Posts by Lucy Stewart
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I get a whole glorious week off between Christmas and New Year's to rev up for the Semester Of Doom that is to follow (grant renewal application; departmental seminar; major conference; preliminary PhD exam proposal; all in the span of ten weeks. Panicking now.) Torn between hoping for some snow to fall already so it feels more like winter and hoping it stays unseasonably warm so I can keep biking to work. At least from now on the days are getting longer!
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Hard News: Merry Christmas, Blossoms, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Here I am stuck (with my family) in North America for a month - it's cold(ish), gets dark early, there are xmas lights everywhere, a definite buzz, feels just a bit like xmas ....
This is my second North American Christmas, and if it doesn't turn up snowing in the next forty-eight hours, the North American Jetstream and I are going to have words. If I have to be cold and twelve thousand miles from home it should at least be a white Christmas. (Likely it won't be - it's been uncannily, unseasonably warm for the last two months - but I'm hoping threats will work where pleading hasn't. To inanimate weather systems. Oh well.)
I'm spending Christmas Day in hospital with my present: the newest member of our family, born yesterday. I await the Auckland hospital version of Xmas dinner with some trepidation!
I don't think I actually congratulated you and Teddy on Twitter, so let me do it here. I hope everything goes well until you make the transition home, and I await the report on your hospital Christmas dinner with some interest.
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Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to Sacha,
If we think there are social equity issues now, just imagine the gap that unequal access to long life would create.
Look at the social equity issues we have right now about, say, raising the pension age, because of life expectancy differences.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
I read the Green Party Transport manifesto and it's entirely possible to see why only three people ticked the "like" box. If only three people like what the Greens are proposing it must be a load of tosh. Public transport is not efficient and never has been.
It's like all the logical fallacies in the world have been lovingly piled atop one another for our bemusement.
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Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I really can't understand anyone wondering what they would do with 700 years, there is so much more to do than one lifetime can encompass.
I think it's the personal relationships that people are thinking of, mostly. Marriage, for one - can you really promise "til' death do us part" when death is several centuries away? Would that be healthy? Even the fifty or sixty years people can get if they marry young is daunting for some. How long do you have to keep track of your descendants? Do you have any personal responsibility to your great-great-great-great-grandchild, like Ross asks? Research seems to suggest that humans have a maximum social circle size. When your family *is* that size...
I liked Kim Stanley Robinson's take on this in Icehenge, where life was extendible but memory was not - the human brain could store about a hundred years of experiences, so by the time you reached three hundred you'd forgotten the people of your youth. Or another book I've forgotten the title of, where the catch with the process was that by continually regenerating your brain cells it wiped your brain - an immortal, youthful body with the mind of an infant. SFF is very good at exploring the possible ramifications of life-extending technologies.
I suppose my basic argument, though, is that there's no point not trying to extend the human lifespan, even a lot. If we fail, no change. If we don't - well, it rather depends on how it works, doesn't it? If it's a treatment you have to take in childhood, that's one thing. If it's an ongoing process you can opt out of, that's another.
Current life extension, however, where people linger on and on in very poor health...that's another story. If that's all we manage - a life where you're old, really old, in ways that restrict you from doing all those things you dreamed of, for more than half of it - I don't know that there's much point to it.
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Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to Bart Janssen,
There are certainly ecological reasons for have individuals die off.
And because of the way evolution works we have evolved to breed and then there is no species survival advantage to living after breeding. Also note it’s unlikely that there is any species survival selection advantage for dying, bearing in mind most of our evolution occurred when humans were a relatively small population.
It's funny how humans have both constructed themselves out of our "natural" environment in every possible way - not necessarily on an individual level across time, you could have a fairly decent lifespan in the Roman Empire if you were rich enough, but on a population level - and yet we're still subject to selection. It's just selection by an environment we've created. We're not the first or most important species to do something like that - cyanobacteria have to win that prize, for the oxygenation of the Earth - but in terms of non-biological creations...it's such an interesting conundrum.
Like you, I certainly believe that death isn't a forever-inevitable part of life - but changing that would bring such massive changes to our society that I don't think we can, from here, predict the shape of it. On the other hand - we have doubled the average lifespan in many places in a century or two. That's a pretty massive change. And society has changed because of it. (C.f. Japan, especially.) The question is what changes you get when you start extending people's functionally healthy lifespans in a serious way. That's something else altogether.
oh Lucy! That was terrible. Also very geeky.
You're welcome. :P
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Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to Che Tibby,
sure do eat a lot of oats these days, and corn. polenta, FTW.
One of the things that's readily available in supermarkets over here, but I think is mostly stuck in organic stores in NZ, is buckwheat groats - they make a great couscous-like side dish, or a nice porridge, and they're incredibly filling. Really good with a nice hot chilli. We've taken to eating them fairly regularly.
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Legal Beagle: 14 Pages of Democracy, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
In the end, you've got to start with the presumption that people aren't utter, wretched douchebags and try and find the balance from there.
And the results, when closely examined, would appear to suggest that this is basically a valid assumption. You can quibble about the odd vote here and there, but there's certainly no evidence of intentional electoral fraud in Waitakere, and I'm going to assume anywhere else. I may heartily dislike the results of our latest election, but I couldn't and wouldn't dispute its validity. We're lucky that way.
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Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Oh and that argument about having to pay more the get good leaders – bullshit pure and utter. The really good leaders take a fair salary, by no means small but also they are aware of what is excessive, that’s why they are good.
I believe that, in the business world at least, they've also done studies which show that bringing in someone from outside and paying them a massive salary to come in and "fix things" just doesn't work - even if the person genuinely did do good things at their first place, they're too removed from the culture and inner workings of the next to do anything useful. The idea that you have to pay someone big bucks to come and save you doesn't work.
And the idea that you have to pay someone big bucks to stay - salary is hardly the only thing that makes people like their jobs, and if everything else (job satisfaction, relationships with colleagues, etc) is good people will rarely be tempted away by pay increases, unless they're entirely mercenary, in which case they'll go eventually anyway. (I was going to say "or the salary increase is just that big", because everyone does have their price, but at CEO salaries it's all a bit meaningless anyway in terms of day-to-day living.)
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Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
So Brownlee will maintain the status quo (Bob and his motley 'A Team' crew of ex media faces and clowns), and get rid of any voices raised in question on behalf of the ratepayers (the so-called 'B Team' of people who are doing what they were elected to do).
It's gonna a long three years...
Bastards...This makes me inexpressibly angry. As you say, the councillors who are implicitly threatened here are those who have shown the most concern for the people who elected them and for doing their jobs well; Glenn Livingstone, for example, is part of this co-op project to make new sections affordable for red zone residents, the sort of thing the government and council should have done but haven't.
Brownlee seems to be taking the whole joke about him being appointed dictator of Canterbury just a little too seriously. He and Parker are defining any dissent whatsoever with their decisions as unacceptable. It's sickening.