Posts by giovanni tiso
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We can all do with a good frugalling now and then.
Totally. Ken Robinson tells the following story.
When my son was 4 in England he was in the nativity play. He got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh.
This really happened -- we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that wrong?" -- they just switched, I think that was it.
Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold."
The second boy said, "I bring you myrhh."
And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
Incidentally, the story was part of a rather wonderful presentation on education at the TED conference and if you can stomach the BMW ads before and after there are many worse ways of spending 20 minutes of your life than watching the whole thing.
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As i said in another thread, I'll be voting for a yellow dog before the National party gets my vote.
I'm with you there, but I wish there was a great deal more differentiation between the respective policies of our two major parties on this. We've talked about hijacking of the platform on the part of the Nats, but on this one it's Labour that has ceded all the ground, it seems to me.
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the value i add to society is my ability to think! can i help it that this pays better than my old job washing dishes?
Maybe not, but it's us thinkers who set the rates.
otherwise, touche.
It was meant for the both of us...
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the actual issue for us thinking types is how much is too much to share without hamstringing oneself.
I suggest we keep doing what we're doing, spending our days at 'work' ruminating about policy and devoting the occasional free hour or two in the middle of the day to a blog discussion, without for a moment letting on to the people who grow our food, fashion our clothes, mend our streets and clean our toilets that perhaps they ought to get paid as much as we are.
Not uncharacteristically, Carlin said it best:
Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that...
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surely we want a society of individuals who "expand the pie", not just expect to be handed some of someone else's share when they find themselves in an economic bind?
My great-grandfather was a very simple guy, a seasonal farm labourer with very little if anything by way of formal education. When his wife died, he had six children; the oldest was twelve. In his old age his chief reason of pride was that he had never walked up the steps of the town council - he had never put his hand out, we'd say over here. And that's fine, somehow the family managed. But let's not kid ourselves that he expanded anybody's pie, and that everyone is equally well-positioned to advance what Leopardi called 'our magnificent and progressive fate'. That kind of thinking is so 19th century.
I would also quibble with the idea that the money I earn is mine and mine alone, and that I part with some of it in the form of taxes because I'm such a good guy. Work is a product of the individual but also of society; and we (I) need people to do all sort of work. If there wasn't somebody willing to clean the toilets for little pay at my son's primary school, and we'd have to take turns doing it, that would eat into my ability to make my precious money. And that's the crudest of examples. We also need the unemployed, as I tried to say earlier. But this takes us too far and ultimately my answer to the following
do i really want a society brought up thinking that the answer to resource scarcity is redistribution?
is yes, of course, but it's not as if I can't see how other people might see it differently.
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Wouldn't it be cheaper to educate children in a developing country, and then bring them over when they're of working age?
Are you daring me to make an argument in favour of immigration? It's like knocking on an open door, come right in.
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I'm now left with zenzizenzizenzic and opisthenar.
Try gibigiana.
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my line slipped a little,
A little? A little?! You equated protecting the rights of the poor with taking rights away from the rich. I'm cognisant of your devil's advocacy here, but Reagan would have been very proud of that particular gambit.
but i'm struggling to find value in funding the poor to have more children than they can afford, when the wealthy are busy breeding like flies. like flies i tell you!
I insist: firstly, you're funding the children of the poor, not the poor themselves; secondly, first-world societies need children, so you're investing in the taxpayer of tomorrow; thirdly, you could make a reasonable argument that in order to raise children you need both time and money. The poor may be short on the latter, but they have plenty of the former; the rich may have plenty of the latter, but in some cases not quite enough of the former. So your investment in the children of the poor may not be such a bad one even in those narrow utilitarian terms.
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Still, I'm rather glad the world is full of human beings, not coldly reasoning Vulcans, otherwise The Children of Men wouldn't be science fiction, would it?
You skirted around one issue: as a society we need children, they are a resource.
(Although not the chief resource - that, I promise you, is petroleum.)
(Trying to get more George Carlin fans to come out.) (Although that was Bill Maher, I suspect, but hey, he's a fan too.)
We'll need somebody to replace the working population when we retire, right? That goes for childless and breeders alike..
what i hate about these arguments is the statement "why should only the rich have children?" well... if they can afford them, then more power to them.
Did anybody here suggest that rich people shouldn't be allowed to have children?
being rich doesn't mean the kids will be better people than the children of the poor. or vice versa.
Who said that?
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i'm not sure that separating the child and the adult conceptually helps.
When I buy groceries, I find it of great conceptual help, if only to get the right balance between the whisky and the nappies.
the dpb isn't funding the child itself. it's provided for the support of the family.
Well, yes, you can't give money directly to the child; but if children weren't seen as the ultimate beneficiaries, there would be very little policy basis for the benefit in the first place. A lot of things besides children can increase your expenses - developing a drug habit, say. You get no state help for that. And while we cannot be sure that the benefit money will go to the child and not to the dealer, it's just as difficult to be sure in the case of the middle-class family that gets a tax break. How do you make that kind of suspicion the basis for welfare policy?
i think that's an extreme of the argument. a better line is "increasing numbers of children will force you to make your dollar stretch further, think about that before you procreate".
I'm not against that kind of message, so long as it remains a message (and I'm not sure about New Zealand, but back home family planning is not the domain of the conservatives, to put it mildly). To limit reproductive rights by threatening economic punishment is appalling.