Posts by Chris Waugh
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Capture: Autumn lite, in reply to Nora Leggs,
the dying dahlia
A dying rose.
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Capture: Autumn lite, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Late autumn…..
Relic of autumn.
And again.
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Hard News: Inside the Shrine, in reply to Hebe,
Bomber invited my son to write a blog post, so he did. Then showed me.
A very good argument for lowering the voting age.
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Hard News: Taking a very big gamble, in reply to Russell Brown,
The Salvation Army professes to be completely blindsided
From the same article:
The Salvation Army - which also publicly opposed the National-SkyCity deal
So how much of the PGF being dumped is petty revenge for its outspokenness, and how much of the suggestion that the PGF is being dumped out of revenge some people's assumptions and Tau Henare being a dick? Serious question, because the Salvation Army and the other big Christian social services have a history of speaking out on social and political issues.
And:
Former foundation head John Stansfield said that the key difference between the two organisations was that the foundation had a strong track record on prevention while the Army focused on treatment.
Nice to know the government prefers to have ambulances lined up at the bottom of cliffs rather than fences at the top. Seeing as everything is measured in terms of monetary value these days: Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a fence along the top of the cliff? Has nobody done a study into the wider economic impact of having ambulances constantly trundle along the bottom of cliffs picking up bodies vs. fencing off the top? I'm pretty sure the fence would come off cheaper not just in the long term, but in the short term, too.
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Hard News: Taking a very big gamble, in reply to ,
With a chain of command coming down from the United States.
Ummm... London, actually. The London in England.
well healed
Well heeled, surely, especially in light of your previous statements.
And is it competitive? In my experience they're the kind of people who'd rather be out of business than cleaning up the messes left by government policy and heartless economics, and they tend to cooperate with others in the field.
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Key: "I can tell you I was bought"
Confession?
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The mention of Shanghai worries me. I dunno, I've never been to Shanghai, and I've taught students from every municipality, province and autonomous region of China but Shanghai, but I find it hard to believe it somehow magically has vastly more autonomy than the rest of the Mainland in such matters. And education is one of the prime reasons we're moving back to NZ*. So, um, thanks, National, for doing your best to close the educational gap between NZ and China.... not. Because for all the talk over all these years of reforming China's education system, and the final appearance of actual reforms of the dreaded Gao Kao (university entrance), it's still very much a system based on passing exams and collecting up magic pieces of paper. And it's still really depressing just how many of my students start university desperately lacking in really basic life skills and with no idea how to use the knowledge that's been stuffed into them (for the sole purpose of being regurgitated onto an exam paper, naturally) in the real world.
Now, having ranted that, I am going to spend the early afternoon watching my students play a basketball match in a team they organised themselves to the point of designing and having made some pretty cool-looking uniforms, and the captain/coach/inspiration behind the team is a highly talented, motivated, ambitious 4th year student who is Going Places. And this team has such a history of kicking arse that more than one opposing team has simply not bothered to show up to the match, even sent a message conceding the game through another team. So the Chinese system is certainly not the worst in the world. But it does put an insane amount of pressure on students from a very young age, and apart from a few test scores, the results of all that pressure and massive workload are depressingly underwhelming.
Surely if we're going to be looking overseas for models of good education, we should be looking to Finland?
*one step closer to making the move! And it's the kind of step that allows us to start planning the move instead of just daydreaming about it. So if anybody has a job for me to do starting maybe July or August, no later than January (inshallah), one that pays adequately (although megabucks would be nice), please let me know.
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As for the big "Who Paid?" question, it's kind of a distraction and seems to miss the point. But if I had to guess, I would guess Oravida paid. They issued the invite, right? And how would a government official get away with paying in the rather austere climate Xi Jinping ushered in? I'm not particularly bothered by who paid - it's already been pointed out that these are the rules of the game. But Collins' inability to just say suggests to me there might be some more questions worth asking, and I do have to wonder just what Oravida was hoping to get out of all this.
Especially considering just how many NZ dairy producers/brands have had their product fail inspection at the border over the last year or two (hint: a hell of a lot more than the NZ media seems aware of, and for all Fonterra's woes, it's more often the smaller brands, especially those buying from the contract manufacturers) and the just-completed Chinese inspection of NZ dairy factories.
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Arable land might not be needed, but water is. The entire North China Plain - including Beijing and Fonterra's farms - is sinking because of the sheer amount of artesian water being pumped up. Water seems to me to be one of China's biggest problems.
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
near enough to Beijing for “town supply”.
And access to power. I'm guessing here.
And yeah, sorry, I got your point, just I replied rather incompetently.
