Posts by Chris Waugh
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Matthew Reid,
Russians are hard to get to know, maybe all those years of suspicion of each other under a surveillance society.
I dunno, the Chinese (gross generalisation!) seem to have gotten through a lot of that, and are still under a fair bit of surveillance, with their natural curiosity and conversationality intact. Wandering around our neighbourhood with a baby has gotten us into a few random chats and made us quite a few new friends.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Jackie Clark,
China's sea turtles (it's a pun on "returned from overseas", it works in Chinese) seem to face similar problems, so no, I don't think those kinds of attitudes are unique to NZers.
I'm glad somebody likes hearing those stories, because last time - um, no, the only time I tried repatriation I got lots of people's eyes glazing over whenever I tried to talk, because all I had to talk about was China. That, combined with Russell's gossip gap, makes for a peculiar kind of loneliness. Hopefully next time, with a wife and daughter to nurse through culture shock (oh, such fun... fortunately I've built up stacks of experience at that here) I'll be too busy, and with too compelling a reason to stay in NZ (do I want my daughter dragged through the Chinese education system?) to be much bothered by that particular kind of loneliness.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Steve Barnes,
“It’s an evitable consequence of planning and a gun-ho approach
Glad you picked up the gun-ho mistake, but it seems to me that he's also saying that the whole thing could have been avoided, and that the mess was a result of planning.
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Field Theory: Let the Eagles Soar, in reply to bmk,
Yes, I recall hearing (not sure if it’s true though – really should check) that LA has the second largest Samoan population of any city
That wouldn't have anything to do with American Samoa, would it? I don't know if they'd be counted as immigrants.
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Hard News: Those were different times ..., in reply to B Jones,
A kid I know asked the other day why “blood” isn’t pronounced “blued”. It’s a hell of a question, because there was a huge accent shift in English after spelling started to be standardised – relics show up in words like blood and sword, making kids’ spelling lessons harder than they need to be for four hundred years.
Ah, the Great Vowel Shift., also reponsible for words that were once pronounced somewhat similarly to the modern German words licht and recht being spelt light and right, but with completely unmatching pronunciations in modern English.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
This is hardly a forensic level of accuracy. It's a question of one important word - million - going missing and in the process drastically altering a story. If it took a 10 year old girl to discover a supernova as close as 240 light years away, how is it we're still alive? Or, how is it we don't have stories along the lines of "5 year old Jamaican boy discovers the sun!"? But put at its proper distance of 240 million light years the story suddenly becomes truly awesome.
I’ve got a volume on nuclear weapons development where the author conspicuously failed to understand the basic technological challenges. What does one do about that?
Buy a book written by an author who understands the subject?
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
A polyglot's question: If the words in the 'random' string were each from a different language, with preferably each language unrelated, would that beat, or at least delay, the dictionary attacks?
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Who’s sneering?
Nobody here, necessarily, but society does value different work in different ways, and not just through pay rates. Immigrants do the jobs locals don't want because locals see those jobs as being somehow beneath them. It's amazing how essential those jobs often are, though. And then a lot of jobs that society probably wouldn't miss terribly much if the people doing them vanished offer huge salaries and a lot of social status completely disproportionate to their usefulness or necessity to society.
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There is dignity in a job well done, no matter how drudgelicious that job may be. It is not work that is demeaning or dehumanising, as work is simply a part of the human condition, and it seems fair to say that most work is drudge in some form or another. Nor is it necessarily the system that demeans or dehumanisises, although the capitalist system certainly helps. It is people's attitudes that demean and dehumanise.
So long as we continue to piss and shit, and if we wish to maintain our current standards of health and wellbeing, we are going to need toilets and we are going to need to clean them. That means paying people to clean public toilets. It certainly does not seem like an intellectually stimulating job, but there is no reason to sneer at those who do it for a living. Their jobs may not be great, they may not be particularly bright or ambitious (although it is always dangerous to make assumptions), but their jobs are necessary and we should respect that.
Basically, no jobs, even those that deal with various aspects of the sewage system, are shitty in and of themselves. It's shitty bosses that make shitty jobs shitty, and shite attitudes on the part of those "further up the social ladder" just compound the shittiness.
It would be interesting to see how the well-heeled would cope if all those in drudge jobs at the bottom of the social heap downed tools for even a week. Imagine fancy-pants currency traders (who, it should be pointed out, produce nothing at all as they accumulate their wealth) having to pick their own fruit, mill their own grain, or butcher their own chickens. Imagine John Key starting his work week cleaning the Beehive toilets.... now there's a pleasant thought...
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Che Tibby,
further, how will they handle the urban mobility of youth? these people change accommodation constantly. you’ll need an army of back-office workers to support the paperwork.
Apparently there're plenty of people in need of jobs. Wouldn't the dole queue be a good place to start looking for that army of back-office workers?