Posts by BenWilson
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Typo in last sentence, I hope it's clear what I really meant. We learn sex in a way that is akin to throwing kids in the deep end of a pool. Which would get you in trouble these days, if you actually did it at a pool.
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You mean many of the things that are proposed for the Unitary Plan, then?
I do. It seems like a step forward.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to James Bremner,
What to do? I am all for an all of the above strategy.
I agree with much of what you say here. You don't really get intensification just by banning sprawl. You have to take positive steps to encourage intensification, and that means density and building restrictions in areas where intensification is desired have to be loosened. Even that might not be enough, and active development by the government of intensified housing might be needed.
Does anyone have any examples of intensification lowering the price of housing?
I'd be surprised if it did that, to be honest. Not in terms of actually dropping prices of existing houses, or creating similar dwellings for lower prices. It would only make the city more desirable, attracting more people to live in it, which would drive prices up.
What we could do with, though, is to create a different strata of property that actually is more affordable. Essentially apartments that aren't hovels, but they also don't have any land. Single people and couples would be especially attracted to that. There really isn't much of this in Auckland.
To actually bring property prices down is a whole economy problem. Our entire banking system is predicated around property and the ownership thereof. Residential property is most of the capital in the country. You can't fix something that massive by little piecemeal measures - everything about the way our money enters supply, interest rates are set, our currency gets it's international value, etc, are all tied up with the way residential property is financed. Short of massive changes in the basic structure of that setup, prices are only going to go up because the most powerful financial institutions here do everything in their power to make that so. A collapse in property is politically unthinkable.
That being so, an enforced stability is created which, as in so many other complex systems, creates an instability. It can look stable, indeed it can look like it's getting more and more stable, right up until the whole thing flips on its head. Stability creates instability.
Why this somewhat strange statement is true is not that mysterious. If an investment is "safe as houses", then it encourages more and more people to invest in it, to take the profits. You can't get more and more people taking the profits without the profits declining. So if you engineered a situation where profits must not seem to decline, then their inflation is to a large degree artificial. It can ride on sentiment, and when that eventually collapses, it is bailed out. The bail out means that people become more confident that collapse is impossible, so sentiment improves, and rides higher. When it stalls, we get another bailout. Of course you can only bail it out so many times, before there's no more bailout money. Then, it crashes down in a screaming heap. The scary thing is that it hasn't happened yet. We've had a property shock, some minor bailouts, and now property steams ahead again. We can keep doing this, until the coffers are dry, because the banking sector is the one group that both left and right governments will always bail out. The entire time, property will rise, right up until the money is gone. This is true both in NZ and the rest of the world - there could easily be another debt fuelled American recovery, followed by an even bigger crash that makes the GFC look tame.
Or we could have the longest recession in history, by holding the stability line hard, the policy of austerity, allowing the banks to punish the poor, cutting every kind of government expenditure so that more and more taxation can serve to buffer the finance industry against the risk it is actually creating. Essentially we can regress to third world social equality status. This has been the plan so far.
Or we could take a different path...but we'd have to choose it.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Gee,
yes… but the consequences of untreated STDs or late treated STDs can be quite serious
The consequences of untreated meningitis can be death within 48 hours. Many things that aren't STDs are serious. Many things that are STDs aren't particularly serious. They don't really hold any special place in the medical seriousness stakes. The only relevance they have to this discussion is that you can't get STDs without having sex, so they are uniquely stigmatizing, if having sex is itself stigmatizing. To this end the endless stigmatization of young sex is a major cause of problems with STDs. It sets up a situation where the young are ignorant and afraid to seek help. It's a perverse outcome of our social treatment of the problem.
Which really seems to support the ‘maturity not age’ angle, but that’s near impossible to judge/police…
It's complicated :-)
I think it's less about maturity and more about being informed, in the public health stakes. Framing the question in terms of information makes it:
1. Measurable. You can test if people know something. You can't test if they are mature. It's, for starters, easy to bluff. Maturity relates to attitudes in life, and anyone can bullshit about what their attitudes are.
