Posts by tussock
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So, Bill English gets a government subsidy to rent his own fucking house, and we slap a coat of paint on that law to make it go away and now he's Prime Minister without anyone even getting to vote on it.
Because that was a very confusing law about how you hide your assets in trusts to avoid taxes and get extra government payouts.
But I guess he is a rich old white man to be revered, and not a poor young brown woman to be ousted, and it's not like any single mums were hiding their spare houses in trusts under the name of their spouse, so it's not even comparable.
This country really gives me the shits sometimes. So deeply fucking corrupt and what does the media go after but those at the bottom of the heap.
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Hard News: Metiria's Problem, in reply to ,
One of the complications with using the historic benefit fraud as a political gimmick, which it is (even when the outcome is intended to feed the poor), is that life on a benefit twenty fives years ago isn’t the same thing as it is now.
In a lot of ways it was worse, early on at least, the recession was very strong, the thing that forced in the rent subsidies was the Meningitis outbreaks spreading from the rather common issues around three families living in a garage, in Auckland.
We didn’t have the same housing shortages then, as we now do. In the mid nineties, it was possible to rent heathy accommodation in Auckland, and have a healthy diat, and do tertiary education whilst on a benefit.
If you had family or friends who could chuck you an extra $20-$50 a week, or you never had to buy yourself clothes or shoes, had someone to drive you around, or someone to provide you with free childcare or whatever else. I studied on a benefit in the early 90's and part of me dropping out was I couldn't afford to feed myself after having the benefit occasionally cut and none of the regular bills stopping. Depression is fun like that, but of course getting diagnosed was impossible while I was still studying.
I accept your anecdote that you knew people who did fine in those circles, maybe it was better where you lived, but it was pretty shit in my social circles, and it's not like I saw much of other beneficiaries given how rarely leaving the house was an option.
And the thing is, it has gotten much worse again under National. The requirements they've put on people, the options they've taken away, it's resulted in a lot more people getting their benefits terminated. That's people with no money for weeks at a time and the bills still rolling in.
I lived that at one point, it is not in any way pleasant, life just gets harder and harder every time that happens, and it's not like you could afford shoes anyway.
Servival is what people who live on the street with mental illness do.
That is of course, part of the conversation about how it's all too easy to get kicked off a benefit in NZ, even when you're obviously mentally ill and incapable of finding work or looking after yourself properly.
But there's a lot of people living in cars now. It's not just the housing shortage, it's way more people than that. People who've had their benefits cut.
It’s just going to feed the benefit bashing trolls.
Fuck the haters, man, they are irrelevant to the conversation.
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Is it perhaps worth noting again that the NZ benefit levels are set 20% below minimum survival costs, that no one who is on a benefit doesn't cheat the system somehow in order to survive, because it's impossible by design to survive on a benefit.
It's been like this for twenty years now. Obviously we're going to have younger people who've been on benefits at some point who cheated a bit on their benefit applications. Once the rent subsidies came in and all the rents went up to capture them, obviously everyone on a benefit had to cheat those too, or go live in a fucking car or something.
But I guess freedom camping's just a lifestyle choice, right.
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1.5 µg, per 100cm^2, of wall, that didn't come off with a quick wipe.
Therapeutic doses are 10-25 mg per day, or 10000 to 25000 µg per day. Illicit use is higher still up over 60 mg per day for heavy users, or 60000 µg.
So to get any affect, off that, you'd want to lick 66 m^2 of wall, and to really bug out you'd be up over 500 m^2 of wall. In some way that magically attracted meth and also replaced it so you could do it again tomorrow.
It really seems like numbers under 10 µg per 100 cm^2 are just being, uh, greedy might be a word. If meth doesn't actually stick to skin much better than wall, any numbers under 100 µg don't even make sense, but of course you'd never be able to find that much meth anywhere, so meth cleaning companies wouldn't need to exist.
Try a cloth.
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Gotta say, electric bikes with these big lithium batteries are just awesome. Not to mention panniers, those are also very good. And a front basket, seems like the last bit my old man's bike needs.
Just, if you want to work a bit more, or ride a bit longer, turn the power down and it happens. Or the rain's on the way, turn the power to maximum and push hard on the pedals and you get home in no time. Cadence sensor is bloody handy for less strong cyclists who sometimes want to get a move on.
