Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to BenWilson,
That's kind of why, in the absence of much chance of them getting any list MPs, National continues to give an open goal to Banks and Dunne. It gives them two extra fairly reliable votes that don't come off the party list.
I think if that was expanded, people would start to notice and there'd be pressure to drop the dual vote (so that party votes went to the party of your electorate choice).
It's possible that if Labour's decline isn't arrested, this will work in the "left"'s favour as Labour holds electorates but loses its party votes to the Greens.
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probably kills Mana
That's down to the people of Te Tai Tokerau, really. I'm not sure they'll be any keener next time on either the MaoriNat candidate or whichever aging joker Labour manage to dredge up (I guess it's possible, and would be nice, if Labour find a bright, progressive young Maori with links to the far north. I kinda doubt it though).
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Hard News: The Watching World, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
YMMV. I've never heard Kate Adie or Ann Leslie on NZ radio.
I have heard numerous public school accents droning on about the imminent collapse of the EU, yah-yah, "fault lines" yah-yah, and so on many times on the radio. Unfortunately one smarmy git sounds like another to me, and I'm normally driving when listening to the radio and don't take notes as to the exact CV of the speaker.
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Morning Report has invited comment from the discredited Republican pollster
Similarly, when a British or European story reaches their attention, they interview some public school piece of toryscum, often failing to set their credentials in context and pretending they're some kind of objective journalist.
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The electoral college system is intended to produce emphatic results
The electoral college system is designed to limit democracy. This was done deliberately by the framers, who were much keener on democracy as a noble concept that on actually letting the common people influence anything (even at a time where many who would normally be in the proletariat were slaves or female, and not counted at all).
Ironically, it continues to serve over 200 years later, by turning the election into that horse-race exercise where votes by non-Ohians are treated as interesting input into charts and graphics, but in effect disregarded.
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to Russell Brown,
There are a bunch of ways something could be escalated:
- at an extreme, a bearded, scrofulous sysadmin (for it would be he) could have entered a senior managers office and screamed at the person until he took steps to rectify the problem
- at another extreme, managers could have been extended a standing invite to daily stand-up meetings - and of course never attended
- the traditional approach would have been to send a memo or email cc'd to everyone the sender can think of. This might well provide effective blame transference. But that's unfashionable nowadays. -
OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Obviously the process didn't work.
But if you are trying to find low-level scapegoats for sacking, then I'm sure they would argue that the existence of a document with a statement that "non-separation of networks was an urgent issue" circulated to appropriate levels of management equates to communication. Management would in turn argue that it wasn't their job to understand low-level project documents.
I suspect the Employment Tribunal would agree.
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I would imagine that they reported it, or were aware it had been reported, by making an entry in the project risk register, on the meeting minutes, or, if using Agile, in crayon on a piece of brightly coloured paper stuck to the wall of the meeting room, which will subsequently have fallen on the floor and been hoovered up by the cleaner*
Either way it was reported. Management would have then failed to understand it and ignored it.
* those outside the IT industry may not be aware of this, but this is actually the current fashionable way to manage things. The risk of data loss is usually mitigated by not employing cleaners.
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Anyways, I'm of the view that this kind of issue could happen in just about every organisation* I've ever dealt with or heard of, especially, but not exclusively, in New Zealand.
The financiers (whether government or private owners) don't want to spend money. The management don't want to understand "techy stuff". The techs can't communicate upward or outward.
The result is that every project either comes to a dead stop (which can create its own scandal, if high profile enough) or gets dragged into service with a burden of compromise and expedient. That compromise might be that it crashes under load, makes life difficult for the users, or has some kind of security hole.
(Example: I was in the bank the other day. To calculate mortgage repayments, they use CICS. That's not just software from the first half of the history of computing, it's from the first third. It's like AirNZ still operating Zeppelins. Obviously there have been many, many projects to improve the calculation of compound interest, but all have failed to achieve the importance/return/profile to surmount the bureaucracy).
* with the possible exception of military organisations where the systems/data are identified as of security importance. And their approach was often around stuff like putting the hard disk back in a locked safe after you finished with it.
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OnPoint: #WTFMSD: "Damning", in reply to John Holley,
I'm not sure where the root of this idea lies, but wonder that Deloittes might have picked up if there was actually any compromise of production Active Directory files and the like. I'm suspecting it's a bit of a red herring.