Posts by BenWilson
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Wow the second paper was just as blank as the first!
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I just think in general it's sad when longtime journalists cross over.
Especially if they do it when they're still officially a journalist.
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It will be very interesting to watch ACT try to hardball National. If Key is half as decisive and tough as they make out, then ACT will shoot themselves in the foot. But perhaps he isn't. Perhaps he's a bit of a sook?
Or is it a longer game he plays? The more he can blame cockups on ACT, the more the public will look directly to him for leadership. At the moment he risks alienating people who may have sympathies to ACT amongst National's base, if he refuses ACT anything. I very much doubt ACT can actually force any leverage out of the government - bringing the coalition down will not benefit ACT in the slightest.
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are you joking?
the US is long bankrupt.Definitely morally bankrupt :-)
I wouldn't get too happy about the US going bankrupt though. You can bet your boots if that happens, everyone else will be bankrupted first.
On the flipside, bankruptcy is actually the only known safety valve for too much debt. Or we can have slavery, I guess. Ultimately, money is only the paper crap that's used for counting goods and services. Burn the entire lot, and all the goods and services will still exist. In fact, they might be better off for more realistic accounting.
The danger is the colossal upheaval in political stability such an event could create. I can feel more wars coming on.
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B Jones, I agree the crossover is rich, but there are really good examples of both pure fantasy and sci-fi. But an awful lot of writers do both.
Re: I, Robot. The book was soooo much better. But it would never, never ever work as a film. It could maybe work as a TV series, in the style of a CSI show.
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Obvious statement follows: The very best sci-fi has a resonance with the culture at the time.
Indeed. Actually that goes for all fiction. I find it interesting that sci-fi always has themes taken from fantasy genres (and vice versa). But readers of sci-fi seem divided into those who also like fantasy, and those who don't. Being in the 'also likes fantasy' camp, I can't understand the other camp at all. I find both genres equally unbelievable, both are just commentaries on our current mindset, and fun stories to boot. OK, sometimes you learn some things from sci-fi set not too far into the future that you didn't already know about science. More often you learn bullshit science that is known to be totally wrong even now. Either way, the stories are always the same, formed along the lines of tales that humans have always liked, which delve right back into our ancient mythology. Science just replaces magic.
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I went on holiday 2 weeks ago and have been sick as a dog ever since. But I put it down the shocking stress of budget air travel when you have a small child in tow.
Heh, can't wait to see what this Hadron collider comes up with. That's the beauty of science - you really can't predict the outcome of experiments. There would be no point doing them if you could. It could be one giant "no, that ain't it" moment.
It is astonishing how expensive it is to do theoretical physics now, though. I guess everything that can be found cheaply already has been, there's probably any number of economic theories which would predict that. I can't help but feel that it signifies a 'degenerating research program' when the costs of progress continue to mount and mount astronomically. But then again, science doesn't work on timetables. Maybe they do their wicked Hadron collision and hundreds of applications suddenly flow out of the observed results, creating technological revolutions unforeseen for humanity. Maybe. We'll see. Maybe it costs billions and points out another dead end.
Physics has long since gone past the point where laypeople can understand what it is they are paying the scientists to discover for them. I've heard several physicists that I know personally say that even with their years of training and experimentation, they don't really understand quantum physics, and that probably only a handful of people do. I guess once the formulae get too complex, 'understanding' it is not really possible in the sense we expect.
I have experienced the same thing in my own work. As a programmer, you build machines that steadily mount in complexity. I can honestly say that I do not understand most of the code I have written now. The best I can say is that I can probably find out how any particular piece works faster than anyone else, but I simply can't keep a detailed knowledge of how it all works in my head. There is just too much of it. And the same goes for the 'world body' of computer code. Probably something like 90% of it is not understood by anyone (although it would have been understood whilst it was being written). It's become like a 'subconcious', the machinery that you expect to work for you, without really knowing how, within your own brain.
Which kind of points to science steadily becoming knowledge that is not really held by humans. Humans will drive it, but no human will ever get more than a tiny fraction of it. As a body of knowledge, it has transcended humanity already. A great deal of it is just lying there in records, or databases, or algorithms, any of which can be understood, but never the whole lot.
It has, of course, been this way for a long time, ever since records have been kept of anything, but I think the modern world has seen an explosion of it, that dwarfs the totally of the phenomenon previously.
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You could, of course, just falsify all the information for the prepaid phone. When they require a passport it could be a different matter, though.
Last time I went to Europe for work, they were very surprised (and I think also a little annoyed) that I would not accept any flight that went over the USA, because I object on principle to being fingerprinted. So my trip went via Vietnam. The agent had screwed up her instructions to me and I did not realize that there is no transit lounge area in Hanoi at all (be wary of this, folks). So the authorities in Hanoi were understandably annoyed at me attempting (as they saw it) to get into Vietnam without a visa (I was actually just waiting for my connecting flight).
Now, just imagine if I'd tried the same thing in the USA, what could have happened to me? Have a guess what happened in Vietnam?
Answer: I was put into a hotel without any guards whatsoever, where I promptly slept like a baby for the 8 hour wait. After that there was a bit of bureaucratic arsing around waiting for someone to make a call, until finally a guy in a military uniform came out, eyeballed me, yelled at them, and I was on my way. No interrogation, no processing, not even demands for payment for the hotel. And people rag on communists for being inefficient, unhelpful and bureaucratic. Pfffft. I'd take that experience over getting fingerprinted by scary angry American border guards any day.
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My brief dalliance with ACT was on grounds of their claims of social liberality. But after hanging with a bunch of them, reading quite a few newsletters, and hearing them actually talk in person about social issues, I realized that it was mostly bs, that they were socially liberal so far as any peculiar perversions they may have had themselves were concerned, but that was the extent of it. 99% of their political energy was trained on economics and the dismantling of social welfare. I was not cut from that cloth.
I'm not sure any party would cater for me. Labour was on the right path until they gave Anderton and Dunne power. Greens are narrowly concerned about the environment - if they are socially liberal in some ways, that appears to be an accident. The more they form into a true political party, the less I like them. ACT are socially liberal, just so long as they can crush the entire nature of every NZ institution formed in the last 50 years. NZ First have never even pretended to be liberal. National are liberal, but only when forced to be by legislation made popular by Labour.
A sex party would be too one-issue for me. Liberality covers a whole lot more than that.
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As for laws on relationships, I generally struggle to see that point. Every conceivable kind of family already exists in NZ, it's just that only a fraction of them are recognized as marriages. Whether they are recognized as marriages, they still are what they are, though. Gay people will still live together much like hetero marriages, loving one another and providing support. Endless cheating will always happen in every kind of relationship. A number of people live as though multiply married. Children fall onto the care of whoever steps up. Children will occur between people who have had no other relationship than a quick shag. Married men will have mistresses, women will have toy boys. A lot of people have no partners of any emotional significance, but have sex with lots of people. Some people get no sex. Some people pay for it.
None of it is 'immoral'. It's just 'how it is'. Laws will not change any of this, and they definitely should not. Sex with minors should be illegal, but basically nothing else.
What the laws do is provide some kind of framework for the difficult job of deciding what to do with people's money, and to protect children. Who has to pay for this child? Does this woman deserve half of this man's money? Should this group of people get an allowance? Should this child be in this household or that?
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