Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Because what you want is to go out with me, right? Not “a woman”, me. You’re attracted to the individual person I am. Same goes for every woman. We’re all unique fucking snowflakes, alright? You want any chance of her saying yes? Treat her as her, not as “a woman”. All women are terrified all the time to the same extent that all men are brutish bastards.
It really boggles me some days just how much society manages to inculcate us with the idea that there is a group, "men", and a group, "women", and never the twain shall meet. It's not true by any measure, yet people perfectly capable of understanding this fact in a non-romantic context somehow lose all sight of it when sexual and/or romantic attraction and interaction enters the picture.
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Capture: Christchurch: Last One Standing, in reply to Alex Efimoff,
Is that the remnants of Shag Rock on the right side of the photo, or something else? The loss/change of natural features like that is one of the things I find hardest to grasp; buildings are demolished, from time to time, the landscape remains...except when it doesn't.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
No they don't. Off the top of my head, you have to earn over $100K as a paying parent in child support in order to completely pay for the DPB of the other parent. The vast majority of people, including people who have relatively high incomes, only pay for the portion of the government support.
I imagine it depends whether you're talking about child support for otherwise working parents or the DPB - they are different things, right?
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Kumara Republic,
In other words, a giant Nauru?
In a lot of ways - I don't recall the details, but my understanding is that the problem with Australia is that it is a) naturally dry and b) geologically inactive, which limits nutrient input. (Volcanoes: crap in the short term, extremely helpful in the long term.) Intensive farming, or really *any* farming, amounts to excavation of what nutrients were there - and the soil only has so much to give.
If you want a really good example of what humans can do to an area, c.f. the Middle East, which once hosted the Fertile Crescent. A few thousand years of human civilization haven't done it many favours.
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Hard News: Crowdsourcing journalism,…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
It seems to work somewhat for NPR in the States.
Only if you want to listen to lists of their sponsors on a very frequent basis and regular pledge drives, where they ask you to contribute every. three. minutes. for a week. More than once a year. PBS suffers from the same problems.
Trust me, the comparative pittance our government spends on Radio NZ is *well* worth the service we get. You can run a public radio service by donation, but it's just not as good. We have something special. Let's not preemptively abandon it.
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Sacha,
A colleague saw a presentation to an Australian water conference a few years ago that positioned farmable climate as a distinct 200 year blip there, with the previous 40,000 years suiting only nomadic lifestyles.
The way we discussed it in ecology classes (two or three years ago now) was Australia as a mining culture; mining the resources that allowed them to farm as much as minerals. Came to the same basic conclusion about the long-term sustainability of wide-spread farming there, though. Geology and climate are just not on their side.
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Islander,
Those are matters outside our ability to influence (or even know when to get away from.) Plagues etc. we can do small things about, but tornadoes, rain bombs, hurricanes, major droughts, and general climate change? not so much it seems...even when we know our own actions are hastening warming & acidification of the oceans, and subsequent die-off of - o unimportant wee things,
like krill, and the planktonic biota...There's fairly good evidence that the Holocene has been a period of unprecedented climactic stability, which enabled the rise of farming and thence dense human civilisation; one particular pointer being that farming arose simultaneously (in historic terms) pretty much damn near everywhere it was ecologically possible, at the same time as the climate seems to have stabilised. People, in other words, Don't Know How Lucky They Are.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Rich Lock,
And it's an easily hijacked meme, too: taxes pay for welfare-bludging single mothers.
It strikes me that what Labour really needs is a slogan that brings out empathy in people, that gets to the idea that we provide social services and a welfare system and all the rest of it because at the end of the day that could be any of us; that when life is uncertain and things can go wrong, everyone is served by having a safety net even if they're not the ones who fall into it, because they could. And because we all do better when someone else is lifted out of poverty. Helping other people enriches us, as a society.
No idea how to put that into three or four snappy words, though.
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Up Front: What if We Held an Election…, in reply to Islander,
But the way the r in Maori sort of slides into d-hood has been a commonplace since people, especially English, started writing the language down…
You do have to wonder how much Maori has been changed and/or ossified by the transition to written language. Give it another couple of centuries before that happened and you'd probably have distinct written as well as spoken dialects.
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Up Front: What if We Held an Election…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
A Czech Communist Party candidate once brought out topless models to get people out and vote.
Or there was that candidate for the Polish parliament whose TV ad involved her stripping. (No link, sorry, it was on a TV news segment about All Those Shocking Overseas Electoral Ads With *Sex* In Them). I believe she lost, though.