N.Z. millions. I dtill can't understand how anyone who hurts their country like that can sleep straight at night.
And as for economic nationalism - you've clearly not tried to buy an NZ apple in Australia, or NZ lamb in Waitrose at the moment...
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As Grant Dalton said on Deaker's radio show last Saturday, if he called Butterworth a "fat prick" it would be all over the place, so we should all refrain from calling Mr. Butterworth a fat prick.
Now, I understand its all about syndicates.
But when Simon Daubney says Allingi is "just like Team New Zealand" all I want to say to him is - no, no you are not. You are mercenaries who made a calculated decision that economically harmed your homeland. Mr. Daubney, in my book, has forfeited any right he has to say anything about what it means to be patriotic. They can do their racing for their Swiss master, but to expect their fellow countrymen to respect anything other than their abilty to sail & read a bank balance is pretty rich.
So I think we should all heed Grant Dalton's advice, and tell all our friends repeatedly and often not to call them traitors.
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"The pits might still be closed but Britain in 2007 is a very different place to 1987 and 1997. It is more affluent, in general, unemployment is at an all time low and it has a confidence that was completely knocked out of the country under Thatcher's rule. "
Now, at the risk of drawing to long a bow, lets re-phrase that:
"New Zealand in 2007 is a very different place to 1999. It is more affluent, in general, unemployment is at an all time low and it has a confidence that was completely knocked out of the country under National's rule."
Yet we are in the thrall of an angsty middle class victim mentality in New Zealand, just like the U.K...
A consequence of Tory-lite third way managerialism or a consequence of a quarter century of Gordon Gekko?
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The Blairite legacy? As Mao Tse Tung said when asked what his view was of the French revolution: "To soon to tell."
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Like the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination, I will always remember vividly the day I first heard an exasperated mum in the Max shop at Dressmart in Onehunga say "Paris Hilton <insert surname here>" stop that right now!" The floor tilted. My head spun. My eyes lost focus. Then she caught me staring and I shamefacedly dropped my head and scuttled off, fumbling for my mobile. And then I called eveyone I had in my contacts list.
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cartoon.
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"... Uribe has had the Army kill a bunch of FARC guerillas. Good on him. In order to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs. God only knows how many people FARC has killed over the decades it has been waging a civil war, and more recently it has been into drug trafficking and kidnapping. Lovely chaps. The more of those that are dead, the better the world is..."
You know, the American world view as believed by shitload of them is a scary thing. Its all about seeing the outside world in the same primary colours & subtlety as a Simpsons
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See? There you again Tom Beard - "the more chance we'll have of building sustainable cities." You are (now its my turn to use the phrase du jour) conflating sustainability with what sort of transport options work best for a small city, and what people want.
Sustainability and convenience are not, alas, always bedfellows.
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Nobody Important: My Morris wasn't clapped out! sure, it was an attractive shade of bile green and you had to get the universals done every 1000 miles, but it had a radio, a heater and most of all IT WAS A BABE MAGNET. Clapped out cars are not babe magnets. Ergo, my Morris was not clapped out.
Tom Beard: You South Islanders just don't know how to have fun. Sternly Presbyterian cyclists clutching champers for the vicar do not long survive in the snakepit of Northern traffic. They just get run over by an SUV being driven with all the joie de vive of our fine combination of Teutonic aggression and Italian fatalism. And anyway, while a bottle of Cristal might be of some use to a 15 year old guy with his hat tipped to some young lady, its bugger all use to him if he can't get to her house first...
I think that you are pissing in the wind to be honest - that entire infrastructure you speak of employs something like 20% of all economic activity in NZ. And those people are voters.
The point I am making is that unless you acknowledge that people love their cars, and they are far more convenient than public transport will ever be (Your personal chariot is sitting in the driveway awaiting your every transport whim, for chrissakes!) you are not going to come up with viable solutions for getting them out of them. Appealing to human altruism might work with some grim ex-south islanders, but not with most polyester Jafa's. Getting people out of their cars will require draconian measures on tolling, congestion charging, and taxes. And that will simply guarantee you'll get voted out at the next election, and fair enough to. Dealing with getting around efficiently is not the same as hating cars because they are some sort of eco-sin against spoil sport urban greenies.
My view is public transport in Auckland will work if it acknowledges the centrality of the car outside the commute from the 'burbs to the work hubs.
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Given that there are almost as many motor vehicles as people in N.Z. and given half the opportunity everyone everywhere abandons public transport for their own car, it always amazes how many people bag cars.
I like my car. It is an extension of my household, a comfortable familiar place that is set up just how I like it and I don't have to sit next to or share it with annoying and potentially unhygienic strangers. It is available 24x7 and with the possible exception of commuting at rush hour in a handful of mega cities it’s always going to be more convenient than public transport. Why Auckland's urban transport planners confess mystification to these plain facts beats me - but its a plain fact humans LOVE cars, and societies like ours that grew up with the car ever more so.
People forget what a life-transforming event getting your own car is when you are 15 or 16, but I don't. I had the first car in my social group, and it was fantastic. We were free to visit anyone anywhere anytime. It was Independence Day when I got my third hand Morris 1100.
At the end of the day, I grew up in a house with one phone, one stereo, one television, and one car. By the time I left that house it had two cars, a van,four- five TV’s and a (x286) computer. I think in our national obsession with whining we forget how much richer we are in consumer goods compared to our parents world, and how much cheaper they are. Boy racers are really just a symptom of that much greater wealth and maybe even a symptom of afluenza, and considering how much poverty most of our fellow humans live in, we should consider this "problem" in that light.