Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: All John's Friends, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But we’ve had times and I tend to think this is one of those periods where those in the house feel they can do whatever the hell they like and to hell with what the party thinks, let alone what the people of the country want … usually because they think they know what’s best for us all.
Yep.
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Farmer Green,
It’s unusual that the farming press is taking up this issue. On the other hand , the truth will always out.
Thanks for that very interesting and worrying read. The more I see of Fonterra, the less I like it. I’m sure I don’t understand all the economics of it, but that milk price manual seems dodgy indeed, and something’s seriously wrong when milk is being dumped.
But it’s a little odd to read that cheese earns so little for Fonterra when a 250g block of Mainland cheese goes for 50 yuan (~NZ$10) in supermarkets here in Beijing.
ETA: I also liked that cartoon about the guy who was fired for doing the Harlem Shake (whatever that is) being reinstated:
"That's right mate, I'm proud to be the only Fonterra recall in years that hasn't spooked the Chinese market".
To be honest, I'm still surprised Fonterra has a Chinese market considering last year's scandals.
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Hard News: All John's Friends, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Um, yes, as am I?
I dunno, Craig. All I know of you is what you post here, and for the whole time John Key has been PM, I've spent all of 10 days in NZ, but I certainly get the impression you're a much friendlier, more reasonable kind of right wing than our current government.
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Hard News: All John's Friends, in reply to Hebe,
A third term will see a right-wards path that will be very hard to reverse or halt
Yep, and that worries me because we're hoping to get back to NZ in time for such a government. But the opinion polls I've been reading about have me hoping there's a chance a 3rd term Key government would be too unstable to be able to push their agenda through.
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Hard News: All John's Friends, in reply to The Ruminator,
We still have a welfare state. We still have a fairly progressive tax system.
So far. It would seem fairly clear that the government is keen to dismantle as much of that as they can get away with. NZ isn't crazy right wing, but the political centre has definitely been pulled right-wards.
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Note to whoever is currently Minister for Buggering Up Auckland Transport:
This is what cities aspiring to be great, international cities, or at least liveable cities do: Invest huge amounts of money in public transport. Subway line, in the pictured case.
Slogan: "The people's subway, the people build, build a good subway for the people." A bit old school communist-y, I know, but I thought governments of democratic countries were supposed to work for the good of the people.
60 billion dollars?!?!?! So why has it been so hard to get digging on the CRL started? Such a simple, short subway line compared to the gigantic network they're trying to build here in Beijing. I feel a bit ashamed that the government of my own country, which is generally considered developed, is so miserly when it comes to smart, efficient ways of transporting people around cities, when the government of an undeniably still third world country can spend so much - and build high-speed intercity rail networks, too - 600km/h, they've been saying this month, they want to build trains that run up to 600km/h! Imagine how cool it would be to have trains like that running Auckland to Wellington and Picton to Invercargill!
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Hard News: Climate, money and risk, in reply to Richard Grevers,
I’ve been told that the “war” between farmers and nomadic herders was a major reason behind the building of the Great Wall
Not so simple. There was conflict, there were Viking-like raids and full-on war, there was trade, there was intermarriage, there was adoption of aspects of each others' lifestyles. Several of the Chinese states of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods built defensive walls. Yan, which had its capital in what is now Beijing, suffered many raids by the Shanrong people living just over the mountains to the northwest, Qi and Lu still had Dongyi people to their east, and, of course, the states were all at war with each other vying for supremacy. Eventually Qin conquered the other states and established the Qin Dynasty with Qin Shihuangdi became emperor - generally accepted as the first emperor of a united China, I guess because unlike the Xia, Shang and Zhou that preceeded he brought all of China under one central government and united things like the systems of weights and measures and writing. He also set about linking up these various lesser defensive walls into a Great Wall, yes, to keep the nomads out.
However, I'd certainly never heard of it being built to keep cattle off farmland. For one, there does not seem to have been much cattle in north China, let alone the grasslands north of the wall, until the modern demand for infant formula came along. So far as I can tell, Fonterra is doing far more to replace cropland with dairy farms than Genghis Khan. The traditional animals of the area would seem to be sheep, horses and camels. We are talking about a part of the world that has never really had much water, where there is a word for a type of terrain more arid than grassland but not quite proper desert - gobi. Secondly, it was a military defensive measure built to prevent people like the Shanrong raiding the Yan capital and making off with all the treasures and women they could through over the backs of their horses and, far more importantly, the nomad empires like the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Khitan, Jurchen and Mongols threatening the security of the Chinese state (yeah, fat lot of good it did them...).
