Open mike 25/01/2011

Written By: - Date published: 6:00 am, January 25th, 2011 - 12 comments
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12 comments on “Open mike 25/01/2011 ”

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  1. logie97 1
    25 January 2011 at 8:51 am

    burt, fisiani, big bruv et al…

    …can someone explain please the South Canterbury Finance situation?
    Did the “Mums and Dads” taxpayers of the country bail the company out?
    And then do we, as the now “Mums and Dads” investors in that company, have a right to know who our clients are?

    I notice in the Herald this morning that there was possibly a much cheaper option to the government, but that was dismissed out of hand by Mr English.
    http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10701787

    Captcha: theory – and that is all it is at the moment…

    • Lanthanide 1.1
      25 January 2011 at 10:45 am

      The whole thing is a tangled mess, but I recall that English took the option he did, costing $1.9B up front, because he was assured that the final cost to the crown, after everthing was sold off, would probably end up being something like $150-200M and was cheaper than any other option on the table.

      That may just be my faulty memory, though.

    • rob 1.2
      25 January 2011 at 10:55 am

      The offer that was made was effectively so losses would be socialised (the 400m) and the profits privatised.

      I have to think the powers that be made the right decision on that one. And I wouldn’t trust anything Hubbard says now.

    • vto 1.3
      25 January 2011 at 10:58 am

      Not quite logie. We bailed out the investors, not the company. So we got the downside and of course the upside will go elsewhere, most probably to people and interests who know David Carter, Jenny Shipley and John Key (not by conspiracy though. a conspiracy is something where such things are less certain and less known. this is all well known).

  2. ZeeBop 2
    25 January 2011 at 9:55 am

    Shaking the tree to get the fruit may work from time to time, but not if the stated purpose of many on the committee is to kill the tree, when there is little fruit to be had! Is Welfare reform is corruption in a time of growing need?

  4. vto 4
    25 January 2011 at 11:02 am

    Have to laugh at this after the GFC and stink about exec bonuses which bear no semblance to reality and never go down. Seems some things never change and even conservative old Cantabrians and the likes cant help but dip their fingers in. No wonder the general public has such little desire to invest in companies on the NZX.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/4577379/Pyne-Gould-rewards-executives-with-bonus-shares

  5. Draco T Bastard 5
    25 January 2011 at 12:26 pm

    How facts backfire

    It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789.

    An admirable sentiment but one with a problem.

    It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs.

    That’s a concern as it means that people who are misinformed are voting on that misinformation and are, in fact, going out of their way to maintain that misinformation. This leaves us with a problem that needs to be addressed but, as the article points out, doing so could be a little messy if not completely impossible. Naming and shaming those who promulgate misinformation just won’t work as “Getting a politician or pundit to argue straight-faced that George W. Bush ordered 9/11, or that Barack Obama is the culmination of a five-decade plot by the government of Kenya to destroy the United States — that’s easy. Getting him to register shame? That isn’t.” And actually banning people from spreading misinformation will be seen as an attack on “free-speech” although I’m sure that actually spreading lies doesn’t come under the heading of “free-speech”.

    We certainly need a better, more critical, MSM that checks the facts of a story before publishing and, preferably, if the facts don’t check out then the story doesn’t get printed. This would, to some degree, reduce the inundation of misinformation that is the MSM today but, then, we have the internet…

    • Colonial Viper 5.1
      25 January 2011 at 1:42 pm

      Yeah, spot on. And it gets worse. This is where neoclassical economics stuffed up, and the behavioural guys have had to come in.

      Give a group of people the exact same facts at the exact same time about an organ donation programme as part of their drivers license education.

      Half of the group then get a drivers license form which says : “tick this box if you do not want to participate as an organ donor” IE it is an ‘opt out’ programme.

      Half of the group get a drivers license form which says: “tick this box if you want to participate as an organ donor.” IE it is an ‘opt into’ programme.

      That one change in the form makes this difference:

      – More than 90% of people who have the opt out form will choose not to mark the form, and will join the organ donor programme.

      – More than 90% of people who have the opt in form will choose not to mark the form, and will stay out of the organ donor programme.

      This is when both sets of people have been given exactly the same information.

      Conclusion: people do not use choices and information the way most people think that they do.

  6. Colonial Viper 6
    25 January 2011 at 4:48 pm

    13 Police Shot In the US Since Friday NZT

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/us/25shootings.html?_r=1&hp

    Its slowly crumbling. High availability of firearms, high underemployment, increasing loss of respect and recognition of the legitimacy of authority.

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