Posts by Ben Austin
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The use of urgency is pretty disgraceful. Has any party or person proposed any sort of policy that would tighten rules on this matter?
Noting of course that such tighter rules could themselves be easily changed
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I for one am glad your adrenaline can be converted into blog posts. This seems like a responsible and productive diversion
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Hard News: Media7: Doing it for the Kids, in reply to 81stcolumn,
Yes, I saw that this morning on Scoop. Seriously…what is the point of the PP plan? It seems there are no significant savings to be made from the government’s own OIA business report, so why bother?
Don’t get me wrong, I can see there might be some room for such a partnership, but the terms of both the contract and negotiation rules would need to be public from day 1 so we know what we are agreeing to and why
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North Otago, Dunedin, Wellington now London so far - all have been home but I guess only the first is where I'm from, but then the family has been there since the 1850s.
Maybe it is a rural thing, but town/country was a pretty important division growing up, so despite my urban self, I still sort of identify with the country as opposed to the town.
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Yes, I still cannot see that there has been any sort of case made for what quantifiable benefits NZ would have to gain from either signing an agreement similar or wider than the Australian- US FTA. Now that might not be a problem if it was that we would not be expected to sign up to quite significant changes in favour of the USA, but we are. So we should at least get something for that.
When Australia went through this process there were several in-depth reports commissioned to examine the benefits of such an agreement and IIRC the report (s?) that favoured the Agreement largely relied upon rather large assumptions based on the value of "invisibles". Where the latter are benefits due to relaxed investment / other rules that increase the amount of inward US investment/trade. My view then as now is that these benefits are very hard to measure and whether or not the assumed benefits are actually linked to the changes to be agreed is almost impossible to know
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Yes, the HTC Desire's internal memory is a slight hindrance, one that I like resolved by Android to allow more storage on the SD card. Most apps are able to be stored on such, just not all. I understand that if one is prepared to install Cyanogen or the like then there are other options not open to the basic Android 2.2
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Tsunami has just hit too it seems! Video link from BBC
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Cracker: It's a Wonderful Thing, in reply to Damian Christie,
Damian - thanks for the update on international viewing. I'll certainly keep an eye on Youtube.
I have to say, small consolation that it may be, the shows that TVNZ 7 makes (yours and Russell's) are the only ones I have made an effort to regularly watch since I left NZ. I would certainly pay for access to a NZ equivalent of the BBC's planned international access for a fee Iplayer app, if I could access TVNZ 7. The rest of TVNZ's current lineup I could care less about. I didn't watch it, or TV3 for about 2-3 years before I left and TVNZ 7 was not up and running at the time.
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I don't see that this has been uploaded to Youtube yet. Are there any plans to do so, or are there any other legit international viewing options? TVNZ usually blocks this kind of thing for overseas views, sadly
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I wonder what the wider economic effect of a distracted and/or lesser Christchurch will be on the rest of the South Island. In many ways it seem to have a similar relationship with the Island that Auckland does with the entire country