Posts by linger
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Hard News: Has Iran found an effective…, in reply to linger,
A personal update: After a delay of two years, largely because of the pandemic, I have finally retired and relocated to New Zealand permanently. Now to work out how to join the NZ health system and get a booster! (I was vaccinated in Japan, but administration was left up to local municipalities, and annoyingly, my city-issued "vaccination passport" is not recognised as valid here.)
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For me, the word of the year was ... Exile.
I've been stuck in limbo in Japan since March 2020 (when I was called back from NZ despite classes then going online-only for the rest of the year, no I'm not bitter at all about that...). Eventually announced my retirement last May, effective at the end of the school year, taking a punt that returning to NZ (this time, permanently) might be possible by March. And so it seems, though the timing will be dicey: it will be almost 6 months since my 2nd vaccination at that stage, but Japan is still delaying boosters until after 8 months.
[Retirement was already necessary for a number of reasons, and has already been postponed a year by Covid; *still* got barbed comments about abandoning my department.] -
...Though as seen in the past month, unofficial distribution channels are also emerging as an effective vector for spreading Covid, since they are not easily brought within an official track-and-trace system.
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Any opinion on whether I/S's example of the proposed law being applicable to a political party's election campaign is realistic?
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Legal Beagle: Submission on the…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Automatic numbering in Word does suck. (presumably the sequence is supposed to be … 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, … 18, 19, 20, … 24, (still 24), 2-->25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, (ignore the blank line), 31, …)
Proofing notes (mostly trivial):
2 [=12]. "Has it proposed change arisen" --> "… its …" or "…the…"
15. at first sight looks redundant, but from what follows, presumably means something like 'not only do the acts carried out fall short of the current definition of a terrorist act, but the acts attempted fall short of the definition of attempting to commit a terrorist act' (a distinction between planning and carrying a plan through to completion)?
17. "it cover" --> "it covers"? (or is a modal verb missing?)
22. "by including situation" --> "by including situations"?
24. "creating Each offence should have its own section" --> "creating a new section for each offense"
7 [=30]. "what is intended to be cover " --> "…covered"
"threating" --> "threatening"
33. "consider with" --> "consider within" -
It is the same thing, if you consider establishing a working public healthcare system as infrastructure parallel to (and – in the sense that NOT doing it incurs even more expense – with a stronger case than) building your bridge.
In the healthcare system, paying a wage sufficient to retain staff is part of the expenditure necessary for maintaining the level of service the public relies on.
Do you really advocate building your bridge and then not budgetting anything for maintenance, so that it falls apart after people have started using it?
The borrowing vs. not borrowing distinction is specious because it's entirely determined by what and who the government has decided not to tax. -
Hard News: Family Matters: a post about 2020, in reply to ,
As Ben Goldacre has pointed out, the drug company argument that they need to price-gouge because of Massive R&D Costs in producing new drugs! ... is hard to maintain when their R&D budget is dwarfed by their marketing expenditure.
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Hard News: A picture of official…, in reply to Regan Cunliffe,
Little of substance indeed. :-/
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Speaker: New Zealand’s far-right hate…, in reply to Carl Bromley,
(i) Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences of the content of your speech. You can say what you like; but you can still be shunned as a result.
(ii) Freedom of speech does not mean you have the right to use any particular platform without regard to its rules of use. You can say what you like; but you can still be banned and/or your content deleted as a result.
(iii) "it seems you are seeking to incite": Citation needed. What violent or unlawful action is being called for? Or are you just seeking to smear? -
I imagine Pfizer and other drug companies are wary about dealing with India because of that country's history of successfully undercutting Big Pharma's price-gouging with generics. To meet the demand, there's going to have to be some vaccine production within India under license as part of the deal, and that does pose some commercial risk for the company. But I also imagine the practicalities of responding to a pandemic should see a reasonable deal reached. The whole point is that no country should be left behind, otherwise the pandemic continues with fresh mutations requiring further vaccine updates and … oh, wait.
It's weird having morally dubious profit-seeking companies cast as the saviours of the species.