Posts by Bart Janssen
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Also from Brand
but it seems Thatcher's time in power was solely spent diminishing the resources of those who had least for the advancement of those who had most
Which seems awfully familiar.
I think asking people to be above celebrating her death is failing to acknowledge just how much harm she did ... individually to real people with real lives. I may not condone pissing on her grave but I understand the emotion that leads people to that.
She led a government that did very real personal harm to very many people. That some of them are genuinely still bitter ... that doesn't explain the block parties by folks were weren't even born then.
I was at university half a world away and focussed very much on getting full of knowledge, but even so I remember riots in Britain ... WTF! Britain was civilised, how could they have riots?
Yes some things were a mess, but it wasn't necessary to use the methods she and her government used in order to make the changes Britain did indeed need to make. They chose a path they knew would cause significant personal harm - and forty years later some of those people remember the very personal harm for which she was responsible. Yeah it's Ok that those people are still angry.
That might be a lesson that some of our current politicians might learn before they choose the path of most harm.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Emma Hart,
Would you ever use it to describe a man?
To be fair I have heard old very camp men sometimes described using that word. But yeah we even made a word expressly for this:
Twatcock FTW.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Russell Brown,
That is ,for someone from the left, a fair summing up of the Lady
Some people seem to have forgotten what a basket case the UK was then
I am sure it could have been do better but it had to be donePerhaps that’s a 20th Century lesson: don’t allow your economy to degrade so terribly that it appears that extremists are the only people who can fix it.
Also don't assume that because they created a solution that it was the only viable solution.
While it is true that some of the things disestablished by that govt were inefficient or just plain useless - the way they chose to do it was worse and what replaced some of those things was distinctly worse.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Margaret Thatcher did everything in her very considerable power to make greed fashionable and turn naked selfishness from a vice into a virtue
It is no coincidence that the 1987 financial collapse happened after those policies of greed.
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
reduced to a radioactive desert
Unlikely. There is no reason for the US to use Nukes. Far better for them to obliterate all manufacturing and military capacity using high precision conventional weapons. This demonstrates the superiority of the US weapons manufacturers thus guaranteeing significant upturn in sales.
The consequence of course will be a North Korea that is even more of a basket case than it is now and requiring huge amounts of aid to recover.
That said the consequences of a conventional obliteration are by no means “clean and green”. But don’t worry John Key will be happy to send in our boys and girls in khaki to clean up.
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Alex Coleman,
100% correct
For me this is the issue. I don't expect the person behind the counter and the local council office to be 100% correct, it simply is OK for them to make mistakes, especially if when we work out a mistake has been made they apologise (see Emma's rules for being an adult).
But when you accept a job like say Mayor or PM and accept the salary and perks that come with that job - then you must accept that part of the salary is because you now have to perform at a higher standard. Perhaps not 100%, maybe say 95% (I'd hope for higher). And even more importantly, if you get it wrong you must absolutely acknowledge and apologise - like an adult.
And yet the public love him.
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Hard News: Neither fish nor fowl, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I suggest you familiarise yourself with the Road Code’s opinion on the matter. It doesn’t support your assertion.
I had one of "those" arguments* once with my partner about exactly that. Surprisingly being able to show her the road code did not seem to improve the argument :).
*you know the one where both of you argue about something inane because you are tired and grumpy about everything.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Brent Jackson,
When it came time to retire the car we'd been driving for 13 years we looked at the various electric option and decided against them. They are expensive, but more important is their cost of manufacture makes the environmental equation very dubious.
At this stage I still think it's a better environmental choice to buy a two or three year old car and drive it for a long time.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to BenWilson,
Bart’s argument about a conflict of interest
Essentially one shareholder is inflating the value of the company shortly before planning to sell it.
My point is simply that if the govt were say one of the many finance companies we've seen in recent times and said finance company was doing what the govt just did then various parties including the fraud office would become very interested. It is more than shonky, it is very close to illegal. And the reason that sort of thing is illegal is that it is unfair to other shareholders and there are laws to protect shareholder from that sort of thing.
It might be possible to do it legally with very good lawyers and especially if most of the negotiations were secret. It would still be unfair on other shareholders but legally so.
Because it is the govt doing this, it is legal. But it is still a very dodgy deal on so many levels that it beggers belief.
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Gareth Ward,
such a large part of our national economy
Um really? Yes it's a big industry and it does employ a number of folk in southland which is very important. But Rio Tinto get very very cheap electricity as it is. And we don't get many export dollars for aluminium, note the same company sells the bauxite to the smelter, unsuprising they don't make much of their profit in NZ where it can be taxed by us. New Zealand doesn't profit much at all from the aluminium. Where we do get value is from the employment of local labour.
What I think (and this is just me) that this government (particularly a National govt) should have done, is allow the market negotiation to proceed without interference. By involving itself the govt has effectively cut the Meridian management out of the negotiation. It is hard to argue that the govt knows the business better than Meridian.
Alternatively the govt could say to hell with pretending Meridian is an actual business lets just make it a govt department again and manage it for the overall benefit of the country instead of playing at being a business.
Now you could argue that a govt should protect those jobs for the good of the country and I might agree with you. But then I would be asking you to argue in favour of de-privatising Telecom and saving the 1300 jobs about to be lost there as well, because frankly if you think a bit of aluminium is important then how important is the internet?