Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Consumer | Jul 11, 2008 12:33

Well, I bought my iPhone. 16GB, black, on the lightest of the 24-month plans. The sales process is reasonably impressive. At the Digital Mobile kiosk at St Lukes mall (there was a queue at the actual Vodafone Store), a sales assistant looked up my existing account, switched it to an iPhone plan, took my money, unbricked my phone, transferred my SIM and sent me on my way.

Actually, it took a little bit longer than that, but I wouldn't have wanted it to be too quick: I was quite enjoying the scene.

The new iTunes App Store is as slick as you'd expect -- selecting, downloading and installing applications is a breeze. The same can't be said for all the apps themselves -- the remote control app for iTunes was a mystery -- and I couldn't connect to my Gmail account. But it's all a fairly bright, shiny consumer experience whose details will doubtless become clearer over the weekend.

Meanwhile, Nat Torkington wanted to share after watching this week's Media7 (ondemand here, via YouTube here):

I nearly ran an energy conference and did I ton of reading and learning for it. Loved the Dog and Lemon Guide guy. His final comment was fucking brilliant, and I think he was closest to my opinion on the whole subject.

Offsets are easy to explain: you shit and it goes into your septic tank, but your backyard can't take it all the years of your turds. So you pay someone to truck your turds away and empty out the tank. You burn fuel (releasing greenhouse gases) or make things that rot (releasing greenhouse gases) or have some other chemical process that releases greenhouse gases like CO2. The Earth can't take it all so you pay someone to take your carbon away and empty out the atmosphere. The only way to do this that we've got at the moment is to plant trees. (If someone develops a "sequestration" system, aka burying the carbon back in the earth and thus out of the atmosphere, it'll qualify as an offset too)

Polluting = shitting. Atmosphere = your back yard septic tank. Offset = paying someone to truck it away.

Trading is also easy. It's like fish. Fish quota is really a license to catch a percentage of the fish in the water---if the Minister finds more fish or less fish in the ocean, your quota goes up or down. If you take a break from fishing, you can lease your fish quota to other fishermen. Companies can emit a certain amount of CO2, and as the government's obligations under treaties force the country to let out less total CO2 emission, each company gets its quota dialled back. But some companies will be supergreen and emit less than their quota permits them to. They get to sell their surplus polluting capacity to other companies in NZ, or overseas.

What offsets don't cover is the fact that trees rot. Releasing greenhouse gases. So they're a temporary measure. At best we should be replanting old growth forests, intending them to be around "forever". If we try to build offsets out of pine trees, we're just pushing the snooze button on our CO2. The sequestration is the hallelujah option--turn the crap in the atmosphere back into crap in the ground. But nobody's there yet.

Clean energy is all about not shitting in the atmosphere in the first place. If you didn't release CO2, you don't need to offset or sequester it. That's hard though, because the fuel we're addicted to is really convenient--oil is a beautiful storage system for energy. Wind power and solar produce electricity, which doesn't lend itself to such convenient storage--batteries are quite inefficient, even in their flash new forms. I'm not sure what that in the septic tank analogy: fuel = slow release porridge for energy, batteries = cheap carbohydrates like McD's, that give you shits. Hmm, maybe not.

I think my metaphors just exploded.

Meanwhile, Stephen Judd notes that the National Library is on Flickr. Indeed it is. And if you look at the Flickr photostream with the PicLens add-on for Firefox (or pre 3.1 versions of Safari on the Mac) installed, it's even cooler.

Also, here are the Flaming Lips practising a forthcoming tribute to The Who on VH1. 'See Me, Feel Me', 'Pinball Wizard', etc.

All right. Best do some actual work. Feel free to amuse and edify each other in comments …

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So far from trivial | Jul 10, 2008 11:36

If the gruesome detail we've heard about Tony Veitch's assault on his former partner has made its way past Fairfax's lawyers, and has not attracted even the hint of a denial from Veitch, then we can assume it is broadly true. In which case, it's hard to see that the police had an option but to investigate.

