Posts by BenWilson
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Being a recently converted cyclist myself, I can only see the cycleway as a good thing. As I see it, hardcore cyclists, the really serious enthusiasts, are not actually the best people to consider how to bring cycling to the masses. That's like taking your town planning advice from Michael Schumacher. He may be an amazing expert on how to push the uttermost boundaries of driving, but he's coming from an extreme perspective.
When I hear the dedicated evangelists of cycling speak, you'd get the impression that no development is needed or even wanted. They have already got over the main barriers that stand in front of masses of people using this beautifully simple form of travel and exercise. They are:
1. Physically trained. To them hills are an exciting challenge rather than something to pathologically avoid
2. Not at all impartial on the matter of safety. Being trained, they are much safer than most people already. They have better road sense, better gear, better knowledge of safe routes, tougher bodies, and possibly more blase attitudes in the first place towards the idea of getting hurt.
3. Coming at it mostly from the point of exercise rather than transport. To them, it seems that transport is a side-effect. To me, exercise is a side-effect.
4. Prepared to wear silly looking clothes. When I cycle, particularly for transport, I want to wear normal clothes.
5. Prepared to shell out big time for equipment. Having invested so much time and energy into cycling, they will not mind having the very best bikes, which are well out of the price bracket most people have for something that they might only do a dozen kilometers a week on, or less.My conversion to cycling happened in Amsterdam, not NZ. It was there that I first realized that it could be a form of mass-transport, rather than just a sport, and a very excellent one too. It was the most liberating experience I've ever had of a foreign city, being able to move vast distances every day, with little effort, and no cost. I was able to stay in accommodation that was both nice and cheap because it was somewhat out of town, rather than the really scungy digs of the center, the cheapest being right in the heart of the knocking shop district. Every day I was able to meander to my chosen points of interest, passing and stopping at things I would never have seen from public transport. I felt unconstrained by time, space, and money. I did spend a lot of money, but it was all on things I wanted, because I was not getting ripped on transport costs, nor constrained by the difficulties of shopping around.
It did amuse me when one coffee shop owner told me that I was probably the only foreigner she'd met who most likely was going to leave Amsterdam in better shape than they arrived in.
It doesn't take a genius to see that a large part of this was because Amsterdam (and Holland generally), have fantastic cycling infrastructure. It was convenient and safe, rather than scary and difficult, the way a lot of cycling in Auckland can be.
To that end, I'm all in favor of more cycleways, and would not be disappointed if they started as a 'patchwork', the way Sam laments that they might. It would be better than no patchwork. Sometimes that's the only way to get a massive public work going.
I'm divided on the true benefit of an intercity cycleway over better cycleways within the cities. I don't see it as an either/or. We should have both. The intercity seems like to mostly appeal to foreigners, but who knows, maybe it would lead to a lot more locals enjoying it too?
On the tourist angle, NZ is very different to Europe, and people are looking for a different experience if they come here. Most that I speak to seem to want to get out of the cities as quickly as possible, finding them depressingly small and provincial. But that may well be because our cities are not very foreigner friendly, and not having well developed cycling infrastructure could be part of that.
As to the 'solve the recession' angle, it's hard to know. Sofie speaks of shelter, food and employment as primary concerns. But this is not the 1930s. We're not going to have a problem with food and shelter this time. Employment is a more likely concern, and large infrastructure projects can stimulate that. But personally I doubt that the cycleway is that large an infrastructure project after all. It's nowhere near on the magnitude of adding another lane to SH1 all the way to Welly. The levels of planning, consents, and just the basic cost of construction are waaaay lower. A cyclepath does not need to be able to support millions of tons of trucks passing over it every year, nor does it particularly need to factor in huge earth movements to make it straighter and safer. It can meander, because cycle touring is already a meandery kind of sport. The gaps between the pieces of patchwork can be filled in by the cheaper expedient of lines painted on existing roads. It could avoid the main line of the highway altogether, for that matter. I'd expect the trail to the Waikato to be more likely to follow the old Great South Rd, which was built with vehicles far more limited in power in mind, horse drawn carriages etc. It could become a historical tour as well as a pragmatic route.
</rant I've been looking forward to for weeks>
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Ben, I think Mark was talking about the impact of digital connectedness rather than copyright - and I tend to agree with him that represents a quantum leap rather than just more of the same.
Well since Mark says so, I'll let that slide. But I'm still not sure that it's quite the quantum leap he suggests. I guess more specific pointing at what actual technology he's talking about would be needed. If it's just "The last 30 years in the computer industry" then we're talking about millions of technologies.
