Posts by Steve Withers
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
The only piece of Apple hardware I have ever bought for my personal use is my iPod Touch...and I love it to bits. It is SO cool.
But it's crippled by iTunes and the shackle to the one PC on the planet that is supposed to be my library...and I can't even delete a song, video or podcast off it without paying homage to iTunes on my one PC.
Instead of upgrading to an iPhone (as I had initially intended) I bought an Android phone (HTC Magic)...and it is everything th iPhone *should* be....but isn't. OK...there are only 25,000 apps for Android (up from 10,000 last July when I bought it)....but I only use 150-ish of them...and the 150 I have do what I need doing more than well enough.
An iPad isn't a laptop...but too big to be phone even if it had been allowed to be one. It suffers the curse of all tablets.
Let's see how it goes.
-
We need to make it clear to our governments - any government - that negotiating treaties like this - in secret - simply isn't acceptable. Particularly if the treaty can't be easily un-done once it is done. That amounts to a constitutional imposition without any real consultation. The hasty, too-late-anyway, pro-forma version consultation we have seen so much of in recent years from National and Labour doesn't count.
Can you imagine how this would play out if we didn't have MMP? the daily STFU to voters from pollies in the pocket of whichever lobby would be unbearable.....just as it used to be.
Most politicians aren't in the pocket of any lobby group.....but some key ones clearly are: like Steven Joyce and Infratil and the trucking industry. Roads over rail - utterly braindead - even as the oil production of the world has already peaked (2008).
No surprise our government may well line up with foreign interests over our own...they have done it over and over - Labour or National - hoping ti win trade concession they never got in the end.
You'd think they'd stop being played for suckers.
Apparently not.
-
John Key seems to be the velvet glove on the iron fist of neo-liberal fanaticism that drives many of the senior ministers in Key's cabinet.
The number of times Key has had to overturn or modify the intentions of his ministers is most interesting. I know people in the public service. When some Minister seems determined to take some hare-brained path into The Land of Stupid, appeals are made to Key via alternate channels....and very often the Rush to Dumb is kerbed....or softened.
It sounds like the way the Saudis do things: Appeals to the King as the last resort to overcome dumbness at lower levels.
I've wondered if they hard-liners won't just discard Key when they get to the meaty part of their rape-the-State-for-Crony-profits agenda.
-
MMP has provided stable, effective government while at the same time limiting the effective dictatorhships we used to suffer under with First Past the Post.
It has been able to do this BECAUSE it is a fully proportional voting system.
Kiwis would be mad to throw away their ability to elect the people they want.....
I don't think they will.
The threshold could be reduced to 3% or 4% and get rid of the 1-seat exception to proportionality. Restore the 50/50 ratio between list and local. The list MPs have been doing a fine job - especially for the minor parties.....while the safe seats for the major parties have been a refuge for deadwood since 1855.
-
Russell: Your experience is one of the reasons I've remained wary of online music purchases. Only in the last few months have I dared to buy as many as 10 (ten) songs from iTunes, across 6 months. I used to buy dozens of LPs / month bac kwhen they were $10 each. Then we moved to $32.99 CDs with are cheaper to make and include less art work, and I felt ripped off. As usual, most of the songs on an album aren't worth listneing to, but you have to buy them to get the ongood ones. I more or less stopped buying music.
Then, for the past several years, the attitude of the RIAA toward music buyers has put me off again and again...and I now buy very little music at all. Their music is essentially imposed on us as our "culture" and they want to own it outright. Sorry......They can keep it. I'll listen to artists I can access by means OTHER than the RIAA and its agents / puppets and clients.
Sorry artists....the RIAA has cost you this music lover....at least.
-
If a person thinks there is such a thing as a good reason to kill a born human being, then they can't really quarrel over the reasons others conjure up for themselves.
Approving of Tiller's killer while deploring Osama Bin Laden is purely and simply hypocritical. Such a person is clearly in favour of murders they approve of, the debate then become about whether you approve or not and is removed from the realm of killing being inherently wrong.
Is abortion killing? I do not think it is in the first tri-mester. After that the situation becomes more grey and ambiguous.
But whatever one's views may be, killing someone who is unambiguously human muct be wrong in any context - including capital punishment.......or we simply return to the debate about excuses.
-
Thank you, Russell. That sums it up very well. The government's intention to get rid of MMP arises from the same source. Democracy prevents these procedural pirates from seizing assets and milking us for our cash. So democracy is the enemy. If one messagecomes through loud and clear from the government, this is it.
-
acidophilus / bifidus yogurt will do as well (or better) as the pills and be more enjoyable on fruit....and probably cheaper.....depends how much you eat in a serving. :-)
-
Mason's attitude is not an unfamiliar one. Many people will downplay the wrong they do.
The Herald again demonstrated they don't let the facts get in the way of their political agenda by calling the face-punch the ear-flick dad. I'm once again glad I didn't my money on a copy.
-
On the subject of TV, I'm coming to the conclusion that entertainment television is the biggest destroyer of human potential ever invented. It is a global auto-dumb-down system that reaches into almost every home in the developed world. The longer it has been available in a country, the more broken that country's community / volunteer support mechanisms are and the greater the ignorance of its citizens about almost everything that actually matters. Things like democracy and how your own society work become black boxes to you because they aren't as entertaining as CSI or Shortland St. The vast majority become hedgehogs on the highway of life....and they did it to themselves by overdosing on the TV drug for years on end.