Posts by Paul Campbell
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Dunedin in the 70s - we wagged - well I didn't, but in retrospect I wish I had - the bullying was so horrendous I have no idea how I ever got up the nerve to go back there day after day - 35 years later the place still gives me the willies, I've actively worked to make sure my kids never do
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of course some will never reach the average - half the kids are always going to be below average - that's the nature of the beast.
As someone pointed out the averages are moving (up) which is a good thing - I think at a very basic level we need to target two things: firstly making sure everyone who leaves school can function in society (bsic literacy, numeracy) and secondly pushing those averages up (this is a case where a rising tide does lift all boats)
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I was talking to a bunch of my son's friend's tonight - one had been fired (he said) because he'd asked his boss to pay him minimum wage (apparently you have to pay a kid under 18 minimum wage after 90 days and he'd worked there that long) - when I explained about what National were doing the penny dropped - "but they can fire us every 90 days and never pay us minimum wage"
Smart kids - that's what unions are for and why politics are important
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Ah but there's the big problem, a real dilemma: a yellow mini showing up in the 1800 would just wrong - but equally it would be really really symbolic - you can see how a director would be torn - I think you take the wheels off and have it carried by a bunch of orcs instead
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I always just think of Baldrick's definition: "it's like goldy or bronzy only made of iron"
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I think one of the great things about the NZ health system is that we DO argue about how and where we should spend our health $$$ (look at the US: some pointy headed accountant at your company's insurance company decides) - we have a public health system we need to keep it functioning in an open way
Health care could happily soak up our entire tax take, or more - obviously we can't do that - instead we make trade-offs between preventative health care and more direct stuff - we put people into waiting queues to smooth out demand and better fit it to the resources available - (think about it - if there's always a surgeon/body scanner/etc available right away then they need to be sitting idle on their hands waiting for you - so (small) queues are a good thing).
The down side of course is that if advocates of a particular treatment (be it patients or, perish the thought, drug companies) manage to subvert the political process then others will miss out - and that's the problem I see here - just like all the other stuff National is jamming through the system without appropriate review this too should be handled more openly - maybe there are other, less vocal, groups who could use that money to help more people.
As I understand it National want to up the health budget by some largish chunk - let's see that go to a select committee - get some some health professionals who understand outcomes and medical economics in to testify, do it right
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I actually bought some NZ wine that came with it's own USB key in the supermarket the other day - it was for a geek birthday party so it was vaguely appropriate - the key contained some promo for the vinyard
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I think that one of those parenting skills they never teach you is how to deal with kids falling down - you have to learn to recognise that look from them that is basically "is he looking? should I cry?" - if you give just the right smile at just the right time they jump up and keep on running
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Living across the Bay from San Francisco I probably went into the city every couple of weeks - but I worked with a couple of coworkers who hadn't been there for 20 years (in fact travelling to Berkeley for work was a novelty - and this was back in the mid 80s)
I guess from the point of view of suburbia the cities have become scary places
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well inflation may be reducing in some global sense short term - but everyone's printing money at the moment like it's the end of the world - add to that that the NZ$ is diving (by about 30$ wrt the US$) so imported stuff is going to go up by about that much real soon now