Author Archive
If it is broke, then fix it
Written By: - Date published: 11:29 am, September 26th, 2012 - 71 comments
Colin James writes good political analysis. His ODT article from yesterday resonates with me. It is time to look for a new economic model as we watch “..central banks – supposed to epitomise the straight and narrow – print money like 17th century monarchs.” as they recirculate the stupidities of the past like any National government.
Greenpeace – working for others.
Written By: - Date published: 3:02 pm, September 4th, 2012 - 13 comments
Greenpeace has a case in front of the Court of Appeal today. It is going to be important for any number of small charities who do some advocacy work that may be considered to be ‘political’.
But Greenpeace deserves a resounding cheer for taking this case when it is far more important to other advocates from poverty groups to churches to climate deniers than it is to themselves.
Climate models fail to accurately predict Arctic ice – deniers fail to notice
Written By: - Date published: 3:32 pm, August 26th, 2012 - 80 comments
Like many people I’m always bemused by the lack of logic that the climate change deniers (CCD’s) have in their extremely selective picking of things to get wound up about – especially about climate models. But when an actual self-evident flaw shows up in the models, well they simply seem to miss it entirely. Like it is now evident that the climate models used to predict Arctic melting vastly underrate the speed at which it is happening. The consequences are going to be unpleasant for the north.
TED is coming to town
Written By: - Date published: 10:35 am, August 16th, 2012 - 2 comments
TEDx will be in Auckland in October. We can get a limited number of tickets to it for those who want go.
Life outside the blog
Written By: - Date published: 12:53 pm, July 18th, 2012 - 27 comments
Our authors do have to live outside of blogging, and because we’re pretty skilled in our various professions we don’t actually have that much time to blog. Which is why this site runs as a coop with limited recognition of the personalities that are so essential to our operation. But it is nice to point out when others recognize our authors in their professions – and I can have a stir at the same time….
Talley’s Group: Arsehole managers – bad faith and bullshit
Written By: - Date published: 10:56 am, May 17th, 2012 - 41 comments
Today there was the characteristic signature of a Talley’s Group company spin that I’ve observed over the last five years on this site with their worker relationships. They lie, prevaricate, and fracture the truth. They appear to be completely untrustworthy and incapable of good faith bargaining. In my view they are the absolute arseholes of NZ managers and companies.
10,000+ at Auckland anti-MOM protest
Written By: - Date published: 3:14 pm, April 28th, 2012 - 87 comments
Lots of people… get down to Britomart.. Mind you Britomart is filling up rapidly. They need a few more megaphones by the look of the crowd. Penny Bright sucks at chants. 😈 Slowly moving off. This is mining protest levels… A lot of people… Seriously slow. Walked 50 metres. Really good humoured and highly social. […]
Veolia Transport: where were the backup plans?
Written By: - Date published: 6:10 pm, April 26th, 2012 - 73 comments
I have and still do deal with quite a lot with systems in my day-job. But this…. I’m aghast at the self-evident stupidity. A power outage has shut down almost all train services across the Auckland region. The fault at KiwiRail’s National Train Control in Wellington, which controls Auckland signals and radio control, occurred about […]
400,000 comments (almost)
Written By: - Date published: 12:18 pm, April 19th, 2012 - 53 comments
By one standard we have now passed 400 thousand comments. But I’m not a bullshitter with numbers like Bill English or Whaleoil. By my standards, we haven’t quite hit it yet. We will in a couple of weeks. I’m starting to get a bit worried about how we’re going to handle the rapidly increasing rate that people are arguing with each other here…
Updates, upgrades, and polls
Written By: - Date published: 9:28 pm, April 5th, 2012 - 111 comments
A bit of maintenance work coming up over Easter, and a Morgan poll that covered last week. National show the effects of their mutual collective suicide attempts, and the Greens pick up the benefits. Labour are doing sweet bugger all. Starting to wonder if Labour MP’s are catching the dogpack socializing disease from National. I have an impress ion of mutual arse sniffing and bugger all work. I’m unimpressed with the dog imitations from either party.
