Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I took Mark's main point was that the survey was asking people what they would do in response to a warning notice, rather than looking at evidence of what people actually did do.
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The problem is that dietary habits are difficult to change and at the moment it's a very middle class hobby it seems. But it doesn't have to be.
Are there any instances in modern times of a country making a significant shift in its diet to address health issues?
I mean NZ is (upcoming generalisation) a meat and three vege country. If we wanted to shift that to a more diverse diet, which was both healthy and low cost how would you go about it? Beyond what governments are doing at the moment which is advertising and healthy living campaigns and whatever else?
Diet is often built up on hundreds/thousands of years of culture, and I suspect it's a titanic shift to push it along to change much faster than it happens naturally.
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Just don't assume anything you read in the paper is true unless you have other evidence.
But it would be nice to have the expectation that almost all that was reported in the newspaper or on the TV news was 'true', just by nature of being news.
I'm a healthy cynic when something sounds dubious, and I'll check elsewhere to find out if that's the case. But "don't believe everything you read/hear" seems like not putting the onus on the media to do a pretty important part of their job.
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This particular fact really irks me. Do we actually need to have "it's wrong to hit girls" enshrined in our law? Can't we just agree that hitting *anyone* is wrong?
I think it's a product of its time.
At the time of the Crimes Act (1961?), to record statistics about domestics was probably ahead of its time. There may have been other reasons for the separate crime of course.
It's since been taken over by changes to ways the police approach domestic violence in the 1990s. All domestic incidents are recorded as such, and each police region (at least they used to in the mid-90s) has a Domestic Violence Coordinator that tracks these things. There's an additional form that the police have to fill in which gets added to the file which covers the domestic violence aspects of it.
It could probably be removed from the Crimes Act, but a major rewrite of the Crimes Act would be a serious job, and I'm not sure anyone is convinced that overall it's so out of date to make it worthwhile. Also, it's proven much easier to tack things onto it via new sentencing bills that target the political issues of the day.
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It doesn't have to, is all I'm saying. Things could be done to change that.
Yes. And there's a fair bit of effort going on to do that already.
But I'm not sure pointing overseas and saying "look, it works over there" is the easy answer. Food is very cultural, and we're not all suddenly going to adopt Asian food culture just because we hit a recession. We need to adapt NZ food culture, and we also need to recognise that poverty has negative health consequences in all sorts of ways, including diet.
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I should back that up with some links:
The [[www.cpag.org.nz/resources/publications/res1123805616.pdf|Child Poverty Action Group 'Hard to Swallow:
Foodbank use in New Zealand' (2005)The minimum amount required to feed the family a basic healthy diet for a week is $104. A moderate healthy diet will cost $134, and a liberal one $162. (pp 43 - 44)
(see the table on page 44 for the same information across a range of people from a University of Otago study).
The final paragraph from that section:
Hence, it is not surprising that low-income people are at greater risk of obesity. When income is limited, hunger must be satisfied cheaply. High fat, high sugar foods provide immediate satisfaction. Tomorrow’s health problems are for tomorrow to worry about. For the 20% of households that can afford to eat properly only sometimes, cheap fatty foods will, in most cases be the standby. “If you haven't got enough money it's easy to make the wrong choices. When you go to the supermarket to buy the equivalent in calories in fresh food and fatty, starchy food, you have to spend a lot more money to get the fresh food…Why do you have to spend more money at McDonald's for a salad than a Big Mac?'' (McFadden, 2005).
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Less employment could lead to more cooking instead of eating out and buying ready-made, pre-processed stuff. I keep saying this - the Mediterranean diet I was happily born into is dirt cheap to shop for and (if you believe the experts) pretty damn good for you. Ditto a number of Asian cuisines I am told.
That's a lovely theory, and indeed I know a couple of people who follow that.
But I think the NZ experience is that less money means a worse diet overall.
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I run on this principle: make it very VERY simple to read. The problem, I feel, tends to be caveats and definitions. Nearly all data comes with them and they aren't the easiest things to make palatable.
Police statistics are weird, and often not particularly useful.
They for example have a common assault charge, and a 'man assaults woman' charge. Often the latter is used in the media as some indication of domestic assault.
However a bunch of domestic assaults end up in the common assault charge, and a bunch of non-domestics end up in the man assaults woman charge. There isn't much consistency as to where two similar events fall.
Despite this they're often reported in the media as gospel, and then once they're misreported, it's a mess squared.
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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?
Actually, it was based on 2 decades in public service administering subsidies, but please don't let the facts get in your way.Where it did or didn't come from wasn't my point. My point was, it was standard free market response to the idea of subsidies, and conflicted terribly with the first sentence.
From the same book of quotes as "I'm not a feminist, but I do believe..."
You are not going to hold the tide back by standing on a rock and telling it to "go back".
Actually I think in some areas 'we' will. There's no viable market in NZ for a symphony orchestra, the government throws it money every year.
I'm quite happy with holding back that tide, and a few others. If the government was to open up discussion of a different method of rewarding copyright holders than via the sale of their product, that'd be interesting to hear about.
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But we shall see, if I'm wrong it would hardly be disastrous for the nation to have to cut back how much it eats.
I think you'll find that less money doesn't mean less food - people still get hungry and want to fill their bellies. It'll mean less quality food. Cheaper meat, less fresh fruit and vegetables, and downgrading from the brands with less fat and more fibre, to 'basic' type brands which are lesser in quality. People will stretch their budgets while still putting as much food in their trolley.