Posts by Mikaere Curtis
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But surely that is the point, the integrity of the person trying to sell the policy is crucial, who cares what’s in the detail if you need to question the veracity of the salesman, and our pm is in real trouble in this context
Given National's decision to promote Brand Key as the identity of their government, I think it is critical that we know if it is real or simply a carefully orchestrated false persona. It appears that the tapes may give us some insight on this.
Did three just put the knife in there, or was I dreaming?
They went hard, didn't they? Note to National: Honeymoon with Garner and Gower is officially over.
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Loving the irony today. On the one hand, Key is happy to hide behind the law if it can prevent the transcript of the tea tapes from being made public, and on the other he is above the law if he thinks there are some potential votes in it.
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Full policy listings here - with every single answer for National thus:
Declined to answer this question
The arrogance is breath-taking; only topped by National's whinging about the media not wanting to engage on policy.
I think this just got WAY out of hand.
Agreed, and I really hope the police are acting in good faith, with no pressure whatsoever being applied from Joyce et al. Given the stakes, I think it would be useful for the media to seek confirmation that this is the case.
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Yeah, writing off the French, no matter how tempting, is extremely unwise. I am certain they will bring their best game tonight, the real question is for how long. My pick is that they are reasonably fragile and that the ABs have the opportunity to rattle them early.
I’ve got very little to go on, except an anecdote on Friday. I work in the ASB Tower, across the road from the Crowne Plaza where the French team is staying. After lunch, I got in the lift with some guys who were talking about an incident with the French players. A Frenchwoman co-worker had just gone over to the hotel and asked some players (in French) for their autographs. They told her to fuck off, and she ended up yelling at them that she was going to support the ABs instead,
That kind of behaviour says one thing to me: nerves.
In the meantime, I’m gonna party like it’s 1987 :)
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Rather surprisingly, no such statement appears in the Greens' relatively prosaic IT policy. But only the Greens are thinking about e-waste.
Its a pity Labour couldn't think the issue through when they were drafting the legislation, isn't it ? It would certainly save on flip-flopping.
And be fair , the Greens IT policy was largely developed before Judith Tizard had signalled she intended to cut off people's internet access on the say-so of apparent copyright holders. I was certainly working on in at the policy conference back in 2006.
Anyway, I think this passage, from the Principles section seems to cover it off:
Benefits of IT need to be shared amongst all members of our society
and not be used to enhance or entrench existing Inequalities, or create
new layers of Inequality. -
I had the good fortune to stroll past the Heritage hotel last week, just before the All Blacks walked out to their tour bus. I stopped to take some photos and the thing struck me was the air of calmness to the team. They just seemed happy in each other's company and exuded a quiet confidence (Cruden, not so much, but hey - who would, if they just arrived in the team?). At that point, I knew they were going to do the business on Sunday.
France, OTOH, will probably pull another fantastic performance out of no-where and give the All Blacks some competition in the first stages of the match. But, like in 1987, the current team is simply in a different class to the French, so I can't see the French really competing.
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Geoff Lealand,
As someone who was frogmarched to a PC a couple of months back (my faculty arguing that they couldn’t support Macs), I am with Russell in only tolerating my Dell. I sometimes wonder how a one-armed person would turn it on (control/alt/delete).
Yeah, it's a crap default.
BUT, it's not as if Dell has an operating system. IMO, Windows 7 was the version that finally caught up with Apple. Took a while, to say the least. ;)
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Hard News: Thanks, Steve. For everything., in reply to Martin Lindberg,
Were the flags on the bridge put at half mast for Stevo this evening?
No, they were at half mast early this morning already. No idea why.
Probably to respect our latest fallen SAS soldier. A soldier who would not have been in Afghanistan except because of a decision that John Key personally took.
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I've hardly ever use Macs in anger, but...
During the late 80s, formy first two years at varsity I had a cleaning job. One of the offices I cleaned as 7 College Hill - the home, at the time, of Apple NZ. They had a lot of promotional material around the place, being naturally curious, I read everything I could get my hands on.
I was impressed at the direction they were taking personal computing. Desktop publishing, little bags that you could put your Mac in so you could move it, that kind of thing. I also read about this new technology (which, IIRC, required a hardware upgrade) called HyperCard. It allowed you to navigate to related topics by clicking on things called "Hyperlink". Now that, I thought at the time, had promise...
The 90s were indeed dark days for Apple, and it felt as if the company could fall over at any time.
My favourite thought about Steve Jobs is something a friend said about him once:
"He created a billion dollar company. And then he did it all over again."
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Hard News: The Politics of Absence, in reply to Tom Semmens,
If our political parties had a cumulative total of 3-400,000 members then I would argue that FPP would probably produce a more democratic outcome than the current social-political environment that our MMP system exists in.
Are you old enough to remember FPP, where the actual mechanism meant a two-party political oligarchy ? I can't see how Social Credit having 20,000 members would have improved their outcomes.
Here you are dfisplaying our political elites typical obsession with the mechanism of the electoral process rather than the actual state of our democracy.
The mechnisms have a massive effect, and you can call me elite if you want, but I'll argue against unrealistic barriers to democracy any time.
Have you ever participated in a political party? Policy and research don't fall out the sky, you know. They take time and effort. If you want to hollow out our democracy, then forcing the smaller parties to redirect vast amounts of effort ensuring they have the required number of members will achieve that nicely.