Posts by Rich of Observationz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
the state should not fund a broadcaster
The BBC has cutouts that are (supposed to) protect it from political influence. For instance, presenters in news and current affairs are not allowed to disclose political opinions: a Paul Henry or Mike Hoskyns would not be employed by the BBC (or indeed in UK commercial TV), except maybe in light entertainment.
Of course, the BBC does centre itself around a "mainstream" position, as you might expect.
-
Speaker: Broadcasting and the Public Interest, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
Like it or not it's still where the eyeballs are.
I said it had a long tail but that doesn't mean it'll last forever. And as Netflix and other things take the viewers away, revenues are falling, which means content budgets are falling, which means content gets worse, which drives viewers to Netflix.
-
Broadcast TV is pretty much obsolete technology - looking at a clean sheet of paper, why would you spend millions on a dedicated radio pipe to do the same thing as near free internet bandwidth?
Of course it will have a long tail, but eventually (I'd give it 20 years, max) TV3 will switch off and then there will be a question of how long the government keep TVNZ on life support.
-
Yeah, I'm not sure how I'll do getting up in the morning with no Redbird.
Could they downsize to something sustainable? What does full-size FM transmission cost? (I believe they are on a "student" license but have a high-power transmitter that reaches all of the city and the Hutt).
-
Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Nick Russell,
Well, I don't have any qualms about Trump fatigue. I don't have any say in who the USians elect, any more than I can do anything about Putin, Duterte, Xi Jinping or many other world despots (actually, even the Chinese can't do anything about Xi Jinping apart from insurrection). I do actually have a vote in the UK for another couple of years, but it's lost in the great mass of stupid.
-
For historical context, this was a fairly common thing: before 1949, the then British empire had a common citizenship and most* people born in any colony were citizens of the whole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_subject. Those people all got stripped of their British nationality as their countries became independent, and then Britain went on to strip that nationality from all the other (non-white) people in countries that they *did* continue ruling, like Hong Kong.
* Not Indians who were subjects of the indirectly ruled "princely states" which covered a large chunk of India. Probably not Egyptians, given that Britain was nominally suzerain there.
-
I was in Andorra in August. Didn't see a crop that wasn't tobacco - tiny little fields of tobacco that I assume are part of some complex tax/duty dodge.
I had a very nice meal in the classiest Auberge de Jeunesse I've ever stayed in. Didn't involve omelette though.
-
There may be a biosecurity issue. We can't have people just bringing in weed, with the concomitant risk of Mexican Marijuana Maggots devastating our local crop.
-
Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Russell Brown,
Well, Russia refrained from trying to infiltrate Austria (and after the 1950s, NATO refrained from trying to infiltrate the Warsaw Pact - before that they did, but all their attempts were betrayed by Philby).
But then, Khrushchev and Brezhnev (not to mention Eisenhower and Nixon) were relatively sane and responsible politicians.
-
Hard News: The next four years, in reply to Russell Brown,
True. But actually, I'd incline to the view that Europe would be more secure if the Baltics and Poland were neutral and secure by treaty (like Austria after 1955) and there was a demilitarised buffer between Russian and NATO forces.
The rush by NATO to move its frontiers up to and beyond the limits of the former Soviet Union does not seem, in retrospect, to have been sensible realpolitik.