Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Serious question: who here regularly watches Campbell Live? And by that, I mean the full episode, live to air. Not occasionally watching a video someone has shared on Facebook.
But actually it's the wrong question.
Media today is a mesh of facebook/twitter/instagram and yes the actual show as it airs.
I do watch the show live about once a week.
But more importantly I follow its reporters and engage with it on the internet in multiple forms.
Thinking about TV in the narrow blinkered vision of the live ratings is dinosaur thinking.
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to martinb,
Okay which dystopian future
The one where the media only exists to make money. Where journalists are salespeople and management is already looking for the next job.
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Envirologue: Branding a Post-Predator…, in reply to izogi,
I favour the approach of regulation of breeding, keeping and sale of cats.
Also I agree with this. I can’t see any reason why cats shouldn’t be treated similarly to dogs, at the very least re licensing and registration.
Absolutely! We love our SPCA moggys. But there is no way we could justify allowing them to breed and chipping them is just good sense. A registration fee would hardly make any difference given what the fleabags have cost us in vet bills.
Given the number of rats they have brought home to us (__most__ of them dead) I think we are probably still on the plus side of the equation.
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Envirologue: Branding a Post-Predator…, in reply to Lilith __,
Humans are quite the pest species
So the question is, do you want to restore the ecology to its original state? If the answer is yes then you probably have to eliminate humans from the environment as well.
Given that is unlikely to be a viable option the question becomes where on the scale from "no humans" to "no wildlife" to we want to be.
I don't think absolute arguments are helpful, predator free makes a nice slogan but it is completely unrealistic and unlikely to be either necessary or sufficient. Predator free is not going to help if we are also habitat free.
As Lilith points out urban cats are probably irrelevant to our native forest estates. And targeting them simply makes most folks dismiss the rest of your thesis.
A far bigger problem is continued reduction in government funding for agencies that
a) do the research to figure out the best conservation approaches
and b) enact those policies
All paid for by taxation that people are constantly trying to reduce.The problem isn't making NZ predator free, the problem is even retaining the funding to do what little we do now let alone improve the efforts to eradicate the obvious first candidates.
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There is a part of me that kinda wants to imagine these are deliberate holes in the systems - used to identify those people with more creativity and more ability to think outside the rules. Then those people can be offered jobs building FTL spaceships and teleportation devices ...
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After reading this my mind turned to ways to fix it (it's pathological I know) and it occurs to me that because of the way we hide the real costs of dairy farming, by making the cleanup a taxpayer and ratepayer responsibility we essentially have no way to develop cheaper or better solutions.
The way research in NZ is structured, there is pure research funded mostly by Marsden and is about 5-10% of what goes on in NZ depending on how you count. And there is product driven research which is focused on making NZ more economically (export) viable but also includes some environmental stuff as well. Seriously we have to make up ... er ... calculate export dollars values for most of our research.
The problem is that nitrogen runoff and leeching is strictly an environmental problem, there is no economic value because the export industries bear none of the cost. Without a benefit to NZs export industries you have almost no chance of getting funding.
So despite having some of the best scientific knowledge in the world about pastures and dairying there is no real way any of them could get funding to do research into finding a solution.
That leaves the only viable solution as fewer cows.
Bizarre.
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Hard News: How about that cricket, eh?, in reply to Ross Mason,
Conspiracy
I think rather than conspiracy, Steven was suggesting it was a poor design option by the architects. One of those
"... wouldn't it be cool if we had windows around the top layer and you'd see sunlight streaming through to make the building feel less overwhelming and monolithic ..."
Without actually considering the purpose of the building - sigh.
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Hard News: How about that cricket, eh?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
wickets that suited our batsmen
Bollocks.
No doubt playing at the MCG helped Australia but the (largely flat and perfect for ODIs) wicket had nothing to do with it. Nor did the wickets in NZ which were also largely flat. No seaming wickets, no uneven bounce anywhere.
Dismissing the performance of the Blackcaps as a result of a friendly draw is both wrong and churlish. Please stick to movie reviews in the future.
What is definitely true is that Australia had better players who played better on the night.
What is also true is that the Blackcaps played a high risk high reward style of cricket that was always going to be an even higher risk against fast bowlers of the pace and quality that Australia have.
With a little luck batting (Taylor and yes MacCullum too) would have made for a different match as would a little luck bowling, Boult actually had an lbw turned down that was out and a number of balls went to ground that in other matches had found fielders. NZ needed to play right up to their potential to compete and they didn't, but that isn't the same as suggesting they didn't deserve to be there and didn't have a very real chance of winning.
Get back under the bridge Tom.
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Hard News: How about that cricket, eh?, in reply to Peter Darlington,
I’m pretty sure we’ll lose on Friday
Lucky we aren't playing on Friday
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So I'm a grumpy old man now, with the classic grumpy old man trait of loving test cricket more than the one day game. I'll even argue long and loud (especially with wine in hand) that ODIs are a thing of the past now that we have twenty 20 ...
BUT
man that was an amazing game!
Nobody in that side missed a beat. I'll heap scorn on anyone who disses any of the team - that includes Taylor who caused a run out true, but lets get serious there were other run out opportunities given by both sides. That is the nature of a game that close. All the players took risks, all knew they could look like a goose or a hero. That is the nature of the game on the days when it reaches the heights.
I'm glad I watched the whole thing, loved every minute.