Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Yes, it's oddly drafted, isn't it, in that it doesn't seem to proscribe a visitor making a nuke.
It doesn't restrict a visitor from exploding a nuclear explosive device, either. (Only from "testing", which isn't defined in section 2.) If you were a visitor to New Zealand who'd just happened to make a nuclear explosive device, perhaps setting it off might be the most practical legal option.
Probably complicated by other annoying laws beyond the Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987, though.
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
You beat me to it. On a re-read, does it prevent visitors from manufacturing nuclear weapons within New Zealand? Section 5 certainly doesn't seem to do so by my reading. It only refers to New Zealand citizens and ordinary residents.
Section 8 clearly says that nobody can manufacture biological weapons, sections 6 and 7 prevent transporting, storing and stockpiling and testing of nuclear explosives, but don't discuss manufacturing. Section 5 says New Zealanders can't help anyone to manufacture nuclear weapons, so it'd probably be tricky all the same, but trying to imagine situations, maybe a foreign embassy without any ordinary residents or citizens presnet could technically set up a nuke factory from which they export or something.......
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Speaker: All aboard: The choice for…, in reply to DexterX,
all graduates made redundant looked for work for a year couldn't get anywhere
We were certainly strung along for months at a time on several occasions only to be told there was no job (or money) at the end of it... and she played the game several times with acronym-happy recruitment agents hiding in front of other opportunities, and doing what recruitment agents often do for people with qualifications they don't understand. (I know recruitment agents are often part of finding work in NZ, but when the potential opportunities for work that'd make you happy are usually in the single digits, that sort of thing just drives you into the dirt after a while, which is why we got sick of it.)
I'm still convinced it's a temporary thing because I miss the place a lot and I'm getting sick of only coming back for a few days at a time then having to leave again, but the driving factor for us to return is still going to have to be us actually really wanting to make it happen. New Zealand doesn't make it easy in its present state.
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It’s a choice every young person on the brink of their professional life might make, between living your values and trying to get quick break.
Maybe for some in legal professions but I'm specifically living over the ditch because my partner was stressed and starting to get quite depressed about finding someone to employ her for what she was trained in, after searching for more than a year. Finally applying in Australia resulted in an offer immediately with full shifting costs, and we very very reluctantly decided to jump ship and contribute to Australia's economy and solving Australia's problems instead.
Similar knowledge economy issue, though. For many scientific positions especially (and perhaps others?), New Zealand employers simply won't take people who haven't either worked or studied overseas, which is a big difference from a few decades back when many of the currently well known kiwi scientists who actually live in NZ established themselves. But today there's very little investment in providing the stepladders to help people move from the bottom to the top of their field, and instead it just becomes an exercise in hiring people already at the top from overseas. Hopefully we'll be back some day because for us it was a big sacrifice in quality of life.
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Hard News: Reading the Numbers, in reply to Russell Brown,
That's Brian Cox. He was in an actual pop band (D:Ream) as a young man.
He's also does occasional cameos on QI for which it's a great addition to occasionally have someone who actually knows their stuff and can speak about it in an engaging way instead of just cracking jokes out of ignorance. I enjoy his ability to deliver complex info, but I wish they'd stop with those shots of him staring into space in some kind of abstract wonder. It seems a bit pointless to me and makes the presentation more about the presenter than the topic. I don't think he needs that kind of stuff to make the topic interesting.
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Legal Beagle: Semi-Random election law thoughts, in reply to Brendon Steen,
Point taken. So does this then mean section 166 is then unnecessary because people who vote multiple times will inevitably be caught, convicted, punished as appropriate and have their votes reversed, anyway? If that's the case, why give scrutineers the ability to legally intimidate voters at all? Particularly if something comparable with Graeme's proposal of allowing the Court of Appeal to reallocate list seats upon adjusted figures were enacted.
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I know that if a scrutineer was to ever exercise their rights under s 166 of the Electoral Act in respect of my vote, I’d want to know what party they represented in order to ensure that party never got my vote ever again.
Wow. I didn't know about that one at all. Are there any recorded cases of a scrutineer actually requiring an issuing officer to demand a voter answer the question?
I guess if a person's been observed to visit multiple polling stations (for instance), it's important to have a mechanism to stop them before they cast an anonymous irreversible vote into too many voting booths, but it also strikes me as the sort of problem that could eventually be more reliably solved with more fluid and real-time digital communication between polling booths instead of the traditional book where names get struck off with a ruler and then compared after the election. I didn't see how they were doing it in the recent election, though, having cast a special vote.
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Legal Beagle: The law may be that stupid, in reply to Bart Janssen,
In short "is this the kind of person we want representing the citizens of the country?"
There are a few sorts of people I'd prefer weren't representing the citizens of New Zealand, but many of those people are doing just that right now. I'm not sure how that happened.
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Richard Aston,
I wonder if it might be better to simply flog criminals publicly until the sight of blood satisfies the baying crowd.. ah yes vengeance is done and it is sweet.
There seems to be no shortage of criticism based around a premise that prisoners are treated to proper meals and "flat screen TVs" whilst victims are often left out in the cold to suffer with whatever fate left them, hence the call for more effective vengeance because there's not much else up for grabs. There's a strong perception that victims are ignored, or mostly ignored, and maybe there's some merit given I see that New Zealand's Victim Support organisation is pleading for donations. The Department of Corrections never does that.
Fortunately for me I've never been a victim in this sense. People I know who've been affected by serious crime are sometimes more or less ignored (or don't know where to get help), or if they get serious long term help it's often because they're fortunate enough to have family and friends who care and who sacrifice their time and money. Many consequences of crimes can never be reversed, but it does cause me to wonder why the funding targeted at corrections (locking up and rehabilitating people) doesn't seem to be more fundamentally targeted at resolving the whole issue that a crime creates as much as possible, on both sides. eg, A more complete ACC-like structure might not go amiss, to help victims cope with consequences at the same time that the corrections system works with perpetrators. Am I missing something about what's already available for victims?
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Field Theory: Fight Club, in reply to Just thinking,
I now offer open hands an questioning eyebrows as a more diplomatic move.
I don't think I'd even want to do this. If I made any eye contact I'd try to be smiling or laughing it off at the time, just to get their attention on what happened. Sometimes if people run red lights in front of my pedestrian crossing, I've pretended to start walking out with the green guy to demonstrate there's a reason for the red light even when other traffic isn't coming. There are probably a few exceptions but usually people aren't trying to run me over. At best they just need a polite reminder that other people besides drivers are out on the road, too.
But if you agitate or distract a driver by implying to them they're an idiot or expressing some other sort of rage, it's probably more likely they'll have an accident either now or later. I know I can lose concentration as a driver when that happens, and irrespective of whether I think I was in the right or wrong, as happens occasionally, it just makes things worse. There's no excuse for road rage but I don't see any value in encouraging someone to lose focus when they're in charge of a very lethal object.
And hey, if you flip a finger towards a car and the driver gets out and starts arguing back at you, it's really no different from what you'd expect in person. I guess as Hadyn notes, the boundaries are different when people think they won't have to deal with the consequences.