Should there be a prosecution, it seems reasonable to speculate that an assault that broke four vertebrae and put the victim out of work for six months would put the perpetrator at peril of a jail term. It is so far from trivial.

Even if he has turned a corner -- and anyone capable of such a sustained, vicious assault as this one probably has something in his personality not easily rooted out -- Veitch warrants little sympathy.

There will be a clause in his contract about bringing his employer into disrepute; it's the quid pro quo for the large premium that being a public face adds to the income of a TV presenter. I have something similar in my contract for an independently-produced programme, and (for obvious reasons) I had to submit to a background check before appearing in the Families Commission's family violence campaign.

I am struck by how much that campaign -- coincidentally back on our screens -- has been in the conversation around this. It tends to bear out the research published earlier this year, which found a very impressive 89% recognition rate for "It's Not Okay". One in five respondents said they had taken action as a result of the campaign.

(John Key, frankly, picked the wrong week to drop hints about preventing the commission from undertaking such activities -- in favour of "supporting everyday parents" -- under a National government.)

Before I appeared in the campaign I discussed, with a Women's Refuge worker, this 2005 Listener column about the media storm around a rugby player who admitted manhandling his wife in an incident that undoubtedly constituted an assault (and was properly brought to court), but hardly bears comparison with what Veitch is said to have done.

The player was granted name suppression at the request of the victim, prompting Michael Laws to express outrage and declare that the player should be "named and shamed". Laws and others held that there was clearly one law for All Blacks and one for the rest of us.

I found out a little about the judge who had heard the case, in which the assault was readily admitted, and was inclined to trust his view that the victim's request for anonymity came from a genuine desire to avoid the trauma of a media spectacle, rather than through duress.

The view I advanced in the column was that that case became principally about the needs and desires of the news media, rather than the best interests of the family involved. When a Herald on Sunday editorial demanded a Ricky Ponting-style confessional, it was hardly a call devoid of self-interest. What better to stuff your paper with?

This is the option that Veitch, a sports journalist, has taken: the sportsman's path to redemption; the media conference confessional. I'm no more inclined to believe in its redemptive qualities than I was in the case of the rugby player: it is a public relations exercise, by definition.

Anyway, after that nuanced discussion, in which the good faith of both sides was established, I went ahead with the campaign, and I feel nothing but good about doing so. It has been a privilege to be involved with it. My personal presence in the campaign -- this time around, I am not just a minor media figure, but a TVNZ presenter -- presumably plays in some small way into TVNZ's deliberations about the matter of Veitch, but I don't think it really matters.

I am perhaps in a tricky position to say this (and I don't envy those tasked with making the decision), but I speak as a man, and not a face on the telly, when I say that it's hard to see how Veitch can continue for now in his broadcast roles. That doesn't mean he can never be redeemed, but the conflict between the friendly face of the channel and the thug who has emerged in the news is just too great to carry on as if it never happened.

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On a wholly different tip, this week's Media7, on the media and sustainability, and how green is the new black, is lots of fun. The panel: the editor of the Woman's Weekly Sido Kitchin; Good magazine publisher Vincent Heeringa and the splendidly curmudgeonly Clive Matthew-Wilson.

As usual, you may choose from the TVNZ ondemand version, the Windows Media clips, the podcast and our YouTube channel.

Want to discuss it? It might be tidier to pop over to our ongoing discussion thread about the issue after you have watched the show.

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And, finally, a fascinating essay on the Pew website about the changing face of evangelical Christianity in America, in a year when the decisions of people of faith may have great political bearing. I am, as you know, not a believer, but I'd love to have such an authoritative eye as Pew's on our own Christian movements.

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And The Mission Is? | Jul 09, 2008 11:31

National has a broadcasting policy. It could be worse. The policy statement begins with the words "National has a clear commitment to public broadcasting," and, really, the bulk of it is business as usual.

