Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to andin,
“Milord, milord the peasants are revolting!”
"Yes, horrible little drug-addled oiks, aren’t they.”
“No, milord, I mean they’re taking up arms.”
“What sort of arms?”
*sproing*
"Pitchfucks.” -
I particularly love the idea of a bath full of wine. I could so go for that right now.
Collective nouns for dildos (N.B. my spellchecker doesn’t allow an “e”) … TBH the first image that came to mind was a “pincushion”; but sufficient quantity for typical use more simply suggests … a fuckload. (BTW I’m getting a spelling error message for that word, and hilariously the suggested correction is “cuckold”, which may say something about how far this spellchecker should be trusted.)
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
What we can say is that
(i) there's a broader range of qualification labels out there, which makes it harder for students (or employers) to assess the meaning of the qualification or its relevance to requirements of a specific job; and
(ii) in practice, some institutions that have been assessed as failing multiple NZQA requirements for qualifications are still being allowed to issue those qualifications, as long as they make periodic vague promises that things are being fixed.Admittedly, students already in the system function as a human shield for noncompliant institutions. The fairest approach for most students in such cases might be to close down habitually-noncompliant institutions, putting their funds into receivership, and using those funds to transfer existing students into equivalent programmes in NZQA-compliant institutions in similar locations wherever possible -- but that is not without its own attendant drawbacks, and someone is going to end up unfairly disadvantaged.
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
[Highly trained hospitality workers] get paid more [overseas]?
Yes. The basic problem (and one that’s become increasingly more serious over the past decade) is that in NZ, relevant qualifications and skills generally aren’t as highly valued, and don’t translate to as high a wage increase, as in Australia. So we muddle through with the cheapest least-skilled labour force that might, under ideal conditions, allow some basic functions to continue -- in much the same way that we traditionally are supposed to try to hold things together with chewing-gum and No.8 wire, and with much the same long-term prospects for success.
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
The PM's facile comments do rather more to support the conclusion that National politicians are lazy or on drugs.
-
i.e., the Peter Principle meets the Dunning-Kruger Effect, confirmation bias and the false consensus effect. Result: pretzel clusterfuck.
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
affordable educational option for upwardly moving Chinese
I’d agree with that as far as it goes – but still these are not Hooten’s “lower middle class”.
NZ (especially, Auckland) is also not reliably more affordable than Sydney, for example – but we do offer a flexible range of entry routes to suit even the lowest-proficiency cases (e.g., starting at an accredited language school, then into a university-run English proficiency programme, and finally into degree courses proper). -
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Sam Bradford,
Try […] to find a builder in Auckland […] who is not literally on crack
Ooh. Hadn’t realised builder’s crack was quite that serious a problem —
thought it was just something you got with plumbers. -
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
isn’t that we have better teaching
Well, some ESL programmes would probably beg to differ on that :-). But certainly, for my students, study abroad in NZ is no cheaper (and depending on the wildly fluctuating exchange rate, has sometimes been significantly more expensive) than comparable programmes in Australia or America.
The difference you mention is most obvious during visa application procedures and at border control. By contrast, once students actually reach their host institution, they generally have a positive experience whichever English-speaking country they go to (because the institutions have a very high motivation to ensure that is the case). The administrative hassles beforehand generally aren't an important factor when students select destinations, except in the extreme case that a student visa is actually refused. (Which used to happen fairly often about 10 years ago for Chinese nationals heading from Japan to the US; but it's rare now.)
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
If you're talking about China, it's the poorer end of the upper class who end up in NZ. The airfares and the living expenses in Auckland are beyond the means of the middle class. So, yes, it favours the prosperous. Period.