Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s interesting, but the vibe is it was offered to the journalist because it makes the ministry look better.
I don't think anyone thought Helen Kelly wasn't at least aware of the political importance of her application. I got the feeling that the article somewhat overstated the political motivations.
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
We're a democracy not a sciencocracy and the demos are entitled to be slow to reach conclusions - or even irrational - if they want to be.
Bollocks.
In the first place I never suggested a "sciencocracy" (sic) the word you are looking for is meritocracy where roles would be filled by those with talent in those roles rather than by popular vote (which I also did not suggest). In the second place your vaunted democracy frequently makes rules and decisions that the public never considered and even decisions to which the majority were opposed.
The "it's democracy therefore it's correct" argument is trite and worthless.
The majority is very often wrong and it is the responsibility of the government to make decisions that are right even when the majority don't believe those decisions are right. What I am advocating is that those decisions should be based on evidence.
What you are suggesting would have homosexuals thrown in jail and employers allowed to pay women and minorities half the wages of white males and a whole bunch of other things that the majority wanted that were utterly wrong.
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Russell Brown,
Dunce’s position
spell check FTW :)
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Hard News: Approved by lunchtime, in reply to Shaun Lott,
Brewed ginger beer will contain small traces of alcohol, but is sold to minors. Correct? Analogous?
Off-topic but
Love the Hakanoa Ginger beer ~1% alcohol, I'm betting they don't even measure it. -
One day we'll have evidence-based legislation, sigh.
Meanwhile it's sad that the bureaucrats are all so risk averse. It seems like everyone in the chain is completely paranoid about making any call. And that means the only person willing to make a decision is the minister who is extremely unlikely to have the depth of knowledge of the people below him or her.
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This whole project seems like a classic case of a failure of research expertise and oversight of the whole enterprise, from development to delivery, start to finish.
So you're saying the manager deserves a promotion then, right?
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Hard News: Paths where we actually ride, in reply to Julie Fairey,
Parking surveys show Mt Roskill Village (cnr Mt Albert & Dominion) has plenty of parking, as does Roskill South. The parking is primarily behind the shops
Apparently since Dominion Rd has two lanes at that point it's OK to park in the left lane to go into the post office ... sigh.
There’s a dairy part way along
I know the one. We drive past it every day. We stopped going to it when they decided to carry on advertising tobacco long after the law changed.
But yeah there are a lot of dairies like this. Legacies of the days when it was OK for a business to use public land as their source of income. That's what they are doing, relying on parking provided by the ratepayers to sustain their marginal business.
I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for them.
As for real solutions for shops like the one you describe, there are only two options, you continue to subsidise them or you don't. At some point the balance of pressure from the needs of the road users must outweigh one businessperson.
It really isn't that far from the shops and petrol station at Mt Roskill or the Sandringham road corner shops.
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I think there's a question here that is missing.
Will the youth engage sufficiently to change NZ politics?
There are some odd things going on in politics at the moment. Sanders in the US has somehow (god knows how for such an old white guy) captured the imagination of a group of voters who can't be arsed answering poll questions but are actually getting out to vote for him.
Auckland city has two strong youth lobby groups who are both competent and active. If either group (let alone both) stood behind a group of candidates there is every chance the whole makeup of our largest city's council could utterly change.
Consider what happens to the national stage if somehow the youth vote is engaged - I don't think any of the current parties (yes including The Greens) have any traction with the youth vote.
I really do wonder what happens if they vote and if one group can give them something for which they really want to vote.
As for your questions
National under Collins or Joyce is much less appealing
The Maori party ceases to exist and gets replaced by the new Maori party
Act remains as scapegoat for extreme National policy
Labour undergoes 3 more leadership changes before the next election and dies
The Greens campaign on alternative health care and promote policy by astrologyCan't say I'm impressed by any of them.
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Hard News: Paths where we actually ride, in reply to Julie Fairey,
Putting aside the issue of on-street parking as car storage for private vehicles, we do need to think about what to do for convenience based businesses like dairies who won’t get business without P5 outside them, or foot traffic driven by being in a town centre, near a PT stop, or in a dense enough community where a lot of walking happens. Do we have an obligation to try to come up with a solution? Do we let the market decide? Is there even a solution to be had or is this one of those hard choices? Genuine questions that I’m mulling over.
I'm not a fan of allowing folks to store their cars on the road. Roads are too important for that to be acceptable.
But there are questions about some businesses. One brutal answer is to say if the business can't survive without a carpark out the front then perhaps it isn't a viable business. Many arguments around the carparks in Mt Roskill shops and Balmoral shops are kind of negated when you see cars parked there the whole day which argues that turnover of the cars is negligible anyway.
But there is another response as well and that is to point to areas where cycling and foot traffic has been encouraged by removing parking and replacing it with shared spaces. In some of those cases drop in business increases because instead of going past at 40 kph more traffic goes past at 5-10 khp and is more likely to actually stop and drop in.
I don't think the change will be easy but the fact of life is that given the cost of our roads we need them to work better and that means for some routes in particular allowing people to store their cars on the public roads is no longer acceptable.
That's more complicated on suburban streets like Somerset (although protecting the schoolkids would seem to be a good idea) but on really critical routes like Gt Nth Rd, K Rd, Ponsonby Rd etc parking is a pretty low priority.
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Hard News: Paths where we actually ride, in reply to Su Yin Khoo,
Luckily, Auckland Transport have cycle counters set up to do just that. Here are the official cycle count numbers from AT. They tend to go up year-on-year.
And here’s Transportblog’s summation on the cycle count from January.
sigh you and your data - next thing you'll be telling us Hosking was wrong too!