Posts by Rich of Observationz
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National credit ratings are smoke and mirrors. It's very unlikely that a developed state run according to the capitalist-social-democratic model would ever actually default.
For a nation to repudiate debt, it would need to abandon that model in some sort of economic revolution. That's *more* likely to happen (or likely to happen first) in countries that experience the most pain.
So, in a small way, the last budget, by making the middle classes poorer, has made a default more, not less likely.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Gareth Ward,
It depends where you set the threshold. But if something was to be stamped as "approved" by the state, wouldn't that put the government under some sort of moral obligation to ensure safety?
Medicines are subject to a multi-phase clinical trial process that costs tens of millions for each substance. It's not clear to me whether such a process would even be ethical - is it acceptable in medical research to test a substance that isn't planned to be therapeutic on humans?
If that sort of testing was done on new recreational substances, it would probably equate to a blanket ban on all of them. So we'd be back to illegality - or at best a grey market where substances were sold for spurious technical purposes, like cassette head cleaner.
A compromise would possibly be for new substances to be required to register and publish their ingredients and pay a levy to fund research into safety. That information could then be used to drive safety-based warnings/bans.
Of course, it would be easier if they'd just legalise MDMA and a few other things.
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Hard News: People Take Drugs, in reply to Russell Brown,
Sabin was conspicuous by his absence in discussion of the LawComm review – and he really only needed to pick up the phone to get himself on Close Up.
I guess he's got a new gig now.
Some prohibitionists are addicted to it, others do it to make money.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Yes, if one is doing sonar engineering and the like, seawater composition is very interesting.
I once had a job washing bottles in a lab that bottled and sold reference seawater - it's quite a process to avoid all contamination. (e.g. no bugs that might alter the salinity through biological processes).
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I'd suggest the view of the less-hippy Greens (and of many doctors) is that if people want to indulge in quackery and it makes them happy, they should do so.
For self-limiting conditions at least, it gives people the idea that they are "doing something" about getting better, which may be psychologically useful.
It was suggested that all quack medicine stores have a sign over the door: "Ineffective Treatments For Self-Limiting Conditions".
None of this is as harmful as allowing Big Pharma to gut Pharmac and force us to pay over the odds for treatments that have also been found unjustified. That's National's policy (see Herceptin) and it's probably worse than subsidising St John's Wort.
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Hard News: Some Lines for Labour, in reply to izogi,
@izogi - exactly.
Even if the Greens were to rigorously purge the policy of anything that hadn't been signed off for evidence-basedness by a committee of five PhDs and a Nobel laureate, we'd still be told that they were a bunch of tree huggers who believe in homeopathy.
NACT, of course, get a free pass to believe any random shit. The Exclusive Brethren, for instance.
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I also can’t believe that Labour supports the free trade agreement with the US
I can, and it's at the root of why Labour are failing.
They're a pro-capitalist party. Sure, they want a nicer kinder capitalism, with 3.142% Kiwisaver contributions, Working for Families and Rob Fyfe/Don Elder "responsible" to a silent state shareholder. But they're basically just a few degrees left of National, just as ACT are a few degrees right.
So when "free trade" is discussed, they turn their economics textbooks to "comparative advantage" and line up firmly behind NACT to take it from the US. It's ideological.
But why pick an argumentative, badly run capitalist party when the authentic John Key version is so much shinier? It's like choosing supermarket baked beans over the Watties variety.
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... the Greens could shake their looney-left image
So basically, the Greens should stop opposing NACT and adopt centre-left policies, with a big dash of concern for lesser-spotted tree frog habitats and a big hole where "social justice" used to be.
That would make them just like...Labour.
Basically, NACT own the media. They are never going to portray any party to the left of John Key as other than crazy or incompetent. It's time to realize this and work around them.
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National and Labour make Muldoon look like a socialist.
Economically, he pretty much was.
Socialism run by tories.
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The post-WW2 war crimes trials were largely circumscribed by the desire of the Allies to symbolically punish Nazism and Japanese militarism whilst encouraging the rebirth of normal society in Japan and Germany.
If you took a view of complicity akin to todays peacetime standards, hundreds of thousands would have been jailed or executed (under the actual denazification measures in Western Germany, 90,000 were detained and 1.9mln banned for a time from jobs other than manual labour. If similar measures had been attempted in Japan, the numbers may have been much larger.)
On the other hand, by requiring strict evidence and allowing a generous interpretation of the laws of war, one might have been able to argue that some of those executed after Nuremburg (Keitel and Jodl for instance) should not have been.