Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Genter's Bill: Starting at…, in reply to Sacha,
In terminal conditions, withholding treatment because of potential long-term harms does not make sense.
Yeah no question about that and I don't think you'd see any issue from doctors.
if they're treating something like say chronic epilepsy rather than cancer pain. Many may opt to avoid it.
The way it reads any chronic pain would qualify, at that point it becomes much more problematic to prescribe something that doesn't have pretty rigorous definitions and quality control.
To be clear, personally I'm all in favour of getting rid of prohibition. I can't see any real difference between alcohol and smoking and marijuana use. Removing prohibition would allow real clinical trials to be undertaken for the medical uses, something sadly absent for most of the claims of medical value.
I just think this amendment is too mixed up to make any progress.
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I can't see this flying in any way.
If you want Doctors to prescribe a drug, even a natural product drug, then you need to control production, establish quality and safety standards, set up a regulatory authority to manage testing and all the bureaucracy that goes with any other drug. And frankly burning it and inhaling vapors is just not going to fly for anything other than a terminal illness.
But basically the bill wants to make it OK for anyone to grow and self treat. Which no doctor is going to want to be responsible for because how the hell is the doctor going to be sure they aren't "doing harm".
Either you go for a genuinely medicinal bill and do it properly, or you legalise, but trying to do both in one amendment, yeah nah.
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Hard News: Stupidity and ignorance have…, in reply to Hugh Wilson,
Someone will hopefully present a more thorough exposition than me in coming days, but think of US car manufacturers (is retaining petrol/diesel models viable? will they produce to European standards?)
All US car manufacturers will build to meet Californian standards which are as good as anywhere. California is the biggest internal market for almost everything in the US so what Trump says is largely irrelevant.
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Hard News: Rugby Now, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Even though the super rugby teams have been around for 21 years now, they have never really commanded the sort of fanatical parochial passion that the provinces did/have.
That was deliberate. The provincial teams were always tied to a place. When the super teams were created they were given identities that were independent of location. This allows for a super team to move location without loss of identity and most importantly allows the team to be SOLD.
I'm sure some suit wearer at union headquarters had wet dreams about selling The Crusaders to Los Angeles.
However, as you note people are passionate about their local team not some anonymous super team.
So the Union abandoned local passion for the pipe dream of selling franchises.
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For me the problem isn't Sky, although I can see how restricting viewing based on wealth is a good way to reduce passion about a sport.
For me the problem is, I find rugby boring now. Part of it is too much rugby. Part of it is the utterly ridiculous dominance of rugby reporting, we could have 10 world champs in a day but the lead story is some rugby player sprained his ankle or got married or got drunk.
But also the game is different now. I used to watch passionately, I used to follow the ebb and flow of the game, I used to know who the players and teams were and what their weaknesses and strengths were - but for some reason the game doesn't engage me now. When I put a game on the big screen I end up wandering off to do something else. The game itself feels clumsy and disjointed.
Beats me why.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Relevant: at The Spinoff Gareth Shute talks to Dr David Galler about health, housing and the current "chaos of social policies".
Wonderful piece.
"they just piss around at the margins and it will ultimately be really ineffective in dealing with the big issues"
tell us what you really think :)
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And having mentioned Ms Swarbrick, one has to look at the young women at the top of The Green party list and think maybe this party is going to bring something different to the beehive.
Perhaps even policies guided by a longer term vision than simply protecting the earnings of the businesses that donated the most.
It will depend on the policies but it is such a relief to see so few old white men (speaking here as an old white man).
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
And these ideas are hard to get into sound-bites so aspiring politicians are less likely to 'perform' well in the media
That is an interesting point and something of a dogma.
I agree that for the last two decades or so "the media" has meant TV broadcast at 6 pm and packaged into stories at most two minutes long.
Successful politicians became good at short bites, broad smiles, confident delivery.
But the times they are a-changing. A lot of folks, particularly younger voters use vastly different media. They can and do read longer pieces. They look at videos where the time limit is however long it engages their interest and not determined by the next ad break.
I wonder if we are not close to, if not already seeing, a change. Are there enough younger voters to allow a politician that communicates in whole paragraphs and explains a policy in an 8 minute video to gather enough votes? Are those younger voters tired of the gotcha political journalist and more interested in the whole story?
I don't think we are there yet, but look at what Chloe Swarbrick did in the Auckland mayoral campaign, she engaged a group of people who didn't normally vote, mostly with long answers not soundbites.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Neil,
Any form of wealth redistribution by the State can be viewed as a subsidy. The State paying for the building of social housing is subsidising building companies and the employers of those who will either rent or buy those homes. Free GP visits are a subsidy to GPs.
That doesn't have to be true.
You can tax all wealth gaining incomes, that would in effect redistribute wealth from the rich since they have many more tax-free wealth gaining options than the poor do.
You can raise the minimum wage. That puts more money in the hands of the poor by forcing businesses to pay appropriately for labour. That also takes money usually from the rich.
But yes some things are subsidies if you want to look at them that way. Free education effectively subsidises education for the poor since the rich can always afford private schooling. Similarly for health care.
The question is, "why would that be a bad thing?"
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Paul Conway,
NZ workers do some of the longest hours in the OECD. They (we!) just don't create much value from an hour at work compared to workers in other developed countries. So our wages are low and lots of NZers struggle to pay the bills.
This I agree with. Except I think you have the cause and effect ass-backwards
The low productivity environment is set up by low minimum wages not the other way around. Low wages support businesses that are inefficient. Low wages are a disincentive for the workers to work better as opposed to longer.
I did read the document.
Sorry but I'm feeling negative because this is depressing. I feel so much of our (your) focus is on helping businesses perform better but the actual people doing the work are not a focus. There is the assumption that if the business performs better then the workers will benefit - but nowhere is that enacted or enforced.
I'd really like to see a stronger focus on the actual workers, not just importing better ones via immigration but figuring out how to structure things so that the worker has a reason (and mechanism) to improve their own productivity.
All that said, some of the problem is our focus on incredibly low productivity industries like primary produce and tourism, both of which are terrible in terms of productivity per worker/hour.