Posts by BenWilson
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Muse: The Good Word, Bad Numbers and The…, in reply to Sacha,
Or you could take it as some evidence that they don't need to own a media outlet to achieve those ends.
I'm more inclined to think that it's just something that isn't part of the culture here. It wouldn't even occur to people as a cool thing to do. Rather like the whole culture surrounding owning a sporting club, something I've always found it weird to care a stuff about, but people go nuts for that kind of thing overseas. Our celebrity culture doesn't really include the super rich, who prefer to keep to themselves and their clique.
I'm not lamenting that this hasn't happened here, I'm just commenting that it seems odd that it hasn't been tried more frequently. Perhaps our egalitarian self-image gets in the way of that kind of ostentation.
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Muse: The Good Word, Bad Numbers and The…, in reply to Sacha,
It's an industry whose business model is changing. Investing in printed media is not a good bet. And online isn't sustainable in NZ yet either, for some strange reason.
It's not a safe bet, anyway. But as part of a massive portfolio of all kinds of bets, I'm surprised that none of our ridiculously wealthy people see the fringe benefits of having their own rag. It would cost a lot less to have a newspaper than to own some of those ridiculous superyachts in the Viaduct that seem to never get used at all. I'm talking about people for whom owning crazily expensive vanity items is normal - how is owning a newspaper any less of a vanity item? They could put a picture of their super-pe..yacht on every page, and get in tens of thousands more people's faces every day. They could influence elections, swing all kinds of favours, take vengeance on their enemies - all the crap that media moguls have always done. It's downright weird that it hasn't happened.
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Hard News: Notes in My Pocket, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I'm not blindly opposed to GPS, but there's a hell of a lot to be said in favour of maintaining basic old-tech skills, cos technology has its limits and breakdowns.
Totally. I'm a fan of GPS, but only as a supplemental tool to navigation, rather than the complete abdication of all responsibility (which eventually leads to loss of basic ability) to keep in mind where I am, where I'm going, and how I could cope if the navvy system died (which it does, regularly).
I'm always amused, from a professional point of view (I used to write navigation systems...well, scheduling, which is related, navigation was a sub-problem), by the things Google navigation comes up with. It really is pretty good for city and central suburban routing, when it chooses a different route to me, it's quite instructive to fiddle around and see why. Often, it's saved either time or distance. But sometimes, the distance saved is minimal for the bizarre routes you get. Also, Google seems to pathologically avoid u-turns, and 3-point turns, which is very safe and sensible of them, but sometimes I've had to laugh - last week it took me an extra 4 kilometers to avoid a U-turn when I made a wrong turn. I could have turned around easily.
In the countryside, it can be hit and miss once you're off the main roads. I was taken down a very long road on the way to Stillwater, only to find that the last 100 meters was private property with a big sign saying "No Through Road, trespassers disturbing the ducks will have the dogs set on them". Which was actually fair enough, it was their driveway, not a road, it was unsealed, with children's toys strewn about, animals wandering, and a tractor blocking the way. When I searched to find the correct route it was only longer by about 50m, and the road was sealed the whole way. If I'd been following the huge road sign that said "Stillwater", with a big arrow, I wouldn't have had that detour. Ordinarily, I would trust the signs, but I was very curious about what Google was doing sending me down a side road.
One thing that Google is very good for, though, is when you're on the motorway, that it tells you the exits by number. This is far, far less ambiguous than by name, especially since multiple exits might have similar names on them (because they go to the same places, ultimately). Also, at complicated junctions, like spaghetti junction, you really want to get in the exactly correct lane early on, since Auckland has still not managed to get away from putting exit lanes on the right-hand side of the motorway. This can lead to horrible mistakes, particularly if your exit is the last one before the Harbour Bridge.
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Muse: The Good Word, Bad Numbers and The…, in reply to Steve Barnes,
They already have one, it's called the media, or what will be left of it once they have destroyed the good bits. Why bother building another bit?.
It's kind of hard to believe that none amongst our elites has the get up and go to challenge for their piece of it. The Morgan family, maybe? It's really a sitting duck, it's not like the frikken infrastructure for printing off newsprint is a huge military industrial complex. Writers are also cheap and by God do journalists sound desperate for a chance to actually do journalism. They'd be able to poach quite a few staff from the Herald on that alone.
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Muse: The Good Word, Bad Numbers and The…, in reply to Russell Brown,
So, like, no one has tried it for at least 12 years? I wasn't really envisaging something indy and small. More like one of NZs burgeoning billionaires setting one up just because they like the pulpit, and think competition is a good thing. That's IF they believe that, which considering the way NZ is, is probably unlikely.
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Muse: The Good Word, Bad Numbers and The…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Starting a credible metropolitan daily from scratch would require a very large initial outlay and the ability to sustain years of red ink.
It's not really that large. There's dozens of people who have that kind of money in NZ, who would hardly notice if the thing went belly up. I'm amazed none of them can be arsed, considering that owning a paper is owning a pulpit.
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Muse: The Good Word, Bad Numbers and The…, in reply to chris,
I share Chris Waugh's concern.
You're not Chris Waugh? Doh! I have to stop thinking "Chris, in China", now. Not specific enough.
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Hard News: Notes in My Pocket, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Oooo, need to go to the ref. Last question is a cheat, and would have caught me. But the question was also a cheat. Howazat?
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Silo Park looks like a map on Steampunk FPS. Sniper tower, mined, only used in CTF games. Playground, weapon spawn point. Carpark, hand weapon spawn point, zombies lurking. Ladders on silos form intricate maze which must be navigated to get around the satanic ritual playing out below, and locks which have to be turned to stop the machine before it kills us all.....
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Hard News: Notes in My Pocket, in reply to Sacha,
I didn't even mention the polar coat thrown over the chair:
4 lighters, a solar powered windup torch, a carabiner, a 3 inch nail, a set of headphones, a beanie, an old wooden pipe, a cigar in a tube, a spare battery for my cellphone, and a ball of garden twine. It's like a survivalist's jacket, I could probably last indefinitely in the bush like that. But actually, those are all there quite by chance, all except the pipe and the cigar have been used recently.
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