Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to webweaver,
Wellington is beside itself with delight. Snow falling in the nation’s capital for the first time for 35 years they tell me.
Who told him that? It might be the first *serious* snowfall for 35 years, or the first to reach sea-level, but I remember perfectly well the first time I saw snow - most likely the early-90s fall someone mentioned in one of these threads. Bit less than three decades there.
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
With the heatpump at full crack we have the lounge all the way up to 18C though with four people shut in here the odds of someone just walking out into the snow are increasing rapidly.
During the snow in ‘06 (such as it was) we had about three flats’ worth of students crammed into our heat pump-enabled living room. One lot came from a flat where you couldn’t get it above 15C or so with blankets hung on the walls and two heaters going on a normal winter day. Biggest problem was finding enough powerpoints for all the laptops. If the Internet had gone down, I think there might actually have been bloodshed.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I just figure this is an attempt to find an other to demonise for the election – it’ not like National are going to get many votes from this (under 18) demographic
I'd see it more as a solution for a problem National thinks its voters believe in, rather than the problem that actually exists. Maybe even for a problem National actually believes exists. It's hard to tell.
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money for basic living costs like food and groceries will be loaded onto a payment card that can only be used to buy certain types of goods
This really worries me, because there's a massive problem with food stamps in the US whereby they can't be used to buy a bunch of things like tampons and soap which are, you know, not exactly luxuries. The moment you get into choosing which "certain types of goods" it's permissible for beneficiaries to buy, you're going to screw up.
More generally, though, it seems like such a useless way of teaching people responsibility. How on earth are you supposed to learn how to budget your own money if the government's making most of the budgeting decisions for you? What if one week your car breaks down and you need to eat rice five nights out of seven to get the money to fix it - but, wait, the government has dictated how much money you spend on groceries. No way to change it. Ooops.
(But, wait, of course, it's not your money, it's the government's money, which they are grudgingly permitting you to borrow so you're not starving on the street. Argh.)
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Sacha,
And perhaps the old ways were the right ways. Perhaps they should shoot the thugs in the city streets.
I thought it was more traditional to ride them down from horseback, but, you know, whatever works.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to andin,
No that would be a individual who does that. Please try not to extrapolate out erroneously.
I really don't see your point. These aren't trends that *matter* on an individual level. They're trends that matter on a voting-patterns, society-wide level. One person who protests for a fairer society at twenty and protests capital gains taxes at fifty is unimportant. It's the shift *across the group as a whole* that changes things.
Unless you're arguing that the boomer generation didn't benefit from a strong welfare state and free university education only to implement policies which are slowly denying those things to their children and grandchildren when they became the government?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Kumara Republic,
It's not so much the boomers, but rather those who sold out and became what they rebelled against
Which every generation does, one way or another. It's not like the boomers are special in that regard. (In precisely how they took advantage of the following generation, sure, but in that they decided they quite liked being the ones with the wealth and power and would like some more of it and for those young people to stop complaining - not at all.)
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Katie R,
I’m not entirely convinced that this is entirely about “young, angry, totally disenfranchised people” either.
We could go with "people suck, especially rioters", if it makes you feel better?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It’s really easy to be an armchair general in the class war when the frontline is twelve thousand miles away and it's not your neighbourhood getting torched.
But the point that this is a creation of social circumstances is an important one. In functioning societies, this sort of widespread rioting is not a regular occurrence (because, well, functioning.) What the rioters are doing is, obviously, wrong. But the circumstances that created a large group of young, angry, totally disenfranchised people - people who riot because they don't have jobs, let alone a future - are equally wrong. It's absolutely an issue of class and poverty and the last few years of economic fuck-ups, and if we're going to have a conversation beyond "how terribly shocking, those awful young people" then we're going to have to talk about those things. That's not "being an armchair general", that's talking politics.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Kracklite,
Some people have very cool jobs...
Believe me, it's one of those things that's much cooler to talk about than to actually do. Especially at 4am. (I mean, yeah, it's cool, but that's because the edited highlights in my mind are a lot more entertaining than the actual Interesting Things: Boring Things ratio.)
Also, I'm a microbiologist, and while there are more important microbiological things visible to the naked eye than you'd think, most of the Interesting Things are macrobiological, meaning that I spent a lot of time going "Oh, look, it's a red blob thingy. What's that again?" and the rest of the room going "Uh, we're geologists, but if you want to know about the lava..." The actual marine biologists were in a different darkened room all the way on the other side of the continent. And one in a darkened room at NIWA, come to think of it.