The headline-grabber is something that, strictly speaking, does not appear in any of the material released by National's broadcasting spokesman Jonathan Coleman: the scrapping of the TVNZ Charter.

What is proposed in writing is the freeing up of $15 million in Charter programme funding to be administered on a contestable basis by NZ On Air. For all that Trevor Mallard has been protesting, this is really an extension of his recent removal of TVNZ's discretionary power over the Charter funding.

I still believe there is virtue in fixing part of the public broadcasting obligation with a publicly-owned broadcaster, but I don't see the sky falling so much as the situation returning to what it was in 2003. The policy doesn't solve anything. TVNZ had the dual-remit problem before 2003; it would still have it under a National government.

Indeed, National would have to instruct TVNZ, a crown-owned company, to draw up a mission statement, which is what it had before it got a Charter in 2003. Although, as a state-owned enterprise (until 2002) TVNZ was primarily charged with being a commercially successful television business, it was also committed to (and this is a paraphrase from a 1997 government document, rather than the original wording) "social responsibility in the provision of quality services, in particular the provision of television programmes which reflect and foster New Zealand's identity and culture, both in New Zealand and internationally, and which are in the overall national interest."

Coleman gives no hint as to whether TVNZ would simply revert to something like the old mission statement, but it hardly seems that National could maintain -- as it says it would -- a publicly-owned broadcaster without some sort of public rationale. If only because, as public submissions on the Charter review last year demonstrated, the public has quite clear expectations on that score. The fiddling with the text that followed seems far less significant than the spirit of those submissions.

The plain fact is that TVNZ has not done a good job of handling Charter funding, which is why the current minister has all but relieved it of the job already. I would, nonetheless, expect it to pick up the bulk of the $15 million in newly-contestable public-good funding. Whether this money will be specifically tagged for Charter-stye programming isn't clear.

There is no detail of this nature in the one-page policy released this week (this may well be a characteristic of most or all of National's policy releases this year) and the real questions about the policy aren't of the "who?", but "how much?" variety. It's all very well to say that National will continue to fund Radio New Zealand, but the words "at the current level" are notably absent. Will it go back to the starvation diet of the 1990s? National cannot blame observers for feeling suspicious.

Coleman himself would probably be a reasonable broadcasting minister; perhaps even a more interested one than Trevor Mallard. He is sufficiently interested in the future of communications technology to have been a participant in the cross-party Parliamentary Internet Caucus, and he asked a couple of good questions at the meeting of the caucus where TVNZ's Jason Paris and I presented last year.

At the least, the wording here is an improvement on the crazy-ass press-releases about Freeview that have formed the bulk of Coleman's contributions so far. After obsessively kvetching about Labour's lack of a plan for taking all viewers digital as soon as possible, Coleman now has the security of knowing he doesn't have a plan either, even though he has now set a digital switchover date of 2015.

The polls say that Coleman and his colleagues will be in the position by the end of this year of not only making this policy -- presently no more than a statement of intent -- work, but meeting some quite clear public expectations. I would suggest that they have plenty of work to do yet.

PS: Here's some next shit: Nat Torkington tipped me to this fairly amazing bit of star-gazing about massed PVRs leashed in a storage network that feeds a BitTorrent cloud of all "good" British screened at any time. Amazingly, the guy's day job is with Ofcom.

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The Greening | Jul 08, 2008 12:23

Okay, I have a half-written post about National's broadcasting policy (short version: sky not actually falling) but that'll have to wait for tomorrow. I've run out of time preparing for tonight's Media7 recording, where I'll be joined by Vincent Heeringa, publisher of the newly-launched Good magazine ("New Zealand's guide to sustainable living"), Woman's Weekly editor Sido Kitchin (who recently ran a "green issue") and automotive curmudgeon Clive Matthew-Wilson.

