Posts by Gareth Ward
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I don't follow sorry Ben - are we saying the negotiation is valid but they haven't done a good job of it? How do we know? All I've seen is a loose statement from Key that the Govt would have provided short-term subsidies to the smelter to keep it open but no more, Rio have refused that and are now back to a commercial discussion with their power supplier? Sounds like we've played a fairly decent negotiating line there...
And personally I have zero interest in my Government entering the aluminium smelting industry.Again though, if pressure then goes on Meridian to commercially subsidise wider economic benefits then that's terrible governance (and would of course dilute the value in the sale as well). Or if the Govt ups it's subsidy offer beyond what it normally would consider prudent... And while I have a dread feeling that could very well happen with this crowd, there is no evidence of it occuring.
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I'll put it this way - if Rio Tinto was threatening to leave for some other reason (or if the power supplier was privately owned) I would expect the Govt to assess implications and possibly open negotiations if they could see a deal that would make net sense to the national economy. They would be negligent if they didn't...
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Hard News: Done like a dinner, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Said shareholder then created a subsidy to a major client of Meridian in order to increase the book value (or share value) of Meridian (which they plan to sell).
I'd need to see proof of the "in order to..." bit. Because the alternative view is they entered negotations for a Govt subsidy to an industry they considered of national economic importance. Or did they specifically announce that they were negotiating the electricity price with them on behalf of Meridian?
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I understand this may not be popular, but what exactly has the Government done wrong here? What should they have done as the alternative?
As far as I've seen, Meridian have independently held a commercial negotiation with their client which has, at this stage, failed. The Government have then, in their correct and proper economic role entered negotiation with a regionally significant employer/GDP source as to how they may keep them operating given they are indicating they will not. As the original post states, this would be in the form of a direct subsidy, completely independent of Meridian and hardly a precedent in NZ's economic history (indeed, hardly a precedent in NZ's 2013 economic history). That negotiation should be, as with all direct subsidy/winner-picking/economic-incentivising, conservatively weighed against the national cost of losing said economic activity...
IF the Govt influences the commercial negotiations of Meridian, or IF they offer a subsidy greater than the opportunity cost for political asset-sale management THEN they should be vilified. Personally my faith in them is rather slim so I suspect this will be become necessary - but AFAIK there is zero evidence either of those things have yet occurred.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Go Home DJ, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm curious whether the Apple devices solved the key problem with effective DJing on a 'droid I ran into, which is that there aren't 4 channels for the sounds,
iOS6 introduced multichannel audio, so apps can, for example, route a stereo cue into the headphones and stereo main out via the dock connector (or any other routing desired). I THINK it's 4 channels total, but may be more.
That obviously requires some form of external soundcard to hang off the dock connector - if you don't have that, most of the apps (e.g. the new Traktor DJ app) revert to a mono-split between cue and master, and you need to split the L/R channels out of the headphone jack... I'm not sure if it's smart enough yet to use Airplay for two channels and headphone jack for the other two -
Please, let's not fuck up another urban playspace by covering it with wealthy people's apartments.
Agreed, but let's also inject some regular, ongoing daily life into the space. Problem with leaving things as "urban playspaces" is they tend to be played in only very occassionally if there's not a "locals" population to keep them going in the off-hours.
Of course that doesn't just come about by plonking apartments into a space - those empty streets of bare walls and giant garage gates behind the Viaduct are testament to that... -
Hard News: Friday Music: Free and Legal, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
The Freegal service costs $205,000 / yearly. Small beer in the overall context of Council expenditure of a billion or so.
What is the overall library budget out of interest?
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to Phil Lyth,
I am looking forward to seeing the first weddings being celebrated on Saturday 1 June. (Is it inappropriate for me to note that is Queens Birthday?)
Ha, rad.
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Kevin Hague came down and spoke to us in the cafe afterwards
Ah ha! He's the guy who runs the Gays isn't he?! I knew it...
Also, that mistreated 18y/o is apparently "a Catholic design student from Wellington". They're designing Catholics now? Intelligently I hope.
(Am optimistic about your optimism...)
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An excellent read, thankyou. And some pretty powerful questions posed at the end...