Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Speaker: You ain't from round here, in reply to Hebe,
BTW, if you are looking for Press or other Fairfax content from the quake era, it's largely up on https://quakestudies.canterbury.ac.nz/. Searchable and downloadable PDF files. Built by the late, (not in a corporeal sense) great team at Learning Media.
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Speaker: You ain't from round here, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Christchurch
That is truly brilliant.
I don't believe Hide's thing that councils are only about services and hence apolitical, because services (and everything else) are intrinsically political.
But I don't buy the idea that councils can conduct an industrial policy that they have neither the fund or legislative basis to do so. Is Apple's success due to the progressive policies of the Cupertino City Council? I think not.
Last time the big thing was that we needed council funded free-WiFi which would revolutionise the city and take is into the 22nd century, or something. It was duly built (with a bit of help from TradeMe) and now I have to switch WiFi off on the bus through town or it breaks my 3G connection while I read their adverts and log in (or just disable WiFi).
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Wellington's council candidates seem to vary between mildly useless and truly offensive.
I don't think any of them understand what a city council does or what the role of councillors is.
A council doesn't "lead the growth of the city into the bright pastures of a new tomorrow" - it disposes of shit and garbage (and runs other important services, regulates building development and use, etc). The task of council is do these jobs effectively - improving employee engagement would be a good start.
Councillors are not employees subordinate to the CEO and paid officers. They are the representatives of the people who voted them in. If they're opposed to something (like a completely unnecessary flyover) I'd like to hear them opposing it, not keeping quiet to the last minute in the hope we might compromise on painting it a better colour or something.
If it were not for the need to put Morrison last, I'd seriously consider not voting.
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Normally I'd support this, but the involvement of Farrar makes me suspect.
Is this one of those things where any benefit will be snarfed by other companies in the absurdly complex telco foodchain, and the "winning" and "losing" firms have both bought different elements in the National party?
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Do we have laws and practices in NZ about separation of church and state?
Is it reasonable to have an overtly Christian waiata / prayer in a government body / SOE meeting? Does it being part of tikanga Maori make it ok?
(I know in the US it very much wouldn't be. People can be very staunch about that over there).
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We had an HR man at a firm I worked in in the UK who was very much the "big I am" - carried on as if he was some sort of deputy CEO. When he left, they advertised his job and we discovered he was earning about the same as a junior programmer.
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What they could do is have a whole round of byelections where all the electorate MPs who can't stand Cunliffe resign en masse to be replaced by smart new positive candidates. It'd be a bit of a propaganda win if it was done right.
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your average Russian spy probably isn't a member of the Communist Party these days
I'd imagine the "are you a member of the Communist Party" is asked of potential FSB employees, and with a negative answer required.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to SteveH,
I think the questions were put there in response to various moral panics over the years.
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Hard News: The shaky ground of…, in reply to linger,
I suppose you could teach a class in a manner heavily biased to one learning style and see if their results correlated with the predicted learning styles - e.g. the ones with a compatible learning style did better.
Unethical, I guess.