Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to DCBCauchi,
I do not think you have to give your name and address.
Name, address, date of birth, and occupation. You don't have to give them anything further, and you don't have to stay and talk to them unless they say they're questioning you pursuant to a particular enactment. You are, however, free to leave at any time unless they arrest you.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to DCBCauchi,
The Dunedin cops are hard-arses
So you're alleging that the Dunedin fuzz put the city council up to this? That's a pretty hefty allegation. Got proof?
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And so it begins. Occupy Dunedin has been issued a trespass warning from the Octagon, effective 20:00 today, and after refusing the Council's offer of an alternative that's rather further out of the centre of town, they're being evicted entirely.
Not sure how I feel about this. I don't like the Council using public space laws to evict a legal protest just because the protesters don't want to go to a smaller, less-visible location. -
OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
But, damn, I wish Cunliffe wasn’t quite so blithe about it leading to lower wage increases.
Given the state of wage increases in recent years, lower is still better than none. I'm sure the Parliamentary Secretaries and EAs would love to get any pay increase, after generously being offered zero percent for the next three years, following on from the lucrative zero percent they've received since National came to power. I think they'd happily take 1% minus 0.5% over what they've been getting lately, and I'm sure they're not alone.
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OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
That's why I tempered it by halving Treasury's projections, Craig. At some point wages will increase, and Labour's not talking about introducing the policy immediately. Or do you think that another term of National will put the country into terminal decline and wages will never rise again?
ETA: I also think the policy needs to be implemented regardless of the accuracy of Treasury's projections. We've coddled business owners long e-bloody-nough about how they treat their staff. I'd like to see a provision that forces employers to disclose when they are reducing pay increases to compensate for increased employer contributions into KS, with stiff monetary penalties for misleading behaviour. If they're too cheap to pay their staff properly, they should be at risk of it costing them far more than the saved wages if they aren't honest about it.
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OnPoint: If Wishes Were Horses..., in reply to Andrew C,
The compulsory contributions are going to increase over time (did Goff say 7%? I was distracted when he was on the radio talking about it), and employers might well not have room to additionally add in the hand wages rises on top of this.
Increasing at a rate of 0.5% per year. Treasury's projecting (yeah yeah, I know) wage growth of 3.8% per annum. Even if Treasury's only got it half right, that's still a 1.4% increase in wages over and above the employer's contribution.
And, frankly, I'm bloody sick of the harping on about how employers can't afford this. We put up with far too many shitty employers in this country, and let them get away with murder because, somehow, they're doing the country a favour by deigning to employ people. If they don't want to wear the cost, then they can be upfront with their employees about how they're too stingy to care for their employees' long-term financial health, and will be granting lower pay increases as a result. But if they can't afford to wear the cost, then they're probably on the verge of going under anyway. A 0.5% increase in the annual wage bill is fuck-all of nothing.
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I'm really curious to see whether any of the government's reaction to Auckland's desire for something approximating balanced transport spending will make it beyond our borders.
Auckland is unquestionably a much, much more "world-class" city now than it was in even 1990, let alone 1950, but we're still running on a 1950s transport plan predicated on paving everything, and right from the opening ceremony it's been on display to journalists who're used to affordable (Auckland's transport fares are significantly higher than many other places), reliable (we had only three train breakdowns in September), high-quality public transport. Not that I'd expect it to make a shit of difference to the Minister of Trucks, but it'd be nice if some foreigners who aren't transport experts passed comment on who awful the public transport experience in NZ as a whole, and Auckland (as the largest city) in particular, really is.
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Hard News: Thinking Digital, in reply to BenWilson,
One time pads are ironically one of the oldest forms of encryption, and also the only kind that could never, ever be cracked. So long as you one-time the pad, of course.
They also pose distribution security challenges which, if surmounted adequately, indicate the existence of a distribution channel of sufficient security to make the use of the pads redundant. When you can send a one-time pad with perfect certainty that it cannot be compromised, you don’t need the pad :P
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Hard News: Winning the RWC: it's complicated, in reply to izogi,
particularly (so I hear) domestic violence fluctuate depending on whether a particular rugby team is having a good season
One of the directors for a play festival I'm involved with works for a counselling service as her real job, and had to produce a "What to do if the All Blacks lose" sheet for the counsellors. She felt like a heretic, being a huge rugby fan (I think a lot of it has to do with SBW's shirt), but also conceded the point when I said "It shows you how thoroughly fucking unbalanced our national psyche is that you even have to do that."
After all, when was the last time the collective nation got overwrought to the point of violence and depression because a Kiwi didn't win a Nobel Prize for which they'd been nominated?
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
How much of TVNZ's 2007 output was house pr0n?
How much of TV3's (and the rest of t3h meedja) output is still house pr0n? Fluctuations in housing prices are front-page news for Granny on a regular basis.