Posts by Alfie
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Slatergate satire from Toby Manhire.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11309070
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It's a new day and the Morning Report interviews suggest that the National Party PR machine has come up with a new strategy - deny everything... Hager apparently made it all up... nothing to see here, folks. That line might work on dedicated right winger voters but it's coming across as pretty desperate. It looks like Slatergate has the legs to run for a lot longer.
Has anybody asked exactly when Ede stopped being an accountable public servant and started being paid out of the Nats HQ Black Ops budget?
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The ODT reports Key as saying that it's "unlikely" he'll ask Judith Collins if she'd shifted a prisoner at Slater's request, or even whether she leaked information to Slater.
http://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/312598/probe-hager-book-claims-fine-key
The old 'Either I didn't know or I can't recall' trick.
Bring on those squirrels!
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I see that Cameron Slater is threatening to lay a police complaint about the hacking of his site. He also claims "insiders in Anonymous - a hacking group - had told him others in the group were gloating about how the hack was done "at Dotcom's behest"."
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11308458
The suggestion that Anonymous would degrade their reputation by associating with someone like Slater is laughable.
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Sorry James George but you're heading off on tangents. Let it go please.
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Paywalls aren't working for the Australian and although it's difficult to obtain accurate figures, it doesn't seem to be working for the Times in London either. The "ten free stories a month" model operated by the Telegraph and others is very easy to bypass once you realise that it's cookie-based. ;-)
I find it extremely depressing how many ostensibly serious news sites are aping the "You won't believe what happens when..." relentless click bait trivia approach of Buzzfeed.
As well as the endless "Ten things you need to know about..." mashups which are scattered throughout Stuff and the Herald these days.
I've been weaning myself off both of our major news sites in anticipation of paywalls and found there's more than enough quality international material available to satisfy my addiction to news. The Guardian, Telegraph (with session cookies), ProPublica, Der Spiegel, BBC, NY Times, etc all offer quality journalism and analysis for free.
Of course if you crave a diet of mind-numbing trivia, annoying auto-play videos and banal user-contributed content, then maybe Stuff is for you. ;-)
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Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to Stamper Stamp,
Maybe green energy isn't a reality after you have looked at the whole picture - a bit like the bio-energy fiasco.
You mean the rest of the world has it wrong? Germany is going solar big time, the UK is heading for 10% of homes, AU is a very solar-friendly country and the US is putting up panels like there's no tomorrow.
You may feel that electicity prices will drop in the future, but I can't see that happening. I did the figures before installing solar and I'm very happy with a 10-12 year payback. My system has already halved my power bills and the panels are guaranteed to be producing 85% efficiency after 25 years. That's 15 years of almost free power and that certainly works for me.
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The power companies will always moan that solar costs them money and that we're somehow leaching off the grid.
The worst example is in Hawaii where conventional grid power is three times the cost of mainland electricity. Power companies have imposed a moratorium on new solar connections and want to impose a fee on people with solar installations of around $120 a year. In Arizona the PowerCos tried to impose a $50 per month "penalty" on solar powered houses - legislators turned that idea down.
We have no government incentives to install solar in NZ, and no guaranteed feedback tariff. So unless the government changes, our power companies are still running the show to their advantage.
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Hard News: Going solar?, in reply to BenWilson,
Ben: The solar customers do pay for their grid use, don't they?
You're right Ben. I have a 4Kw grid-tied solar system which cost just over $11k+GST installed and I certainly subsidise Contact Energy. In the summer we're generating 350Kw in an average month, but in winter (north of Dunedin) that drops to around 100Kw per month.
My lines charge each month is just over $80+GST... that's before we start using any power. There's not much competition in our rural area so Contact generously charge us 0.3176 per unit and only pay around half that amount for the power we feed to them. The power companies are still making ridiculously healthy profits.
Even so, I reckon we'll repay our solar investment in 10-12 years... even sooner if power prices continue to rise the way they have in recent times. And it feels great to see those pretty little passive panels knocking out usable energy every day.
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Seeing $5m of scarce NZ On Air money being funnelled into one quite inappropriate project was too much for me... I couldn't bring myself to watch it. Do we really need an overpriced Auckland drama to tell the ChCh story?
I would urge everyone to take a look at Gerard Smyth's powerful, low budget doco "When A City Falls". It's raw and it's real. For me, it's easily the best film that's been made about the Christchurch quakes... it had me in tears.