Posts by Peter Ashby
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@Russell
Your blithe assertions that 'someone' should have seen the CRU's plight and given them the resources to accede to the flood of vexatious FOI requests ignores a major problem: using what monies exactly? Universities here are not flush with cash, press offices often have as much as two whole staff!
Science funding is extremely explicit about what you can spend on what and trying to get permission from the funders to use money from pot A for another purpose, while possible takes time and no little bureaucracy. AFAIK there is no source of funds you can apply to here in the UK to deal with FOI requests.
The other problem is that much of the data was proprietary, from the UK Met office which is somewhat notorious in jealously guarding its data so it can make money of it. Perhaps the CRU should have made stronger efforts to change this, but it was not really a problem for them so why should they? The FOI requests asking for access to these data could not, legally be granted.
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@Sacha
I'm a child of the '60s and I like tripe, done well. Eaten it as such in Slovenia and Italy for eg. I also like liver (cow, sheep, chicken or whatever), kidney (steak and, yum!), pan fried lambs brains (melt in delight), haggis (chopped lambs lungs amongst others), I currently have black pudding (congealed blood sausage in essence) in my fridge. I was eyeing lambs hearts in the supermarket yesterday and noting incidentally that the NZ ones had less fat than the British ones. I have eaten fish eyes as a dare to freak out my sisters and other things most delicious that many will not eat out of squeamishness. For visual difficulty squid cooked in its own ink in Venice has to come top. a plate of grey bits in black sauce served with a bright yellow slab of polenta, but the taste and texture were absolutely wonderful.
I have taught the offspring to not be particularly squeamish too.
The reason I don't eat tripe more often is I don't remember the last time I saw it for sale and my wife doesn't like it.
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@Jake Pollock
Except that the good Sergeant Vimes and I arrived at the theory independently. I do remember recognising the essential truth of it when I read it. However the good Sergeant gets one detail wrong. Cheap boots cannot be salvaged by cardboard insoles when the uppers disintegrate or part company with the soles. Boots that last long enough to wear out the soles, are GOOD boots. I must have been buying the 5 dollar ones.
Stands to reason me not being in employment. I was not idle, just married with kids while an undergraduate then trying to do same on a PhD stipend that was less than the dole. It only worked because the University Grants Committee didn't enact punitive marginal tax rates on income earned from tutoring, demonstrating labs and other such things. Unlike those on the dole, who can easily be deterred from working by the system that makes it not worth their while.
I have kept our poor cards, as a reminder, should I need one, that we have been poor, officially.
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I don't care about your summer, because my eye was caught by the ad top right for The Verlaines tour and here I am on the wrong side of the planet and no longer 18 or even 19. Even if it is an absolutely lovely early spring day here in Eastern Scotland, the sky is blue with unthreatening puffs of white cloud and there is actually detectable warmth in the sunshine. The crocuses are out and the daffs are poking their leaves above the surface.
Dammit!
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Thanks Islander, I will add having been there that the poor buy more necessary stuff than the well off do too. An example: shoes. When you are poor and you need a new pair of shoes or go barefoot (not advisable in the Student area of Dunedin, especially in winter). But you have no discretionary income so you buy the cheapest pair of shoes that will do. Meanwhile Mr Well Off buys durable shoes at twice the price. The catch is that the cheap shoes last 1/3 as long as the durable ones.
I have been both those people and confirmed it empirically. These days I go through the soles of my street shoes before they need replacing. With the cheap ones the uppers go long before the sole wears out or the uppers part company with the shoes.
Thus it costs more to be poor and that is before you have to try an heat damp draughty dwellings. When you are poor you scrimp on things the well off consider essentials, like insurance. You buy 3rd party on your vehicle not because its worth jack shit, but because its all you can afford. The stuff I take for granted now makes me shake my head sometimes.
There but for fortunate genetics and an applied brain go I. Not everyone is so fortunate and the decks are not stacked in your favour if you aren't. I look back at the young me at scholarships, grants etc applied for in every expectation of success and wonder where that confidence came from and can I have it back please.
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@Craig Ranapia
Oh, so you pull the entire bottom tier out of the cake shave most of it off, and that's OK because even though you can't pay for shit at least you're still screwing over the rich pricks? I'm sure there's a logical train of thought on the tracks somewhere, but it's running awfully late...
Now I know you didn't read all of my last post and just picked on the generalisation at the end. So I will say it again, since you obviously missed it:
Those who must spend ALL of their income just to stay afloat pay the most GST as a proportion of income. So that 14k is not 'tax free' since it will be SPENT and not invested in non productive real estate, foreign trips, foreign cars, foreign made consumer durables etc.
