Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to slarty,
along the lines of the “we-don’t-like-that-you-decriminialised-prostitution-so-we’re-going-to-label-you-as-child-sex-slavers”
You're assuming that they're wrong. I'm not so sure that they are, sadly, and in any case I'm going to say [citation needed] on your proposition that it's some kind of retribution for us legalising prostitution. It's not like that affects them in any way unlike, say, us allowing parallel importing of copyrighted materials. I at least understand them putting us a list of "naughty" countries for the latter "sin".
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to David Cormack,
We're not even second in the OECD, as (in no particular order) Chile, Singapore, Israel and Poland are all above us in that table.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
our rate of incarceration is second only to the [USA]
Actually, it’s 68th to the USA’s 1st.
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Angus Robertson,
When GM sold 20% of Subaru in 2005 (during an economic boom) it got USD315million, when Toyota acquired 7.8% of Subaru in Oct-2008 (during a global recession) it paid USD311million. The share price of Subaru more than doubled after 20% of it was dumped.
Ah, now I see your "logic". What happened to the share price immediately after the 20% sell-off? Did you do any accounting for inflation?
When we talk of the stock value falling with 20% of the company being dumped on the market, we're not talking about a period of three years we're talking about a period of a few weeks. The value depression will occur nearly immediately and could take years to recover.
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Angus Robertson,
If Gina Rinehart dumps 20% of Fairfax the price will fall, but not because Gina Rinehart is dumping 20% of Fairfax stock
That would make it the first stock-dumping in history where the very fact of the dumping didn't depress the price, I suspect. Supply and demand, Angus. A sudden, massive increase in supply always results in a decrease in price. There's a reason that stockholders who're cashing in some of their holdings after an IPO, for example, release only small quantities, and that's to avoid depressing the market price.
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Steve Withers,
If she dumps her shares and the value crashes….she could probably buy an even larger chunk of the company at firesale prices.
Something that is very, very legally-questionable, since it amounts to market manipulation. Whether a regulator would try and prosecute it is a different story, but even the weak regulations in NZ would provide grounds for a criminal investigation if someone dumped stock and then bought more stock at the resultantly-lower price. After all, if you're trying to gain control of a company so that you can turn it into your private echo chamber it's of benefit to you to own more shares and thus exert more control.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Hilary Stace,
In Wellington it can be used 9-3 or all day weekends on trains and buses
Those conditions are nationwide, with some local variations based on what's available. The Government pays transport operators to provide those services.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
we need an actual way of taking money off people.
Eftpos?
*snort* We may as well stick with cash, for the length of time it’d take for people to pay to get on the bus using eftpos.
Seriously, the reason for using a touch-based smart card is that people don’t need to stop as they board the vehicle, they just swipe as they walk past. If you’re bringing on 10 people at one stop and it takes even 10 seconds for each person to pay and take their ticket that’s well over a minute spent at that stop just getting passengers on board. If they can swipe through it could be 10-20 seconds.This is not change for change’s sake, it’s vital to improving public transport service levels in Auckland.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Super annuitants have an integrated public transport system swipe card. Remember the gold card? Our public transport already uses that system and it works if you are 65.
Seems to get the ol’ folks around. Why couldn’t it be adapted? Oh,of course, it’s too late. That or I’m just not 65 yet and at 64 it just wouldn’t work.
It could be that bloody simple to implement!They only get free trips between certain hours, and they get them by showing the card to the driver. It’s not a smart card, it’s an exceptionally dumb card. It’s not scalable as a transport fare card because unless we’re proposing to make public transport completely free we need an actual way of taking money off people.
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Hard News: If wishing made it so ..., in reply to DexterX,
Government interference that let the company work on the scheme despite failing to win the main contract.
Was that just before an election
No, after. Joyce was the Minister involved.
As far as NZBus getting this done, it's a matter of replacing their existing on-board readers with new ones which should be a matter of minutes since there's already cabling (and, the way these things are designed nowadays, the cabling is very likely to be Cat5/6 with an RJ45 plug, making it extremely versatile) so nothing more involved than unscrewing three units and screwing in place three other units. Even if they have to draw through new cabling there's already existing ducting. A single person should be easily able to do five buses in a shift. Oh, but wait, because NZ Bus threw their toys and got to install their own, incompatible, readers, they can't just pre-wire their whole fleet without losing access to the existing Snapper-based HOP cards.
The standard that AT/NZTA developed requires sub-one-second card reading with high reliability. Snapper cannot do that - it's a festering pile, really - and that is the "core of the problem". It was entirely reasonable to require a high-quality system, and it's not the fault of the designers that Snapper doesn't meet the specification.