Posts by Christopher Dempsey
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that's 'Mangere' bridge... sigh.
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Slightly different matter - that was setting the council budget in a way that adversely affected its poorest communities. The idea of commercialising services like libaries and art galleries was suggested by staff - from the finance team. Funny, that.
How does one know that one wasn't being 'toyed' with by the Cit's'n'Rats over this issue?
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Isn't the per second charging after the first minute? So you won't escape a minute charge for those answerphone calls which last less than a minute...
Hmmm... the devil is always in the detail. Our bill is full of 2-5 second calls. Answerphones are mobile telephone companys' best friends. :)
Or you could leave minute long messages to get your money's worth... just make up a list of minute long messages, pick one to use when you phone, and recite your minute long message...
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Plus the fact that short calls and calls which are not answered (but answered by answerphones and quickly terminated) are charged per second not per minute.
Isn't the per second charging after the first minute? So you won't escape a minute charge for those answerphone calls which last less than a minute...
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I've been back some thirteen years now... from 6 years in Canada.
I remember being very depressed for a couple of years after I got back - baffingling so. I remember one day being in absolute tears outside the Citizens Advice Bureau on Queen Street. It took a hell of a long time to adjust being back. It wasn't easy at all.
At least now I'm starting to like Auckland. I'm currently enjoying that low sweep of suburb dressing the volcanic flanks up to Maungakiekie (One Tree Hill) as I drive back over the Mangare bridge from the airport. It's an astonishing landscape, a marriage between the violent volcanic lava and the gentle rythmic pulse of suburbia.
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But the case for privatising monopoly delivery of an essential service just seems nonexistent. It wouldn't be cheaper than current provision (which is setup commercially so is not being subsidised), and the only argument for privatising a service like that is the private vendor would run it more efficiently through being exposed to commercial pressures and would therefore deliver it for lower cost. That won't happen in a non-competitive setup. If you then setup regulatory arms to try and counter that then you've just added the cost of bureacracy and lost your efficiency argument.
Try telling that to a Nactional government and let's see what answer you get...
Short answer is that there is a very long, wide and immeasurable disconnect between your rational, common sense/thinking world as you describe it, and a Nactional government.
Why precisely that gap is there, I've no idea. But it's there alright.
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My eyes just glaze over in this thread. I'm with vodafone, but can't see any point in switching. My REAL concern when I do go shopping for a new phone is finding a phone that will work with my hearing aid.
However, I am impressed by Telecom's efforts here. It sure ain't the old telecom, but time will tell if things have changed.
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Numerous charitable and government organisations have lawyers and accountants on their boards. Wouldn't you want a group of people handling millions of dollars to have among them someone with these professional skills? I'm not advocating that every board member should be a lawyer or accountant.
No reason at all then to put a few non-lawyers, non-suits, non-accountants onto the Transition Agency, is there? I'm struggling to find them there though.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of either Hide or the CitRats. But please give us more than "because that's just the kind of thing they'd do".
But that doesn't mean there's an active plan to flog off all of Auckland's assets. Wanting to do something and having the balls to do it are two different things.
Here's how it works, in a very large nutshell; you give the levers of the assets to business friendly friends, say, Cits'n'Rats (or on the odd occassion, someone who is nominally left, but very 'friendly'). They don't have to do anything except sit there like little Miss Muffet with her asset-rich pie.
Along comes a spider, say, Merril Lynch, or Price Waterhouse Coopers, or Deloittes, or Russell McVeagh, or you get the idea, who just wispers in Miss Muffets ear that the asset-pie would deliver [here follows magic incantation using words like 'return on investment', 'expenditure' 'cost benefit' 'value for shareholders' 'equity' 'customer' etc.]
The levers are 'released', and control passes to someone else, usually a client of the spider. Note Miss Muffet didn't have an active plan.
This is a very large nutshell, but if one strips away non-essential items and thinks in gross simple terms, this is what I believe happens. But like all fairytales, there are a few black swans ready to fly across the picture.
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Given that apparently the protest organisers couldn't stop the people from going onto the bridge, their ability to stop them doing something stupid while on it = about nil.
Point taken, but I would offer that the middle class tend to be very, err strident about things from time to time, so no, no amount of Wayne McDonald's saying No was going to stop the rising tide of middle class resentment and sense of entitlement to that bridge.
And I say it again, this was a middle class walk over the bridge. The potential for stupid acts was there, but middle class behaviour militates against it to a large degree (astonishingly so). The 'riling' up was of an extremely middle class nature; 'we'll just ask politely', 'we are not here to cause trouble', 'burn fat not oil' etc... so it wasn't at all 'militant'.
Just a very large bunch of middle NZ wanting to walk on the bridge. Heaven help anyone standing in the way - they got swept aside, including the very middle class organisers.
Paul Henry isn't a journalist so why the hell does he get to front something like Close Up?
Spouting your own opinion, shutting down the other side and giving free run to those who you agree with is not even close to journalism.At the risk of doing a Craig, now that we've established that Paul Henry is a prat, wanker, mysogenic, pseudo-journalist, and general all round effing prick, could we save the bandwidth and concentrate on researching email addresses of the producers of Close Up, emailing them and complaining? Emaling advertisers also works.
I did it over the moustache comments. The more complaints, the more likely he'll be removed.
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From my observation there is precious little analysis on the news as that takes way too much presentation effort. And mostly the news fomat doesn't have time to do that justice.
Word. It's all about the sizzle these days and the great unwashed is being brainwashed into thinking sizzle is what counts.
I'm entirely unsure what happens next in this narrative; do some of the great unwashed 'wake up' and realise what's happening? Does someone offer something more substantial somewhere else to attract them (after all, an empty stomach grumbles on a diet of pure sizzle). I don't know.