Posts by Clarke
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Gordon Campbell is skewering Melissa Lee:
It is rare indeed to find arrogance and ignorance combined so exquisitely in the one harsh and clanging package, and the P.R. crew down at National party head office must be thinking that polling day in Mt Albert just can’t come soon enough, to get her off the front pages.
It's a delight.
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But what's this Residential Tenancies Amendment Bill they've sprung out of nowhere? Screwing over tenants in favour of landlords again...?
It's that democratically-elected dictatorship in action again.
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Returning briefly to the Rankin story ...
I have to profess profound admiration for John Key in how he's handled this one. I presume his message to Peter Dunne is "you're a political irrelevance with no party backing, a bare majority in your electorate, and incredibly bad hair. This is a subtle way of saying you're of no further use to me."
As a way of holding up a middle digit to someone who's meant to be a support partner, it's hard to think how Key could have done it better.
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Apparently it will encourage employers to hire those at the bottom of the employment heap, rather than those who can, you know, actually do the job?
That sounds like an excellent reason to bring in the legislation under urgency .... so I look forward to seeing the significant and material up-tick in employment within (say) 90 days of the bill being rushed through. 'Cos if this really is the heartland business issue that Phil O'Reilly is claiming, then there must be an overhang of demand to give jobs to the barely-employable that is being held back by the current restrictive rules.
So I'm willing to take bets on what the next household employment survey shows .... how much will the workforce participation rate rise? Or - as everyone with a brain knows - will it simply result in the casualisation of existing jobs?
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The farmers in question are amoung the worlds most efficient users of carbon/kg of produce, they are by world standards the complete opposite of polluting. An ETS sets farmers/business as convenient political scapegoats and does nothing to tackle global warming.
Even if we take this as read - and I agree with George, btw - allowing farmers to escape their environmental obligations is simply a bad idea in the long term, because of the perverse incentives it creates.
And if farmers (the dairy industry in particular) really had the country's best interests at heart, we'd still be able to swim in our rivers as they would voluntarily clean up their own cow-shit, rather than fighting tooth-and-nail to pollute as they do today.
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and the price of petrol dropped 5 c/litre today. This new government is superb!
John key's biggest threat is the mouth-breathing end of his own support base .... I've had two people tell me today that they're glad National got in, because they're going to repeal the s59 law and pull out of Kyoto in the first 100 days.
That's the trouble with not presenting any policy - some voters will just make stuff up, and then be outraged when the government doesn't deliver it.
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The other thing Peter Dunne has in common with the Nats is the desire to sell things ... or in this case, to give them away.
My curiosity was piqued by the juxtaposition of a supposed major oil find with the UnitedFuture policy that the stuff be given away.
I for one have no realistic expectation that there is anything resembling 12.6 billion barrels of recoverable oil on the East Coast. But I am convinced about the desire of Peter Dunne to effectively give whatever is there away to the lowest bidder:
We believe that the general policy should be a zero royalty rate with the government reserving the right to apply a royalty, on a case-by-case basis specific to rate of any medium to large oil field discovered
If anyone could explain the logic of this - and our local UF candidate can't - I'd be much obliged.
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And this just has to hurt ...
Sarah Palin's home state Anchorage Daily News endorses Barack Obama
Sanity in Alaska. Who would have thought!
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@Mark:
Here's a service I would gladly pay for. As a (sometime) audio geek, I find the quality of all MP3s simply appalling, and would happily pay a premium for music encoded with at least a lossless encoder, and preferably completely uncompressed.
In an ideal world, there would be a sliding scale of quality vs price - if I'm prepared to drop some serious money, I could get something that approximates the original digital multitrack in native or SACD or DVD-A format. Accompanied by the high-res cover art, album notes and all the rest.
Nobody offers this. And it seems the only reason non-one's making money off my audio geekery is because of the industry's paranoia about distribution of hi-res music. So at the moment I still buy the physical CDs, then copy them uncompressed to the music server.
And while I'm pie-in-the-sky dreaming, can we please see some recognition from the local industry that the pricing models will have to change - in an online world, trying to pretend that a US$7.99 new release magically becomes 30% more expensive when it arrives in NZ is simply a nonsense.
But for all that, thanks for being one of the few people in the industry that's interested in having these conversations.
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@Mark:
Here's a service I would gladly pay for. As a (sometime) audio geek, I find the quality of all MP3s simply appalling, and would happily pay a premium for music encoded with at least a lossless encoder, and preferably completely uncompressed.
In an ideal world, there would be a sliding scale of quality vs price - if I'm prepared to drop some serious money, I could get something that approximates the original digital multitrack in native or SACD or DVD-A format. Accompanied by the high-res cover art, album notes and all the rest.
Nobody offers this. And it seems the only reason non-one's making money off my audio geekery is because of the industry's paranoia about distribution of hi-res music. So at the moment I still buy the physical CDs, then copy them uncompressed to the music server.
And while I'm pie-in-the-sky dreaming, can we please see some recognition from the local industry that the pricing models will have to change - in an online world, trying to pretend that a US$7.99 new release magically becomes 30% more expensive when it arrives in NZ is simply a nonsense.
But for all that, thanks for being one of the few people in the industry that's interested in having these conversations.