Posts by tussock
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On the discussion of how speed works, there was an Experiment in Victoria, Oz when I was kid there (early 80's), where they figured a lot of people were crashing on the main freeway north of Melbourne (Hume Highway) because the road was too bloody easy to drive on (design was to allow safe travel at 160k) and put people to sleep.
So they raised the limit to 120k, from 100. After a year, they had less accidents, less injuries of all types, about the same serious injuries, and a few more deaths. About as expected. They did the math on social costs, and the extra deaths lost significantly: adults are just too valuable.
NZ roads just aren't that good. At all. I'd point out how much better off society would be if the speed limit was lowered (crash rates and injury rates drop on anything but the easiest roads), but it'd be an easy way to lose an election for any party proposing it, so it's not going to happen.
Having said that, many local back roads are down to 80k now. Because the council asked and no one objected.
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It's pretty strait forward as a language issue.
You "are" the things which you are; smart, handsome, tall, married, a doctor, white (not going to prison for pretty much anything, eh). They're huge social constructs, routinely affecting your everyday life and how people treat you.
You "have" the things which are normally invisible to society or transitory in nature. You have a TV, or HIV, or poly-cystic ovary syndrome, or a bloody nose, or a degree in statistics. You can also "get" iterative things, like migraines or colds or ulcers, "catch" the infectious ones if it's commonly thought they are such.
You "had" the things which affected you in the past (often permanently) but are not recurrent. You had a vasectomy, a year off work, a stroke.
You had a job. You don't have a job. You are unemployed.
You had a wedding. You have a spouse. You are married.
You had an accident. You have epilepsy. You are fine, thanks.With autism, there's no had. Nothing happened.
You can have social difficulties, anxiety, you can get panic attacks and dissociative events. But they're treatable, you learn to deal.
You are autistic though. It's a defining thing. When people think it's something you "have", that's a problem, that causes difficulties.Excuse the definite article, "one" reads rather poorly in repeat.
Anyway, the language people use has to reflect that. "Experiencing" is just bullshit, you experience the mountains by taking a walk on the Routeburn. It's a holiday, something you willingly partake in and then leave behind.
Disclaimer: I am an aspie, being totally off-base about how language works in the wild does happen. -
Hard News: Jones: The contender leaves, in reply to Pete George,
I’m also puzzled by the no frills ordinary bloke claims, I didn’t often see that in him.
It's like when estate agents sell a house. Cozy => Really f***ing small.
"No frills" just means he swears a lot. "Ordinary bloke" means he's a sexist dinosaur. Also the sort to launch a popular crusade against one of our most powerful companies, and then abandon the party for greener pastures in the middle of it because he "didn't want to work with a bunch of fucking smelly pot-smoking hippies that give him a hard time just because he says what everyone's thinking".
If you'll forgive the not-an-actual-quote. But that does seem to be about what happened, tried to find some way to both stay in parliament and not work with the greens and when that didn't work he jumped at a fake diplomatic position (but one with a real paycheck, "roving pacific ambassador" => permanent island holiday on the government dollar, mate).
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Three strikes laws are abhorrent. If the penalties on burglary or whatever else are too soft, raise them for everyone.
That doesn't actually do anything but put more people in prison, but at least it would keep certain ACT party donors (the private prisons, duh) happy without forcing the law to be disproportionate.
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Didn't you all know? If it was important, people would be doing something. As people clearly aren't doing anything, it can't be important. Logic demands it.
So if we keep not doing anything, that keeps us safe. A good sign that things aren't really all that much of a problem after all, despite all those chicken little types and their fancy science.
Like getting inoculated, just asking for trouble. Retreating before the coming tide, as if! No tide if no one retreated, is there.
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Though after the last election, polling of non-voters suggested more National voters stayed home because National "was going to win" than did those who might have voted for opposed blocks.
So declaring a victor before polling really does make everyone less likely to vote. And more so for National matches their polling results quite well.
Or maybe Labour just GOTV better every time. Greens similarly poll well with younger intending voters, only to have young people ever less likely to actually vote on the day. Maybe the Greens need to join the Labour program and help young people get to the polling station, at least in the seats with the widest total margin between intent and result for them.
