Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Australopithecus,
When I raised UBI with my farmer in-laws, a good foil against my worst left-wing daydreams, those were the issues they raised.
Which is interesting in light of how Social Credit was mainly a rural party. I don't think farmers so much as people from small towns, though. A UBI is an old, old idea, dating back at least until the 1930s. It got outcompeted as a set of ideas by Labour parties, though, with their alternative, unemployment benefits. This played well with their core demographic (back then), workers, who had a far greater power through industrial action to demand such a benefit.
They did have one more – won’t folks just stop working?
I think you have to accept that under a UBI there would be less incentive to work in low wage, low pay jobs. Which would seem all good, except that we get a lot of our work done by people in low wage, low pay jobs, so a likely consequence would be prices going up for things we currently expect to be cheap. It would change the face of society quite a bit. I'd expect a corollary effect, that the price of things we expect to be expensive might become cheaper, if more people had the freedom to pursue careers in them. So lawyers and dentists might become a bit more affordable. That depends whether the respective unions would actually allow more of them to be produced.
I personally do not think it would matter enough to worry about, and if we found wage inflation was going crazy, it wouldn't be hard to put taxes up to suppress it. The two really should be basic tools of inflationary control, along with the government's ability to print money and to pay for projects. They could also use an adjustable savings rate. Then we could ditch this whole stupid idea that we create money and control inflation by using the OCR.
What I think would really change about work, though, is that people would work a lot more on things for their own direct benefit however they perceived that. So mums/dads would be a bit freer to look after their own kids. A lot more people would engage in projects they believe in, like charities or open source software, or writing on blogs. There would probably be a lot more goofing around. And I think a shitload more people would get tertiary education just for its own sake, and that education might become less career oriented.
All of those things are good, IMHO.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Danielle,
I have dual citizenship
You do? I thought that was all but impossible with the USA.
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Hard News: Autism and celebrity, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I've felt that many times, and I wouldn't even count myself as vulnerable any more. Now I just pick and choose. A suggestion for change has to be weighed up in terms of its time cost to expected return ratio. With many strategies available, I can choose one that suits the situation. Also, a lot of suggestions have crossover with quite basic "good parenting skills" for children who are "normal". Not losing one's temper, for instance, is good advice at all times. It's up to me to decide whether I feel helped or patronized by a particular suggestion for a strategy. I usually opt to presume the intention is the former. Just as they say "You're the adult, remember", I tell myself "They're a professional, remember".
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Actually, it’s so automatic that I’ve even forgotten that I do the same with my own name here. Because my long-form name was a subject of annoying ridicule at primary school. Ben is a contraction, and if (as so many people seem to want to do), you guessed that I’m a Benjamin, you’d be wrong. My name even gets mocked in my own language!
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to Soon Lee,
I’d change my name if I lived in Thailand. They got endless mirth out of “Ben”, because it’s (so I understand) like the verb “to be” in English, and has a few other meanings. Every meeting with a new person would go something like:
“Ben ben”
“Ben? Ben ben?”
<nods, laughs> “Ben ben”
<looking me up and down>"Ben BEN!”
“Ben ben ben!!”
<mutual chuckles>
“Ben ben ben ben…”
<outbursts of laughter>I think there were all sorts of jokes in there, something like:
“This is Ben”
“Ben? His name is really Ben?”
“This IS Ben”
“Big Ben!”
“Really Big Ben” (Thai is a language that uses double adjectives to emphasize stuff).
“He is big and he lives big...”However I can only really guess, since there’s tonality to the jokes and asking for explanation just drew more titters. I think there was some aspect of sexual innuendo in it all. Amusingly, after one such exchange the big guy who was pissing himself with laughter introduced himself to me as Matt. But his mischievous girlfriend told me his real name was “Mass”. He frowned. Clearly he’d heard before how much fun English speakers would make of a big guy whose name was Mass. I didn’t press it, and confirmed:
“Matt”. But his girlfriend wouldn’t let it lie, and played some more:
“Matt, Ben. Ben, Mass. Ben ben, Matt mass”. She then introduced me to his friend, whose name was Boom. I confirmed, punching my hand as I said “Boom”. There was a startled silence – they looked to each other and she said “How he know?”. Turned out Boom was a Muay Thai boxer. He was quite happy with how that went down in English.I think people choosing their own names is fine by me.
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Note: My experiments have very low potential cost compared to starting/stopping a program like ABA, just to see if the progress stops/slows. But I'd think that some aspects within the program could be amenable to that kind of testing. It could be better than nothing, if one is unsure what is actually the cause of improvements. I don't know whether that's even part of how the program works.
