Posts by Nat Torkington
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Loved it, Finlay. It beggars belief that we're in April on an election year and we still have no idea what the Opposition's policies will be, other than bootcamps for truants. What does Key propose to do about the loss of skilled workers from New Zealand? The accelerating gap between house prices and household incomes? Crime? The balance of payments? Inflation? Will we find out before the election, do you think? Sufficiently far in advance that we can have a meaningful debate over whether they're sound policies before we vote on them?
I didn't renew my subscription to the Listener. I was on the edge, nostalgic for the old days when both sides would get the sharp edge of the writers' pens, until I saw this cover: "The new psychology of LEADERSHIP - The surprising insights that could help John Key win" with, right under it, "Is David Cunliffe after Helen Clark's job?". It's become a spooge rag for the National Party, with the sternest remark aimed at the National Party being Jane Clifton's recurring "if only they were better able to capitalize on the failures, weakness, and craven excesses of the Labour Party, to show the voters the glorious strength and nobility that the Nats have in them! Shame on them for not being able to do so ... yet!" refrain.
I'm a pro-market business person. I like capitalism, and I think it can do a lot of good. I'd be prepared to vote for the Nats if they were to simplify tax and employment paperwork so it was easier to run a business, improve the quality of schools and universities so I could easily hire smart people, and so on. I don't even see that. Go to the Nats web site and check out the policy areas: bare! The 2005 policy statements are terse and useless: the IT one doesn't mention broadband, or even "Internet", and under "Economic Development" there's a press release from 2007 that talks about a website the Nats set up to see how the government procurement process works--the opentender.co.nz site doesn't respond today and there's no followup press release talking about what they learned. It's a policy vacuum, not a platform, and it's bloody frustrating.
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Don: how do you find NZ content in the morass of Rick Astley that is YouTube?
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Journeyman was intriguing but never paid off: always with the shadowy deus-ex-ex popping up and being adorably omniscient yet never actually telling us (a) what the fuck's going on or (b) why we should care about these people. I tried hard, watched six episodes, which in retrospect turned out to be about four more than I should have.
"Big Bang Theory" ... now *that* is worth downloading. Some seriously good shit there, my friend. Particularly if you have a geek in your life. It's got a cliche premise, and the first episode skated uncomfortably close to ridiculing its characters, but it just got better and better. Ditch your Journeyman habit and get with the big bang, and not just for the hook-filled theme by the Barenaked Ladies.
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own a banjo
Hey hey hey! Now it's my turn to be an offended minority. Watch your stereotypes, pal. Hillbillies with banjos aren't a purely Cantabrian phenomenon.
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I'm not saying looking at overseas successes and failures is a bad thing, as long as you don't think you can just pick up something that plays well in Broken Bottle, WA, drop it on Whykickamoocow High and expect to instantly get the same result. But I'd rather not see kids who don't get a second go at an education being used as lab rats, or reduced to a data point in a research paper.
I'm not sure where this was suggested. The story was that NZ has pretty good test scores. Somehow that became "don't turn our kids into lab rats!".
I'd love to know how you'd reform the education system. What would be the first policies in place should the Craig Ranapia First party be elected in 2008?
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Fingers crossed, then, that Juha will be the only Aucklander heading north to Leigh for the holidays. I look forward to a barren Omaha, its former residents enjoying the clogged streets and intimate ambience of Waiheke, your Auckland away from Auckland.
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I've missed the last ten years of political discourse in this country. Could you remind me why I'm supposed to care what John Minto thinks?
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Interesting how the nation is going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief in the wrong order. Supposed to be Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Instead we get Denial ("NO!!!!"), Depression (Sunday), Anger (Monday on talkback, the fingerpointing at players, coach, conditioning regime, administrators, ref, etc), Bargaining (the coming hunt for the new coach), and never Acceptance ("it was the ref! it was the waitress! it was it was it was ...").
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The thirty minutes of handwringing rugby wank on Morning Report was ridiculous. It is literally yesterday's news at this point. What's served by encouraging the lineup of finger-pointing has-beens to second-guess and grizzle? (Highlight: the poor word choice of describing the players becoming emotional in the locker-room afterwards as 'choking up')
"Moneyball" is a really interesting book about how statisticians turned around a baseball team. One of the things I took away from this book is that season games are about skill and execution, while postseason are all about luck and injuries. In general, baseball and football teams won't make it through to the World Series or Superbowl if they lose players to injuries. And while you can condition, recondition, play or protect as you fancy, ultimately injuries are in the hands of the gods. The World Cup is a sign of upon whom the Gods are smiling, not a sign of the consistently best team.
Anyone who pokes shit at the ABs for the loss deserves all the emotional wounds the loss can bring. The team was in great physical shape but they weren't able to play sufficiently better than a gritty French team to overcome the few inevitable bad calls. C'est la vie.
The national rugby conversation I'm dreading is the one about rebuilding the ABs after the majority of the team leave for Europe's rich clubs. There'll be a flood of new caps and whoever gets the coaching position is going to have a hell of a job turning what were (this year) non AB material into ABs.
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Turns out The Economist had a bit to say about nuclear power. Some relevant chunks from Nuclear Dawn are relevant. On uranium availability:
Nuclear has worked well in France in part because it is accepted by politicians and the public alike, so there are few delays due to protests or planning problems. Elsewhere, these have lengthened the construction period and enormously increased costs. Once up and running, however, nuclear plants have a distinct advantage over those run on coal or natural gas: they need comparatively little fuel to operate. Although the price of uranium jumped from about $70 per pound in January to about $130 in mid-July, operating costs of nuclear power plants have changed very little. (Construction accounts for as much as three-quarters of the cost of nuclear generation.) Moreover, the rise in the price has prompted an exploration boom that will ultimately lead to more mines and greater supply. Uranium is not thought to be particularly scarce—it has simply not been very profitable to look for it recently.
On waste:
Even though new designs for nuclear plants may be safer, they still generate toxic waste. After about three years of use, the fuel is depleted of most fissile uranium but has accumulated long-lived radioactive materials that cannot be burned in conventional reactors. At the moment most such waste is stored near the plant until it can be moved to a permanent facility. But no country is yet operating a final disposal site for highly radioactive nuclear waste. America's Yucca Mountain repository, for example, is not expected to be ready for use for many years, if ever.