Posts by linger
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to Kevin McCready,
If I remember rightly, the general outline goes something like this:
(i) Wearing a helmet is, generally, safer for an individual cyclist who would be cycling anyway. It may lead to some cyclists taking more risks, and may also lead to some motorists engaging in riskier driving around cyclists, under the false belief that they are more protected than is actually the case, so the population-level improvement in safety is marginal – but still, at an individual level, once you’re at the point where you’re in an accident, you want to be wearing a helmet.But (ii) increasing the number of cyclists does more to increase their overall safety than does wearing of helmets, through a number of population-level effects on behaviour, through improved visibility, through consequent reductions in car use, and through forcing improvements in supporting infrastructure.
And (iii) having a mandatory helmet law is one factor reducing uptake of cycling.
This constitutes an argument against a mandatory helmet law at the population level; but it does not say that you as an individual are safer not to wear a helmet.
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Hard News: Fear of Cycling, in reply to cgduff,
Our future king enjoys cycling not wearing a helmet I can to.
I'm confused by that comparison. "Our future king" is not subject to NZ laws, however much of an arse this particular one may be (and that depends very much on whether you look at it from the viewpoint of a population or of an individual, and yeah we've done that in previous threads).
[Bally difficult to fit a helmet over one's crown, what?]
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Hard News: Meet the new bots, same as…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Or indeed the old standard
I'm Not Racist Butt
(isn't it dark up there) -
@TracyMac: Nah, it’s worse: expensive point-scoring. Blinglish’s recent hints about possible tax cuts render this unambitious piddling footling pussyfooting around cutting future eligibility for super an example of fiddling in several senses.
Well, bugger me, it must be an election year :-/ -
Hard News: Superannuation: Back to the Future, in reply to Moz,
I am paying NZ tax, at the residential rate, on my NZ income. Yes, I would be eligible to pay the lower nonresidential rate; but I choose not to as a matter of principle.
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Hard News: Meet the new bots, same as…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
they are getting better at appearing ‘real’
They sure are. Including an apparently positive if bland reaction is scarily effective social engineering -- you want to give those statements of approval the benefit of any doubt, even when you know you're being manipulated. It's the selection of dormant threads that is the best indicator that an automated process, rather than a live human, is involved. If there hadn't also been such clear examples resuscitating years-old threads, I would have thought twice about reporting the ones attached to merely month-old threads.
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Hard News: Superannuation: Back to the Future, in reply to Richard Wain,
One reason would be because most NZers have already been paying taxes, for decades, on the understanding that they would get national super.
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So far, there’s been a cluster of features that together have formed a reliable diagnostic for the recent flurry of bot-posts here:
(i) new username;
(ii) random selection of thread (often long-dormant, because most threads are);
(iii) lack of new relevant content (though some superficial relevance may be achieved through copying key words and phrases from the thread, sometimes with some additional generic response, e.g. that the topic “is interesting”);
(iv) nonnative grammar or vocabulary selection;
(v) inclusion of a link to a website offering some service (either as in-text link, or as an icon in the message header).But none of these features by itself would be a sufficient diagnostic; and one may expect some improvements in (ii), (iii), and (iv), possibly to such an extent that it would be hard to tell a bot from a genuine commenter.
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… Well, that's weird. My system just updated with my own post showing as 17 minutes old (and therefore uneditable) immediately after posting. And I would have wanted to edit it, since the intervening conversation has rendered it moot.
[Mystery solved: system clock was wrong.]
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Access: Privacy and the right to consent…, in reply to Moz,
That's almost certainly not what Sacha meant by "payback"!
The long-term object of the exercise is purportedly increasing the efficiency of the system and thereby, in theory, helping more people without increasing funding. History of similar centralisation moves suggests the efficiency gains sought are a mirage, and that, if there were any benefit, it would be subtle enough that several years' observation would be required to confirm any difference.
The possibility of abuse by ministers seeking retribution, and even the possibility of actually helping more people -- without reducing the per capita cost of that help -- are not really on the radar of the idealists driving this move.