Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to mark taslov,
locals, ’cause on average I only get 30 every day … They just don’t turn up, they couldn’t get a ride, I don’t know, but their reliability, I mean, you just can’t depend on it.”
Translation: I don't pay locals enough for them to afford a reliable car each, or even one reliable car between three or four of them. The pay is so low that if anything better turns up they'll do that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the essence of "casual workers", they work when it suits them and the boss... if you don't want casual workers, hire permanent ones. Or is "casual" only supposed to go one way - they're always available whenever the employer happens to want them, but by god they had better turn up promptly and enthusiastically whenever the boss calls.
I think it's telling that the wages and conditions on dairy farms only attract the truly desperate locals. People with recent drug convictions who are finding it impossible to get any other work, anything at all, so they're willing to go and live on a dairy farm and get treated like sh!t for sh!t pay.... nope, not good enough for this prince of the land, he demands a better class of peasant.
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Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to Emma Hart,
they wanted to be able to ... have a handy reason to sack "problematic" workers
That's been my observation. The one company I've been at that introduced this had an all-staff meeting to explain it. When I suggested that we randomly draw names from a hat, or throw dice to generate employee numbers there was a distinct mumbling and shuffling before I was told the suggestion wouldn't work and they were going to "guess" who should be tested because that's what the drug company recommended. I suggested that as a gesture of good faith one of the five senior managers should be included in every round. Nope. My job was safe, I was just making them stand up at the staff meeting and make it clear that they were targeting specific people.
The rugby thing just smells like arse-covering to me. "be seen to do something".
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Hard News: Sky and 2020, in reply to Gabor Toth,
try and appreciate the fact that crappy internet speed is something that many of us have to put up
You may not have noticed, but crappy is what I have to put up with for the indefinite future. The difference is that I have to do it while people lie in public about what I'm getting and when it will be upgraded and other people pat themselves on the back (also in public) for having prevented me from getting a better connection. Imagine you have kids in primary school and you're listening to Jonky or Pullya Benefit talk about how awesome charter schools are and how your kids are doing so much better since National privatised their school.
It's the difference between "that sucks and we are working to fix it" and "you should be grateful that what you have is so awesome and it will be made perfect by the end of 2016 at the latest".
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Hard News: Sky and 2020, in reply to Hugh Wilson,
I'm not the architect of the NBN policy, or involved in any service delivery
I didn't imagine you were. And we're not within 10km of the NBN, so that's irrelevant to my current complaints. As far as getting serviced by Helstra... we have been. They are the only provider of broadband in our street (even if you use 10Mbits as your definition of "broadband") so we just have to accept getting serviced by the one provider. We can't even get commercial DSL or fibre, because we're not a commercial area so none of those people will even talk to us.
I don't actually expect guaranteed 100Mbits 24/7, but I would like to be able to buy a faster connection.
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Hard News: Sky and 2020, in reply to Hugh Wilson,
option of purchasing a 100 mbps plan (and possibly higher)
This is very much building a better stagecoach territory.
And a 100Mbits "we paid extra for more speed" connection that drops from half the advertised bandwidth to one fifth during the time we most want to use it is "better than most"... you wankers.
But hooray, it's possible that at some time in the future our legacy connection might be "upgraded" to a marginally less antique version of the same thing and if that happens there's a possibility that we might be allowed to pay extra for slightly faster internet, or maybe choose a different provider? Excuse me while I vomit.
It's pure politics: Malcolm Turnbull assured us that the NBN would be an expensive piece of junk, and he's made it so. A political promise has been delivered. Sadly it's not one of the useful ones. And too bad about the other stuff he promised at the same time... cheaper and sooner have long stopped being options (it was going to be completed in 2016, IIRC).
My approach is to buy a different house, one that has one of those "unnecessary" fibre to the home connections, and hope that eventually gigabit internet drops from the current $17,000 a month on the NBN (plus usage charges) to something more reasonable (I kid you not, kiwis, I kid you not)
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Hard News: Sky and 2020, in reply to Hugh Wilson,
NZ seems much better positioned for than Oz given the current high uptake of 100 mbps plans
Stop making me cry!
We technically have a 100Mbits plan here in Sydney, with Hellstra cable, and it consistently delivers 50Mbits off peak and 20Mbits peak. Apparently when the National Broadband Network rolls out to our area we will upgraded to an "up to 25Mbits" connection that if reports are to be believed will deliver somewhere between 10 and 15 during peak times.
