Posts by Matthew Poole
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In the absence of a better place for it, this is scary. Not entirely sure where it sits in terms of getting into the law, but the faintest possibility of councils being allowed to toll roads without Ministerial approval, not to mention removing minimum water quality standards, is just too terrifying for words.
How the hell did we reach the point where people even suggest this shit?
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Oh dear Mr Lhaws is going to be a bit upset
Is it Lhaws or Lawhs? Either way, I think the decision is almost worth it just for the reaction it's going to trigger from dear Mikey.
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The police could invite police from other countries to come and try out their tactics.
That one could be total goer. Challenge the foreign fuzz to deal with hundreds of rioting yoof without resort to firearms!
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although I don't know whether this was "the degree they entered to do", in which case it would include a lot of people who finished *a* degree nevertheless
In one of the first papers I took, the lecturer said that something like 1/3 of students graduate with a completely different major (never mind degree, and keep in mind that migrating to or from a conjoint constitutes a complete change in the degree) from the one they had in mind when enrolling. So, I suspect that there's confusion between actual drop-out rates and frequency with which minds are changed between enrolment and graduation.
Thinking about it, there was almost certainly not a 50% drop-out rate over the three years of my degree, based on the distinctly unscientific measurement of me observing people reappearing in lectures or around campus for the duration of my studies. Given that I was enrolled in two distinctly different majors I got to see quite a wide cross-section of students within the faculty, too.
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It's hard to fault the police for going in hard when you consider that the suburbs in question have been the scene of attacks on fire fighters, in recent times. It sounds like the cops may have been somewhat, err, enthusiastic with some of their actions, but history is not on the side of the students when it comes to the police decision to treat it as a hostile environment from the outset. If there's no respect for fire fighters, why should the police give the benefit of any doubt?
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Wrong thread, Keir?
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Hilary, that'd be because in the EU it's possible to carry out some fairly significant degree of "social engineering" without the media and the public screaming and ranting about it.
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If we're going to pull stuff from the book of Marx, sure. But if it's about maintaining a decent welfare state, education and healthcare paid by a central tax system, these are still at heart popular concepts in New Zealand, despite being 'old school', and pretty socialist.
I've been saying for a little while now that, at some point, NZ needs to have a discussion about just what kind of society we want to be: do we want to be a low-tax economy, or do we want to have high-quality, readily-available social services coupled with quality education? The two are mutually exclusive (as Craig is so ready to point out), but neither side of the political spectrum has shown any inclination to actually ask the public which way we want to turn.
Act, at least, are speaking in consistent terms - slash taxes, but also slash services. They have a prescription that is balanced, but it's also one that, as I understand Kiwis, isn't broadly acceptable to the country. Unfortunately nobody else is asking about a real alternative. Instead we're being sold reduced tax rates with no acknowledgement that this isn't sustainable if we want to keep the kinds of public services for which we were once widely-known. -
I would have thought military and prison spending came close, though prison spending is probably hidden in state budgets.
If a figure I just read in an NYT OpEd of 18% of GDP is correct, he's absolutely right that not even military and corrections come close. The US defence budget is under 4% of GDP (3.5% last I saw), and corrections spending, being nearly USD50b at the state level and around USD8b at the federal level, is a mere rounding error on a 14-digit GDP.
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Oh, sure, the insurers in the US are total fuckers. But don't think that NZ doesn't have delays in treating cancer patients. Flights to Australia for chemo ring any bells?
Right now a friend is waiting for an MRI to determine if a cyst detected with an ultrasound is a tumour. The radiologist certainly thinks it's not good. But, because it only might be cancer she gets bumped down the MRI queue (currently scheduled for a fortnight away, after the ultrasound last week) by people who do have cancer. That's not necessarily wise, since at least the people who are known to have cancer are also getting treated for it. While she waits, she's potentially got untreated cancer growth.