Author Archive
Numerical illiteracy at the Herald
Written By: - Date published: 1:21 pm, April 29th, 2015 - 46 comments
Today, we see a Herald ‘editor’ demonstrating exactly how useless they are at interpreting polls. They are saying that a poll where almost all of the sample was taken before the Ponygate story broke, indicates that it doesn’t matter much. To rub home just how stupid and out of touch the Herald editors were last week, it then whines about nasty social media. What can one say of these cloistered monks of ‘journalism’… Plenty.
Replacing Russel
Written By: - Date published: 3:47 pm, April 19th, 2015 - 48 comments
The Greens have closed their nominations for male co-leader, and are running a number of provincial meetings. I went to the second one in Auckland. The biggest issue for the Greens now after cracking the 10% electoral support in 2011 is that they didn’t grow their vote in 2014, and remain well below polling. Part of that is getting their public face right.
The end is near for IE
Written By: - Date published: 2:56 pm, April 16th, 2015 - 25 comments
Internet Explorer is now less than 15% of the sessions on this site. However it accounts fro nearly half of the development and testing time for the legacy variants. Microsoft has a replacement in the works, which should get released soonish. But I’m tired of wasting time on a crap browser. I’m dumping it now.
Cameron Slater has a idiot for a lawyer
Written By: - Date published: 8:00 am, April 14th, 2015 - 42 comments
Instead of taking the shot granted by the High Court of simply making an appeal, some incompetent legal dunderhead made the idiotic move of not filing. Then they took the much harder step of belatedly attempting to get the Court of Appeal to allow them to appeal. Complete stupidity. But this is a lawyer with Cameron Slater for a client..
Development of the mobile theme
Written By: - Date published: 2:01 pm, April 4th, 2015 - 61 comments
Last week, very reluctantly, I coughed up the money for a development version of the mobile theme. About a quarter of our readers primarily use mobiles to read the site these days. When you add tablets it gets closer to 40%. I need to create a mobile theme that enhances the existing one for better commenting. If you have simple ideas for that, now is the time to speak.
April fool Pete George released from ban…
Written By: - Date published: 1:53 pm, April 1st, 2015 - 113 comments
Pete George was released from his ban this morning. Something that he was clearly bracing himself for yesterday when he directly lied about this site yet again…
Early heavy voting in Northland continues
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, March 25th, 2015 - 28 comments
It looks to me like the early voting for Northland is likely to be close to or more than 50% of the total vote. Part of that is because it is a by-election. Part because of National’s hapless and tainted candidates (past and present) going against effective opponents. But also due to the strong trend to early voting. It will need to cause changes in electioneering.
On the flag – lets not have one
Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, March 21st, 2015 - 101 comments
I guess that John Key wanted to raise the idea of a flag change to divert attention from his misdeeds and lack of anything positive from his terms in office. I can’t think of any other particular reason for bringing it up. But the referendum appears to lack the option of dumping the flag. Why have it at all?
900,000 comments
Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, March 18th, 2015 - 28 comments
Yesterday morning we went though 900k comments. We have done another 100k comments in 188 days since September 10th. We are slightly behind our long predicted exponential growth to a million comments in August.
Still making things go boom dangerously
Written By: - Date published: 5:27 pm, March 15th, 2015 - 26 comments
I have been reading Neil Sheenan’s “A fiery peace in a cold war” on the development of the US ICBM forces in the 50s. At the same time I’ve been reading last week’s Economist, including a feature on the current developing arms race in nuclear weapon systems. Quietly falling into another insane arms race.
New site – Evening Report
Written By: - Date published: 7:14 pm, March 9th, 2015 - 20 comments
Selwyn Manning has set up and will edit a new site (eveningreport.nz). Nice to see another progressive net news and current affairs site being set up. It will be interesting to see how this one develops. But there is a lot of room for different media in the net space.
On Northland
Written By: - Date published: 1:44 pm, March 4th, 2015 - 117 comments
I’ve been getting tired of the fantasy elections that some political commentators seem to enjoy playing. Currently the fantasises is in Northland, with the same old tiresome lines. It is a pity that most of those playing this game don’t ever seem to think about the behaviours of real voters, real candidates, and real parties.
Do the young really lack concentration?
Written By: - Date published: 1:23 pm, March 1st, 2015 - 85 comments
Now that I can no longer call myself young, the old adage that younger people simply lack concentration does appear to me to be correct. I look to the numbers on The Standard to see if there is a correlation and if I can argue a causation based on age. Are the younger readers without concentration, or are they just busy…
Carmel stood down for possible conflict of interest
Written By: - Date published: 6:48 pm, February 25th, 2015 - 231 comments
Carmel Sepuloni’s mother has had charges of benefit fraud being laid against her. Andrew Little has done the sensible thing and stood down her as its social development spokesperson. While I’m sure that we will still get the dribbling trolls, this is how potential conflicts of interest should be handled. Updated.
Condescending Catherine Beard on TPP
Written By: - Date published: 9:01 am, February 18th, 2015 - 51 comments
I’ve been involved in exporting from NZ for more than 35 years in everything from manufacturing to software. I support free trade. It is always embarrassing watching idiots waffling on a subject without any facts. But that is what you get with the secrecy of the TPP restraint of trade negotiations.