Winston polls better with old folk, and they still do vote very strongly, so their comparative proportion rises on the day (not to mention the climbing proportion of old folk in society over time, and how they don't have to skip work to vote). Supporters dying out indeed. If anything it's the religious brigade who are slowly disappearing.
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The real trick here is there's an enormous amount of money to be had. With a partnership school all your incomes are higher and all your outgoings are lower and it's government guaranteed forever, or at least until people stop voting for the bastards.
I mean, it's not as rich a pickings as the private prisons, because you can't just arbitrarily double your private school population like you can with prisons, unless you shut a randomised bunch of public schools each year or something.
And there's the trick. Pull all the top teachers and students out of the poorest schools, hand them more money for leaving, then close the school that got "worse" in their absence so you can do it all over again. The awesome thing with the constant testing is there's always somewhere going to be headed downhill over any particular school year.And all you have to do to start a "partnership" school of your own is donate some dosh to the National party. Easy as tau.
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As I understand it, google nz is owned by and pays a fee to google Ireland for the use of the google brand and software and so on. That fee is always roughly big enough to eat up each year's operating profits. google Ireland pays some pathetic tax on it as a profit, and then sends it back to google USA as "tax already paid".
Obviously that's not a real licensing fee, it's an obvious tax dodge. The problem for the IRD is google's too big and are making too much money off the dodge all around the world for a court case to ever naturally resolve and become a precedent. It would never get out of court.
Ideally the government would just keep a list of tax havens and insist any fees paid to companies, trusts, and other legal persons therein are paid from after-tax profits and earnings or not at all. Obviously google would shift ownership to some country which was not on that list and continue it's creative accounting, but at least someone would be getting a decent amount of tax out of them.
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I haven't been to Auckland since I was a kid, but all I see on the news and such (google knows all, but won't tell me) is traditional section divisions and huge apartment blocks. Are there still no skinny 3-story townhouse rows for packing in people? That's the problem here, right.
Because I've played Sim City, and that medium density housing is the shiznit. Lets your public transport become efficient and well used, makes optimal use of distributed fire and police stations, health clinics, saves schooling costs, all sorts. Lets you pack your amenities around them and provide cheap happiness boosts to good numbers of people.
Low density certainly lets you crank up the rates, but they all end up going on massive motorway projects to shift everyone around, huge school catchments, extra water costs, and so on. All those cars, nightmares.
High density's alright once your office blocks can support a decent subway system, but that in turn needs fed by your medium density base.
Yes, I'm sort of kidding. You shouldn't have to have played the various Sim City games as much as I have over the years to know all that.
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I don't think I ever really got how decent a place PAS is before this. I wish I had something to add, but y'all are doing superbly. So is the internet in general, it should be said.
Perhaps a review. Triggers, sorry.
* The police lie. All the time. It's their default response to being questioned (and presenting evidence, making enquires, etc).
* The police want convictions so bad (it's how they're reviewed and promoted, after all) that they will not even take reports of crimes where a conviction might be difficult to achieve. They will lie about this too.
* The police consider rape is difficult to convict. Which it clearly is, due to the issues around what counts as a valid defence.There are a good many layers of problems there. Not readily solved either. Obviously one would start by incentivising report takers to take reports. Then incentivise those who bring cases to bring cases. I get the courts would be busy, but it seems they'd be busy with rapists, so fund them some more hours, appoint some more judges, and get on with it.
But then ...
"These young guys should just grow up," Key said this afternoon.
Whut?!
See, there's problems with incentives in the police force, problems with the trial structure too, but holy shit the problems with rape culture seem to overwhelm them by a very large amount. Grow up? So, stop wearing your pants so low, get a tie and jacket, hold your head up in public, and oh, stop raping people. So childish. Really?
Fixing that could sort some of the ridiculous things juries accept as a defence for rape, in line with lowering the number of rapists so as to not fill up the courts and prisons too fast as the police think it a good idea to do something in response.
