Posts by BenWilson
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I also ended up doing a TL:DF
Too Long: Did Facepalm?
I'd say the reason for that one was much more to actually get the politicians themselves interested. Of course the Labour bigwigs wisely chose not to respond at all.
But yeah, one of the things that most put me off Kiwiblog was not the trolls, but Farrar's tendency to run those kind of pieces. His "report cards" on the various politicians were a study in setting up a framework for debate that excludes people who come from a different point of view.
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Admitting it's broken is a critical step, but it may not be the first step. You have to also have a clear alternative. That's the bit I'm most interested in hearing. Genuine alternatives, in detail, rather than more deconstruction. I was convinced our economic system was pretty damned broken a long time ago, as so many people have been.
What I still struggle to foresee is how our economic system can actually survive the end of work. It should be the penultimate moment in our history, rather than a catastrophic king of the hill battle to be the last owners of everything.
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Hard News: First, admit it's broken, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
There's registration? I just put my name and email in, and it knew who I was anyway.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to JackElder,
Nice one. They should do it with him in a hi-viz vest. Then as a super hot, semi-clad woman.
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Hard News: When the drug warriors turn, in reply to Ross Bell,
Sounds Wicked! But one does wonder, why not just have pot and meth, if that's your thing? As he concludes.
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Hard News: When the drug warriors turn, in reply to Russell Brown,
The active ingredients get banned and swapped out whack-a-mole style
Yup and it's not clear if it was all synthetic cannabis either. Those effects smacked of an actual tranquilizer. Noticing him all silent, I asked him if he felt a bit sick when the dinner arrived and then his eyes rolled back and he fell toward me - I caught his head to prevent him going into the pasta, and held him for about 30 seconds, another person bracing him beside, and then he regained consciousness and had no memory that it had happened at all. This repeated several times (although he was sitting on the floor after the second time, waiting for an ambulance to come). In between the bouts of unconsciousness he was completely lucid. It was really bizarre. I'll certainly remember that birthday party.
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Hard News: When the drug warriors turn, in reply to Russell Brown,
Given the mounting evidence that synthetic cannabinoids are potentially much more risky than actual cannabis, that doesn't make any bloody sense.
I can personally attest to that, having spent my 40th birthday at the A&E with an experienced stoner friend who make the mistake of popping outside to have a couple of puffs of Kronic. He actually lapsed into unconsciousness during dinner 4 times. It was quite bizarre, and unsettling, we thought he might be having a heart attack. But no, it was all the Kronic. In another incident, the same fellow (yes, he was this foolish) found himself confronted with armed police at his door, having called the police on himself during a Kronic induced psychotic break. In 10 years of smoking dope in large quantities, nothing like that had ever happened to him.
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Edit 0.8 to 0.08 in the previous comment. Blowing 0.8 would be some kind of local record, I'd imagine. Most people would have had their last breath long before.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Russell Brown,
Subjects could test negative after 5 mins and positive after 30, without drinking any more.
Indeed, although at the time they tested negative, presumably they were not actually that drunk, so an impairment test might tell you something, if it's a very quick test, or you have the level taken after as well (and then average the two). But it's not the way you'd want to conduct an experiment in which you proved what impairment was like at particular levels, because the level is changing too rapidly. What that one shows is that a readings are inaccurate when you're consuming very rapidly. Which, ironically, shows the importance of drink counting. Drink 10 beers on the trot and blow 0.8, but simple maths (which you'll still be capable of) will tell you that you will be over the limit for somewhere on the order of the next 8 hours. If you're as big as me. If you're smaller, there's a reasonable chance you'll be spending some of it at the A&E getting your stomach pumped.
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Hard News: When "common sense" isn't, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Nice summary, Bart. I'd go with the accident stats, simply because that is the stat that we want to improve. I don't care if people are impaired, if they're not causing accidents. It has the advantage, too, that you don't need to take local conditions into account, in some arbitrary, complex way. These are contained in the crash stats themselves. A lower limit might well be justified somewhere that the roads are also really unsafe, which would surely show up in accident statistics.
The thing that's hardest to calculate, though, is in your point:
But the data says that where alcohol is involved in serious accidents the drivers are usually way over the current limit so logically there is no advantage to having a lower limit if you are concerned primarily with reducing serious accidents.
So correlation between being unsafe to drive and being near the limit is harder to make because the data are sparse?
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