Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Stewart,
is constantly railing about the environmental constraints on farming, the compliance costs, etc but he knows it is the right thiing to do and he complies fully because he believes he is a custodian of the land he farms.
Ah, but would he do the same things if he wasn't required to by law? Does he do more than is required by law? That's the difference between someone who really considers themselves to be a custodian and someone who's just trying to mute the tone they've set by ranting about urban do-gooders and their prissy environmental protection laws.
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The bit that stunned me about Novopay was the Hamilton (IIRC) school that got to see pay details for another school after the administrator put in the wrong code. That's a fundamental user authentication failure, compounded by a data segregation failure it would appear. The wrong code should respond that the user isn't authenticated, it should never be sufficient for a single PIN to be the entirety of the protection of payroll data.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Sacha,
Great to meet you and your other half last week too.
Yes, likewise.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Islander,
and pay fines for the pollution – because it’s cheaper than fencing off the polluted areas.
I encountered an interesting article in the Economist a few months back, which looked at the impact that fines needed to have in order to discourage antitrust violations. The conclusion, not surprisingly, was that the fines needed to be absolutely massive, far in excess of just the opportunity benefit that might be seen from a violation.
NZ has woeful levels of financial penalties in most areas, and this is particularly true of the fines levied on businesses. Telecom has been on the receiving end of our largest fines, and not a single one has exceeded, from memory, $12m. A company with annual revenue in the billions isn't going to be swayed by an eight-digit fine, especially when it's not adjudged until many years after the fact. Similarly, wilful polluters need to not just be billed the real and actual costs of cleaning up their messes but also fined a punitive sum so large that it makes the cost of doing the right thing attractive. And if it breaks them, well, tough shit. We only get one environment, and the sympathy I have for people who are too cheap and lazy to protect it as they pursue personal profit could be measured with a very tiny micrometer.
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One thing that clicked for me about the TVNZ7 numbers in the wake of that report being released is that it was only 17 January this year that it became possible for Neilsen to track time-shifted viewing. Since TVNZ7 broadcast so much of its material outside peak times, that would've had a significant impact on moment-in-time viewer numbers. Makes the numbers even more bullshit than they already were.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to AndrewH,
So my partner and I spun them a yarn that we were getting married in Europe, needed $50k to fund the event. “No problem” they siad and we got the cash.
Thank you.
Also, loans for IVF. What're the bank going to do? Repo the foetus? -
Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The banking system basically lends on tangible security: property, plant and the like. It’s role is not venture capital provision, for the very good reason that when people put money in a bank, they want it back.
Sure, but they lend on rapidly-depreciating items like cars. This person just wanted a personal loan, but the bank wasn't interested. They'd have happily loaned money for a car worth far more, taking the risk of writing off much more than $5k.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Bart Janssen,
look around at those people who are succeeding and fund them.
Fund winners, don’t pick them.
Or, at least, don't discourage banks from lending to those who are succeeding. We've lost innumerable ventures because getting domestic funding has been too hard, including the recent sale of a wireless charging technology that has massive potential (I'll be here all week) for electric transport. We've got a serious problem with the policy settings that have banks lending 95% on residential property but unwilling to lend $5k to someone who wants to start up a business (yes, really, $5k. They ended up begging on Facebook).
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Sacha,
A problem spanning all governments since our world-leading Resource Management Act was introduced has been failure to set national standards for regional councils to use, despite their requests.
National were quite happy to set a voluntary target, however, and allow councils to vary it based on their local conditions. It's not much of a step from doing that much work to just setting a fixed standard, except that a fixed standard would require rural councils to start policing farmers and whilst the councils recognise the value in doing so the farmers (and National) are far, far less convinced.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
producing high value luxury products. Not out of radiata, I suspect?
Why not? Interior mouldings can be, and are, made from NZ pine, and are popular overseas. Just throwing up our hands and saying "It's too hard" doesn't help us get away from being a low-wage farm.