Another reason Australians pirate more content than anywhere else in the world is that if you want to watch in HD let alone 4k it really helps to download it first then watch it later. Most content providers don't let you do that (so I'm told. Ahem). With 5-ish "content consumers" in the house we chew 400GB-500GB a month, and that just can't happen if it's limited to the times we're actually home and awake. Not with 20Mbits for most of that time, anyway.
Not to mention my habit of watching youtube in HD or 2.5k at 1.5x or 2x speed. Try doing that with 5 people on a 20Mbits connection. Snort. But then we would cheerfully pay more than the $120-odd a month we do now if we could get a decent speed.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to BenWilson,
300 watts is already well over what all but the strongest humans can consistently deliver.
At Yabun yesterday there was a gym dragging passers-by onto their wind trainer gadget. The girly was able to exceed 300W for a minute, burning a whopping 20 kJ. We'd just eaten lunch, so my initial 800W quickly dropped to 500W to avoid throwing up. But really, 300W is only a 50% increase over cruising along on the flat, so you'd expect anyone in good health who rides regularly to be able to hold 300W for a couple of minutes to get up a hill.
Based on that and a bit of actual riding, I think 300W is reasonable. But even 500W for a single-rider, lightweight bike is getting silly. I would like to see a 1000W/25kph class, though, so that multirider and load bikes could legally use power assist. Especially when you start loading two or more kids into/onto a load bike, 300W stops being a lot of use on hills. It's great on the flat because it lets a normal rider accellerate away from stops as though the load isn't there, but on a hill they often run out of grunt quite quickly because the load bike gets hard to handle at low speed and then you're in a death spiral of wobble... back off pedalling to focus on staying upright... slow down.. wobble more... oh well. That's where the throttle systems come into their own, BTW, you can use them to help push the bike up the hill.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to BenWilson,
Whereas squeezing 10% more into batteries pretty much involves having 10% more batteries, simple
And the extra capacity works for everyone, all the time. Regen only works for people who use it, when they use it, if conditions are suitable. If you live at the top of a hill it's not going to help you at all... you can't regen down the hill when the battery is full, but have to grind up it to get home when the battery is empty. More battery capacity means you get to have power on the final uphill.
I do love the eBike thing, and I'm glad we have usable ones now. Also glad that people have worked through a whole bunch of ideas and we have knocked the sillier ones mostly off the market.
On that note, the Gazelle ebike I rode had the battery under the rear rack, but it was fairly small and with the torque-sensing drive it was very much aimed at giving you that "I'm really strong" feeling on a bike that was rideable even with a flat battery. The dedicated ebikes with a battery slot behind the seat are heavier and harder to ride without power. So you can buy a bike to suit what you want to do with it. I quite like the idea of 300W and no speed limit, because my use in the near future will be for a long commute, where I want to do 40km on decent paths and roads in under an hour.
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Hard News: Up with the Pacer: embracing…, in reply to Robert Harvey,
Can you talk a little about regenerative electrics vs these ones?
I"m not sure that a production bike exists that has regen - it's possible, but it adds weight and complexity for little benefit. The core problem is that you want regeneration instead of braking, if regeneration is available, but you absolutely demand that braking always works whether regen is there or not. But bicycle brakes are all direct action, you can't tweak the electronic brake booster to divert braking p[ower into regeneration. So you end up with a "regen mode" on the throttle or a button on the controller. It's a bit of a pain to use, so people don't... so it becomes even less useful as a feature... so manufacturers don't put it in.
A quick look at stackexchange suggests it's not very useful (search and maybe 10% extra range in hilly Auckland and an answer with more links)
The numbers from that answer aren't encouraging, BTW: at 30kph you might have enough kinetic energy to give a 4% charge, assuming everything is 100% efficient. In practice you might get 50%. So you can slow down from 30kph using only regen, then the regen might get you back up to 20kph, But you need to start regen five seconds before you need to stop, because you can't charge batteries at 1000 Watts (that would be 15 minutes to fully charge a normal eBike battery!)
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Hard News: The next four years, in reply to nzlemming,
National Day of Patriotic Devotion
Surely then they should have used "Whip It" at the inaugural dance?