Posts by Rich of Observationz
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When a company has no hope of paying its debts and continues to operate, that's called "insolvent trading" and is illegal. If management were drawing a salary while this was happening, then that pretty much amounts to stealing (from the creditors).
That's the case whether the money was going to Miss Whiplash, the Remuera Golf Club, a church or the Foundation for Saving Babies and Cute Furry Animals.
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the Ministry of Justice had an outstanding-fines outreach [at Pasifica]
I hope they also do one at Grey Lynn Festival and Thorndon Fair.
(Very sad about Finn. I never met him, but people I know did, as happens in a small city).
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I don't see why broadcast spectrum stops being a treaty right just because it wasn't known about (by Maori *or* British people) when the Treaty was signed.
There are NZ fisheries that weren't exploitable in 1840 because of lack of technology. Broadcast spectrum arguably goes with the land one is broadcasting over. Since government has chosen to treat it as a commodity, Maori should get part of that. (Even if it's unfortunate that some iwi treat it as purely a source of dollars rather than a cultural resource).
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Coming from the UK, I'm used to newspapers having a political position: the Telegraph is right-wing Tory, the Guardian is left-wing Labour and so on. But they have *eight* major national dailies, so you can more or less pick one that matches your political orientation and literacy level.
I think in a country with one paper per city, there has been a tacit agreement that newspapers at least pretend to be apolitical, no? (and that in return, the words "monopoly" aren't mentioned too much.)
This has always been a bit empty - all the papers have a tacit conservative authoritarian bias without being outright partisan. (e.g. the Dom Post led this morning with "Crims text messages wiped" - on a story that Vodafone are no longer providing police with the ability to browse through everyone's text).
Since the spring, it seems that even this convention has been dumped and the Herald is now fully lined up behind National. I'm not sure why; maybe it was felt that even with a new face and friendlier policies, the Nats could again choke at the last minute without a more solid peanut gallery behind them?
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ironic, since I write spam filters
Interesting. I used to work at Marshall, though I wasn't the guy who did the constant incremental refinement on the spam filter.
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...you will be going to see the L.E.D.s at Mighty Mighty tonight...
So are they like LCD Soundsystem, but with less battery life?
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The pa was the prototype for WWI trench systems. With that, and Rutherford laying the foundations for the atomic bomb, kiwi ingenuity killed a *lot* of people in the 20th century!
It took until 1918 for the European military to work out how to overcome entrenched positions (with battle lines stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, outflanking them was impossible). What finally worked was the "rolling barrage" where the troops advanced just behind highly accurate artillery fire. This minimised the time the defending troops had between being attacked by the artillery and the infrantry and enabled the forces to advance again. Using this technique the Germans advanced first, but ran out of resources before the western allies did.
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Shared sovereignty isn't unprecedented: Andorra is such a state, albeit in the framework of a constitutional monarchy.
More appropriately, the South African constitution provides a role for traditional leaders and customary law.
Plus communities overseas often have a lot more devolved power than in NZ. We could maybe follow some of this and allow local communities to control their own policing, for instance.
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re: Soccer, it was one of the things I left the UK to get away from.
Plus soccer viewing is by no means as universal an interest as people make out. In my office of 20 people, we had one person who followed the game enough to own a season ticket, maybe two others who watched it on telly and the rest were up for watching big finals and that was all.
UK politicians, especially Labour ones *pretend* to be really keen on football, incidentally. They normally choose a team when they're adopted for a winnable seat. Tony Blair claimed to be a fanatical supporter of Newcastle and to have spent many a happy teenage day watching Jackie Milburn, his idol. Milburn left the club when Blair was four.
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Regarding Auckland Airport and its imminent closedown by the Canuck invaders, it's a real problem having all these foreign owned businesses that could shut down at any stage:
We could be left with no banks, newspapers or telephones and be forced to line up for hours at the remaining New World supermarkets and Gasoline Alley servos for food and petrol.
Could happen any moment - better stock up!