Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Chris Waugh,
how much formula is going to be left for Kiwi kids who need it?
I'd assume the factories can make as much as they can sell. I suspect the only reason to restrict supply is that Fonterra don't want to undermine their Chinese partners, the sale of bulk milk powder being a much bigger business than retail cans of formula.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
One thing Thatcher never did was to introduce a Henry VIII law. I suspect the Lords wouldn't have worn it.
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Rhythm & Vines, where they're happy to mix up genres
That's on NYE, when all the people who never go to gigs go to a gig. So they (and others) try and book a wide range of acts so that lots of people can notice that their favourite B&G/metal/BBQ reggae/commercial rap act is playing and will go along.
It doesn't make for a flowing dance experience when you've got psy-trance seguing into rugby-match music (as happened the last year of Canaan Downs).
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Reluctantly ditched, I think. It was fairly marginal and if the voting process had been as simple as in NZ or Australia, she may have survived the spill.
What convinced them she was damaged goods was the huge level of opposition to the poll tax, including the biggest riot in central London since the 19th century.
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Matthew Poole,
If a supplier puts an undeclared back door into a device allowing unauthorised access, that's probably an offence under s216 or s249 of the Crimes Act and would be a police matter. So it should be for the police to look at this.
It isn't an act of war, despite all the popular wank fantasies about "cyber-warfare" and thus isn't a defence force concern.
(Open source infrastructure would avoid the problem completely)
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Matthew Poole,
It would be possibly to adopt the Irish model of having intelligence functions within the police and defence force.
This would have numerous advantages:
- there would be a clear demarcation between action against criminality and military threats. (The Defence Act requires that assistance by the Defence Force is authorized by the PM and that there is an emergency).
- the police have an imperfect regulatory process through IPCA, but at least they have that process. They also have an accepted task of detecting and preventing crime and their work can be judged by this - investigations are expected to either end in prosecutions or be dropped when no crime has been detected.
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a matter of not even being able to effect rational change
For the print workers, was it rational? A printer now (unless elevated to management) probably works longer for less money than their counterpart in the 1970s. Journalists maybe had a few golden years as papers expanded to fill 200 page Sunday supplements, but that's all gone now.
Would [co-operative ownership] have actually fixed any of the problems of the coal industry?
Well, the fundamental problems of fluctuating coal prices and carbon costs (which were unknown in 1980) don't admit of many fixes. It's to be remembered that the UK government didn't break even on the costs of fighting the miners for over ten years, and the cost of substituting coal with nuclear power was huge (and only really justified by a need to battle both the mining unions and to produce plutonium for a putative nuclear war with the Soviets).
Putting the miners in direct control of their destiny (and preferring UK mined coal over foreign imports) might have lead to an extended and controlled rundown of the industry, giving people and communities a chance to adjust and disperse.
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Hard News: Thatcher, in reply to Russell Brown,
I have also been thinking about this.
The fundamental problem that Britain had (and largely still has) was a total lack of community of interest between employers and workers.
The former (drawn in human terms from a public school educated, isolated caste) were concerned to achieve profits with minimal investment and thus maintain their dominant economic position. For the workers the only option for their own betterment was to utilise their one form of leverage - withdrawing their labour (or threatening to do so) at the point where it would cause maximum disruption (such as to a newspaper about to go to press).
In postwar Britain before 1979, this had reached a fairly dysfunctional equilibrium where workers had fairly secure employment and decent wages and business/state functions rattled along getting steadily more broken, to the detriment of the employer class. This was partly manifest in stagflation, but that was mostly due to the fact the employers were unable to attack employment or conditions due to union strength.
What Thatcher did was to use the physical power of the state to wage war on the working class, enabling the employers to impose reduced conditions and employment and shift the burden of economic dysfunction from rich to poor.
There was an alternative: a radical government could have transferred industries from state and private capitalism into cooperative hands while removing the institutions that maintain class division (public schools, elite universities and undertaxed wealth accumulation*). This would create a world where workers own and control their employers and generate that community of interest between enterprise and worker which is so lacking.
[* The Attlee government paved a way here. The reason there are so National Trust owned mansions for tourists to visit in the UK was due to that government's tax policies making such properties unaffordable in private hands. Unfortunately, this didn't last - widespread tax evasion was followed by Thatcher removing the taxes and enabling plutocracy to dominate again ]
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I'd note that Ireland (a country of similar size to NZ, which complies with international conventions and has somewhat larger security worries) subordinates its intelligence organisations to the police and military.
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Hard News: Key Questions, in reply to Steve Barnes,
GCSB derives it's name from GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) which was created as a cover identity for the UK's codebreaking organisation (a more obscure one that the former Government Code and Cypher School).
I don't think Bletchley Park had much involvement in actual government communications (provided in those days by the GPO and the Signals Corps/Admiralty) - those functions which actually fit the name were added as the organisation grew.