Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The new motorways constructed in Auckland with hard dividers are equal in standard to any high-speed roadway in the world.
That's a pretty big call. There are definitely some high quality stretches of motorway, but I was pretty much talking about highways. Why bother with super high speed motorways? If you're going 100km/h then the times people take to get around just aren't going to be significantly improved by adding 20km/h, when the entire city is less than an hour from one side to the other, and only a small proportion of that trip will generally be actually at the speed limit, given traffic.
On the highways, as you agree, we don't really have much where a really high speed is justified, and for the most part the opposite is true, it would be better if the speed limit were lower.
If the limit for suburban side streets were even lower, say 30km/h
The way they seem to be bringing that about is by speed humps, but they might as well change the limit if that is the whole intention.
SH1 south of Drury and north of Albany are as low-risk as any road globally
I guess those are technically motorways. I wouldn't class them as autobahn good, though. They're way narrower and bendier, and they seem to undulate more. I doubt I'd feel safe at 240km/h even if there were no other cars on the road.
It’s the difference between the majority of hit pedestrians surviving and the majority dying.
That's certainly a nice break-even point, but the way we rate death proportions vs right to speed doesn't seem to follow any clear logic, at least not at a political level (I expect engineers have a different view). It's not really enough to just classify the chance of death from each collision. You also have to consider the chance of the collision, and that's got a lot of factors, but a big one is pedestrian density. That's extremely variable around the city, so each street really should be weighed up on its own merits.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to tussock,
but it’d be an easy way to lose an election for any party proposing it, so it’s not going to happen.
I don't know about that. A lot of people want speed limits dropped, at least in their area.
Having said that, many local back roads are down to 80k now. Because the council asked and no one objected.
Which is the sensible way for it to happen. Each speed limit has to be weighed up on it's merits, so it's not really a national government issue. On a really, really good road, a speed over 100km/h could be justified. We just don't have any roads like that. But if we did, I wouldn't want a law made prior to the road being created to block it.
Nationwide efforts need to be caveated to conditions. The law dropping maximum speeds to 40 around schools was a good idea. But even still, it's nowhere near sufficient. Traffic engineers should judge each case individually. The pedestrian traffic on Ponsonby Rd is sufficiently large that making it 40km/h was a good call, despite there being no schools anywhere along it.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to Shulgin,
….ate a thai pie between the funeral home and the police station…the salvation cafe Avondale…just say’n….just……
You'll probably bump into that young guy who limps around Avondale every day. 5 years ago he was sniffing glue every time I saw him. Not so much since then, but he always seemed wasted. I presumed he was having legal highs. Now, maybe it will be back to the glue.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Australopithecus,
why doesn’t any current party in NZ promote it?
As you say, Mana seems to be pretty clear on it.
I think it's not got big support because it's quite a radical idea. It would cost a hell of a lot of money, so the details of where that money would come from need to be clearly fleshed out, and none of the big 4 (Labour, National, Greens, NZF) dare to go there. We're talking about something that could possibly be the biggest chunk of all government expenditure.
Did Socred support a UBI?
I think they supported something like it, although their means to finance it was considered outrageous by the two main parties. They're pretty much ancient history, but I do find it very interesting how popular they once were in rural NZ, considering the very radical nature of their economic policy. I think farmers might have been the first people in NZ to really feel the crushing weight of debt on every part of their community.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Maintaining high-quality educational outputs doesn’t just happen. Medical education in NZ will never be open-entry for all comers.
No, I'd expect them to maintain standards. But they might get more people who meet standards, if the pool of people who could afford the time increased dramatically. If they then simply put standards up so as to keep the numbers down, I would not be surprised. That would confirm something I've thought about medicine for a long time. But we could be pleasantly surprised. It wouldn't take a huge influx of graduates to have an impact on prices.
I chose lawyers and dentists as mere examples of what might happen with a more generally educated and time-rich population. Pretty much anything that requires education and training will receive downwards pressure on prices from more people being available who have those skills. I think this is happening already. Lots of high-training professional careers are nowhere near the meal-tickets that they used to be. 100 years ago, just being able to read and write was a meal ticket. Now, you come out of 10-12 years of school and face unemployment, and prospects are only a little better after non-technical tertiary training.
