Posts by Rich of Observationz
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In yachting, there are classes where the equipment is rigidly specified, like the popular Laser or even supplied by the organisers, as in the World Match Racing Tour.
So you do have events which are entirely down to competitor skill.
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I quite like sport. I prefer participating to watching, and have competed in three (or two, according to some of you) sports since adulthood.
However, I disapprove of the RWC for these reasons:
- the government has taken away basic rights of free speech in order to grant monopolies to a foreign sporting body- the government is using *our* money, during the deepest recession for many years, to subsidise said foreign sporting body
- large (and mostly foreign-owned) corporations are using flag-wrapping around this event as a propaganda device.
None of this is actually necessary, and I fail to see how turning a sporting event into a festival of corporate capitalism makes the games better for spectators or participants.
YMMV though. If one is amongst those increasingly desperate to prop up corporate capitalism and the nation state, I can see how Big Sport appeals as a gambit.
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90,000 people are coming here for it.
Interesting number though. Apparently 2.4 million tourists visit NZ each year, so the rugby fans are only 4% or so of the total. I'd be interested to see if this years tourism numbers are up as expected.
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Also, wouldn’t it attract the attention of Defence early warning systems
I'm not sure we own any, or need any, really.
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the rest of the world
For definitions of the "Rest Of The World" that exclude China, India, 44/50 European countries, everywhere in Asia except Japan, everywhere in South America except Argentina and everywhere in Africa besides South Africa and Namibia.
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Subway isn't a Dickensian hellhole
Maybe for the staff, but does anyone actually enjoy answering twenty bloody questions just to get a sandwich?
When I go to buy my lunch, I want to be presented with a selection of lunch items I can choose from and maybe make minor adjustments to. If I wanted to specify the recipe, I'd go and buy ingredients and make my own lunch. Really.
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I was working for a large NZ firm a while back that had so many obsese old people there that they'd run out of disabled parking spaces. Which is something you can't actually expand, because they need to be near the door. They might soon have to run golf carts around the car park
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Is there some sort of cozy tax applied if you try and import anything that decadent?
(UK price of under $3k). -
I had this wonderful heating system in England. Oil fired boiler driving the central heating, with logs stacked in the boiler room so that they had about a year to bake before being used in the woodburner.
This is what we need here (can you even buy heating oil in NZ?)
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Interesting urban areas don't often arise out of council's plans, but often in contrast to those plans.
Cuba St, for instance, used to be a mainstream shopping street with banks and department stores. Those all moved across to the Lambton Quay area, and Cuba St became a neglected area with cheap rents. That meant that new and edgy businesses could afford to set up and hence it became a creative hub.
Planned developments, OTOH, tend to be predicated on shininess and high rents, which means that only the usual suspects (*$s, Glassons, Body Shop and the like) can afford to move in.