Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Your aunt does provide an economic good for New Zealand - an employment opportunity for the carers, and a business opportunity for the residential care provider.
Right, but the government pays for all of that. So the net balance is a loss. The government is not going to treat disabled care as an income producing asset. The same goes for other cost centers like health and education generally, but there is the argument that the workforce they create and keep healthy is worth the money put in, in eventual tax income for the government. That argument is very tenuous when you consider cases like my aunt. There was never a prospect of her earning money upon which tax could be charged.
Therefore, by implacable logic, if she deserves care, it is not because of any economic benefit in the care. It is purely because she needs it, and she is human so she should be treated as one. I'm deliberately choosing the most pathological example I know of, to make the point.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I know he didn't mean it that way but it is the political equivalent of the blonde joke.
Well, I wasn't saying you were stupid. Just that the way you reason is not IMHO the way the majority does.
I'd agree with Gio that if aggregate economic outcomes are used as the totality of the reasoning, then the disabled are almost always going to miss out. I find it pretty hard to imagine my 50-something year-old aunt, who is severely intellectually handicapped to the point of having a mental age of something like 3 or 4, coming up as anything other than a cost on any balance sheet, considering her care is about one half of a full-time live-in carer in a premises dedicated to people with similar disablement. She never has and never will contribute any net positive economic good for NZ. But her ongoing care is a basic human right, the entire argument for it comes from a sense of right and wrong. I don't even think one needs to be left wing to see that, although one might need to be some kind of libertarian nutcase to fail to see it*.
*Actually a better terminology might be "to unsee it"
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Lilith __,
Why does this have to be an either/or thing?
It doesn't. I was making a comment about Bart, and somewhat flippantly. It's a digression so I don't really want to talk to any points raised against it.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You're like the ultimate lefty to vote directly against your interests, on behalf of a cause (children) that doesn't have a personal element. I don't actually think that kind of reasoning is "like most kiwis". Voting after one's back pocket is really common.
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I'm talking deliberately about the second hand market here, too, because that is the market that matters when it comes to trends with vehicles. In that they are entirely different to computers. Most cars on the road are second hand. If electric vehicles are unable to penetrate the second hand market, they will never become pervasive. So far I haven't been convinced that they will. Essentially, they don't have very much longevity, because the expensive part dies quickly. One could easily buy a ten year old petrol driven vehicle and find it not much less of a machine than it was new. But every second hand electric vehicle I've looked at in the last 5 years is a considerably less practically valuable machine than the new article.
In fact, I'm yet to even come across a second hand electric motorbike that even works at all, in the sense of being able to carry me up a hill commensurate with the vehicle's supposed wattage. In all cases, it has been the battery as the part that has failed, and the vehicle is worthless without it.
Maybe this will change, as the price of batteries drops. If they become just a component, rather than most of the value of the vehicle, something you can readily replace without tossing up whether to write the vehicle off, then the EV market will reach a point that it can begin to take over.
It doesn't matter at all what the latest cutting edge is in these vehicles. The 1% who buy new experimental cars are never going to change the world. Thomas Edison was driving around New York in an electric car over 100 years ago now. But he was an eccentric multi-millionaire.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Except cars are much more expensive than the engine.
As with a laptop, you might find the car and the detachable engine costs more than two comparable cars without such convenience. Most of the parts in a laptop cost a lot more, and simply won't deliver you anywhere near the cutting edge in, for example, their graphics card.
There are also much better reasons why you only want one computer than there are for your car. A computer contains a huge amount of configuration that you must spend your time on, whereas cars are much more limited devices in terms of configuring them/setting them up. Generally you adjust the seat and mirrors, and put in some of your own music, and that's it, it's set up for you.
Depending what you actually mean by the engine, you can actually already do this with any plug-in. Just carry a petrol powered generator with you. People already do this with DIY plug-in utes (where the ventilation is not a problem). But a 100kg 7kW one isn't going to push a ute along very fast (I'm guessing it would be like towing the ute behind a small motorbike). A 100kW generator is a big beast of thing.
But you're talking wish-list stuff anyway, right? 20 years from now kind of thing, rather than what we might easily have within a few more years? In that case, yes, sure, that's a configuration that might have appeal to people with very limited storage space, probably inner city dwellers with a single garage. I was talking more like 5 years, when it's feasible I could get a second hand plug-in electric car, and I'll already have a petrol one, which I would probably just keep. This is a household, after all, so more than one car is very useful.
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They did for a while, but then 5 years ago they disappeared – in the EU, the US and Japan current policy is to inflate the monetary supply. So its are back to square 1. The monetarists are no longer in power.
I'm not so sure about that. Quantitative easing is the monetarist answer to the Keynes trap. It works on the same logic, dispenses the money by the same channel, encourages the same debt fueled growth that must hit hard limits at some point. It is ironically not austerity that is bringing private debt more under control, but actual consumer self-control due to fear, and the banking system is doing everything in it's power to erode that self-control, because it undermines their ability to control the money supply, and thus growth. Nothing has changed systemically, at all. We do not have a new world order of economic management.
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Up Front: Another Brick in the Wall, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Everything now is to do with how clever people are at knowing about and meeting ‘eligibility’ requirements, which like everything else in Disability (tried accessing a NASC lately and quibbling over IQ points?) are being interpreted more and more narrowly
Word. I was extremely fortunate with my son, in that my dad worked with disabled children of various kinds, and when the slightest window of opportunity opened for an ACC claim, he basically nagged me into making a real effort into following it up. Most people would not have realized the significance of the opportunity like that. To him, as someone who worked directly with a very expensive part of the operation, getting kids technical/IT resources, he was patently aware of the vast gulf of difference that exists between people getting support from the ministry and people also getting some from ACC.
Also, when the assessment came, it's one of the few times that I've really thanked providence for the gift of intelligence. It could so easily have been blown, by not knowing how to appeal to the assessor, how to put the case that an accident is likely to have occurred. Indeed, in the greatest of ironies, none of the doctors in NICU even considered the possibility that it was an accident until I pointed out that the bruising on my son's head from the ventouse was in the exact same place as the bleed discovered by MRI. Whether or not that was the cause, it was enough that it was a credible cause, and it had to be stressed at the assessment, and it had to be in the doctor's reports to even be considered.
Gotta go, but more to say on this.
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Sounds like a traffic light would help a lot.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Rich Lock,
Rich and 81st. Good to hear from both of you. I don't find your stories self-indulgent, in this context. Thatcher passing is like a milestone for Brits, and summing up entire lives lived under her legacy is natural, and also interesting.
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