Author Archive

Send a JAFA to Wellington….

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:52 pm, April 26th, 2010 - 12 comments

To paraphrase Muldoon – send a JAFA to Wellington, and we can only increase the average intelligence of both parts of the country. Needless to say, TV news chose to focus on a minor story in Goffs speech. If a future mayor of Auckland, Brown, can sit at the cabinet table on decisions related to […]

When a newspaper gets useful…

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:28 am, April 24th, 2010 - 7 comments

I’m not usually envious of Sydney, but they have a newspaper that actually researches the issues that matter to their local audience.

The Sydney Morning Herald has been researching transport issues in their city. If newspapers are to survive the transition into the networked era, they’re going to have to relearn how to focus on local issues. Otherwise why would we pay the pay-wall for material we can get elsewhere?

Bogus bullsh*t on the costs of copy and counterfeit

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:00 am, April 19th, 2010 - 10 comments

Over the last decade or two there have been some extraordinary claims about the cost of digital copying and counterfeiting on businesses and economies. However there has been little information that hasn’t had some pretty major and almost certainly incorrect assumptions. The upshot is that the cost of copying and counterfeiting has been hugely overestimated.

Fox News – driven by conservative bullshit

Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:00 pm, April 11th, 2010 - 24 comments

Rachel Maddow has a look at exactly how much Fox News just makes stuff up and calls it news. It uses selectively edited stories like the ACORN ‘pimp’ story, the ‘climategate’ e-mails, and many other highly inaccurate ‘stories’, and promotes them for ratings.

In effect Fox News is the (un)official spin channel for conservative activists to peddle garbage entertainment on. Have a watch of Rachael as she tears the facade of conservative story telling apart.

Gung Ho

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:01 pm, April 5th, 2010 - 3 comments

This is eleven minutes of pure Patti Smith singing about Vietnam in her usual ambiguous poetical style. Came up on the playlist while coding, and I had to stop to listen to the sheer menace in her voice. I had a look for a video. A powerful song, and a powerful rendition by its creator.

The knives are out (again)

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:01 pm, March 27th, 2010 - 3 comments

This image has been sitting around since October 2007 in a unposted post from all_your_base awaiting someone who deserves it.

I read Marty G’s post today about the infighting in Act.

I’m awarding it to Rodney Hide. He seems to deserve it….

Labour on mining. Brownlee on bullshit.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:00 am, March 26th, 2010 - 33 comments

There has been considerable discussion about the message and targeting of Labours policy on mining around the conservation estate in OpenMike and some of the other blogs. This is obviously going to be a reasonable large policy platform in the upcoming election in about 18 months (how time flies). So Labour having a clear policy on it over the last decade pleases me greatly. It agrees broadly with my views of balancing the economics between exploitation of extraction and sustainable tourism.

I’m pretty much in agreement with Lew at Kiwipolitico who said “Labour’s campaign against mining Schedule 4 land looks strong, especially at the iconographic level.”

Crossbreed a dumb mistake with wingnuts

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:23 pm, March 21st, 2010 - 6 comments

An amusing tale of how Rush Limbaugh screws up, and a pile of wingnuts immediately jump to the wrong conclusions.

American wingnuts at their most ridiculous. But we have the angry and irrational breed here as well.

Fabians seminars on the budget.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:31 pm, March 20th, 2010 - 1 comment

There are a second set of seminars in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch over the next week on Choices and Consequences of the 2010 budget. Based on the Bold Choices seminar that I attended last weekend in Auckland (there are later ones in Wellington and Christchurch), they will be well worth attending. There are some materials on-line from that seminar.

Oh and David Farrar was shocked to find that Kiwiblog had been advertising the seminars

Search upgraded (yet again)

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:47 am, March 15th, 2010 - 4 comments

My absence this weekend from moderation and posts has partially been because of going to the excellent Fabian seminar today. However it has largely been due to trying to get a workable search system running. One that didn’t bring the whole server crashing around my ears every few months and cut the issue of everyone having to stop receiving data for up to a minute when someone used search. One that allowed comments to be accessed as easily as posts.

It looks like it is finally working correctly, but I’d like feedback on any errors that show up.

Updated: Several different server and site updates.

Alternate forms of protest

Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:41 pm, March 4th, 2010 - 27 comments

Now this is pretty damn funny and just adds to todays absurdities over the waste of money on rugby world cup TV in 2011. Veteran Springbok Tour protester John Minto has found himself at the centre of a new Eden Park storm, with a controversial plan to name a nearby $3 million road after him.

Will the supercity transition authority now want to stop community boards from naming streets?

150k comments and rising…

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:41 pm, March 3rd, 2010 - 4 comments

Well the discussion keeps going on, and as you know I like marking these occasions as the database steadily grows (and my backup nightmares keep increasing). The 150,000’th accepted* comment was by Lanthanide here at just after midday. He was explaining the real world politics to someone who preferred their own myths. When the 100,000th […]

Come Aucklanders – protest tomorrow.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:52 pm, March 1st, 2010 - 7 comments

The select committee on Rodney Hides vision of the Auckland Super-City sits in Parnell tommorrow. The National MPs complicit in foisting this idiotic vision of Auckland on us will be there along with the architect – the head of the lunatic Act party.

Spend your lunchtime demonstrating what a crock this version of the super-city is. Do it in Rodney Hide’s Epsom electorate.

Updating the blogroll

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:08 pm, February 25th, 2010 - 14 comments

I’m about to start sweeping the blogroll for dead or moribund sites over the next week. The general rule is that I mark sites private if the recent posts are inactive for more than 3 months (or I can’t read the site). If anyone wants to get their site added (or re-added) then use the […]