Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: It Began ... in Chicago, in reply to nothingelseon,
You shouldn't take LSD and drive a train. Weed is fine, but acid is going a bit too far (even if you're much less likely to fail a drug test from it).
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s/Investigative journalist/feckin lunatic
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if we don't reduce our deficit now, we'll have no room to respond to the aging population
I don't quite buy that. The basic problem is that if our population ages, we will produce less and consume the same (or more). I assume the theory is that if we've salted money away overseas (or at least not borrowed much), then we can repatriate the funds and buy imported goods to make up the difference.
That all seems to be based on an assumption that everything else in the world carries on just the same, leaving NZ's aging population of the future in a position to smugly collect its rents and relax in the beach house.
I don't see that that's going to happen: we've got climate change, peak oil, the demands of the majority world population for freedom from repression and poverty, not to mention little curveballs like nuclear proliferation to worry about.
My view is that we should live for today and seek to equalise production with demand through real-world measures like increased migration, not target an artificial number that may have no bearing on the future.
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it can't govern as it purported it would
What amazes me is that otherwise intelligent people actually expected them to.
"It's time for a change"
"Labour are corrupt because they made me put a name and address on an election poster"
"Helen Clark is a CRIMINAL. She didn't tell her driver to slow down"Wake up voters. And grow a pair, opposition parties.
Word. But unlikely to be heeded.
I think people have managed to disconnect losing a job / not getting a payrise / not getting decent education from the deliberate acts of the government that causes those things. What have the Greeks, Irish and even the British got that we haven't?
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We know we need to reduce our deficit
Why? We're 7th lowest in the OECD for government debt. We're in a recession. In a recession, the government should borrow to get out of it (and in a boom, it should pay down those borrowings, exactly as the last Labour government did).
The only problem with borrowing more is that it might damage the ultra-leveraged speculators who did most of that private borrowing.
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the train lines during RWC games will be switched
That sounds expensive - surely all the signalling must have had to be made two-way, etc. Or are all NZ rail lines made bicurious?
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Hard News: Getting dressed for the party, in reply to Andre Alessi,
That seems similar to the plans for a gate at the bottom of Cuba Mall.
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The street is named because the community board members considered tearing down houses to create a walkway used maybe 20 times a year a "swampy decision".
See, the rugby company failed to add to their enabling laws a clause removing one of the few vestigial rights of community boards - naming of streets. Apparently the runner up names included Mandela Way and Minto March.
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Field Theory: Japan moves, in reply to Bart Janssen,
You say that like it's accepted truth.
The International Committee On Radiation Protection, who are the international authority on this, disagree:
while existence of a low-dose threshold does not seem to be unlikely for radiation-related cancers of certain tissues, the evidence does not favour the existence of a universal threshold. The LNT hypothesis, combined with an uncertain DDREF for extrapolation from high doses, remains a prudent basis for radiation protection at low doses and low dose rates.
So do the New Zealand National Radiation Laboratory, incidentally.
But maybe we should abandon these international bodies and have safe radiation levels decided by a vote on slashdot.
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And also related to statistics:
The accepted model amongst most health physicists is the linear no-threshold response model discussed in this article.
That posits that any increase in radiation will cause an increase in cancers. “Background” radiation causes cancers – it isn’t safe, it’s just unavoidable. One particle track going through a cell nucleus, if unrepaired, will give you cancer. And whether that track hits a nucleus and whether a body repairs it is down to chance -so the more particles, the more cancers result.
Gofman reckoned on a figure of 475,000 additional cancers from Chernobyl. It’s hard to say if he’s right, because you can’t tell whether a cancer is an additional one from man-made radiation exposure, or a “natural” one.
So even if there are zero acute deaths from Fukushima, that doesn’t mean that a bunch of people aren’t going to die, even without knowing what caused their death.
[The nuclear industry is keen on an alternative model, radiation hormesis, which suggests that low doses are harmless/beneficial. Evidence for this has been somewhat lacking, although it has the force of convenience on its side]