Posts by Moz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Access: Respect, please, in reply to Angela Hart,
I was taught sayings like "Do as you would be done by" , "Don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his shoes" , "If you can't say something positive, don't say anything" and "You reap what you sow"
Most of those only work at a meta level, though, and many people completely miss the point even while literally obeying them. That's where you get the "wear earmufffs/use a wheelchair" version of "walk a mile", for example. And "do as you would be done by" is a classic trap for the egocentric and socially unaware. They end up giving a soccer ball to a blind person because "soccer is great fun".
They work fine as a thinking exercise, "how do I think this person would feel" and "what would it be like if" can be very useful. But even more useful IME is to directly state the primary lesson from all of those: ask people about their desires and only do things you have consent for.
-
Access: Respect, please, in reply to Russell Brown,
(sorry for a slightly off-topic reply)
I've sometimes wondered if he has perfect pitch.
Now *there's* a disability that's interesting to explain to people. It helps some people to think of it as a tape deck in my head. Whatever I can remember, I can remember accurately. And I suspect that this is more common with autistic spectrum people.
For me, it manifests as difficulty distinguishing difference in pitch from difference in tone. And boy can I ever do that. Somewhat memorably, a CD player that was <1% slow sounded flat to me... and you wouldn't wish that on anyone, honestly. People didn't believe me until I showed them an A-B comparison (of $10k CD players, BTW).
It makes singing with other people difficult. "in tune" is a matter of opinion, and it takes a lot of work for me to keep track of just what sort of awful is the desirable one. "you're not singing the same as the recording in my head" is obviously always going to be true, but sometimes the person is "in tune"... and 99% of the time they're not. When 1% out is definitely out... can you sing in tune?
The big reveal for me was at university when I hung out with a couple of fairly musically talented people (Jo Cherry and Fiona Pears) who could actually hold a note and explain why a "perfect fifth" on a piano was always going to sound like cats in a sack. Piano, in general, is torture. Non-fretted instruments played by talented people, that's the go.
-
Hard News: Te Reo Māori in schools:…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I suspect the bigger problem here is not the failure to communicate the importance of learning one language or another... High school students need to learn to construct a logical argument based on factual evidence.
That's a whole different meaning of "language" though. I agree it's important and sadly missing in many education systems, though.
Nelson in the 1970's and 1980's was very monolingual. I learned a little Maori at university but it's mostly gone now - living in Oz doesn't help. At school I had more formal instruction in French than Maori, and was firmly pushed towards the STEM stream which I'm still not wild about (although I would have preferred Japanese or Maori to French, which really was the option).
I think NZ should take advantage of having nearly-one indigenous language and teach it to everyone. The same argument in Australia falls apart because of the 580-odd languages most are extinct or nearly so. Plus it's big enough to sustain communities in immigrant languages in a way that NZ really struggles to do, so it's quite possible to live in (some parts of) Australia speaking only Greek, Italian, Cantonese or Vietnamese. Probably others. My mother in law has slightly better English than my Maori, and she gets by. Which makes "which second language to teach everyone" quite fraught. Or maybe we should allocate one language to each school? Just because having multiple languages really means multiple teachers and that gets expensive and complicated. Better IMO to have "the other" language at each school or district.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Russell Brown,
can’t ALL venues, promoters and others follow Blinks lead and publish ya bloody set times... I like the early-and-late shows idea too. It would be fun being able to rock up for a 6pm start.
Very much so. No offense to intro bands, but I'd rather be at home having a nap if the lead act is only going to play from 11:15-12:00 and the doors open at 7:30. And if I could go to a gig that ran from 6pm-9pm rather than 7:30-ish...9:30 until midnight I'd be very happy indeed.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: Good ideas and grumbles, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
I'm with him on the crazy low admission prices bands charge. $5 for a gig? That's what I was paying in the mid '90s, - and even that was cheap student prices. It's nuts that a band wouldn't charge at least $15 today.
