Posts by Lucy Stewart
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[42] kind of epitomises the National Party's approach to crime ("We have no evidence anyone is thinking about breaking in and interfering with the ballot papers, and it's never happened before, BUT IT MIGHT!"). I particularly liked Judge Adams' judgement that the police had better things to do.
[49] was also illuminating - I'm surprised they allowed votes where people had crossed out their first choice and tried again, but I'm glad we have the kind of system where that's a possibility.
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Southerly: Coming Up For Air, in reply to Che Tibby,
i recently discovered a minor allergy to wheat and series of other things. short story: if it makes you fart, it was a problem.
Enough of a problem to give it up altogether, though? There are a lot of foods which are always going to give your intestinal methanogens a happy time, but are otherwise fine to eat (as Islander said: beans.) It's more to do with whether you can digest the food (or its breakdown products) or not, and there are lots of things we eat which contain components humans can't digest at all or which get scavenged by our gut microflora. If particular foods cause a *lot* of flatulence, maybe, but as a rule of thumb, it seems a little...reductive.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Just a note Megan Woods was a business manager for our CRI. She doesn't come from a science background AFAIK but her time here should have given her some insight.
Indeed; I had a reasonable amount of contact with her during my Young Labour Christchurch years - she was very involved with YL, probably why she got Youth Affairs - and she struck me as someone who was aware of the issues I'd like a science spokesperson to be aware about, i.e. stuff of concern to the people actually doing the science.
It is also significant that Shearer has taken on Science himself. Especially given much of the commentary from National implied they believed science and innovation needed a prominent role in cabinet which led to some musing that John Key might take on the portfolio.
I guess I was disappointed that it was handed to Joyce along with eleventy-seven other jobs, it would have been nice to see the government give science the prominence in their cabinet that they gave it in their rhetoric (don't mean rhetoric as a pejorative but it seems to come out that way).
National talk a good game about science, but they've never shown much understanding that it it's not as simple as putting money into projects that have "direct business relevance" (however that's measured) and getting money out. It's really easy to talk about how science leads to innovation and Other Good Things, but the devil, as I'm sure you know, is in the details. And it's the devil I'm interested in, metaphorically speaking.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Russell Brown,
Jacinda Ardern vaults up to #4, one ahead of Cunliffe, who has Economic Development and Associate Finance, but not quite the broad brief I was urging.
Definitely not the snub some news reports were implying he'd get, though - and it's very good to see Jacinda getting up there.
What interests me most is Shearer taking on Science and Innovation (and Megan Woods as associate; that makes me really happy.) It's a nice message, him being the leader and all, but I will be more interested in what actual policy comes out of it. I don't think I've ever seen a science policy from a New Zealand political party that really spoke to me either as a scientist or someone who is generally interested in the promotion of science; it would be extremely pleasing if Labour upped their game there.
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Hard News: It was a munted year, in reply to Russell Brown,
He actually seems to have been reported to have said “trunk”, “trunks” and “truck”.
Clearly, Bob’s diction has slipped since his TV days.
Or the reporter's hearing isn't that great - or, given that the details of sewerage systems are not a matter of common discussion in non-munted years, the reporter or Parker or both wasn't familiar with the usage and that contributed to the misuse. It's pretty easy to mispronounce or mishear words when they're in a context you're uncertain of, and "main sewer trunk" is not a common turn of phrase. (I mean, I'd hope the mayor of Christchurch was familiar with its waste disposal systems pre-quake, but.)
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There have been only very short patches of time in my life when I've experienced that feeling you describe so aptly of waking up and remembering everything is still about to go to crap without the aid of factors probably outside your control, but I can hardly imagine what months and months of that would be like, psychologically. I'm very excited to hear the technical details, and hope the whole thing goes as uncomplicatedly as it possibly can. Just don't take the family swimming in Lake Ellesmere, once you get there; if I recall my geology report on it correctly, Canadian geese have not done its nutrient levels any favours.
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I don't think you meant "main sewer truck", though I guess a lot of sewage is transported by vehicle in Christchurch these days, or has been.
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
The great thing we do have going for us here in New Zealand is that it is quite easy to slip/slide from one class to another. In fact you don’t even need a Lotto win to do it, just good luck and timing
Or bad luck and timing, of course. What everyone always seems to ignore with the whole Poor Person Making Good thing is that if the percentage of the population who are in the "middle/upper class" section isn't rising, it means some people are going the other way....
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OnPoint: Dear Labour Caucus, in reply to giovanni tiso,
But not allowing for the existence of class or a sufficiently honest and nuanced understanding of class impoverishes the political conversation, and so not even the introduction of a CGT (bad for the propertied class) and the extension of the retirement age (bad for the working class) proposed by Labour were able to be discussed in terms of how they affected different sectors of the population differently - but always solely in terms of their effects on the government's books.
I think this is an extension of the shift in political discourse over the last year or so, whereby sovereign debt has become the benchmark by which everything - absolutely everything - is measured. Whether a policy increases it, decreases it, might increase it, might decrease it...that's it. Not whether it helps or hurts *actual people*, or, god forbid, whether countries like New Zealand - with internationally very low levels of government debt - even need to be concerned about it as their first priority. Back in 2007/2008, when the whole economic crash was brewing, I don't remember government deficits garnering anything like the level of attention they have now. It's been a very marked shift in how things are discussed, and it doesn't seem to me to entirely reflect the realities of the situation for a lot of countries.
It's not about the erasure of class so much as the take-over of political discussion by pure economics. And Labour, to a large extent, chose to buy in to that view of things, rather than say, hang on, maybe we're looking at the world the wrong way if that's our only measure of achievement. In a year where they did choose to come forward with a lot of policies considered politically unpalatable, I would have liked to see that.
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2011 -- The Vote!, in reply to Lilith __,
It’d be fascinating to know what coaching these overseas call centre staff have in our dialect and idiom. I wonder what definition of munted they get taught? :-)
Yeah, friend's response was basically: all the words in English and they took the time to teach you *that* one? (Although it's equally possible the rep picked it off after having customers call in and use it in their complaint.)