Posts by izogi
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It’s possible that this is an outlier poll
Yep.
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Hard News: Circumstance and coincidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m not sure if it quite amounts to that, but Mataparae was certainly under pressure over his responsibility for the handing over of Afghan prisoners to torturers.
I may be going over the edge with conspiracy here, but now that he's been shunted into what's meant to be such a neutral position (Queen's representative n' all), has he become any less accessible to media for commenting on matters like the Defence Force and the spooks?
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I don’t buy DPF’s complete dismissiveness as for me there are clearly questions here which need answering, but I agree with his comment about the spooky sinister music. When journos have something real, they shouldn’t need to decorate it with such artistic junk which is typically more about triggering an emotional conclusion from an audience instead of an objective one.
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Both tragedies were characterised by high death tolls, and both showed the impact of the National Government’s deregulation agenda in the 1990s – and the failure of subsequent Labour Governments to reverse those changes.
I think the problem goes back even further than that, if you consider the 1995 Cave Creek Tragedy where 14 people died and 4 more were left with serious and mostly crippling injuries. It’s less of a corporate thing, but that was an indirect consequence of the mess which the Labour government made of DOC’s formation in 1987, followed by 5 years of a National government doing very little to address a department that was so uncoordinated internally that basic safety issues were being ignored against a priority expectation of low-paid workers doing more with less.
Nothing significant happened regarding responsibility for anyone at the top there, either, despite Commission of Inquiry comments that the upper management of DOC didn’t seem to understand the concept of accountability. Denis Marshal, who’d by then been the Minister of Conservation for 5 years, even managed to find a quote from Geoffrey Palmer to describe why he wasn’t personally responsible for everything done in his name. Those who came nearest to being prosecuted were those worker individuals on the ground, who’d been most closely tied to building the actual platform, but to me this ignored that the whole department had had this type of thing going on all-over New Zealand, and the victims were probably just unlucky to be the ones to discover it.
Following that there were claims (eg from the Herald) that the problem was obviously that government couldn’t be held accountable to the same standards as the private sector, because people in the private sector are automatically accountable with their jobs at stake, but I think the more recent examples, like Pike River, are evidence that the issue is far more complex than that.
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Hard News: Autism and celebrity, in reply to Sue,
when is jim mora not underwhelming – sadly
It was about what I expected for the type of show he has. He seems more interested in the range of interesting personalities and lets people talk about what they’re keen to say, which I think is okay in that context if you know what sort of show it is and that it’s not critical and confrontational journalism.
I’m not sure what to expect from when he shifts to Checkpoint after 5pm. Hopefully he has a very different persona.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to Brent Jackson,
Modern car’s speedos seem to read about 8% lower than the car’s actual speed.
I hadn’t realised how widespread this was until I drove around with a SatNav for a few weeks in the UK, and it displayed the actual speed compared with the speed limit for the section of road (which was very useful – totally useless and dangerously misleading once we reached Ireland because everything was out of date).
Even a GNSS-based speedo will under-read on corners, though, unless there’s some kind of internal algorithm to compensate, though, because if it’s not a perfectly straight line then the points it’s measuring between will be closer than the distance actually driven.
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Speaker: Sponsored post: Speed and Safety, in reply to George Darroch,
That message is not that the person driving faster is a bad and reckless person, or that the father is blameless and in the right. It's simply that accidents are more likely at speed, and when they occur the consequences are worse.
As Matthew has just said I think the speed thing is a distraction in this campaign, or at least in the ad, even if its relevant.
When the ad was first posted to YouTube, I found it amazing to see just how many people in the video's comment thread and elsewhere were screaming that "the guy pulling out of the intersection was a terrible driver". "It was all his fault". "Why do we let crappy drivers on our roads?!?!?" "Case closed".
...or to similar effect. Does NZ require defensive driving courses yet, or are they still just a faster-licensing incentive?
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to Paul Campbell,
it’s common practice for Chinese people learning English to choose (or even be given) an English first name
When my sister was teaching English in China a few years back, at about the time that The Matrix series of movies was popular, most of the class chose the English first name of "Mr Smith".
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to ,
Becouse buisness’s can’t sentence people to prison?
I think this touches on it, but the spooky thing for me with government being treated as “a business” is that it’s automatically a “business” that’s empowered to write its own regulatory environment to suit itself, whether that involves financial reporting, fair trading, human rights, or whatever.
Real businesses can’t do that. They operate in a relatively predictible regulatory environment that’s defined by the government, not by themselves.
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Speaker: Why we can’t just fix secondary…, in reply to Deborah,
It’s illegal
Thanks. I was sort-of hoping so as it's nice reassurance that we're not missing out simply because of ethics.