Posts by Kyle Matthews
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decent haggis
I've only tried it locally, not in Scotland, but my experiences to date have indicated that this is an oxymoron.
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By contrast, the Super 14 starts a month to early, the season meanders along with several peaks and troughs and putters out a month to late with an end of year northern hemisphere tour that does little more than devalue the All Black brand to a by then utterly over it domestic NZ audience.
Hear hear! Can we have a season that climaxes with a big final, rather than all the best players buggering off overseas to play games that we have to watch at some ridiculous hour of the morning against players that we don't care about? Cheers.
(Except, hockey definitely isn't a hitting game, it should come under the same category as soccer. Boxing is a hitting game though...)
I know. It's insane. It's not as if I don't live in sight of the damn thing either. But it's the tethering to the old country that does it.
Your ties to Italy are preventing you from venturing to Kaikoura and below?
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I believe that, not from some free-market ideological position (which I definitely don't have) but because I believe the quality of work would diminish under a subsidy. Subsidies are generally, given out at a blanket rate, to enable otherwise uneconomic activities to exist.
You didn't notice how you claimed it wasn't from a free market ideological position, but then the rest of the paragraph was straight out of free market 101?
But were they quantum leap advancements?
In the instance of Columbus, no.
In the instance of agriculture, yes. From no agricultural system, to having one is probably the greatest leap humankind has made technologically.
having some drugs legally available and others prohibited for quite arbitrary reasons just encourages people to say "f**k the law, this is no worse than x".
I don't disagree with that. But if you believe that it is bad, then "it's happening lots" doesn't seem to me to be the best argument for changing the law.
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Let's stipulate that the level of copyright infringement is high. Let's say there are 300 infringements an hour. How on earth do you prosecute that? As an individual, do you spend all your money and time trying to stop it, or do you change your business stratagy to minimise the impact? One path will cost and frustrate you, the other may lead to something.
I don't buy this argument (which I'll call the "it's happening too much to do anything about it" argument).
I also don't buy it for decriminalisation/legalisation of drugs.
If something is wrong, and its wrong enough to do something about, then the fact that its happening a crapload isn't a reason not to do anything. Particularly when it comes to illegalities where you can recover some of the costs from the perpetrators.
More valid to me would be "OK, it is illegal, but we actually don't care as long as you're sensible about it", or "it's illegal, but it's almost impossible to do anything about it".
Columbus set about a chain of events that led to a colossal exodus, but does that really make the discovery of America a quantum leap? Or the technology that led to it?
We once had a history lecturer candidate who came and gave their sample lecture on Columbus. When she came to talk about the technology that got him here, she said "I get lost in the bathtub, so I'm not going to talk about the boats much." She didn't get the job.
Advancements in boat technology enabled Columbus to get to the new world. And technology and disease enabled those that followed him to conquer it.
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Well dude, shelter is all good, but quite honestly our problem isn't having not enough food. It's having too much. This recession, if it hits the food, will probably actually make the country healthier.
You'll have to explain what that means Ben. I can't see how more people not having enough money to provide sufficient food of quality for their families is going to make the country healthier.
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Kyle, add on an extra 0 to that figure would ya? Rumour has it $1400 is gonna be the cheapest. That's apparently gonna get ya a game between 'minnows' and another game with a big name team.
I thought that was finals tickets, which they were predicting would mostly be 4 figure sums.
Quarter finals, particularly the 3 not involving NZ, should be substantially cheaper.
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I'm thinking that the nomads in the world might disagree with that, and those races that moved across various parts of the world from prehistory on. They took fire with them, you know, and stories.
And the culture of non-agricultural societies remained essentially unchanged, for up to thousands of years, despite having fire and stories.
Agricultural societies produced ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, various empires across the middle east, ancient China, and the various civilisations that colonised the modern world.
No non-agricultural society developed a system of writing for example.
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What I was looking at was cultural change. Fire at night meant leisure time for stories to be told. Writing meant that the stories became fixed, instead of being retold with cumulative subtle changes.
Actually writing didn't help too much there. Too unreliable in the copying, there's lots of evidence of scribes changing things to the way they wanted them to be. Mass production started to firm up the fixed nature of writing.
Agriculture and domesticated animals are the greatest colonial weapon ever. Greater than diseases, military force, boats all put together. As much as Giovanni points out, it enabled them to stay put, it also created the greatest expansion of peoples ever. Agriculture and domestic animals created excess food which created population explosion which led to movement of people to new land, and also allowed specialisation of skills, leading to many of civilisation's early technological developments. End result: numerous local populations being assimilated or removed from the face of the earth entirely. All of which, it goes without saying, involved a bit of cultural change.
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And if you want to see the All Blacks play the best advice is to not live in the South Island. The All Blacks will play in Auckland thrice, and Wellington and Hamilton.
I'm sure a few months ago they were talking about NZ playing in a NZ wide pool, so that the maximum number of NZers would get to see them.
Now we've got all the pool games in the North Island, and most likely a Chch quarter final for them. Which will cost $100+ per ticket?
And Aucklanders get three chances to see them? Are they all washing their hair two out of three Saturday nights?
If I was a person who would actually pay that much to see a live game, I'd be pissed.
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But this is not the 1930s. We're not going to have a problem with food and shelter this time.
I suspect a few agencies involved in the relief of poverty are reporting the opposite to your theory at present.
It might not get as bad, because we have a much better welfare state now. But we better believe that food banks are going to be seeing a big upturn in business.