Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Angela Hart,
I should think it's enforcement that would be the problem.
California has tried to control guns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_California
When the Black Panthers wielded AK47s for self-defence outside the state court house, open-carry was outlawed in 1967 by, of all people, then-governor Ronald Reagan and the NRA.
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Although the NRA provided material and strategic support to Australia's minuscule Shooters Party, nothing with that kind of scale and pervasity has ever existed there. Without a deeper understanding of the different situations in Australia and the US, downplaying the NRA's influence is empty hypothesising.
As Katharine Moody & Tussock have mentioned earlier, the NRA has gone from being a social training club, to what could be more accurately described as an arm of the military-industrial complex.
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Hard News: Hate and guns, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
*shudder* As I've pointed out elsewhere today, more than once, this is shit my father didn't have access to when he was a solider fighting honest to God Nazis in a real war.
And yet it's still nowhere near sufficient to 'overthrow a tyrannical government', as those who think they have a copyright on the 2nd Amendment would have us believe.
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Southerly: I Fell Down, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Actual manufacturing is, well, boring, I have a cheap pick&place machine, I do occasional (very) small manufacturing runs, it stops being fun fast. On the other hand visiting Shenzhen and hanging out with the growing western hardware hacker communitity is a lot of fun (well except for that whole Legionaires' thing).
Mostly though I guess the thing I'm trying to get over to kids (and adults) is that electronics (and other consumer stuff) doesn't have to be just something that is made somewhere else by other people, we can design it here, prototype it here, build it and sell on the word stage
On the other hand, assembling widgets has traditionally been a ladder of opportunity for those who've never won the social lottery of privilege. Now, credentialism is king thanks to the Wild-Westernisation of the labour market, among other factors.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Roger writes…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Right in the middle of Sir Joh's iron rule of Queensland, no less. He probably would have seen them as "dangerous hooligans".
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I've noticed that the Electoral Commission requires a fixed address to be on the electoral roll, and that private boxes don't count. (See Residential Address section on their web site.)
So how do the homeless get on the electoral roll, given the above rules? There's probably enough of them now to cause a sizeable poll swing if they managed to do so and all of them voted.
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And we thought that mental institutions were abolished years ago. They were basically prisons but for the mentally ill.
I'm luckier than Ashley in that I'm higher-functioning, living independently and in a job. But all the same I've struggled to earn more than the minimum wage, and for much of my working life my wages have been topped up by the taxpayer.
And the Future of Work is extremely relevant for people like me, given that jobs like mine are threatening to become museum pieces, and have little or no recourse to retool. If you've had the "no job without experience, no experience without a job" conundrum, it's just the same for people in dead-end jobs.
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I've said it before, but Labour's digital apprenticeships policy is a potential deal-maker for me personally, since it could be the one thing that gets me out of the dead-end cycle. So if Labour needs to stand for only one thing, it's extending the "ladder of opportunity" for those who haven't won the social lottery - the "Kiwi Dream" sounds like that on the surface.
The MOU is a starting point for heeding Abe Lincoln's immortal words: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Now if they can stay on message, and retain some even half-decent publicists, and in the long run tell the seat-warmers to know when to quit...
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh, that crowd went through the P thing years ago. No one ever tests stately villas for meth.
NB: Not joking. That happened.
So it's just like the American War on Drugs focusing on pot smoking homies instead of powder-snorting stockbrokers?
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And another Machiavellian thought on the housing crisis/bubble: how easy would it be to introduce P and cocaine to Auckland's hyperclasses? Then sit back and watch the evictions in the leafy areas.