Posts by Stephen R
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I believe it's China Miéville you want for the "flag waving commie" spot in your pantheon
Or Ken Macleod who, if memory serves, was a card carrying trotskyite at one stage. Him and Iain Banks are drinking buddies and both fairly left wing, according to the Edinburgh Scifi club members I met down the pub in London.
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Standing in the queue for the metal detectors at HKIA, two men in uniform carrying MP5 submachineguns pushed into the queue ahead of us and passed through the metal detectors without waiting. There was the predictable beeping noise, and then the wand operator, with a completely straight face, proceeded to wand them down (more beeps) and send them on their way.
I think they do have a sense of humour, they just hide it well.
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Speaker: The Voyage: The Engine Room…, in reply to Richard Aston,
Well I don't know about that . It may have been true 20- 40 years ago when those aging were flogged out manual workers but I think the future of aging may be different. I am 60 and am not expecting to retire for quite some time and like many of my friends we are looking after our health a lot more than say, my parent's generation did. I wouldn't be so quick to write off the aging population as a liability too soon.
I'm not so hopeful about the future. The over-use/miss-use of antibiotics makes me fear that in the next twenty years we're going to lose that great tool against disease. When that's gone, then I wouldn't be surprised to see the next generation have an average life expectancy lower than that of their parents.
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Speaker: How's that three strikes thing…, in reply to B Jones,
But until they do, are there many other reasons to pay for a 20G data plan?
I don't download illegal content. Not songs, not movies. I used to have a 20G data plan, but have increased it to 40G since overshooting a few times.
I tried buying games on Steam. As an example, Dragon Age Origins was 24GB. 8GB for a game is pretty average. A linux distro is quite often 1GB for a starting point. One game I play releases patches fairly regularly which are more than a GB.
Because a lot of their market is US based (most customers there don't have data limits), more and more developers are happy to release huge patches via the web.
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One of the things I try to get my head around is that I think that Germany would not be nearly as well off if it didn't have people to sell it's manufactured goods to.
Sure, there are jokes about towns in Greece who have the highest per-capita rate of Porsche ownership, but if they didn't buy them, then would anyone? The question is how did they buy them, and the answer is the producer loaned the money to the customer, then booked it as profit. I don't think that's really profit until the people who bought it manage to pay it off.
Having an economy that is always producing more than it consumes, and then lending money to its customers to buy its excess production is not a long term sustainable situation. There is no way the Greeks can pay back that money unless, as a country, they get to a situation where they are producing more than they consume for an extended period. Worse, since the world is a zero-sum game, there is no way that the Germans can get paid back unless either a) someone else borrows a bunch of money to pay the Greeks for their mythical excess production, which only shifts the problem onto someone else's books, or b) the Germans consume more than they're producing for a while to let their debtors earn some credit back and bring things back into balance.
I don't think that's going to happen. The Germans appear to be reacting to uncertainty by producing more and spending less.
The Germans got hit by hyperinflation followed by a depression after WWI. They are currently more scared of the possibility of hyper-inflation than the coming (arrived?) depression, but it's not completely irrational of them.
The "Greek bail out" doesn't seem to me to be a bail out of the Greeks, but a bail out of the banks that would go down the toilet if the Greek government went bankrupt, and the follow-on problems of the credit default swaps that would be called in if the Greeks defaulted, which might make life difficult for a lot more people.
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I'd put $300 towards a note taker for Mojo if Lockwood doesn't provide.
Do you think there are another 99 people in NZ who'd do the same?
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Blue Dogs, much?
If you're implying that Labour appear to be trying to be like National (only just slightly more compassionate to the poor), then I'd agree with that to some extent, but looking at the income distribution numbers, I really do think that a lot of poorer people were better off under Labour than they were under the previous National government, and I suspect than they are now.
Rich Lock wrote:
Well, for me it’s more that National propose (and vote for) laws I disagree with, and don’t lose any sleep about it, whereas Labour wring their hands and look all anguished, and then vote for it anyway. Which makes them a pretty useless opposition, in a lot of respects.
I agree with this a lot.
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Sacha,
How do you explain the Greens' opinion poll totals rising while Labour's declines? What are they doing differently or better?
From my perspective, the Greens argue like adults. I've been very impressed by a succession of Green MP speeches in the house. When Nandor was first elected I wasn't really a Greens supporter, but then I heard him speak. Actual logic! Coherent views! Complex subjects looked at with subtlety and reason. And the more I listen to Green MPs speak on a variety of subjects, the more they impress me. The Greens actually had a sensible, thought out energy policy before the last election which appeared to be something no other party could manage.
I liked Michael Cullen and trusted him to manage the economy, (was I the only one in New Zealand paying off my mortgage as fast as I could during the good times, instead of extending it to buy a flat screen TV?). I was lucky enough to hear him speak on the economy in a small room of about 20 people, and he made reasoned, coherent arguments about why he was doing the things he was. (I'm starting to see a pattern here.)
I used to be a Labour supporter. Actually donated money and delivered pamphlets. I had quite a long chat with Annette King (my local MP) on a street corner before the last election, about various subjects, including the proceeds of crime act. I was arguing that if they can't get enough evidence to convict someone, then they shouldn't be confiscating their stuff, and Annette was telling me that "We're only going to take stuff off the bad people, and the police know who they are". I felt like I was being ignored. I felt like Annette was telling me that "if you're not a criminal, you have nothing to fear" - I've played too many games with rules-lawyers to trust that badly written rules won't be abused by future players. Combine that with seeing some pretty terrible examples of parliamentary argument from Labour.
I decided that Labour, much as I want to like them, can't be trusted as far as I can kick them around moral or civil liberty subjects, and don't appear to have much in the way of principles that they won't compromise. If they ever do make it into government again I want there to be some adults alongside them that they have to run things past to get approval when they have brain farts regarding turning NZ into a CTV monitored police state. On the other hand, I'd like there to be some people to moderate some of the Green's ideas about science, although my impression from the outside is that the Greens have been improving (from my perspective) there over the last 10 years.
That's why I support the Greens.
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Lying back on the table, the doctor had some music playing to try to keep things relaxed. The nurse and doctor both looked very confused as my wife and I became wracked with spasms of laughter, while they were poking around "down there" with sharp implements.
The music that had just started playing was "You've lost that loving feeling..."
I'm pleased to report that after the bruising wore off, it wasn't true.