Posts by BenWilson
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Dominant
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Hebe,
I like quaxing, but it’s regional
Cantabrians can go quaxing if they want to. It's probably even more popular there, being a flat city.
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Is hosking attempting to kill quaxers?
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Up Front: Reading Murder Books, in reply to Rich Lock,
The one where he fights a legion of invisible glass villains from China, for example. Or the one where they find a lost Persian army in the Egyptian desert.
I'm sure he was as phlegmatic and coldly logical throughout as ever. Lots of detail about the possible march times of lost Persian armies, and how one might spot them from the air.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to chris,
Thanks Ben that was illuminating both in terms of how much it revealed as much as how much it didn’t
I'm starting to realize that stats is supposed to be that way.
It seems to me that you're rather bitter on Rob Salmond. I think this is misplaced. It's perhaps a sad truth that a party like Labour has to consider positioning strategy, with all the winners and losers that that entails, but I'd rather they did it with data under the guidance of a guy like him, than with the kind of knee-jerk reacting that often mars their decision making.
I'm not sure they do really "Flit back and forth along this line", since their position is an aggregate of many positions, and overall there's not much flitting - what flits is their position on particular issues along that dimension - they trade one off against another, depending on it's apparent popularity. It's annoying and it's why I won't vote for them (I basically don't really know what they stand for), but I can understand that I am an atypical voter, and further that the party that I tend to vote for recently (Green) is stuck with Labour anyway. The silver lining is that Labour is also probably stuck with Greens too. I'm not a typical Green voter either (so far as I know), since I mostly like their economic and social policy - environmental issues are a distant 4th or 5th place really. When they actually ever get some power, I may live to regret supporting them, as their compromise is likely to be every reason I voted for them in the first place. Such is the reality of actually gaining power. Such is my main disaffection with representative government. I prefer referenda. Except that they're always on stupid shit like flags and smacking, because that is also part of how representative government works.
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Cornwall put me off detective novels forever, unfortunately. Prior to that, the aforementioned oldies are favourites of mine, and I'd only add Biggles. Which might seem odd until you've read a Biggles and realize that he's basically a flying detective. Even in the wartime novels, he approached problems thrown up by the German Air Force as a detective would. In the post war ones, he is, in fact, a CID.
If you never read any other Biggles books, Sergeant Bigglesworth, C.I.D should be it. It starts slowly, with the typical Biggles bollocksing around a base with his goofy mates, directly after the war has finished, getting bored because basically they're all mad, and can't really celebrate the end of something that killed nearly all of their friends and family. But fortunately for Biggles, Nazis didn't end just because the war did...and thus begins a non-stop pursuit of a villainous airborne gang across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, finishing with an epic 2 day pursuit, culminating in a brutal dogfight and then a shoot out on the ground.
Only a quarter of a mile of heat-distorted air divided the two machins; and still the distance closed. Biggles sat quite still. His face was expressionless. Never, not for an instant, did his eyes leave his quarry.
Ginger moistened his lips, thankful that he was not in the Renkell. There was something so implacable, so relentless, about Biggles when he was in his present mood. He knew that whatever happened he would not turn back. He would go to the end, even if their petrol ran out and left them stranded in the heart of the Sahara... -
Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to FletcherB,
for me it’s 2-3 km extra (10-20%) distance in exchange for a nearly flat ride and nearly half on protected cycleway
Presumably the alternative is New North Rd? Or perhaps a sneaky back street route to Mt Eden Rd I can see why you'd avoid those. Hilly and dangerous. I'm pretty glad to be near the Northwestern, although I concur with previous posters saying that the route from Waterview to New Lynn is pretty much hopeless so far as cycling infrastructure is concerned. There's basically a half-arsed footpath/cycleway that ends about halfway up Gt North Rd, at which point you can either ride on the footpath (I consider this the more dangerous option since every driveway is blind, it's very narrow, and most days there are bins taking up the entire thing) or the road, which is a busy highway, the main feed to inner West Auckland.
Particularly dangerous along that stretch is the Blockhouse Bay Rd turn off, if you want to go straight. Many times I've had drivers overtake me, then do a sharp left turn directly in front of me, often cutting the corner. Now, I make that impossible just by taking the whole lane for 50m before the corner. Having the option to be a dick taken away seems to make drivers not be dicks. So far.
In rush hour, coming the other way up to that corner, I often take the footpath. If nothing else, it's just much quicker. But then at the top, the lengths involved to get to the cycleway are just stupid now. I have to merge off the footpath into traffic, then cross two lanes, then ride down the median strip, then turn across two lanes onto a shitty bumpy footpath covered in leaves, cracks, potholes, those spiky seed pods, pedestrians, dogs, cars pulling out of the servo, cars pulling into the servo, and then the tiny narrow gap right at the bottom which has a fucked up jarring bump right in the middle, and invariably has 3 pedestrians standing together discussing whether they should go into Oakley Creek Walkway. Then it's a stiff climb to Pt Chev (I was hoping that at the very least this could have been avoided in all of the billions spent on the intersection upgrade - that the cycleway could have followed the motorway under the bridge), followed by having to cross Carrington Rd on a pedestrian crossing, and then finally, finally we get to the cycleway goodness, which is very good (well except that for about 3 months they just used the stretch of it past St Lukes Rd to park digging machines and diverted all bikes up a whole bunch of suburban hills to get across what was a 100m downhill cycleway stretch before - I don't know if this is now fixed).
I don't know exactly what could be done to improve the Waterview to New Lynn stretch, though. It's naturally very narrow going up to BB road - the only way to widen the road would be to acquire hundreds of millions of dollars worth of housing. Same goes all the way to New Lynn - this is just one of those shitty old ancient routes, the "Great" North Rd, which would have seemed a marvel of engineering when Auckland was mostly forest, but now is just shite. Avondale used to be the end of the line, prior to bridges being built, so it was probably not planned that this road would be feeding the hinterlands of West Auckland. The Ash St bypass could certainly have a painted cycleway added at almost no cost, although I don't find that stretch particularly dangerous myself, except when it's littered with parked cars, something I can't really understand. Why make a bypass and then let people park on it?
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Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to George Darroch,
I was having this disagreement with Wellington cyclists recently. When you’re around pedestrians on a shared space, anything above about 15km/h is either unsafe or uncomfortable for the people you’re around, depending on how many of them there are.
That is true, but it's hyperbole to say that speeding bikes are in the same danger league as speeding cars. It's like comparing slingshots and pistols. Both can kill, of course. But which one does, in fact, kill the most people, by far?
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Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to Roger,
I doubt you can expect a conviction in these circumstances, but you can report people anyway. At least a record is kept that they were involved in this kind of traffic incident. Might deter them at best, or get them later at worst.
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Or perhaps I should say – there might once have been a rhetorical reason for doing so, when parties like ACT purported to offer an option in the bottom right quadrant. But in practice the opinions of their membership, and then ultimate their leadership, were actually in the upper right (or extreme right using standard parlance). It was a graph simply made to make ACT look unique. Which is didn’t, because it isn’t.
You could also suggest that NZF might go more to the top left quadrant. But they don’t really seem to end up there using the questions of the compass. They just end up in the middle, maybe a shade to the left. I found them to be very close to Labour, when you get down to their actual opinions. I think (but didn’t explore greatly) that demographics forms the main difference between these two parties.
Since these were weak dimensional choices, I looked for better. Didn’t find them, though. I’m sure they are there, with the right questions, but it seems like forming a nice left to right graph IS the analysis most designers of these questionaires seem to want, so that is, of course, what they get.
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