Posts by linger
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Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to ,
Agreed that there needed to be more actual opposition from the Opposition this last couple of terms, but the Greens have consistently done more than Labour there, and you'd be hard pressed to conclude they're as baselessly poll-driven as either National or Labour. On balance, the Greens, having put in more work, should be in charge of social policy; the practical question (given the most likely range of election outcomes) is whether Winston First would allow that.
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Access: The Family Carers case – here we…, in reply to Angela Hart,
Vile policy has consequences, you’d hope – with an election coming up.
That was Wairarapa MP Alastair Scott, standing in for Nicky “out on the harbour” Wagner.
(N.B. Scott may have become the National rep at short notice — because bad weather prevented many of the scheduled reps from getting to Wellington — rather than just because Wagner had better things to do.) -
Māori watching kereru falling out of trees after too many fermented miro berries, after the initial reaction of "whoo, free meat!", surely would not have failed to think "that looks like fun". Even indirectly, that's a good "use for intoxicants" right there.
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to R A Hurley,
My point is that it is dangerous to rely on "one study says..." (especially if that study seems to support something surprising) rather than considering the balance of available evidence.
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Hard News: Our own fake news, in reply to R A Hurley,
However, as reported on This American Life, one study, purporting to demonstrate a way of counteracting the backfire effect, had to be retracted when it emerged that the survey results had been fabricated.
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The false claim is that bilingualism […] will reduce a Deaf child’s chance to learn English.
That fear of semilingualism is an “argument” commonly advanced against teaching any language other than the dominant majority language. The only condition under which it might have any validity is where the learner is excluded from communities using both languages (in which case, the reduced input and lack of interaction is what harms language acquisition). For any other case, bilingualism enhances overall language ability.
There’s a Radiolab episode that presents some quite compelling cases:
(i) a marginalised Deaf man who first realised at age 27 that there was such a thing as language;
(ii) a group of Deaf children, brought up individually with no common language, who on being brought together in one school (in which lessons were in Spanish, which they didn’t know) developed their own sign language.
Of course, since this is for radio, their stories are told by Hearing individuals... (N.B. there is also a transcript available at the link given.) -
Hard News: Know Your Stuff: getting real…, in reply to william blake,
Your position is only tenable if you can show that it actually further reduces harm, compared to a programme that demonstrably reduces the risk of people taking unknown drugs. In pointing to a knowledge gap, you seem to have somehow missed the point that this initiative reduces the existing knowledge gap.
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Hard News: Meth Perception, in reply to tussock,
Ah, but the minimum level is decided by the Won't somebody think of the children? factor … hence the effective dose is much smaller — let's say divided by 100 to scale for order-of-magnitude mass ratio, so 100µg/ 100cm^2 = 1 mg/ m^2. And everything sticks to infants, apparently…
Try a cloth.
Smoked, snorted or injected :?)
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Hard News: Know Your Stuff: getting real…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s not an entirely irrational choice to still choose to proceed in that situation.
Exactly; which is why — given that amount of knowledge — the 1/3 willing to proceed anyway is maybe not as serious a problem as it might otherwise appear. To fully make sense of the “2/3 decided not to” statistic, we’d really need more detail on what the alternatives were (essentially: no significant drug content [so then why not try it?] / different drug with effects known and desired by the purchaser / different drug with effects unknown to the purchaser / different drug with known effects not desired by the purchaser); but of course that classification depends on whether or not the actual ingredients consisted of a drug the user was willing to try — which is subjective, and not something KnowYourStuff would necessarily ask about.
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two thirds of people told they didn’t have what they thought they did chose not to take it
Are punters given the full breakdown of what’s actually in their putative pills, or just the binary of whether or not it is what they think they should have?
The former would at least make some sense of the one-third of people told they have something else who then choose to take it anyway: if they know what it is, they can make an informed choice. (Yeah, OK, using recreational drugs correlates with risk-taking, so one shouldn’t expect entirely rational risk assessment, but still…)