Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Russell Brown,
AGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Google mistranslate!
Well, as you can see, it does well enough with lists and technical terms - the kinds of things for which there is a direct correlation between words in L1 and L2, but even then "Jiashibaoba pasteurized" probably is better rendered as "Jiashibao [because product name - don't translate, only transliterate, unless you can find an official English name] pasteurised". The garbled grammar of the first bit, though... Well, you get a good enough idea. I've certainly seen worse machine translation.
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I'm sure he was necessary for the Dinner they had but it was the brushing aside any attempt to know his business or name other than a border official, several times but happily noted the other guests, all from Oravida is what seems out of order to me.
I don't know. And it's taken me a few days and several different arrangements of search terms, but finally I found a story on something I read about and stupidly neglected to blog a couple of weeks ago: Green Valley Dairies, producers of Oravida, recently had some of their milk held up in Guangzhou (article in Chinese, but you can see Green Valley Dairies Ltd listed in English as the producer) for not meeting Chinese standards. Maybe irrelevant, but...
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Not quite - Fonterra has a number of dairy farms in China already
And Rich:
a Waikato type climate
Not Hebei. There are plenty of wetlands in the area, but it's bone dry from autumn through to spring, and the pollution....
Also, NZ has been exporting dairy cows to China to help Chinese farms build up their own herds of top-quality milk-producing cows.
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Not sure what Judith Collins was doing here on this latest trip, but she has been here in her capacity as ethnic affairs minister. I don't see keeping the Chinese border control official's name secret as a sign that customs issues were not involved, though. Nor that any such issues were involved. But it is worth asking a few questions
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to Steve Barnes,
So. Nothing to see here, move along.
Of course the hacking is not indiscriminate. They're deliberately targeting everybody.
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And some more.
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More silliness with the fish.
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I’ve been doing strange things to the wee one’s new goldfish…
And a slightly more normal shot, too.
And can't quite decide if this last one is worth posting. What the hell, might as well...
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to jh,
It wasn’t cherry picking.
It was a quotation taken out of context and used to support a point the article quoted from did not support.
Again, got a link for that wikipedia quotation? It's kinda hard to assess the quality of an argument without a context for the quotation.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to jh,
That quote comes from here:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/44170.htmlCherry picking seems to be a popular sport. That very same article also states:
Today’s world is different from that in which we evolved, and we need to adapt. Just as sweet and fatty foods are far more accessible today than they were a quarter of a million years ago, so too has our cultural landscape changed. The modern world is irreversibly multicultural. Nations bump up against each other, populations shift and cultures change. Monoculturalism is simply no longer an option in developed nations, and cultural quarantine just leads to apartheid.
Not only is multiculturalism inevitable, but it should be embraced warmly. Interaction between different cultures enriches all, it opens our eyes to new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing and interacting with the world. Beyond even the sharing of ideas, art and culture, multiculturalism also encourages tolerance, a virtue that is increasingly important in an ever more diverse and fragmented world.
Certainly, there’ll be friction and disagreements. But far better to tackle these issues in a pluralist framework that is fully aware of the nature and origin of disagreements rather than either ignoring them and letting them fester or buckling to our primitive instincts and pushing for monoculturalism.
This framework also doesn’t need to be relativist; it can provide the means for genuine disagreement over values and norms, predicated on liberal values of tolerance, social harmony and cooperation. A pluralism of norms can be allowed, and some disagreements tolerated, but if a norm or custom opposes the pluralist framework itself, such as practices that limit the freedom of women to be educated or participate in the workforce, then it can and should be challenged. But outside of this fundamental provision, there are many ways of living that can coexist without impinging upon each other.
