Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
But there would be consequences.
Naturally, as there is from not doing it, too. Which one is worse? A consequence of reneging on the 30 year part of deal would be that other parties in future might not believe the government if they attempted to negotiate such a deal again. It would set up a precedent that corporations couldn’t buy our laws, so we’d never be able to sell them again. I think I could not only live with that, but indeed would actually prefer that.
ETA: And the consequence of not undoing this deal is that there is now a precedent for making deals like this. It's the thin end of a scary wedge, IMHO. If we are going to start eroding the supremacy of our own parliament, I'd rather we did it on things like human rights, rather than corporate rights.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Sacha,
tribunals, dude :)
No, you already bid that, and got raised.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to llew40,
But who gets to decide what is a ‘good’ deal or not
In a technical sense, the government decides. There is no higher authority.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It does quite quickly become difficult to feel sympathy for SkyCity.
It's difficult at the best of times.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Sacha,
trade tribunals, sir..
I see your tribunal, and raise you "shutting off diplomatic ties".
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I was already on ”Depression”, and forgot that everyone else was still on ”Anger”.
I moved to Acceptance some time in the 1990s when I realized that the rubber hose method will always work if they want your data.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
If our government is going to renege on the deal, we should expect to have to pay. That’s what happens when you go back on your word.
It would be a better business practice not to go back on big corporate deals, if you want to make more of them in future. But that's really where the onus stops. If a government makes a stupid, stupid cripplingly expensive deal, and the next government decides to can it, I don't have a problem with that. It might teach the corporations not to be so greedy in future.
Deals with governments are not like deals between private individuals operating under a rule of law. There is no world government to enforce anything on a government, so a deal with them has to always take that into account. It's fallacious to pretend this is not so, and that the government acts like a private citizen. It doesn't.
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Hard News: Political Idol, or whatever…, in reply to George Darroch,
Indeed, it's junior partner, no matter how you dice it. But it could be a very significant junior if it is required for the majority. This looks likely, if the left are to get in at all.
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The iron law of oligarchy at work?
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The counterbalancing force is that it becomes harder and harder to maintain a deception, the more people who are involved. It's extremely unlikely that Trojans would go unnoticed by every single person involved all the way down a chain of manufacture, starting in hardware. Something hiding in a compiler is not going to be missed by someone who likes to tweak the assembly code output. Something hiding in an assembler is likely to be noticed by anyone scanning the output, since assembly language code has a much more linear relationship in output binary size to input code size than higher level languages. A sneaky piece of logic out of place on a chip will be noticed by anyone trying to reduce the cost of the chip by reducing its size.
Despite making fun conspirational fiction, computer crime is really hard to get away with because the culprits are usually obvious, and almost no one understands every little auditing system out there, every way in which they could be spotted, or caught after the fact. The people who do understand are usually well paid enough not to want to shit in their own nest.
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