Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Media7 will soon be Media3, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
But what does this do for the Save TVNZ7 movement? Along with Back Benches, Media7 was one of the flagship shows of the channel, and one of the reasons why people wanted to save the channel. What will be left to save of TVNZ7?
There is no saving TVNZ 7 – and that has been the case for some time. It is gone.
But the drive to create a new public service channel for the long term is still vital. The “Save TVNZ 7” name needs to be retired in favour of something that denotes the desire for a new, independent public service channel.
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Hard News: Media7 will soon be Media3, in reply to nic.wise,
Is there still a plan to podcast it? Living in London, it’s a great way to keep up with what’s happening in NZ… (happy to help with that if needed)
I'll have to have a conversation with them about that. How much of T3 on demand is geoblocked for you at the moment, out of interest?
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to John Armstrong,
I just don’t know if the ‘they are all hopeless’ narrative is all that productive. It certainly doesn’t do much to promote political engagement, which, IMHO, is one of the more serious issues in contemporary politics.
I very much agree. The easy vilification of people who stand for office is corrosive. We need people to stand for office in a democracy.
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Hard News: Briefing, blaming, backing down, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Do you really want us to talk tonight about boring old intermediate school cuts? ACC Chairman and CEO resigning. Auditor-General investigating the Prime Minister’s pokie deal. The class size backdown is positively passe.
I'm sure we'll get onto that, Matthew :-)
BTW, I don't think I've mentioned that our third panelist tonight is Mike Williams.
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Hard News: The Perfect Drug, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Something I notice about the drug regulation debate is that there are many people who believe that if they marshal their arguments well enough and make a sound case for a science-based policy, government will change. It doesn’t work like that – illegal drugs are illegal in order to enable government to pose as the friend and protector of the non-drug-taking majority.
I think it's a little more nuanced than that -- and more to do with the unshakeable political wisdom that there's not enough political upside to taking an evidence-based approach to drug policy.
I've written a piece for the Drug Foundation newsletter looking at the multiple instances of politicians who betray (or at least forget about) their apparently sincere views on drug reform as they get close to power: Obama spoke repeatedly on the need for more enlightened drug policy even as a senator -- and is now overseeing a ridiculous crackdown on medical marijuana. David Cameron proposed legalisation of all drugs while he was contesting the party leadership -- and has gone completely the other way.
And there was a point when Helen Clark just stopped talking about treating drug use as a medical issue. Although, to be fair, when she did talk about it in the early 90s she reaped an utterly hysterical media response.
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Well, this is interesting …
A certain mole tells me that the Ministry of Health is quietly moving towards a new and very different perspective on drug regulation, at least as regards new substances – driven by the knowledge that playing whack-a-mole runs the very considerable risk of what you hit with the ban-hammer being less harmful than the thing that replaces it in the market.
Things could get a bit lively.
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Hard News: The Perfect Drug, in reply to BenWilson,
It’s kind of sad that liberalism has ended up mostly being about preventing harm, when the main point of it was the maximization of happiness, and harm minimization is only one small part of that. It’s lost its way when harm reduction is what life is all about.
Quite. It's very difficult for the prevailing philosophy to permit the use of a potentially harmful substance just because people like it. Unless, of course, it's already permitted.
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Hard News: How to make more awesome use…, in reply to lprent,
Re search: as a suggestion.
We’re using Sphinx search at the standard. Runs as a cron service doing delta updates every 15 minutes or so. Does a full recalc of the entire site sometime in the morning. Reads directly from the SQL server. You can pretty well custom fit it to any data source.
Thanks for the tip! I’ve been wondering if fixing our search – which, in case anybody hadn’t noticed, really does not work well – should be the next upgrade.
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Hard News: How to make more awesome use…, in reply to Sacha,
discreet badges
PR schwag.
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Thanks, guys. No one's in mortal peril, but through several different things happening in succession, I had a sudden allergic reaction to debt.
I will slap a Donate button on the home page and think about voluntary subscriptions (although I'd want there to be goodies for people who did that). And I think I'll have to consider our advertising options.
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