Author Archive
Xmas number one in the UK.
Written By: - Date published: 10:01 pm, December 24th, 2009 - 9 comments
One of the stranger Internet campaigns has being going on in Britain. It has resulted in this excellent track being the Xmas number 1 single this year (it is in my programming playlist for special bugs). Far better than the usual mulch, and enough to wash out the taste of John Keys version of Snoopys […]
I wonder if he’ll ask for a name suppression order.
Written By: - Date published: 1:45 pm, December 24th, 2009 - 27 comments
No Right Turn has a post The blogosphere is not above the law. Since the beginning, there’s been a meme on the internet that the law doesn’t really apply here, and that we can get away with anything. But while there may be practical difficulties (particularly if people are smart and careful), it certainly does, […]
Jingle Bells – walking away from debt
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, December 24th, 2009 - 5 comments
In the US it is easier than NZ for home-owners to walk away using the jingle mail options in the US. However in NZ it is far too easy for businesses to do the same. Slate Magazines article “Everyone’s Defaulting, Why Don’t You?” by Daniel Gross points out the absurdity of expecting home owners hit […]
Those childish people of Northern European descent.
Written By: - Date published: 11:08 am, December 23rd, 2009 - 12 comments
Poring around the nets while I’m on holiday is turning out to be quite interesting looking at summaries of science. I’ve been picking out some for discussion here. Here is a post from Knol with a summary on why Europeans are so pale. They discuss well-known ultraviolet / vitamin D linkage with the consequent diseases. […]
Mass layoffs, layoff the boys.
Written By: - Date published: 3:00 pm, December 22nd, 2009 - 6 comments
There are always consequences to the type of mass unemployment that we’re starting to see in NZ at present. However there looks like being an unexpected one. Spontaneous abortion of male fetuses as a response to mass layoffs. The Economist science section has an article “Girls on top” that discusses this. According to Ralph Catalano […]
Those hard to find WIMPs
Written By: - Date published: 4:00 pm, December 21st, 2009 - 25 comments
There have been some new results from the search for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) at the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) in Minnesota. This showed up in The Economist science section last week with an excellent summary of what they were looking for and why in the post “An early Christmas present?. Around a […]
Good Xmas news for Auckland
Written By: - Date published: 10:55 am, December 21st, 2009 - 11 comments
The UMR poll for the Auckland super-city mayoral race is interesting reading. The headline difference (PDF) of 11% towards Len Brown over John Banks has been extensively reported. The poll of 482 people, while small, is even more interesting when you see the breakdown of figures – and a lot worse for John Banks. The […]
Participate in teh Golden Garth awards
Written By: - Date published: 12:25 pm, December 16th, 2009 - 25 comments
James at Editing teh Herald has started the Golden Garth awards aimed at rewarding the recipients at the Granny. You should all get over there and suggest candidates. I’m puzzling on it myself because there are so many good candidates. I’m aware that some think that the Dom Post is worse than the Granny, but […]
The wage freeze is dripping
Written By: - Date published: 11:06 am, December 16th, 2009 - 1 comment
Over at FairDeal, NZEI have announced that the support staff in schools have managed to get a wage increase. The campaign by support staff members and the wider union has finally resulted in a settlement of the support staff collective agreement. There is now a $14 minimum rate for Grade A, a $14.62 minimum rate […]
Fomenting happy mischief. Indeed!
Written By: - Date published: 4:41 pm, December 13th, 2009 - 53 comments
David has a new innovation at the sewer. The old comment voting system has been enhanced to, amongst other things, hide comments when they receive enough votes against. I had some fun testing this last week under various logins that I set up some years ago and keep active. It looks like an innovate quantitative […]
Drinking Liberally – Auckland
Written By: - Date published: 5:01 pm, December 11th, 2009 - 5 comments
The final Auckland Drinking Liberally takes place NEXT TUESDAY upstairs at THE KINGSLANDER and features political commentator/national campaigns director for Finsec/all round nice guy Andrew Campbell. Andrew has a weekly spot as the leftwing commentator on National Radio’s Nine-to-noon show on Mondays. He’s coming to give us his ‘end of year review’ and what to […]
Brownlee destroys a free market choice. Shut Whirinaki to get it back.
