Posts by James Butler
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Southerly: One Hundred and Thirty-one…, in reply to Sacha,
Also, none of that professional planning restricting the superior intelligence of the free market. Every city can look like downtown Auckland if they’re left alone.
Well, every city can look like Auckland if you deliberately design the roads and zoning to encourage sprawl...
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Susannah Shepherd,
A quick Google™ suggests that "Affluenza" may well be worth reading, so I shall reserve judgment for the time being. But I'm immediately suspicious of a study which goes looking for something which is defined at least partially in reference to a particular set of cultural norms, and finds that - gasp! - it is more prevalent in the culture which defined it.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Steve Barnes,
A lot of depression in modern society is, as we know [citation needed] is the feeling of inadequacy many people feel as a response to the ideal consumer, go getting “wealth” creator. We live in a time where financial value is directly tied to socialtal value, you have to “Improve” you have to be “Better”. Growth is King.
"Citation needed" indeed - I've heard variations of this argument before, and I don't really buy it. I am pretty intimately familiar with the effects mental illness of various sorts - depression, anxiety disorders etc. - has had on family members (I seem to have dodged the bullet myself) and while I don't doubt that one's society and environment have a major impact on the effects and expression of such disorders, I see no reason to believe that they are the causes. History is full of accounts of people prone to "melancholia", or taking their own lives due to thwarted love etc., and it's hard to read such stories without seeing evidence of symptoms we see in friends and loved ones with depression (in a similar vein, possession by demons is a meme that goes back to Biblical times and beyond, and persists to the present day in some communities; and descriptions of it tend to look a lot like Schizophrenia or related disorders). It seems dubious to me that the pressure to conform to modern societal expectations is really any greater then that of older forms of conformance, to religious, customary or familial norms - people just seem predisposed to make up arbitrary rules and expectations, and enforce them with disapproval, censure and ostracism.
That said, I think there has been great benefit in the Enlightenment idea that we can analyze, understand and possibly "treat" mental illness, not just clinically or pharmaceutically, but as much with understanding and love. This has to be better than whacking people with Bibles.
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Hard News: The Orcon Great Blend 2011 in…, in reply to 3410,
It’s very frustrating for a person like me who wants to know who everyone is, not to know!
Not to mention people like me, who rely on people like Jackie knowing everyone :-)
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Kate Hannah,
some kind of protest
There's this. My wife and kids will be attending.
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Were you for, or against?
I was approx. -1 at the time. But I remember as a teenager once borrowing my Dad's old oilskin jacket and asking "Where did this paint stain come from?", to be told "Oh, that's whitewash which was thrown on us when we protested against the Tour".
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Hard News: Vanilla Buffalo Yoghurt, in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh well, that’s one thing settled: I can’t ride a bike without flat bars. Tim at Rode kindly let me ride off to me meeting on a Cannondale road bike and while I loved it being light and quick, I really can’t do the posture. My neck is still hurting.
You can do curly bars without the racing posture - most touring bikes are on the upright side (eg. bars level with or slightly above the seat), but with drop bars for the variety of postures you can adopt: hands on the lever hoods for cruising, on the crossbar for sitting up for some variety, or on the drops, head down, when you really want to go for it.
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
A $12k coffee machine.
If you had one of those for five years, at 6% interest and assuming a cost per cup for beans and milk of $1 a time, then you'd break even at just over two cups day. (Versus shop coffee at $4).
By this measure my Bialetti stovetop - which I thought was an extravagance at the time - must be raking it in!
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Hebe,
my La Marzocco Linea
You obviously need all the help you can get… what izzit?
I'm assuming it's a bicycle.
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Hard News: An open thread while I'm down…, in reply to Sue,
animalsbeingdicks.com
I’m assuming that site has this one, but I can’t be bothered looking for it.
ETA: Oops, of course the upload didn’t work. Sigh. Here.