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Written By: AB - Date published: 10:00 am, April 26th, 2025
That piece by Yiu and Cheung displays its questionable assumptions with this declaration, "[t]he accommodation supplement is undoubtedly grounded in good intentions." By this I assume they mean that the intention is to make life better for the recipients ...Written By: AB - Date published: 4:29 pm, April 25th, 2025
Yep - mere sanity seems pretty damn good right now. Says something about where the world is.Written By: AB - Date published: 11:17 am, April 24th, 2025
Chris Dillow in a typically clever and thoughtful recent post (Governments vs Capitalists) notes that: "Capitalism has always demanded two things from the state (though these can sometimes conflict): profitability and legitimacy." The conflict here is ...Written By: AB - Date published: 3:28 pm, April 23rd, 2025
What Mitchell's office is doing is not unique or surprising. Settler colonial projects do try to undermine or question the indigeneity of indigenous peoples. There are two main ways of doing this. The first is to undermine the fact of indigeneity by ...Written By: AB - Date published: 12:05 pm, April 23rd, 2025
I suggest moving Tesla production to Mars - no tarrifs on the red planet and the dust asks no questions and makes no judgments.Written By: AB - Date published: 10:59 am, April 23rd, 2025
Yep - he's demanding that the state maintain the economic conditions where one section of the community can systematically loot another for ever. That's the authoritarian Right in a nutshell - preaching 'freedom' but in love with State power.Written By: AB - Date published: 12:05 pm, April 21st, 2025
That's fair Mickey. I think it's useful to distinguish between religious belief at a personal level and the behaviour of religious institutions. The former we might regard as a universal human phenomenon that we see in people with very different politics, ...Written By: AB - Date published: 10:28 am, April 19th, 2025
Presumably people are employed to audit and edit documents for plain language compliance. So maybe it's short-sighted penny-pinching as well as not caring if people don't properly understand what their rights and entitlements actually are?Written By: AB - Date published: 11:09 am, April 18th, 2025
I'm sure the judgment will have great influence of what many people think. But I'm not convinced that this will always be helpful. What I am really talking about is language, how it gets used and the effect this will have on social relations. I'm ...Written By: AB - Date published: 2:06 pm, April 17th, 2025
The judgment is that this is what the word "woman" means in the context of the UK Equality Act. It has no legal or intellectual or moral force outside that context. In particular, it is not a judgment that this is the only thing that the word "woman" can ...Written By: AB - Date published: 4:16 pm, April 16th, 2025
No - because any departure from the practice of universality in social services creates injustices at the margins, bickering, grievance, opportunities for the manipulative bad faith of propagandists, cover for niggardly and ideologically motivated ...Written By: AB - Date published: 3:59 pm, April 16th, 2025
Perhaps they could be more accurately described as externalising some of the costs of production onto future generations. However, that fact that they are allowed to do so by governments is a form of state support.Written By: AB - Date published: 12:47 pm, April 16th, 2025
Their polls still seem to have credibility with mainstream media sources - so they have some ability to seed narratives that will get aired publicly. Not sure how they will use that influence in Wellington - they probably aren't sure themselves at this ...Written By: AB - Date published: 10:35 am, April 16th, 2025
Plentiful opportunities for Curia/TPU to play a role in tilting the table.Written By: AB - Date published: 9:36 am, April 16th, 2025
Sounded to me like Simeon was using the number for what's known as the 'total cost of employment', not salary. So, it included employer Kiwisaver contributions, ACC levies and overtime worked because of staff shortages. And probably other things as well ...Written By: AB - Date published: 12:22 pm, April 14th, 2025
As per Key in opining that Trump would be better for the economy. Perhaps Key's idea of what makes "the economy" good is (as a former currency trader) a place with plentiful opportunities for unearned income, where speculators can thrive and countries ...Written By: AB - Date published: 12:07 pm, April 14th, 2025
Any panegyric about AI from an obviously stupid person is all about creating acceptance of an environment where AI is not (and will not be) adequately regulated.Written By: AB - Date published: 4:56 pm, April 13th, 2025
Thanks TV. I like Auden a lot more as I get older.Written By: AB - Date published: 5:50 pm, April 12th, 2025
A close-run thing I'd say. But Beckett had the best hair to go with the face, so he wins. But yes, the 'folded' metaphor is odd in that line of Auden's. Perhaps the point is that something that is folded is very physically constructed, and a voice has no ...Written By: AB - Date published: 5:10 pm, April 12th, 2025
All I have is a voice / To undo the folded lie... From September 1, 1939 by WH Auden. It's an old problem.Written By: AB - Date published: 2:11 pm, April 11th, 2025
Yep. Most likely ideas - or more accurately, any form of expression of ideas- that the Trumpists don't like. For example the idea of an Israeli withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. This allows you to deport people on student visas on campuses in pro- ...Written By: AB - Date published: 1:49 pm, April 11th, 2025
You can't ban ideas - they are in people's heads. You could ban the transmission of ideas through writing or speech, but everyone acknowledges that this can be a dangerous slippery slope. You can, and probably should, ban explicit or even implicit calls to ...Written By: AB - Date published: 9:37 am, April 11th, 2025
And if the Australians are of a similar mind to us on this, that is very helpful in terms of a strategic separation from the US and building interoperability with Australia on security. But the fact that Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party might win the May ...Written By: AB - Date published: 12:42 pm, April 10th, 2025
I have a problem with the Greens not knowing how to win elections and advance beyond being a niche party. To do that two things are required. First, have a credible and actionable plan for averting climate disaster that does not have average voters ...Written By: AB - Date published: 10:25 am, April 9th, 2025
We need ‘sponge cities’ to avoid future flooding disasters We needed to start building sponge cities decades ago. We didn't because it would have been dismissed as red tape, an inefficient allocation of resources and likely to increase construction costs. ...Written By: AB - Date published: 9:16 am, April 8th, 2025
And when all the available land is planted in trees and the country has failed to bring emissions down because the tree planting plan has justified more delay, resistance and inertia, and that delay was also justified by saying that magic tech solutions ...Written By: AB - Date published: 3:19 pm, April 6th, 2025
Trump's tariff policy "was based on advice from a fictional economist". We already know that the Trump coterie are crooks and liars, so no surprises. But is this much worse than, say, fictional economics from a real economist? Probably it is worse, but ...Written By: AB - Date published: 2:52 pm, April 6th, 2025
I expect roblogic is describing the people s/he experiences as the keenest supporters of our CoC. We would need a survey of the over-50's to correlate CoC support with Trump favourability. Then break that down further by race and gender. It's certainly ...Written By: AB - Date published: 1:16 pm, April 6th, 2025
Trump's tariffs are simply a sanction on anyone with the temerity to run a trade surplus with the US. It's not an economic policy at all, it's an assertion of pure power. Plus, it must be a more than remote possibility that it's all a calculated game of ...Written By: AB - Date published: 10:17 am, April 4th, 2025
Any adult who uses words like "phenomenal" and "stellar" has lost contact with reality. Like the rest of her government (Luxon especially) she's a salesperson, and the product she is touting is herself for having achieved such an apparently astonishing ...
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