Posts by BenWilson
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Bush 2, Iraq, his second election.
But yes, you're right, I've obviously had a memory fail there. He was subsequently re-elected after doing that. So it wasn't a platform of invading Iraq. It was a platform of having already invaded Iraq. I'm not sure if that's better or worse, really.
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I'm not really seeing a need to search souls quite so hard as what a lot of people have been doing. It's not the first time that a prick has been elected to a major democracy. It's not even the first time this century. It's not even the first time, this century, in the USA.
A President of the USA was elected not so long ago, pretty much on a platform of waging massive full scale war on a country on completely made up pretexts. He then went ahead and did it, and hundreds of thousands of people got killed, and the country is pretty much destroyed, and the region destabilized, and we're seeing cascading effects of it today. He had the help of a bunch of other pricks who also got elected in other major democracies. One of the major backers, Berlusconi, is even as much of an outright seedy, dirty rich bastard as Trump is. They've probably had orgies together, when Trump could drag himself away from putting out to Putin.
That doesn't automatically mean that I should consider what Berlusconi's supporters think is a good idea to be one myself. It doesn't make me reconsider my position and wonder if perhaps I should be grabbing more pussies myself on a daily basis.
It just makes me realize that you have to fight for things you believe in, and not give up just because you have a setback. Sure, during a setback, the winner is likely to do all sorts of lording and trying to make me doubt myself. But for fucks sake, if there's one thing I can fucking do, it's stick to my goddamned guns, when my own beliefs are at stake. And I will continue to do that. I don't care if they elect Satan himself in the USA, I'm not going to fall to my knees and worship the bastard and all his followers.
And for most people, the guns they can really productively stick to are still their little assault rifless that footsoldiers are given. Yeah it would be nice to be a fly boy and drop some serious munitions when you're in a war, and it's always fun to speculate about what those fly boys did right or wrong. But at the end of the day your contribution is likely to be some little hole you have to defend. So do it. If you can't do that, you're not a soldier, you're a civilian, and the best you can hope to ever be is not a casualty, but don't count on it.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
She & Bill no doubt assumed middle-class folk are too stupid to understand the relation between cause & effect
She was not wrong. Trump also assumed this, and was also not wrong. His own personal conduct has not been that of a champion of the working man, and the women under him seem to work pretty hard too. But that does not matter. You can do anything when you're a star, he said this himself.
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It's the Disputes Tribunal but the same comment applies. You can't contact out of the jurisdiction. The Act states that very clearly.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Thanks for the vote of confidence. But no, I don't think tarpitting the Tribunal can be dragged out for years, nor will there be any further expense. Furthermore, we have a number of these coming and the referees may see matters differently in other districts.
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The idea of trying to evade NZ law on jurisdictional grounds, when their business is run here in every meaningful part of the word "run", is farcical. I'm pretty confident that any judge can see this. Any person can see it - the conniptions are astonishing that are required for anyone to think that passengers and drivers operate via contracts between each other, or that drivers have a contract with anyone but the local Uber that signed them up, trained them, advised them, dealt with every issue, collected lost property, fronted the organization in every meaningful way. Even Uber staff themselves struggle with it. It's clearly very, very difficult to deal with the cognitive dissonance required in maintaining an entirely fictitious underlying relationship to people who are not even strong in the English language. I've heard many of the conversations where a driver starts pinning them down on the detail in which the staff member's speech starts becoming incoherent, addled, rapid, breathless. This doesn't happen to people who are sure of their standing. These are signs of people breaking down while telling outright lies.
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Arden's case has been pushed back as their defense appears to be entirely jurisdictional. It's not clear why, with the several months they've had to prepare that this adjournment is necessary. Hopefully it indicates that the referee wants more time to get their head around the issues. Because more time is only going to make things worse for Uber. If the referee even reads the Aslam & Farrar vs Uber ruling beforehand they are pretty screwed. That thing was incredibly damning.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Like so many of the online troll farm that form The Dimpost’s commentariat you seem to have reduced “the left” to a gaggle of online dilettantes.
Yes, it's not been helpful analysis, certainly not reiterated every week for years.
I've come to think that "positioning" really has little to do with political choice and thus political success. It doesn't matter where your party is positioned in the issue space, if its gravitational pull is tiny. Peter Dunne straddling the exact center has shown this over and over.
It's not nothing, but it's not explaining anywhere near as much as strategists would seem to believe.
Because even the big parties often can't pull voters whose actual position on every issue places them exactly on it's own centroid. You might be the archetypal Labour voter on every issue, as represented in your own opinions and those of the rest of the Labour voters, and yet not actually vote Labour. You're just a bit more likely to be a Labour voter than the other options. In fact, you could be significantly to the left of all of the parties on every issue, and yet still vote for the ACT party. You obviously see the world differently to the average ACT voter, but that doesn't seem to stop people.
People are pretty random, really. Every person makes up their own mind in their own way, and I don't think they even really know why they vote the way they do, even when they can articulate their reason. In fact, the polls give us reason to believe that even when they articulate who they are actually voting for, that this might not even be accurate.
Which is why I can't really get with the soul searching. America has basically rolled the dice. Changing the government is always a roll of the dice, and I think there's a bunch of people at all times who are of the mind that a roll of the dice might be better. You have to be miles ahead of the opposition for the randomness of that to be eliminated. Clinton was never miles ahead, and this time the Democrats lucked out. Did America luck out? We shall see. Fortunately, for now, it's still a democracy, so they can re-roll in 4 years.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
Yeah bro a lot has changed in the last few months. Worth a look again.
I've spoken to the people who run it personally. A couple of very switched on guys with a sound business plan and some big backers. They fully want to work with the Drivers Association (although they baulk at the name having Uber in it, as you'd expect). They're on the steady-she-goes build, prioritizing the level of service over the driver's guarantee of a full time job - their biggest challenge was literally to build the driver base, so their $15 guaranteed fare was an excellent ploy. But now they seem to be gaining viral traction, and their pricing is set to compete head to head with Uber without killing the drivers in the process.
I hope they get into the Wellington market ASAP. Then there would be no reason for (compliant) drivers to fear the sudden loss of Uber from this market - the gap could be filled in very, very short order. The non compliant drivers? Who cares, really? They never really had a job, and what nebulous employment they did have caused huge hurt to the others working for the same company, and made the playing field totally uneven for any competition, most especially the regular taxi industry. Which is why I don't include Christchurch in my wish list. Uber never even attempted legality there. It will be a bit stink for the small number of compliant drivers, but I don't think that gap can't be filled rapidly too.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
There still seems to be a surge map. But it's never been that easy to see how hard the customer is being surged. Part and parcel of not being responsible for the billing.
Last night I had a first. Big long surge at end of Shapeshifter concert. Got 4 back to back Zoomy rides. It seems like they are really starting to get market penetration. I was stoked, drivers get guaranteed $10 minimum fares. So cheaper for passenger and better paid for driver. Also I notice the passenger base has way way less pissed munters. It's like what Uber was like at the start of the year.
Then I get this with my breakfast this morning. Full page exposure.