Posts by Stephen Judd
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Bad enough, you may well say
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Actually, I think it's worse. Slinging the word "retard" around is one thing, actually pointing to someone who has problems and inviting people to laugh at those problems is just nasty. As my mother would have said, he is a nasty little man.
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At bottom, though, the issue with Paul Henry isn't his choice of words, but the attitude he expresses with them.
He could use the most decorous language possible, but he'd still be a sneering eejit who goes for the cheap laughs -- just less oafish and more polished.
It's as though someone told Henry about comedy afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and he went "oh, they must have mixed that up."
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Riding a motorbike carries with it a very high probability of an accident that leans heavily on the health system, so a decent insurance premium seems justified
Not in a universal system that insures rugby players, skydivers, trampers, ... we're all in this together, mate.
Personally I think it's the thin end of the privatisation wedge. Of course you want to accustom people to being segmented and paying higher premiums before chunks of risk pool are sold off. No doubt the highest-risk, uninsurable people will be left to the state.
Note, I don't ride a motobike.
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Roger: Gio beat me to the rat story.
But anyway it gives us a good example of the problem with the policy. Based on this story, I would say that Tolley is rude and contemptuous. Is that a personal attack by me on her? Some people would say yes. And yet I think it's legitimate criticism.
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My theory is that Lucy is the first visible manifestation of some emergent Iain Banks-style AI, like HAL, but nicer.
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I'd like the phrase it's knowledge, bro to receive some consideration from the judges. But I also think that denier has a lot of resonance at the moment.
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DeepRed, thank you for linking to that old Gaynor article -- it's a pearler.
ScottY: I've read that report more closely now, and I don't find too much to disagree with in its prescriptions, quite honestly. If I were the author, I would be annoyed with the media coverage which devoted a lot of space to presenting our local culture as problematic, but very little to his recommendations about working with the culture.
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In my defence, I'm thinking of the business journalist summaries of the report -- I've only skimmed the thing itself. The summaries I have read basically amounted to "local employers are lazy and their employees are jealous."
For me hostility to "people of wealth" (great phrase, with its echoes of people of colour, oh those poor oppressed rich) is most intense where it's most deserved: inherited privilege (eg Doug Myers), and corporate shenanigans (Brierly and Fay and Richwhite et al). I think we are far more tolerant of people who have built up productive enterprises that employ others.
[edit] yeah, what Danyl said.
Skimming the report it seems that its brief is cultural factors, which excludes the very important scale issue. When just the barrier between us and Australia is so challenging, it's not surprising that people grow their businesses to city or NZ scale and then stop. A business in a country of 10s of millions of people has completely different growth options to a business here, no matter how hostile or friendly the populace are to wealthy people. This is always going to put the "satisficing" balance at a different point to where it might be for someone in a bigger market.
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Rich: you are reminding me of all the handwringing about how unambitious our entrepreneurs are, all wanting to retire to their baches and go fishing, which is to say redefining the parts of our national character that are most humane and admirable as being a problem.
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Here's a question I'd like a task force to look at: when you have a skills shortage, you need skilled labour. You can only get that by growing it, or importing it. People train or immigrate in response to higher wages. So why don't local employers pay more for skilled labour? Everybody knows that you get paid more elsewhere -- but why? What are the structural reasons for that?