Posts by Stephen R
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Speaker: The problem of “horror tenants”…, in reply to Lilith __,
With that possibility hanging over tenants, is it any wonder we don't fight for our legitimate rights when we are shortchanged?
We rented a house that was being used as a squat when we tried to move in - although we never met whoever was living there, we put their stuff in the garage and it disappeared that night.
We lived in it for a couple of years, and then the landlord came back from the UK or other foreign parts, and gave us 42 days notice. Then they wanted to keep our bond because the owner's new wife thought the house was a mess. I actually thought that the house was marginally better than it had been when we moved in, but without pics we couldn't prove anything, and the agent wasn't going to argue our case. In the end, we decided it wasn't worth the time to recover $100 each. (Yes, this was back in the days when the rent was about $100 per room)
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Hard News: Softly, softly, in reply to Russell Brown,
but to claim as Pilger does that they're all neo-Nazis is palpably untrue
My Ukranian Co-worker (his Mum still lives in Kiev) said some of that comes from the second world war. The Ukranians who looked at Stalin and went "He's scary" joined up with the Germans not because they were Nazi's so much, as they really didn't like Stalin (much like the Finns in the Continuation war really). The impression I get is that decision has meant the anti-Russian side in Ukraine has been tarred by the Russians as Nazis ever since, and some of them might indeed have self identified as Nazis (Although it's not clear to me that this is because they actually agree with anything Hitler did other than shoot Russians).
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to Matthew Poole,
There's also the "It doesn't ship from the continental US, which makes it that much harder for us to intercept and 'enhance'" factor.
I think it's also likely be some of "We're bugging all the stuff produced in the US, so I bet the Chinese are doing the same".
A liar never trusts anyone...
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to Idiot Savant,
OTOH, if you don't want to play, just tell them that you're a drug-addicted communist wikileaks-supporter with huge financial problems who is cheating on your partner (that establishes three of the classic motives: Money, Ideology, Compromise). Problem solved.
Yeah, nah. Not if you have a real job.
The Act, as I understand it, allows the GCSB to shut down network provision businesses who don't comply, which means that if they can't get any staff with security clearances, then they (potentially) can't operate, which means they'll (somewhat justifiably) make passing a security clearance check a requirement to be/stay employed.
It's one thing to muck the Government around when it just costs them time, it's another when it affects your ability to pay the rent.
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If I think about TICSA too hard, it just makes me sad.
Discussing it at home last night, we decided that basically it was going to mean the GCSB mandating use of routers/Network configurations that were compromisable by the NSA or GCSB. I'd bet that if a network provider found a way to firewall off any command/control signals from outside their network, the GCSB would tell them to stop.
There doesn't seem to be a way to avoid being observed, sorted, classified and profiled without giving up on modern life.
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Hard News: The sphere of influence, in reply to "chris",
New Zealand [...] seems either ill-equipped or under prepared to handle the inconsistencies being presented.
One example I encountered when helping a refugee from Iraq - his birth certificate, his passport and his academic qualifications were in different names, so it took quite some effort for the relevant authorities to believe that he actually had an accounting degree.
From what I understood at the time (communication difficulties might have affected this), it was quite common in Iraq for a man to change his name when his wife had a first son, to something equivalent to "father of <son's name>" and culturally that just wasn't something NZ coped with well.
Which all reminds me of http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
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Kathryn Ryan did an interview with Dr Tom Flewett, head of Addiction Services at Capital and Coast District Health Board this morning.
Interesting discussion. I didn't know that natural cannabis has anti-psychotic properties (that the synthetics appear to lack).
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Hard News: Illegal Highs, in reply to Russell Brown,
Un-fucking-believable.
Yeah, nah. The nice man on Nat-radio the other day said that it wouldn't be possible to rate the drugs for safety without animal testing, so this is basically a way of banning them without having to ban them. I'm pretty sure that the politicians are smart enough to know that, even if they won't admit that in front of a camera.
Personally, the analogs look pretty dodgy, and (even though I'm not a smoker) the real thing looks safer. Why not legalise, or at least decriminalise, that?
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Up Front: Just Like Unicorns, in reply to Emma Hart,
And, y’know, also, Bible, not written in English.
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Observing in court one day, I witnessed a gentleman being prosecuted for breaching a non-contact order by driving down the street his partner/ex-partner lived on, and waving at her.
The defendant's lawyer was putting it to the judge that the defendant should not be punished because he was driving down the road by accident, and was only waving to show there were no hard feelings. He sounded like he really believed it, and that his client was being unfairly picked on.
My opinion was that the defendant was waving to show that he could come by anytime, and the police wouldn't be there.
In this instance, the judge appeared to have a similar opinion to me, and remanded him in custody for the meantime.
It occurred to me that it was the lawyer's job to try to sell that line to the judge as convincingly as possible, to do less would be not doing his job properly. I wondered whether there was some sort of code that lawyers used to judges to say "My client has told me this is his excuse, and I'm trying to sound as convincing as possible, but please don't let him off" and whether using such a code would in effect not be doing the lawyer's best to get their client off, and thus failing as a lawyer. The better the lawyer does their job, the more sleazy they can look.
I also wondered whether since most (all?) judges have been lawyers, the lawyer could make their pitch secure in the knowledge that the judge was smart enough to know that the line was bullshit. There's a lot of twisty thinking down that road though.
Bits of the law look fascinating, other bits make me want to wear rubber gloves and use a long pole before examining closely.