Posts by Matthew Poole
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Having heard the same rumours as others, I imagine, I do have to say I'm not in the least bit surprised nobody was going "rabid dog" at Key over it in the House. Nobody wants to be the one who brings that dead rat (what Worth's alleged to have done, not Worth) into the House, if the rumours are actually true. The KB comments (I know, I know. It was a temporary moment of insanity, y'ronner, honest!), on the other hand... They obviously missed the bit where Helen booted Field as soon as he was actually being charged with something, which is as much as any PM should be expected to do.
I don't envy the moderators their job over the next few days, I have to say. Speculation will be rife, and there's bound to be someone who steps over the line.As for Boscowan, while I was at St Lukes on Monday I heard someone yelling something through a loud speaker. Couldn't hear it clearly, but the name is sufficiently unusual that it didn't take much effort to work out who was being a public nuisance.
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nor am I suggesting completely ignoring R'nD was a great idea
I have to say, this Budget exceeds my worst fears for its total lack of commitment to anything knowledge related. Slashed funding for academics' salaries. Abolished R&D credits. Replacing the Fast Forward Fund with some nonsense food industry funding that's a fraction of the value and ridiculously targeted. No real increase in tertiary funding despite acknowledging the increased numbers of enrolments. And so it goes, etc, ad nauseum.
National are determined to cement our position as a primary producer, with our fortunes firmly tied to the apron strings of the agricultural sector. Splendid way to (not!) encourage improved economic outcomes from individuals and for the nation, especially since part of the reason for the massive reduction in tax income is the huge drop in commodity prices and corresponding diminution of farmers' payouts.
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There are no doubt perfectly good arguments for privatising public assets if you think about the world a certain way.
Oh, of course. They mostly revolve around this mythical notion of a competitive market driving prices down in reflection of the long-run marginal cost
They dissolve once one realises that in a market as small as NZ there is simply no room for true competition in utilities. Hell there's barely room for pseudo competition in cellphones, and they're the lightest-weight "utility" around. Sadly ideology trumps reality, at least in the minds of Rodders et al, so we're stuck with not only selling the cow but also paying premium prices for the milk.
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it'll be much easier to force it on the rest of the country
And this should not be seen as an "Auckland issue".I'm not sure if I read it somewhere, or thought of it myself, but as soon as I saw Act's position on WaterCare (can't recall if it was before or after Rodders got made LGM, but it was definitely before we saw the Megatropolis report) I understood that fucking over Auckland's water would be the first step on a path to forcing every council in the country to divest water utilities. It's not a big leap, and it can be done by central government with a single stroke of their legislative pen. Councils can only own assets because the law permits it, after all. They like urgency, as we've seen, and getting that kind of clause through under urgency would be a piece of cake. It might even miss scrutiny by Labour and the Greens if the rest of the legislation in question was particularly odious.
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Any mayor who advocates asset sales in this environment is a dead man walking.
And that's stopped them before? I seem to recall Gruppen-Fuhrer Banks campaigning on frozen rates and cessation of the dividend payments from WaterCare. Increased rates in excess of inflation? Check. Continuing WaterCare dividend payments? Check.
They only have to get into power once to be able to run amok. This new Megatropolis legislation enables that further. Rodney's agenda regarding councils losing control of water utilities is explicit, and not in any way secret. If he can get Auckland divested of WaterCare, it'll be much easier to force it on the rest of the country.
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Yeah it is somewhat ambiguous, and he'd have difficulty defending any employment decision that rested solely on a person's presence at the rally. But that doesn't mean that he actually intended it to refer to anything less than taking part in an unauthorised bridge crossing.
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Oh, and while I agree that support people for open systems cost more they're also historically far more cost-effective for the systems:admin ratio. You need many more MS admins than OSS admins for the same number of servers.
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Bart, if we're trying to save costs by going away Windows and Office, why would we then switch from the Microsoft Tax to the Jobs Tax by getting Macs? PC hardware will run Linux just fine, and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a Mac. The hardware quality is not higher than that of a PC of equivalent spec, for the functionality required by the average government desk jockey. And having been briefly afflicted with one of those nasty 20" iMacs with the shit displays, I wouldn't do that to any hapless civil servant. Buy Macs for designers, by all means, but don't pretend that paying $2500 (assuming a very hefty discount for government purchases, from the $3800 retail) for a desktop with a 24" screen is at all economic for all users.
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For that matter, even Microsoft isn't indistinguishable from Microsoft, in the sense that changes between OS versions and Office versions can be quite marked.
Office 2007, for example. That bloody ribbon drives me up the wall, on the few occasions when I'm forced to use it. Doesn't help that I'm mostly using computer lab machines around uni that won't allow me to retain customisations, but I shouldn't have to customise it to feel like I know where shit is. I can sit down with OOo or any older version of Office and feel perfectly comfortable.
Rich, as Stephen has pointed out most people use only a subset of the functionality of Office. It can mail-merge, it can save directly to PDF (can't do that in any older version of Office!), and it can do styles. How much more functionality do you actually think gets used by your average governmental desk jockey?
As "thin" applications become the norm, provided they're not being implemented using ActiveX they should be totally cross-platform. If it's designed well, it'll work in any capable browser on any OS. A great example is RaboBank's online banking interface, which is identical in Firefox, IE, and Safari, across Windows, Mac OS, Linux and FreeBSD. That's how web systems should be. Once they are, the user doesn't have to give a damn what the OS is or what the browser is. Google Apps works just fine in FF on FreeBSD and Linux, so again there's no compelling reason for someone who's just a desk jockey to need a full application stack running on Windows. Obviously anyone dealing with sensitive or classified information is a different story, but there are many, many jobs in the public service that deal with nothing more sensitive than the office telephone list.
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I would imagine that he knew that his attitude was unpopular with a sufficiently-sized section of the public that, even if he had no specific knowledge of internal dissent, he had to realise that the odds were on people within NZTA disagreeing with the position taken regarding the walkway/cycleway.
There's also a difference between telling people that they'll face employment consequences for taking part in an illegal activity that's directly aimed at their employer and telling people that they're not allowed to disagree with their employer's policies. The article read very much as it being the former, not the latter.