For comparison, most Elefant Traks gigs around Australia are $30-$40, often plus a $5 booking fee. I've paid $60+ to see some local bands and ~$100 for people like Sarah Mclachlan and Ani Difranco.
How do those prices compare with other performing arts like theatre and dance? It's been a while since I saw anything non-free in NZ but I vaguely recall $30 being cheap for Fresh of the Boat in Wellington circa 2000.
FWIW venues in Oz are really struggling because pubs find it much more lucrative to steal from pensioners and addicts via pokie machines than to fight NIMBY residents to play live music. {insert rant here}. I saw Joelistics in the basement of a gay bar the other day, a venue that sucks but the choices are very, very limited.
-
Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to Andrew C,
showing forecast bau prices quite a bit higher than most forecasts I have seen lately.
That $120 is $/MWh wholesale in Australia, for those who (like me) needed to look it up. I'm interested in the numbers you've seen so we can compare. The report talks about the price increase in these terms:
This increase is less than electricity price increases already experienced by household consumers. For example the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal in NSW has proposed annual tariff increases of between 7 and 10% over 3 years to June 2013. This rise was motivated by the need to “enable higher levels of investment in the electricity distribution networks”. The price increases mean that after 3 years the price of electricity will increase by up to 42% which equates to a 8.6 c/kWh increase.
A significant chunk of the price rises you're talking about have already happened. Although the BZE modelling was not quite right, the actual prices doubled over 5 years. Admittedly that retail price increase had little to nothing to do with generation costs, it was mostly network costs. But now we're starting to see generation costs rise as Australia starts to sell gas internationally so the local price is going up. Suggesting that prices rises will be more restrained in future means you have much more confidence in Australian politicians than I do.
-
Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to Andrew C,
their claim seems to rest considerably on the assumption that their price forecast is not much higher than the bau will be
That's right. Remember that their study is primarily an answer to two claims: first, that 100% renewable can't be done at all; and second: if it can be done it will be economy-wrecking expensive. It's also a 40 year forecast, so if it's within a factor of 2 it's a great deal better than most long term economic forecasts.
For context, in Australia we've just backed away from spending $40 billion on a national fibre to the home project, but in the last 10 years or so we've spent $45 billion upgrading that electricity grid to deal with twice the demand we currently have. Demand is dropping{1}, and that seems likely to continue in the short-to-medium term (5-10 years).
So the question "what if we spend $40 billion on the electricity sector and it turns out we didn't need to" has already been answered: power bills double. We did that as a result of political error, and it seems increasingly likely that one consequence was the election of Abbott (people wrongly linked the doubling of power prices to the carbon tax, when it was the states linking grid owner profits to the capital value of the grid).
{1} in some areas peak demand is growing due to air conditioners - our peak load is hot summer afternoons. Which is exactly when PV is most effective, meaning that home PV is not just reducing the need for new peak generation capacity, it's reducing the need for grid expansion. We all save twice... except those off the grid, obviously.
-
Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to Andrew C,
What exactly do you mean by this? To be profitable, what happened to the price in this study?
"profitable" meaning people made money out of it. Primarily electricity consumers, in this case, meaning the price of electricity was lower with 100% renewable than with the current approach (subsidised coal and gas with legislated advantages in terms of access to land etc). The full study is here
Note that they also assumed people would do things like insulate their homes, and that there would be a change in government intervention in the market (requiring rental WoF, charging for carbon emissions, etc). Any 30 year forecast is necessarily a very political document.
BZE left a bunch of advantages out of the study because they're contentious - the falling price of renewables, any generation that isn't already commercially available, the secondary costs of ie converting farmland to wasteland when fracking for gas.
-
One retailer in Victoria is charging 14c/day if you have solar because they own Australia's dirtiest coal plant (Hazelwood) and solar is cutting into their peak demand profits.
-
Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to Stamper Stamp,
Maybe green energy isn't a reality after you have looked at the whole picture - a bit like the bio-energy fiasco.
You mean like the 80%+ hydro that NZ ran on for 50-odd years last century?