Posts by Rob Hosking
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This informed consent stuff goes way too far, I reckon. They should just tell you what their intention is, give you the relative risks and consequences, and then if you'd really love to hear all about the butchery that's involved you could, you know, ask them
Yeah. I'm a Mac user, in this as in other things. Don't bug me with how it works, just make it go, and make it look reasonably nice.
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Yep, what pretty much everyone said. Good luck.
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Overcome momentarily by an inappropriate Five Go Mad flash.
Gosh. You're so mature, Sacha...
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OK, my Christchurch little old ladies story: it was February 1990, I was hitching north from the junction at Belfast. The sesqui had just happened, it was a great summer despite the recession, and I was returning from what was the best tramping trip of my life.
Ushi, a German visitor, was also hitching a lift from the same spot - she was a marine biology student and was off to see the whales at Kaikoura.
Thumbs out, cars whizzing past. This little Hillman Imp with two old dears in the front goes past. They won't do hitch-hikers, I think.
Wrong. They pull over, urge us both to hop in.
After the formalities the one in the passenger seat gets out a letter to read to us. Its from the Queen. She reckons they are regular correspondents. I'm wondering if she's about to tell us Napoleon is a great-uncle as well, although I suspect she would regard Napoleon as horribly common.
She is also under the impression I'm German as well and you know how once someone makes a mistake like that it can be rude to correct them?
Anyway I'm not too sure about her hold on reality and I'm just glad she's not the one driving. It emerges she was some sort of lady-in-waiting for one of the old governors-general - Bernard Fergusson, I think - met the Queen during one of the Royal Tours, and they hit it off. As you do.
So she reads us the letter. It did have corgis in it, I remember that.
Then she gets on about our then-current governor general - Dame Cath Tizard. Tizard had just been featured on 'This is Your Life' and when Bob Parker popped up with The Book she'd turned to him and said 'You Bastard' - all this being broadcast.
These two were still in shock over this, the one with the letter in particular.
Then they got on about "the Maoris' and how most of them couldn't read. And they all left school at 12. And...well, I'm politically pretty conservative, certainly compared to most folk posting here, but I'm no racist, and I'm trying to suggest this might be wrong, and trying to do it in a vaguely almost German accent.
Ushi, I have to say, is visibly thinking this is all hilarious.
When they got onto Winston Peters having "risen above being a Maori" the atmosphere of suppressed hysteria in the car almost levitated the Hillman Imp off the road.
We got dropped at the Hanmer turnoff. It was a relief to be able to actually laugh, out in the fresh air.
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But I doubt I'd ever get stopped anyway - pulling people over seldom seems to happen any more, unless you're really asking for it. The cops are either too busy or too lazy.
[splutter] Not where I've been driving, mate. I know I do a lot of long distance stuff but I see it a lot. And have experienced it twice over the past year.
Although at least the last cop, in north Canterbury, was decent enough - as he wrote out the ticket - to tell me roughly where the next cop would be.
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The head of philosophy at Oxford in the Edwardian era used to tell his students that nothing they would learn would be of the slightest use to them in life, except the ability to work out whether someone was talking "rot".
Admittedly that was before post-modernism, but it is still not a bad description of what a good philosophy degree should do.
And I don't think you need to go to uni to learn that: the two best detectors of 'rot' I've ever known (both journalists) have never darkened the door of a tertiary institution in their lives, at least not as students.
My own parents were profoundly ambivalent about me attending University - no-one in my family had done so previously, and although they were assured I was bright enough they had the uneasy conviction university was a haven of Silly Things. And since I already had an attraction towards numerous things in that category they weren't too sure I should be encouraged.
The relief when I was accepted for journalism, at a good old fashioned down to earth Polytech, was pretty strong.
I later went to Uni, and pursued many Silly Things, not all of them female students.
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Just a point about Lomborg: he was never a climate change opponent.
I think this is another case of people choosing to demonise someone without bothering to go to the trouble of looking at what they're saying.
He queried whether the methods of dealing with climate change were best suited to dealing with the issue, and also whether a whole lot of things which are automatically attributed to climate change really should be.
But he's accepted it as a reality. He did in his book 'Sceptical Environmentalist' and he certainly did when he spoke at the Trotter dinner back in '02.
In fact it was one of the first things he said.
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A momentary spasm of nit-pickery here but I hate the way the medical bods use the term 'benign' in these cases.
To me, benign is something that is all smiley with hugs and drinks all round.
Even a benign tumour is a bit of a bastard. Just not as big a bastard as a malign one. (this is from personal experience, long story, not going into it here).
Anyway, great piece of writing, as always.