“Who gets to have an opinion on the hīkoi and who must remain ‘impartial’?”
I enjoyed reading Madelaine Chapman’s column on who gets to play the impartial card. The Treaty Principles Bill, which inspired that column, does not start from a neutral place, but ignores a lot of history since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
I liked this photo of New Zealand Historian Vincent O’Malley with a sign saying “Read some bloody history”; bloody it is.
I write mostly technical posts, but my work does not exist in a vacuum, so it is time for some #nzpol .
O’Malley showing a “Read some bloody history” sign.
I like food. I mean well beyond eating to survive: I do enjoy flavours. Thai is my favourite cuisine but I have a rule: I will try any food that I’m offered at least once. Sometimes the surprise is positive, sometimes it’s horrible; but that’s my rule.
I don’t know how I ended up in this Our World in Data page, but it is a good comparison. There will be quite a bit of variability depending on the specifics of the production system (beef in country X vs country Y, grass fed vs grain fed, etc), but I am interested in the rough scale. And the difference is huge.
Of course greenhouse gasses are only one of the environmental considerations when comparing different types of food. Water use, fertiliser use, soil conservation, pollution runoffs, etc come to mind. This is even before considering animal welfare; I like animals walking around and I pay more for that type of product.
I like the taste of beef but I have to say that I am eating it much less frequently than I used to five years ago. I am not asking you to be vegetarian or vegan—I am neither. In fact I am not asking you to do anything, but I just keep on looking at the graph thinking what I can do better while still enjoying food as much as I do.
Travel is part of life and if you have pets, finding appropriate boarding for them is a must. This is my explanation for why you should not entrust your dog to Glenstar Kennels, in Canterbury, New Zealand.
At the end of 2016 I had work approval for a two-month trip overseas. Normally I would book accommodation for my dog at the SPCA boarding kennels (as when we had two-months repairs to our house following Christchurch’s earthquake). However, as this trip included Christmas/New Year, it was impossible to find a vacancy. I was happy to find a spot for my dog at Glenstar Kennels spanning the whole end of year period.
Currently there is some discussion in New Zealand about the effect of the reclassification of schools in socioeconomic deciles. An interesting aspect of the funding system in New Zealand is that state and state-integrated schools with poorer families receive substantially more funding from the government than schools that receive students from richer families (see this page in the Ministry of Education’s website). Continue reading
“What has {insert biotech here} done for food security?” This question starts at the wrong end of the problem, because food security is much larger than any biotechnology. I would suggest that governance, property rights and education are the fundamental issues for food security, followed by biotechnological options. For example, the best biotechnology is useless if one is trying to do agriculture in a war-ravaged country.
Once we have a relatively stable government and educated people can rely on property rights, the effects of different biotechnologies will be magnified and it will be possible to better assess them. I would say that matching the most appropriate technologies to the local environmental, economic and cultural conditions is a good sign of sustainable agriculture. I would also say that the broader the portfolio of biotechnology and agronomic practices the more likely a good match will be. That is, I would not a priori exclude any biotechnology from the table based on generic considerations. Continue reading
