Posts by st ephen
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Hard News: We have to rethink the annual…, in reply to andin,
Policy Analysts come in many flavours - well-informed and diligent, arrogant and ignorant, well-meaning but overwhelmed, politically-aligned and blinkered, ambitious and self-serving, open-minded and creative etc. I have heard that MoH has a particularly virulent infection of ideologically-driven analysts with no experience or knowledge outside Treasury and ACT/BRT circles.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Hilary Stace,
The ODT thought the police apology merited two paragraphs on an inside page.
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I was brought up on sago and tapioca puddings in the 1970s in NZ - comfort food for my mother's generation (along with seameal custard and Spanish cream). I think I owe my svelte figure today to an early-acquired habit of skipping dessert. I'd be inclined to give Angolan wallpaper paste a miss too.
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Hard News: Memories of the news, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's fascinating how this exercise provides a demographic picture that wasn't apparent before.
Yep, because while there's not much difference between a 51 year-old and a 59 year-old now, there's a huge difference between a 1 year-old and a 9 year-old then. It's funny how time compresses and you catch up in age to the big kids from your childhood.
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"Metiria Turei campaigned for political parties but didn't work while lying to Winz"
Perhaps it was just the clickbait headline, but the comments below this Stuff article seem like a coordinated up-voting campaign in action. Troops mobilised for the election campaign - on one side at least.
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Sacha,
...anybody who thrusts a broken bottle at a person's throat half a dozen times is charged with at least that.
??? Sure, but what has that got to do with the case Graeme linked to in his attempt to show the even hand of justice?
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Oh FFS - " ultimately received ". If Kingi had been white he never would have been charged with 'assault with intent to injure' in the first place, let alone been sentenced to five months in jail.
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Hard News: Obscuring the News, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
The best part is that having shown how to get the answer that "most people" get, they don't point out that you can only get that answer by swapping the multiplication sign in the final equation for a plus sign.
(I do know an artist who thinks that if it's OK to say "Let horse = x", you might just as well say "Let x = +"). -
Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to David Haywood,
I think it's recognised that the Kyoto Protocol (and therefore the ETS) doesn't make any sense if there are parts of the world outside the system. China does at least report its emissions under the UNFCCC, so we do get to see the ice block manufacturing emissions even if they don't enter an accounting system.
Shifting everything to a point of consumption would be interesting - we could sheet home most of those livestock methane emissions to someone else. The flip side is that the plantation forests that have offset over one-third of our gross emissions for the last 25 years have mostly been grown for someone else too. (One of the proposed accounting approaches did allow us to claim credit for sequestration by trees here, while making the wood product end-users in our export markets liable for emissions at the end of the product lifetime. Great for a country with a small population and big net exports. Naturally none of the heavies at the negotiating table were keen to join NZ in pushing for that option).