Posts by Matthew Poole
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I am not against funding stuff in Auckland.
That does, unfortunately, make you part of a minority. There are an awfully large number of people who reside elsewhere in this country who begrudge Auckland every last cent of taxpayer money that it gets, no matter what it's for or how much tax Auckland contributes.
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I doubt there is much economy of scale in having a Auckland-wide garbage contract, for instance.
Well, there's enough scale in the recycling contract to have justified the $30m "just chuck it all in the recycling bin" (yes, that's plastics graded 1-7) recycling centre in Onehunga, and it's only servicing some of the cities in Greater Auckland. Of course, with commodity prices having done a splendid imitation of an Airbus, it may no longer be quite as viable as it once was. It is, however, something that I love to rub in the face of my family who reside in Wellington and Hamilton, that we don't have to sort our plastics :P
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but how will the people of North Shore, Manukau and Waitakere feel about paying to fix Auckland City's water and wastewater woes once there is s regional water entity?
How will Auckland City ratepayers feel about paying to build North Shore's new treated outflow pipe into the harbour? That's a long-term debt-funded construction, as I understand it. Fair's fair. Don't be bitching about you paying for some of our capital works (and don't forget that we've been carrying your share of a whole bunch of regional amenities for a long time!) if we're paying for some of yours.
It's that "We'll pay for ours, you pay for yours, and never mind that we both benefit from yours and ours" bullshit that's kept Greater Auckland in such a fucked-up state for so long. -
I'm a Te Papa fan mainly because it is free
Auckland Museum used to be totally free. Then the funding woes hit it, and now you're "encouraged" to pay a "donation". Had Te Papa not been built, but instead its obscene sums of startup funding dropped on Auckland Museum, it'd be Totally. Fucking. Awesome.
But that would've meant acknowledging that Auckland somehow managed to build a world-class museum entirely independently from central gummint funding, and we just can't be having that shit.
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It is difficult, living south of the Bombay Hills, to discern what benefits there might in a super-charged Auckland. I guess we need any benefits better explained
Well, for one thing it'd simplify rating by having a single council that sets and collects rates. At present there's Auckland Regional Council plus whichever of the "city" (including the districts) councils happens to be in charge of the area in which your property is located. All the city councils use different rating formulae, and they're different again from ARC's. It's a quagmire.
Then there're the complexities of "fair" compensation for regional amenities. Auckland City Council wears an awful lot of annual expense for things like MOTAT and Auckland Zoo, because they're located in Auckland City. They're clearly regional resources - as witnessed by how far schools travel to bring their pupils to visit - but other councils object, strenuously and bitterly, to having to actually contribute to their upkeep. There was even a central government statute in the works to try and force the other councils to pay their bit, which seems very draconian for something that should, by rights, be easily resolved.
Auckland's inter-council relationships are dysfunctional, to say the least. There's lots of parochialism between the different cities, much of it driven by the ratepayers themselves. Take the rivalries and bitchiness that exists between regions (especially Auckland and any of the regions south of the Bombay Hills), and then drop that into a sprawling urban area that has people on opposite sides of a street in different local authority boundaries, and you're beginning to get some idea of what the problem is. It's the rest of the country "paying for Auckland's roads" (don't get me started), but it's people in spitting distance of each others' houses who pay rates to different bodies and then have those rates go to maintaining the same road but in different stretches. Shambles is the politest adjective that springs to mind.
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Wannabe - where's ya Holden?
On blocks, in the front yard, where it should be :P
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For purposes of formfilling could I just get confirmation whether this screened on the 24th or 25th? Tom's post says the latter, YouTube says the former.
YouTube suffers from that wonderful Yank disease of thinking that the entire world is in a single timezone: theirs.
Given that it's not yet "today" in even the eastern-most states, YT's not going to catch up for a while. -
There's an AU$11 000 fine for linking to a site on the banned list.
The daily fine is a risk once you've been informed that you're linking to banned material, and fail to remove the link. It's still a stonking great sum of money, but it's not quite as ridiculous as the hysteria has portrayed. You're given a chance to fix the problem before they start whacking you with enormous penalties.
So would this blacklist prevent any connections to the server? Because it strikes me that the first thing you might know about it, if you were one of those innocents caught out by it, would be when you couldn't establish an SMTP connection to your mail server... or FTP any new files to your website...
It's only HTTP, as I understand it. So you'd not be blocked from sending email, or uploading content to your alleged porn site.
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I have some of the fastest and cheapest internet service in the world
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Look upon ye works, Ms Gattung, and kindly go kill yourself!
Russell, with the benefit of seeing just how much of a Deane clone - ignoring the obvious anatomical differences - Gattung turned out to be, I really want to see what kind of excoriating verdict your update offers on her performance.
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The other thing about double bunking is the impact on prison officers. Entering a cell is much more dangerous when there are two prisoners in it.
Meh. They're only low-wage social outcasts. Their safety matters not a jot. What's important is "being tough on crime and criminals". If a few screws get shanked, well, that's a trade-off that society just has to bear.
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