Posts by Joshua Drummond
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"Same reason why everyone shopped at The Warehouse for your CD instead of the old Sounds....cost and simplicity.
The government fee per annum is only $US100 and unlike NZ companies there's minimal administration required so no additional cost.I might be comparing apples with oranges, but the Companies Office tells me that it only costs NZ$160 to register a company in NZ. It's not like it costs you anything after that, unless you're counting stuff like taxes. So (assuming the "government fee" is analogous to the registration fee here,) by paying US$100... well, that works out to about NZ$148.20 at current exchange rates. So you've saved... twelve bucks. Wow. Not to mention if it's an annual fee it's actually costing you more to be a registered company in Belize than it would here. As for "minimal administration required" - it really isn't that hard to administer an NZ company for the purposes of the Companies Office. Being solvent and filing annual returns as well as director details etc just isn't that hard. To complete the CD analogy, from the information you've provided here, it's rather as if instead of shopping at Sounds or the Warehouse, I arranged for pirated CDs to be imported from Afghanistan. It really does seem like far too much trouble.
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This is awesome. Kate, for posterity - why on earth would you register in Belize? It seems like an awful run-around for a little blogsite. I hope you can log into PA System soon, because it's a little weird seeing Keith respond to his own comments. Also, with regard to " it's little wonder you are 6 writers down on the list behind Russell Brown" - I don't think that, um, means a thing?
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Whale Oil: the slow-motion car crash of NZ bloggery. Nice work, Keith.
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Poor guy. What an absolute shit of a situation to be caught up in. It must be difficult to speak out about a situation like that, even with a guarantee of anonymity.
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The surveys are long, banal and repetitive. I can't help but wonder how many busy people just get annoyed halfway through and put the phone down, which must have an impact on the sample.
Lots do. It happened to me plenty of times. What's more common, though, is for people to get incredibly bored yet feel obliged to stay on the line out of politeness. When this happens, they stop taking the questions seriously and (say if you're asking for opinion of a certain service station on a scale of one to ten, with one meaning bad and ten meaning excellent - you know the drill) they start answering in all ones or tens. I'd say only around two in five surveys were any good as far as proper samples go. So many people game the system, and they all get entered as proper surveys. Generally the only people who don't bugger around are poor old folks who like to have someone to chat with and housewives with nothing better to do. Businesspeople are almost always too busy.
And you know how they always say "now, on a scale of blah to blah with shit meaning crap" every bloody time? We HAD to do that, and we got in trouble if we didn't read the question out exactly, every time. As far as I could tell, the supervisors were chosen for their ability to be pedantic utter arseholes.
Wow, long post. Sorry. I could vent about that job forever. -
Gods. Digipoll. I used to work for them. If you think it's bad taking a survey, try being the one reading the thing out.
The "it'll only take 12 minutes" thing is a management-mandated lie that we had to tell. We know quite well that it'll take much longer, but people simply won't stay on the line that long. I got in trouble several times for being overheard (the supervisors are omnipresent bastards) telling people how long the survey would actually take. It was the worst job I've ever had, and I've also been a telemarketer. So that's saying something. -
That should make pretty interesting viewing. A proper mainstream (Media 7 is mainstream, right?) discussion about the deal youth get in the media is one of the things I've looked forward to seeing for ages - the only place I have really seen it before is in student mags, various internet articles and, uh, Tearaway.
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Here's one of those annoying fan-made videos with no actual video, but it's the first link I could find on short notice:
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"A little bit country, a little bit rock n' roll?" That is South Park (the 100th episode, if I remember right.)
Of course, they might have been referencing something else which I have no idea about...