Posts by BenWilson
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Not sure about that, maybe an even bigger step was developing weapons with which to hunt food and defend against predators. Rapid switch to being the most dangerous predator on the planet.
Or then again, maybe it was the art of copying other humans, which made the development of tools possible. Tough call whether to call that 'technological'.
Or perhaps it was standing upright that was really the big jump. That freed our hands up. That was possibly the first digit al revolution :-)
Of course, standing up may have flowed from brachiating, which flowed from tree climbing...and so we go back, every step being quite possibly crucial to every subsequent step.
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Did your knee just jerk then Ben?
Yes! How did you know? I also salivated when you wrote Kapisi. Not really sure why. Now I'm flinching involuntarily at the thought of your next post.
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I can't get bitter on 91. It was the year I first got laid.
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For you perhaps but for factory staff layoffs, buying bicycles, helmets and lycras wont be the first thing they spend there redundancy on.
Perhaps not, but they may very well be using bicycles if they can't afford gas. Most people can get one pretty cheap compared to just about any other viable form of transport. The second hand market is totally saturated, and hand-me-downs happen all the time.
I remember realizing that in Amsterdam. I had hired quite an expensive bike, and was still slightly unconvinced about the economic benefit of it over, say, a scooter. But at one point a girl whose bike had broken down pleaded with me to help her fix it. I was able to help, by showing her the way to the nearest bike shop, after diagnosing that the problem was that the wheel had come out of alignment, needed a very minor adjustment (I had no tools). As we walked to the shop, I gleaned that she was pretty much a totally impoverished student from France, and this bike was just about her only physical asset. It turned out the thing has cost her 10 euros. To her, it was a very valuable device.
So don't go knocking bikes as toys for rich folk. As a child they opened the city up for me. They enabled me to earn money doing a paper round. They got me to places I would have needed money to go. They got me to school every day. And once, I was almost killed on one. This would not have happened had better infrastructure been in place. I was cycling on the footpath because the road seemed too dangerous.
Many of the children in my neighborhood (which is still working class) ride bikes everywhere. Quite a large number of adults seem to use them for transport, and we're not talking about lycra clad executives. We're talking about people who ride to the factories along the street from me wearing the fluoro clothes that they work in.
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The thing about real socialists in the West today, is that they are living in a capitalist world. To that extent, they may have views that socialists would totally abhor if the world was actually socialist, like owning copyright. But given that it isn't, the position is far more tricky. Like reality usually is.
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Sorry, just re-read and I think you were talking about people after the day being able to agree - and you're right.
Well, to be perfectly honest, I was actually talking about during their meeting, but with hindsight, yes, that too. I actually wasn't envisaging a formal vote having been taken, more of a "pitch this and watch how many people fold their arms and frown" kind of agreement.
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I think it more likely that the cycleway is just one of the few things most people could agree on. All the 'big ideas' would have had major opponents.
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Whatever, but it'd be nice to be able to move beyond the hype-ridden and dehumanising language of marketing.
Indeed. I don't think of them as baby-boomers. I think of each individual person I know, by their name. OK, there are some similarities amongst my parent's generation, but mostly, I see difference.
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You'll have to explain what that means Ben. I can't see how more people not having enough money to provide sufficient food of quality for their families is going to make the country healthier.
What Kerry said.
In a little more detail, I really don't think we're going to ever get to the point in this country where we don't have sufficient money for food of quality. I was kidding about us getting skinnier - that just ain't gonna happen because of economic reasons. But we shall see, if I'm wrong it would hardly be disastrous for the nation to have to cut back how much it eats.
I like the cycleway idea less as a response to recession, more just a good, simple idea that could benefit enterprising persons along its path.
Me too. I'm quite happy for this 'economic brainstorming' to actually do some good for a change, in a purely conventional way, without having to be a big idea or solve the recession. It might help, there's definitely an argument that it would be stimulatory in many ways. I highly doubt it would be a particularly expensive project compared to just about anything at all that we do for cars.
Like I said, it's not a binary. It's not cycleway OR feeding starving children. It can be both.
imo, the future for nz will be better if we start setting good examples for the world again. actions speak louder than words, etc. energy technology is a key area we should look at.
And cycling is one such technology. It's a way of saving energy and cleaning it up. I suspect it would only have serous impact in this respect when applied to commuting.
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Advancements in boat technology enabled Columbus to get to the new world. And technology and disease enabled those that followed him to conquer it.
But were they quantum leap advancements? Or was it actually something pretty tiny, some minor enhancement in the art of sailing? Or indeed, was it simply that he had the guts (and backing) to try it?
The point I'm driving at is that quantification of what is a quantum leap and what is not is pretty thin on the ground. People argue about which advance was bigger than which, but there is never any definition of what it is to be a big advance, or how one could calculate the magnitude of the advance. Furthermore, a big change is not necessarily a good change.
This quibble is really only to address the rhetorical use of such metaphors as "this is the biggest thing since writing". I don't think they help much (although they are fun to speculate about, of course). The destruction of the entire human race would probably be the biggest revolution we could ever achieve (unless we rate taking the whole planet with us while we're at it), and we could probably do it, but that doesn't make it the best thing we could do.
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