Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: What if We Held an Election…, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I have real trouble not doing that at airports. A check-in person once very sternly told me “We don’t find those kinds of jokes funny.”
I can also tell you that Australian customs staff do not find jokes about apples amusing.
My brother gave our entire family heart palpitations when we stopped over in Singapore, weren't selected to have our bags searched, and he said very, very loudly "But they didn't even check to see if we had any drugs!". Turns out telling a fifteen-year-old multiple times about how tough Singapore's customs is can be counterproductive.
OTOH, we did accidentally smuggle some apples into Australia on an earlier holiday (you can get away with it if you're very sincere due to having forgotten you have them, and have some legal but smelly cheese as a decoy for the dogs) so we are a suspicious bunch.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to TracyMac,
So the advantage of using it is that you don’t have to speculate about someone’s motivations – it’s about the effect the concern troll is having on their audience.
I've always understood it to indicate a certain amount of insincerity, or at a minimum a lack of caring about their audience outside of the issue they are concern trolling on (hence the "troll" part.) Otherwise it's just called "being annoying", which lacks the same punch.
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Carol Stewart,
have you seen this, Lucy?
Yes. Yes I have. I find the columns about technicians particularly accurate. (Took me aaaaaaaages to work out the Chuck Norris joke, though, I could tell you a dozen of 'em but I've only actually seen a picture of him once or twice.)
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Up Front: What if We Held an Election…, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
I worked on a couple of elections in the '90s and this was also something I did when there were quiet moments. Easiest way: if you knew for sure that someone wasn't going to vote, you could basically just rock up to a polling booth and vote in their name.
You would both get on well with my partner, who has a bad habit of, for example, speculating aloud - quietly, to be fair, but still aloud - while waiting in line in banks on how he'd stage a robbery. In retrospect I'm kind of glad we went through US Customs separately.
(Of course it's not like I participate or anything.)
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Sacha,
If only it were just academia. That's a prime symptom of *this* country's widespread poor management too: managers whose egos can't cope with specialist staff and other parties like suppliers knowing more than them - which is exactly how it should be.
It's just such a jaw-droppingly stupid way to run things. In this instance we got there because it had been mentioned that their lab was having trouble with [thing outside their subject expertise], and only hiring undergrads in [other subject], who of course didn't have the experience to fix the problem before they moved on. It was such a classic ego-impeding-progress problem. I can understand wrestling with it, especially given the comparative budget and effort involved; I can't understand not biting the bullet and hiring in the specialist you need after multiple failures.
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Sacha,
I can picture your hands on her shoulders, lovingly recreating the ground acceleration. Or maybe her neck (early Bart Simpson styles).
It was part of a wider range of WTFery, so I had time to moderate my reactions. (Probably only scientists will get this, but the best bit was "I don't like hiring postdocs who know more about their subject area than I do.")
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Hard News: When A City Falls, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I wouldn’t know about outside of Christchurch, but the mood abroad seems to be almost a stampede to forget.
One of the most teeth-gritting conversations I've had this year: with a scientist who does a lot of field research in Antarctica, flying through Christchurch. "Oh, you came here from Christchurch, how lovely, I've been there so many times, it's so English, all those lovely buildings...wasn't there some sort of earthquake or something?"
I feel it is to my credit that what I said was "Yes, a very bad one," not all the things that came to mind.
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to Hebe,
Chch Central was always a bit of a worry: the emptied-out city centre, a fewer than 1000-vote majority, redrawn boundaries a few years ago and Brendon Burns being a nice guy without an ounce of mongrel in him.
It also encompasses a lot of areas with high turnover in population - I've doorknocked there for Labour, well before the quake, and you got a lot of people who'd moved on and in since the last time someone went round, whereas when I did the same in Christchurch East there were a lot more people who'd lived there for a long time. When you have people who haven't lived there very long, they wouldn't be likely to stick around after the quakes.
As Conrad says, Brendon has been an extremely active and dedicated electorate MP, despite losing his electorate office in both September and February and, IIRC, suffering severe damage to his house. The result isn't a total shock but it is unusual, and probably owes something to a combination of factors that may well have been outside Labour's control.
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Is there any idea when it will be out on DVD/available to expats? For obvious reasons I very much want to see it, but there's no way I'll be in NZ while it's on theatrical release.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum '11: counting…, in reply to HenryB,
It is sloppy and not ideal practice but I suppose one would have to either cast a second vote in ones own name (thus cancelling out all ones votes except the referendum vote?) or use someone else’s on the electoral roll. To have any significant effect on the final result this would have had to have been orchestrated so well it would be hard to imagine it.
And this is why efforts to stem voter fraud that focus on identity theft - the most difficult, least effective, and least prevalent form - are just voter suppression in disguise. Having to show photo ID to vote does not make democracy better, it makes it worse.