Posts by BenWilson
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Wow! What a thought!
I neither advocate nor deny it, I'd like to point out, but I am going to consider its implications. Just not right now.
I'm going to run with the line that you're not being sarcastic.
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I, for one, welcome the baby boomers as my overlord.
Seriously, I've never been able to get that bitter on my parent's generation just because of the accident of their birth-time, any more than my grannies' generation who perfected the art of slaughter, despite many of the best intentions. Nor am I bitter on younger generations, despite not particularly enjoying their tastes in music, or how fat they seem to have become.
When you see people in their context, it's hard to hate them. When they are your family, who gave you life and raised you, it's doubly hard. When they are your children, it's just plain stupid.
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I'm not sure what this wall-pissing exercise in comparing technological advances is meant to achieve or signify. Nothing that is being said is quantified, and any quantifications would be highly disputable, firstly on the actual numbers but secondly on the relevance of the numbers.
I mean what constitutes a 'quantum leap' in technology? That it changes how people do things? Some extremely subtle changes can be considered highly profound. Some massive movements could be considered insignificant. Columbus set about a chain of events that led to a colossal exodus, but does that really make the discovery of America a quantum leap? Or the technology that led to it?
And does it really matter? No one is disputing that the electronic digital age is changing the world. The question is: Is it changing it in a way that is leading to making the world better for enough people to justify what is being lost? What practices will lead to the greatest good? None of these answers are settled, hence this debate.
A debate in which I'm sitting on the fence. It seems like an extremely hard debate to have, because the private practices of pirates are much like masturbation, or watching porn. They're things that, because they are repressed by society (rightly or wrongly), people find it extremely difficult to be honest about, and extremely hard to trust the motivations of others. Just as most people will deny looking at porn in public, so also I think most people believe that to be a general lie. As in, no particular person can be easily accused of being a porn watcher without starting an insoluble shit-fight, but a lot of people know a lot of people who have porn, so many of them, in fact, as to think that the practice, like masturbation, might be near universal (at least amongst men). No one can really know if it is, because few are open and honest about it, and if they are, they are derided as perverts, just as pirates are derided as thieves.
A particularly illuminating term from Marxist discourse comes to my mind - objective alienation. Enforcing copyright on yourself in the privacy of your own home is exactly that, the internalization of society's rules, whether or not society could even find out. Marxists tend to hate it when the see it, if it's in support of capitalism. In this particular case, it is in support of capitalism. Copyright is a capitalist institution. Socialists are more likely to think that all ideas belong to the state, or humanity (which they feel the socialist state is the perfect representative of).
I know it's pretty old-skool to talk about Marx, but I've long held that he's a pretty good source of analysis on capitalism (having coined the damned word), if a poor prophet of any decent alternative. Furthermore, his criticisms of capitalism apply in spades to this particular debate.
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Does the cycleway seem to you to be the pinnacle of insight as to how NZ can handle the economic debacle in which we find ourselves?
I thought I made my answer to that clear. No.
I think the knocking of it because it's not the Big Idea is silly. I'm not holding my breath for the Big Idea, either from National or from the Obama camp. This recession will be solved by a series of small ideas, and just grinning and bearing it.
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Lovely shot in the arm for a dull and blustery Friday. Cheers Russell, I knew there was a reason I came back here. I've raised the possibility of moving back to Melbourne with my Melbournite wife any number of times, really as a duty to her family more than because I want to go back there, but she simply prefers here. Which leads to a constant feeling of disconnect when the number of departees is brought up as a criticism of Auckland (and NZ more generally). I left too, once, when I was young and wanted adventure. But that wasn't because Auckland sucks.
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Ben, have you got any basis for your feeling that objections to the cycleway are anti-National? And have any of the objectors to it declared any political partisanship?
No evidence whatsoever. Other than that the objections seem to be flowing from people who, under Labour, I'd have expected to have reveled in the idea.
