Posts by James Dunne
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The real question is how long before Occupy Garnet Road and She Who Must Not Be Named scent progress and descend on Unitec to ruin everything.
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But that would require Jeremy Corbyn to be a competent politician and to have the political instincts of a walnut.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
He probably gets it paid into an account which doesn't bear interest or donates the interest to charity or makes charitable payments which he thinks outweigh any benefit that he might have derived from the interest or he uses some other sort of Islamic financial instrument.
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How exactly does Russia become more secure by bullying its neighbours and acting like Upper Volga with nukes?
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There is something oddly gratifying about waking up from a dream - whether pleasant, frightening or just baffling - thinking 'where the hell did that come from?' and then realising what your subconscious was getting at - whether that's just reprocessing recent events or something a bit deeper and more symbolic.
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Hard News: This. Is. Crazy., in reply to Robert Urquhart,
I was going to suggest AirBNB as a fairly feeble joke, but I do wonder on reflection if there might not be some logic to doing something along those lines.
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Well, the assumption with medicines is that the benefit outweighs the risk. That's why chemotherapy drugs are approved for use even though they're very poisonous and very bad for you: because dying of cancer is even worse. Nobody would approve a drug with chemotherapy-like side effects that just treated a headache.
The assumption in the PSA is more or less that using an approved product certainly doesn't give you any health benefits and the other benefits you gain from using it (i.e. that it is fun) aren't really quantifiable. Hence the only acceptable risk is a low one - _not_ no risk whatsoever, mind, which I think is a bit of a jump forward from the old prohibitionist model which was that controlled drugs delivered no benefits whatsoever and therefore there was no level of risk that was acceptable.
The difficulty with leaving that balancing exercise to individuals is that by and large they are pretty bad at it. Which would be fine, except that somebody who has come down on the wrong side of the "should I take methamphetamine" calculus is likely to be something of a nuisance to others, to put it mildly.
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Of course, if one was to remove cannabis from the Misuse of Drugs Act and approve recreational cannabis-based products through the, ahem, Psychoactive Substances Act, it seems likely that it would be hard to demonstrate that a product where you inhaled smoke would pose no greater than a low risk of harm to those who used it.
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My secret dream has always been a period drama with SIS spooks picking over the underbelly of Muldoon-era Wellington, but I suspect our defamation law means such an exercise would be a bit risky, to put it mildly.
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The awful truth is that millenials don't vote enough for anybody to really care what they think. If Generation Zero et al could mobilise enough votes to unseat even two or three of the councillors responsible, things might be different. But they can't so they won't.