Open Mike 23/02/2017

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, February 23rd, 2017 - 38 comments
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38 comments on “Open Mike 23/02/2017 ”

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  1. Sanctuary 1
    23 February 2017 at 7:38 am

    Trumpism in action…

    “…The Trump administration struck a major blow to the San Francisco Bay Area after scrapping a $647m plan to electrify the region’s largest commuter rail system…”

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-california-clean-energy-electric-rail-project-caltrain-high-speed-a7593956.html

  2. tc 2
    23 February 2017 at 10:24 am

    I see the commcomm have rejected the voda/sky merge.

    Going on past form they will now have a checklist to work through, go back and get it rubber stamped.

    • greywarshark 2.1
      23 February 2017 at 11:28 am

      Talking about the way that business is or is not done or started in NZ there was an interesting interview on RadionNZ this morning about the new business of plants and pharmaceuticals as in medicinal cannabis and whether our farmer and rentier government can expand their capacity to take in the advantage of this new ‘field’ before others get to dominating, like our good friends in Australia/sarc

      They have already done this in 1960s with opium poppies and now Tasmania is
      a world leader in supply.
      RadioNZ
      science health
      8:53 am today
      NZ unlikely to follow Aust’s medical cannabis lead – advocate
      From Morning Report, 8:53 am today
      Listen duration 2′ :28″ Add to playlist
      http://www.radionz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=201834311

      Australia is loosening rules around medicinal cannabis and there are moves to grow its own supply. Medical cannabis campaigner, Shane Le Brun, says there’s no political will to do the same here, and if we don’t act soon we will miss our chance.

      It’s going to be big, bet we will miss the bus. Thanks to our complacent ability to keep on voting in a do-nothing government that puts any risk-taking development money into expensive computer systems etc when we need to be piloting say three different new schemes each year, to take us into new business territory and provide employment here and new skills. But NZ government runs after and concentrate on any gold rush, at present dairying and inflating house prices. Funny that. It’s what we were concentrating on in the 1840’s. Of course we have some good business in IT, but that’s a very fast changing world that feeds on real business transactions, which tend to come from making and growing things.

      • tc 2.1.1
        23 February 2017 at 2:30 pm

        Colorado shows that its got massive potential.

        So much so that the entrepeneurs backing the start ups are going hard before big business gets involved.

        Consider the fabric, paper potential also as its a very high performing fibre.

        • greywarshark 2.1.1.1
          23 February 2017 at 2:41 pm

          tc
          Yes seems to have numbers of uses. And i believe that it can turn out yield per m2 without as much need for protective harmful sprays which cotton requires.
          Win, win methinks, provided it’s supervised right.

      • Cinny 2.1.2
        23 February 2017 at 3:07 pm

        Listening to Dunne on the wireless the other day, most of the ‘medical cannabis’ allowed into NZ has synthetic ingredients. Lol what’s the point when we have the perfect growing conditions, it’s a weed and one of the easiest things ever to grow

        Another interview this week about said topic, in Aussie they are having problems with supply and demand of medicinal cannabis, their demand exceeds their supply so they will end up importing at this stage as well.

        There is a huge industry available, massive earning potential, just waiting to be tapped into.

  3. greywarshark 3
    23 February 2017 at 10:39 am

    In these times of fast moving news 8 days is a long time. But this oldie is a goodie.

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11800401

    Neoliberalism has immobilised humanity in the manner of those parasitic wasps whose offspring excrete a chemical which fatally overpowers their host’s self-protective reflexes. Aware that we are being destroyed, we are nevertheless incapable of resisting our destroyers effectively.

    What to do?
    For a start, it’s time to stop getting caught up in the individual fights and realise that climate change is a mission that must be tackled on a World War II scale. All hands on deck.
    We must stop believing governmental and corporate lies about why we can’t economically do such things, or anything. Because, you know, the economy.
    We need to wise up to the fact that continuing to compartmentalise our endless individual battles – pay equity, dirty dairying, transport, roading, autism funding, education, intersectional feminism, partisan politics – is a waste of precious energy.

    Don’t get me wrong. All are beyond important but, ultimately, unless we tackle climate change and right now, there’ll be no human rights or environment to actually fight for.