What your friend and teacher says about Chinese (or Asian, as you originally stated) farmers, as reported by you, simply does not match my experience, and quite frankly, doesn't make any sense. My parents in law are farmers in the mountains northwest of Beijing, so I'll use them as an example. My father in law had a small herd of sheep, just over 50 head when he sold them. They spent their mornings trying to escape from their pen that occupied the western half of the family courtyard. They were fed a mixture of corn, agricultural waste - corn stalks and similar such things from the family plots, "weeds" (not entirely weeds, but "useless" plants growing around the edges of fields and amongst trees in the orchards) harvested by my parents in law, and in the afternoons, they were taken out to graze from those "weeds" around the edges of fields and among trees in the orchards, with my father in law doing his damndest to make sure they didn't eat anybody's crop. This method of animal husbandry seems to my eyes to have a lot more to do with the realities of population density and working within what is still very much a peasant agricultural system - all land belongs to the village and is divvied up amongst the villagers, with each household getting several small plots. There simply isn't anywhere to leave your animals grazing unattended for any length of time. Now, of course, it is always dangerous to argue from "But my in laws do this...", so please let me assure you that what I have seen my in laws doing pretty much matches up with what I've seen in other parts of rural China - adjusted, of course, for local variations in environmental conditions.
More: Historically in China education hasn't really been available to the masses. One needed a certain amount of money for that, or at least, a certain class background or parents able to make the necessary sacrifices to get their kids a leg up. It was only with the founding of the PRC that education became widely available to rural kids regardless of background or means, and even then, what with the 100 flowers and their harvesting, Great Leap Forwards, Cultural Revolution (when my mother in law was bullied out of primary school after only two years because of her father being 8th Route Army, and my father in law spent his time teaching city kids to farm), and what have you, it's probably fairly fair to say that it was only my wife's generation that first got a decent chance at an education. Chinese farmers, in my experience, tend to be an extremely pragmatic, hard-scrabble bunch who are adept at "eating bitterness", as the Chinese put it, and doing whatever it is they need to do to put food on the table. What you report your friend and teacher saying makes it sound like they're mystically in touch with nature, and that, apart from reeking of Orientalism, just does not match anything I have seen or experienced.
Dunno what Ian has to say about that, though.
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Hard News: Cranks, self-seekers and the mayor, in reply to Yamis,
an ad for a Chinese tourist destination
Ha! Should've known. The whole thing stank so badly. Tech in Asia has the courtesy to post a bigger version of the image than the Herald had and yes, you can clearly see "Shandong" in the bottom right corner of the screen. And the Daily Mail, ermmm, scribbler lives in New York! And pulled the quote from the traffic coordinator from an unrelated AP story! About the only thing going in the Herald's favour in this farce is that they're in fairly illustrious company having reposted it.
Conclusion: Beijing Environment Protection Bureau and Weather Bureau official Weibo feeds are more reliable than the Herald.
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Hard News: Cranks, self-seekers and the mayor, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The Herald has at various times been a very good informative source of news and information. That doesn’t seem to happen very often now.
I’ll have to trust you on it having been informative. I only read the Herald website because the format works better for me than Stuff or Scoop and it has more information than the TV or radio websites. I gave up on their world news section because it’s about 90% mindless reposting of the AP feed with not even the tiniest adjustment to account for the fact their core audience is people in Auckland* and the rest only marginally better reposts of the Independent, Observer or Daily Mail (with one about a week ago being a grossly overblown Daily Mail “OMG Beijing smog” piece of shit. It was bad on that day, but nothing like January 2013 and nowhere near as apocalyptic as the Daily Mail tried to pretend). I still rely on it for NZ news, but my international news now comes from entirely different sources, as the AP feed really isn’t that good regardless of whether it’s been tweaked to suit the Herald’s core audience or not. And relying on the Herald to keep up with Wellington Phoenix can be frustrating. So I guess I’ll just have to tolerate Stuff’s setup for the tiny little bit of sports news that interests me and Public Address for my NZ news.
*Two things there: 1: If your article says “the nation” and I have to scroll down to confirm my suspicion that the nation referred to is the USA, then your website has a problem, and for crying out loud, just delete the imperial/American measurements and leave the metric ones. AP includes both to account for their customers coming from different countries. 2: Please Herald, don’t try to kid me. Your “national” section does cover the whole country, but is still very, very Auckland-centric. And no, this is not some south of the Bombay Hills chip on my Wellingtonian shoulder, that is how your “national” section is. If you had separate “Auckland” and “national” sections, wouldn’t be a problem. ETA: Except that if it did split into Auckland and national sections, based on current form, the Herald's new national section would be rather small and uninformative.
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I'm sorry, but I had to follow that Solo Passion link because, still being in the process of recaffeination, it reads to me like the title you'd give an organisation advocating for the rights of wankers, and I was completely unaware there was any threat to the right to pleasure oneself.