They're just brilliant. eZee Sprint my old man got comes with a built-in keyed wheel lock, by the way, and a stand, and mudguards and chain guard and the rest. As well as the key for the power that also locks the battery in. So if you nicked it, you'd have to lift it into a ute (might make you grunt a bit), take it away to dismantle the wheel lock, and then get a key for the power unit and a charger .... So fairly obvious that you've nicked it really.
And the tires! Revelation, they've been, compared to crap I've been using. Shwalbe Marathon. 1000k and still sharp tread edges. My race bike is a good bit lighter weight though, I noticed after using the ebike a bit, just that you can pick it up and swing it round and stuff. That ebike you'd mostly want to wheel it places, especially when loaded up.
And my 80 year old father has ridden 1000k on a bicycle in the last couple months. Which is pretty cool in itself. I used to do better than that when I trained for things, but not now.
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Seriously, when the does Russia stop getting to use Operation Barbarossa as a free pass for being everyone’s neighbour from Hell? It’s been seventy-five years.
You mean when the most powerful army on earth tried to commit genocide against the Russian peoples starting at Leningrad and annihilating all human life beyond for being insufficiently Aryan?
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Russia's not a nice country, they're poor, socially conservative (it's seriously like the 80's there, punk rock and all), their democratic government fell over a while back and there was no food in the shops for a year, and the guys who fixed it were either going to be the criminal fraternities, the army, or the spies. And the spies won that and now run Russia (the criminal families got the oil, the army got the electric network and generation, the spies got the government, and they sometimes work together now).
Russian foreign policy starts with how they will never fight another war on Russian soil. It's just not negotiable. Attempted genocide against a people changes the national psyche. People who militarily oppose them or talk shit about removing Russians do not get to have armies on their borders, end of story. That's not a government thing, that's just everyone, you don't get to be government in Russia unless you agree with that.
Like how Israel starts with Jews being the majority in a country, and that country not ever being invaded or they will end the world for real, and any other solutions to their problems are completely off the table. Because of the genocide in WWII.
Like how China is very serious about people not splitting up China as the imperial powers did from the late 19th century, because that ended in the attempted genocide of the Chinese people by Imperial Japan in WWII.
None of this is an excuse for the reactionary and disruptive behaviour of those countries, but you must be able to understand it because it is not going away.
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And it's not really all 75 years ago for Russia, the cold war involved a great many assassinations and proxy wars on their borders for a very long time, including recently with the fundamentalist religious types that the CIA/Saudi alliance funded on their doorstep.
The same as it's not really all 150 years ago for Māori, eh.
The same as France is still super serious about a civil government and that whole liberty and fraternity and equality thing, or the USA is about not splitting the union, or Germany is about it being politically impossible for them to start a war in Europe through various trade and common policy treaties, or England is about not being ruled from Europe, even though the last one is rather many centuries out of date and not particularly true.
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So, it was before this law about 2% of serious offenders would re-offend in a serious way, and of those, 4% (or 0.07% of the original) would offend for a third time. Or you're just more likely to get it pinned on you, or whatever.
And aside from judges not entering certain convictions since the law change because they would be manifestly unjust, such as a 2nd or 3rd strike conviction, and people accepting lesser sentences rather than face the risk of such a strike, let's assume that the 30% reduction in re-offending could be real and note ...
That's reduced "serious crime" by half a percent. On top of the eight percent it dropped by anyway, across the same time period. Because there's less lead in the petrol when the current bunch of 20-somethings were kids, or the police got their funding cut, or whatever else has changed.
Which isn't nothing, it's like 30 less serious crimes, in five years, or 1 every couple of months. So it is possibly something, like a 1 in 700,000 reduction in your chance of having a serious crime committed against your person every year, or at least a reduction in the chance of someone being sentenced as such after the fact. Plus or minus an unknown amount.
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But I guess if you get shot by a repeat violent offender while he's on parole, that's great headlines for weeks, and if you die of diabetes like everyone else, then it's not headlines at all, so sugar taxes are bad and no parole for all sorts of people even if it does nothing to help is good. Because "good" is whatever protects the government from headlines.
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People being thoughtful is difficult to distinguish from people telling lies.
It's that little pause. After they start speaking.
Certainty, even of the nihilist kind where nothing matters, doesn't look at all like lies. It's what makes a talented liar, a certainty that they are not lying, at least for some interpretation of what they're saying.
No use voting for a liar after all, never know what they're going to do.
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I see there's a massive conspiracy being proposed, backed by shady foreign governments.
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I did once tend to believe in a few of them, but then, you know. What if Russian nationalist internet trolls are just the same as USian nationalist internet trolls and do very similar stuff in large groups all at the same time because it's the zeitgeist.
