Posts by Kyle Matthews
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The Russians would go on to lose in any case (far more entertaining was the bronze medal match between the US and Finland: Suomi voitti).
You're nuts. The game went into overtime and then umpteen rounds in the shootout after teams were tied after 3 shooters. The Americans kept on putting TJ Oshie out there to take their shots and he scored four times on the shootout and made himself a national hero. Best game of the tournament apart from the USA-Canada womens final.
The whole game had an undertone because it was a replay of The Miracle game from the 1980 Olympics when US college amateurs beat the Russian team and went on to win gold.
You don't follow ice hockey by trying to see the puck, it's too small. Watch where the players skate and you'll soon figure out what's happening with 3 inches of rubber.
It's even faster when you're on the ice.
You can watch the NZ league livestream here: http://new.livestream.com/nzihl.
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As for the stadium which apparently we’re committed to: ask anyone from Dunedin about their covered stadium. Last year the people of Dunedin subsidised 93% of its rates. What a winner.
Still a contentious issue down here, and no one is particularly happy with the cost and how the figure slowly creeps up.
But plenty of people are really happy with the stadium and glad it was built. There might be different priorities in terms of what should come first, but Christchurch should definitely build a covered stadium somewhere in the queue. I would almost never go to events at Carisbrook, but I've been several times to the new stadium, and it kicked everyone's butts at the Rugby World Cup.
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For test cricket they know for certain that they will get a couple of thousand at best, essentially they know they will make no money from gate sales maybe $5-10000.
I wonder if someone at NZC has done the figures comparing the amount of money from ticket sales from an incoming Indian test tour, vs the share of TV hosting rights - said to be $35 million for this tour.
I mean, if improving the test cricket environment by filling up the stadium with 10 - 20,000 people meant an extra million or two in cut from TV rights in the next tour, that would be worth letting everyone in for gold coin donation on this tour and missing out on a couple of hundred grand at best.
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Looked pretty clear that she came over to the media first to give them a few quotes and pictures, then went over to sign some autographs and have photos with fans, and then went to catch her taxi and get ready to perform in front of 10,000 fans that evening.
Diva must have been redefined when I wasn't looking. Seems like everyone got what was reasonable, unless they happened to be standing between her and a camera.
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and dairy farmers want to make a shedload of cash. they’ll absorb the cost, push it onto consumers, and keep doing it.
the theory goes that consumers will push back and consume less milk. but… like petrol it’s something we just grump about, then pay for. look at the butter/cheese kerfuffle when fonterra starting ramping up international prices. people complained, and now we’ve all adjusted and just keep buying it.
The point of taxing this bad thing isn't just to increase the cost and not affect behaviour. It's to increase the cost and 1. make doing it better have a financial incentive, and 2. make doing other things which aren't as bad look better financially in comparison.
So I don't think we should be looking for 'less milk'. Ideally we want milk produced in a better way (Bart's non-burping grass/cows) is a good example). Making it that way will be taxed less so there's the incentive. So if you resow all your pastures in non-burping grass, you don't get levied.
Whether or not that's possible or effective is another question.
If scientists were some kind of sainted caste whose training required them to maintain a priestly detachment from mundane concerns that might be of more than passing interest. As you’ve made it clear from your postings here, they’re largely barnacles on the economic boat.
Well that's not fair. Most scientists are just trying to do a decent job and make a decent salary. If the government provided a decent funding system for that, many would happily work for them, and follow many scientists who have released their results into the public domain.
If we don't support publicly funded science then we push their work towards Monsanto and other less than savory organisations. If you want scientists to work on solutions to the world's problems such as climate change, fund climate change science and let them come up with a bunch of options and then we can choose which to pursue. Given how crap the world has been at dealing with the problem to date, I'm not sure we can close any GMO doors on principle.
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If leaving it to the market worked, wouldn’t some other country have tried it?
I'm not saying 'just leave it to the market'. Just I think that if the government created an environment where it was an option for a second Pay TV provider to come in and compete, we'd suddenly find ourselves getting better service/price out of sky.
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or regulation, like other countries have.
You could do. I guess I don't really see why a competitor in the market wouldn't fix most of these problems. Maybe it's impractical in such a small market for a second company to invest in the content in a significant way.
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That’s like a record company claiming singles would cost the same as albums if people were allowed to buy them separately.
Up until a few years ago, you couldn't buy most of the songs on the album individually, the only ones you could buy individually were the two or three that have been released as singles.
Clearly as a business model it works much better for Sky to pile most of the channels together in packages, and only open a few things up for individual sale. It's not like music where the customer can just move onto a different band. The situation is only going to change in any substantial way when we get competition in the pay tv market.
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Any chance you have a link or citation for the Canadian study on fatal crashes? An odds ratio of 40 sounds quite close to 5*8 (odds for cannabis * odds for alcohol), suggesting that either no interaction was included in the model, or that the interaction was small or non-significant, which would be an interesting result.
I had a second think about this, and I don't think it can just be a multiplier. Example:
If for any drive you have a 1% chance of an accident. If cannabis makes that 5 times more likely, you have a 5%. Alcohol makes it 8 times more likely so that's 8%.
To figure out the multiplier of the two, you don't multiply 5% by 8%. You multiply 1-n. So that's 95% by 92%. Which is 87.4% - your chance of not having an accident while under both. Under a multiplier with a base of 1% you have a 12.6% of having an accident while under both.
That's 12.6 times as likely, not 40 times as likely.
If you redo it with a base of 0.1% (probably much more accurate, you have an accident every thousand times you drive), 99.5% times 99.2% = 98.7%. 1.3% chance of being affected by both, so 13 times as likely (there's some rounding taking place there).
So it's either incredibly basic maths fail, or there's something else going on.
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Then various orientation tours – what year was it that the lemon heads headlined?
1993. Though at Otago I thought Muttonbirds were better. They had just released Nature the year before and smashed it on stage.
My first real concert was Elton John at Mt Smart in 1992 - Dad loves him.
But after 1993 orientation my first great gig experience was Faith No More at Sammy's in Dunedin. From a time when largeish bands used to actually come to more than two places in NZ. Borrowed my flatmates drivers licence to get in - he was a 27 year old Iranian with different colour hair and eyes. Luckily I wasn't ID'd having just turned 18.