Posts by Rich of Observationz
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shitty and utterly powerless you feel at the very notion of choking down medication
taking Prozac, for example, for years is something I find deeply unattractive
Isn't this because society not only stigmatises mental illness, but also the use of chemicals, legal and illegal, to alter mood?
All things being equal, there is nothing wrong with taking an SSRI every day. Any more than there is me taking an ACE inhibitor each day to suppress hypertension.
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I thought Firefox *was* Netscape version N?
(My eyes glaze over when I see an explanation of open source politics).
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One thing I find strange is that when economists talk about productivity, they are stuck in this early-20th century model where productivity improvement is all about buying a bigger clump press that can churn out more widgets per man-hour.
I think a lot of productivity increase is through the nature of work changing. So if Factory X, which makes clothes at a labour cost of $12 an hour closes due to foreign competition, but in the same week Atelier Y opens up *designing* clothes at a labour cost of $25 an hour, then productivity per worker just doubled.
For me that's how we improve productivity - by increasing the number of high-added-value jobs.
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I guess future nanotechnology could allow for graffiti that moves.
Further, if painted over, it could remove the upper paint layer and restore itself.
If erasure was persistenly attempted, it could proceed to eat the wall and turn it into Grey Gloop.
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Librarianship might be the best job in the world with the worst pay
I used to work in a business that supplied information and software to European corporates and banks (it's now part of Dialog, which you librarians would know, I think).
As well as our team getting pretty reasonable money for the UK IT industry, the librarians (and CIOs = flash way of saying Chief Librarian) were also on quite good money.
One advantage of being a hub for Evil Capitalism in its full fury is that it creates lots of nice well paid jobs for knowledge workers. We don't have that in NZ, really.
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The whole background two this sucks.
It started because a middle-aged white male killed a kid. Now, shouldn't we be doing something to get the not insubstantial number of middle-aged white psychopaths (someone who considers that killing is an appropriate response to petty vandalism is, in my book, a psychopath) off the streets and into appropriate institutions?
No, we should ensure that these nutters aren't provoked by a bit of tagging. Maybe ban spray cans altogether - so that a whole genre of legitimate art is eliminated, not to mention all the other artistic and decorative uses of spray paint.
If you have an issue with "your" property being tagged, then get some graffiti artists to bomb it for you. It's fairly proven that a lot fewer taggers spray over other peoples pieces than a blank wall.
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On the rugby, if the Super 14 is being played to new special rules (presumably to encourage a Southern Hemisphere style of rugby) what happens when we have to play Northern Hemisphere sides under the traditional rules?
Or is the idea that either they have to change (unlikely, given that money talks and they have lots of it) or that the game splits. Which would give NZ a much clearer run at the world cup title that is ours of right..
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For some reason many of the cruise passengers (not sure if they were from the Queen Vic or another ship) got disgorged into Auckland hotels. The knock-effect meant that you couldn't get a hotel room all week and I wound up having to stay in the Formule 1 - at least it wasn't a backpackers..
Anyways, if the cruise industry feels the facilities aren't up to scratch, shouldn't they be the ones paying for better ones?
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"satellite internet" services use the same frequency block for a large area of the South Pacific. So a satellite provider has to send all its traffic down one bit of bandwidth - that's a pretty scarce resource. Hence satellite internet is only ever going to be a remote area solution. (Compare wired solutions, where you have each circuit on independent bandwidth, or cellular solutions like Woosh or WiMax, where the bandwidth is shared by a smallish locality).
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I guess Auckland's functional enough - I lived there for four years. But basically, Wellington's infinitely better - part of the reason for that is all the people who live in Auckland :-)
Pretending that Auckland is five cities, not a city centre surrounded by urban sprawl, is just silly though. My view on a city is that it's a large urban area, usually surrounded by suburbs, and then countryside.
Another point on Auckland - why do so few people self-identify as Aucklanders? I went to see the Auckland rugby side play Waikato at Eden Park. "Visiting" supporters were in the majority - and for a lot of them their connection was that they went to uni in Hammy, or stopped for a pie there, and had spent all the subsequent years in Auckland.