Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I'm somewhat frustrated that the response of some people to the post was "doctors are fine" when that wasn't even what the article was about. All people should be able to demand quality city planning regardless of their profession.
Also some doctors aren't fine, we have a serious problem attracting doctors to be GPs (which requires further qualifications) and various positions in provincial hospitals are running locum followed by locum followed by... because of the difficulty of attracting doctors.
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Synthetic Cannabis uses chemicals to emulate the same effects, (as I understand it) but it is a constructed/manufactured substance how do the makers and sellers get away with not listing the chemical contents?
Presumably the labeling regime only applies for those things you eat/drink, so I'd imagine cigarettes don't have the labels on them either.
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As a sort of aside, I’d be interested to know what the crowd and the council think of bike lanes which go between sidewalk and parked cars.
I thought this would be ideal, but I suspect it presents problems for the cyclist - you need to be able to access the road to get into lanes, turn etc, you can't do that if trapped behind cars. And traffic turning across the lane would be a problem too.
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Hard News: The War Stories, in reply to Islander,
-there was - I understand - a deliberate decision, made on financial grounds, not to repatriate ANZ horses-
Also quarantine reasons. According to wikipedia, 136,000 horses were shipped from Australia. 13,000 were left at the end of the war, only one returned to Australia, the rest were killed or went to India.
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Yes, and the same goes for the unions in the 80s who floundered aimlessly as Douglas rogered the nation. Citizens and voters deserved a better choice.
Yes. And that ripped open the NZ trade union movement and saw the creation of an alternative to CTU.
But it's certainly difficult to see the wood for the trees when you're battling amongst them.
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Catching up...
If I ever manage to write a book about this endless, endless goddamned internet argument from which I can apparently never escape, it will be called: Identity Politics Ruined the Left! How These Dudes Know What’s Really Important And The Rest of Us Should Just Shut Up.
Hear hear. I may have mentioned it before, but the more I look back on my time in student activism in the 1990s, the more I'm convinced we lost it because we lost the language debate. Once we were arguing about the public/private benefit of tertiary education, the other side had won - we were just arguing about how much they should charge.
If we'd put a stake in the ground and argued only that this public/private benefit debate was an argument not undertaken for the rest of society where the state provides financial support, the whole battle might have looked quite differently.
And frankly, when Mandela dies I suspect he’s going to end up being a lot like Thatcher in this respect – when the dust settles, his life is going to be a lot more nuanced and ambiguous that his fans or detractors will comfortably admit. That’s how clear-eyed history tends to work.
I'm going to go with Mandela being looked upon a lot more kindly in the history books than Thatcher.
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My kids are fine, though, that’s the thing – to echo what others have said. If we write on this board chances are we’re the lucky ones.
We have the same in my family where my niece has DS. Two parents who have learnt to be pushy to get things for her, and two grandparents (one of whom is a professional in the sector) who can be downright aggressive. I feel sorry for any bureaucrat who gets in their way.
It's solo parents with three kids, one or more with disability, little education themselves, limited support networks that are getting right screwed.
That was a pretty traumatic conversation to have to have with some moron about my 3 month old. I am sure I will have some gems to come
Good luck. Make sure you sign up for the DS newsletter and any support networks. I'd be wary about Saving Downs, I suspect there's a strong crossover with anti-abortion ideas in there. I think that if there was a magic button that could be pushed so that another DS baby would never be born, they'd go to court to stop us pushing it. Schools are a long way down the track, but if you find a school that supports DS kids well, you might have to think about zones and your location :(
I’m being selfish because I want NZ to have a better economy and social structure – I will benefit from that as much as every one else will benefit.
I'm with Gio. If we argue it's better economically or socially for society then all of a sudden we have to prove that point and the opposition can try and disprove it. It's what the anti-smacking legislation got bogged down in. Do children have the right not to suffer physical abuse? If the answer is yes, evidence that it's good for them or bad for them or does them no harm is irrelevant. If children have the right to education it doesn't matter if it's better for NZ for them to have it, they just get it.
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(Also, there’s a perfectly good reason we don’t let the GCSB spy on us even if it would be more efficient, and it’s because they are the external spies: no monolith, as a le Carre character would say.)
I suspect somewhere in there is an answer along the lines of "this is a networked system, so NZ spies don't spy on NZers... but Australian spies can and do". Echelon consists of several countries and there's a lot of information sharing going on.
I, personally, do not subscribe to the Keith Locke school of thinking that NZ lives in a totally benign environment in which the only threats to NZ come from our intelligence services’ existence.
I don't either. But it's a leap from that reality to the GCSB and the way it's been set up and run as the solution. There are other possible answers.
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Except cars are much more expensive than the engine.
I don't own a desktop and laptop computer, I own a laptop and occasionally connect it to screen and keyboard and mouse when I want. The same principle should be able to be applied with good design.
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to BenWilson,
Sounds like a traffic light would help a lot.
That's at lights. Here