Our social challenge is how we deal with that. We've achieved a wonder of the world in bringing to the entire population something that was the sole privilege of the very wealthy only a comparatively short time ago. If only we could see it as the social good-in-itself that it really is, without continually tying it back to economic output, in a world where human effort is rapidly devaluing. I think this is actually happening, though. However much rhetoric there is to get people into career oriented education, people still choose the education that mostly interests them, and then just make do when it comes to workplaces. And since most jobs actually aren't rocket science at all, this is pretty sensible.
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Hard News: A law gone awry, in reply to ,
I think the line between addiction and recreation is quite blurry. Less so with tobacco, sure. That's one of the most addictive substances ever discovered. But even still. I, for instance, do actually use tobacco recreationally. I've never been addicted, not even when I was a regular user. Stopping required no effort of will whatsoever. And sometimes, I enjoy a cigar, even now. Probably one per annum, recently, but it's still there.
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to "chris",
So I’m genuinely interested in your answer here:
Where do you draw the line?
It depends on the purpose and who you are communicating with.
For official purposes, full and formal names are required. If you have to bridge a language gap then you're obviously going to have to change your name a bit to even be able to use the characters available in the other language, and should stick to the characters from then on. But that's already problematic, especially if you make a poor choice, when your mastery of the language is extremely weak and you are unaware of how it will trouble natives, or be ridiculed by them. The idea of taking a name in that language is extremely compelling, if your name is likely to be mangled.
It's also a wonderful opportunity for self invention, one of the greatest reasons for travel in the first place. You may actually be a different person amongst different peers. You can choose who you are, how you wish to be known, afresh. You might want to let your peers choose a name based on your character. That seems like a very good idea, really, and much how names are conferred everywhere. If you have a particular talent, it can be built into the name, making it easier to remember, and to stand out as well. You should be able to escape the annoyance of people fucking up your name, or making fun of it. That isn't how you want to be remembered, the girl whose name sounded like "bareback" or the guy whose name sounds like "Who", when instead your name could instantly reminisce people of some extremely popular star, or some cool and interesting invention summing them up. Or you might just want something really commonplace, but evocative of your original name.
It would be a pity to lose these chances.
In informal use, it's entirely up to people how they want to be addressed, and entirely up to people addressing them whether they do. Nicknaming is common and a lot of people like their nickname more than their real name, even in their own language. Or they prefer their last name - I've noticed that's really common amongst people who went to Grammar schools, probably because of teachers having done it, and also because last names are often more remarkable, or simply because there are people of the same first name within circles.
Within families it's extremely common just to refer to the person by a familiar for their position wrt to the speaker. Mum, Granddad, etc.
So names are a pretty complex thing, and if someone doesn't want to tell you the name you want to hear, there's often a pretty good reason for it. If you can actually say their real name well, that might even be less of a reason for them to let you know it. There is power in names, and giving over that power is something people have every right to at least have reservations about.
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Is a K+R sound unusual in Chinese? R is probably the most troublesome sound - even native English speakers have a lot of trouble with it :-).
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to Chris Waugh,
My second guess, and it’s the only other I can think of, is a name shared with a pope and a film star
And a way of serving eggs. I like the name. But I keep it in reserve, making sure people have earned it. Also, a short name is a convenient name. People don't have to contract it to make it familiar. The familiar versions are my least favourite. Benny, Benjy, etc. They're names people give to dogs.
There's actually quite a lot of other possibilities. Benedetto, Benito, Bennett, Benson, Bentley, and all the various spellings and contractions amongst them. That's just European sources. But yes, Benjamin and Benedict would be the most common English variants, in that order.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to izogi,
it seems surprisingly difficult to find one on either side of the ditch who’s qualified and interested in advising with personal tax on both sides.
Especially since we now have the ability to bring our super funds back to NZ. I would rather outsource working out how to do that.
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