Posts by BenWilson
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Songwriters need people who believe in them. And that belief is its own reward.
Too true. Artists generally are precious and fragile and they need our love and support. It's not like they don't earn it, but even if they don't, they should get it anyway.
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Hard News: Cabinet and the Reeferendum, in reply to andin,
How long is that going to take? Fucking forever, death will come sooner at this rate.
I've never felt it to be more imminent, TBH.
I don't really think the greatest danger is the idiotic Nats ATM, it's people within the coalition. Whilst it's an issue that has quite a lot of popular support, I don't think that is along anywhere near as partisan lines as issues like taxation or education. Which is part of the reason a referendum does make some sense. But the coalition does have the power to muck up the framing hard enough that it's just not quite going to cross the threshold. Hopefully they do not do that, they aim for a referendum that is sufficiently conservative that it has a high chance of a clear yes majority, whilst still representing meaningful and helpful reform.
National are basically playing themselves into a foolish corner because there is no required or even clearly likely link between a referendum yes and a party vote either way, and all they can do by failing to engage properly in good faith is show themselves to be disorganized and quite possibly to alienate a significant chunk of their currently dwindling vote.
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Hard News: Cabinet and the Reeferendum, in reply to Sacha,
Peter Dunne is not impressed.
Well, he did have like 16 years or so to have a go himself....
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Just want to say thanks Russell for keeping the constant feed of good quality info on this unfolding process. I don't have much more to say other than it looks like it's well in hand. In fact, that's really why I don't have much more to say. Swarbrick is doing an astounding job of keeping the whole thing real and perhaps it's quite sound of the government to let her get on with it. Even the sad lack of coherent debate from the Opposition is not really that bothering - I think Bridges neverending single digit popularity is a sign that the public just can't take him seriously, because he is inherently not really a serious leader.
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I will miss a few of the serious journalists like Nippert and Fisher, and I’ll see how that goes over time. But I could never contribute to any media company which continues to publish reguritated brain farts from the likes of the Hoskings and the Sopers. I just couldn’t.
Quite. And I doubt I will actually miss anything good because everything gets re-shared, reshaped, repeated, etc on blogs and social media. I feel a little bit guilty that people did good work and didn't get paid properly for it, but that's really not my fault, and no amount of paying the Herald will fix it. I don't know what will but I'm damned sure it won't be this.
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Speaker: The economics of shit speech, in reply to Sacha,
Libraries, coffeeshops, etc.
Yes! That's where I read the paper version today. So I guess not all is lost.
I don't have any answers for the fine art of journalism. I very much doubt this is going to work out for the Herald writers, when far, far more successful newspapers around the world can't even make paywalls work. It's a bind because once you accept that it's a rearguard action, then it really fucks with any feelings that I should help to prop the thing up, right up until it dies - about 6 months from now, using maybe $30 of my money, one dollar of which will go to the likes of Keith Ng and Matt Nippert, and the rest supporting a crumbling establishment, and a scary amount of that $30 ending up in Mike Hosking's gas tank to be squirted out on cyclists.
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Speaker: The economics of shit speech, in reply to Emma Hart,
I do too, but here’s my issue. If we end up with good-quality journalism behind paywalls, how are poor people supposed to access it?
Yes, that would be like the bad old days when they literally had to buy the paper one because that's all there was.
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Hard News: What does the wastewater…, in reply to linger,
that subset has a total consumption of 16kg a week
Without knowing anything about how many people are using that, it's hard to figure out whether this is a lot or not very much at all. I expect mean use is a somewhat misleading statistic anyway, since it would be highly right skewed - the vast majority of users would hardly ever have it, and there would be a small hard core that use heaps.
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Legal Beagle: A (non-)submission on the…, in reply to Pete,
Yep this is where NZ cleaves into two nations all right
I would not consider the tiny number of people determined to own military style assault rifles a nation.
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Prioritising costs will lead to bunny control being underfunded hence more ecological damage
Farmers don’t kill bunnies for ecological reasons, they do it for commercial reasons, and paying someone to do it properly is a sound commercial expenditure in a real business. I’m still not really seeing the reason why military style assault rifles should be owned by anything other than a very small number of people with a very genuine business reason.
I’m not getting any kind of feel from you that this is really about pest control. It’s about the right to have those weapons because you like them. I’m sorry, that’s just too bad now.
ETA: The reason I don't feel like it's about pest control with you is that you only give the laziest of throwaways on that cost, and then all your arguments focus around the lethality of all sorts of other things that have not been banned, which is an entirely different argument. You keep coming back to that, so it's pretty clear that's really your whole actual reason for outrage. You wanted those guns and you don't intend to slaughter anyone, so therefore people owning cars who also don't intend to slaughter anyone is unfair somehow. It's not a good faith engagement, so don't expect inclusiveness.