Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I'm not saying there is a connection, but Sue Bradford's use of the Green Party as her personal vehicle is not the kind of carpooling that we should be encouraging.
I don't buy that. At least she's not passing laws which benefit herself, and/or her friends/business colleagues. Not all MPs have been so scrupulous.
And whatever side you stood on, the smacking kids bill is at the cutting edge of social debate, and not just here. And she's not the only person in the carpool, there's a whole heap of health and social agencies who were in that carpool too. And it got people taking an active interest in parliament, either for or against.
The 16 year old voting won't be so 'hot', but neither will a bunch of things in parliament. She's not doing it for personal benefit though, she's spent a lot of her life working with young people who are intelligent, thoughtful, and politically involved. She doesn't believe they should be denied the right to vote. It's a valid issue for debate.
Seems like she's fulfilling the purpose for which Private Members Bills were designed.
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We can't figure out what to measure. "Carbon footprint" is a pretty crude measure of damage, and nobody's yet agreed upon where to stop the infinite regression of "but to get the food to the store you need to ship it in a truck and that truck had to be made and the parts for that truck had to be flown in and the aircraft had to be made and its parts had to be flown in and ..." so as to avoid idiotic situations like that one.
Sounds like a bunch of nonsense to me, who sold you that line?
The environmental cost of the trucking/shipping/parts of those things will be part of the charge the company sets for moving your goods. You don't need to figure it out, that's their job.
All any one company has to do is figure out their costs - that is, their current costs, and their additional environmental costs - whether that be levies on petrol, green taxes, whatever - and charge appropriately.
The transport company will charge more for long trips that use lots of diesel. The company that sells the parts will figure any environmental costs into the price of their goods. The shops will figure it into the markup on the goods that they sell.
This already happens with petrol taxes, custom and tax duties etc. Just about every good and service would have a component of petrol tax in it - large or small.
Doesn't seem like rocket science to me, just another thing people in business have to consider when setting their prices.
Whether or not it's something that we want to do, is one question. Whether or not it's possible - seems like a silly question to me.
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It's OK, your carbon footprint increase is negligible. The bus already runs, so unless you've pushed it over the magical number where they put another bus on, hardly any increase there at all.
The true magic of public transport! You can let your wife have the rollerblades back in compensation.
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I haven't had to do the same since I moved back to NZ but I hear it's just the same, except you wait at different places in the process.
I think that's it's on the same, or I'd argue, largely the same with some differences, because of a lack of money, expertise, resources, beds etc in NZ. If you threw more money into the NZ system, you could come out with shorter queues. If you threw more money into the US system, you'd most likely come out with bigger profits for the HMOs, and the same length queues.
Here the medical system largely cares about patients, health, best outcomes, short waiting lists. There the care that parts of the system (health care professionals) put into that have been distorted by HMOs/insurance/profits.
Ben - I was more referring to totally non-urgent stuff, no sane hospital in the US or NZ is not going to do the same thing (but woe betide you if in the US your HMO thinks you possibly could have rung them to get permission first, you may be stuck with the bill).
A friend of mine was in a car accident recently, and her insurance disputed the cost of the ambulance that took her to hospital (but not the cost of the hospital care itself). The accident wasn't life-threatening, but it was certainly worthy of a trip in an ambulance, especially given that her car was totalled. Eventually they agreed to split the cost, which for a short ambulance trip was something like $4000 US.
There are unfortunately lots of ways to be screwed by your HMO it seems. It astounds me that people should have to worry about these things before seeking urgent medical care.
Have we learned nothing from the teachings of Homer?
I must have missed that episode of The Simpsons. Or is that in the upcoming movie?
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So how do they measure it?
In general, you could be considered to be on a site if you continuously 'hit' pages within it, without a break of longer than 5 minutes. Or 10 minutes. Depends on the type of site - PA you'd say longer because it has long pages of comments, and decent length blog entries.
So if you moved around the site, going to a new page every few minutes, it'd measure the total amount of time without that break, and record that.
If you did as you do, and left the page open without clicking links of posting replies, it wouldn't measure that total time, as you wouldn't have hit the server for those hours.
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What about all the money wasted on faceless bureaucrats and unnecessary form filling by our GPs?
Stories told to me by friends about their experiences with the US health system, insurance companies, etc, make our system look sane and efficient in comparison.
Seriously, monkeys on acid could design a better health system than some of the moronic things I've heard. It'll be interesting to see what Michael Moore's Sicko movie has to say and the reaction to it.
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A public low cost/no cost wireless network (& perhaps the odd wireless laptop) for the wards in the public hospitals would be a great way for patients & their families to overcome some of the isolation that occurs at hospitals.... & great way to get some informed advice whilst waiting for a doc ;op
Given that last night Chch hospital admitted that staff shortages in their emergency dept possibly contributed to the death of a patient, I'm not sure if internet access is top of their list of things to spend money on now.
Congrats on the baby. It's all uphill from now, honest.
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What’s your beef about Panama?
Because you've skipped over the bits where the US supported a tyrant (Noriega was a CIA informant) and then jumped in and invaded a country when he became less than convenient.
Like some other country that's in the news a bit recently.
And they reserved the right to invade Panama again to protect their security interests. Which could be translated as 'run your canal the way we want or we'll take over it again'.
But you've rightly reminded me of another reason why the US suddenly finds morals crossing over with foreign policy. We can add 'The Panana Canal' to 'Oil'.
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A big R.E.S.P.E.C.T to the person brave enough to upload a torrent and be the initial seeder for a 78 gig file! They must have one hell of a connection....
There's no need for the upload if you have a server, just cap the file straight to the server. Though seeding out 78GB... that's commitment to 'the cause'.
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I forget who it was who said it, but “the constitution is not a suicide pact”. A very sensible sentiment that covers issues like rendition and robust interrogation quite well.
I watched Road to Guantanamo last night. You're talking out a hole in your head James. Bush's (largely successful so far) attempt to find a space between American law, and international law, to hold these people and treat them worse than dogs is truly horrific. Talk about human rights abuses.