It's easy to get excited about the biggest thing since writing was invented, but the way technology has been exponentially improving for at least a few hundred years, it's hard to know if just about everything that's invented isn't a quantum leap, and that we're not in an age of quantum leaps, but a continuous quantum explosion. Guessing the future is a highly risky business. It is quite possible that in 100 years people will look back and say "well, yes, humans did really start using the internet a lot around that period, and computers rose very rapidly in power to their now stable physical limits, but fundamentally society did not change much at all. Capitalism continued unabated, rapaciously eating every bountiful piece of resource that the newfound power produced, a lot of drivel was produced, which kept a lot of people happy, thus hiding the fact from them that the resources were still incredibly unfairly distributed, and most people in the world were still direly in need of basic services". Who knows really?
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Joe that is a very good idea. Or perhaps a more lenient method - they can be Sir, but only when they are wearing the hat. Any time they are addressed or spoken of when they aren't wearing it, the title is not needed. The more and higher the titles, the bigger and sillier the hat.
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The two comparable tipping points are fire, and writing.
Actually, the scale seems to me more on the order of what happened when we moved to modern ideas of intellectual property. Prior to that, it was open season. It was a big step but I'm not sure it's on the order of writing or the even bigger step before, talking.
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Rob, that's the problem. Everyone will agree that theft is wrong.
Not everyone. But certainly most people will agree that it is illegal.
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Of course, were one to be asked...
LOL. Nice.
Refusing honors can be tricky. I tried to refuse a high school prize for Computer Studies, knowing full well that one of my best friends in the class towered above me in the field (and still does). But he was always profoundly disrespectful to the teachers who we both knew were well beneath both of us in the subject, whereas I was a model student, meekly and submissively learning the irrelevant and outdated tosh that was taught, just to get good marks.
But I saw upon being dragged to the headmaster's office to account for this mysterious behavior, that I was talking the kind of truth to power that children simply don't have the power to do to adults, and that my position was a disrespectful challenge to their entire department of computing. So, I opted instead to accept the prize, and got a purely personal pleasure from the practical joke of being handed a copy of Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins by the Head of English and the Headmaster, in front of hundreds of applauding parents. Only the Head noticed, and he kept quiet about it.
I wonder how many people who accept major honors have similar experiences.
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Didn't Russell post last year that in fact each poster retains copyright of our own words, and Public Address owns all the stuff around it?
Don't know, don't care. I bequeath it all to Russell. Anything to avoid turning off Adblock and having Flash crash my workstation and kill my own work in the process.
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And it's not very close. A factory exists for one thing - mass production of the same item or items. An artist is at the other end of the spectrum - producing (in general) single, unique items.
I don't know if you got the analogy. The artist is the person who both designed the good to be mass-produced, and owns shares in the only factory allowed to make it. They don't take exception to anyone buying their widgets, trading in them etc. All they take exception to is anyone else being able to make them, thus cutting them out of the profit loop.
I repeat that the analogy was not meant to prove anything. It's just an idea to help people to look at it from another angle. Lateral thinking, basically, coming at it from perhaps a Marxist angle.
If it was my idea (I don't know and I don't care), I formally state as the artist that everyone may use it however they like, but Russell actually owns the expression of it here.
It seems to me that my analogy is simply from copyright to patent. Which are both IP anyway. So it's not really that illuminating, except maybe in pointing out how deeply capitalistic copyright is.
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Rob, could you show me the place where I 'called zax on this '? I definitely referred to the Zax, but what about that makes you the subject? C'mon, some hard evidence please. I'm really looking forward to a good long hard argument about this subject. Perhaps another 20 pages? Let's really get down and parse each other to the nth degree.
There's nothing offensive about the Zax. They're just funny. So funny they get their own bypass.
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Heh. Haven't seen that for years
Excellent! I've only ever read the book. Well, actually, had it read to me dozens of times, by my parents. But that movie actually builds on it quite nicely.
It could come in handy whilst negotiating contracts or something else to do whilst sitting at your desk waiting for that phone call from Big Records.
Classic! I remember a kid from high school who had a similar talent. An asian foreign student. He could spin books on his finger. The funniest part was that he never stopped . He'd be walking down the corridor doing it. You'd see him eating his lunch doing it. I even recall seeing him sitting an exam doing it, writing furiously with the other hand, whilst negligently spinning this book on his finger. I wondered if he did it in his sleep. It was quite a fascinating habit. I couldn't do it.
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