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, December 10th, 2009 - 26 comments
From the Meridian Energy web site. Meridian Energy Limited has confirmed it has suspended offering new Renewable Energy Notes under the investment statement dated 29 October 2009 following the decision from the Ministerial Review into the Electricity Market to transfer ownership of two of its South Island hydro stations to its sister SOE Genesis. Energy […]
Capitalism in its wonderful natural form.
Written By: - Date published: 7:55 pm, December 7th, 2009 - 29 comments
Following on from our report earlier this year about ideal places for libertarians to go, it appears that we are now seeing capitalism in its wonderful Ayn Rand style libertarian idealized form. Somali ‘maritime companies” have setup a stock exchange to help incubate free enterprise in its natural form. From Reuters we have this report. […]
Minor tweaks
Written By: - Date published: 1:53 pm, December 5th, 2009 - 3 comments
I did some small interface changes on Friday morning. The main effect was to widen the page from 950 pixels to 1024 pixels to allow for a wider sidebars and central content. I also cleaned up the header graphic a bit. Consequently I’ve just increased the depth of thread discussions from six deep to seven […]
Key is going. Now who pays?
Written By: - Date published: 9:10 am, December 4th, 2009 - 19 comments
So John Key has finally dropped his veils* and is going to Copenhagen. Well, Rob Emmerson correctly predicted how the ineffectual Emissions Trading Scheme amendments by NACT did wind up. Taxpayers pay almost all of the cost, our kids pay even more, and polluters have no incentive to reduce emissions. Now imagine what happens when […]
Words of wisdom from the 19th century
Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, December 3rd, 2009 - 5 comments
One of the most amusing things in the granny today is Garth George, our iconoclast from Rotorua ripping another hole into the credibility of the Brash Taskforce 2025. Absurdities abound, the first of which was the appointment of people like Dr Brash and Mr Caygill who, along with their soulmate, Act Party seat-warmer Roger Douglas, […]
Systemic failure of the media
Written By: - Date published: 1:52 pm, December 2nd, 2009 - 32 comments
felix in comments points out in his usual sarcastic style about the media response on Don Brash’s 2025 Taskforce report. For example, consider this online poll (tvnz): What do you think of Don Brash’s 2025 Taskforce financial report? It’s too radical It’s about right It doesn’t go far enough All the questions imply some degree […]
Get rid of the fool.
Written By: - Date published: 5:02 pm, November 30th, 2009 - 36 comments
I haven’t bothered looking too far for reaction to Paul Henry jerking off in public to attract attention to his personaility defect – inflated ego. Against the current had a post that captured my opinion the best – Meet Mr Stupid. This time the victim of Henry’s ‘witty banter’ was British singing Susan Boyle. Henry […]
Stockholm Syndrome and leaky homes at the coast
Written By: - Date published: 4:12 pm, November 27th, 2009 - 47 comments
Bomber over at Tumeke has a good post up on Goff’s speech. Pointing out the Maori Party has Stockholm Syndrome is not race baiting That to me sums up Goff’s speech, far more eloquently than I could. He referred to Eddies earlier post…. ..ouch, did we read the same speech? I don’t think pointing out […]
Rod Oram on ETS and Monetary Policy
Written By: - Date published: 12:15 pm, November 25th, 2009 - 5 comments
Rod Oram did a business segment on Nine to Noon yesterday. As usual he went quite deep into the issues. A welcome contrast to Colin Espiner and his very limited level of understanding (“they did it too”) on the complete change of direction in the short-sighted changes to the Emissions Trading Act being pushed through […]
CCDs. Worms perhaps?
