Posts by Moz
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Access: Cause, care, cure and celebration, in reply to BDB Inc,
to accept them in the moment so you can feel peace is all that is needed. All underlying negative thoughts and feeling of non acceptance will be non verbally transmitted to the person.
That really resonates for me. Well put!
The big thing is that disabilities are a spectrum, and the question is how far along a given spectrum can people be before they're acknowledged as disabled. That works two ways - people struggle to have genuine problems accepted or help funded, but others struggle to be accepted as functioning people in their own right (rather than being labelled and told they need to be cured).
I'm extremely skeptical of people who want to "fix" me because I've had so few positive experiences with them. Invariably their version of "fixed" is either that I'm completely subservient to their wishes or I'm hiding how I am in order to appear "normal" regardless of whether that makes me happier. Should I have to be cured so that I don't make you uncomfortable? Isn't that your problem?
Preventing the most serious cases of autism, depression, whatever disorder you want sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Things that make people deeply unhappy or dysfunctional in their own lives seem to be good targets. But if we also take away people who can focus single-mindedly on things that fascinate them, people who get wildly exuberant (without drugs) and make mad, passionate art about how they feel,people who stare into the abyss and come back newly enthusiastic about what they want to do, what are we losing as a species or society?
And by doing that we open people who can't, or choose not to, use the cures to a whole raft of negative effects. There will always be people at the margin who don't get the cure or can't prevent the problem, and how we deal with them is a real test. Should we shun children born to parents who reject the offer of a cure? Or even just punish the parents? How do we do that without affecting the child? Ethics can be fun :)
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Up Front: Just Like Unicorns, in reply to Lilith __,
My point is that the correspondence between libido and fertility is tenuous.
I was thinking as I rode home that I've only seen this in fertile couples. Post-vasectomy it's gone away, so I wonder if it's not at least partly psychosomatic - knowing you can't get pregnant frees up the sex drive.
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Speaker: Facing the floods, in reply to Sacha,
I suspect because there's already a natural wetland, and that's what is flooding every time. The question is, as with all these things, who will pay to move the human stuff out of the wetland.
So much of the long-term trauma seems to come down to money. The PTB have spent a lot of time trying to look as though they are in control and everything is going to quickly return to normal. Oh, and that cheap repairs will solve the problem. I still wonder how many red and orange zone homeowners would have accepted "pick one of these standard designs, built in Rolleston, in the next year" even if it meant losing a lot of the former value of their home. Especially after the second big quake. Standard designs and mass construction is how we got a lot of Auckland and Wellington suburbs, for example.
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Hard News: A Big Idea, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
David Parker says, it helps everyone
Except those poor people who are debt-free, anyone saving money, and those living off the earnings.
Of banking, not prostitution, that is.
I'm in the "trying to save to buy a house" category so the only way this would help me is if it pushed interest rates up or caused house prices to collapse. But since it's designed to do exactly the opposite I'm not seeing how it helps me.
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Up Front: Just Like Unicorns, in reply to Tom Beard,
gay sex isn't real sex because it can't make new life.
I'm guessing that STI's don't count? "darling, I made new life... lots of cute baby chlamidia bacteria"...
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Hard News: A Big Idea, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm not entirely sure what the exceptions are.
In Oz there are so few exemptions that it might as well be mandatory. If you're a permanent resident or NZ'er you can't avoid putting money in unless you stop earning or retire, and you can only get it out to avoid starvation or if you're nearly dead. The main exemption to paying in is guest workers with a compulsory scheme in their home country.
The big thing in Oz is that pay is exclusive of super unless you're on a salary, where sometimes it's "packaged". Which means that for poor people they get $x/hour plus super, rather than the NZ scam where it's $X/hour except oh by the way we're taking some of that and putting it where you can't get it. Which also means that when the government hikes the rate your take-home pay doesn't change, only what you cost your employer.
Where NZ does better is that kiwisaver is a low-fee system, so rather than poor people being forced to donate their savings to the finance industry it actually builds up from the first dollar. Over here it requires each person to work out which fund to use, and the low-fee funds can be hard to find (they are introducing a govt-backed low-fee fund now... after a decade or more), otherwise people with little money in super can find themselves paying an annual fee of $200 or more, plus 2% of their total each year, plus 5% on contributions. I got screwed that way once before they bought in "super choice" (letting employees choose their own fund), because the *ankers I was working for used a fund that charged me a lot of fees and presumably paid them a kickback. The $2000-ish compulsory super I put in over a few months vanished before I could get it out (they charged $500 if you closed the account within two years, as well as every other fee they were allowed).
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Being of the definitely not smoking persuasion, it's the other methods stuff that I'm watching. "Gummie bears" could easily be made, say, green and leaf-shaped rather than bear-shaped, so that it's at least obvious what's inside. Trying to make them unattractive to children (especially if you call all those under 21 children) is going to be hard work, especially since they'd ideally also be attractive to adults.
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Hard News: Feed: Grandpa's Kitchen, in reply to Howard Edwards,
Reminds me of the kea recipe:
Or the spotty recipe: feed spotty to cat, eat cat.
One thing we're losing with urban densification is all those vege gardens. My great-grandparents had a fruit trees on Auckland's North Shore when I was a kid. Which I was not allowed to climb because the trees were old and fragile. These days it's tomatos in pots on the aparatment verandah.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to Bart Janssen,
from that (deeply cynical) perspective the only viable solution is a technological solution that sidesteps the need for those in power to behave responsibly.
Fascism! Technomancy, call it what you will, the belief that if we can just get those messy people out of the way the technology will work properly.
The problem with your solution is that there are already a lot of people with the technology to oppose you, and they're doing that as fast as they can. I don't know that they would be so blatant as to set coalfields on fire if you started sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, but I expect that they would come up with a close equivalent.
So a precondition/first step of the technomantic solution is to thoroughly disempower or eliminate the problematic people.
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Hard News: The Language of Climate, in reply to BenWilson,
Maybe the bridge is actually a bad idea. But even if it is a bad idea, people should still be allowed their place to work on their bridge idea, free from others trying to stop them doing at least that.
Replace bridge with, say, nuclear weapon and I think your problem becomes much more obvious. "we're right, so it's good when we do things that would be considered awful if other people did them".
That said, I agree with you. There are times to debate, and we've done that. It's time to act, and talk about action.