Posts by Kumara Republic
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Polity: Canada voted, in reply to Katharine Moody,
My assessment of it is that a large group are lurching more left than left of centre when it comes to voting.
On the other extreme, there are the ‘thwarted social climbers’ who maintain the delusion of ‘born to rule' or 'keeping up appearances’ and will scapegoat all those below them for holding them back if they fall off the ladder. They include but are not limited to the sort of people who swing behind the far-Right in Europe, or wield rifles at US Tea Party rallies.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to Kyle MacDonald,
Yes, that was a great piece of journalism by Tim Hume, and pretty much put a stop to any further influence with ACC. It was beyond shocking that she had been let anywhere near the treatment of sexual abuse survivors.
Colour me surprised, her husband is active in ‘MRA’ circles, who still downplay Bert Potter’s wrongdoings. I read that link so you don’t have to.
Most of those who speak for ‘men’s rights’ aren’t really speaking up for actual men’s rights, but something more akin to ‘divine rights’.
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Polity: Canada voted, in reply to Keir Leslie,
It may well be be that Mulcair’s decision to go hawkish the deficit was bad, but it’s also possible that if he’d stayed dovish we’d now be talking about how he was always going to lose because Canadians couldn’t trust him on government finances.
Instead of simply saying "it's a waste of money" on any spending announcement, it should sound more like "money being handed out to tax-dodging billionaires could be better spent on more teachers etc".
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Polity: Canada voted, in reply to Matthew Goody,
More specifically, and what will emerge when the smoke clears, is that Mulcair and the NDP misread and miscalculated Quebec. It's astonishing to me how they let their influence in French Canada slip away so quickly.
Jack Layton was a hard act to follow for the NDP after cancer caught up with him.
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Polity: Political strategy and Canada’s NDP, in reply to simon g,
But there’s one lesson at least: FPP is a joke. Not that we need to be taught.
Justin Trudeau has thought out loud of electoral reform.
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Polity: Forty, in reply to Amy Gale,
Do you think you would like testing, as they do at Aspiritech?
It’s one area that’s been recommended to me. Unfortunately, NZ has nothing closely resembling Aspiritech or Specialisterne that caters for autistic jobseekers. At least last time I checked.
I had a year’s worth of mentorship with an NZCS/IITP mentor, and it didn’t get terribly far. What I was hoping would fill the missing rungs in the career ladder turned out to be little more than pep talk. So unless you have a degree, IITP membership is time and money down the drain.
And what I’m absolutely sure about is that I’m best suited to a trade apprenticeship training approach. Trouble is, DevAcademy seems to be the only player in town.
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Polity: Forty, in reply to BenWilson,
I’d have to agree that self-teaching is a blunt instrument, even with the tightest self-discipline. One can read all the books they can on the latest coding technologies, and still get nowhere fast. Unless of course, they set up their own biz, which not everyone is up to. As for myself, I’m too autistic and inattentive to self-teach to a large degree.
Where schemes like DevAcademy stand out is the direct links with industry and what is basically a revival of the old trade apprenticeship approach. From my recent past experiences, an apprenticeship-style approach is the one thing that can fill the missing rungs at the bottom of the ladder where it’s needed most.
One of the better policy platforms to come from the Labour caucus is the Digital Apprenticeship program, but sadly Prostetnic Vogon Joyce – a big fan of survivorship bias – wasn’t interested, instead reinventing the wheel with the ICT Grad Schools. It’s yet another reason why I’m angry at tax dollars being denied to those who need a hand up, while going to those who are already loaded and know how to game the system.
In my current job, I’ve done HTML/CSS/Visual C# on a very informal basis, but it’s just an add-on to my usual work (building and fixing PCs and laptops) and I tend only to use them when I have to. I’m still doubtful as to whether Web coding is the way forward for me, given my past grief with concepts like pointers in Pascal and Modula-2, and bombing out horribly with final year papers involving Java and CORBA. Or maybe those doing the teaching were at fault? Deep down, maybe I’m really a designer over a developer at heart.
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Polity: Forty, in reply to izogi,
My perception could be biased through my own experiences, but over time I’ve found for me that knowing people is frequently a huge factor in landing jobs, probably moreso than being the most highly skilled person possible. Employers often seem to be more comfortable with someone they know plus often that’s quicker and easier and less expensive than going through a recruitment process, and many jobs are never advertised. The path for getting into many workplaces is completely unfair.
And for those with ASD & SAD and other ‘non-people persons’, connections are often an alien concept to them. Which is where organisations like Specialisterne and Aspiritech fill the void, to a large degree of success. In NZ, there’s no such equivalent, and even the nearest matching agencies like Workbridge and Emerge have had too much staff turnover to be of any use. I’ve basically thrown away a few hundred dollars on an industry mentorship that didn’t get anywhere far, and another few hundred on what's basically a certificate in buggy whip repair.
I refuse to accept my lot in life, and yet the ladder of opportunity is missing more than a few rungs.
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I’m not yet at the magic number, but all the same I’ve felt this whole ‘failure to launch’ thing. Being undiagnosed with ASD and subsequently being misunderstood can be a big factor in that.
After bombing out of university in my early 20s, I very much played it straight. I finally got some meaningful work later in that age decade, but the minimum wage no longer buys as much as it used to, and thanks to the Internet of Things I now seem to find myself in the same boat as Detroit’s car workers during the 1970s.
DevAcademy is seemingly my last chance to debunk the notion of “if you haven’t made it by 40, then you’ll never make it.” If I can somehow find a spare $11k without having to sell cocaine or pull a bank job. The $28m that Prostetnic Vogon Joyce is spending on the IT Grad School would be much better spent on apprenticeship-style schemes like DevAcademy.
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Envirologue: 1080, "eco-terrorism" and agendas, in reply to David Hood,
I see according to the charge sheet, the businessman charged (who John Key putatively labelled an eco-terrorist at the time of the threats) had a financial motivation.
There are echoes of the Rodney Whitchelo case in Britain in the late 1980s. The guy thought his Scotland Yard expertise would make for a get-rich-quick scheme... and was proven wrong.