Posts by Stephen Judd
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to David Ww,
Clips help when you have hill climbs on your route. Even now I have toe-clips. Since I wear stiff-soled shoes to work, it's a nice little boost.
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I should note that I now live in Christchurch. There is no reason to work up a sweat on you bike in Christchurch ever, unless you actually want to.
Woolly gloves or well-dubbined driving gloves are nice in winter too. And I have been known to wear a polyprop balaclava under the helmet -- stops my ears getting chilblains when I arrive at work.
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For the next 6 months, I'll be looking like this. Otherwise shortsleeved shirt.
The point is that I ride for strictly utilitarian purposes, and I find I can do 20 kph or so for an extended period without breaking a sweat. If I'm going to work, I dress for work.
I do have mudguards, and in winter months I pack a Ground Effect rain jacket, cheap overtrousers and some neoprene overshoes. The worst the rain does is wet my scalp through my helmet.
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Watched it. Could have been twice as long from my POV, there was a lot that could have been dug into further.
For example: if we did have legalisation/decriminalisation of small-scale cultivation, what happens to those small subsistence growers? Their current returns are only as high as they are because of the risk premium for being punished.
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Alas, I only ever got to piss on the Berlin Wall.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Keir Leslie,
what on Earth is Shearer thinking
Seconded.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Russell Brown,
In newspapers, it absolutely was.
Ok, I didn't read that sentence as confined to newspapers.
I was thinking of NZ's transformation in the 80s, along the same lines as the UKs, and having trouble understanding how that could be described as pragmatic.
Raymond says;
I am sure it could have been do better but it had to be done
This implies that what was done was fundamentally right, and flawed only in execution. I disagree. Something needed to be done, to be sure, but this is just recycling the myth that There Is (was) No Alternative.
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In other countries, New Zealand included, the move to a new era of production was achieved pragmatically
What.
(On edit: I need an explicit definition of "pragmatically" to make any sense of this claim).
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Hard News: Illegal Tender, in reply to Myles Thomas,
I can’t see why Hone and others don’t realise that prohibition isn’t effectively stopping marijuana’s availability
I think most prohibition advocates know that. I imagine they fear the situation would be even worse without prohibition. We need to show them the examples from elsewhere in the world where decriminalisation has reduced abuse in the community, and encourage those who genuinely care about their young people to join the dots.
And I think here is where some law reform advocates fall down -- if they stress too much the relatively low level of harm caused by marijuana abuse compared to other, legal, drugs, they turn off people who might otherwise listen, because by them time it goes through the prejudice filter all the other side can hear is "marijuana is harmless", which they know isn't true. I think there's more win in saying "take all the harms you see caused by abuse, and ask yourself how they compare to the social harms caused by prohibition."
(caveat about "those who genuinely care about their young people" because I firmly believe some prohibition advocates are more motivated by protecting their economic interests...)