Posts by Paul Campbell
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Today’s Tremain
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I think one of the big problems with the bailout was that it didn't come with consequences for those who had caused the problem in the first place, this meant that no one really learned anything, no object lessons were made for the next generation of money managers
Equally the politicians didn't undo the mistakes they had made - IMHO the Glass–Steagall act should have been passed again as a prudent measure that had kept things running smoothlyish for the past 80 years
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The EFF comments on the latest TPPA leak
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It's been a few years since I spent a lot of time in Taiwan but the impression I got was that it really seems to be a weird series of contrasts - the greens want to be what they already are, a country - that's easy to understand..
The blues, the KMT, the remains of the old guard that Mao chased off of the mainland, who ruled Taiwan as a police state for decades, the arch anti-communists ... they still think they're going to somehow rule China so they are cozying up to the mainland because both they and the CP believe in the one China they just disagree about who should be in charge
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Craig I suspect that people here who live on the mainland or visit a lot probably are thinking hard about whether to touch those lightning rods .... it's probably why we're talking about character sets
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I'm working on reading vocab (I need to read component data sheets) - sitting around 2000 chars at the moment - my brain seems to do reading vocab so much better that verbal ..... not being embedded in the language makes it lot harder, I'll have a week at xmas, (but mostly in HK) - I actually don't need much to buy parts in the Shenzhen electronics markets, mostly politeness and numbers
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Chris: yeah, as I understand it most of the changes that were attributed to Mao had been being proposed for decades before, he just had the means to push them through.
I must admit I was guessing at how mainland people would react to traditional script, as I mentioned I’ve had that discussion with people exposed the other way, never had a chance to ask the opposite
(and I'm slightly biased since I'm learning simplified)
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There is a gulf there - a Taiwanese friend talked about the disorientation when first faced with simplified Chinese (the mainland post-Mao writing system brought in to increase literacy), I'm sure those who've grown up in Hong Kong feel the same, while those from the mainland may find what they see in Hong Kong as "old-fashioned" a thing of their grandparents - then again I suspect those tourists are likely more at-sea faced with traditional Chinese writing than Hong Kong residents who over the years have likely been faced with both
Hong Kong is embedded in a larger Cantonese speaking region (many of NZ's early immigrants also came from there) - but the HK border is largely surrounded by Shenzhen which is a new city (just 30 years old) that has attracted people from all over China, there they mostly speak Mandarin because it's what they all have in common
Chinese as written in NZ signs is an equally wonderful mix as most of the tourists likely read simplified while most of the immigrants read traditional
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yes but those are for drone operators, all I really want to know is: can I borrow one of those helicopter live deer hunting gizmos, basically a shotgun that shoots a big ass net to capture Slater's (spit) drone if it's flying on my property and peeking in my bedroom window? and then tie its expensive camera to a honey badger and return it to its owner
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I see they are hiring "drone operators" - I wonder who they are planning on spying on - and how NZ law handles people who down invasions of their privacy
