Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to izogi,
tobacco companies don’t seem to have made any serious effort to change their long term focus away from addicting people to cancerous products. You’d think any smart business leader might have started a shift decades ago.
When smart is synonymous with making lots of profit, I can't think why they'd change their business model. An addictive product is the perfect product. It does kill, but it's over such a long time it hardly matters to the bottom line. So long as it's through the customer's working life...
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Those are really the only two ways that wandering goatherds could cease to be a problem.
I can think of half a dozen alternatives, that could at least buy them a whole lot of time for extraction. But yes, there will always be times when the horrible decision of killing civilians might have to be made, just to save one's own life. Which is yet another reason that covert military operations against guerrillas should always be kept to a minimum.
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To be fair to the restaurants, both times I've been so far (Friday afternoon and Saturday morning), the area has had very high volumes of people, by NZ standards. I wanted to go back to Rushworth on Saturday because they seemed to be more about breakfast, and they were big enough to write on PAS, but unfortunately breakfast finished at 11am, and there were about 15 people in the queue ahead of me for coffee, and I had my youngest with me, who was getting pretty antsy, and there was no seating free. So I went looking for somewhere else appropriate, and seriously couldn't find anything that didn't have the same story - big queues, no seats, and no breakfast. In the end, I settled for squid and chips at the fish market for $7, served in a ice cream cone shaped wrapper, which (of course) could not be put down.
I'm thinking more kiosks around that area would be a very good idea. The ones that were there were doing a roaring trade, and it's not like the restaurants were suffering any lack of business. There's so much space left.
I can't help but wonder just how many drunks are going to end up in the drink all around that area, and just how damned hard it would be to get out of the water if you fell in. It's traditional to border high falls into things with fences - but I presume the difficulty is that so much of the area is actually still wharf. If a child fell in, what the hell would I do? Dive in, and then tread water with them, while dozens of onlookers wondered where to find a rope and what to do with it? The nearest ramp is in Westhaven. How it's set up at the moment, I'll be amazed if there isn't at least one fatality.
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Rich Lock,
The argument would have been that to leave them tied up would have inevitably led fairly quickly to their discovery and release, and the local bad guys would then have known there was a US team, on foot, in the local area. Dead bodies are easier to hide, and can't give out useful information like numbers, direction of travel, etc.
It would have been less quick than letting them go so they could then head straight to ... whoever they were going to go to. Which was what they actually did, and what then happened.
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To be fair on England, I have never really felt affinity for any of Europe. It's not my fault that my ancestors came from there, and they did what they could to change that.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Simon Grigg,
Mother England is not as distant as we would claim it to be.
It's one of the things that has always made me feel like a stranger in my own country. I've never got the Mother England thing.
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Sacha,
I will confess to having spent a little too much time thinking about such things. It's an interesting martial art sub discipline, tying people up, whom you are pinning. I presume people can see immediately why it's not widely taught?
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OnPoint: A Friday-Appropriate Hager Excerpt, in reply to Rich Lock,
Yes, it's fucked up. The tying up option seems perfectly good to me, and complaints of not having a rope simply pathetic. They could have cut bindings from their own, or the goatherd's, clothes. We're talking about elite commandos here, people who are meant to be able to cope with difficult situations. I could fucking well tie a couple of people up just with the clothes I'm wearing right now. If the safety of my team depended on it I find it extremely hard to believe they didn't have anything at all on them that could have been used. The straps from their packs? The laces from their boots?
I also find it hard to believe that human restraints aren't just stock army gear, considering that those cable ties that are typically used take up a minimal amount of pack space and their utility in the handling of prisoners is both incredibly obvious, and very likely to come up in warfare.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes, however influenced by online buddies one might be, getting an actual bong hit from them is quite unlikely.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to B Jones,
A kid I know asked the other day why "blood" isn't pronounced "blued".
If it came from the German word blut , it probably was pronounced that way once.
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