Posts by Andre Alessi
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I understood that to be an oblique critique of genetic engineering (creating Uruks out of Orcs and Men) rather than any reference to any explicitly racist ideology. There are elements of miscegenation to the original which don't stand up well to modern eyes, but I think with that scene they were trying to distance themselves from more obvious and problematic ways of creating new species (anyone notice any female Orcs?).
I think it was a pretty clever way of explaining how Saruman "made" the Uruk-hai. Prior to that there was no real explanation for how they appeared-after all, Orcs were supposed to be corrupted Elves from the First Age, and were effectively immune to aging. Tolkein was fairly explicit in stating that the "creations" of Morgoth weren't natural, and couldn't grow or change in the same way as natural beings, which suggests Orcs weren't bred in a normal way anyway. PJ's scene captured the unnaturalness of the Uruk-hai (and thus how far Saruman had fallen) extremely well. It was a dramatic and thematic choice, not a political one.
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"People don't care about local government, except when they do."
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You could always try the letters page of the North Shore Times- though I sometimes think it gets overrun with all of Andrew Williams's alter egos.
I'd suggest the Flagstaff too, but I think they're a little too busy outing lesbian ministers to bother with anything as insignificant as this.
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so all that stuff in the book about black skins and slanty eyes should be dismissed as irrelevant? :)
Not to mention the sallow faces of the "half goblins" in Bree, particularly Bill Ferny.
But on the flip side of that, the entire book explicitly rejects the idea that heroism or nobility comes from being tall, handsome and well bred. Sam and Gollum both are held up as examples of "real" people who shouldn't be dismissed based on where they come from or what they look like, because they're still people underneath it all. Many of the greatest tyrants in the history of Middle Earth were from the "chosen race" of Numenor, who were led to cause untold suffering by their own arrogance resulting from their pride in their racial heritage.
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The nub of the story is that because the Super City process is being pushed through in such haste, only a "veneer" (and that's the word that's actually being used) of unified services will be put in place. This means that the money spent on the process will not achieve the ostensible aim of the whole exercise – cost savings.
I see this sort of thing all the time in the private sector: senior management decides X is a good idea and will save the company millions of dollars a year, so tells middle management to find a way to make it work by date Y. Middle management realises they'll never be able to achieve the goal literally as stated, so come up with a "good approximation" that will allow everyone to say the goal was achieved, even though the bits that are left out of the final result were the bits that were going to produce the efficiencies in the first place.
It's always driven by one thing: senior management with no real understanding of the day-to-day details of the organisations they manage. This encourages people further down the totem pole to work to achieve the arbitrary goals they're set, rather than focusing on genuine improvements to the organisation.
I'm so glad we're starting to run our local government like a private company.
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Russell, this is a classic case of the SST not understanding context; at the moment Eden Park is not considered a potential target (of any kind, I presume) so has minimal security. When the Cup is underway, well, let's see them try again.
On the contrary, I'm sure they understood the distinction precisely. They wouldn't have attempted a stunt like this if they didn't think they could get away with it-why waste all that time they could otherwise spend drinking? That's why "stings" like this are the worst kind of reporting-we only hear about the ones that work, so reporters make damn sure that their little performances always work.
Jonathan is going to grow up into Bill Ralston.
Or another Bomber.
Did you know you were at the house that was filmed at, Friday ? :)
I lived across the road from that house on Crummer Rd as a student. In one shot, you could see clear into my bedroom window. I used to enjoy being woken up by the singing of the church services in the house next door, too.
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Except that latency is irrelevant for most of what consumers do today. It doesn't matter if latency is 50ms or 500ms, or even 5s, if you're watching YouTube. What matters is the size of the pipe, not how long it takes the request to get to the far side.
Not to derail the thread too much by dwelling on specific technical details, but the particular issue I was mentioning this in reference to is apparently not the result of just international bandwith, but rather specific issues with the route from here to there that more bandwidth won't necessarily fix:
Youtube Performance on TelstraClear
Most gamers will be happy to see any reduction in latency to international serves, though.
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I think the new cable will only really have an impact on the consumer side for customers (at least in the short-to-medium term) if it also drives more local ISPs to set up caches with international content providers. Issues like TelstraClear's ongoing performance issues with Youtube streaming don't just need more international bandwidth, they need local caches to deal with the fact that we're separated from most other networks by significant distances, and latency will always be a factor. The real limitation for consumers will still be the delivery between the local exchange and the jackpoint, though (until VDSL2 starts taking over...well, I can dream!)
Even so, the impact at a macro level on ISP overheads can't possibly be a bad thing for consumers.
I was sorely tempted by the Pixies show like I seldom am anymore. But I managed to get my dates wrong, and blew my chance at getting a ticket. In fact, my reaction was a little like this guy's when I saw all the tweets about how awesome it was:
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It's been a lazy, quiet summer really. I got out of the office more than the previous summer, and even made it down to Welly at the start of it with the Girlfriend (I seriously plan on moving into the Comfort Hotel on Cuba St just so I have constant access to French cafes and Scopa.) Also spent a lot of time doing as little as possible as often as possible-I never realised how enjoyable lying around on the couch could be until I didn't have the time to do it!
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Of course we should question the priorities. I have done so here myself. They are allowing themselves to be influenced by the 'wrong white crowd', but that doesn't by inference make all entrepreneurs or people who lean to the right greedy criminals.
Sorry to pick this particular quote out of the conversation, but I'd like to point out it's entirely possible to be an entrepreneur (or businessperson, or whathaveyou) without being right wing in the slightest, and I think the tendency we have to conflate the two isn't helpful.
Gio's thrust seems to be similar to my own on the original point, though-the fundamental basis of most right wing ideology is that reality is fundamentally fair without government intervention, so those with greater material wealth are people who are obviously "better at life" than the poor. Further brands of right wing thought tend towards the idea that wealth should automatically entitle its holders to greater social and political influence, either subtly (via improved living conditions over the poor) or overtly (via increased visibility and weighting of political opinions). The logical conclusion leads towards a kind of meritocracy where wealth indicates an individual's merit.
Now obviously, when baldly stated like that, hardly anyone on the right actually holds those views, but it's very hard for people like Gio and myself not to join the dots and see this as the practical effect of right wing philosophies.
Edit: Sorry for linking your opinions with my own, Gio, I'm also only +1 Red Bull this morning so I may not be completely rational.