Posts by Bart Janssen
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: They want to blow it all up, in reply to Neil,
I think it would be a reasonable thing to say – if we continue advances in public health then overall the health of the population will improve. That’s been shown with vaccinations, fresh water supply etc.
Those were all the result of concerted action and application of liberal ideals
I agree to some degree that things have improved. I'd argue strongly that many of those changes in public health derive from socialist ideals and not liberal ideals - although that may depend on your definition of liberal and/or socialist.
However the point is that much of the improvements Pinker likes to cite come about from huge gains made at the very poor end. It doesn't take much of a change to reduce child mortality in sub-saharan Africa, essentially clean water is enough. That change has a massive impact of the averages because the number of humans affected is large.
But that averaging says nothing about the lives of say Sth Auckland Pacifica where very little of the benefits associated with Pinker's optimism have much impact today.
Instead Pinker's theses are used to support a neo-liberal economic setting that demonstrably harms poorer sections of our society while allowing Remuera tractor drivers to pat each other on the backs and congratulate each other on how well their ideology is working.
I know Pinker is more nuanced than that but that's how his theories are being used and he does not own that responsibility.
So no I don't accept the thesis that things can only get better and I have little patience for Pinker and his ilk because frankly, whether he intends it or not, his ideas are being used to justify harm.
-
Hard News: They want to blow it all up, in reply to Neil,
I think his argument has a lot of merit - the success of liberal values has made life better for a great number of people. Vastly lower mortality rates in child birth for example.
The problem is one of averaging. It hides a multitude on sins.
Yes on average health has improved but for black men in the US health has declined.
Pinker argues "don't worry about it" but that's just an excuse to ignore real problems experienced by real humans not data points on a graph.
The other problem with Pinker is interpolation and extrapolation. He both assumes data in between actual measurements and he assumes that because a graph has a trend that the trend will continue. Now that's fine if you are dealing with maths but when you are dealing with people there really is no fundamental reason to believe that a trend will continue.
In Pinker's world the GFC had no effect on people. In Pinker's world droughts in Syria did not cause an uprising and there are no refugees.
I don't mind the reminder that some things have improved but I do mind the implication that we should just ignore the atrocities - because trends-on-a-graph.
-
It's depressing.
Someone recently asked "what are you most afraid of globally?", meaning climate change, nuclear war, plague, antibiotic resistance etc.
What terrifies me is social collapse.We think our social rules are robust, the basic social contracts we have with our neighbours, with the police, with businesses, with doctors, nurses, teachers ...
What Trump has demonstrated is those social rules are fragile and can be destroyed remarkably quickly.
But it isn't just Trump, it's essentially the entire US political system that is allowing/instigating this destruction of a society.The question I'm unsure about is who benefits?
-
Hard News: The miserable archive, in reply to Steve Withers,
If it was found to be unsafe
But it was never unsafe. Never ever ever. Not a single piece of data showing harm or even potential harm. Just a misused and misunderstood number.
There should have been no remediation costs because remediation was utterly unnecessary.
-
Hard News: The miserable archive, in reply to Steve Withers,
what was this Tribunal supposed to do in *legal* terms?
Ok to toss a grenade - In legal terms they were breaching the rights of tenants based on "evidence" that was false and known to be false.
In legal terms - well I'm not a lawyer - but I'd say the tribunal has made decisions that are legally unsupportable and were unsupportable at the time.
At the least many of their decisions should be legally overturned. But I'd imagine that will be a legal process and come too late for many poor (socially, emotionally and financially) people.
So no I have NO sympathy for a tribunal that failed so utterly.
-
What I find so utterly depressing about this is that it's become clear that HNZ and now ADHB have a culture that is focused on punishing people who use the services those agencies are meant to provide.
Somehow we've allowed our core social services to lose their raison d'etre.
I'm certain that at the actual hands on end of those organisations most of the staff are really trying to do the good that those agencies are meant to provide. But they aren't in control.
I don't think it's just one government's fault. I think it's a long term cultural problem. And I think it's something that needs to change unless we want New Zealand to become a different kind of country, a much harsher, meaner country, one that doesn't care for the people.
-
Up Front: A Word About Safety, in reply to Emma Hart,
by the idea of switching from adversarial to inquisitorial trials
I look forward to a post about your conclusions.
From everything I've read, the problem is NOT the jury. The problem is the use of the adversarial legal system. There have been reviews that have come to the conclusion that the adversarial system fails in rape cases.
But there is a huge emotional investment by those who practice and more importantly by those who teach the law that the adversarial system cannot be questioned.
I don't know how we can change the system but it is so obviously failing women. It really should be a national scandal that rape victims are not protected by (from?) the lawyers of this country.
-
Hard News: We are, at last, navigating…, in reply to Russell Brown,
But in general the reality is likely much more mundane
To some extent I agree. We don't do envelopes stuffed with $100 bills. But we do have a culture of you scratch my back and I'll let you know when a really good investment property come up on the listings and let me shout you a nice dinner at Cibo while I talk about our meth testing company.
-
Two parts of this piss me off the most the first, and obvious one given my job, is the way scientific data was simply ignored for so long by the media. It was boring to report the actual science and much more exciting to report the drama however false it was.
That's a theme across most the the media today for any issue be it meth, marijuana, vaccines, GMOs, homeopathy, vitamin supplements, herbal remidies etc etc etc in each case the media happily ignore the science and go to the companies making money for comment. The replicated peer-reviewed data is there but the media don't understand it and don't think the public are interested.
There are exceptions in the media but that's the problem they are wonderful and valuable exceptions. As a consequence we have a public exposed to bollocks constantly.
The second thing that pisses me off is the people who made money from this. Banks and mortgage companies who almost certainly were getting kickbacks, real estate agents (why anyone believes anything a real estate agent says is beyond me), testing companies, remediation companies and so on. People who knew damn well they were selling snake oil but took money from people anyway. And yes there must have been politicians who were taking kickbacks here as well in some form or another.
It's corrupt. And it should have been stopped years ago.
-
Hard News: Loops and Diamonds, in reply to Russell Brown,
Interestingly if you buy an e-bike designed for Europe it will cut the assist at 25 kph as standard.
Our experience with such a bike is that it really does everything you want from an e-bike, unless of course you really want to go fast in which case a good road bike will usually be the fastest thing you can get.
I don't necessarily believe the number should be 25 kph but I do think it's reasonable to expect e-bikes on bike paths to be going a "reasonable speed". Figuring out how to achieve a legislation that will achieve that might be fun since the definition of reasonable is variable and subjective.
As a side note we discovered that one consequence of having the extra 20 kgs of battery and motor on the e-bike is that the disk brakes wear a bit faster than you would normally expect - worth checking the brake pads earlier than you would normally.