Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Moz,
I think restricting it to people legally in NZ would be desirable, but otherwise yes, all for it.
Doh, yes, except that one.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Bart Janssen,
uh huh … so you’ll be bringing that to the next wine and food match will you?
Tell him not to quit his day job, whatever that is, go on!
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It's an interesting thought experiment that we could have no voting age whatsoever, nor any other restrictions. If you can mark a ballot, you can vote. It's secret, so parents can't force kids to vote how they say. Buggered up votes are ignored. What would be the real effect? Would they vote along family party lines? Or would small targeted parties come into existence, such as Every Day is Christmas Party? I can see that being tried, but the vote would be split between many such options, if it ever worked at all. Would the child vote just be mostly random?
Similarly with the criminally insane - given this is a small section of the population, is there really some danger that they're going to install a party of their own? Or even put any pressure on politics other than their own interests, just the way everyone else does?
Probably this is something that could actually be statistically explored.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Emma Hart,
What they’re having to grapple with is over-connectivity, the invasiveness, the lack of privacy. The permanent record of every dumb thing they’ve ever said or done. The same thing can look quite different depending on when you came in.
How does it look to them? I'm curious if this hyperconnectedness is something people born to it actually complain about.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Emma Hart,
I’m talking about us creating an ongoing, long-term situation of pollution damage and resource scarcity, and leaving our kids to deal with the worst of it. This generation, for the first time, has a shorter life-expectancy than their parents.
I think that's true in some ways, but there's a great many ways in which the world is a better place than it was 25 years ago, when I was a teenager. Whilst older generations may have built the internet, I think X-generation can at least lay a claim to probably having built most of the World Wide Web, and I sure didn't have me one of those back then.
But I agree that an important part of finding out what teens think about things is to ask teens, and there's not enough of it.
I'm in a strange situation of being surrounded by teens, but as peers rather than people I have some kind of authority or power over. I'm doing an undergraduate degree. It's quite a strange and surreal experience. They do seem to be quite different to my generation (as I remember them at the same age), but it's hard to be sure.
One thing I'm pretty sure of, though. They're much more accepting of the inevitability of fees and student debt (they've never known it any other way), and of lower wages and high unemployment when they finish. That's just how it is, it's so long since these decisions were made that they're no longer up for debate, quite aside from the feeling that no-one with power listens to them. Questioning student debt is as pointless as questioning privatized telecommunications.
It's an experience that has certainly made me far less sure of what it is that I know about te yoof. I agree, however, that the interaction fills me with optimism. There's some hella smart kids. Hella wise, too, in cases. Not to mention waaaaay better dressed than we ever were.
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Up Front: The Kids are All Right, in reply to Hebe,
Finn's your boy?? Grats!
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Soon Lee,
Indeed. But they don't, of themselves, constitute a curry, which is what I thought the name implied. I was hoping of drying the leaves and having free curry powder :-)
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Soon Lee,
just as Italian is equally a fusion cuisine when it uses tomatoes
Yes, and pasta. They don't do it exactly like the Chinese, but that's where the idea came from.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I guess the point I was trying to make was that chilli and its heat are not required to make a true curry
But they are required to make a hot curry, which seems to be the way Indians like their curry, however this came about. So it's not really a total threadjack. I mentioned my homegrown ones because I would like to make a hot homemade, homegrown curry.
Amusing aside. The plant "curry" has very little to do with curry. I was sooo disappointed by this after growing one.
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Feed: My Life in Curry, in reply to Idiot Savant,
now I have them as weeds
Nice weeds! My garden's the same - I get endless brassicas coming up as weeds everywhere. Zero effort broccoli. It's amusing really, because things pop up when the season is right for them. No thinking involved, just weeding out the things you don't want.
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