Damn you readers :) Upgrades again
Written By: - Date published: 7:47 pm, February 10th, 2015 - 31 comments
Well ok, after the election I figured that I could shift the site to some slower storage with a whole lot of redundancy in a RAID6 array of slower drives. We’d have a lot fewer readers than our peak for 6 months after post election, right? Nope – wrong. You are making me work…
The prince and the pea
Written By: - Date published: 8:45 pm, January 21st, 2015 - 80 comments
I have pointed out before that Bomber Bradbury is wee bit unsuited to the two way dialogue of the blogs. A fragile prima donna who doesn’t like to be contradicted by the people he gallantly slags off in his routine piques of bitchy ranting. Updated with Bomber proving the point as his manufactured myths fall apart.
Where is Cameron Slater?
Written By: - Date published: 7:55 am, January 21st, 2015 - 142 comments
Yesterday I got contacted about Cameron Slater’s current address. Apparently the arsehole of the kiwi blogosphere hasn’t been paying his court ordered judgements against him that have been incurred in recent years. The person who contacted me wanted to serve a notice to bankrupt him.
Written in a deep summer haze
Written By: - Date published: 8:44 am, January 5th, 2015 - 94 comments
I was astonished by an anonymous NZ Herald editorial on New Years day – “NZ economy is in a good place and thriving”. Obviously an inferior intellect was slow cooked in the warm holiday weather. It turned to mush and regurgitated one of Bill English’s wet dreams. Dairy prices are unlikely to rebound any time soon.
SkyCity’s expected subvention explained for John Roughan
Written By: - Date published: 9:28 am, December 27th, 2014 - 42 comments
At last, some of our conservative short-term thinkers have woken up to the elephant in the room with the SkyCity convention centre subvention. Years late and their previous support has cost taxpayers dearly already. Perhaps they could learn to read reports? And think before committing us to be suckers?
Finally, Cuba.
Written By: - Date published: 7:45 am, December 18th, 2014 - 145 comments
I was born in June 1959. In October the following year, the United States put an embargo against Cuba, and it has remained in place ever since. Today it appears as if President Obama in the USA is intending to lift the substantive parts of the embargo. About time.
Lone nutters and suicide by cop
Written By: - Date published: 8:27 am, December 16th, 2014 - 89 comments
As anticipated, the Sydney cafe siege was caused by a lone nutter with a dubious history. He committed suicide by cop apparently after killing a hostage. Meanwhile we have had opportunistic jerkoffs like National MP Mark Mitchell displaying their paranoid fantasies (probably as urine dribbles down their leg) to justify recent poorly written and rushed legislation.
First review results
Written By: - Date published: 6:56 am, December 9th, 2014 - 111 comments
“Labour’s review panel has reported its findings back about the party’s election campaign and the reasons for the low 25 per cent result, identifying problems ranging from a failure to unite behind former leader David Cunliffe to resourcing and confusion over its “Vote Positive” slogan.”
Poor (and rather pathetic) Bomber
Written By: - Date published: 9:52 pm, December 8th, 2014 - 109 comments
Martyn Bradbury is still ‘leading’ the left from the behind. My focus on this site is how to reduce all the costs. One of those costs over the last year has been complaints about us from inside the NZLP. That is why I decided last month to drop my membership. Bomber snarkily whining up his ego looks like another wasteful cost.
National’s campaign of false equivalences
Written By: - Date published: 8:23 am, December 4th, 2014 - 102 comments
John Key has been advertising us in parliament. But he has a problem distinguishing how his right puppet blogs operate compared to the volunteer blogs of the left. It says more about how John Key thinks than it does about us. Key prefers sites that recruit prostitutes in order to blackmail reporters.
Losing money
Written By: - Date published: 7:32 am, December 2nd, 2014 - 26 comments
The economic news is depressing for NZ at present. After riding a dairy commodity boom for the last few years, the payout for farmers looks like it will drop from a high of $8.50/kg last season to $4.85/kg this coming season. Meanwhile National has neglected our most sustainable resource – people. So expect a busted economy for the next few years.
Scott Campbell: Liar on The Nation
Written By: - Date published: 11:26 pm, November 30th, 2014 - 93 comments
Scott Campbell made a statement on The Nation this weekend about this site being used to attack him as a journalist in 2007/8. After having a good look around for evidence on site, I have concluded that Scott Campbell simply lied. Quite why this comms specialist for the right made this lie I don’t know. But I’m quite pissed off about it.
Two guilty approaches after Dirty Politics
Written By: - Date published: 7:21 am, November 28th, 2014 - 43 comments
There are two approaches to being a star of dirty politics and not wanting to answer questions about it. Both were displayed on Campbell Live last night by Jason Ede and Cameron Slater. And Andrea Vance has details on taxpayers paying for Slaters legal bills.
Dirty political money – why isn’t it illegal?
Written By: - Date published: 7:30 pm, November 26th, 2014 - 39 comments
The Greens have released information that shows National having 77% of their donations in the last 3 years ($3.375 million) funnelled to them in non-public quite large donations. What are they providing for that? Well amongst other things it pays for sleazeballs like Jason Ede. But what legislation?
Oh dear – National’s “white elephant” is still growing?
Written By: - Date published: 4:56 pm, November 23rd, 2014 - 44 comments
Public transport traffic in Auckland keeps growing by large 7.7% per year. Car traffic despite all of the motorway and roading improvements grew by just 2.3% in the whole period of 2006 and 2013 amongst commuters. But our current idiotic National transport minister wants more roads? And won’t let Aucklanders decide what they should do despite them voting with their AT Hop cards.
Interwebbing
Written By: - Date published: 11:04 pm, November 20th, 2014 - 8 comments
I was just having a look through the connections between this site and others (and contemplating how to increase it). I thought others might also be interested.
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