Posts by Ben Austin
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Seems like a pretty low test for what is becoming an essential of modern life. Does NZ have any sort of User's Rights movement/etc for utilities or things of an alike nature?
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Surely as a broader point, any country dependant on the commodities boom should be rather worried - plenty of non white countries included in that. Although this whole "whites only" lols is a little confusing to me at least - does this include Latin America? Where do we stand with countries that have large white or not white minorities?
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I'm really rather pissed off at this R&D move. What exactly is the justification for making it harder for technology businesses to stay in NZ?
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So anyway, I for one am glad that the NZ Herald is making good use of the internet and all it offers for the election campaign.
I want to say "what the fuck?"
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I was in Berlin a couple of months back and due lack of german language skills combined with failure to note subtleties of the timetable/track repair schedule we ended up stuck some distance from the airport at a suburban rail station in southern Berlin.
In Berlin these are all very lightly staffed and in comparison to London at least to find a real person to actually ask a query of is rather hard work. However we eventually managed to find a helpful assistant who disappeared into her booth high above us for 5-10 minutes while she called around the various stations and such to plot us a path that would work at that time of night. It was mildly complicated and required loads of running about between platforms in the east of Berlin but it got us there in the requried 40 minutes. Then of course Ryainair was an hour late.
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Mediawatch did a story on crime reporting in NZ several months ago*, of which the tl;dr version is "NZ media reporting on crime stories seems on average to be greater than other comparable countries". Which plays nicely with the always popular viewpoint that things are going to crap, no matter how much evidence states categorically that this isn't the case.
But at least this does give me the chance to spam the Ted video, A Brief History of Violence from Steve Pinker.
* 27 July 2008
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I'd be happy to modify or change MMP if I could be assured the other choice wouldn't be FPP and sadly I don't see any serious debate about an alternative to the latter if change is mooted, at least amongst the National Party.
So if it is MMP or FPP (as is) then I'll always vote for the former, having now experienced the delights of an unreconstructed FPP system here in the UK. Living in a safe Tory seat means if I don't love Rifkind I shouldn't bother voting. Fuck that.
I'd rather support the actual protections of a coalition PR system rather than the theoretical protections of electorate MPs in a 2 party system who *might* rebel if the issue is serious enough.
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It just grates a little. Like adding "gate" to every scandal that has even a mild connection to politics. I predict soon we will have a headline that reads something like "Beltwaygate Scandal Rocks Wellington Insiders"
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I guess one reason I was mildly surprised was that I've always got the impression the PRC has a strong moral puritan flavour when it comes to things like that. Admittedly that impression is based on reading Western articles on China so it may not actually be substantially correct.
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The story link about the popularity of cosmetic surgery was interesting, but what was more interesting was the "popular stories" bit at the bottom. The stories were all stuff like "Sailing girls know how to work it" or "Sexy Javelin Girl".
Good to see that the readers of Chinadaily are about as classy as Stuff.co.nz's Editor's Picks