Posts by Kumara Republic
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Prolefeed, according to Jane Clifton.
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Apparently "One Turns 40" was a lot better.
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Escape From Manukau - coming soon to a cinema near you!
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NZ produces a lot of quality TV shows with high ratings potential that never make it onto our screens - a symptom of junk food economics. Partly because of that, I've basically opted out for the last 6 years or so.
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Tom S: Certainly not the case for me. My folks are very much North Shore types, and largely through a textbook Paul Graham experience, I've ended up a Grey Lynn/Cuba St/Raglan sort of guy.
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Or should that be...
Σ;3
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Likewise, no sign there of what should be the biggest story of the day, namely that the banking ombudsman has found that ANZ told large investors to get out of the collapsing ING fund, while telling small investors that it was all good.
Still, why isn't it a bigger story? Too scared of losing ad revenue?
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Peter A:
One question: why aren't those teenagers motivated to do something more constructive?
From Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular":
"I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.
As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere."
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"Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between schoolwork and the work they'll do as adults.
And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.
Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at school on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.
What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.
Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them."