We need “operation 9” to suppress the bookies
Written By: - Date published: 12:37 pm, March 30th, 2012 - 22 comments
Evidently the people at iPredict don’t like being called “bookies” or being described as “opening a contract” on someone. We are now being targeted by this shadowy organisation.
Perhaps it is time that the police exerted themselves as the entertainment for the media and started operation 9 against this subversive organisation
You know you’re in trouble when: The bookies open a contract on you
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 am, March 29th, 2012 - 163 comments
You know that bookies sense when there is blood in the water and they’ll create contracts. I don’t gamble but the interesting contracts today in my mind are “Judith Collins to cease being a Minister before 1 June 2012”, “An ACC official ….to be found to have leaked Boag email”, “Beehive staffer to be found to have leaked Boag email”, etc. And a politician is definitely in trouble in NZ when they start talking about defamation 🙂
Organisational review – Auckland
Written By: - Date published: 5:14 pm, March 12th, 2012 - 10 comments
Just a reminder that Auckland’s first organisational review meeting is tonight.
Please encourage as many Labour members as possible to come along and contribute to the discussion.
Why I think that Auckland is getting scammed
Written By: - Date published: 12:42 pm, March 12th, 2012 - 69 comments
It turns out that the report that provided the basis for a 12% return on equity at the Ports of Auckland is based not on something commissioned by them. Instead it comes from the previous employers of the current chairman at PoA, who have previously been interested in buying ports in NZ. And the comparisons used for the ROE are spurious.
Dumbarse ports management and owners
Written By: - Date published: 11:24 am, March 7th, 2012 - 278 comments
Today Ports of Auckland sacked 292 employees in the pursuit of the unobtainable by the idiotic. The Ports of Auckland from the start intended to provide a conflict with the intent of sacking all the workers and rehiring them on worse conditions, saving $6m (20%) in wages a year. The amount of money saved was a pittance compared to the underlying problems the port needs to fix.
The biggest party are non-voters.
Written By: - Date published: 4:06 pm, February 24th, 2012 - 25 comments
The option that most eligible voters in NZ supported in 2011 was “don’t vote”. Nearly 7% didn’t enroll, and if enrolled then more than 25% didn’t vote. Of the eligible voters from the 2006 census, over 30% didn’t vote at all. And since 2006 the voting population has almost certainly increased. It means that National’s large vote is probably less than the biggest “party”. Not a particularly good mandate unless you’re as deluded as John Key.
Fran O’Sullivan will be distressed over Crafar decision.
Written By: - Date published: 5:36 pm, February 15th, 2012 - 64 comments
Now there is a surprise (not). The Crafar farms sale doesn’t conform to the economic benefits required under the Overseas Investment Act. Fran O’Sullivan is going to be distressed. The decision by the OIO and government was not in conformance with the the Overseas Investment Act. Fran waffled about everything except what was required by the Act – as our “anonymous” authors pointed out and were abused for doing so by Fran.
Journalists – pah!
Site health – comments and posts
Written By: - Date published: 4:31 pm, February 12th, 2012 - 36 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 11:22 am, February 12th, 2012 - 15 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 2:02 pm, February 5th, 2012 - 216 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 9:56 am, February 1st, 2012 - 33 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 2:25 pm, January 26th, 2012 - 122 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 12:11 pm, January 25th, 2012 - 12 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 5:19 pm, January 19th, 2012 - 7 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 12:01 pm, January 13th, 2012 - 30 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 9:05 pm, January 11th, 2012 - 137 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 1:58 pm, January 6th, 2012 - 15 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 11:26 am, January 2nd, 2012 - 104 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 11:29 pm, December 30th, 2011 - 31 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 2:17 pm, December 29th, 2011 - 36 comments
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
Written By: - Date published: 12:04 pm, December 19th, 2011 - 94 comments
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.
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