Posts by Moz
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
This is a New Zealand story and they're not getting away with this shit.
That I like. And your approach sounds more reasonable :)
I do hope it doesn't take someone actually getting slapped by the plod for Uber to see reason. I don't think there's much to gain from someone losing their car/everything/life.
I put it to my housemate when he was Ubering that for most Uber drivers they're basically selling their car one ride at a time. He seemed to think that getting $20/hour from Uber was an excellent deal. Despite his accounting qualification he didn't seem able to grasp the not-very-hidden costs that you describe so well.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
I doubt their ability to even organize anything that would come up on the radar as a strike.
To be effective it would have to be not just illegal, but dangerous - they would have to hack or otherwise attack the Uber app in some way, which would annoy Apple, Google and Uber (as well as the police). That's the sort of combination that leads to long sentences, because the tech companies are very capable of assembling a court case and the police in NZ are not good at distinguishing hacker fact from hacker fiction.
Simply blocking the streets would only get them so far, especially in NZ where the ... welcoming arms... of the state are always open, especially to poor, non-white people who are causing trouble.
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Cracker: Breaking the Silence, in reply to linger,
Corruption overwhelmingly favours those who have power.
But not all those who have power. Filipino housemate is a big fan of Duterte because after Marcos things went downhill there. Apparently a murderous vigilante might be less corrupt than the current incumbent, and he thinks it's worth the tradeoff.
A possibly more interesting question is whether having "secret science" running the country would be better than "secret wealth". Especially since in the plutocracy we currently enjoy those seem to be implacably opposed sides.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Got Knox?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
even an A3 scanner would help
Those are pricey, but I got an A3 MFD from Officeworks for under $300 a few years ago. I assume functions other than scanning work, but I bought it as part of my "rip and scan all my CDs" project and it works well for that. There's this Epson one that's only $220 (I dunno what brand mine is). The A3 dedicated scanners I found were over $1000, so I figured I could go through a few of the MFDs before it was more expensive... that was five years and over 500 CDs ago :)
I also use the sheet-feeder, and a few times have destructively scanned things (the Gregorian giant book of pictures, for example), or pulled and replaced staples. FWIW when doing that it helps to quickly take photos of the whole thing first so it's easier to re-assemble double page images. If your book has those and no page numbers.
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Legal Beagle: An update of changes to…, in reply to Rochelle Wilson,
so the populace won't know of deliberate peaceful exits from Life?
Nah, they'll be called "victim-solicited murders" to match the current legal status. Completely different thing.
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Hard News: Forgetting what we didn't know, in reply to Rob Stowell,
do you think we qualify as a tax haven? Or were we simply the unwitting dupes of clever Panamanian lawyers?
It doesn't have to be just one of those, and there are other options. Key, for example, might be suffering Collins Syndrome or have whatever his "highly ethical lawyer" has (is this another case of "99% of lawyers giving the rest a bad name"?)
I'm inclined to think it looked like a good idea at the time, turned out to be extremely useful once the then-new government came in, and since no-one was jumping up and down... no problem!
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Polity: Is being a tax haven worth it?, in reply to izogi,
I suspect it is, which kinda disproves my point. Less of a loophole in NZ, by the look of it.
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Polity: Is being a tax haven worth it?, in reply to izogi,
If someone discovered a technicality which enabled them to legally kill a person
I'm told that Western Australia only disallowed hunting permits that included aboriginals late last century. Whether someone could have got a permit issued and used it is an open question, but it was at least superficially the technicality you are looking for.
The other "technicality" is the legal practice of heavily discounting driving incidents so you end up with "I was drunk and he annoyed me" ending with a conviction for... perjury, in the case of one Australian former police officer here. Wasn't there a case in Christchurch a few years ago where a drunk got in a car and drove it through a crowd of people, injuring if not killing people? No "attempted murder" or even "assault with deadly weapon" charges there IIRC.
(sorry, can't find links, but II have looked)
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Would those who readily despair over the dietary intransigence of lesser mortals be prepared to modify their own eating habits for the greater good?
Have done, for a long time, still do. I have made a whole heap of "lifestyle changes" for the greater good. I have started eating (kangaroo)meat again recently because being vegetarian while also eliminating legumes and most pulses from my diet proved to be ridiculously difficult. But eating the latter was becoming impossible.
I have done a bunch of "experiments" which actually look more like chemistry than biology. I eat a lot of soup because it goes in square plastic jars in the fridge easily, and then to work. Or the freezer. So I make big pots of soup once a week, and put different mixtures of vegetables, beans and stuff in. Occasionally an experiment will result in my partner being told "there's 10 litres of soup in the fridge for you to eat", because I ate one bowl of it, waited half an hour, it wanted out so I went to the toilet, then felt weak and queasy for 24 hours.
At the risk of somewhat derailing, I am one of those people, who lives somewhat under the global GHG allowance/energy intensity level and puts a perhaps silly amount of work into the three Rs. My indulgences are Lego and a couple of geek toys a year. It's possibly that 3kW of PV on the roof counts as an indulgence too, pay a premium for 100% wind power on top of that is either indulgence or insane... you choose.
(roo here is a game meat, you can't farm them so the meat is all wild shot, it's the least unsustainable meat I can find. I'd welcome correction if I'm wrong, but that's what my literature search said)
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I'd personally want to see if reintroducing the food caused the problem again.
I check many things, but there are some things that taste so vile I doubt it's a gut thing, it's a super-taster thing. I'm generally concerned about getting enough variety in my diet, because I know I tend to habituate on foods. But stuff I like but my gut doesn't... I test that. Hot cross buns, fruit bread (so bad in so many ways if you look at the FODMAP exclusions)... I love them, so I eat them anyway. But most legumes blow straight through, and I know they still do because so many vegetarian things have unexpected legume content. Which my gut detects...
It also fascinates me that people are so happy to experiment on themselves
I'd happily experiment on someone else but until we can clone microbiota it seems unlikely to help. The broad studies do look likely to be useful... in about 20-50 years. I want something that lets me eat enough to stay alive, now. So I eat random stuff from time to time (tomorrow: lactose-free yoghurt, which is a thing now, so I bought some). The good news about my gut is that it's pretty fast-recovering, I have not (so far) been forced into bed for a day... instead I spend quality time on the toilet.