Posts by Russell Brown
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Excellent discussion indeed!
I've just stacked two metres of wood and I'm too tired to even dig out all my old civil unions posts to find out what I think ...
But Tess, can I say I admire the skillful and sincere way you're pursuing an argument at odds with the majority view of the thread. Nicely done.
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But with many of the media's big players - including Rupert Murdoch - thinking of charging for content, is the tide about to turn?
You're not allowed to mention newspapers, Rob. You've never worked for one, so how could you possibly know what you're talking about?
But seriously, the Murdoch experiment will be interesting -- it's been tried before though, so I hope he has a better model than premium subscription, because except in the case of newspapers that sell raw data (ie: the WSJ) it hasn't worked. And no one will ever stop copy and paste.
The problem isn't that people are reading the news for free (it's not like newspapers actually pay the bills out of newspaper sales -- the money they make from those is quite small), but there there's not enough advertising revenue chasing too much inventory.
At any rate, even if it works, there will still be plenty o' free in the Murdoch papers online.
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Meanwhile on their own bloody blog, its "destabilising" the appointments haven't been made already, yet it was "anti-democratic" it was set up under urgency?
I think the point is that it's destabilising that the government is charging ahead without anyone really being sure what what the hell's going on. Quote from that blog post:
Notwithstanding the community opposition to the anti-democratic aspects of the Government’s super city model, there is mounting concern about the uncertainty generated by the Government’s handling of the transition. And this only days after the enabling legislation was bulldozed through under urgency. This draconian law strips local councils of their powers (check out s 31 of the Local Government Auckland Reorganization Act) and gives them to the new transition agency. As a result, some development projects around town are grinding to a halt.
In Waitakere alone, question marks hang over two big projects, the New Lynn railway and urban redevelopment, and the Westgate mall expansion. Banks and private sector partners are nervous about continuing. They don’t know whether they should be negotiating with the Council, or with the transition agency, and whether the new super city will want to continue with the projects. Tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of private sector jobs could be at risk.
The Government could fix the problem by getting the transition agency to work closely with Councils to decide which projects get the go-ahead. First though, appoint your transition agency.
ie: They should first appoint their transition agency and then actually consult with the bodies affected so they know what the hell's going on. The comments from Bhatnagar, a very faithful soldier, are quite telling. He was reduced to saying he hoped they wouldn't take their new rules too seriously.
Imagine what finger I'm holding up, and have a good day because I appreciate being called a liar about as much as you do.
Woah. There's no need for that. I apologise if you took it as me calling you a liar, but you seemed to be agreeing with Garner that they'd been demanding that the process be accelerated, and I don't see any evidence of that. I was taking issue with your argument.
Also, I did watch some of the filibuster coverage, and as far as I could see it wasn't as you depicted it.
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Six? Really? I think the wheels will come off far sooner than that.
I'll believe that if and when the polls start turning.
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Hi Helen!
For that reason my company agreed to develop the Freedom Farms website as they do a great job in providing a solution to the problem of intensive pig farming.
I'm glad to have my favourable impression of the company confirmed by you.
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The brutalisation of those who work in factory slaughter situations must surely have a huge social cost.
I'm not aware of research to that effect -- but working in American chicken plants is bad for your health and various other things. It's a disgusting, exploitative industry that preys on a largely immigrant workforce in a brutal fashion.
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FWIW, I think the commentariat has said too much about the Auckland/Albert shemozzle ending National's "honeymoon" (ie: they've decided that's the case) and rather too little about something equally significant -- that it has energised and given a sense of purpose to the Labour caucus.
It's remarkable to think that it's only about three weeks ago that the Labour MPs were still looking like a rabble, and fretting about the by-election, but now they have some real issues and actually seem to be enjoying themselves.
They'd best be coming to terms with Opposition politics of course, because it's still odds-on that they'll have six years of it.
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Seriously, were there any substantive amendments put up that would have genuinely improved the bill and the Opposition had the slightest interest in passing?
Yes, there were actually. The points about council employee maternity leave being endangered weren't trivial, even if they were airily dismissed. And a number of the Labour MPs spoke really well about what was being done.
And we're done with the idea that Labour has said two different things about the haste of the process, then? C'mon Craig -- putting another side to the argument is one thing, but that was just making stuff up.
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I think we should, as a nation, look very carefully at the way we transport and kill *all* our domestic food animals.
Agreed. Although I suppose we can console ourselves that we don't have the filthy American horrorshows described by Eric Schlosser in Fast Food Nation.
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For once, Russell, I'd actually cut Duncan a bit of slack, because in the wonderful world of knee-jerk opposition politics you can demand to know why the process is taking so long, anddecry the indecent haste of it all because there's no shot you can afford not to take.
I'm not aware that they have though. Perhaps you know something I don't. OTOH, they did spend the weekend trying to slow the thing down while the government was shoving everything through under urgency.
Even the postponed announcement was evidence of haste in itself. Rodney Hide shouldn't even have said he was making the announcement until he had his appointments signed off by Cabinet.
And now they've rushed through the bill that sets up the ATA, it contains provisions that even Aaron Bhatnagar is complaining about.
It's ridiculous, frankly.
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