    Chris Trotter wrote about it on Bowalley Road:
    https://bowalleyroad.blogspot.co.nz/2017/02/too-little-too-late-rachel-stewart-on.html

    Rachel Stewart on n Waitangi Day in NZ Herald and vox pop:
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11796001

    Rachel Stewart’s line for living in her on-line frontispiece:
    https://ridingshotgun.me/

    • Draco T Bastard 3.1
      23 February 2017 at 11:22 am

      Don’t get me wrong. All are beyond important but, ultimately, unless we tackle climate change and right now, there’ll be no human rights or environment to actually fight for.

      Well, there’ll still be an environment – there just won’t be any humans around to damage it in the pursuit of profit and self-aggrandisement.

      • greywarshark 3.1.1
        23 February 2017 at 11:33 am

        Oh DTB that seems likely and it makes me so sad. But I also fear that much of the environment will be wrecked along with us and all those lovely little creatures that co-habit the planet will be wiped out instead of able to go about their lives and existence just being. I don’t want to be part of a monster species that destroyed everything that each part of it built, ie each group being motivated to take the other group down a peg or to and burn all their achievements or hack at them for monuments and pieces to show in museums.

        • bwaghorn 3.1.1.1
          23 February 2017 at 4:15 pm

          Science is the only answer , we need to find a way to remove carbon and methane from the air ; humans will not , can not , and don’t want to do a thing about it, if it means living with less,

  4. Colonial Viper 4
    23 February 2017 at 11:28 am

    I refreshed my browser to read the new comments on Ad’s post detailing the left’s issues approaching the 2017 election. And the post was gone.

    Also salutations to Paul and Pat.

  5. Ad 5
    23 February 2017 at 12:05 pm

    Here’s a curiousness I don’t get.
    World oil consumption continues to creep up year by year:

    http://www.indexmundi.com/energy/

    And yet after the sustained oil price collapse of the last two years, huge potential oilfields are being stopped. Yesterday, Exxon just wiped 3.3 billion barrels of untapped crude oil (including Canadian oil sands) off its assets, and hence off its future revenue. Most of that wipeout due to the oil price being such that future ‘locked in’ fields were no longer economic.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-22/exxon-takes-historic-cut-to-oil-reserves-amid-crude-market-rout

    How can sustained oil demand go up, oil price go down, and future oil supplies go down as well?

    Is there some budding oil futures analyst out there who can assist?

    • Andre 5.1
      23 February 2017 at 12:32 pm

      I’m no oil futures analyst, but I’m quite willing to speculate on topics that interest me.

      First, the Bloomberg piece concludes:

      “Under SEC rules, proved reserves can only include oil and gas fields that can be produced economically within the next half decade. Price trends from the previous 12 months are compared against the estimated cost to harvest crude and gas in determining which reserves are counted.”

      So it seems Exxon doesn’t forecast oil prices skyrocketing again in the next five years.

      Longer term, even some petro-states (notably not Russia) appear to getting serious about renewable energy. So they clearly see the end of oil. They may be trying to sell as much of their cheap-to-extract oil as they can while there’s still a market.

      This is coming about because of the massive cost reductions in renewables electricity generation, to the point where renewables plus storage is becoming competitve with fossils even for peaking power, and the massive improvements in electric vehicle technology and pricing.

      The push for carbon pricing is getting stronger. When even a group of senior Republicans get together and advocate a serious, continuously increasing carbon tax, you know climate denialism hasn’t got long left. Admittedly those Repugs are all retired and have no current power over policy, but it’s still a huge step.

      To labour the points, we’ve got a convergence of the acceptance we have to move beyond fossil fuels for climate reasons, and that the cost of renewable energy solutions to replace fossil fuels is coming down rapidly enough to keep a cap on fossil fuel prices for the foreseeable future.

    • Colonial Viper 5.2
      23 February 2017 at 12:34 pm

      Major oil producers including OPEC cannot agree on production cut backs.

      Add to this excess production from North American shale/fracking/tar sands, new US rules under Obama allowing the US to export crude again, and also countries like Iran wanting to greatly increase their production in the short term.

      So the current crude price is depressed as supply greatly exceeds demand, and the depressed price destroys the economic viability of future oil field development.

      • Ad 5.2.1
        23 February 2017 at 12:58 pm

        Oh no, I roughly presumed all of that. Iran deal in particular.

        I just can’t get the long term low barrel price when global demand is consistently growing. (Don’t worry I have no sympathy for the oil majors in any of this.)

  6. Leftie 6
    23 February 2017 at 12:23 pm

    You don’t need to be rude, Adam.