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, November 24th, 2009 - 73 comments
It has been fascinating over the last few days watching the CCDs (Climate Change Deniers) make an another attempt to scale the bastion of scientific thinking and language. In this case someone hacked a copy of decade of e-mails at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at a insecure University of East Anglia webmail server. There […]
Gerrymandering Auckland city
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, November 24th, 2009 - 11 comments
Due to recovering from a cold over the weekend, I haven’t had time to blog about the super-shitty electoral boundaries released on friday in traditional style. However jarbury has done a great analysis over at the Auckland Transport blog. If you look at the all-important councillors, the striking thing is the inequities of the voting […]
What I did on my holidays – by [insert name here]
Written By: - Date published: 11:04 pm, November 20th, 2009 - 38 comments
Ohmigod, after Red Alert informed me that the National MPs had started a blog, I nearly died!!!!!!! And after I’d finished that and resurrected, I went and had a look at it. Yep, I was right. These buggers know nothing about what blogging is about. Some moronic PR flack somewhere (is that a parliamentary crest […]
On “keeping your powder dry”
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 20th, 2009 - 41 comments
Reproduced with permission from No Right Turn for a viewpoint on the process of policy formation. This morning, Labour leader Phil Goff announced that he was abandoning the NeoLiberal consensus on monetary policy, with the aim of getting a monetary policy that works for the many rather than the rich few. But specifics were few […]
Damnit… I missed the 4000th post
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 pm, November 18th, 2009 - 8 comments
Well I missed it. We rolled past the 4000th post at the end of October. A bit unexpected, it was too early by my reckoning and I wasn’t looking for it. We’re now at post 4154 so well on the way for the next milestone. Number 3000 was in early June, so it took a […]
I don’t give a shit about Hone. But the lynch mob is interesting.
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, November 14th, 2009 - 74 comments
Whatever argument there is between the hierarchy of the Maori Party and Hone really doesn’t concern me. While I’m sure Kelvin Davis is watching with considerable interest, Hone was elected by the voters up north for being exactly who he is. This isn’t a political row with the over-powering stench of political hypocrisy like recent […]
Planned outage
Written By: - Date published: 4:40 pm, November 13th, 2009 - 7 comments
At about 7pm on Saturday 14th there will be an outage while the server gets another upgrade to a new OS kernel. Your server should be down for 5-10 minutes, we will restart it at the conclusion of the maintenance window. Yeah right – last time it was a couple of hours because the server […]
Give the snip snap to the zip zap plastic fantastic? Yeah right!
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, November 12th, 2009 - 23 comments
Brian Fallow has a great post over at Granny Herald this morning. “Emitters on bludger’s end of deal” deals with the way that the NACT government has been loading costs onto future voters and taxpayers. On superannuation: By siphoning off and investing around another 1 per cent of GDP while the babyboomers are still in […]
Brownlee: Not an ardent follower of fashion. Merely obsolete.
Written By: - Date published: 2:35 pm, November 11th, 2009 - 15 comments
One of the things that has surprised me about the government and Brownlee’s energy policy is that it is so mundane and 20th century. In every other area of their political electoral strategy we saw a pithy slogan, often pinched from overseas, substituting for policy and dumbed it down to the level of the dittoheads […]
Oops some people got cached…
Written By: - Date published: 11:56 pm, November 2nd, 2009 - 13 comments
Sorry to anyone who thought that The Standard hadn’t published anything today. The site had in fact been pretty active for a Monday. You got caught by a wee mistake by me* I moved the site to a more accessible location on the server in preparation for updates in the free time between now and […]
The best dividend is POWER!
Written By: - Date published: 9:51 am, October 30th, 2009 - 18 comments
At this point it seems a bit pointless coming to work this morning. I’m sitting in a dark office with the cheeping of UPS’s (uninterruptible power supplies) and ozone as the batteries discharge keeping servers alive. The entire crew are sitting around waiting for the power to come back on, like large number of people […]
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