Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, December 10th, 2009 - 26 comments
From the Meridian Energy web site. Meridian Energy Limited has confirmed it has suspended offering new Renewable Energy Notes under the investment statement dated 29 October 2009 following the decision from the Ministerial Review into the Electricity Market to transfer ownership of two of its South Island hydro stations to its sister SOE Genesis. Energy […]
Written By: - Date published: 7:55 pm, December 7th, 2009 - 29 comments
Following on from our report earlier this year about ideal places for libertarians to go, it appears that we are now seeing capitalism in its wonderful Ayn Rand style libertarian idealized form. Somali ‘maritime companies” have setup a stock exchange to help incubate free enterprise in its natural form. From Reuters we have this report. […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:53 pm, December 5th, 2009 - 3 comments
I did some small interface changes on Friday morning. The main effect was to widen the page from 950 pixels to 1024 pixels to allow for a wider sidebars and central content. I also cleaned up the header graphic a bit. Consequently I’ve just increased the depth of thread discussions from six deep to seven […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:10 am, December 4th, 2009 - 19 comments
So John Key has finally dropped his veils* and is going to Copenhagen. Well, Rob Emmerson correctly predicted how the ineffectual Emissions Trading Scheme amendments by NACT did wind up. Taxpayers pay almost all of the cost, our kids pay even more, and polluters have no incentive to reduce emissions. Now imagine what happens when […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:05 pm, December 3rd, 2009 - 5 comments
One of the most amusing things in the granny today is Garth George, our iconoclast from Rotorua ripping another hole into the credibility of the Brash Taskforce 2025. Absurdities abound, the first of which was the appointment of people like Dr Brash and Mr Caygill who, along with their soulmate, Act Party seat-warmer Roger Douglas, […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:52 pm, December 2nd, 2009 - 32 comments
felix in comments points out in his usual sarcastic style about the media response on Don Brash’s 2025 Taskforce report. For example, consider this online poll (tvnz): What do you think of Don Brash’s 2025 Taskforce financial report? It’s too radical It’s about right It doesn’t go far enough All the questions imply some degree […]
Written By: - Date published: 5:02 pm, November 30th, 2009 - 36 comments
I haven’t bothered looking too far for reaction to Paul Henry jerking off in public to attract attention to his personaility defect – inflated ego. Against the current had a post that captured my opinion the best – Meet Mr Stupid. This time the victim of Henry’s ‘witty banter’ was British singing Susan Boyle. Henry […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:12 pm, November 27th, 2009 - 47 comments
Bomber over at Tumeke has a good post up on Goff’s speech. Pointing out the Maori Party has Stockholm Syndrome is not race baiting That to me sums up Goff’s speech, far more eloquently than I could. He referred to Eddies earlier post…. ..ouch, did we read the same speech? I don’t think pointing out […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:15 pm, November 25th, 2009 - 5 comments
Rod Oram did a business segment on Nine to Noon yesterday. As usual he went quite deep into the issues. A welcome contrast to Colin Espiner and his very limited level of understanding (“they did it too”) on the complete change of direction in the short-sighted changes to the Emissions Trading Act being pushed through […]
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, November 24th, 2009 - 73 comments
It has been fascinating over the last few days watching the CCDs (Climate Change Deniers) make an another attempt to scale the bastion of scientific thinking and language. In this case someone hacked a copy of decade of e-mails at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at a insecure University of East Anglia webmail server. There […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, November 24th, 2009 - 11 comments
Due to recovering from a cold over the weekend, I haven’t had time to blog about the super-shitty electoral boundaries released on friday in traditional style. However jarbury has done a great analysis over at the Auckland Transport blog. If you look at the all-important councillors, the striking thing is the inequities of the voting […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:04 pm, November 20th, 2009 - 38 comments
Ohmigod, after Red Alert informed me that the National MPs had started a blog, I nearly died!!!!!!! And after I’d finished that and resurrected, I went and had a look at it. Yep, I was right. These buggers know nothing about what blogging is about. Some moronic PR flack somewhere (is that a parliamentary crest […]
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, November 20th, 2009 - 41 comments
