Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Matthew Poole,
Seriously, the reason for using a touch-based smart card is that people don’t need to stop as they board the vehicle, they just swipe as they walk past. If you’re bringing on 10 people at one stop and it takes even 10 seconds for each person to pay and take their ticket that’s well over a minute spent at that stop just getting passengers on board. If they can swipe through it could be 10-20 seconds.
MInd you, a cardboard ticket that the driver clips, or simply looks at, is pretty damned fast, gets money off people, and costs next to nothing to set up. I'd prefer it to owning a Snapper card myself. Not a big fan of technology for its own sake. Has the added advantage that you can just look at it to work out how many trips/days you have left.
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As the father of a disabled child I can't see anything good about high pressure education at all. Kids are humans, not merely future worker bees, and it should be about giving them a wide range of skills for the rest of their lives, in many aspects of those lives. It really is amazing what a shadow economics has cast over our lives when you consider just how much we have compared to our ancestors.
Don't buy into it. We all get to be kids only once. It should be a happy time. It sets the tone for the rest of our lives. It sets the tone for the future of our society.
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The teachers at my 6 year old boy's school feel obliged to talk to his conformity to National Standards, but breath a big sigh of relief when I appear disinterested in that, and want to hear their own opinions on what his educational needs are. These are far more nuanced, and also much more interactive with me and my wife. I feel it's important to make teachers feel that you trust them as professionals, praise their achievements, come to agreement on goals moving forward, and ask them what you can do to assist.
I had a little chat with the principal before home-time last week, and it was the first time I've heard him genuinely embittered, being a character that just oozes positivity at all times normally. But he looked on the bright side, that the human beings who are responsible for education in the schools have managed to make every stupid initiative work out in the long run, that education works despite the politics. It was almost like a twist on Life finds a way in Jurassic Park to Teachers and parents find a way. The bitterness was that it was working that way again, when it would be nice if for once for once the government of the day actually took the advice of the professionals doing the job.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Matthew Poole,
No, we don't. We have police, and we have intelligence services. We categorically do not have secret police.
Language police, on the other hand, can be found on every street corner.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Somehow, I think I prefer drunks to secret policemen. Let alone drunk secret policemen.
Depends on the numbers. We do have secret police here, of several kinds. But I agree, drunken policemen have been amongst the most unpleasant kind of drunk I've ever dealt with.
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Hard News: Drunk Town, in reply to Tom Semmens,
I just don't think lauding the sort of public order that a repressive regime like China's can achieve is in any way useful when discussing the problems of a free society.
I think it's useful, it's a point of comparison. Not perfect, but I don't think you can really put it all down to the system of government. It's also about the culture, which Chris and Chris both live in, observe on a daily basis, and it's extremely interesting to hear their perspective. It's very simplistic to just characterize China as a repressive regime. If they say people are less aggressive when drunk in China, I think that it's worth hearing what that's about. Because being threatened in the street by drunks, and not feeling safe to socialize is also a form of repression (and more so, the less capable of violence you are, so disproportionately repressive of women and children), quite possibly an even more serious one because it comes from within, an internalization of the methods of control that are used in "free" societies. We may have a due process, but that doesn't mean that due process hasn't banged a shitload more people in prison proportionally than they have in China.
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to merc,
I really don't see voting as the problem, but there you are. I am totally against compulsory voting as I am against compulsory working.
The right not to work is a powerful one. The right not to vote as well. Registration by all means compulsory, voting no.
A non-vote to me is a vote against the system.I don't think being forced to work is in the same league as being forced to vote. In Australia being "forced to vote" just means being forced to turn up at a polling booth, mark the form in some way, and stick it in the box. You can still "no vote". You can write whatever you like on the form. Also, the consequences for not doing it are similar to the consequences for parking your car for 15 minutes too long on a time limited zone. So you can buy the right to not even go to the booth for quite a small fee. Effectively, they're just taking out the issue of the "rational voter paradox". You can quite logically reason that the actual benefit of voting is less than the hassle of doing it, in this country. In Oz, that paradox is entirely absent.
I'm in favour of that kind of compulsion. It's at least as important as making sure that car parks don't get hogged all day.
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Great news. Choice as.
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Hard News: The Perfect Drug, in reply to Danielle,
My doctor was bragging to me a few weeks ago about how he denies pain medication to people all the time, because people can get addicted. Considering how fast he was to suggest escitalopram to my wife for anxiety, a mood altering SSRI with quite far reaching effects, I nearly choked on the hypocrisy of the guy. Then he gave me a broadcast on behalf of the National party about the evils of living on the government tit, before sending me home without a bill because the government pays for child doctor visits. Thinking about changing doctors, just to give him some market discipline (and save myself the teeth grinding).
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Hard News: The Perfect Drug, in reply to aimee whitcroft,
He also pointed out that more people are killed riding horses than die due to taking ecstacy/MDMA.
Gotta love that kind of stat. My only worry is that a lot of people will see that and think "yeah, we have to put a stop to all this horse-riding". It's the basic problem with all harm minimization arguments - if you can find any harm whatsoever in X, then minimization of harm means that X can't be taken. The great philosophical irony is that these ideas sprang from utilitarianism, which in its earlier forms at least took account of the actual pleasures, enjoyments etc, and balanced harms against them. But they the time that school of thought reached J S Mill and a reasonable level of sophistication, it was entirely about harm. This is mostly because the idea of actually making use of a moral system as a basis for laws structurally can't take account of enjoyment - it's only about prohibiting some things. You can't absolve yourself from a crime just by really liking breaking the law.
It's kind of sad that liberalism has ended up mostly being about preventing harm, when the main point of it was the maximization of happiness, and harm minimization is only one small part of that. It's lost its way when harm reduction is what life is all about.
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