Posts by Sacha
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"Mexicans with cellphones"
(nah, I'd go with twatcock)
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Catherine Delahunty links to the alternative group's report of submissions heard and to the WWG's official wiki to discuss their options paper - and identifies another dodgy use of stats.
The [WWG] report has a “relentless focus on paid work”, based on the assumption that being in work provides people with the best opportunities to achieve social and economic wellbeing. This “work at all costs” focus fails to address the reality that there simply aren’t jobs for people to go to in the current climate. We just heard that the number of new jobs created in September was the lowest since 1999.
It’s also a flawed approach because it’s based on some very dodgy uses of facts and figures. The report says that most people on one of the four main benefits (Unemployment, Domestic Purposes, Sickness or Invalids’ Benefit) would be up to $120 per week better off if they worked full time on the minimum wage. Sounds ok, except this assumes that they manage to find work for 40 hours per week. In fact, WINZ considers full time work to be 30 hours per week, and abates the benefit accordingly. If you do the same calculation for 30 hours per week, as economist Paul Dalziel has done, 40 percent of people would actually be worse off taking a minimum wage job than staying on the benefit!
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Law lecturer Nicole Moreham asks did media coverage breach a right to privacy for miners' families just after they were told there could be no survivors?
As the family members emerged from the meeting, just moments after receiving the news, their every expression and reaction was filmed and photographed by waiting reporters. These people did not want their pictures taken. Some gave hand gestures and others told photographers to ‘f%^* off’. Photographs were nonetheless taken and printed. Within hours, detailed images of relatives’ faces were circulated around the world.
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Concern has been raised that by disseminating these images, the media have turned individual grief into a commodity to be captured, printed and sold. People are shown at their most desperate and vulnerable: mascara is running, faces are twisted with emotion, people are crying. TV footage shows relatives interrupting tears and intimate conversations to deal with encroaching media. Interviews reveal that for many family members media intrusion has made an already unbearable situation even worse.
It seems that the media’s conduct at Pike River crossed an ethical line. In my view, they have also crossed a legal one. There is a good argument, first, that some members of the media have committed the tort of breach of privacy.
The tort’s first requirement is that the relatives had a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of the events depicted in the images. This is almost certainly established. Courts have made it clear that individuals have a right to be left alone if they are experiencing something traumatic, distressing or humiliating, even if they are in a public place at the time. Leaving a meeting at which one has been told that there is no hope of finding one’s loved ones alive is a paradigmatic example of that situation.
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DomPost editorial continues the conflation of increasing total beneficiaries over time with the small number of long-term recipients (and like the WWG dunces, gets there by just ignoring the significant social/structural changes since 1980).
Benefit dependency is on the verge of becoming an intractable problem. How do you signal to fit, healthy individuals that it is unacceptable to spend their lives on benefits without punishing their children? The answer is you can't. However, something must be done to reverse the increase in beneficiary numbers.
and concludes by saying exactly what the government wants to hear:
A fundamental reassessment of the rights and obligations attached to welfare is needed.
Chicken Little would be proud.
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A firm Listener editorial notes the contrast between New Zealand's aspirations for more cycling tourists and the rude reality of our oafish driving.
Cyclists are pictured getting along cheerfully on pretty streets and scenic roads. In reality the environment for cyclists here is dangerous. Indeed, it can be downright intimidating, as evidenced by the story earlier this year of the Christchurch businessman who threatened to “nail” cyclists with his Hummer. This incident and others were later reported in an article in the Berliner Zeitung, warning tourists about Kiwi drivers’ appalling attitudes to cyclists. The paper also reported that six days before she was killed cycling in New Zealand in January, German tourist Mia Pusch blogged about aggressive Kiwi drivers, describing them as “beasts in human form”.
And the answer?
But the most effective way to make cycling safer is to get more people cycling. Research shows there is safety in numbers: the more cyclists on the roads, the more accustomed drivers become to looking out for them (and the more likely they are to be cyclists themselves) and the safer cycling becomes.
But this won’t happen by chance: parents won’t send their kids to school by bike until there are cycle lanes and safe crossings; commuters won’t cycle until they feel confident motorists will give them space and respect. Yet planners refuse to take cycling seriously – particularly in Auckland. The cycleway alongside the Northwestern Motorway is commendable, but the NZTA’s primitive attitude towards a cycleway on the Harbour Bridge virtually guarantees that commuter cycling in the city will continue to suffer.
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University of Auckland researcher Alistair Woodward calculates that if we made just 5% of short commutes by bike, 22 million litres of fuel and $193 million in health costs would be saved annually.
I should note that Professor Woodward is the head of the University's School of Population Health, not some junior researcher.
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Worst case scenario, but I'd never heard of Centralia until this week.
The flames on the surface were successfully extinguished, but unbeknownst to the fire fighters, the coal continued to burn underground. Over the following weeks it rapidly migrated into the surrounding coal mines and beneath the town, causing great concern.
Soon the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources began monitoring the fire by drilling holes into the earth to determine the extent and temperature of the fire. In retrospect, it was realized that the well-meaning workers may have unwittingly provided the fire with a natural draft by drilling these boreholes, feeding the coal’s combustion.
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The fire still burns today beneath about four hundred acres of surface land, and it’s still growing. There is enough coal in the eight-mile vein to feed the fire for up to two hundred and fifty years, but it may burn itself out in as few as one hundred years.
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Rachel Smalley tweeting that she has heard a third explosion reported - by helicopter pilot. Is trying to confirm.
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Isn't Andrew trying to constructively tease out a counter argument?
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One for 3410 - Jay-Z does Empire State of Mind last night
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Hard News: Friday Recommends, in reply to JP Hansen,
call it Auckland intuition :)