Author Archive

A rare opportunity

Written By: lprent - Date published: 6:26 pm, February 19th, 2010 - 6 comments

It is not often that I compliment the authors that write for No Minister. However I have to compliment SageNZ for his prescient post about Huljich Wealth Management – “Huljich funds and stock pumping”.. I noticed the post while I was scanning their site with my usual level of mild distaste (it usually feels like […]

The Economist – looking at risk

Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:42 pm, February 14th, 2010 - 1 comment

The Economist has been looking at the failures in the financial markets at assessing risk. They have quite a lot of material available. But here are some audio visuals that are of interest.

Note: These clips are all in iFrames which may not display/play where there are strong web controls.

The pipsqueak attacks the Waitakeres

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:30 am, February 12th, 2010 - 21 comments

This is a fast way to get my blood boiling. Rodney Hide as minister of local government has removed protection from the Waitakere ranges. It is time to make the Act party extinct rather than merely being on the endangered species list. The Waitakere ranges are the only readily accessible tramping around Auckland. Virtually every […]

Poneke: If only scientists were more like god…

Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:00 am, February 7th, 2010 - 79 comments

Poneke’s weblog recently wrote a critical post about ‘climategate’ where he has had a look through the subset of  selectively leaked pages of private correspondence thieved from the CRU at the University of East Anglia. His analysis didn’t bother to look at the science of climate change virtually at all, and what science was looked at was full of myths. Furthermore it wasn’t particularly original. Most appeared to have been cribbed from a number of climate change denialist sites and throughly debunked in part or as a whole by many other sites. It was hardly the type of original thinking that David Farrar at kiwiblog should have labeled as being

Poneke’s full post is a must read.  It is also the sort of journalism that should be in the mainstream media.

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Werewolf on the Defence White Paper

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:59 pm, February 2nd, 2010 - 24 comments

Gordon Campbell has written in Werewolf an excellent pre-review about the Defense White Paper due for release in March. Needless to say whatever it returns with will be controversial because it helps to define the direction of the next few decades of expenditure and focus for our military.

Then we will not have some of the remarkably stupid ‘debate’ by the ossified that happened in the early 2000’s as the Labour government implemented the Quigley review of the armed forces. This pushed the army to the fore, and relegated the other two services to a support role.

It was clear that many in that debate never bothered to read the Quigley report.

John Key – still clueless

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:00 am, January 31st, 2010 - 25 comments

John Key is now stands as being first in NZ for being ‘clueless’ on searches in Google. He is number seven in the world as being clueless. The google-bomb is still running! It will be interesting to push him to number one in the world.

Maintenance time

Written By: lprent - Date published: 7:00 am, January 29th, 2010 - Comments Off on Maintenance time

On Friday at 7 p.m the server is getting kernel upgrades and other maintenance upgrades. They reckon that it will take 10-15 minutes. In the past this has taken from 5 minutes to 45 minutes depending on the disk state. Be warned and don’t get alarmed – the server hasn’t gone down.

Lots of good posts in 2009.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:26 pm, January 21st, 2010 - 24 comments

I was pulling out the stats for 2009 so I could update Tumeke blog rankings about who authors on this site so Tim could update the names under our site name. Rather than just send it to him, I thought I’d post it here and send him a link 😈 Because I wanted to understand […]

A note to the idiots. Weather is not climate.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:32 pm, January 16th, 2010 - 56 comments

When you get a cold snap in the local weather, it means that somewhere else got somewhat warmer. Weather is a case of local shifts in energy balances. Climate changes on the other hand are an overall shifting due to underlying changes in energy inflows and retention. You can really only see them looking at […]

A Potty Peer making money off future misery.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:10 pm, January 9th, 2010 - 72 comments

Gareth over at Hot-Topic has written a delightful post “Popgun for hire: A$20,000 detailing one person who is making money off climate change. No it isn’t the scientists. It is our favorite Potty Peer – Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Some of the CCDs have been saying that there is a “climate change industry” and […]

Tax Working Group is inherently flawed.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:40 pm, January 8th, 2010 - 16 comments

Marty wrote on taxation expert Craig Elliffes opinion series in the Herald a few days ago. The third in the series wound up with statement at the end that exemplifies the major issue with the Tax Working Group and its process. At the tax conference of the Tax Working Group, Susan St John of the […]

Granny is surprised, no-one else is.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:29 pm, January 3rd, 2010 - 12 comments

John Banks is steadily dropping away from a possibility of gaining the Auckland super-city mayoralty. A Herald online poll has John Banks falling to third in preference behind Steven Tindall – who has not even declared that he is interested or would run. Len Brown is far higher in preference. Self-selecting online polls are about […]

Final thoughts for 2009: Looking at deep time

Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:03 pm, December 31st, 2009 - 64 comments

Well it is the end of 2009. So here are some final thoughts on the implications of the political shifts in the climate change debates this year. It has been marked from my viewpoint of an irreverable shift from arguing with CCDs (climate change deniers) to CCSs (climate change skeptics) which on the whole has […]

Phil O’Reilly – dumb enough to fail

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:51 pm, December 29th, 2009 - 20 comments

Phil O’Reilly  of Business NZ has an opinion piece in the NZ Herald today decrying businesses that trade on the ‘clean and green’ image of New Zealand. He writes as if it is a solely a tourism issue. This is a spin line that David Farrar at Kiwiblog swallows hook, line, and sinker. However the […]