Posts by Robert Urquhart
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to 3410,
How about setting up a donation thing for Haywood’s power bill? I’m in for $20.
+$ (and predicting the next post from David will be in protest)
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Ouch David. I now feel slightly guilty for admitting how grateful I am to the builder who brought forward fixing my roof and did it on Friday to beat the cold snap.
It's just me at home most of the time, so I'm heating the office during waking hours, the bedroom during sleeping hours, and I've set the night-store up to keep the chill off the hallway. Kind of wishing I'd had the walls filled at the same time I had had insulation installed in the roof and underfloor. But we are double-glazed and the windows account for large amounts of wall.
4-6 inches on the back lawn this morning. My parents report 5-7 inches out Sheffield way with patches/drifts up to 12 inches.
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http://www.hipmama.com/node/45867
I'm writing this from from the relative safety of a third floor flat in Hackney, east London. Over the last few days I've listened to nonstop sirens, watched armoured vehicles rumble past, helicopters hover overhead, as cops partitioned part of the neighbourhood. I have watched from the window as kids streamed down the alley toward or away from danger, watched on the news as riot police charged and bashed their way through crowds of angry, frightened teenagers armed with bricks.
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OnPoint: It's real, in reply to BenWilson,
+1 In much the same position myself
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This may or may not be relevant here
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/07/we-need-the-new-news-environment-to-be-chaotic/
The business environment for newspapers continues to be grim. Pew recently reported that advertising revenue rebounded in 2010 for all forms of media, except newspapers.* This might just be a matter of transitioning from print to digital revenues but for the fact that the market values a print reader far more than a digital one. The more or less official label for this problem is “analog dollars to digital dimes”; because of the enormous difference in assumed value per reader, lost value from print is not made up for by gains in digital readership.
The ‘analog dollars to digital dimes’ problem doesn’t actually seem to be a problem. It seems to be a feature of reality.
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Having one kind of institution do most of the reporting for most communities in the US seemed like a great idea right up until it seemed like a single point of failure. As that failure spreads, the news ecosystem isn’t just getting more chaotic, we need it to be more chaotic, because we need multiple competing approaches. It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have -
Hard News: Meanwhile in Epsom ..., in reply to Andre Alessi,
Read as
(and possibly eat the faces off of opossum MPs.)
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Hard News: A Capital Idea?, in reply to Angus Robertson,
If more likely the market goes down then we subsidise every landlord 15% on their captial losses through a tax rebate. Which would suck.
1. Only if they sell. And if we get the property market freeing up because a whole lot of landlords are selling at lower-than-current pries, that's a win.
2. You're assuming that there will be a "rebate" if you make a loss on selling a property. I don't believe that's a given - certainly haven't seen it mentioned anywhere myself.
You may mean an "effective rebate" rather than the government actually handing over money or a tax credit? In practicality that would be no different to selling at a loss in the current situation.
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It’s not just in Christchurch that it’s happening – in fact the most vocal/vicious “righteous outrage” I’ve heard about from my friends often seems to come from people who aren’t actually here, or necessarily directly affected.
Which parallels other my observations in other cases. It’s really easy to get wound up on someone elses behalf and launch an attack against the symbol of the “faceless corporation” without thinking about whether the person wearing that symbol is actually responsible for the problem. I know I’m guilty of this of occasion when I blog about an issue and don’t differentiate between the people who set policy and the people who find themselves in the position of having to implement it.
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Just saw Megan saying her bit on TV1 news. Spiffy.
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Given the amount of attention this has started receiving my friend (who is not allowed to speak to the media and thus could be at risk of losing her job) has asked that I remove her comments from the link above.
I summarise thus:
There aren't as many staff processing claims as you think there are, they aren't paid as much as you think they are, they all have broken homes and earthquake-stress here in Christchurch of their own and they also suffer threats and abuse from claimaints.
Which I know the sensible crowd here at PA understand anyway.
(A mod might be able to update my original post with this?)