Posts by Alfie
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An excellent interview with Ross Bell on Morning Report today. It seems that the government is more than happy to use cowboy meth reports which Housing NZ freely admits are dodgy, as an excuse to evict tenants.
Underlying this mess is the National Party's ideology that the state shouldn't be in the public housing business. Or anything that benefits poor people. Now tax cuts for the rich, that's a different thing altogether, innit.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
...at least he had the good grace to put his name to his ongoing relitigation of this case...
That's about the best you can say about van Beynen's effort.
I guess I'm biased. I worked on lots of news and current affairs stories about the Bain case, firstly for TVNZ then for TV3. For years it's been an ongoing subject of discussion amongst those journalists and broadcasters who covered the case closely, and almost without exception they believe Bain is innocent.
I've been privvy to interviews and other information which never made it into the public arena and which convinced me that David Bain was wrongfully convicted. I'll tread very carefully here, but it's a matter of record that the day before the murders, David's sister Laniet had told her pimp Dean Cottle that she planned to confess to her family that evening about her prostitution. That posed a serious threat to the people Cottle worked for... powerful people within the Dunedin brothel scene, people with reputations to protect.
It's also a matter of record that Cottle was dispatched offshore, didn't show at the trial and his evidence was never heard by the jury.
While it would be unwise to elaborate further, keep in mind that the cop in charge of the investigation, Milton Weir, subsequently lost a defamation case he took against Joe Karam.
It speaks to his credibility that Martin van Beynen managed to write an editorial on this subject without once mentioning Judith Collins' disgraceful role in rejecting the Binnie report because it didn't coincide with her prejudice.
Yes, someone got away with multiple murders.
It wasn't David Bain.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I’m tempted to ring the Press and ask what a front page costs these days.
Their remaining credibility?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
...a Police operation in the Queenstown area... about 10% of the vehicles did not meet COF conditions and several drivers didn’t hold P endorsements and there where many log book infractions.
Looks like the rot is spreading throughout the industry.
When it comes to Queenstown, the rot has always existed. I know of one major tourism operator who employed two professionals to drive a mini-bus, ferrying tourists to his attraction. After one of the drivers resigned, the business owner decided to use unqualified staff to fill the gap, despite the fact that they didn't have the required P endorsements. His logic was that he was employing those people anyway so why should he pay for professional drivers.
The shit almost hit the fan when one girl drove a van-load of tourists off the road one icy morning. Because the van had no branding, or a COF for that matter, they got away with lying to the Police that she was a private person driving a group of friends.
I suspect future Police operations in QT will show up numerous infringements.
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Loosely related to Dirty Politics... Tony Lentino, money man behind WhaleFat who featured prominently in the Rachinger files as "the financier" has died aged 42.
In related news, Slater's Lentino-backed venture Freed -- the business which was going to employ dozens of media people, seems to have dropped off the net completely.
https://dnc.org.nz/whois/freed.nz
https://dnc.org.nz/whois/freed.co.nzThe best laid plans... etc.
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McCully's scandalous $11.5m Al Khalaf bribe is back in the news.
Treasury documents released under the Official Information Act reveal McCully met with Al Khalaf in Riyadh in April, where he also met with the Saudi Minister of Commerce and officials and hosted a function for interested New Zealand companies.
A spokesman for McCully's office said there was no scheduled meeting between the pair, "however the two spoke briefly at a reception and Mr Al Khalaf commented positively on the progress of the food security partnership".
There was no scheduled meeting. The two just happened to be in the same room in Saudi Arabia at exactly the same time. What a coincidence. Not.
The documents also reveal that Treasury was kept in the dark over the sheep bribe by McCully, and that despite he and Key repeatedly claiming the bribe was to avoid "legal action", Treasury officials could find no sign of any threatened legal action from Al Khalaf.
In other words, the Treasury paper confirms that both Key and McCully were lying through their teeth.
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Fairfax has written down the value of its NZ assets by NZ$100m. I have no idea what that means in he real world. An accounting trick pre-merger? A tax loss? Perhaps an economist could advise?
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Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Solar City, who have taken over the sales are, are … hopeless (in my experience.)
I was speaking with a local Solar City installer last week who told me they've been instructed to flat mount all panels to save money. So instead of lifting the rear of panels by mounting them on a framework to achieve the optimum angle, they now have to go with the existing roof pitch. That's an extremely poor decision from one of our biggest solar players.
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When we were planning our PV install we looked at adding solar hot water. The wisdom these days is that you’re better off putting in a slightly larger inverter and adding a few more panels at around $220-250 each. Obviously that only applies when you’re already installing a PV system.
Picking up on Moz’s comment about the ideal angle for panels, most installers take the easy route and go with the existing roof angle. If I ever get around to building my ideal little zero-energy, off-grid house, I intend to ground mount the solar panels, hinged at the base, with some small motors to lift the angle in winter. And I’d like to add a small windmill to the system, but that’s another story altogether.
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Substituting battery storage with a large UPS and keeping it seperate from the mains supply was actually Moz's idea, and it's a damn good one. ;-)