Posts by tussock
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So, just from an outside perspective, y'all are talking about subsidising exports, right? I mean, we're exporting the production of local labour here, so that's how I'd categorise it. Selling the production of films to foreigners.
Because subsidising exports is a universal disaster. Horrible stuff. All your local capital and skill gain goes into gobbling up the subsidies, rather than seeking out natural market profits. Market distortions and so on, the underlying cause of boom and bust cycles.
Wool mountain, Butter mountain, (psst, milk powder mountain, giant truck mountain), film production capacity mountain. Whoops, did it again.
Now, yes, these subsidised exports produce a lot of high-paid local specialists, some of y'all are here. But there's no natural market for your investment in time and money, never was, certainly not locally, and that's the whole problem. More subsidies just distort the market further and drive more capital into this false investment opportunity.
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Hard News: Sick with Anger, in reply to 81stcolumn,
I was at Otago ~18 years back, but I don't recall any physiology papers, nor straying into their lectures. More Math, Physics, Cosc, a touch of History and Philosophy. Plus, lectures ultimately failed to be anything like as interesting as I had been promised, so I wasn't at all that many of them. 8]
@Devaluing. Right. When one points out that Olympic sprinters have some advantageous genetic predispositions in regards their physiological responses to sprint training, it doesn't devalue their actual sprinting, which is amazing.
Similarly, Aspies do tend to get really good at their special interests and it doesn't devalue how good they are at them. It's more, you know, pointing out the things they'll benefit from some extra help with, typically.
And like you said, Russel, for me too, having a list of the ways in which everyone else (give or take) is actually different, and that it's a thing with a name, that's very nice to have. Even though there's a thing around the net where that's not accepted at all, which is another story.
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Hard News: Sick with Anger, in reply to Simon Lyall,
Re: Salon article.
Must say, that is the most ridiculous piece of shit essay on anything I have read in a long time. It’s, well sums itself up quite nicely.
When we mistake a brainy, introverted boy for an autism spectrum disordered one, we devalue his mental gifts.
Or … when we notice that autistic people include fucking Einstein and Newton, maybe we notice that exceptional mental gifts are exactly what you bloody well hope for on the spectrum and maybe don’t get otherwise. Even though almost all of us aren’t quite so lucky.
Hell, the other force of his argument is that people with social difficulties who get extra help with that can improve a little, in an argument where he in effect suggests we not give so many people help like that.It’s like finding that people were sick and you gave them medicine and then later they weren’t sick any more so obviously that medicine was all wasted. I am struck by the massive stupidity of it.
Which I guess makes me too fucking smart to be on the spectrum too. ?!
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Speaker: The act of not eating doesn't…, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Ramadan is where you eat a huge breakfast and huge dinner so you can skip lunch, because everyone's skipping lunch (or a few people anyway, there's a lot of exemptions). The community spirit there is where you gather to celebrate eating big, together. It's like thanksgiving every night for a month.
Lent is where you go vegan for a month (again, with a lot of exemptions), and again, everyone is doing it. It was during the part of the year where meat and so on was hard to get anyway (or at least economically hard to justify).
The new 40-hour famine is where a bunch of impressionable tweens are told they're very good for being hungry while everyone around them is eating and being hassled about their weight.
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Hard News: Seeing the numbers, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Noting that technology costs are themselves driven by the cost of employees in the technology sector, so it's really a race between the ultimate productivity of different skill sets. At least in theory.
Good capitalists are always putting some poor bugger out of a job, after all, unless the entrenched interests can stack the deck in their own favor.
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It seems kinda silly to have a law that only protects sources and journalists who don't own cellphones or computers, eh. Almost like someone should be thinking of some amendments there, sometime.
Not that it'll matter once the GCSB's running the infrastructure. It's not like they bothered about warrants before they had all that power.
Still, enjoy your attempts at cloak & dagger folks, and good luck picking software, operating systems, and hardware that the NSA hasn't built any backdoors into for the whole world to browse.
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Interesting problem for the left this sort of thing. When you're all on the side of truth and justice it's common to nitpick and argue trying to find the best expression, where the fascists on the right all just march along to the same mind-numbing propaganda.
Like how the green party policies are "all mad", except the ones you read, turns out those ones are awesome and obviously good for everyone. Shame about all those ones you haven't read, because they're all mad, still.
Of course, most National voters don't actually like National party policy. When you tell them they just think you're lying, because that's not the sort of thing they'd vote for. People are weird.
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Witches, eh. You'll know 'em when you see 'em. All out to eat your children they are. Horrible. Don't wait 'till the kids are in the pot, just watch for the signs; black cats, night walks, unmarried women, don't attend church, said anything bad about the witchfinder, denied the danger of witches.
As to racism in mass media, yes it is very bad and hurts us all. Same as racism in justice, education, and employment, which all feed each other. There's pretty good statistical proofs of that about the place now, but like climate change, a lot of people don't want to hear it.Censorship is also very bad and hurts us all, in that people think the stuff which gets through is OK, when a lot of it is very bad indeed (that usually being the point of it), and a lot of the things which get blocked are just minority political statements. One rather fine thing it does is limit popular censorship, which is often much worse.
Same as any old rubbish justice system is better than a lynch mob.
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Legal Beagle: On Consensus, in reply to BenWilson,
The votes lost by supporting such a system.
I'm suggesting the big parties might possibly go for it, which means their PR machines get on board. Ideally they both get on board and there's no fight about it at all.
My take is the big parties have the option to point out that they can stop bending to the will of the little ones by getting more of them in to pick through. Labour can go anti-Green and National can go anti-ACT. That's probably a vote gainer for them anyway, give or take.
Labour can quote that they only have to take the Green's good policies then, so as not to lose any green-leaning reds. Ditto for Nat and ACT.
The people who only vote for either National and Labour (or stay home) should take any potential future difficulties easier if it directly cuts ACT and UF and NZF and Green off at the knees. The question would be on swing voters who already flop toward whoever TV talks about that cycle. If they all jumped on Winston running an anti-tiny-party campaign that could block everyone. Hard to know.
Biggest difficulty would be getting the little parties on board. Some of them are really only a handful of people between elections. Have them set up with alternate sets of adds to run in the last week of the campaign. -
OnPoint: Budget 2013: Bringing Down the…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The whole thing must be quite a lot smaller in reality. People paying a few billion in taxes that they never actually pay and have it show up as both tax and spending in government books is ... weird. Do they even keep track of where their actual tax comes from, rather than just the theoretical stuff?