The Standard » lprent

Site health – comments and posts

lprent — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 03:31:38 +0000

vto made a comment that he thought that the number of comments was diminishing at kiwiblog. Now I have no idea because I usually avoid the sewer section there. However it did remind me that I should have a look here. It feels like it has been getting more popular, but intuition is a poor substitute for actually looking at the numbers.

John Key’s emergency descent

lprent — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:22:29 +0000

A great graphic from the Sunday Star Times as John Key starts dropping towards a hard landing in the personal popularity stakes. And in the great tradition of journalists everywhere, the rest of the article is about how he is still preferred by rubber fetishists.

Fran O’Sullivan: a shill with diversions

lprent — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:02:14 +0000

Fran O'Sullivan took objection to RedLogix criticizing her articles on Crafar farms. It helps our traffic, but really she should relook at the utter crap she has been writing before attacking the questioner. She talks about everything except why the OIO within their legislation limited framework should or should not have approved the sale. The more that I reread her work on this subject, the more I ask: what in the hell is she trying to hide?

Outage

lprent — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:56:54 +0000

There was some maintenance done on the main NZ server last night. All looked ok when I went to sleep at about 6am, but appears to have started having problems from about 8:30 onwards with intermittently waiting on some network resource. Problem looks external to my server and the server’s support staff are chasing it ...

Teapot tattle

lprent — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:25:19 +0000

The Teapot Tapes have leaked on to the internet.

You can torrent it and listen past all of the noise.

Funding the puppets of denial

lprent — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:11:36 +0000

There have been some interesting investigations going on into the funding of denier lobby groups. The reluctance of them to disclose their sources of income is becoming an issue. What can be seen is that they have very publicity shy funding sources. Most likely it is those who stand to lose money if effective measures are taken to reduce the impact of climate changes. So they want transparency in science and hypocrisy on their own funding of their own 'independent' mouthpieces.

US Congress gets a Darwin award

lprent — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:19:56 +0000

The idiots at the US Congress, after covering themselves with shame in 2011, have already started to try to surpass it this year with dumbarse legislation against online copyright piracy. Not only will it not prevent the crimes of its intended targets, but it is also so badly drafted that almost anything can and probably will be deemed to be a copyright violation. Good choice for a Darwin award. The only problem is that most of them have already bred.

The problems of pBooks

lprent — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:01:31 +0000

My iPad was powerless, so for the first time in a month I reached into the vast numbers of pBooks that litter our shelves and are going to be a real pain to move in a month, and tried to start to read one. I looked at the video of instructions from the 14th century and while that showed me what side to open it from. But where was .......

Ports of Auckland wage numbers

lprent — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 08:05:05 +0000

There has been some interesting material floating around in comments and on facebook about the Ports of Auckland waterside disputing workers wages. Looks like we are starting to get some more information outside of the right wing nut job sites. Ultimately the information has to be provided by the Ports of Auckland because they are the only organisation that holds the wages data across employees. But the figures provided by the P0A (the 91k) include overtime payments, shift payments, superannuation subsidies, medical insurance subsidies and hardly constitute a normal wage that the employee would see..

Post-xmas blues

lprent — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:58:39 +0000

My blobbed out and weight gaining holiday in sunny Southland is over. I'm back at work and feeling like an early day. Generally I have the post-Xmas blues and a couple of kilos that I need to wear off. But this came up on my playlist at work.... Yeah right

Tax-take bullshit

lprent — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 22:26:07 +0000

An earlier post by Mike Smith on inequality referred to a claim by Geoff Vincent that 12% of the taxpayers were paying 49% of the the taxes. Now this was patently a spinners interpolation on the tax data and shouldn’t be part of the debate.. A comment by DH has a look at that bullshit. ...

Self inflicted injury

lprent — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 10:29:53 +0000

FFS: If you are going to confess your foibles to Facebook, then don't let a low-grade sociopath have access to your dribblings. Not only is it going to be embarrassing to you after you sober up. But you are going to find that every other border line nutter has liked it all over the net. A few simple rules when you are sober will prevent the problem.

Myths and moralising – the conservative trademark

lprent — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 01:17:10 +0000

Even smart conservatives in my experience generally think far too short term, fail to look at history and in the final analysis view everything from their own narrow interests rather than those of society as whole. They prefer historical mythmaking and moralizing about others rather than thinking. The Economist throws up another telling example by David Brooks.

Comment Privacy and fools

lprent — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:04:51 +0000

Cameron Slater is a technological idiot. Well he has just proven it again. A comment on our site referred to IP/e-mail matching at another site. In his own guilt about privacy abuses Slater immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion.

I'd advise people to never put comments on sites that lack a privacy policy that is explicit about what information may be used for. But we ensure your privacy here.

I am going to miss the real Aaron Gilmore

lprent — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 02:06:52 +0000

The body of Aaron Gilmore will be leaving Parliament. However the divine rapture of the presence of "Aaron Gilmore for Prime Minister" will linger long after after that pretender to the name has gone.

Read the wisdom that is Facebook on the blessed one.