Posts by TracyMac
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Hard News: Last Words, in reply to Ben McNicoll,
I'm sure this is discussed further downthread, but why have such a bastardised system as PV when you might as well go the whole hog with STV and get a properly proportional result (if that's what you want)?
And yes, the big parties hogging the seats is precisely reason I was never impressed with the system while living in Oz.
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*snort*
Masterly, my good sir/madam
(in reply to 3410)
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Hah, my sojourn in the UK from 1998 to 2003 exactly reflects the flip from net emigration there to net immigration here.
And with the hand-wringing about the "brain drain" from here to Oz, it's very rarely I see the fact mentioned it's often actually a LABOUR drain. A decent minimum wage and the mining industry are certainly incentives to get away from shitty $12 an hour jobs here
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It's not just people from east Asia who refer to foreigners as "aliens". Our lovely neighbours on the northeastern side of the Pacific do the same. Charming.
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Hard News: Everybody's News, in reply to Ross Mason,
Thank you for this. I got the whole conspiracy-theory bollocks from a previous co-worker of mine, and he would simply not STFU when you pointed out the simple logic - Occam's Razor indeed - of how the buildings would fail. I even did a demo by putting some heavy objects into a stack of cardboard boxes and then dropping a heavy weight on top. They pancaked quite appreciably before toppling over... and they didn't have a girder framework inside channelling the kinetic energy pretty much vertically.
Also, perhaps it was obvious to me because I saw the thing live on TV from about 10 mins before the second plane crashed into its building - University of London fibre network with massive internet pipes to Europe AND the US meant no appreciable lag with sites like the Beeb and even CNN for much of the day. You could not watch the impacts real-time and not see how the collapses occurred.
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Just to note as an addendum, I really don't want to turn this thread into one the rights and wrongs of the Salvation Army (their belated apologies and all - I'm afraid I wasn't in NZ in 2006 and missed the momentous occasion) - my point is really that Bish Brian seems to be operating along a similar continuum, but heading towards the US-type extreme. And that social services should be maintained by the state, not handed over to more or less dodgy private organisations with limited accountability.
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Hard News: Bishop Brian: It's worse than…, in reply to Russell Brown,
From the Salvos' website in Oz:
We oppose vilification of, or discrimination against, anyone on the grounds of sexual orientation. No person is excluded from membership, fellowship or service in the Army solely on the basis of sexual disposition.
Homosexual practice however, is, in the light of Scripture, clearly unacceptable. Such activity is chosen behaviour [my emphasis] and is thus a matter of the will. It is therefore able to be directed or restrained in the same way heterosexual urges are controlled. Homosexual practice would render any person ineligible for full membership (soldiership) in the Army. However, practising homosexuals are welcome to worship with, and join in the fellowship of The Salvation Army.
How nice of them. And it wasn't just the HLR in the late 80s I was objecting to; that was just the most egregious example of their religious policies in the NZ political context.
As for being "aware" of people feeling discriminated against by Salvos, well, I know of at least two personally who got preached at about their sinful ways when they requested services. This was a number of years ago, but as I cite above, their core beliefs seem only to have changed in terms of a little style rather than major substance - no, they won't chuck you out of the church if you remain celibate for life.
I'm not saying that they are blatantly denying services to queer people, because I don't believe they are in Western countries. It's just that I don't feel like supporting a bunch of bigots whose entire ethos is against my lifestyle.
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Destiny has helped people get out of the gutter, and men become fathers. Yeah, in exactly the same way the Salvation Army guilts money out of people to help those they only deem worthy of helping, which, if you did not know, does not include queers. Nor do they refrain from trying to interfere in national politics, beginning with lobbying against the Homosexual Law Reform bill in the 80s.
I am grateful every single day for state social welfare, which allows people to not be beholden to right-wing nutcase organisations who only extend their "charity" to select groups. I just regret the fact social welfare has been so eroded as to allow these nutcase groups a toehold into vulnerable peoples' lives.
(Just to clarify, not ranting against what Russell has said; I'm just disgusted at elected representatives attending a religious function in anything other than a private or ceremonial capacity.)
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Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to John Holley,
Sounds like the all-too-common experience of crappy analysis and requirements-gathering up front, leading to bizarre architectural and infrastructure decisions. The fact they did not listen to the technical staff on the ground, apparently, who know the complexity of the systems, is warning bell number one.
Sure, frequently there are awful crusty systems and the kind of old farts who implement them in an effort to keep themselves in gainful employment forever, and consultants and prime tech teams can be great at clearing out those rats nests. But I can’t believe nothing at all was salvageable, nor that a more phased integration approach wouldn’t have succeeded. Because often, you need to clean up the process at the same time as the technology, if not before.
I’m looking for jobs back home right now, and I think I’ll give Deloittes a swerve, even though I’d like to find something soon … and they are advertising.
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@Rich, the trouble with SAP is that it's not just a big accounting package. It was originally a huge Plant Maintenance product, with the Financials as part of that. Now, of course, the Financials are much enhanced, and there are modules for HR, Sales, and Production Planning (encompassing, god help us, change management), and many many more.
My personal view is to get best-of-breed solutions for each area with a view for ensuring they have integration functionality for the bits that need to be hooked up. Sure, that can add some cost to enterprise solutioneering, and it is nice to get good stuff that is already hooked together, but as far as I'm concerned (not being an SAP guru), SAP does everything more or less crappily. Maybe the PM component is good for physical plant, but my god the interface is shite and I can tell you that it doesn't cope with IT "assets" (which my organisation are trying to shoehorn in).