Posts by Bart Janssen
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There is a conflict here.
Yes local issues should be decided by local representatives. Makes perfect sense.
But that assumes the representatives on the local councils are competent. And also assumes those same representatives are not corrupt.
Sadly given the number of councils and hence the large number of said representatives those two assumptions are highly likely to be false.
But if you amalgamate you need fewer representatives, so you have a better chance of finding competent people to fill those roles.
However, should you be so unlucky as to then fill one of those roles with an incompetent and/or corrupt representative then they can do considerably more damage to a larger number of people.
Given that fundamental conflict I don't see that worrying about dictatorship by the majority is a big issue here. It may not be particularly fair for one region to take over another but that has little bearing on whether it is a good thing to happen. Whether it turns out to be good is entirely dependent on the quality of the representatives.
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Russell Brown,
And from her former colleague, Tony Wall, also to me:
“oh for god’s sake enough of the moralising – it was just a good old fashioned yarn !”
It was only a joke and a hug ...
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Matt Fairhurst,
like a door.
But it *is* a door.
No it's a dual function door - saving valuable floor space (and hence ratepayers dollars) by combining bookshelves with door functionality.
Truly forward thinking.
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Russell Brown,
the HACK Cheryl Howie
fixed for you
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to Sacha,
How many Aucklanders own those?
pfft I do - they are shite but good enuff for my skill level :). And they were dirt cheap second hand.
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Hard News: Park Life, in reply to BenWilson,
Personally I think it would be kind of cool to have the golfers weave in and out of the areas that are used for other activities.
Until someone loses an eye.
Sure it might be a complicated puzzle to solve, but if it could be solved then it would be kind of cool. Bear in mind that no playing field is perfectly safe. Also bear in mind that Chamberlain is not a tournament class golf course so some compromises in the course are possible.
I'm sure you can come up with a couple of hundred reasons to disagree with me but I still think the idea would be cool. At the very least it would be nice to have a golf course where golfers are not completely segregated from the plebs.
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Just out of curiosity, would it be impossible to integrate the playing fields within the golf course? Yes that would mean some fences to protect people from slices and hooks. But the separation of the golf area from the rest of the public space seems to make the whole area feel exclusive (even if it isn't).
Personally I think it would be kind of cool to have the golfers weave in and out of the areas that are used for other activities.
As an aside for a few years a mate and I used to regularly bowl on down to Chamberlain at about 4pm each Friday to play for half price.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to BenWilson,
I and almost all my colleagues have rather large egos in some sense, or we wouldn’t be doing research at all.
I’ll trust you on whether that is actually so, but have to ask, do you think it’s a good thing that it is so?
It's part of the selection process. Science, by its very nature, involves constant failure. Good labs are critical environments, not nasty, and not personal, but critical of ideas and methods. Most PhDs involve periods of hard tedious work, frequently resulting in results that are unpublishable.
For better or worse (and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it) you don't get through a PhD and continue in research without a fairly large slice of self-belief and ego.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to BenWilson,
You could publish directly onto the internet at no more cost than the effort of setting up the site.
Sadly that isn't true. My employer, a CRI, has very specific policies about staff web sites. It's a matter some considerable annoyance to me that my colleagues and collaborators in Universities have personal web pages hosted by the university that describe them and their work. Whereas my employer is uncomfortable with such pages - sigh.
Also you are forgetting about who pays for the work, no funding agency would accept a self-published web page as an outcome from their grant money and if that was my only outcome I could kiss goodbye any future funding. It simply would not be acceptable.
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Speaker: Market failure in the research world, in reply to Mark C. Wilson,
It is perhaps field-dependent
Very much so. The "hard sciences" are way ahead of us in that respect.
I don't begrudge some of the fee because it costs money to have could copy editors and good admin staff at a journal. But some journals are milking it.