Posts by Stephen R
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I had a brief discussion with Cr Sarah Free in Wellington about the whole "text this number to donate money to the council instead of giving to beggars" campaign WCC was running, and my position was that a lot of the people begging on the street are doing so because for whatever reason they can't manage the bureaucracy required to get a benefit and that a WCC fund would just be more of the same kind of hoops to jump through.
Since they folded the pilot scheme shortly afterward, I don't think I was the only person giving them feedback that the idea was a bit wrongheaded.
It was with somewhat mixed feelings that I read that Wellington was seen as a soft-touch by street beggars. (Quote from memory: "You don't go hungry in Wellington"). I'd prefer to live in a country that didn't have people who needed to beg to get by, but if we don't have a system that will look after those people, I'm glad that some of the people with means have some compassion towards them.
-
Several things to consider:
$200k per year is probably half what it's costing per dev, once you take contract rates, Project manager, and hardware.Long term projects in large institutions are crippled because nobody wants to tell the new IT manager that they can't do it, and they're pretty sure that if they say that they can do it, in five years either
a) the person being asked won't be there any more, somebody else's problem
b) someone else critical to the problem won't be there any more and they can blame them, somebody else's problem
or
c) it might actually work!Thus at the start of the project the IT manager gets all the good news, and a few years down the track it all goes to pieces.
As to expecting the final costs to look like the original estimate; the problem won't be sufficiently understood, or described, for anyone to have made an accurate costing. If the people paying get strict about how much they're prepared to pay, the people doing the work can get strict about doing what they were originally asked to do, which probably isn't fit for purpose.
This is why large long-term IT projects go over-budget.
-
That Spoek Mathambo is an awesome Joy Division Cover... I'm really enjoying it.
-
Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Moz,
Although I also think there's a good case for saying that the PKK/PYD army are fighting exactly for human rights and specifically women's rights.
I'd probably say they're fighting for their existence. Between Turkey and ISIS, I suspect that if the Kurds just rolled over, many (most?) of them would be killed as being "the wrong sort". That appears to have been the case for a long time.
-
Up Front: Reading Murder Books, in reply to Emma Hart,
Barry Hughart's ancient-mythic-China detective novels
Are they the ones that start with "Bridge of birds" and have "Number 10 Ox" as the sidekick character?
-
Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm not a typical Green voter either (so far as I know), since I mostly like their economic and social policy - environmental issues are a distant 4th or 5th place really
That's a significant part of why I vote for them - I looked at relevant financial policy and decided that I didn't trust Labour not to screw things up without the Greens keeping them honest, since Michael Cullen left.
I also think Labour has developed a certain amount of authoritarian tendency that bugs me, which I hope the Greens would help keep in check if they ever got into power together. (I mostly think this after a long conversation with Annette King in her position as Minister for Police who was pushing for the right to confiscate people's stuff without having to convict them of a crime.)
-
Totally affected by the fact that I've walked down some of those streets, and I have much sympathy for the people of Paris, but Francois Holland's speech about having war declared on them made me a little uneasy.
Given that the French have been bombing ISIS in Iraq since September 2014, why are they surprised that ISIS fought back? Since ISIS doesn't have an airforce that could bomb Paris, this is exactly the sort of attack they must have been expecting. I'm uneasy at the implication that "it's OK for us to bomb their cities and hospitals because any civilians we kill are collateral damage, but it's not OK for ISIS to shoot civilians in our country because they're intentionally shooting civilians."
To be clear, I'd really rather nobody killed civilians, but that's not an opinion followed by countries with big airforces...
-
Speaker: The government's Rules…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Often the vendor will have a building inspection done,,,but for about $250 you can get your own done.
Yep, totally agree, but recent articles suggest that there were shortcuts taken that affect the safety/longevity of buildings during that period that weren't detectable without pulling off the outer layer - I'm thinking something about missing fire-collars in an apartment building which cost an extra 20% of the cost of the building to fix (after the 40% to cover the leaky building remediation) - which means even a building inspection won't find all the dodgy things that were going on.
And going into debt that much to play Russian roulette on house integrity is just not attractive.
-
Polity: TPP, eh?, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Looks to me that only the US legislators can save us from this type of multi-national corporate rule now.
And isn't that a scary sentence to contemplate?
-
Was considering buying a new house, but not knowing anything about building, I'm scared to look at anything build after 1995... I'm guessing there's a lot of other people out there feeling the same way.