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What an excellent debate.
But my question is : how do you rationalise that lack of a ‘control’ child’ to measure progress against?
A perennial problem. For my boy, I tend to look at improvement against how he was as the only available baseline. Which is nowhere near perfect, but there's very little else to go on. He may have made the same progress without any of the many strategies we've been trained in, and all the work by therapists. I highly doubt it, but we really can't be sure.
As with so much medicine, there may be a ton of science behind it, but every patient is to some extent an experimental subject with the one data point to work on. If someone appears to be flourishing under an unorthodox program, we tend to stick with it.
Sometimes, when I think the harm would be small compared to the knowledge gained, I do the experiment of withdrawing something that appears to be working, just to see if whatever it was addressing worsens.
For instance, a big favourite of most of the therapists who focus on autism is for us to use visuals to help communicate. I tended to think they served limited purpose in my son's case and were a great deal of effort to continually maintain. The reason I thought they were limited was because he is sight impaired and hyperverbal. He has an excellent auditory memory, particularly for lists, and loves to be given lists and to make them.
But I tried it anyway, and some of the things that prompted it improved. But after a while, having spent many, many hours making visual checklists for things, essentially comic strips of the process for such things as toileting or getting ready to leave the house, I wondered if it was the pictures or something else that were working here. So I took away the pictures, and just made the lists as written checklists. Things remained as they were.
So I concluded that it was actually other factors at work here. The focus on order and routine, perhaps. Maybe, also, the fact that such a focus caused me to become more organized about the things that had previously been triggers for conflict. Particularly around time to leave the house. I found it very hard not to show nonverbal signs of frustration, since the non-cooperation would mean that we would become late for things. But a checklist given with enough time was a very reliable cure for this for my situation. I make no general claims about this for other children on the spectrum. Mine's like all of them, unique. His multiple disabilities (vision and low muscle tone) have their individual flavour, and I think he has some unusual strengths on account of them.
I may also repeat the experiment in future, and find different results. Children change as they mature. And always the opinions of trained therapists are going to count for a lot. I have to be on the watch for hubris, of course. The most obvious one is that a paid therapist will usually want to continue to get paid, and they might therefore be making recommendations just to maintain their own relevance, after the time for that has really passed. The only real way I can know is to continue to follow their suggestions, and see if any of it is helping. So far the hit/miss ratio has been pretty high.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to WH,
That said, I’m not suggesting that drivers should be less vigilant.
Totally. Therein is the point here. Of course making the roads better will do the lion's share of the work in bringing down road tolls. But that's not something that people making ads have any influence over, and it's also something that is plenty in hand already. A huge proportion of our government budget is dedicated to roading, and a tiny fraction to campaigns of this kinds. So the ads focus on what little they can do, and the message that speed contributes to accidents is true, and easily absorbed. There are many other safety messages that could be delivered, and I think many were delivered in this ad. Of course you should bloody look when you pull out onto a highway! That's really clear here. That's the main cause of the accident. So long as they're giving a breadth of these kind of messages, I'm happy. I don't know how much it helps anything, but I'm certainly not offended by it.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to WH,
And realistically speaking, what does that extra speed really get?
It gives you back time. Which is why we build motorways. I can remember when the trip to Whangarei hit suburban roads and horribly dangerous winding highways, at around Albany. The alternate route is still there, and I travelled it recently. It's just like the road in the ad - many places were traffic can and does pull out of side roads onto the highway, and it has one lane in each direction, and winds up and down over hills through farmland. The motorway is much safer and faster. Safer, in fact, makes it faster. By design, you can't T-Bone cars at intersections on motorways.
But the downside is, of course, that they're colossally expensive. Advertising on TV is not in the same league.
I'll agree with comments that an obsessive focus on speed is a bad thing. I'm not sure that's entirely what happens in this ad. But it's easy to see the allure of speed as a target for police. It's measurable.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Matthew Poole,
If they’re over 50 and got their licence as a teenager they may as well have got their licence out of a Cornflakes packet for all the rigour of the assessment.
We've been over this before, and the numbers really don't back up what you're saying here. Most of accidents, BY FAR, are by young people. Experience counts for a great deal, and people become naturally far more defensive as they get older. This is nearly indisputable from the actual crash statistics. Old drivers really only start getting unsafe when their powers begin to fail, their eyesight and general concentration.
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