Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Can't they just build another one?
Seriously; its not just this case which is being delayed, and when cases are delayed this much, justice is denied.
I think this large one was made by knocking out the wall between two ordinary size court rooms.
So I presume that yes they can build another large one, but each time they do that they lose one court room. So it's probably a trade off between "how many big court cases we have" vs "how many court cases do we have". If you're using a large court room for a small case, you're being inefficient.
What's crazy is that it's the room that determines when the case can go ahead. I would have thought that judges and staff would have been the scarce resource, they presumably cost more than the actual court room.
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Trial date has to wait until August next year because that's the first time that a court room of sufficient size for 18 defendants is available for 12 weeks.
Will be pushed forward if the court case or number of defendants shortens.
Crazy.
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Off topic: NZ women just lost to Australia in the 2020 final. Fantastic effort by Devine to get them with a chance to win it off the final couple of overs, but needed 5 off the last ball (4 to tie), and drove it down the field but the bowler got a partial stop.
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It takes little further thinking to connect their casual racism with the speaker, government and party that is behind them.
I thought the John Key/Cannibalism thing was a media beat up. If there was any racial angle to it, I thought that came from the media who jumped straight to 'cannibalism' because the target of the comments were Maori.
The idea that "having someone for dinner" literally means that is pretty weak.
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Except that the Round 1 mentality also leads people to put in less serious punts, so that they might get the opportunity of the second round, which is also a time-waster.
But a lottery first round would lead to even more of that. So you would have applications that are silly completing the full proposal, and I've had to work on helping an academic with a full proposal, they're a significant piece of work.
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Thirdly, I'd be inclined to weight it so the longer your name has been in the hat, the higher your chances are. Perhaps with a guaranteed entry to Round 2 after X years if your luck has been out.
But that just makes it easier for people who have been around longer.
I doubt the current first round does a good job at a assessing potential of an application (which is incredibly hard to do), but at the least it prevents people wasting time where the panel knows they wouldn't fund any full application that came to them on this topic from these people. Otherwise you might have full applications from recent graduates who have yet to get published. That's a waste of everyone's time.
I'm in favour of using a lottery to decide entry to medical school, but there the lottery works in reverse. You meet the reasonably stringent entry procedure, and then after that it's luck. You guarantee good doctors, but don't have all the stupid stuff that goes on at first year pre-med with students trying to get their average marks as high as possible, which doesn't necessarily make them better doctors.
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What I meant is that if they made the first round a random draw, it wouldn't produce discernably different outcomes with respect to quality, and there would be a great time-saving for researchers and panellists alike (ie non-monetary cost)
I'm not sure if many academics would be impressed if they were told that their application would be picked randomly to go on to the (much more extensive and hard work) second round. You might easily send the most brilliant and useful idea back because it never got looked at.
Open revolt might actually be the result.
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Still, I do have to thank The Standard for pulling off a minor miracle: Making my preternaturally laid back partner red-in-the-face angry after reading this -- apparently The Standard doesn't believe in, or care about, practical realities and are quite happy to trash people who do if there's a cheap political point to be scored.
I can't buy into the uproar about buying our trains overseas, when we buy just about everything else overseas.
I can see a valid argument for "producing this in NZ will have other benefits which should be taken into consideration as part of the tender". But if the government is going to do that it should be done across the board, not just because a bunch of people have suddenly found trains are really expensive and people like them.
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Good to have it done.
Shame that some more effort could have been put into it, rather than "oh wait, they've said sorry, now we look like the dicks".
As you note, a match between the NZ Maori and South Africa, to which ex-NZ Maori players were invited to an attached function, would have been appropriate. And it would have been a humdinger of a game too. That would have required some pre-planning however.
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I lived in the US for 20 years and largely avoided sports - but my boss had season tickets for the then new SF baseball park - I took my 9yr old son, not a baseball fan either - to watch - he was supremely bored, luckily there's a lot more going on in the stands to keep people's attention.
That was my experience too - Toronto Blue Jays vs Boston Red Sox, 2006.
Watching the drunken fans abuse each other and get tossed out, followed by the 7th innings stretch cultural experience was way more interesting than whatever was going on on the field.