Posts by Lucy Stewart
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And, Lucy Stewart, I also wonder why 'fur' and not 'leather'...I'm sure as shit not going to abandon my possum& merino socks & jerseys - or my wonderful jacket lined with 12 of the little... Oz imports-
One wonders if perhaps people associate "fur" with, say, "dalmatian puppies" enough to have skewed the answer. But like you say - the stuff is hardly rejected in our day-to-day lives...
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Thing that sprang out to me: abortion is considered very significantly more acceptable than wearing fur. That's...I don't even know what to think about that. (I mean, yay on the abortion stat, but...what happened to our hunting culture? Possum fur? Surely we're all good with possum fur? No?)
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Anyone who has marked uni assignments/exams recently will know that the universities are full of people who shouldn't be there.
Best way is with alcohol. Easier on you, easier on them. Or harder, but possibly that's just me.
I think anyone over 18 should be considered an adult and prosecuted as such.
They are prosecuted as such. If they're prosecuted. Thing is, there is a place for diversion; I just think it needs to be applied fairly and evenly.
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According to this survey of household electricity prices most consumers pay between 22c and 28c per kWh. Let's be generous again and say 30c/kWh.
Holy shit, really? And I thought we were being stung during winter at 21c. I don't even want to think about what our power bills would have been at 28c.
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People have suggested going elsewhere, but one of the problems with NZ is that there are very few places to go.
I would pay good money to see them go to, ooooh. Hokitika. The Alps would kill most of the cars, but that would be half the amusement factor. Finishing would actually be an achievement.
ETA: Magic!
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So, I suspect that there's confusion between actual drop-out rates and frequency with which minds are changed between enrolment and graduation.
I suspect so. My partner started out in engineering and will end up with a PGDip or Master's in COSC, which is not a huge leap but still not finishing the degree he enrolled for, and I know a lot of similar stories (especially around engineering.) OTOH, I know enough people who did drop out to make me believe the true figure might be closer to 50% than you'd think.
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The problem is that the Undie itself is a fine thing --- I mean, watching them all set off, there's skill and ingenuity and fun in the cars; it's the drunken idiots in (and from!) Dunedin that fuck it up, and they should have the book thrown at them, but it really isn't fair to punish Canterbury engineering students because Dunedin has a dysfunctional culture.
They had more police than students at the send-off, and banned egg-throwing and water-guns. Rioting is a problem, but water-guns? There was a certain degree of paranoia there.
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If I had have know university entrants could be this thick, I might have felt better about not attempting my school certificate.
The last statistic I heard was that 50% of uni entrants did not finish their degrees (although I don't know whether this was "the degree they entered to do", in which case it would include a lot of people who finished *a* degree nevertheless.) However, anecdata suggests this is pretty accurate. Uni is a bit of a dumping ground for the young and aimless these days, and I don't know it's very helpful.
30 years ago 6 weeks of work paid for the years bed and breakfast. Not any more.
Also depends strongly on whether you're paying for bed and board during that six weeks or not. If I went home to my parents' and worked full-time all summer I could earn most of what I needed to live for the year. Pity it's just not practical.
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Seems to me that rich kids are no more, no less likely to drink and do stupid things than others in society. At university and other tertiary institutions, the drinking just gets a bit more organised. This isn't, for me, a moral tale of privilege but of the role alcohol plays in our society's ideas of fun.
Maybe so, but I challenge you to imagine those same images of riot on the streets of South Auckland. Would anyone be entertaining for even a fraction of a second the idea that it was all just a bit of good fun? Would there have been several years in which participants got off with diversion?
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What's intrinsically "natural" about imaginary made-up bullshit?
Call it another modus tollens (thank you Jack) - Science = Unnatural, imaginary made-up bullshit = Not Science, therefore Not Unnatural. Science is logical and also provable, but stuff like homeopathy feels right. It's one of the most infuriating things about humanity at large.
Not that I object to anyone paying for the placebo effect, but given the scorn lavished on the medical system by "alternative" practitioners - which can often lead to people not getting healthcare they actually need - it can be outright dangerous.