Not happy with racing changes
I support Paul Flowers comments (Southland Times, June 19, 2020) in relation to tote staff and electronic betting machines.
Take away the personalities and advice from the Tote staff for an electronic machine that cannot return cash for investment, but you get a credit ticket, which you have to take to a TAB off course to cash in.
Further more they are quickly destroying the market they had with these policies in the past three years.
Good business requires marketing and promotion.
Watching the racing administration in the past years is like watching paint dry.
Staff numbers and salaries should be accountable to results. LW Insall, Invercargill
Supporting wonderful library staff
I wholeheartedly agree with a recent correspondent to your paper about the excellent service from our library staff.
Ben, Jill and Catherine have been personally outstanding to me over the years.
I trust with any planned Invercargill City Council reorganisation it will not have a detrimental effect on our
wonderful library and its staff. N McDermott, Invercargill
Is it really an age of reason?
Tony Timpa in 2016 dialled 911 for help. He had not taken his medication and was sinking into some sort of psychosis and when the Dallas police arrived he was in a severely agitated state.
Handcuffed and with his legs manacled they subdued him face down on the ground with a knee between his shoulder blades and neck. Eventually his pleas for his life ceased. He was dead. You can watch this on Youtube.
You might wonder why the death of an innocent young white male received no media attention yet the death of a drugged violent black criminal George Floyd under similar circumstances has resulted in global media coverage, protests, demonstrations, riots, looting and arson.
Maybe the answer is simply racism, only black lives matter.
Despite the fact we dignify the present as the Information Age, it is in fact the Attention Age.
People are not controlled by the rational part of their brain that requires information but by their feelings and emotions.
Technology has facilitated that which seizes our emotional attention and individuals and institutions do not have the energy or discipline to reserve judgement until the facts have been ascertained and analysed.
The Age of Reason is over, destroyed by the very technology and social conditions it enabled.
With our iPhones we will be able to take selfies to post on social media a record of our descent into un-civilised mindless mob savagery.
It will do no good but it will feel good and that is all that matters. Mervyn Cave, Manapouri