Posts by Christopher Dempsey
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I am still no better informed.
A booty clap is when a lady wearing a g-string claps. With her bottom.
TMI. I guess some things are better left mysterious.
-
Russell's post talked about hitching. In a slight change of thread direction disability activists have
chained themselves to the gates of the White House to protest at long term disability services and supports not being part of the Obama health plan. That means the bias towards institutional care in the US would remain.Good on them!
And
What Robyn Said. I would have thought it easy enough to contact say the Waikato University Computer Science Department, and work your way out from there...
-
Capitalism/Mactional/The Business Roundtable/EMA/etc have a lot to answer for over this particular behavioural pattern where the 'pillock' with the nasty flu struggles into work.
Yes, comrade, because nobody is ever ill in our planned Socilaist utopia. Now get back to work in your factory before I call the commissars!
LOL errr, yes well - I didn't plan for it to come out like that... LOL
-
Lots of studies have shown that the pillock who struggles valiantly into work does stuff all that is useful themselves and infects the whole workplace.
Really seriously, if you're sick the best thing you can do for your workplace is stay home.Capitalism/Mactional/The Business Roundtable/EMA/etc have a lot to answer for over this particular behavioural pattern where the 'pillock' with the nasty flu struggles into work.
Work is the ONLY thing worth doing, nothing else. The nasty Protestant strain of thought here inoculates capitalism with the mantra that those that struggle, even in the face of adversity, will triumph in the end. Companies and organisations buy into this thought cause it generates profits.
Struggling means side effects, in this instance, infecting all your healthy colleagues. The upshot is that everyone suffers, at a far greater cost to the company / organisation than if the person had instead, been encouraged, nay, ordered to stay home at no cost to him/her in terms of lost pay/sick leave for 5 - 7 days.
(Also, if you are on a shit wage, with shitty conditions, and work for an organisation that hates unions, you'll come into work regardless. That's how I got the flu in Toronto in 2006, two days before I came home. A Taco Bell worker, plainly and clearly sick, handled my order. I know, I should have left the place straight away, but goodness I was hungry!)
But we all know that, right? The wingnuts/business roundtables of the world don't. Can't see it.
Though, I was amused to see the EMA last winter start advocating that perhaps, just perhaps, companies should look at encouraging people to stay home. Plainly, the penny dropped for them, after how many years??
-
Broadband and internet brings us this...
-
Sure, but Kyoto is a palliative at best. The changes we need are radical and require a radical rethinking of the notions of development and growth, as well as of human and environmental capital. From that broader perspective the difference between Labour and National is negligible. (And I'm a Labour voter, mind.)
The radical re-thinking needed here requires a complete change in our lifestyles, not to the mythical granola eating sandal wearing model promoted by wingnuts, but to one where we pay attention to how we live. Most people I suspect intuitively understand this.
Everything we do impacts on the environment. We have, collectively, agreed to politely ignore the true cost of impacts on the environment; in our best 'human' manner we mimmise, mitigate, wish away, pray for a technological solution, justify, wear tinted glasses, slowly go frustrated/mad, or drink our way to oblivion.
We continue to support a system that demands such behaviour, and that system binds, gags and blindfolds us so that those that are within it think it a normal and natural system, but it's not terribly hard to see that it is a system created by some for the mass to the benefit of some, and if it is a system that is created, another model can be created - one that is more just, but never compeletly just. You need injustice to have justice.
I'm not saying anything particularly new here. All the evidence is available to anyone with a brain and a broadband connection.
My choices when faced with this somewhat overwhelming, daunting seemingly monolithic beast that is wearing the world out, and not delivering what is true, good and beautiful is to choose hope. Not a blind, sunny, sunflower optimism, but a more grounded and realistic optimism.
Sigh. That, and good friends, family, food, music, art, books and wine. And PA of course. The rest is rubbish. :)
-
A dumb question perhaps - what does NACT stand for?
Dumb answer poss but I think it is National/Act party.(I should read this first eh?)
Though I prefer the term 'Mactional'.
-
Oddly enough, the Powershop reporting I thought did go too far was the Campbell Live story on Monday night, which was presented as a report but came across as a promotional video.
That's been done before. Paul Holmes, about 5 yrs ago, featured a promotional video for a mystery shopper company on his show, calling it 'news'.
Retailers are there because the alternative would see us all shafted (even more) for our electricity
Not if it were owned by the people for the people, as God intended.
That's the problem with some NACTs; they think they are God. Just ask Bradford.
My humble view is that so long as we must have corporate overlords (which, clearly, we do), it would be nice to be able to talk to them every once in a while instead of having them talk at us the whole time via their marketing people and advertising agencies. Fencepost those spaces however you like, but they will be a more valuable addition to the site than the ads, unobtrusive as the latter might be.
Heh, that'd be interesting... imagine - how does that story go... the emperor has no clothes...
-
Well the Eskimo / Inuit debate reaches Canada (where I was born)...
The 'your views' is roughly on par with dear Granny's errr 'readers'.
-
This morning's media circus is quite astonishing, a veritable tragi-comedy (qualifier - not downplaying suicide attempts) and thankfully provides fertile ground for some person doing a doctoral thesis involving self-absorbed people, media, law, sports, living by and dying by the 'media', and other things all mixed in with a spot of Deleuzian thought.
Still, the best of a bad bunch in this 'drama', Tony Wall, sums it up - Veitch cannot, at the end of the day, appear to actually say sorry, without recourse to minimisation/justification/contexualisation of his actions.