Posts by Paul Campbell
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Of course people in Dunedin get up - Toy Love upstairs in the Cook packed to the gills was the very best place to see/feel/hear them - I wish they could record that.
A very early memory of Chris: sitting in the Gardens Tavern an evil booze barn near the Otago campus watching some dreadful 70s hair band - I can still remember Chris saying "even I could do better than that" ..... he was right
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Peter - I mostly agree that movies need special protection - anyone can make and record music in their garage these days - they don't need a recording studio, pressing plants, warehouses, trucks, or stores any more.
The same thing applies to DVDs - except for the recording studio - that's why we've ended up with YouTube - real movies genuinely cost millions of dollars to make and for that reason they need to be able to make that money back or we just wont have any movies.
However consider this graph record labels are losing money, artists are earning more than they used to for performance - in fact more than they are losing from piracy so they are better off - and the total music industry income is actually going up - it's just that there's a bunch of guys in LA who can't afford their coke habits any more and they're pissed, and they can still afford lawyers and lobbyists - that wont last, eventually, just like the dinosaurs, they'll go away.
The movie industry has an equivalent to "live performances" those are those initial big screen performances - to be viable I think you need to structure your business to survive on those - just like the movie industry 30 years ago used to - TV, PPV, DVD sales will bring in some extra gravy but as soon as your product hits that market the cat's out of the bag so don't depend on it.
Near 0-cost distribution and duplication changes the world - you can't make it go away so you have to adapt
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oh - a "sub arachnoid haemorrhage" is a real thing - initially I figured you were just pulling (all 8 of) their legs
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Kyle - it's not that they need parking wardens per-se but they need the parking wardens to write the tickets and they need the tickets to collect the fines. Because after all parking fines make for good city income.
Still - can't be as bad as Dunedin's recent parking debacle where the city council managed to piss off just everyone in the city by almost doubling the number of meters and converting a lot of the P15/30 spots into metered parking - probably in an attempt to cover some of the cost of the stadium. The result has pushed the cars of people who used to park all day downtown further into the surrounding neighbourhoods pissing those people off too.
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Happens the world over - I got a ticket when I lived in Oakland - from the San Jose airport for a car that was different colour from my truck - I did all the by-mail appeals etc but couldn't persuade them that it wasn't me and couldn't afford the time off to contest it in court - I had to pay it.
BTW - in California you can't convict someone without a trial what technically happens with parking tickets is that you pay the bail and then skip out on it - that's the fine.
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He's good at scaring small children - he could be a scary clown
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Russell - yeah I think denial is part of it - "I didn't pay them and nothing bad happened ..." probably helps.
When I moved back home to NZ I filed my US taxes and somehow they got lost .... The IRS kept sending me annoying letters and I just ignored them, they were far far away and I hadn't done anything bad .... then a year later they sent me the bill for half a million dollars ... that made me wake up, refile (now with the actual records that had been stalled in transit with the rest of our belongings) and they sent me a big refund
Probably we need more creative ways to help break the denial - a polite visit from a nice policeman, refusal to process a WoF or registrations, towing rather than more tickets would help people wake up to the fact that they haven't been forgotten
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probably with stuff like parking fines the system shouldn't let things be able to get so out of hand - $20k in parking fines at what? $200 a pop is 100 tickets - anyone with more than 10 tickets outstanding is probably heading for trouble and needs to be pulled in for a good talking to by a judge, hit 20 after that warning and it's probably time to start taking the bus because if you can't afford the fines you can't really afford to run the car the way you are using it
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I must admit my favourite headline ever was from the ODT: "Police stoned during IRA raid"
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Speaking of U2 and the Berlin Wall - they're in trouble for building a Berlin Wall