Posts by Howard Edwards
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Thank you for your post Russell. I saw this Campbell Live item and thought
1. This is a very one-sided presentation. Why aren't we hearing from other members of the affected community who don't play golf?
2. That is a mighty big piece of recreational land surrounded by rapidly growing and intensifying population areas. Surely someone (preferably the local board) should be thinking about what is the best use of this land for nearby residents, rather than just putting one's fingers in one's ears and chanting "change is bad"?
3. It's been a long long time since I lived in Christchurch so please correct me, but: back in the 60s and 70s you could cycle or walk through the golf course in Hagley Park. In other words there was no issue with mixed use.
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Hard News: Incomplete, inaccurate and misleading, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thus is the world of the big consultancies...
Ah yes, Price Waterhouse Coopers who convinced my employer that they were at serious risk unless we were all forced to change our passwords every 6 months.
I was quite sad after 6 months when I had to give up Ifnh8PWC ....
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Hard News: News from home ..., in reply to BenWilson,
Wow, he's talking UBI. Now I officially actually like him.
+1
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The last part of the Herald article is gobsmacking:
The office of Police Minister Michael Woodhouse did not respond to questions as to whether Cabinet needed to consider the matter again. Asked if the minister's office accepted the figures were wrong, a spokesman said: "It is unfortunate that some figures required clarification."
No it's not unfortunate, it's incompetent. And no they didn't require clarification, they required correction.
How do these plonks get away with talking such crap?
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Unfortunately dealing with Auckland Council bureaucracy is not a straightforward or fairminded process IMHO. I am (or rather a contractor on my behalf is) trying to get a resource consent issued to fix the mess caused by a landslip over 16 months ago. I'm not a developer, just a property owner who got hit by a natural disaster a la the ChCh earthquake (have a look at images 2 through 5 at this link).
A couple of weeks after the consent was submitted Council asked for an onsite meeting with the Geotech engineer and contractor, but at the last moment we were informed that one of their staff had sustained an injury and could we please meet at the Council offices instead. The meeting seemed to sort out their concerns provided we supplied some more detail, got neighbours consent etc. However when the material was emailed to the team leader we got an out-of-office reply "away for the next 3-4 weeks" which meant tracking down the new contact person, after which we discovered there were new Council staff involved and could we please meet onsite to discuss their concerns? So I forked out for the geotech engineer to front again and again we are led to believe that everything has been sorted - but we are still waiting for the green light.
Oh and I also have to pay $300 + GST for iwi consultation (applies to the whole Waitakere Ranges protected area which includes most of Titirangi) - perhaps a good idea in principle but it seems a bit over the top when I am just trying to repair land damage - not putting up a 10 story apartment building. And one of the apparent causes of the slip was an undiscovered landfill dump that lay under all the regenerated bush and contributed to the slope instability.
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Hard News: The Hager saga continues, in reply to simon g,
From John Roughan's first column after the election: "It wasn't just the endorsement of a good and decent man, the election result made nonsense of the conventional political wisdom that a single party cannot win an MMP majority."
Pardon me - where's the nonsense now?
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Hard News: A call from Curia, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Grumpollie grumpollie.wordpress.com/2014/03/13/rob-salmonds-post-on-cell-phone-polling/ has a post about this - the relevant bit (which appears to apply to both cellphones and landlines) is this:
For those interested, RDD (random digit sampling) works by randomly generating numbers within number banks, then connection testing them, and then re-sampling the connected numbers.
Self-selecting samples are a problem - you can adjust estimates by measuring covariates such as age, gender, ethnicity etc and adjusting to align the sample with the population of interest, but how do you come up with estimates of variance (i.e. margin of error)?
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John Drinnan's recent NZ Herald article on the use of PR consultants in the media gave me a "Jesus wept" moment when I read this:
"Jennings said the controversy had been a wake-up call to the media to be careful about using PR people on current affairs programmes. But media could not afford to be wholly dismissive, he said, because they needed people who were intelligent and articulate on screen."
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Steve Barnes,
The full stop denotes the end of the sentence and is not supposed to be part of the URL.
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Hard News: The Ides of Epsom, in reply to JLM,
Just a coincidence that the richest lifestyle blocker of all happens to be Kim Dotcom, then?