Posts by Keith Ng
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Gareth Ward,
I don't believe the logic says that - because the counter would be that you're arguing a Government should continue to issue debt to buy more and more profitable private companies.
The current stated reason (in Key's speech) for privatisation is that we can't acquire more debt, therefore we need to sell assets to raise capital. The "we can't acquire more debt" part is without qualification, which makes it possible (and necessary) to argue for selling profitable assets, simply because "we can't acquire more debt".
Saying that this is an illogical position doesn't mean that the state MUST therefore take every opportunity to invest in profitable enterprises.
Of course, there are good reasons for the state to limit its investments, and it does. It invests exclusively in natural monopolies, in sectors that are heavily regulated (because they are natural monopolies). That's a pretty clear and logical line to draw, whereas the current proposal: "the state should be invested at whatever level it stands at in 2011", regardless of benefit, that's entirely arbitrary.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Lyndon Hood,
The Chairman seems to know, but perhaps someone can help me out: How will part-selling Solid Energy help it raise capital?
I think the argument is that, free from meddling government ownership, they can raise more capital.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Jimmy Southgate,
Yeah, Treasury's probably going to come out in favour, but I want to know what their case is and whether it stacks up.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to Kumara Republic,
"You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea” – Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers, shot dead by the KKK in 1963.
You can kill a man, but that probably won’t affect the operation of distributed servers run by people other than the guy you just killed.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Anyone know if Hong Kong is inside the wall - when I was there earlier this year some potentially interesting stuff seemed inaccessible - but probably not as much as I'd have expected if it were (no problems with PA though).
Nope. Hong Kong and Macau are firmly outside the wall.
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OnPoint: Pay Attention, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm surprised Public Address can get through the wall.
This stuff is MAD arbitrary. My domain, which hosts nothing but my Google Apps email, is blocked. Took me a day to figure out that they didn't actually block Google Apps. Dropbox is inexplicably blocked. Half the Tor site is blocked some of the time.
It's not so much a "wall" as potholes strewn wildly about the place.
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Collective nouns don't have feelings.
More importantly, collective nouns can't sue for defamation.
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Would you be able to write in depth commentaries on all these subjects on the same day without some expert in, say treaty law throwing a tantrum because there were errors in your legal analysis?
Here's my dirty secret. I have no stats qualification. I have no economic qualifications. My degree was in political science and religious studies, and my honours focused on 16th century philosophers like Hobbes and Hume.
My fisking contains no actual statistical analysis. All I ever do is read the source, the footnotes and the titles. The only things I ever pick up and start fisking are things that common sense will tell you is complete crap (e.g. "Wages grew 13x faster in the recession") or things that jar with what I remember from 6th form statistics.
My point is that I don't care, as a starting point, whether journalists can or can't do this. I care that, because they don't, they are a disruptive and irrational force that is harmful to collective decision-making (e.g. Climate change).
But even if they have the aptitude and the resources to do it, their format doesn't allow it. Say I was standing next to a NZPA journo writing that inflation piece, and I explain everything I wrote in the blog to them, then what? It doesn't fit with the conventions of a news story. Isn't that just a bit fucked?
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Danyl, I feel that some of the commenters have been unfairly harsh and a tad aggressive about what you've said. The PAS community is a great bunch of folks, but we do hate on the MSM pretty hard. I do too. I know I over-generalise about the crappy aspects, and under-appreciate the good parts. I'm working on it.
But if journalism is simply a passive reporter of information, then what's the point of their existence? What does, for example, NZPA provide that Scoop doesn't? Completely predictable quotes containing nothing but platitudes from the opposing side? Slightly more snappy copy?
If journalists don't have any subject knowledge, or have the time and aptitude to learn about it, then I don't see what value they actually provide.
Once upon a time, I though that resource was the biggest issue. I thought that if they could afford factcheckers, they would do this. This is not true. I can debunk facts, I can provide transparent links to authoritative official data, and still nobody cares. I can prove that politicians flat out lie about facts, base policies on complete bullshit, and... nothing.
According to our editorial gatekeepers, statistics are basically opinions. Nobody cares when a minister lies about statistics, about how the country is doing, or evidence for a policy - because that's basically opinions anyway.
Unlike you and Russell, I *don't* have real newsroom experience. All I know is that a great deal of the information published in our media is wrong. It's academic whether that information is quoted, or paraphased or editorialised, in columns or features or news. When the headline reads "'Inflation Figures Encouraging' - English", people think inflation figures are good. The only people who pay attention to whether it's an opinion or a stated fact from the editorial voice are people like us.
The experience that I do have is sitting around the table at the PM's office. Since the media has no truth-filter, lies and truth get the same mileage. It means that perfectly good ideas become political liabilities. Bullshit ideas become core policies for no good reason.
It makes a mockery of the idea of governance by an informed citizenry, and it has turned politics into the circus of bullshit that it is today.
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The headline of the NZPA/Herald story is:
"Govt claims credit for six-year inflation low"
How is this not true? Doesn't your piece make an identical claim?Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was just blowing off steam with that comment. I got a bit pissed off after seeing these headlines