Posts by andrea quin
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Ben, basically your argument is that the mall is easy cos you can drive there, they have lots of nice carparks and there aren't nasty "random obstacles" around the place.
It's not surprising that it is easy to get to in a car, placed as it is near a motorway and next to major arterial roads. At busy periods, these roads are pretty much at capacity. With the induced demand of a double-sized mall and an additional 2000 carparks (it takes a whole motorway lane an hour to move 2000 cars) , these roads will at capacity much more of the time and many of the surrounds will be overcapacity -- maybe that'll just encourage calls for a widening of the motorway there. All these extra cars will make it hard to improve public transport in the area -- how can you put a bus-lane in along St Lukes road if it always full of cars? And it is not a choice to drive, it is the design of the place being poorly connected by bus and rail (unlike any of the other malls in the region, including Manukau, New Lynn, Henderson, Sylvia Park etc).
Development is not necessarily crap --- intensification of the CBD or real town centres (as opposed to corporate owned monopolies) brings more people in, creates a cool vibe, encourages interesting bars, restaurants, cafes, arts institutions etc. It also allows for proper public space so that normal civic stuff can happen there -- protests, meetings, fairs, markets, hanging about and playing. They are more efficient, more varied A mall is a private space designed to be bland, non-threatening and basically single-purpose.
Sure, malls have a function, it can be handy to have all those shops in one place, under one roof. But put it in a place where people can easily access without a car and where people might want to be for some other reason than simply being at the mall. That's the point here, it is not just anti-mall hysteria or nimbyism, it is the fact that this locks the whole area into a really shitty cycle of shitty development.
And never heard of any cyclists killed in a mall? Huh, I bet no-one drivng there ever killed anyone either, or put anyone off cycling. Come to think of it, remarkably few cyclists are killed on motorways either. Stupid argument.
Try reading this excellent post at Auckland Transport blog that thoroughly catalogues the planning disaster that is St Lukes Mall.
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Well, actually, you can make a web link to any item on the iTunes Store
He didn't state it that clearly, but obviously he means that while you can make a link, the link is useless to those without itunes software. All those people who bought beatles downloads necessarily had the software, no?
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Looking at the news today reminds me: Wikileaks.
Edit: Snap.
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Liquefaction
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Cracker: Gone Fushin’, in reply to christopher brown,
Christopher, you'd have to ask others that -- some people seem to like "releasing" them, others stuff them, others measure them. My point, I think, was that that seemed like an awful lot of fish for 3 people to eat but Damian has said he gave much of it away and that it was a rare event anyway.
And I think you should check out the impact of recreational fishers on fish populations -- it is really hard to measure the recreational take, but fisheries estimate somewhere between 1500 and 6000 tonnes of snapper are taken by non-commercial fishers annually from the Hauraki/east northland/BOP area. Bag limits (and commercial quotas) have been steadily reduced over the years to try to replensih the fishery but it is still highly stressed.
You might say that on its own, that non-commercial take would be sustainable and the depletion is due to the commercial take, but there is only one population and it doesnt care whether it is being plundered for money, recreation or genuinely hungry mouths.
While Damian claims to have reasonable faith in the quota management system, I'd say it generally considers the seas as a commercial resource to be managed for maximum exploitation and is not sufficiently well informed by good research (because such work is very hard and expensive). I'd like to see a lot more marine reserves around the country (50% of the coast?) to protect and regenerate this incredible ecosystem. It might even make the fishing better...
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Cracker: Gone Fushin’, in reply to Damian Christie,
I know, it is a tough one. In some ways it seems to epitomize sustainability to go out on a little boat with a rod and catch your own dinner. Certainly many of the problems with fishing are avoided in this way -- no long-lines, no trawling, no dolphin by-catch. But in Forest and Bird's Best Fish Guide (pdf) they point out that snapper stocks are still under serious threat and recreational fishers may contribute significantly to that. Maybe your mate's fishing charter might want to target something else over the summer....
But seeing a sunfish! How cool.
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Nice fish and all that, but the profligacy of it all makes me a little queasy. Are you fishing up to your catch limit just so you can eat snapper for breakfast?
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For some reason, 30 comments per page doesn't seem like enough now. How about 50?
And just in case no-one has noticed, the audio posts aren't working yet. Error message says:
The page at http://publicaddress.net says:
jPlayer 1.2.0 : id='jquery_jplayer3' : Error!
Problem with Flash component.
Check the swfPath points at the Jplayer.swf path.
swfPath = /publicaddress/static/js
url: /publicaddress/static/js/Jplayer.swf
Error: self._getMovie().fl_play_mp3 is not a function -
That article about Records Records is grim reading -- sounds like they are left with nothing decent in the way of music retailing down there now. A Marbecks? The Disk Den?
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What, you have the world's best computer chip technology recording your time but you don't even report it? You can even adjust for all those walkers who held you up if it is that bad...