Posts by Duncan McKenzie
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Kyle way back up the thread was asking what happened to the Ministry of Works and Development.
It was corporatised into two SOEs in 1988 - Works Civil Construction (that built things) and Works Consultancy Services (multi-disciplinary mostly engineering consultancy). Both of these businesses were obliged to compete with other businesses in the same field - which after many redundancies they managed to do.
Of course a lot of functions the old MWD used to do just weren't done any more, or were picked up by other departments like Environment.
Around 1997 both of these SOEs were privatised. WCC went to Downers (Australian) where it operates as a division, and WCS went to Kinta Kellas (Malaysian crony capitalists as far as I can tell). WCS is now called Opus International Consultants and still competes in the same area. It has recently listed on the stock exchange.
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I bought a beer in a small town in Indonesia once.
The town had no electricity. Ice was made in a plant on the edge of town, then brought into town in big blocks on the back of a bike. It was then thrown onto the side of the road and cut into smaller bits.
Several of which were put in my beer...
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About the Mt Albert motorway and Fran O'Sullivan's response.
Transit did at one stage consider an above-ground (well, more correctly, surface) option. The trouble with that is that as well as taking probably more houses than cut & cover, it also divides the community into two and displaces a lot of open space - something I have a personal interest in as a regular walker through Alan Wood Park. Transit would be under pressure to provide compensating open space in a reserves-poor area - through acquiring yet more housing?
Only if the road builders were prepared to skimp on the mitigation (and find some way of avoiding Pak n Save) would this option be significantly cheaper. And skimping on the mitigation is not what I want..
Hell, even authoritarian Singapore has a policy of not sacrificing more housing for roads. It hasn't stopped them from building roads though - they are being tunnelled.
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There was a positive side effect of the spray programme at my place - bug-free peaches off the tree.
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There is an up side. This from Molesworth and Featherston
"Rugby doesn’t influence the economy
We thought we’d mention this in case the unthinkable happens this weekend and France - not the other team - qualify for the semi final of the rugby world cup...(What with Dougie not even on the bench n all.)
When Reuben Thorne led New Zealand out of the world cup in the semi-finals four years ago, he commented to a reporter that the loss would dent the economy. The story was picked up all over the world. We noted at the time that the record shows he is more a great All Black Captain than a great economist. New Zealand has been dumped out of the world cup four times now. Each time, our economy has accelerated in the following quarter. We have won the world cup once - in 1987, immediately before the stockmarket crashed.
From an economic point of view then...Allez les bleus. (Actually, we’d rather have a recession, thanks, just this once.)"
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When I stopped believing in Santa Claus.
He was actually called Father Christmas where I came from. I was a quite smart 6 yo when, having seen the old fraud in the South Canterbury Farmers, I worked it all out. You whisper your wishes in his ear, and he later passes these on to your Mum, who hopefully would do the right thing.
I breathlessly revealed this scam to my Mum, who conceded that I could be right.
So no big presents from Father Christmas after that. Smart maybe, but not so bright...
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A modest proposal re TV advertising.
Pass a law that requires the amount of TV advertising to be halved but requires advertising rates to double.
Broadcasters get the same money, but have more space to fill.
Surviving ads will have twice the impact. Advertisers need not spend any more. Probably the more annoying cheap ads will go.
Then, a year after that, pass the same law again...
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Just love the name of the UK chief of defence staff
Sir Jock Stirrup. -
Thanks Richard L for evoking memories of the bus ride to Lake Toba (more than 30 years ago). The bus tout in Palembang showed us a picture of the flash Mercedes bus that we were to ride on. We hopped on ... only to be driven to the big bus station where the old Chev with plastic roll-up windows that was going to take us the length of Sumatra was waiting.
The bus drove day and most of the night for 4 days. Along dirt roads through rain forest. Across wide muddy rivers on rafts that were just a bit bigger than the bus.
The bus was stopped in the middle of one night by Indonesian police on motor scooters. The fugitive from justice that they were after was a passenger. He jumped through the plastic window of the bus and into the night. Out come the guns. They missed fortunately, otherwise we probably would have been accompanied by a bullet-riddled corpse for the rest of the trip.
Lake Toba itself, and the island in the middle of the lake. A refuge for burnt-out travelers, at a cost of $2 a day including unlimited banana susu. I was the only person in the losmen where I stayed who had a watch. Never mind that it was in need of a service and kept stopping - each morning on waking I would set it for seven and thus became the time standard. A more important job than it might appear, given that my host ran a ferry service to and from the mainland.
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I too have done stints of jury service and my experience was pretty similar to that of Heather Gay's. The first time - more than 10 years ago, was in the DC. The next two were in the High Court
Some observations;
The rape trial was in the DC. The first drug trial, where the guy was caught with a tab of acid and stupidly told the cops he had given another away some months before, was possession and supply of a Class whatever drug, so was tried in the HC. That seemed a bit odd.In the rape trial I got the feeling that the Police are under instruction to give the complainant her day in Court and do not do a lot to ensure a conviction is secured. So a lot is put on the complainant (and on the jury).
In the most recent drug trial, where the defendant was caught red handed with a kg of meth at the airport, (he claimed he was an unwitting mule) we the jury were warned that in real life, not everything gets neatly tied up with forensic evidence. We were also told that we had to consider the evidence before us, and not do our own research. That didn't stop one jury member doing an internet search for the hotel the defendant stayed at in Malaysia.
We were all conscientious and took our duties seriously. And most people can bring something to a jury - one really quiet guy on the last day of the second HC trial let slip that he worked for WINZ where they are trained to look for the body language that goes with lying.
But time for my grouch. Judges get $200 k a year, lawyers get $200 an hour, the police will be on $40 an hour, and we the jury got something like $20 a day. Not so good when you are self-employed like me.