Posts by Roger
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Hard News: The remarkable rise of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Years of decline into partisan media
That; and the partisan courts, the partisan government agencies and partisan politics all the way down to school boards.
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Hard News: Paying for the storms to come, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Although I’d note that climate change and its effect on extreme weather events was well known 20 years ago – it was however loudly denied.
Try 40 years! I clearly remember answering University exam question sea level rise and increased stormyness in the late 1970s
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The Hawke's Bay Region has recently developed a single region-wide open source GIS platform that seems to be working well and has delivered significant savings:
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Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to BenWilson,
It is possible to call *555 to report bad driving. Or the police if it was really bad. For someone pushing me with their car it would be the police.
Well, of course it is - but the attraction of doing so disappears quite quickly, the Police generally aren't interested and you tend to get advised that it is a civil matter even when the 'accident' was quite deliberate. I've been deliberately hit half a dozen times over the years and only bothered to report it once, it is simply not worth the time and aggravation.
A few years ago I was deliberately hit by a delivery truck who after hitting me stopped, flipped the bird and yelled abuse. As I lay in the road the following car driven by two airforce officers avoided driving over me and insisted that I report it to the Police and that they would both give evidence. Even with credible witnesses the Police let it go as careless driving with a minimum fine.
My understanding is if you have Go Pro footage they are not interested as apparently you could have fabricated it.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to Euan Mason,
What happens next will be a test of our democracy.
I am finding it very hard not to be both cynical and pessimistic; consequently I am expecting it to make little or no difference. Please world, prove me wrong.
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I went to private anglican schools so with saturday morning school that meant 9 years of church six times a week before you got to Sunday! Religious education came on top of that, however while my junior experiences were bigoted hardline homophobia, my secondary experiences were actually genuine comparative religion and teaching that different faiths were just cultural expressions of one god.
However, the result of all that has just left me as a firm follower of Richard Dawkins.
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Not sure if that would work with a Chinese bank though
Chinese ATMs work just fine, as do Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian... Japanese less so.
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Hard News: Auckland's future: Keep calm,…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
If the council came up with an elegant, easy to administer, and fair money making scheme that would raise gazillions, Bill English would simply change the law to stop them doing it.
I think that this very accurately sums up the situation!
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Justine? Justine was all but banned back then - under academic restriction. How'd he even get copies?
You are right and my memory was betraying me, it was Peter Weiss's 1963 play Marat/Sade. But I now remember that Slaughterhouse-Five was also on the list
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Had a 7th form English teacher (in the mid 70s) who put both Portnoy's Complaint and Justine on the reading list....