Posts by Jason Kemp
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Nick Russell,
A tone deaf government who are walking blindfolded and still no traction from the opposition :)
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Now if only Labour could stop throwing themselves under the bus this is a gift for them in them in the lead up to elections. In longer term narrative the wheels are falling off National everywhere.
Perhaps one more swamp Kauri story might help and whatever did happen to that Northland MP….
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Perhaps a bit too much detail but this might be of interest to some. What is significant is Ella herself taking part in the process.
The Spinoff Exclusive: Lorde explains the backstory behind every song on her new album By Henry Oliver | Music Editor -
Hard News: The Oncoming Day, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Thanks Rosemary - I think "demand management" was exactly what I overheard. The apparent staff bonuses for doing that was the surprise.
The relevance of all of this to health care is that that same context applies.
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The irony of all this penny pinching is that having diseases like this in the community actually cost more than treatment ever does. Even when people get the tests and find out what the the options are it is still not easy to access help even for the most savvy of us.
Sometimes even getting a diagnosis is blocked or made difficult because of the possibility of expensive treatment. Especially if there is a social stigma.
In the weekend I heard overheard a conversation between two social workers. This took place in a public area and while they didn’t identify anyone by name it was a bit scary.
The story was that someone was entitled to help with accomodation and that included various allowances. They had tried to claim before but this time went along with one of the social workers. Their request was granted but it was made clear that it was because of the presence of the social worker.
That social worker said that even though their “client” was entitled to help – the agency that person went to would get some kind of bonus if they were able to limit or prevent the claiming of the benefit entitlements.
It was like the PR line was – the government is here to help you but if the internal policies of the agency could limit or even prevent access – that is their real policy.
I understand that rationing of services is a reality but surely we all deserve a much more transparent accountability of the true costs of denying help?
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Last week I had to drive to an after work hours project. Normally it takes me 5-10 mins. It took 1 and a quarter hours. I had allowed 20 mins which was triple the usual time but there was an extra wide crane truck blocking all of a lane and then some plus other traffic delays I didn’t see. It seems to me that driving anywhere in Auckland during rush hour is almost impossible.
Commuting by car is not an option and I’d guess bus is not very good for similar reasons. The train is good but until the CRL comes online it is very limited and frustratingly slow.
Good luck to anyone who thinks they can buy on the city outskirts and commute. The only viable option is to remote work and / or move to another city or town in my view.
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All of these property stories are just click bait to help out the advertising department at the Herald. I use Ben Torkington’s Chrome extension and it identifies the source of click bait stories. These ones just get labelled property.
What I dislike about the property stories is that when it matter no real investigation is done. Fletcher Building said in February that their profit forecasts were correct. A matter of weeks later they did a write down of more than 100m.
We never got anything really from the Herald on how such a thing could happen. It is hinted at reasons in other stories but property advertisers are one of the few remaining “rivers of gold” left from the classified department.
For the past couple of years I have been ignoring the home page and hoping there are some useful stories in the business or tech sections. Really hard to find any content in the Herald that is useful to me. Stuff looks to be worse and so the StuffME merger discussions continue.
I was at my local Foursquare yesterday when they were closing up. They had dozens of newspapers they were trashing. Even offered me a free one. I declined.
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I hope the information in the book is credible enough to initiate an independent inquiry. What I suspect is needed are enough people to read the book and to pressure their elected politicians.
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I'm curious about how streaming TV has changed the landscape on all of this. My experience over the past 3-4 years is that I have watched more great TV on Netflix than I ever did on broadcast.
(Coincidentally I had a look at the new TV3 website and it looks to be modelled on the Netflix layouts including look and feel.)
Partly that is because the programming is wide open - 40yrs + or - of tv programmes to choose from. Being our own programmers is attractive as is being able to serially watch without any advertising has transformed TV into something we like.
I'm probably a minority audience but it has made broadcast TV pretty much unwatchable with its high percentage of dross and interruption style thinking.
I did watch TVNZ7 when it was on and it seemed like a good idea at the time - however with the conflicts of interest between various parts of TVNZ I can understand why that didn't work.
I have spotted a channel on Freeview called Duke which seems to be some kind of TVNZ experiment. It seems like with the Freeview setup it should be easier to launch some other PBS style channels there and have them run by an experienced team from TVNZ.
It seems like "public service" programming could be made to work if the obvious conflicts of interest were removed.
I did read somewhere that the total of TVNZ dividends was approaching $100m. Not sure how many years that represented but surely some of that dividend stream could finance a PBS style remit?
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Hard News: Burning down the house to…, in reply to Nick Russell,
The fatigue is part of the tactic. ’Normalisatio’n and we should resist this. It is much harder to meaningfully do this outside of the U.S but somehow we must.
This from a longer piece Against Normalization: The Lesson of the “Munich Post” By Ron Rosenbaum
Democracy destroying itself democratically. By November 1932, his party had become the largest faction in the Reichstag, though not a majority. After that election though, it looked as if he’d passed his peak: his total vote had gone down. It looked like the right-wing parties had been savvy in bringing him in and “normalizing” him, making him a figurehead for their own advancement.
Instead, it was truly the stupidest move made in world politics within the memory of mankind. It took only a few months for the hopes of normalization to be crushed.What is interesting is that the repeal of the Obamacare / ACA act has pretty much stopped because there is no actual replacement. Throwing out all of the previous admins policies is easy to say – when campaigning but much harder to achieve when in power.
We need some more moments of truth when the voters realise the emperor has no clothes ( T has no bathrobe) and they need a real plan.