Posts by JackElder
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Ah, clearly that's what the "bi" part means: it's implying a 2:1 ratio in the gender of your sexual partners. Hence, if she'd called you a septisexal, she'd have had to recommend that you have 5 husbands and 35 wives.
Which seems terribly exhausting.
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It may actually just be a single download I suppose
First one's always free, bro.
there will be roads/cycleways above ground, which, while not quite as efficient as a motorway, won't be horrific for getting from A to B.
Personally, I cycle around the bays - an extra 2k each way on my commute, exposed to the full force of Wellington's wind - rather than ride through the Mt Vic tunnel twice a day. I'm astonished that anyone does it, frankly.
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I hope someone pointed out to him that YOU CAN'T WALK ON THE MOTORWAY IN NEW ZEALAND! Whether it's above or below ground.
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With tunnels, there's a special section dedicated to walkers and cyclists. It's called "above".And I'd like to point out that it's also illegal to cycle on a motorway in NZ. So we already have a large network of areas where you can't legally walk or cycle, and I'd certainly expect any tunnels to be included in that. I suppose that you could always put a footpath/cycleway at the side of the tunnel (as happens in the Mt Vic tunnel in Wellington) - it'd be absolutely vile to go through (as the Mt Vic tunnel is), but you could do it if you were really worried about walkers/cyclists.
Of course, the real point here is that a tunnel would siphon some of the motorists off the aboveground route, making it safer to walk/cycle. So in that sense maybe he should be agitating for the tunnel, in order to get increased walking/cycling rates.
The Champs Elysee is actually rather boring compared to the mazes of old alleys in places like the Marais
Yeah, but can you imagine the final stage of the Tour de France being held through the Marais? Carnage. And not even with good camera angles.
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his predilection for colourful ties and mismatched shirts.
I used to have a manager like this. We all thought he was cultivating a "wacky" persona. Then we found that he was profoundly colourblind.
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Immigration advisers: in my distant past, I had occasion to see the work of a number of immigration advisers. Based on what I saw, I have absolutely no problem with a reasonably punitive licensing fee for them. My only qualm is that I think that it'll lead to some of them ripping people off even more. Bearing in mind that the plural of anecdote isn't data, and for fairly obvious privacy/professionalism reasons I'll leave it at that. Except to point out that a lot of the worst problems I saw came from immigration advisers who were offshore, who people had engaged locally outside NZ to help them get into NZ. If you don't speak English, don't know a huge amount about NZ's culture, and come from a country where using professional "facilitators" to access services is standard practice, you're very vulnerable to some wideboy who speaks your language, talks a good line, and can drop hints about needing to give "extra processing fees" to expedite your application....
Disclaimer: there are some very good immigration consultants who provide a lot of help for people.
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The thing I like about that transgender teen article was the way that the news service had to really scrabble to find someone willing to go on record to say that it was a bad idea. In the end, they found an ethicist willing to speak out in favour of denying someone psychologically important surgery during a crucial time in their life and which they will get in under a year anyway. I just wish that they'd made it slightly more explicit that this ethicist has a certain potential bias. Like, if they'd actually mentioned that he's an associate professor at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family.
But still, all the people who actually mattered in this case seem to have had their heads screwed on right, and that's what counts.
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For that, and for so many other reasons, I am eternally glad to have never worked in a kindergarten where the predominance of parents was, how shall I put it? Oh, yes, that's right. Middleclass. And white. And neurotic.
Just for the record, the specific parents who refused to attend the Halloween party were none of these things (well, neurotic, maybe).
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I think the key is to always use the highest gear you can to maintain a decent rev count (~90-100rpm). On hills, this usually means dropping into a lower gear rather than manfully struggling on - using too high a gear is allegedly bad for your knees, and it's usually easier for most people to push a lower gear at higher revs than to push a higher gear at lower revs.
Or to put it another way: Jan favoured a higher gear/lower revs, Lance was notorious for spinning a lower gear. One of them kept winning.
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Basically, they said that parents/schools would never allow kids to explore witchcraft in such a way...
My eldest daughter's creche did a calendar as fundraising one year - you got a custom calendar with a picture of your child on it. They specifically asked us if we minded them using their favourite picture of her, which had her dressed as a witch. They understood, they said, that some parents might find the photo offensive.
I thought this was funny because their emphasis was on the fact that you might find the photo offensive - not because they'd dressed your kid up as a witch, but the actual record of them having done so.Mind you, they did have to rename the halloween party for this year because a number of parents refused to attend it last year for religious reasons.
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Sad as I am to say, I think the cycle route is slowly petering out. Expect maybe that some body will be set up to try and coordinate regional efforts, or maybe they'll just bung BikeNZ $50 and task them with it. Then when some reporter asks the question in a year or two they can say "We have put that in the hands of the appropriate authorities, progress is being made..."
There's a lot of people who want the cycle route to happen. It's just that an increasingly small number of them are in parliament, as the full cost of implementing the original proposal strikes home.