Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
The only people who maintain a diverse love life beyond youth are crusty old free-love hippies, tacky suburban wife-swappers, and creepy, self-deluding loatharios and cougars.
Don't forget the widows and widowers in those dodgy free-for-all rest homes. Bless their souls.
ETA: Gah, this was to Max, not Lucy.
ETA2: Oh, and welcome, Max. -
Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sacha,
Don't know enough about the others.
I can assure you the McDonald's is within the acceptable 1% variation that their quality control allows. The chips become disgusting at precisely 7 minutes after being lifted from the fat. The pickles are not crossed. The sundae gives you diarrhea for only one poo. The milkshake will only travel up the straw at the same moment that the chips became revolting. I've not counted the sesame seeds on the buns, but feel pretty sure they will be tightly clustered around the acceptable limit, and evenly spaced. Their menu still runs from the Teresa Gattung playbook of pricing confusion, in which somehow you always ended up with a lot more food than you wanted. I expect McDonald's have modeled this more carefully than Telecom, doing time and motion studies on exactly when the average customer enters the totally confused state, in which upsizing feels like a moment of clarity, but turns out to have been a trap, and the free drink was not a gambit after all, because you realize you didn't actually want a cup of ice and coke syrup.
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Up Front: I'll Be in My Bunk, in reply to Max Rose,
And if you believe the arguments in books like Sex at Dawn, enforced monogamy might actually be the most widespread suppression of human sexuality.
It might be, but I haven't noticed generally higher rates of happiness amongst the non-monogamous. Some of that is down to a lot of people actually wanting commitment, which is obviously comprised in multi-amorous relationships.
*ETA, Which is not to say that polyamory can't work. It just looks harder to make it work from the outside.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Sacha,
And the Lynnmall one is probably better than St Lukes, if you're malling
Yes. I particularly like the grill place in the middle.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Russell Brown,
I agree on the ease of access of Ponsonby, although I've taken Marcus to boy's lunch at Albert St several times, even when extremely crowded, and he's requested to go back, prefers the Japanese place there to St Lukes. The boy is developing taste! But I bet Leo would hate it with a passion. "Everyone is eating dog food!!".
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Thanks for showing us the error of our ways.
My pleasure. Because I don't work in the city, when I go looking to eat out, I actually shop around, ranging across the entire city. Albert St is by far the best food court in this town. Only problem, it's so popular that it can be hard to get a seat.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Sacha,
Today's Herald editorial refreshingly continues that retreat from free-markey lunacy.
Sort of. In your quote:
Markets are ideal for allocating resources economically when they function freely. When the market is removed from one side of the supply and demand equation, it usually will not function properly on the other side.
Sounds like people who can't quite let go of the idea of free market efficiency, and have to save the hypothesis by saying that it's only free if it's controlled the right way. Which is less lunatic than saying it's more efficient to just let property developers cash in on the Christchurch bonanza at the expense of thousands of property owners whose insurance obligations have not been honored. But can't they just let the idealism go? Allocating resources economically is hardly a priority - this is about fairness, decency, and preventing the total economic destruction of a city. Who gives a crap about economic philosophers? That goes for ones on both sides of the right/left divide.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
Albert St is a lot closer, has a bigger range and better prices. If you're going to have an Asian food court, surely one that's actually situated amongst the densest Asian population, and frequented by the most Asian people, would actually be better. It only seems good in Ponsonby because the alternatives are dozens of overpriced eateries, cashing in on the wealthy, trendy demographic.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Bernard Hickey, Gareth Morgan, and now FranO appears to be applying for membership to the Market Apostates Club.
It's good to see. I think faith in markets has been severely rocked, finally. It's taken the gradual slide from recession to recession into full blown depression and a real catastrophe for people to realize that economics is meant to be a practical business rather than an ideological one, and politics is meant to actually solve social problems rather than ignore or even create them. I don't think these ideas are really beyond people who are traditionally right wing, who usually pride themselves on their practicality.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Russell Brown,
Meanwhile, back to Marvel Grill at Wynyard Quarter.
Yes, I can't see tipping helping there. Foot-voting is a much better idea. And making them give a fuck about the internet by writing a shit-can review on every site you can find that even lists them. They may soon start to grasp that people who write reviews that aren't on the internet often get their source material from it. Also, if you're so inclined (I highly doubt many PAS readers are, though) yelling at them angrily can work. If you're lucky, you can get kicked out, and don't have to pay the bastards a cent. THAT is very punishing, and however much it might upset the other patrons, it's actually doing them a favor.
I've been put off wasting my time on the Wynyard Quarter eateries, that's for sure, although, to be honest, nothing about the look of them from the outside, prior to even reading about it, appealed. They looked like exactly what they sound like, rip off artists targeting the indiscriminate. When there are actually hundreds of good places to eat within a couple of kilometers, why would I waste my money?
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