Posts by linger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Cabinet and the Reeferendum, in reply to Neil,
And also (almost inseparably tangled up with "learnt", but persisting into the next generation regardless of environment), an epigenetic contribution further limiting impulse control and increasing base anxiety levels.
-
Hard News: Cabinet and the Reeferendum, in reply to Moz,
I wouldn’t want to deny anyone their faith, nor to disrespect anyone’s reasons for avoiding alcohol. But it was unsettling to realise that the label showing the impurity level was not helping. My student would have been more comfortable with a product label that didn’t mention the possibility of any ethanol being included, because that would have allowed room for a more pragmatic approach, rather than a strict reading. Given a choice between a low-end vinegar with 0.1% ethanol, a high-end vinegar with 0.005% ethanol,, and a cheap product with nobody-knows-and-nobody’s-saying-how-much ethanol … as she saw it, she’d have to choose the *last* of those.
-
Hard News: Cabinet and the Reeferendum, in reply to ,
Apart from Twitter basically being a synonym for “please cite source”, dosage matters. One molecule of anything isn’t going to spoil your day.
Tangentially related: one of my Muslim students was worried about sourcing alcohol-free vinegar. By which she meant, guaranteed 0.00000% alcohol. Problem being that almost all commercially available vinegar has ethanol as an impurity (typically around 0.1%). The fact that this isn't enough to cause any physiological effect, and that some fruit on your grocer's shelf will have higher levels of alcohol, did not reassure her in the slightest. Religion trumps chemistry.
-
Hard News: Digital persuasion and the…, in reply to ,
They want people to be forced to use the windows instead of Windows?
-
Hard News: Rip It Up: A history of us, a…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Seems roughly commensurate, actually. NZ newsrooms mostly switched to computer layout during the mid-1980s. (Allan Bell was able to carry out studies of the process of news editing in 1984, based on physical drafts, that by 1988 had become impossible to replicate.)
-
Speaker: The economics of shit speech, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
disdain
...or alternatively, after having read it, you feel the need to de-stain ...
-
Hard News: Cabinet and the Reeferendum, in reply to Trevor Nicholls,
Toothless, but still sucking away,
gumming the issues, and the works.Just a shame that Labour has ended up offering so little of a contrast on so many matters where they promised to make a difference…
-
Speaker: The economics of shit speech, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Yeah, nah.
For any individual column, the definition has to rely at least partially on the reader's (perhaps unreliable) assessment of the columnist's intent, because we need to know the relationship between the columnist's expressed opinions and the facts available to the columnist. If there is no necessary relationship, or if the opinions expressed are directly counter to known facts, the columnist is either bullshitting (if they don't care either way) or willfully misleading. Either could, and should, be called "shit speech", in the absence of some other signalled intent (such as satire).But if the columnist is explicitly advocating hatred of or violence towards some sector of society (e.g. cyclists), then "shit speech" is in fact an undeservedly generous label.
And consistent patterns across the same person's columns, or even more generally across many different columnists hosted by the same media provider in the hope of achieving some institutional gain, are much easier to assess.
-
Hard News: What does the wastewater…, in reply to BenWilson,
Absolutely; from that figure, we can only extrapolate more generally to the population, not more specifically to any smaller subset of users.
(On which note: the catchment area for Moa Point includes not just the entire Wellington CBD, the universities, and the hospital, but also the south coast from Island Bay eastwards; so it really is a stretch to conclude anything about cocaine use in Miramar from that. Might as well say it's all those bankers, as shown by the contamination levels of banknotes! )
-
Hard News: What does the wastewater…, in reply to Russell Brown,
In really mindblowingly huge quantities, too, if taken literally.
(“This is your news. This is your news on drugs. Any questions?”)
There is, at least, a more accurate rendition two paragraphs up, though: i.e., the data covers a total of 80% of the population, and that subset has a total consumption of 16kg a week (which would imply a total national weekly consumption of ca. 20kg if the sample is representative).