Like gamergate, which was thousands of men who set about harassing female game journalists for a year or more, and it turned out to not be a conspiracy as such, just a bunch of assholes who all happened to believe the same thing (and probably all voted Trump), that women should not be listened to, and a bunch of people got caught up in it to various extents.
Or like Whaleoil here, who sort of had a massive collection of politicians and political aides and media people at his beck and call but actually was maybe one politician really feeding it and maybe one journalist really driving it as accepted news and that was pretty rare anyway and as far as it went, everyone else was just there at the same time doing some of the same things sometimes, while a lot of other people were highly critical.
Those things are genuine problems too. Fake news ... well, there's always Fox News, it's not like it has to come from Russia to make USian people stupid about the world at large.
And there are actual conspiracies. The actual evangelical Christian religious conspiracy in the United States to dumb down science education and "teach the controversy". Or the actual political conspiracy of the Republican party to tell a lot of anti-abortion lies in order to secure that same high-turnout religious vote, because it only hurts women. You've heard of them from first-hand sources, because you always do with real conspiracies. People are proud of that organisational shit.
When George W. Bush was conspiring to invade Iraq on a bunch of lies, the western media mostly parroted them, but there was also leaks from inside and criticism against and the biggest protests against it ever seen around the world. There's plenty of people still believe Iraq was about WMDs and ISIS is a natural result of Islam, rather than the invasion was a conspiracy of lies and ISIS appeared out of the horrific lack of care shown for the population after it. The real world being more complicated still.
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So there are massive state conspiracies for wars and stuff. And there are massive numbers of people on the internet sometimes go do the same horrible thing just for kicks without any sort of conspiracy. It seems fair to just accept that if it is profitable to lie to US Republicans for the add money, then a lot of people will totally lie to US Republicans for the add money. Just like Fox News does.
Also 6 crazy things you'll never believe will help you lose weight overnight. Those are also profitable, and everyone is doing that without conspiring to do that.
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And yes, google does not respect the truth of things, only their popularity, and only then relative to people it considers similar enough to you, thus feeding your preconceived beliefs in a way that makes your happier to buy stuff. TV news is much the same, when you think about it, they'll tell you all week about a grisly double murder but nothing of the thousand other people who died that week, a good few after all too much consumption of the sponsor's products.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I get not diagnosing people. I do, it's unfair and improper in general and it's unfair to Trump, but it helps me understand the world, so here it is.
When people say that Trump is just a bad person and racist and misogynistic and so on, that he's a failed businessman or all sorts of things, but to me that's like saying people with Asperger's are rude and deliberately offensive. You're missing the point. It's also failing to be predictive, understanding Hitler as a megalomaniac helped other nations prepare for War against him, and helped defeat him in very specific ways (like at the battle of Minsc).
Like with Trump, to say he's gone bankrupt a lot, and so is bad at business. Clinical narcissism makes life a different experience for people, Trump's business don't go bad because he makes mistakes, it just lets him rip off his investors, who are suckers, it completes that social transaction for him where he took all their money and kept it. That's how Narcissists relate to people, when he says "when your wife gets old you get a new one", like she's a piece of furniture, he's not kidding.
Because everyone is furniture. Just things to be shuffled around and used, unless they challenge him, and then they may be like him and see the world the way he does and must be removed as a threat. Narcissists in positions of great power are very dangerous. Trump is now very dangerous, for real.
When he says he's going to do something and get someone else to pay for it, he's not kidding, at all, because he is awesome and everyone must do what he says (and when they do he will rip them off). He will economically punish any nation on earth that fails to follow his demands, with tariffs and mass visa cancellations and monetary restrictions, like he said he will already. US cities and states that fail to comply at their own cost with him whims will have all federal funding cut for everything. He has said that and is not kidding at all. That will ruin economies the world over and he will love that shit because he did that.
He's not blustering, this isn't fake. It is helpful for people to understand that. Everyone to him is a threat to him, or something to be used for his personal aggrandisement. To hear people cheering his name is why he became President, and now everyone will have to do what he says, or he will ruin them.
He's not a failed businessman who says mean things because he's a cool anti-establishment guy. He's an extremely skilled manipulator of investors and lawmakers and the wider population who likes to completely screw people, both those who support him and those who oppose him, just to prove to himself how great he is. And now he's going to be the President of the United States and he will not listen to anyone about anything ever again.
This is a very bad thing. He's not just a bad guy.