Posts by Matthew Poole
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Speaker: The Democracy-Free Zone, in reply to Joe Wylie,
From his past performance in attempting to silence Lianne Dalziel by releasing her personal information, it’s standard Brownlee modus operandi.
I think you mean standard 5th National Government modus operandi. So that would make it a National Standard.
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Speaker: The Democracy-Free Zone, in reply to Steve Barnes,
So what if the election was held on the originally appointed date in 2013 and the people refused to accept the cancellation of their democracy and just went ahead.
At this point I will cry out for Graeme, but I suspect that the informal nature of the ballots (electoral officer will be bound to not produce ballot papers since the elections have been cancelled) would be what National would hold up in support. That and, of course, that they have suspended ECan's status as a democracy and, thus, elections are invalid. It's very soviet, one-party-state ish.
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Speaker: The Democracy-Free Zone, in reply to Steve Barnes,
if the people of Christchurch went ahead and held an election anyway, would the Government refuse to recognise the authority?
Well, yes, they would, and not just because they're a bunch of self-important entitled jack-asses. They also have the benefit of local elections needing to be called by the local authority's properly-appointed electoral officer, and outside of the triennial cycle the electoral officer must be instructed to conduct an election by said local authority. With no elected local authority the electoral officer for ECan (who I assume must have been appointed, since the law requires that the position be filled) is not going to be the recipient of such instructions. And that means that National could, entirely correctly, dismiss the election as a sham, possibly even fraudulent, and certainly not worthy of proper recognition.
The terrible weakness of our system of government is that central government has all the cards, and cannot be compelled by any means short of armed insurrection to even let go of one card's corner.
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Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
In which case I'm now thoroughly confused as to whether they meant the man's rank or his former job description, particularly given that military officers are normally given a job title of "officer commanding xyz".
The style guide also appears to bear out my ire at their lack of capitalisation of Air Force. They're not talking about a collection of military aircraft lacking a cohesive identity, in which case air force would be correct, they're talking about an identified organisation with a title that is being shortened. Likewise "defence force", which is the short form of an organisation's name.
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Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The best error I’ve seen in the Herald (probably computer generated) is the conversion of the abbreviation STG into a pound sign, as in this article
Another article on the same general topic had "sterling" where I assumed, from its out-of-context position, STG should have been. Their auto-complete is obviously not something the authors watch with the necessary level of care.
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Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The paper’s usage is correct. Titles are capitalized, job descriptions are not.
Then what does "former wing commander Logan Cudby" mean? Wing Commander is a rank, and there are references to others of that rank with appropriate capitalisation. The article's internal consistency is a mess.
They also failed to adhere to the correct form by not capitalising Air Force once, except when they correctly used Royal New Zealand Air Force. Hell, the article even says "Australian defence force". The body is called "Australian Defence Force", ffs. Similarly there are references to "defence force" which I take to mean NZDF, and there's talk of "defence websites" which should, I believe, be "Defence websites" since I've assumed it's meaning websites operated by parts of NZDF.
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The new format doesn't seem to have done anything at all to the quality of the editing. Simple courtesies such as capitalising "Air Force" and ranks are apparently foreign. All the more galling for their capitalisation of New Zealand Defence Force.
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Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald, in reply to Russell Brown,
Nothing showing up as new in Play Store. The only NZ Herald app is the one I already have installed. So, as I was saying...
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Hard News: Reviews: #NZGT and the Herald, in reply to Jeremy Andrew,
Unless it was just the iPhone app that got a facelift.
Probably. There is no other platform [ETA: of any significance], after all.
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You also missed Liam Dann letting us know that he's been the Business Editor for nearly five years. It's a new format, not a whole new bloody paper!
Hopefully, and I'm not holding my breath, the editorial staff have taken heed of the strong resistance to tabloid content that their focus-grouping uncovered as they went about re-branding to tabloid format. I was heartened to read that they've put the newsroom through some quite intensive training on using numbers, only to see today's brain fart about the Conservative Party only needing to do 1.35 "percentage points" better than their 2011 2.65% in order to cross a 4% threshold. That may be true, but it's more enlightening to point out that it requires a 50.9% increase in the number of votes the Party receives for that to happen.