Posts by JLM
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For people who need to walk, slit an old pair of woolly socks or grab a pair of stretchy airline socks inside out, and but them on top of your shoes. Works a treat for packed snow or frost. (Even been scientifically proven in good old Dunedin if I can find the reference)
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Legal Beagle: Crowdsourcing the referendum, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
10 different factors and facets of voting systems: I like list MPs vs I hate list MPs. I like proportionality vs I like single-party majority government. etc.
I like parliamentary representation that is representative of the population vs mostly white older males, I hope
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Idiot Savant,
To get votes from old people who hate young people. It is that simple. Whether these measures target an actual social problem, or even do so effectively, is irrelevant.
That's what I wanted to say. I guess you could call it the "politics of envy".
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It really pisses me off that the yoof have become a convenient scapegoat to target for issues that affect all of us with pretty little policy snippets - like the cartoon bandaids you stick over a kid's injury but with less placebo effect for the injured. Youth benefits, car-crushing, zero alcohol for learner drivers - all designed to help us older ones tut tut complacently without examining our our behaviours and entitlements.
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Hard News: Media7: A new censor -- and a…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Seems rather impressed with himself, that man.
Well he has reason to be.
But it still doesn’t seem to make him an easy interviewee.
He obviously prefers the sort of soft and worshipful interview that Jim Mora gave him on 8 months to Mars
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OnPoint: Easy as 1, 2, 22.8 billion, in reply to DexterX,
This is news only for the week ending Friday July 29, 2011
The minimum wage needs a lift – it is the best way to boost an economy that has been mismanaged along the lines of a wait and see approach on the basis that it can’t stay bad forever.
Nationally one in every five children lives in an impoverished household.
Have you seen the just-released Green Party policy to tackle this?
http://www.greens.org.nz/press-releases/green-plan-bring-100000-children-out-poverty
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Joe Wylie,
There are a few blah old-school tomato varieties that persist in seed catalogs and remain mysteriously popular.
One I really like that's not too "blah" is Bloody Butcher from Kings, because it seems to get ripe fruit weeks before the others, both under glass and outside - a big plus down here in the deep south. And it keeps on giving, too.
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It combines the best of soap - characters you know and identify with, who fall into general categories of goodies and baddies but sometimes surprise; drama - who's going to cheat this year, and are they going to get found out, who's going to have the legs this time; travelogues - scenery, scenery, scenery; and reality tv - better, because no-one ever knows what is going to happen at any particular time, especially this year.
And that's apart from the sport. Cycling is the only sport I watch
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I have a question - has there ever been a version of CGT in NZ before? I ask because some time after we married in the early seventies we followed the example of some canny friends and bought a section in Rangiora with the intention of reselling it and providing a home deposit. Our friends had already bought a house, so it was their first step in what proved to be a long and successful retirement plan in property investment.
Some time after we had bought it there was an introduction of some sort of tax on the proceeds of our intended sale. We were apparently exempt as it was our only property, but our friends were worried they would have to pay tax. In the end they didn't, by the simple expedient of saying that they had intended to build on the section but had changed their minds. Both sections were sold at a "handsome" profit.
Did this happen, or is it a figment of my imagination?
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Hard News: #NetHui: it's all about you, in reply to James Butler,
The basic idea is that they use less water + are gentler on the clothes. As a bonus, ours provided several weeks of entertainment for our children when it was new – they would happily lie in front of it for a whole cycle, watching the clothes go around through the glass door.
Danielle’s right though, they take forever to run.
I love, love, love my frontloader (well, I did wash clothes in the bath for over six months) and it has a wool cycle that finishes in an hour and cleans almost everything better than the bath did.