Open mike 05/03/2010

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, March 5th, 2010 - 16 comments
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16 comments on “Open mike 05/03/2010 ”

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  1. Lanthanide 1
    5 March 2010 at 9:50 am

    Inside goss from my uncle on the Telecom XT failure is that it may have primarily been caused by different firmware revisions on controller cards in their switching centre in Christchurch. Which is an appallingly basic thing to get wrong. It’s possible that the specific cause is replacement parts taken off the shelf not having the same firmware revision as the rest of the active equipment; eg they didn’t ensure that spare parts were up to date.

  2. John Dalley 2
    5 March 2010 at 10:04 am

    I note in the newspaper that Brash has replaced Huljich. Wow that makes me want to invest with them. Brash and Banks should quite frankly be jailed.
    What i don’t hear being asked is, if the share price was held up by this secret injection of cash by Huljich, How much did they reap as rewards from the share price being kept artificially high.
    How much extra might have Huljich, Brash and Banks plus shareholders by this artificially high share price??

    • Pascal's bookie 2.1
      5 March 2010 at 10:18 am

      From memory it wasn’t about share prices. The money went into the fund to ‘make up for worse than expected returns’ (that’s not a quote, just a paraphrase of the spin).

      Other words to describe the same action might be ‘money went into the fund to make the returns seem better than they actually were, thereby artificially and deceptively boosting their comparitive performance vs other kiwisaver funds’

      And yeah, the Brash Banks should have known about it and they too should be gone.

    • BLiP 2.2
      5 March 2010 at 11:26 am

      The whole thing is pretty dodgy. Peter Huljich hasn’t left the company, he’s still the Operations Manager and while he has resigned from the Board, he is being replaced by his father Chris Huljich. Meanwhile, Banks and Brash who, as directors, should have known what was going on, wander around saying “nothing to see here”.

      Bunch of rich pricks playing fast and loose with other people’s money if you ask me.

    • felix 2.3
      5 March 2010 at 2:45 pm

      Serious question: How many people on the board of directors?

      • mickysavage 2.3.1
        5 March 2010 at 8:48 pm

        There are three listed in the Companies Office records, Banks Brash and Huljich.

        Then there were two!

        • felix 2.3.1.1
          5 March 2010 at 10:57 pm

          Ah. So when Brash guffs on about how ‘the board’ didn’t know this or that and ‘the board’ decided to accept the resignation and ‘the board’ appointed me to blah blah he’s just talking about 3 guys swapping titles with each other.

  3. Pascal's bookie 3
    5 March 2010 at 1:23 pm

    Andrew Geddis gets all up in Basset’s face. Good stuff.

    The bit of the Basset I found most laghable at was this:

    The reporter covering the story you guessed it – is Bernard Orsman. He is the one who was censured last year by the Press Council for a serious misdemeanour.

    Firstly, so what?

    Oh, just poisoning the well,
    oh well carry on I guess
    if that’s the way you roll.

    Wouldn’t hurt to link though, so folks might be able see what you are talking about. Because it’s the internet and that’s the way we do things.

    Secondly. Whatever happened to your writing gig at the Dominion, Mr Serious Misdemeanours?

  4. felix 4
    5 March 2010 at 3:02 pm

    Verbatim quote from Stephen Joyce, Minister of the Crown, on Morning Report today:

    “There’ll be some decisions around some of these lines that really aren’t carrying hardly any traffic at all”.

    Is it really too much to ask that members of the government have some basic communication skills?

  5. Draco T Bastard 5
    5 March 2010 at 4:34 pm

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10630087

    The review, led by Peter Stott of the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, found the “fingerprints” of human activity on many different aspects of climate change, including the overall warming of the Antarctic recently documented for the first time by other researchers.

    “The observations cannot be explained by natural factors,” Dr Stott said. Since 1980, the Earth has warmed by about 0.5C and is now warming at a rate of about 0.16C per decade, with even higher rates at higher latitudes such as in the Arctic.

    So, the possibility of Climate Change being caused by natural causes is vanishingly thin and the speed at which the Earth is warming is increasing. Meanwhile, we have an ETS that rewards polluters.

  6. randal 6
    5 March 2010 at 4:50 pm

    who read chris trotter in the dompost this morning?
    he is right about the tactics used by the right in their quest for power.
    society is too fractured to place any faith in mass movements any more but raising cosciousness is the key.
    we as friends of the left and working class people have to go round the bastions erected by the right and forge new methods to let the people know just waht they are up against.
    e.g. stop all the wonk talk and get down to treal nitty gritty.
    fencing with the dumbass tory stooges might be good for the ego but in the end its the direct approach to working voters that will count.

  8. George.com 8
    5 March 2010 at 9:47 pm

    A friend of mine described John Key as a Ronald McDonald Prime Minister last week. Seeing the reaction our Dear Leader, Kim Johng Key, got when he opened a school on Tuesday, it sorts of fits. I can’t describe how exactly it fits. It just does.

    • BLiP 8.1
      6 March 2010 at 12:01 am

      Of course it makes sense. Just like with McDonalds, take away National Ltdâ„¢’s bright colours, flashy ads, the clown out the front, and what have you got? A bunch of foreign investors flogging off a shit product that ultimately does more harm than it does good. Voters, it seems, are stuffing themselves full of Big Macs with little consideration of the impending heart attack.

      Mmmmmm . . . I’m lovin’ it.

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