Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to ,
My policy suggestion to the Greens is this: Stop using commercial software in schools. Invest heavily in technology support for open source software in schools.
About half of the Greens ICT policy is about FOSS. However, their policy includes acknowledgement that
- Open Source products may not fulfill all of an organisation's ICT needs
- introduction of new systems to organisations needs to be done carefully because of the time and costs involved in switching over and retraining.
So "compulsory" has been made secondary to "practicality", but they still have an ideological commitment to pushing open source.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
a well-off urban liberal
Oh man, remember when this meme was "Chardonnay Socialist" and it was about Labour? Good times.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
You can see why a guy working in a coal mine on the West Coast [or an oil rig in Taranaki, or some other extractive industry] might not find that a super reassuring policy, to be honest.
Yes, I can. I have family who work in those industries. But without government intervention, coal mining is hardly an industry with a long and healthy future, yeah? The West Coast is littered with dead coal mines, and that wasn't down to the Greens.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to BenWilson,
It may be the wrong question, I think the answer is likely to be that they actually don’t see the need for employment in the same way, or at least to the same degree, but I do really want to hear them say that, if so.
The Greens do see the need for employment, because they recognise the social good work does. What I don’t think they accept is that employment must come from industries (dairying, mining, etc) that cause significant damage to the environment, and which are currently only sustainable because those industries don’t carry the cost of that damage.
So, a solar energy scheme, which will employ people doing installations, makes more sense than oil exploration, and not just from an environmental point of view. For a start, we know the sun is actually there. We’re not going to get a toxic sunlight spill. And the benefits go to NZ businesses and workers rather than vanishing overseas.
I’m not saying I entirely agree, or that I think it’s enough, but I don’t think it’s fair to say the Greens don’t care if people can’t get work.
Also, in the light of this, and my own very similar experience, I’m heartened by their recognition that “WINZ” doesn’t currently assist people into employment and training, and should.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
still not seeing Colin Craig being “gifted” East Coast Bays or Upper Harbour anywhere outside the media’s damp and excitable imagination.
This is my one prediction for the election: The Conservatives will not get a seat. They will get, however, a great deal more media attention than they warrant.
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I love perfume, and this column touches on a lot of the reasons why. I'm not much into clothes, or at all into shoes or makeup, but there's an entire drawer in my dresser full of perfumes. These days I get most of mine from Possets - all their scents are hand-blended by one woman who has an absolute passion for perfume. She relates scents to seasons, countries, mythologies, various cats... Every year she runs a Cambienne, which is bottled and released several times as it matures, so every Cambienne is different.
When we were in Aswan, our guide took us to a place that sold essential oils and were also suppliers to European perfumiers. They sat us on ornate couches and gave us karkady while we had a smelling session. Then they sat us down with their catalogue, got us to name perfumes (Hugo Boss, Joop, dozens of big-name perfumes) and they told us which name they sold that blend as. They were pure essential oils, without alcohol. I brought home Lotus (warm, soft, floral) and Papyrus (dry, higher note, more masculine) because those were the scents I was never going to get anywhere else.
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Up Front: Floodland, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
It seems like the land movement has fundamentally altered the risk profile for a lot of the city in ways that haven’t yet been worked through, because everyone’s still cleaning up from the quakes themselves.
There's a lot of... I was looking for an indirect way to say "money", but fuck it, money, tied up in denying that the changes in flood risk are because of the earthquake. And, like Bronwyn says, what do you do? Where the Heathcote is now regularly flooding, maybe that could be fixed by dredging. But near where I live, the flooding risk is because of a whole bunch of little underground streams that, prior to the quakes, used to just burble away minding their own business. The land around them dropped, and now perfectly normal levels of rainfall causes huge surface flooding. What can be done about that?
The drop in the land levels is quite hard to get your head around, because it's pretty much invisible.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Hebe,
though it may have been Isabelle on Campbell Live?
It was. First part here, second part here.
The Flockton Basin is insanity. It seems so clear the land should have been red-zoned - it dropped up to 50cm in the quakes. Dredging Dudley Creek is not going to solve the problem.
It's been heartening to see so many non-Chch people so angry after watching that Campbell Live piece. It would be even nicer if it meant something changed.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to Megan Wegan,
You already did. You just received it by text.
True. Those were fucking brilliant. Kind of sad I missed the Twitter end of that, though - Megan ran this for me, as there was no 3G at my mother's death-bed.
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Hard News: Poor Choices, in reply to JacksonP,
That was the most fun I’ve had standing up, I mean sitting at a keyboard, in some time.
So glad. Because that was a Bunch of Fun for me. I love collaborative creativity. I suppose we could use PAS to do a 'paragraph at a time' story. The only problem might be people making additions at the same time.
This might be the most thoroughly I've derailed a thread for a while...