Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: Cannabis: The Experiment is Real, in reply to BenWilson,
I also went to a couple of bars over there, which had a really different vibe.
There are (or used to be) a handful of bars that didn’t mind the smokers, so you could sit in and have the experience of drinking at a nice bar along with being able to freely skin up if you fancied it. But they were very much the exception – in general drinking and smoking are/were kept quite separate. I understand it’s changed quite a bit over there, too. The problem with being a country that is an island of regualtion in a sea of prohibition with porous land borders is that you inevitably end up attracting large numbers of a pretty unsavoury element, and there have been some changes made to crack down on things as I understand it. It’d be a bit different for somewhere like NZ, though. Sometimes geographical isolation is a positive.
I don’t buy alcohol immediately that I see it and drink it in the middle of the day, because that’s not the way I want to spend my life.
This was always my reply to fanatical stoners who insisted that there was no harm in it (less harm than booze blahblahblah). If I was getting out of bed and necking half a bottle of rotgut for breakfast, I’d have a problem. That’s not really any different from rolling out of bed and immediately rolling up. It becomes your life rather than an enhancement to your life.
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To expand on that slightly, I am reliably informed that control/restraint techniques are not taught well in the NZ police training curriculum, and there is little to no on-going or follow-up training. And why would there be in a culture where brute force can be used instead?
It's harder to learn effective control/restraint, but it can be used effectively even with very large body size differentials. A culture less focussed on brute force and with a more finessed training and fitness standard would perhaps value these sort of skills more.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I'm sure you'd be one of the first to cry foul if incidences of use of firearms or Tasers increased because officers were not required to meet such rigorous physical standards, but if you don't have the strength the only alternative is to use a weapon.
Without wishing to add to the derail, you are offering this as an either/or (strength, or heavy weapon), and don't seem willing to consider that non-frontline roles could be created or expanded without diluting the physical requirements.
I know two NZ serving police officers. One is female, slightly build and around 5'4''. Last I heard, she was a specialist detective working in child protection having served her 'street time'. She was the only female in the unit. The other was around six foot and was an amateur boxer. He told me a story once of how he arrested a guy P'd off his head who started acting up rough. A couple of gentle taps to the groin with the nightstick didn't calm him down, so the intensity went up. Apparently, the guy just about started to notice he was being repeatedly smashed in the nuts with full force around the ninth or tenth strike.
While I agree that physical fitness is important, you'll have to work a lot harder to convince me that it's the be-all and end-all you're making it out to be.
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Hard News: Cannabis: The Experiment is Real, in reply to Stephen Judd,
At an appropriate price point and with appropriate regulation, solid middle-aged punters like me become appealing customers and importantly, we are actually in the market. Right now I have much more to lose trying to hook up with a reputable supplier than a spotty youth with no career and no responsibilities.
This. While I may or may nor have indulged in my mis-spent youth (and, like Ollie North, I have no recollection of the event in question. Any of them), any desire I have now is far outweighed by the trouble I'd have to go to in order to hook up a connection (and I wouldn't know where to start these days), and what I potentially have to lose.
When I drink now, it tends to be in moderation, and I almost always pay a premium for something I actually enjoy sloshing across my tongue rather than the cheapest rotgut I can find that'll get me legless (ah Mad Dog 20/20, I'll never forget the good times). I'd do the same (strictly in theory, you understand) for a decent, premium-quality smoke, and I'd feel a lot better about doing it knowing that I wasn't helping to fund organised crime.
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Hard News: Cannabis: The Experiment is Real, in reply to Russell Brown,
Evidence is powerful when you get close to it.
Do you think he smoked the evidence or baked it in a cake?
Excellent article, BTW.
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If we're going levity, then I for one welcome our new Female Overlords.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
emember the feeling of frustration when you walk into the video store and can’t even decide where to begin looking?
For me, this is where Netflix has a considerable advantage over Lovefilm. The user browsing interface is far superior, and the 'you watched this, you may also like....' on Netflix is actually very, very good, tuning down to quite specific genres with zero effort: 'you watched ['80's action film X]. You might also like ['80's action film Y]'.
Odd, because Lovefilm is Amazon, and they're normally pretty good at that.
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Having not bothered with any Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails since around 1995, I gave the album he/they released earlier this year a listen on the internets, and was very pleasantly surprised. For those that like that sort of thing.
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Hard News: The Future of Television, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Sure, but there’s a number of complicating factors. Hannibal (which Three is showing sometime in the new year) is pulling the kind of ratings for NBC that would usually get an expensive network scripted drama euthanized with extreme prejudice. But it works for the network because it is a co-production, and the way the deal is structured means they’re not only kicking in a relatively modest percentage of the budget but the license fee is a lot lower than is the norm for similar shows. (In no small part to co-producer Gaumont International securing very strong foreign sales.)
That supports my point, though. Hannibal might turn out to be a slow burner, or it might deserve those low figures. From what you've said, the network(s) are playing it smart enough to spread the risk around and give it time to find its feet, rather than can something potentially good at the first sign of trouble.
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It occurs to me that one thing that might need to start being taken into consideration with ‘highbrow’ long-form drama series and the like is the slow-burn factor. Viewing figures at time of intial broadcast are arguably now much less of a factor than they once were.
‘The Wire’ is an extreme example, but I had people getting all enthusiatic with me about this great new show they’d just watched for several years after the final episode had aired. That’s now been replaced by ‘Breaking Bad’, where I’m getting Facebook notifications that friends have just started watching series 2 on Netflix, when series 5 ended a few weeks back. I’ve done it, and am doing it, myself: I got into shows like BSG several years after everyone else was buzzing about it. I scroll through Netflix now and watch shows like ‘Mythbusters’ and ‘Deadliest Warrior’ years after they were first broadcast. YouTube is full of docos that I’d like to watch, mostly from back when the History Channel was still good. On broadcast TV, shows like ‘The Onegin Line’, ‘The World at War’, ‘Only fools and horse’, etc. are still on what appears to be an endless loop on their own dedicated channels. But someone’s still paying for ads to be broadcast in and around them. GoT may cost millions an episode, but it’s going to be milked for decades.