Posts by Stephen R
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Hard News: Housing, hope and ideology, in reply to ,
Even the guy at work who goes barefoot all the time out of choice has a pair of shoes that he keeps in his car because it’s illegal to drive in bare feet.
I did not know about that law.
Neither did I, nor I suspect, did the women I've been driven by who kicked off their high-heels to drive in (stocking covered) bare feet since that was safer...
edit: Ninja'd by Lucy
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Speaker: David Fisher: The OIA arms race, in reply to Kumara Republic,
On that note, I'd say a Kiwibank of electricity might be less cumbersome to set up than the "Pharmac of electricity" that is the NZPower proposal.
Christchurch used to have a fairly vertically integrated power supply, owning lines, power and generation (I think) and any profits were used to reduce rates bills.
National in the 90s de-regulated while at the same time regulating to make it so that the CCC couldn't own companies at all those levels (so they had to sell some, and the price of power in Christchurch doubled) in the name of competition.
This is despite Max Bradford promising me to my face that the price of power would go down.
I'm still a bit miffed about that, but the point is that we'd probably need to alter the whole sector before that would be a goer.
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Hard News: The uncooling of the inner West, in reply to Russell Brown,
And now the government has declared it has no interest in building, or even owning, more state houses.
The People's Republic of Christchurch is however looking at forming a council owned corporation and buying the State houses the gummint wants to sell, and then building more. The reason they need to form a corp to do it is that councils are apparently aren't eligible for housing subsidies, whereas "private" rental providers are, and the council is not able to afford the maintenance without it.
I think Lianne said on the radio that they hope it would be self-sustaining once it's up and running.
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Hard News: TVNZ: Emptied out, in reply to Russell Brown,
If you missed Media Take last night, it's here.
Enjoyed that Russell, but the video crashed for me about 19:05 several times, and I had to skip the end of the discussion about the Christchurch plan in the pub courtyard.
Toi Iti has a marvelous delivery of dry humour.
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Speaker: David Fisher: The OIA arms race, in reply to nzlemming,
they would find the material in hard copy (even if it meant printing it out first!), photocopy it, redact the photocopy, scan it as an image and send out PDFs of the images. Which meant I'd have to OCR and correct it myself. They did this after they realised that we were getting too much information from the metadata and that blacking out text on paper with a Sharpie didn't mean it couldn't be read later. Ah, those were the days...
They also do this because of episodes like someone trying to black out an email address in a pdf and failing because the email address was still in the file, just drawn with a black mark over the top. Most people doing these things are smart enough to know that's possible, and not well trained enough to know exactly how to make sure that there are no traces of the material they want to censor still in the document.
Printing, removing, and scanning produces an air gap where you can be reasonably sure that there isn't a track-changes in the background showing where all the interesting bits are.
Given the amount of shit public servants can get for getting this stuff wrong, I don't really blame them for the overkill.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
I just don’t understand why the Greens could even begin to think working with National is a sane idea. First up today, day 1, take away workers right to have a break at work.That’s a National first Policy that will pass.How could the Greens work with a Party prepared to do that?
Now personally, I'm quite one for face spiting nose cutting but...
As I understand it, (and I'm by no means a Green insider) The Greens make a decision based on whether the situation would be better if they engage than if they didn't.In this situation, The National Government is going to do what it's going to do. If the Greens manage to make the situation better by coming to an understanding on some issues (or perhaps we should say, "Less Bad") then they might well do that.
With your example, Maybe National is going to remove smoko breaks and poison the rivers if the Greens do nothing, and by engaging, maybe National only removes smoko breaks. Should the Greens engage or not?
I think a case could be made that they should salvage what they can. There would probably be other costs (such as potentially losing some support for choosing to have anything to do with National) and I'm sure the Greens would consider that, especially since they do a lot of their policy decisions in concert with their wider membership.
Unlikely, yes; insane, I don't think so.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
So they were happy to wait until after the Election to try deal with National but not Labour? I recall Greens wanting Labour to make a deal with Labour before the Election.
One of the things that an opposition needs in order to be taken seriously as a potential government is a story that convinces people they could form a government that wasn't full of internecine struggles, backstabbing and dysfunction.
Bits of Labour seemed to delight in firing more barbs at the Greens than at National. I saw the Greens invitation to campaign together as an attempt to look like a credible alternative to National, AND to reduce the amount of strife between Labour and the Greens (which I think affected the support of both parties negatively).
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
The Greens asking National for a memorandum of understanding is a tad strange. Key constantly puts them down.
Maybe it will shut up the chattering classes who say the Greens should suck up to National. Now the Greens can say "We offered to talk and they said no" and that's the end of it.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to Russell Brown,
Or print it, sanitise it, scan it, and use the scan..
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to mpledger,
Who ever redacted the e-mail address didn't do a very good job. Just "alt-tabbing" between program windows makes the redacted part visible for a while.
Or you can highlight and copy-paste and get the original value.