Nice people thread part 5 - nicely does it

chewmylegoff

michaels wrote: »

It is the skiers overtaking that cause the problems, just like on the road if you are overtaking it is up to you to keep clear of the other slope users.

Plus only skiers have a problem with slushy conditions, its fine on a snowboard.

i was the one being overtaken. or more accurately having a snowboard smashed through the back of my ankles. she was going about 4 times faster than me on a very wide piste and i wasn't in the process of turning. so i'm pretty confident it was her fault!

misskool

finished book 2 of the hunger games.

toddled to work and going to try and race through book 3.

i remember why i like children's books. zoom zoom

LydiaJ

zagubov wrote: »

I think he was worried he'd broken Starfleet's Prime Directive (sorry, showing my age here, nobody'll know what I'm talking about)

Showing your age? Maybe you're 11. DS is 11 and he knows perfectly well what the Prime Directive is.

silvercar wrote: »

We didn't do well choosing god parents. The theory eas to pick a married couple who hadnt yet had children, so in the event ours were orphaned they would have a substitute set of parents.

DS1's have diametrically opposing views on just about anything to DS1, if we had left him orphaned in childhood, life would have been difficult. DS2's god parents were going through a messy break up at the time we chose them but kept it hidden, so we haven't seen her since DS2 was 6 months old. He has since remarried and the new wife isn't really interested in other peoples children.

Our latest will assigns responsibility to someone more in line with our thinking. (both now being 18+, they don't need adopting as such, but having an inheritance at such a young age could bring with it irresponsibility, so they can't access the money without approval until they are older).

We had also asked our parents to be guardians, if anything should happen, given that they were under 50 when the eldest was born, we've also changed that.

For DS and DD we chose two married couple each, really good friends of ours that we expected to remain close friends permanently, as follows:

DS godparent couple 1: She's still my best long distance friend. We meet up most school holidays, but usually just her and the kids and me and my kids. This is no bad thing because he has a way of relating to kids that works with his own kids but categorically does not with DS. I don't think it helps that they only have daughters.

DS godparent couple 2: Have decided not to have kids but stayed quite involved with us and with DS until they moved to Scotland. We don't see so much of them now, although I try to get up there to see them most summers (combining with a visit to my brother who's also in Scotland). I think they'll come into their own when DS is a bit older - they're generally better with teenagers than younger ones.

DD godparent couple 1: Fantastic people that we saw a lot of when they weren't too far away, but they've now moved a lot further north, which makes it harder. They're also rather snowed under with their own three adopted kids, with some "issues". We end up hardly seeing them. Again, they agree with me that we all hope our kids will be a bit less incompatible when they're a bit older.

DD godparent couple 2: I'm still really close to her and see her fairly often - she's the friend who came from London to help me move house. He was great until he left her to shack up with someone else, and he doesn't see us any more.

Anyone else notice an absence of men who actually see my kids?

zagubov wrote: »

Anyoine with a couple of minutes to spare might find this article on spurious statistics worth a read.

Says pithily what probably a lot of us have been thinking.

Love it. Thank you.

zagubov

Relating to my last link, and grasping at straws here, but can any NPs help me track down an article I saw once on the news once about a movement in France which was all about evidence -based policies. It was probably before I started posting to this site last autumn.

There was a politician or more likely an economist who was a major player who argued that all decisions should be informed by what actually seems to work. Naturally she was ridiculed for being pragmatic rather than theoretical but I had to admire what she was doing.

She claimed that the evidence to support most ideological policies was weak at best and would get laughed at if scientists were asked to check their validity.

To give you an idea, whenever youth facilities are provided in an area to distract kids from delinquency, there's allegedly better evidence that the crime rate goes up than goes down.

Also there are claims that when tax rates go up to pay for services then people and firms move away but it's unclear whether that actually happens or whether a few random instances have been cherry-picked to support someone's ideas.

Also a dodgy dossier about weapons in Iraq.... (thinks..I better quit while I still might be ahead).

Anyway has anyone else seen /heard of /otherwise encountered this and knows what they were called ......anyone???:o

(expects stony silence):(

And welcome back chewie, hopefully in one piece!:)

michaels

DD1 has an American Great Uncle who shows no interest, an Aunt who has no money as her husband chooses not to work and a God mother who is good for birthdays and Christmas but we should probably see more of as she is fairly local.

DD2 Has a great Uncle in law who is less involved than I expected, an aunt in Antigua who is to far away and ...an American great Aunt who again does xmas and birthdays.

DS has Cousin in law once removed fairly local, good for birthdays and Christmas, a work contact local again good for birthdays and Christmas but less involved than I expected and another very distant relative from London, quite young who I hope will get more involved as he gets older.


DD2 now also has a free spirit from Cornwall who will teach her a lot.

vivatifosi

zagubov wrote: »

Relating to my last link, and grasping at straws here, but can any NPs help me track down an article I saw once on the news once about a movement in France which was all about evidence -based policies. It was probably before I started posting to this site last autumn.

There was a politician or more likely an economist who was a major player who argued that all decisions should be informed by what actually seems to work. Naturally she was ridiculed for being pragmatic rather than theoretical but I had to admire what she was doing.

She claimed that the evidence to support most ideological policies was weak at best and would get laughed at if scientists were asked to check their validity.

To give you an idea, whenever youth facilities are provided in an area to distract kids from delinquency, there's allegedly better evidence that the crime rate goes up than goes down.

Also there are claims that when tax rates go up to pay for services then people and firms move away but it's unclear whether that actually happens or whether a few random instances have been cherry-picked to support someone's ideas.

Also a dodgy dossier about weapons in Iraq.... (thinks..I better quit while I still might be ahead).

Anyway has anyone else seen /heard of /otherwise encountered this and knows what they were called ......anyone???:o

(expects stony silence):(

And welcome back chewie, hopefully in one piece!:)

Could it be this one zag:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/27027.html

misskool

yay, finished the hunger games trilogy now

Doozergirl

I've fallen behind again. Whilst I catch up, does anyone know of an easy, but free program I can use to create a simple floorplan? I'd rather eat my hair than try to use Paint for it but I have no other idea what to use

Doozergirl

vivatifosi wrote: »

What we could really do with is a good east-west road across the countRy, somewhere further north than the M25, that takes traffic across the countRy.

Edited for you

I can go up, up, down, down and east a little bit but if I wanted to get to you, it would take me all day, despite the fact that it isn't really that far. My friend in Hertford might as well be in Cornwall.

zagubov

vivatifosi wrote: »

Could it be this one zag:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/27027.html

This may well be it. The article was like a breath of fresh air in a world of mischief, befuddlement and spin that makes up much of political life.

I'm against the death penalty and I believe the stats show it doesn't affect the murder rate (but does affect the conviction rate, as nobody wants to convict a suspect wrongly).

But try talking to people in the developing world/US and see how their eyes glaze over when evidence besmirches their pure joy at retribution. Doesn't apply to everybody there but it's worryingly common.

I did a history degree in which I learned that the classical world rarely experimented or tried things out (they never let evidence get in the way of a good theory) and you could take someone from the start of the Roman world and timeshift them to the end 1000 years later and they would be able to handle all the technology no problem at all.

Buit if you took someone from the start of the middle ages and brought them 1000 years later to the end, they'd be completely astonished and baffled at all the whizz-bang technology despite it all looking very simiilar to us.:cool:

In terms of politics and economics we're obviously still with the Romans!