I can't live in a world where I don't talk, so I get my talking out by talking to myself.
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As always, Stephen reads the market with superb financial acumen.
With the Government of the day *finally* cracking down meaningfully on substandard housing (which has been a known quantity for at least 3 years), Landlords are about to take a financial hit chunky enough for Kiwi entrepreneurs to break back into the market as the landed gentry begin to re-invest in the productive economy to maximise their speculative return.
Most property managers appear to be operating on the assumption that it'll be a hefty - but one-off - repair cost, but flats like ours are obviously going to take several stages to transform if they have to meet the new standards.
Having lived in a country with lifelong renters, it's really not that bad. Everything else in Italy was godawful, but the landlords didn't harass their tenants as much as the Italian bureaucracy did.
Paying off the debt, leaving me free to actually travel internationally when/if the fancy strikes me (to acquire an experience I can't convincingly reproduce without first-hand knowledge...) is WAY more important personally, and the retirement savings will be far more useful than putting a down payment on any property down.
10 years from now, my creative work will be paying for itself as well anyway...
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Two Years in: How is PM Jacinda Ardern's Government doing? - Stuff
One million people with mental illness don't receive care: Productivity Commission - The Age
'This is what happens when you normalise a culture of bureaucratic secrecy and deliberately seed distrust between Government-led operations and marginalised groups (via media monopolies) for political purposes...'
[quote:
'Productivity Commission chairman Michael Brennan told the Sun-Herald it meant two out of five people with mental illness were not receiving treatment.'
[...]
'Mr Brennan said there was no "magic wand" for mental health and urged a "multi-faceted" approach similar to the way the road toll had fallen because of a combination of seatbelts, safer vehicle design, better roads and random breath testing.
He said the mental health system was "tacked on" to the physical health system.
[...]
"[Mental illness] is something that tends to afflict younger people and that's crucial in terms of reinforcing the need for early detection and early intervention and also the lifetime cost that can come about if you don't."
This is actually the root cause of the faulty relationship between the mental health system and society-at-large.
Clinical Psychology produces diagnoses of mental illness (catalogued in guidelines such as the DSM...) based on experimental research which, for several decades, has been conducted mostly at universities using undergraduates as guinea pigs.
This has led to wide-spread sampling bias over-representing what are popularly referred to as WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) patterns of thought in diagnostic processes.
University education - as opposed to a more generic 'tertiary' education - is bloody difficult no matter which academic field you are pursuing, and experimenting on twitchy, slightly isolated weirdos (which most young people are...) is simply going to reveal that struggle, not anything meaningful about the way our physical and mental health are tied to our ability to meaningfully communicate our perspective to our wider community.
If you can't make yourself understood - for any reason, people will think you are 'sick' and try to 'cure' you...
Also related: Number of violent attacks rises each year at Melbourne's mental health hospital - The Age
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I think one thing the academic musicians are WAY ahead of the other formal arts practitioners on is what the essential quality of 'performance art' is.
My avant-garde friends have been billing their performance art experiments as 'new music' for years now, and we're all extremely fascinated with the relationship between gesture and sound.
As both a writer and a performance artist, I feel that pull strongly.
I can't draw or paint, but I'm a good photographer and a v. good director, so I know about capturing (and manipulating) perceptions of visual and physical space as well.
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