Posts by George Darroch
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Simon Grigg,
there is almost no such thing as vegetarian food in Thailand aside from the likes of fresh fruit dishes. And even when fruit is processed for some dishes, prawn or fish extract is added.
I tried my luck a little in Thailand, but mostly I just went to the 7-11, where you can read the ingredients.
You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered that sambal (Indonesian flavoured chilli paste, for the uninitiated) frequently contains shrimp and fish sauce. I still eat it by the spoonful, although I'm careful when buying my own.
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Fish isn’t vegetarian!?
I tell people I don't like to consume the souls of other beings. That really throws them.
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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
Ben, your words are an evocative outpouring.
I've only ever had hot apple pies from McDonalds, on account of my veganness - when it's 3am and you're driving between Canberra and Sydney, there's very little on the road, and even less that's open.
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There are two separate issues at hand here, in either case.
The first is the degree to which breastmilk confers benefits to a child (if any).
The second is the degree to which these benefits (if they occur) obligate the mother to provide these, (and importantly, other parties to facilitate this)
In the case of childbirth, the first is the degree to which clinical/non-clinical settings and types of supervision confer benefits to the child and mother.
The second is the degree to which this obligates the mother and other parties to facilitate these.
Stated for the sake of clarity. It may be that everyone is already working on these assumptions implicitly (and it may be that the argument has spelled these out clearly already, in which case please ignore), but I think it's worth making them explicit.
There are reasonable arguments for all these positions, but if they appear to be conflated (whether they are or not), there is going to be a degree of frustration - either side appears to feel that they are being asked to defend or attack imaginary positions.
I'm not going to comment on the article, because I read it in a Borders several weeks ago. My memory is vague.
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The is evidence the other way too. But if you’re going to talk about the impact of the changes, you do have to talk about what the changes look like.
Should be the start of any debate, really. I don't have an opinion - really - but in this case (unlike many others) there's a readily identifiable and stable metric, in the form of mortality. Using that as a starting point (and any other consistent and justifiable measures) seems fairly sensible to me.
Were we able to freely access academic journal articles, we might be able to examine such evidence.
Likewise, the evidence on breastfeeding.
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One good thing that has happened in the last few years has been an opening up of free access to developing nations. It's unclear how far, or for how long, this will continue, but it does mean that friends in Indonesia aren't stuck in information deserts.
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Carol, I’m not saying that. Both models have severe problems, and it’s naive to pretend either works well right now.
I’m just saying that almost every academic I know would rather do it as they have always done it, rather than fight their department for one thousand dollars. Independent researchers have absolutely nobody who will pay the publishing costs – they have even more incentive.
Of course, this is because the production and consumption of knowledge is fractured. The users, producers, buyers (academic libraries, mostly), and regulators (publishers) are all separate and have entirely different incentives and reasons.
What has worked well (in my opinion) is open-access free publishing. The ANU E Press does this very well, publishing high-quality monographs and reprints, paid by the university itself as the extension of an existing publishing house. It’s run up against constraints (they have an editorial backlog, and their budget isn’t unlimited), but the costs are mainly up-front ones. Once something is on the internet the cost of serving it is very low. Academics love it, because they thousands of downloads instead of dozens of sold copies, and a great increase in citations (their work is getting out there), and readers obviously get high quality products entirely free. They have publishing on demand for those who want paper product.
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Open access journals have a substantial article submission charge – it’s $900USD for one journal I’m involved with. This, of course, is meeting with a lot of resistance from the scientific community. But it does seem to me that it’s the future.
And that's the problem, merely loaded on the other end. Departments are now having to choose between 'free' and paid submission. Grubbing your departmental committee for for money is never fun, but especially so if you're a postgraduate or lowly faculty member. You essentially make all research a matter of value for money. I'd actually rather give that decision to a money making journal than to a cash-strapped university.
Which is to say that these charges bother me tremendously. There are some costs in the system - but I'm unconvinced that the costs have been pared down sufficiently, and distributed equitably.
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I paid because I too get pissed off with stupid statements of misfacts that should have been easily found out. I am certain they are broadcast in ignorance. (Perjoratively that one BTW).
Yeah. I can't read the paper or watch the news for that reason. It hurts my brain to see that much simplified ignorance mixed with a few hyped and cherry-picked facts.
I saw a prominent academic speak today, on a highly newsworthy subject (not only important, but with a number of news values). I thought about how if I was in another country I've lived in, or was in a different age, that she might be on television. She might get 800 words on an op-ed page, but nobody's going to pick up the story otherwise.
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I think it comes down to not enough people shaking better sense into their friends who are proudly saying they will vote National just because Phil Goff is a numbnut. Or proudly saying they won’t vote at all. Vote frikken Green if Labour isn’t left enough for you. I think we’re not shouldering enough of the blame ourselves, as a people, if we just let National do this.
Quite.
It doesn't help that every political 'journalist' is treating this like Survivor Wellington and waiting for all to convene on the last Saturday in November.