2. Capable of being changed. You can't really make people more mature that easily. Nor is it clear whether you even should (I have already said I find the idea of maturity cards scary in that it could actually exclude MORE people from a basic birthright and a tremendous good). But you can rather easily and cheaply make them better informed.Then immature people can have sex without such severe consequences, and decide for themselves if it really is their bag. My own opinion is that genuinely immature people will find that it is not, but they wouldn't even try in the first place. Most people who want sex are to some degree ready for sex. Not necessarily the most full on kind, but it's rather crazy that it's a binary thing. Either you're a chaste virgin or a raging slut, with nothing in between. Little else in life is like that, because so few things in life are set up as binaries.
But I don't have a clear picture how this could change, because sex is a private thing. You can't let your son have sex with someone and watch to make sure it's not going too fast for him. We don't have sex teachers that are charged with gently popping cherries, the way we have swimming teachers. I can't really see how that could be done within the context of current society. Which is not to say that such people don't exist - practically every personal story on prostitution ever told speaks plainly of the baby steps by which they went from being a blushing virgin to an experienced prostitute. The stories are extremely believable - anyone telling of being an absolute pariah has little reason to put false dressing on how it all happened. But we're a long, long way from a world where that kind of thing could be accepted. Ironically, the way they tell it is usually a whole lot gentler than a lot of people's first experiences go. Not surprising, since for most people it's left to chance what that will be like. We still learn to swim that way apocryphal stories about Pacific Islanders teaching their kids to swim go - chucked into the water, sink or swim.
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Legal Beagle: D-Day for Dunne (updated), in reply to Sacha,
But Dunne isn't middle-aged. Definitely not mid-life, unless he lives to be 120. A "senior moment" seems more likely to me.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to andin,
Who’s making that argument?
Who would try, when the pass is held? (that's the point of heading something off at the pass)
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Legal Beagle: D-Day for Dunne (updated), in reply to DexterX,
He could have got away with Unity Future, without having to change the signage.
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For me, BBQ is a necessary corollary of beer and sports. It doesn't feel right to watch rugby without my hair smelling of smoke.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to "chris",
were your friends being cautious for the sake of it or because they’d failed to take adequate precautions?
It was because their partner, or ex-partners of partners had revealed that they had an STD. Some of it was caution. A lot of it was at the insistence of the partners. It wasn't a particularly common story, nor a particularly interesting one, any more than someone having any kind of communicable disease ever is. We get sick every year, it's just part of life. STDs are probably under-reported in the underage because of the shame and potential legal danger in it. Which is why treatment for them should be free, anonymous, and non-judgmental, in the interests of public health, and children should know how they can access that treatment.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Keir Leslie,
The cathedral masons.
They were generally commissioned by the aristocracy or the churches, though. They happened because rich people wanted them to happen.
And lots and lots of things were paid for by groups that weren’t the idle rich.
The things you're talking about mostly came from idle time. Folk arts are things folks work on when they have the time for it. This does happen from time to time even to poor people, that there are times of plenty, times of idleness. Long cold winters indoors. Post-harvest times. Any time you managed to catch a whole pig just for your family. I only mention the idle rich because they have this is a near permanent state, so their idle time can be spent on sustained attention to whatever interests them, and often with no connection to an eventual paycheck at all so the scope was greater, no investigation or art or thought too uneconomic to be allowed. Also, they had resources - if what they were interested in required some expensive input, they could fund it. If knowing about it to any sufficient level required education, they could get that education.
Again, I'm not glorifying the existence of the idle rich, or saying they were better than everyone else. Just that their mode of existence could be a blueprint for what things would be like if everyone was like that. And it's not a world of nothing happening, all economic activity ceasing, all motivation gone. On the contrary, it's one where the only motivation is for what people want, and the only activity directed toward that, and that it can create amazing things, because it has done that, throughout history. Essentially, I'm saying that the connection between remuneration and work is not straightforward and obvious as a way of directing human behavior. It doesn't necessarily bring out the best in people, because many of the best things of all time have been created by people working entirely for free enabled by no concern for their roof, food, health, safety, and freedom.
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