I don't think that solving the decession (so sick of the ambiguity of recession vs depression) is the right standard to be holding public works to, right now. It's an impossibly high standard, a rich source of false dichotomies. It might help, is all. Even if it doesn't, it would be a good thing to have anyway.
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I suspect a few agencies involved in the relief of poverty are reporting the opposite to your theory at present.
Well dude, shelter is all good, but quite honestly our problem isn't having not enough food. It's having too much. This recession, if it hits the food, will probably actually make the country healthier.
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To be honest I think a great deal of the objections from the left against the cycleway are simply bitterness that it's National proposing it. Much like the bitterness against the waterfront stadium was because Labour was behind it. I'm personally sick of that kind of partisanship, which IMHO squandered a primo opportunity completely, and made me lose a lot of my pride in NZ as a country. And I don't even go to live sports.
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The thing that annoys me most is that the cyclepath idea is the flagship in terms of infrastructure spending. It doesn't really pitch NZ forward in terms of creating a platform that growth can be subsequently built upon.
Well, we are also getting the information superhighway too. And I don't know where you live, but over my way there's already been plenty heaps of infrastructure spending on the roads and trains. Alternatives should be getting some of the pie. Personally I don't need trains at all. I have never even once caught the train in Auckland, despite living close to a station. But I'm not bitter on them spending all that money on double-tracking. It's a public good.
I don't think anyone is pinning their hopes on the cycleway to cure the international credit crisis that is driving the recession. But it might help NZ and it would be a good thing to have too. It's not an either/or. This kind of binary construction is a lazy refutation of a good idea.
You are getting the feeling I am kidding?
Well, your analogy is so ridiculous that it's farcical. The reasons not to build a publicly funded cathedral in Putaruru are so legion they don't even weigh into this debate. I'm assuming you're an intelligent person and this is just satire rather than a serious argument.
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SOmeone pointed out that motorists will benefit if more people (admittedly plebs) use public transport, similarly motorists will benefit if more people use bikes.
Yup, it's such a simple point too. The moment I realized it was the moment I stopped hating buses and cyclists. Just because most of the time I'm not in a bus or on a bicycle doesn't mean that all the people who are in one aren't actually helping me by not being a car instead, something far more likely to get in the way of both getting around, and parking. I still hate taxis though.
Tom, I'm getting the feeling you're kidding a little. Or you don't understand the demographic of cyclists. For starters, a huge proportion of them are children. But the majority are just average people, who own a bike, and also a car or two, and cycle mostly for pleasure. Then there's the hardcore minority that you seem to be talking about, who have made a major lifestyle choice out of the thing. Certainly these are the people who do the most kilometers. They are also the people most likely to get in your way, having worked out that the roads are unfortunately the safest place to cycle most of the time. That problem can be solved. In solving it you also get the bigger part of the demographic on their bikes a lot more often, a colossal good in so many ways, and you have made a healthy form of transport for children (and everyone else) considerably safer.
Yes it is a public work that only some people will use. Like every public work. I'm not sure what your objection to cathedrals is, perhaps religious? The modern cathedrals are things like parks, museums, public theaters, stadiums, etc.
You are totally wrong that NZ is inappropriate for cycling. It just has challenges that need to be overcome. One that I recently realized is as simple as the fact that you can solve the problem of hills by just making your bike's gearing ratios wider (a very cheap task). Then even the steepest hills are no problem and no sweat (unless you want to sweat). You just have to go slower over the hills, but you do get the pleasant reward of a free and fast ride down the other side. Rain can be solved with a raincoat. Wind is not the problem that many think it is, because most trips are there and back. In one direction you actually get lovely free energy. But some problems can't be solved by the rider - like the fact that roads are still dangerous. That's where collective effort is the only way forward.
I live in Auckland too. And personally, I'm pretty sick of naysayers against public works here. It's one of the things keeping this town a pissly little village of petty minded tight-arses.
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