The topic is the greening of the media, and how sustainability is the new black (or, in the case of Trelise Cooper's shopping bag, pink). How much is green consumerism really saying the world and how much is it just making us feel better about buying stuff?

If you'd like to come along to the recording at The Classic in Queen Street early this evening, email me quicksmart via the "reply" link below. Otherwise, feel free to share your thoughts in advance of the show.

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The Mood | Jul 07, 2008 12:41

There was a lot of reaching for answers in yesterday's Sunday Star Times: what exactly is going on with the public mood, and what does it mean? Perhaps the keenest observation came from Auckland University political studies senior lecturer Jennifer Lees-Marshment, in Ruth Laugesen's diverting bit of guesswork, How National's spin doctors operate.

In truth, we don't know whether, or to what extent, the unusual public mood is a product of anyone's spin, let alone (as Laugesen admits) Crosby/Textor's.

But Lees-Marshment notes that the Crosby/Textor political marketing style "can be so simple, and so powerful, that it can stir up fears without offering any solutions. Do too much of that, she says, and you are well on the way to stirring up political disillusionment and disengagement."

In Laugesen's front-page story, 'End of the road for Clark?' (oddly, not online), Dover Samuels notes that people in his electorate believe "if National gets in the price of petrol is going to drop down, the price of food is going to fall."

In the same story, Laugesen writes that longtime Parliamentary correspondent Ian Templeton sees "a mood for major change of the kind that had been seen in 1960, 1975, 1984 and 1990."

This, says Templeton, comes despite very strong government performance on some of the big jobs: employment, government accounts, public and private savings, major Treaty settlements.

I was talking to David Slack on Friday and he brought up a name: Tania Harris. Her 1984 1981 Kiwis Care march, organised via talkback radio, wrong-footed the commentariat, filled Queen Street, caused a sensation. Exactly what it was about is another matter.

I think that's where we're suddenly at now, with the difference that this time around there may be professionals poking the mood in the desired direction. Chris Trotter can fume that the public support for the truckies' protest was irrational and self-defeating; he's right. But that hardly changes the fact that most New Zealanders seemed to treat it like a Telethon, an opportunity to send a message (even if it was "we'd like to carry on subsidising trucking companies' damaging road use through our taxes please") to the government.

How confused was this phenenomenon? It had the spokesman for the Libertarianz swearing undying resistance to a user-pays scheme, in favour of taxation of the public. Yes, that confused.

But not as confused, oddly, as the march organised by the Asian Anti-Crime Group, whose organiser has been happily issuing warnings that if the government doesn't do something, he and his people will hire in the Triads to provide vigilante security.

The government has, of course, done something: increased sentences, put more people in overcrowded jails and put more policemen into South Auckland. Robberies fell 13% in the district last year; homicides plummeted (there were twice as many killings in Wellington as Counties Manukau last year). There is, per capita, more crime in Central Auckland.

Looking at it rationally, Low and his friends (who include the tireless Garth McVicar) would be better advised to ask the triads to stop selling methamphetamine than to offer them a tasty new protection racket. (Actually, as has been pointed out to me, a Singaporean expat who claims to know triads is probably bullshitting. But he's bullshitting with a megaphone.)

But at any rate, you say, the vast majority of people won't buy into this vigilante craziness, will they? Not so fast. The vicious lunatics who crowd the Herald's Your Views pages are totally up for it. That and execution without trial, shooting taggers, the lot.

National hears the cheering crowd now, but I suspect some within the party will not want this public mood to develop too much further. It's one thing to ride on a wave of unfocused anger at the expense of a tired government -- some of it from people who seem to think the government should be able to protect them from every insult, even the imagined ones -- and another to find the place is ungovernable when it's your turn.

PS: Do you think the Herald will continue its crusade over unfair use of public funds so far as to ask National whether, as Mr Hager alleges, it is paying campaign strategists from Parliamentary funds? Because "trust us" usually isn't regarded as an answer.

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