Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to Hilary Stace,
People are apparently being encouraged under Obamacare into third trimester abortions. So now you know.
As we've long known, it was international PR firm Hill & Knowlton who concocted the Kuwaiti incubators story. As I'd been doing a little job for them re. the then upcoming Auckland Commonwealth Games when the story broke it kind of stuck in my mind.
It's hardly the stuff of conspiracy theory to presume that those with deep pockets adversely affected by Obamacare would avail themselves of the services of similarly 'creative' talents on offer by the PR biz.
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to Russell Brown,
And they’d quite like the renminbi to be the default global currency too.
They're all tooled up and ready.
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Hard News: Trump's Dummkopfs, in reply to Rich Lock,
'all serving members must remember that the armed forces are politically neutral'.
If the next Edwin Walker is out there, surely Trump would be the one to embolden him.
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Polity: Four thoughts on polling in…, in reply to Son of Dad,
A living wage is important to my real life, and I would have liked to have been able to read what candidates' positions were on such matters.
Apart from candidates' own social media efforts, Living Wage Aotearoa New Zealand did a pretty good job of keeping up with where many main centre candidates stood on that issue. Even Kiwiblog appeared to have its uses. Newly elected Lambton Ward Councillor Brian Dawson, bottom ranked by David Farrar, is now City Ambassador for the Living Wage.
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Hard News: Friday Music! Special Records, in reply to andin,
Little Queen st no longer exists I discovered buried by that monstrosity downtown shopping something. Which never worked. I used to love the jumble of shops that was downtown Ak. All gone, ah progress... or was it developer madness...
Bruce Jesson's eminently readable The Fletcher Challenge: Wealth and Power in NZ is a great account of the machinations behind that. Lest we forget.
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Up Front: Wonder Bi, in reply to ,
...Crocodile Dundee...dolphin thieves...
While I managed to avoid the Flipper movie, the one memorable review I recall described it as starring Paul Hogan after he'd "had his face ironed flat on easy street:"
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Stephen Judd,
...supposedly his grotesque illustrations of people were grounded in his experience of returning to England and seeing all the knobbly, bony, puffy, wibbly faces of English people en masse for the first time.
Sometimes it seems that he might have simply painted what he saw. His 1931 self portrait is pretty nice.
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Hard News: There in half the time:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I remember doing a test-ride on a road bike a while ago and thinking the brakes were just ridiculous. Did not like at all after disc brakes.
When I first checked out e-bikes there were still a few models with front wheel v-brakes. Fortunately they seem to have pretty much disappeared. While I sometimes find myself holding back from overtaking a lycra lad out of concern for their feelings, I wouldn't be tailgating them if I had to rely on v-brakes.
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Hard News: There in half the time:…, in reply to James Butler,
Surely there must be a torque reaction arm somewhere which needs to be detached?
I believe these are only really necessary on larger motors than are currently permitted on rego-free bikes. Most of my experience is with direct drive rear hubs with no internal gearing. Never seen a torque arm on one of those.
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Hard News: There in half the time:…, in reply to Stephen R,
Other than that, I haven't had a failure that required me to try to take the wheels off, but that looks a little more complicated than on my old bike.
Compared to a regular bike, removing a driving wheel with a hub motor has one extra level of complexity - somewhere there'll be a cable connector, ideally weatherproofed, which you'll pull apart and later reconnect. The worst I've seen IMHE is three cable ties to snip off and later replace for a tidy job of securing the wiring back to the bike frame.