Posts by Walter Nicholls
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Hard News: Paths where we actually ride, in reply to Marc C,
what is needed is a culture change and big plan to enable cycling along all major and not so major main streets and roads in Auckland,
That's going to be hard. Most of Auckland's arterial roads are already widened to capacity. And motorists hate it when you take lanes away again.
My children's "best" cycle route to school is basically a huge gravity well. But the more direct route along the ridge (shorter, and virtually level) includes a long stretch with two lanes, no parking margin, and the narrowest of footpaths.
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Hard News: Paths where we actually ride, in reply to Russell Brown,
projects to the East, South and West
Maybe I have a case of "WIMBY" (Want In My Back Yard) but I'm not excited by any of the projects listed for the North Shore. They look like a case of building what is easy rather than what is needed. Who commutes between Massey and Albany? I wonder what the occupancy of the half-hourly 130 bus (that route) is compared to the double-deckers being added on the busway?
Further out it DOES look interesting, mostly because of the prospect of linking to the SkyPath.
There's more to the picture than just the roadways. How about converting the lowest level of all the carparks to bicycle only and installing shower blocks? It could even be a requirement of all new developments, like fire regulations.
I guess we just have to be patient. -
Note Herald site is still giving assorted error messages - The APN-branded one, 503 (internal server error) and just plain not responding to requests. No doubt the Herald IT people are on to it and it will settle down in due course. (It's probably a cluster of web servers of which only one/some are down)
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Up Front: Stand for... Something, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
Actually I have been waiting to see something like this.
(And ackshully, you wouldn’t need the ackshul flag) -
Like Russell I like the idea of voting on the day, and our local primary school is a polling booth so it's also a social occasion for us (less so now both our kids have left there).
But I voted last week. I wasn't going any unforeseen events prevent me voting, and nothing anyone did from that point on was going to change my party vote, and as for electorate vote I just voted on party lines: I don't know the candidate at all but tactical voting would have no effect on this seat, might as well give them encouragement.
I echo others at the level of political engagement among young people, my eldest won't vote until next election, but I'm sure at 15 I wasn't anything like as interested and informed (and from sources more varied than TV). -
Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Russell Brown,
A list of all the things Cameron Slater has deleted from the Whaleoil blog since August 18th
Oh my - I feel dirty just reading the subject lines. Anyone on this forum that has recommended against visiting this website has given good advice. No wayback machine for me. (or others on this thread I notice). I kind of hope though that someone with a stronger stomach is busy collating them for posterity...
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
On this very website, perhaps…
( Edit: ok, not quite) -
Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Angela Hart,
we’ve gone from paying down debt and being indebted to the tune of (I haven’t checked exactly) something like 10 billion, to constantly borrowing and owing about 60 billion.
Perhaps someone clever than me can try and put this into perspective. Annual revenue of NZ Government is about $60 billion. - but that doesn't translate easily into a personal analogy, as nearly all "homeowners" cope with the idea of owing several times their annual income. They would expect not to have to sell off the pantry to service the mortgage, though.
My favourite (if that's the word) bugbear is this one: Govt operating deficit bigger than expected as tax take lags - did they really not expect the tax income to drop, given that National have consistently dropped tax rates (3 times) since taking power in 2008?
I'd really, really like to see a graph comparing fiscal forecasts with actuals over the last 10 years Keith Ng does this kind of thing extremely well.
Don't even get me started on the broken window fallacy in Chch. -
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Grant McDougall,
The word stuck in my head for the last few days has been "complicit". Perception of this will decide which individuals fall over the month ahead.
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Back onto the film, on publicity: almost entirely thanks to this blog post and subsequent comments, I took the family (2 kids under 13) to Albany last night. About 8-10 people in the cinema, but all stayed to the end of the credits, after which there was a tasteful silence (thanks Event Cinemas) before the regular sound-filler started up again.
Worth spending 107 minutes on. Yes, it is a bit uneven, but it is mostly showing different images to what was plastered over the TV news and some brave people to allow themselves to be filmed.
One small offhand shot - a girl "off to Auckland" made me think there is another untold story, that of the refugees, particularly the students. There were several in my childrens' schools, how many have gone back home yet? What are their NCEA/university results going to be like?
