Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I thought that most of the 200 missing would in fact be amongst the 147 recovered bodies,
I thought I heard someone on this morning's news program saying essentially that. ie final death toll probably around 200 not 300 ... crosses fingers
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
that is a little too close to regarding economics a science. when in fact is a social science
I doubt any economist would have a problem with describing economics as a social science.
I have no problem with the science of economics. And describing it as a social science is an irrelevant distinction. Social sciences are just as scientific as any other science. The only distinction I would place is that most folks like to be able to test hypotheses with experiment, however like some other sciences (eg physics) some economic hypotheses are difficult if not impossible to experimentally test. That means economic theory is sometimes built on observation of past events without the ability to properly test by experiment. In such situations it possible to build plausible consistent but ultimately wrong theories.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Where will they drive now
You just want to chase the cars.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Keith Ng,
They are asking a vital question
Yup that's quite true. And of course you are right there are moral, decent economists.
However the vast majority have been taught that because in any society there are arseholes who will rip you off the logical solution is to assume everyone is an arsehole and behave accordingly. Hence if supplies are short you price gouge because if you don't rip people off someone else will and then folks will buy all your stock and you'll have nothing to sell while the arsehole got rich.
Of course there is another option and that is asking folks to take only just as much as they need and leave stuff for others, without price gouging. And oddly that's pretty much what most folks did. Because contrary to the assumptions behind price gouging most folks are decent caring and fair.
Personally I'm really over having our economy managed by folks whose first assumption is people won't be honest, decent and fair.
By all means we need folks who will address those questions but why do we have so many of them whose first assumption that we are all basically amoral, when as the last week has demonstrated that is not true?
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I suspect the rebuilding of Christchurch will be the subject of many a thesis, both engineering and architectural.
For me it seems obvious that the new Christchurch will be safe. The modern buildings survived and protected their inhabitants even through this quake. It seems that unless something really stupid happens (always possible) that what is built anew will be safe.
There is also an opportunity to redesign the infrastructure so that people can and will go to the city heart as more than as a tourist. That will take skill from the town planners but it can be done. It is also possible to make things like light rail and bicycle routes - those things we dream about for Auckland but can't do because everything is in the way. In many ways that is technical stuff and hopefully the people skilled in those arts will be allowed to exercise their talents.
But will it be beautiful?
People talk about the beauty of what Christchurch was and mourn that, which is fair. But new buildings can be beautiful too, or ugly, depending on the beholder, but worst of all they can be boring. IMO I don't mind if I hate some of the new Christchurch but what I really don't want is to be bored by it. Let architects loose and let them build striking new things, better yet make them build striking new things. Don't let them succumb to the mediocre or the lowest common denominator. Don't rush new buildings up quickly. Yes some people will hate the new buildings but that's fine. And that doesn't mean everything has to co-ordinate either, it's not a theme park it's a city and great cities are diverse.
Spend that extra money to make Christchurch spectacular.
And sure I don't mind paying for it, really I don't mind. The people of Christchurch have suffered and if it costs me some tax dollars to give them back something really good, then I don't mind.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Matthew Poole,
rational behaviour by all players
I've always found it better to translate this as
"we expect people to be selfish untrustworthy bastards, like us"
I find it quite amusing when real people fool economists by being generous altruistic and ... nice
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So to summarise economists are, and have always been, full of shit.
What is more obscene though is that most (all?) economists we hear from have vested interests in the policies they propose. I'd have much more trust in an unemployed economist on the DPB talking about the value of price gouging than one who owns shares in BP and Progressive enterprises.
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Up Front: Ups and Downs. And Side-to-Sides., in reply to Russell Brown,
I still don’t fully understand how they do that so quickly
They don’t have to fill in triplicate forms and do reports so they can actually do the work they are good at and ya know they are good at it!
To be a little less cynical a lot of time is usually spent making sure they don't damage other underground services and at the moment they just wing it and figure the odd broken phone cable is fine. Some of the fixes may also be just temporary which can be a lot quicker.
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Hard News: Some time last week, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Or is any change a good change?
I'm with Gio on this. I could care less about how twitter looks and so in this case the design matters not a whit to me.
But as the place I have worked in has evolved from a research institute that mostly just did science into a business that ... er ... well does something ... I've seen our "design staff" change everything about how we are presented. It seems very much as though every new set of managers needs to "change the look".
I love design when it affects and responds to function. I love design when it genuinely changes the way people feel (which could be argued as function anyway). I hate design when it is simply about changing regularly because each new designer needs to make their point.
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If it was me, I would take say 500 mL of the first batch of water mix 1:1 with bleach (just standard cheap bleach not the stuff with detergents in it) and wash the dehumidifier then straight away rinse it with 2 lots of say 250 mL of water or 5 lots of 100 mL. More small volume washes are much better than a big volume wash (geeky math can show you why but trust me).
I'd avoid soaps or detergents myself.
Without knowing exactly what the innards of the dehumidifier look like my worry would be corroding the workings with the bleach. Hence the rinse straight away.
Likely your first batch of water after that will be "chlorine rich" may not taste nice but probably won't harm you. After a while the water you collect should wash away the traces of chlorine.
And really my thoughts on this are just guessing on how to clean the beast. There might be dehumidifier specific reasons why this may not be a good idea. It's a nice distraction :).