Posts by Idiot Savant
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Take OIA requests, which are so often time-wasting fishing expeditions by the Opposition party, to be leaked out-of-context to the media, or deployed as momentary gotchas in the House. They cost enormous amounts of time and money. That's not to say the OIA isn't A Very Good Thing, but it isn't used as the MPs who passed it though it would be, and it does encourage butt-covering.
It's called "accountability". Frequently its trivial and for the wrong things, but its certainly better than the alternative which our Public Service Manager so fervantly desires.
The same critique applies broadly to their entire post: the rules the Public Service Manager rails against are there primarily to ensure the public service is accountable for its use of public money and does not do things with it that the public doesn't like. And as a member of the public, I quite like this situation. Yes, fewer rules and less oversight would free up the self-procalimed Great Leaders in management to Do Things (tm). But it would mean far less accountability when they inevitably stuffed up (and they will, sometime, somewhere; no institution is perfect or composed entirely of trustworthy paragons of virtue). And as the people who own the beast, we're entitled to make that tradeoff.
And that said: we all need to learn to distinguish between the trivial bullshit that so often passes for political "news" in this country, and the important stuff. We'd all be a lot happier, our politics would be a lot saner, and Rodney Hide would eb out of a job. See - everyone's a winner!
The fear of the discoverable really does chill honest advice in the public sector. A friend in a major public agency was brutally hauled over the coals for an email questioning an assumption about modelling -- not because he was wrong or not doing his job, but because it might prove embarrassing if it got to the media.
Which suggests their manager does not accept public accountability,a nd should not be working in the public service.
-
Yep. If folks had any credibility they would simply refuse to appear on his shows. I know I don't watch TV but just *knowing* he is back is a symptom of something terribly wrong.
Lightweight, celebrity-obsessed...
-
I wish god would submit his laws to select committee hearings. I have some issues with a couple of them.
I wish the government would do the same.
-
It looks more like a festive Cthulhu to me...
1D10 / 1D100 SAN loss.
-
Yes, they might have to ratchet up the drinking part of the equation to compensate methinks.
Would that be a Bad Thing?
-
This certainly used to be the case, before I had children and socialised with other parents.
Ah. Forced social interaction with mundanes. There's your problem.
My uni friends are still far more interested in discussing things like the viability of the bus exchange for Call of Cthulu LARPS - the upstairs concourse appears to have no right angles.
Clearly its the Liao equivalent of a tinnie-house. "Fortified walls? Screw that, what's we're really worried about is something popping through the angles of time and covering us in corrosive blue goo..."
-
Where's our famed Kiwi reticence about religion?
Alive and well over here. I don't even know the religious beliefs of most of my friends, unless you count things like nWoD vs oWoD or 3.5 vs 4e (as opposed to "not at all"). I'm not interested in knowing, they're not interested in telling me, and everyone is happy that way.
-
I don't know
why does lunch
do this to me?Poor kitchen hygeine?
-
And in the meantime, the key point - that the participants in the conferance represent a particular worldview, which is oblivious to the actual effects of their "no lose" solutions - is completely ignored...
-
I should add that the business representatives form a coherant faction in the ways that others do not, with the result that their worldview and ideology is going to dominate the conversation. In a real sense, the others are simply window-dressing, there to make up the numbers and hide the fact that this is a right-wing talkshop.