Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to simon g,
Some journalists themselves could review their own behaviour here. Many have been prominent in the media telling us about nasty online abuse they get from trolls, but the same broadcasters/columnists are shamefully silent when the abuse comes from those in power.
I sometimes wonder how many of them are auditioning for ministerial press secretary roles or commercial PR. If they're admiring of or otherwise blind to abusive state power, would they still be so if the Govt of the day staged a Leveson Inquiry, or even went full-on Putin/Erdogan?
Censorship is bad, but useful idiocy masquerading as free speech is even worse.
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The same underhandedness is also behind Hollywood accounting. When a film breaks even many times over, the big studios involved are still able to declare a loss on paper and use it to justify shafting the cast & crew. The more savvy Hollywood players circumvent this by insisting on a cut of the gross instead of the net profit. Maybe the same could apply to company tax.
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It seemed to have echoes, unintentionally or not, of old American citizenship tests that owed more to pop culture values than actual civics. Namely, those tests that asked questions about famous baseball players and other stuff.
An even more infamous variant in the Jim Crow-era US South cranked it up to 11, and was designed to prevent blacks from voting.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to Russell Brown,
Agreed. I was determined to participate in good faith in the first round of the referendum and to make a positive choice in doing so.
But … it could be said that the Lockwoods are the kind of thing the guy whose favourite movie is Johnny English and favourite music is “easy listening music” would choose to champion.
If there’s a tribal element to my response, it’s not really political, but cultural. That flag seems to perfectly embody the mediocrity of recent years. The idea of enshrining that into an enduring symbol gives me the screaming shits.
This, so much. I’m starting to draw comparisons with Nickelback. And possibly even the Ford Edsel in the 1950s and New Coke in the 1980s.
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Hard News: The unstable Supercity, in reply to Bart Janssen,
To be fair Govt procurement is horrendously hamstrung by regs. Often the folks doing the actual work know they are pissing money down the proverbial, but they have no option to do otherwise.
Namely the requirement that the contractors have to have a physical nationwide presence.
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Hard News: So what now?, in reply to Sacha,
Yes. The retired and the wealthy do tend to have better options.
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to Barry -,
5. All the arguments put forward against the new flag were used against the current canadian flag. That grew on people over time, and I think the current option would also gain popularity.
A big difference is that the Canadian flag passes the test of “less is more”, as do the flags of South Africa, Japan, France, Italy, and the USA. The Lockwood flag doesn’t – it practically screams out “designed by committee”. And when the PM concern-trolled for support for the Lockwood flag on RNZ, he basically reinforced perceptions of it being a vanity project.
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Hard News: What you lookin' at?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Our watching is dictated by my laziness in integrating new devices to our system* and my love of some key sports. To get cricket I have to get sky, which means we have sky on demand. Sky on demand has some nice and odd stuff, “About a girl” was typically British fun if a bit cliched at times. And Sky allows us to time shift any series we are interested in on broadcast TV.
I keep reading about how SVOD is the next big thing, and to a small degree it is. The biggest obstacles are 2-fold: firstly, broadband data caps are still slow to rise; and secondly, Internet-capable AV devices still have a steeper learning curve than traditional TVs, especially for those with narrower attention spans than us.
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Hard News: The flagging referendum, in reply to linger,
Interesting subgroup comparison by age: younger respondents (under 30y.o.) are more likely to favour keeping the current flag, whereas older respondents (over 55y.o) are relatively more likely to favour change (but even so, still show a higher absolute level of support for NOT changing). That generational trend goes against expectations that the young should be less conservative – and, considering who will have to live longest with the outcome, is a further argument against change.
Could it be more an indicator of good design taste, rather than social conservatism per se?
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Hard News: So what now?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Burton seems determined to burn everything to the ground.
Did we expect anything less from a prominent spokesman for #GenerationRentier? For those of us discussing the issue on Twitter, I've come up with the perfect hash tag.