    [TheStandard: A moderator moved this comment to Open Mike as being off topic or irrelevant in the post it was made in. Be more careful in future.]

  7. rhinocrates 7
    23 February 2017 at 12:28 pm

    http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2017/02/milo-yiannopoulos-trash.html

    Alt right scumbag pees on the carpet and annoys his owners, who ignore the fact that he’s already crapped in the hallway.

    Simon and Schuster drops Milo Yiannopoulos’s book deal and even some Republicans are holding their noses and pretending that they never knew him.

    Simon & Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally “do the right thing” and now we know where their threshold, pun intended, lies. They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies. They were fine with his transphobia, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. They were fine with how he encourages his followers to harass women and people of color and transgender people online

  8. Enough is Enough 8
    23 February 2017 at 1:08 pm

    Is this guy saying that it is ok to rape a woman if she is wearing a short skirt. Is that his defence?

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/89676076/kuggeleijn-rape-trial-complainants-clothes-provocative

  9. Xanthe 9
    23 February 2017 at 2:45 pm

    Well its looking increasingly likely that whoever gets to the treasury in 2017 will have to find 2.4 billion dollars to pay Kim Dot Com’s damages. The flimsey construction of lies and bluff is falling now

  10. Cinny 10
    23 February 2017 at 3:00 pm

    Bahahahaha must be election year when the outgoing government makes promises to take 23 years to clean up the water ways which their decisions muddied in the first place.


    New Government target to see 90 per cent of rivers and lakes ‘swimmable’ by 2040

  11. Siobhan 11
    23 February 2017 at 3:17 pm

    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11806239

    And there it is, no surprises there. a company that is always on the lookout for good PR with its wages and employee benefits…a whole lot easier when you employ so few people in a company with such high turn over…

  12. Muttonbird 12
    23 February 2017 at 4:08 pm

    Who says NZ doesn’t have an effective opposition? Here, the Greens are governing from opposition just as Labour has done on many issues around housing recently.

    No sooner than a survey was released showing New Zealanders are increasingly concerned about the state of our waterway and showing a perceived link to dairy intensification, than Dr. Nick is on the pier at Riverhead drinking glasses of water for the cameras while adopting long-standing (but watered down) Green policy.

    We need progressive governance, not reactionary.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/89718668/government-announced-new-target-to-see-90-per-cent-of-rivers-and-lakes-swimmable-by-2040

  13. Galeandra 13
    23 February 2017 at 7:40 pm

    Arrived for the first time in months for a browse just in time to to see CV banned on his first day back in months for for inaccurately representing his banning (gagging?) order….

    [……Banned until a month after the election. – weka]

    I’m a great fan of Forest & Bird, epecially like the kokako, and have hopes to see it back in the Naki soon. Not so much some other birds I guess especially the kind that are all beak and little brain.

    Nothing’s changed. See ya.

    • Drowsy M. Kram 13.1
      23 February 2017 at 8:32 pm

      Also a fan of Forest & Bird (with a life membership – such pride), but a bird that’s “all beak and little brain” – now that’s a bird I’d like to see ya.

  14. Penny Bright 14
    23 February 2017 at 10:11 pm

    https://t.co/rHhiNTGEK1

    Filmed various media interviewing Auckland Transport’s Chief Infrastructure Officer outside the Auckland High Court, Wednesday 22 February 2017, and asked a couple of hard questions myself.

    It is simply not true, in my view, that corrupt Murray
    Noone and corrupt Barry George were a couple of aberrant employees of Auckland Transport.

    Garbage.

    The bribery and corruption grew and flourished, in my view, as a result of the ‘collaboration’ model of contracting, which was
    the ‘brain child’ of none other than the corrupt Murray
    Noone – who managed to get this ‘collaboration’ model of contracting supported by both Fergus Gammie, former Chief Operating Officer for AT, but also CEO David Warburton, who took it to the AT Board – who approved it on 18 May 2011.

    Don’t believe me?

    Check out for yourself – paragraph [301] of the ‘Reasons for the Verdict of Fitzgerald J’ – which proves, in my view, just how this entrenched ‘Corruption’ model was effectively endorsed at the highest levels of Auckland Transport.

    How on earth was / is lawful and proper for a ‘public official’ to simultaneously be a ‘private consultant’?

    How widespread is THIS practice and who else is asking?

    Penny Bright

    2017 Independent candidate, Mt Albert by-election.