Posts by Martin Roberts
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Putting on my "common man" hat, I am going to throw my lot in with Keir. Adequate housing provides the consumable good of shelter which is a necessary input to generate productive labour capacity. If you don't believe me, try living in a shanty over winter.
So I reckon a house is productive like, say, and education. If that isn't "productive" in your terminology, then there is presumably another word which applies and renders the prevalent productive/unproductive dichotomy meaningless since it doesn't span the relevant options.
You can certainly buy more house than is productive, but that is a separate question.
Are people employed to maintain the shelter "machine"? Yes.
Do I consume shelter? Yes. Maybe not the house, but the shelter. There's a limit to how many can be sheltered in any single house, and any night's shelter is either consumed or lost.
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Can't resist joining in the cycle love...
Jack and Stephen - My co-worker has a Blade 8C, and finds it works well. The granny gear isn't as low as his previous 21-speed bike, but he still manages to climb a good portion of the rise from Onehunga to Hillsborough beside SH20. He did put his own saddle (bought in 1980, iirc) and slightly higher handlebars on it.
Russell - there were some good maps put out in 2008/9 by MAXX. One each for North, Central, West, and South Auckland. CAA may still have hard copies if you can't find them elsewhere.
Also, with the next SH20 section there is supposed to be a cycleway to match. Plans are probably road based, but it would be nice to connect through Oakley Creek as an option. Tidying up some of the cracks and bad camber would help, as well as making it more wheelchair accessible. -
What happens if your third conviction is for a crime committed prior to your previous convictions? Say you have two strikes already, then get done for child molestation from twenty years before. Anybody know?
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But your brain stops physically developing in your youth. That's when all the connections that are going to be made, are made. Not something you want to screw up with chemicals.
I thought that scientific consensus on this had moved slightly. Can't give you a proper citation, but one of the endless repeat interviews on NatRad over the summer mentioned it. Which could have a small impact on the question of legalising for adults, which I hadn't thought of before.
While I'm talking to the experts, what do people feel about the duration of effect from smoking dope? I know that it is 'measurable' for days, and note that Tony reckons it lingers a couple of days (in kids) after the weekend. In practise, how much does this constrict where and when it is safe and responsible to smoke?
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Prediction of earthquakes and tsunamis is not accurate. One might or might not occur over several centuries in the Pacific Islands. No group in Samoa, Tonga or NZ is ever going to be able to provide a seamless response (unless the Ministers really do have a direct line to God), because we could not know beforehand.
Tropical storms don't seem so rare, though.
As for churches, I understand that most of the house rebuilding in Samoa is being organised through churches. With government oversight and solutions for those few without church connections, but primarily through the churches. Which is a challenge for external agencies to facilitate the reporting quality they need.
Finally, I suspect that siphoning off money in times of crisis is not readily equated with squeezing your congregation for donations. We seem to be assuming that the cultural and moral calculus yields the same result in both cases.
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I'm surprised to hear that it's so pronounced in the other changing rooms.
I was surprised to learn that the girls' showers at my intermediate school had separate stalls. We lads had one large space with about 12 nozzles. Well sized for a game of crab soccer with the soap. Somehow those games faded away as we hit high school...
Co-educational nudity, however, was not encouraged.
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It seems to me that the Yes campaign was slow to realise the level of interest being generated. I certainly eased off on the issue several months ago as people seemed to feel the issue would quietly die, then around the start of voting began to think I'd got it wrong. In one of my main social communities that was far too late to build understanding and overcome the default response the question was engineered to raise.
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I do think Rick breezes through the fact of the events not actually raising a lot of money once costs came out.
I'm not completely sure that everyone knew that was how the events worked, and I'm relieved that the trust has moved on from the focus on events.
Other countries have well established distinctions between the portion that covers costs and the portion that is a donation. Many tickets for charity events directly indicate the breakdown. I think that this would be a useful concept to nurture in NZ.
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The number I consider most important is the ratio of impact to donated resources. The actual cash movements are secondary - only drug smugglers and terrorists start charities with the primary purpose of moving money around.
There seems to be a growing discussion in the charity sector on quantifying impacts. Rick provided some data here in terms of 28,000 kids receiving a nominal $370 of goods. It gets harder to quantify the impact of these goods -- in terms of pride, increased schooling access, etc -- and even harder to size the consequential change to the children's downstream impact on society.
On the 'amount donated' side I would include admin grants. It would also be nice to factor in unpaid (or underpaid) work. Should gifts in kind be booked at cost, wholesale, or retail?
I am about to move into a paid support role with a charity (i.e. become an admin cost) and find this conversation fascinating. Thank you, Rick, for your extended response which demonstrates many ways in which this data can be represented. I hope in due course to contribute towards making such information available, in the expectation that robust comparison and analysis will end in greater confidence for donors.
(On a more personal note, it is somewhat daunting to ask whether my contribution will so improve systems that my new organisation could bring in 10 times my salary in donations.)
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Regarding the Palm Oil thing, the guy from Cadbury's was claiming their Palm Oil is "sustainably sourced". Is that possible ? Bit like the Kwila decking issue ? How would the consumer "really" know.
That's an important question for me; about child slavery even more than rainforests.
Wandered into Philippe's once and the service staff knew nothing about the origins of the chocolate. Schoc says simply "all our growers are treated fairly and respectfully", which is more than I've seen on many an expensive brand's website but hardly beyond question.
Turns out that Callebaut has a useful page on Corporate Social Responsibility (thanks for that link, Rik) but it seems any certification they could apply for is still in the pipeline. That leaves me eating the limited range of Fair Trade certified products, but thinking many of these small and tasty-looking brands are probably safe. How can I know?