Therefore doing this costs diddly squat since the tax you 'give back' you get returned as GST. The only possible argument against is that GST is a less efficient way to collect tax than PAYE though in the Information Age that is less so than it used to be.
But you carry on believing the myth that the 'undeserving' poor pay no tax so are just bludgers and parasites if it makes you happy. Meanwhile reality will continue on without you.
So apart from urgently taking on your shoulders any slur against 'the Right' (I even capitalised it) you do your best to resemble strongly that which you object to.
Well done.
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The lowering of the taxes on the top earners is just a jab to the jaw for everyone else to distract you from the kneeing in the nuts the rise of GST is for everyone else and especially the poor. It works like this, when you are forced to spend everything you have just to stay afloat a large proportion of your tax is paid as GST, you can't avoid it. When you have discretionary income you can choose either to spend it or bank it (which covers investment), so a GST hike just makes you reassess your options.
But as Islander has pointed out, that is what you voted for when you were voting for that nice Mr Key who would never do something as nasty as that.
Here in the UK we are sleepwalking down the same path. The Tories have a JK figure in Cameron, all smooth salesman, butter wouldn't melt in my mouth etc But the same old unreconstructed Tories lurk behind him resisting the media attempts to out them shamefully by such subterfuge as asking them about policy details from their portfolio. Just like Key they are trying to say as little as possible on the policy front, firstly so they can just wait for a lame duck too term Labour govt to wear out its welcome and because they don't want to scare Basildon man or White Van woman with the reality of what will follow.
The Right always follow the money, rewarding those that have it and punishing those who do not.
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@Islander
More boys than girls are born, that there are more women than men as you correctly said doesn't change that. The rule of sex ratios in the mammalia is very plastic depending on circumstances and if skewed is usually done so by mechanisms after conception.
I have known a number of strains of lab mice that have a distressing bias towards males. Distressing when you are doing developmental biology and need a few stud males and a pile of females. Distressing because of what happens to all the unwanted males.
But then it is the lot of the mammalian male to live fast and die young. All this muscle takes resources to maintain. Which when we're talking pseudonyms hints at mine in other forums. For the record I am Peter Ashby, one of them anyway (it's a bit freaky when you get, out of the blue, an email from 'yourself').
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@John Fouhy
I have a wind up torch too, it's part of the wind up radio that sits in my garage workshop (no cable to hog limited outlets and get in the way of power tools). At a pinch I can smash the window and grab it from outside. Not that I would want to be in this house in Eastern Scotland if a proper earthquake hit. Far too much heavy, inflexible stuff around and above me.
In NZ you may have to have your house lifted up and put back on its foundations after a quake, but it will be essentially intact. Provided as Russ says, it doesn't slide down the hill. NZers do seem rather cavalier about cantilevering living quarters out over steep descending hills. Even above the Hutt Valley, fault line central. I suppose you take your chances, but what about the poor sods who live below you? And why were people granted permission to build like that? in an earthquake zone?
But then there's Greymouth and its CBD below river level, still not moved up the hill. We humans are strange, if nothing bad happens for a few years we think we're bulletproof then act all surprised when Nature takes a swipe at us.
Russ, I wish I had sent you that assessment of the effects of a new vent in the Auckland field years ago when I first found it. Was ignorance bliss?
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@StephenJudd
I have a perhaps unusual take on the 7% cut in benefits in '91. Early in that year my PhD stipend came to an end before my bloated project had ended so we had no choice but the dole*. Despite our income prior to registering unemployed being LESS than the dole we still had to stand down for iirc 2+ weeks (we ate lentils, spuds, milk and cheese) and even after the cuts we were still about $20pw better off. Our kids are not delinquent as a result and I bet if asked they would admit being oblivious. They were warm, dry, well housed, fed, nurtured and loved deeply. We survived.
However that is only because we knew the situation to be only temporary (as was surviving on my stipend). Contemplating at the time what it must be like to live like this year and after year and raise kids beyond the infants ours were I very much did not want to go there. I truly do not know how most people don't go down the drain living under those constraints. What is remarkable is not that some people crack under the strain, but that more don't. That people are that resilient is not imho a good enough reason to keep them in such penury.
*The dept and the university 'forgot' about me for a year, which is how I managed to be a PhD student and on the dole. The DSW were extremely understanding and helpful, they are thanked for financial support in the acknowledgements in my thesis.