Andrew Easterbrook

I saw on CloseUp the other night an item where a bunch of parents and academics were going on about how the “Energy Drink Companies” are so evil for marketing and selling concentrated energy drink shots to children. The general message was that this is horrible and someone (i.e. the government) should do something to put a stop to it.

I think this is ridiculous. There’s no way there should be any legal rules preventing the sale of high sugar and caffiene drinks to kids – it’s not the government’s place to impose those sort of rules. It’s a parent’s job to tell their children not to buy the drinks, if the parent doesn’t want the child to buy the drink. Imposing a law or regulation preventing kids from drinking tasty things that are bad for them is quite a substantial rejection of parental authority, admission parents cannot control their own children, and will relegate energy drinks to the same level as pills and drugs.

Energy drinks are not a social evil. They are not something so detrimental to the health of the country that they need to be regulated and controlled (and for that matter, nor is Coldral). Regulation and control should be limited to those very few things that cause significant and substantial harm to people that use them and only then, as a last resort, when all other avenues have been exhausted, AND when the thing-to-be-regulated has been proven to cause adverse effects no matter what the circumstances of use.

I have been thinking about a few things this week. This post can serve as a reminder to write something about them in the future.

• I think there’s an important connection between having a good life and the accumulation of “defining moments”. Of course it’s self-evident that defining moments in one’s life are what one remembers, but what about prospectively, as well as retrospectively? Might it be good to seek out and aim for certain defining moments? Not just “goals” but something different, something more like milestones. A goal might be to learn to fly, for example. But a defining moment needs to be an actual experience, so in that case, the defining moment would be flying solo. Having lots of good defining moments will be enjoyable. And it leads onto my next point,

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Draft of an essay I may or may not get around to finishing. No guarantees as to readability! Click more if you really want to read my idiosyncratic ramblings. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last two days, William, Hamish, Jake (William’s flatmate) and I have been travelling around the Hawke’s Bay wineries sampling the local produce.

Overall, today’s wine was significantly better than yesterday’s. I’ll give a brief but not exhaustive description of most of the places we went:

• CJ Pask had a good Merlot, but everything else was average
• Black Barn was a very nice winery, and had very knowledgeable staff. Their Chardonnay was above average (7)
• Te Mata claimed to have the best wine produced in NZ, the Coleraine. It wasn’t that great. But the Bullnose was very nice
• Craggy Range had flash buildings, nice but not brilliant wines, and the staff used scripted explanations
• Abbey Cellars had nothing that great
• Trinity Hill had live music which we listened to as we sat on the lawn. They had a very smooth easy drinking syrah (6.5), and a good viognier (7)
• Ngatarawa‘s Chardonnay was first equal for the weekend, a Glazebrook (8). Glazebrook also make a very nice Gewürztraminer, but I can’t remember what I rated it, only that it was very nice.

That was Saturday’s lineup. Nothing very impressive except the Glazebrook range. I was generally unimpressed with all of the Hawke’s Bay Pinot Noirs we tried, and even the Cab Savs and Merlot blends didn’t impress that much.

Sunday’s wineries were a big step up. The original plan was to go to the beach – we didn’t think that they would be open due to the Easter trading laws (post coming later). But much to our surprise they were! A couple of the places (out of a total of 9 today) we went weren’t very good so I’ll just leave them out. Read the rest of this entry »

The New Zealand legal system requires all prospective legislation (“bills”) to pass through the Attorney General’s office, which produces a report on its consistency with the NZ Bill of Rights Act 1990. This is a crucial part of our process – since the Bill of Rights is not supreme law (it doesn’t trump other statutes unless a rule states otherwise), compatibility with it needs to be ensured to avoid possible human rights breaches within statutes. That is, if bills could pass through Parliament being inconsistent with the BORA, nobody would have recompense against those human rights-violating statutes just because they violate their human rights. That would be pretty shit. And guess what? It IS pretty shit: the AG’s vetting almost always gets ignored.
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What I’d like to know is the percentage of people that are pro-life that also eat meat. By my reasoning, it’s brazenly hypocritical to say an unfeeling, unconscious, undeveloped, barely existing foetus deserves more of our respect than a living, breathing animal which can feel pain, is conscious, does feel happy and sad and does have a memory.

My guess is that a very large number of pro-lifers are also ravenous carnivores and this angers me. The pro-life argument is that a foetus is “alive” and should be treated as sacred (forgive the simplification) – but conspicuously missing is that life is worthy of respect only if it’s human life. Most of the animals we eat have far higher capacity for life than a foetus yet we treat them differently on the grounds that they are not human. Prima facie this is acceptable to a lot of people, but then you ask, “Why does absence of humanity justify such discrimination?” and rarely get an adequate answer. I suppose one has a slightly less incoherent position if one is Christian and believes humans are inherently different because God told them so, but that’s not really good enough for me.

The flaw in my previous post is my assumption that in order for us to make a legitimate judgement on irrationality, we have to be able to say all irrational decisions are bad. This is wrong. In order for us to generalise in such a way, it is just necessary only to assert that because most irrational decisions are bad, the irrational decision [x] is bad. More loosely, we are justified in saying “it’s highly likely that your irrational decision was bad.”

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Something I think that people often underestimate both the truth and significance of is the fact that human beings are not always rational creatures. All the time we make decisions that are not rational, yet often the first criticism we make of other people’s decisions and actions is that they are irrational. I think that, in the spirit of accepting differences, tolerance and open-mindedness, perhaps we need a rethink of when criticism of rationality is justified.

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The draft Code of Practice generally does the best of a bad situation. However, there is one major issue and a few minor issues I think arise out of a close reading of the code.

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Bear in mind that the delay announced today is to allow the “sector” to agree on a final code of conduct. The reason the sector (read: RIANZ etc and the major ISPs) do not currently agree is that the recording industry wants to make the code more pro-rightsholders. So more time makes it more likely that the strawman policy at the bottom of the CoC (see here) will make it into the final version. Read the rest of this entry »