Posts by Moz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Envirologue: Fool me Once: Lessons on…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
And will the TPPA really force open the agricultural markets of America and Japan, as its most ardent defenders claim?
Yeah, sure, in about 10 years they promise to start opening them up. Just like they did with most of the other fre trade agreements. But there are always get-out clauses, and they always use them.
-
Envirologue: Fool me Once: Lessons on…, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
Who gets the upside?
Multinational corporations.If you look at this as an agreement between TNCs and a bunch of nation-states it makes more sense.
When I was younger I foolishly thought that one day a TNC would outright buy a small country like, I dunno, Nauru or Kiribati, and use that to leverage their way into the WTO, UN etc. Eventually I realised that they already had enough influence over the USA that there was no need.
The TPP is mostly about fixing the problem of democracy interfering with profitability. The more of one we want the less of the other we can have. But if we redefine democracy as "one dollar one vote" the problem goes away...
-
Hard News: Nelson Street: Not too…, in reply to BenWilson,
If we're talking about an actual separated cycleway that's an opportunity to make something that is a second-to-none experience for cyclists
On the Manakau Bridge underslung path and in Christchurch what they (used to?) do is have a grade separation of a couple of centimetres. It's enough that you see it and feel it, and it gives people the idea that there's a separation. And it's easy enough to do, an extra layer of whatever material they're laying down works. Or just the "green bike lane" stuff.
I used to ride the Darling Harbour Bridge every day on my commute and I can testify to the non-workingness of a major commute route for both pedestrians and cyclists that's wide and unmarked. Darling Harbour has tourists as well to mix things up. Their solution is a 10kph speed limit, which as you might expect is ignored by all (including the joggers). The contrary experience around Docklands in Melbourne was a wide off-road bike path next to a wide footpath. That worked really well until some muppet decided to put rumble strips for 20 metres each side of every pedestrian access to the bikes path (about every 100m), which meant a lot of cyclists switched to the adjacent road that didn't have them. Much to the anger of many motorists.
For the on-ramp conversion just green-laning a strip up the middle and putting a centre line on it would seem to be enough. And ideally a "pedestrians cross here" marking at each end to hint that wandering aimlessly around on the green bit is a bad idea.
-
Hard News: Meet me at Camera 2: White, in reply to oga,
Thank you, that's a much better description of the parallel I've made a few times. I have to bookmark that!
-
Hard News: Meet me at Camera 2: White, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
As he left this hearing he walked chatty with his lawyer to the escalator where a young woman was also approaching. She saw the 2 of them and stood aside so they could walk in front of her to embark on the escalator. WHY?? She was first.
Likely she's been walked into too many times and has decided that her safety takes precedence.
If that irks you using the roads in Lakemba would drive you batty.
One thing I notice is that many of the headscarved women drivers give way to everything. Which makes some intersections really ugly, because they have no problem driving half-way across an intersection then stopping to let a car that they have right of way over turn across in front of them. Which is at best slow because not all other motorists go "it's wunna them muslim nebbishim, I will walk all over her" and drive through. Of course, the ones that do drive through can be found by listening for the crunch when they find a headscarver that doesn't defer to every other car on the road :)
That's a clash between "a woman shall defer to any and every man she meets, leaving her owner to sort out precedence problems", and the Road Rules. periodically this nearly kills me and I decide the Saudi solution is appropriate. ("nearly kills me" is not being used as a figure of speech in this case).
-
I quite like the idea of using privilege against itself. Being the white bloke who stands up and derails a panel that's talking at the women present by saying "hey, you rich white men are ignoring the experts on this subject who are right here"... is more likely to be productive than the existing discussion.
Also, I love using bicycles as an example of privilege, because most people can ride a bike but know which side of that particular privilege they'd rather be on. Unfortunately too many people just say "I don't wanna" and that's the end of it.
There's a quote about it being hard to get someone to understand something that their job depends on them not understanding. And that's a big part of the problem with privilege. What benefit does a privileged person get from acknowleging it, and it needs to be more than "you stop yelling at me" (they can usually just leave and get the same benefit).
-
Hard News: Meet me at Camera 2: White, in reply to Shaun Lott,
This may be pedantic, but I think those bombs will kill you regardless of your skin colour.
It's not about whether the weapon, when used correctly, will kill. It's about who the weapon is most likely to be used on. And overwhelmingly, those weapons are used on poor brown people. The chances of any of those weapons being used against, say, the US bankers who broke the world economy recently is indistinguishable from zero.
Which is exactly privilege.
-
Access: It’s just a bout of Chronic Sorrow, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Definite yes on screen shots as well as saving web pages for offline viewing. Internet archives only go so far.
All this cloak and dagger shit is ridiculous though when we are talking about how our government responds to the needs of vulnerable citizens.
Very much so. This isn't the US, our government is supposed to be on our side.
And back up your hard drive...
And encrypt everything. That's less about nasty people reading what you're doing, and more about what else is on the stolen laptop. You really don't want all those scans of your identity documents that you needed for online passport renewal being available on the black market, or all your personal medical details harvested from the email discussions with your friends. VeraCrypt has now replaced TrueCrypt for hard disk encryption. Don't be afraid to write down the passwords/passphrases for those, just keep them in a safe place. Or use, say, one page of your address book as passphrases. "Bob and Sam, 0253462538, 253 Queen St, Ashburton" is a perfectly reasonable passphrase. Until they move, anyway :)
-
'is it contagious?'
It's socially contagious - people who piss me off find that a wheelchair to the shins impairs their mobility.
-
Following Emma's link, the "can {disabled person} have sex" one I have actually seen. I was as stunned as the person being asked, and she was waay too nice to say anything rude. There's got to be a snarky version of "first you'd have to talk to her rather than me, then you'd have to ask for consent". "I think you just blew your chance", perhaps?
I once spent some time at a dinner party hearing stories from Kate who has some kind of muscle weakness syndrome that meant she usually uses a wheelchair. But can stand up if she needs to. And has a friend (Sarah) who is intellectually disabled but able-bodied. That combination is apparently head-exploding for some people. Funny, but also very wearing after the first 10 times someone asks Sarah a question she can't answer and ignores Kate regardless of what either of them say. Me, I just wanted to know who counts as the carer?
Sarah had a thing for firefigthers, and once found a male strip revue featuring firefighters. So she dragged Kate along. Literally, in the "get in your chair we're going to see naked firemen" sense. The highlight was wangling said strippers into helping them out of the not-very-accessible theatre after the event. Sarah was apparently beside herself with excitement, and the strippers were very nice about it.