Posts by BenWilson
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Does anyone know what "Judeo-Christian values" are?
I don't think it's an entirely meaningless phrase, even if it is very, very vague. I think the phrase tends to be used as a contrast rather than as a list. It's a bit like 'European'. Clearly not meaningless, but hard to define. I think it's not a set, it's a property, which you can have in varying degrees. The world is not divided into Judeo-Christians and not-Judeo-Christians. Instead, everyone has a level of Judeo-Christianity. This level could be 0% or 100%, but I don't think you'd have to be 100% for anyone to say you had Judeo-Christian values. I, for instance, am bitter on slavery just like Christians have always been (with individual aberrations of course). But I'm agnostic. So I have some level of Judeo-Christianity about me.
I think the values are so deeply ingrained it's often hard to recognize them. I think charity is a good thing, but I couldn't say why I thought that, or how I came to - it's just something that's revered in the society I find myself in. Similarly with my dislike of permitting suicide. Intellectually I think suicide should be allowed, but find it very hard to get my heart to agree with my brain on it.
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Ultimately I think a strong fundamentalist Christian party serves mostly to split the vote from the wingnuts. So it hits the likes of Dunne and ACT the hardest. But this particular bunch look like they'll only be hitting themselves (and probably their children).
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My Nana thought he <i>wasn't</i> a terrorist. But they'd never put *that* on the TV.
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Choice, all one has to do to get on the news is make a redneck post on Kiwiblog.
And Greenspan rags on Bush for being too soft on Congress trying to rush appropriations bills through??? wtf is that guy on? I know Reserve Bank Chairmen are deliberately apolitical (within the bounds of constantly plugging neocon economics in the case of Greenspan), but come on, man. Bush wanted all that expenditure, his team was behind it. To depict him as irresponsible for failing to bring Congress to heel is getting the right answer for all the wrong reasons.
I think Greenspan genuinely can't face that George W Bush is a direct consequence of his own world view.
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Anyway, back to the topic. Who is Redbaiter?
He's his own imaginary friend. Everyone needs a friend.
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Is that code for unemployed? Not at all surprised.
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Redbaiter is an artist.
He is. His art is timewasting. I'm actually surprised he's died down in the end. He must have clicked to my deeper game of wasting the timewaster's time. I was reinstalling software, running long compiles and playing civilization at the same time, so the portion of my time he got didn't stop anything important.
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Heh, love NRT's description of bloggers "sad bastard at computer keyboard picks nose, has opinion". Can't say that MSM opinion seems much more deep than that, ...
Mind you, is it sadder to sit at the keyboard picking your nose and not having an opinion? I don't think there's much in that one either. At least if you have an idiotic opinion, people will tell you on the blogosphere. If you keep it to yourself you can spend your whole life as an idiot and never know.
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Robyn, I'm only guessing, of course.
Leigh, the angry truck drivers all wanted a piece of me until they saw me. Then they wanted someone bigger to have a piece of me for them. But when I put maps in their hands every day they calmed down a lot, except for the ones who couldn't read.
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Tom, keep at it. It'll be useful, even if it's never perfect. Human directions and guesses are certainly no less prone to error.
I feel your pain on the data capture. I spent 4 weeks on my hands and knees labelling and measuring the first customer's stuff (hence the data entry error described above). With mapping software it got easier (and eventually it became part of the product), but this was over 10 years ago when the satellite maps were much more expensive and less extensive. Then there was the live running of the system, when headaches like road closures, bridge washouts, roads too narrow for big trucks but not small ones, questions of turning around, roads which it was safe to carry an empty load over but not a full one, etc which basically were handed over to the guys the software was meant (by management, not by me) to replace. But at the end of the day they had to admit it has saved them a lot of money, and the mapping software itself was a huge hit, especially when I added printouts of the actual route onto the schedule. The drivers went from hating me and calling me a f*cking kiwi c*nt (this was in Ozzie) to loving me overnight. Furthermore that drove out a lot of the craziness in the schedules as they saw that the system was using roads that didn't exist or were not roads, etc, and sent in those corrections every day.
A very interesting software project, that. It broke me, to be honest. I bedded down the three main regions in Victoria, then quit for an easy job in a stockbroker with a big pay rise and half the workload.
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