Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Sacha,
By other machines.
Yes, and also people. Lots and lots of people.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Big data will wipe those jobs out as well.
Eventually. That software all still has to be written. Doing that is a colossal undertaking. What we don't have a good model for, at least not a progressive model, is how to manage that transition. If people were housed and fed and had free time and entertainments galore as a result of all that automation and development it would be an obvious massive win for the species. I'd like to think that it might even happen faster under those circumstances, as all those people would be the market for all that development. That's one utopian vision, and it's an old one. If we must have an oligarchy of production, at least we can have a democracy of consumption.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
It just seems odd to come down on him for proposing something really bold.
That isn't what I'm coming down on him for. But yes, this goes nowhere. I don't know what's possible in drug reform because that comes down entirely to whether it gets political support, how the horse trading after the election goes. I'm feeling pretty cynical this time around. It doesn't feel like an election year. It feels like a fait accompli, a rinse and repeat of the same bullshit, promises, lies and I fully expect all the usual backpedaling afterward. Perhaps it's all this training in statistics, I've come to expect the future to resemble the past.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
Tell me again how Dunne’s the problem.
Because functionally it's as if McClay still held the portfolio.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
So your problem is that he listened to evidence and changed his mind?
Well, from what you said earlier:
Although when I interviewed Dunne last year, he insisted that he’d always held such views and making no change to the law on cannabis a condition of United Future’s coalition support for Labour was only a sop to the nutbars in his caucus at the time who wanted to make the law even more draconian.
..it's pretty clear that there was no change of mind going on, just a change in what he now considers politically expedient.
On this one, any reform advocate will tell you that the bloc in the way of reform is in the National Party.
Yes, the very party that he supports with confidence and supply, and was allowed this position by. They clearly think it's in safe hands. I pretty much agree with them. They have no need to install one of their own, since they are getting what they want as a "concession" to get not only confidence and supply for their government, but also stasis on cannabis law reform. If National get in again, I feel pretty confident that it would become politically expedient, based on everything he has ever done in the role, to expect him to compromise on this. Based only on 5 times around the block. To be blunt, if Labour get in, I'd expect him to compromise on this at the slightest whiff that Labour aren't ready. Even if he holds the balance of power (again).
If cannabis reform had any urgency at all for him, don't you think it would have shown, at least a little bit? That he might have spoken out stridently on a matter pertaining to his own portfolio and his own beliefs as well? Always it's weasel words, waiting for evidence, blocking it on some specific or other, some last morsel of risk to him. People died in great pain while he fumbled around and fucked it up. Yes, now it's a policy. Not something he's pressing the government on right now as a Minister in charge of the portfolio. Where are the speeches in Parliament? Where's his campaign message, his public statements that having seen all the evidence presented over 15 years in the role that he really, finally, actually stands for something other than centrism?
Fair enough, lots of people do, and his pomp can make him hard to like at times.
Oh, yes! I really don't like him. He comes across to me like an Anglican minister preaching in their softcore-barely-even-believe-in-God kind of way, and this is him begging his God, the political center, to give him a death-bed absolution. My bet is that his God has stopped listening.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Hilary Stace,
So he might be saying stuff about cannabis law reform now but as to actually doing anything about it – highly doubtful.
Yup. I'm not buying it. The guy is like a double agent for prohibition.
I’m puzzled about what you think he should have achieved. He delivered the National Drug Policy, which is a good, progressive document, undone only by its incompatibility with the law.
If he genuinely believed in legalization all along, then I think he should have made a damned stand on it, from the position he held. Sometime before now, when it's likely he's not going to make another term. Those other achievements? I really think some no-name regional Nat could very well have done better with 15 odd years to burn on it (although of course quite a few of those years it could have been a no-name city Labour MP). Sure, it could have been worse. It could also have been a damned sight better. That's the story of Peter Dunne. "Could have been worse".
I'm not disparaging that he's NOW, finally, after having entered Parliament when I was 13 years old, coming out that he actually always believed in this and what is left of his party will throw all of it's support into it. But I'm not about to forget that he held the portfolio responsible for it for over a decade and still could not man up and do it then. That shows that he has always put his political career ahead of his beliefs, and I think drug policy and it's its victims in this country have been casualties of that cowardice.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Russell Brown,
15 years in the job. I'm sorry, but professing good intentions and yet doing very little beyond temporarily legalizing much, much more dangerous alternatives have worn my patience well thin with this character. He sat square in this position, blocking anyone else from having it, and claims he always wanted to legalize. I find it as convincing as I find Jim Bolger's renouncement of neoliberalism. When it would have made a difference was the time to announce such views. Now, it sounds like a sop to what little remains of his voter demographic, and if he is ousted, he will never have achieved something he claims he always believed in. As with Bolger "I'm sorry" doesn't cut it when we're talking about people holding this kind of power.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
TBH, so long as the whole set up is about trying to put the incentives in the right place for the maximum extraction of profit to be directed where we want it to, I think it's always going to continue to be the losing game it has for decades. Where we are is simply a capitalism end-game. It's not like we haven't been trying to do this. Every country has - and a whole lot of them are doing it way better.
If we step back from proposing solutions and look at what the actual problem is, it's that wealth distribution is highly unequal/unfair, and many do not have enough for life's basics. It most certainly is NOT that our society does not produce enough. Quite the opposite, it produces more per person than ever before in history. Even our housing problem is like this - there are actually hundreds of thousands of empty houses around the country, in the form of luxury baches. But talk of compulsory utilization is a non-starter. Homelessness is clearly not considered any kind of actual crisis, nor is the fact that most of our labour goes to paying rent.
Between the last paragraph and this one I've literally had my tenant once again explaining why they could not pay the rent, that they were already behind on. It's a familiar story, the guy is a jib-stopper on a zero hour contract and his boss seems to be punishing him for trying to get holiday pay that he thought he was entitled to. The woman is a student of beauty therapy and has two children, one a year old. She offered to move out if we insisted, that she was horribly embarrassed about the missed payment. But I'd rather not evict them, since he has a credible payday coming from a private job, and they're good tenants otherwise, and have fought their way back from significant arrears before. They're really battling. I heard them having a raging fight a few nights ago over money, and she told me the power company disconnected them. They have every kind of creditor turning up to take stuff away from them. I could end up being left holding the baby if they they end up not being able to pay. Which sucks for me since I'm waiting patiently to get paid for my own work, too. We're more than a few paychecks from being unable to pay bills, but not that many more. Definitely nowhere near what our on-paper wealth would suggest.
But I'm not going to make a family homeless if I can avoid it. I'd sooner put the rent down.
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Hard News: Drugs and why Dunne did it, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Maybe I’m overly dramatic
Not that overly. All the things you mention are happening daily, and they shouldn't be.
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Hard News: Budget 2017: How do we get…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The one thing guaranteed to be a game changer would be a housing market crash. Bill English would likely be more scared of it than ISIL terrorists or North Korean missiles, because a crash would heavily discredit the very Anglo-Saxon Model he so adheres to, like the Great Depression did for the Gilded Age.
Well it would screw up the wealthy classes a whole lot more than any of those are likely to. But for that reason, all stops would be pulled if such a thing seemed to be happening. Government would directly intervene to bail out the banking sector, and many other measures even more drastic could be taken.