Reproduced with permission from No Right Turn for a viewpoint on the process of policy formation. This morning, Labour leader Phil Goff announced that he was abandoning the NeoLiberal consensus on monetary policy, with the aim of getting a monetary policy that works for the many rather than the rich few. But specifics were few […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:28 pm, November 18th, 2009 - 8 comments
Well I missed it. We rolled past the 4000th post at the end of October. A bit unexpected, it was too early by my reckoning and I wasn’t looking for it. We’re now at post 4154 so well on the way for the next milestone. Number 3000 was in early June, so it took a […]
Written By: - Date published: 2:15 pm, November 14th, 2009 - 74 comments
Whatever argument there is between the hierarchy of the Maori Party and Hone really doesn’t concern me. While I’m sure Kelvin Davis is watching with considerable interest, Hone was elected by the voters up north for being exactly who he is. This isn’t a political row with the over-powering stench of political hypocrisy like recent […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:40 pm, November 13th, 2009 - 7 comments
At about 7pm on Saturday 14th there will be an outage while the server gets another upgrade to a new OS kernel. Your server should be down for 5-10 minutes, we will restart it at the conclusion of the maintenance window. Yeah right – last time it was a couple of hours because the server […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:15 am, November 12th, 2009 - 23 comments
Brian Fallow has a great post over at Granny Herald this morning. “Emitters on bludger’s end of deal” deals with the way that the NACT government has been loading costs onto future voters and taxpayers. On superannuation: By siphoning off and investing around another 1 per cent of GDP while the babyboomers are still in […]
Written By: - Date published: 2:35 pm, November 11th, 2009 - 15 comments
One of the things that has surprised me about the government and Brownlee’s energy policy is that it is so mundane and 20th century. In every other area of their political electoral strategy we saw a pithy slogan, often pinched from overseas, substituting for policy and dumbed it down to the level of the dittoheads […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:56 pm, November 2nd, 2009 - 13 comments
Sorry to anyone who thought that The Standard hadn’t published anything today. The site had in fact been pretty active for a Monday. You got caught by a wee mistake by me* I moved the site to a more accessible location on the server in preparation for updates in the free time between now and […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:51 am, October 30th, 2009 - 18 comments
At this point it seems a bit pointless coming to work this morning. I’m sitting in a dark office with the cheeping of UPS’s (uninterruptible power supplies) and ozone as the batteries discharge keeping servers alive. The entire crew are sitting around waiting for the power to come back on, like large number of people […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:46 am, October 14th, 2009 - 15 comments
Day 7 of the bus strike by Infratil The idiotic employers at NZ Bus owned by Infratil have dragged their lockout into a 7th day of disrupting Auckland’s commuters. Yesterday they repackaged some of their old proposals and tried to make it look like something new. What the grasping employers want is for the drivers […]
Written By: - Date published: 4:58 pm, October 13th, 2009 - 7 comments
Day 6 of Infratil’s strike Brian Rudman had a column yesterday that clearly articulated how Aucklanders view the bus strike by Infratil management at NZ Bus. Only a few days ago, my bus had to take an unscheduled stop outside the public toilets in Victoria Park. The driver locked his money box then made the […]
Written By: - Date published: 9:28 am, October 8th, 2009 - 7 comments
Well the intransigent owners and managers of Infratil / NZ Bus finally went on strike this morning in their quest for higher profits. They locked out the bus drivers for threatening to abide by their contract. This is causing widespread chaos amongst other businesses as their employees are unable to get to work. We just dispatched […]
Written By: - Date published: 10:00 pm, September 21st, 2009 - 6 comments
The outage earlier this evening was due to the hosting company taking the server down.. We will be rebooting the host machine to update its kernel and apply some other fixes. The reboot will occur at approx 2200 PT (10pm Pacific time) on Sunday September 20th. Your server should be down for 5-10 minutes, we […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:45 am, September 20th, 2009 - 8 comments
We haven’t seen much of this myth in NZ. However it shows some good examples of selective reading of news articles and papers by CCD’s in support of the “Martians drive hummers” line. Thanks to Andrei for reminding me why videos like this have to be made. You have to read the whole article or […]
Written By: - Date published: 11:53 am, September 19th, 2009 - 24 comments
If you are in love with the concept that 1998 was the warmest year on record (wrong by the way), don’t watch this. This runs through exactly why you don’t know what you’re talking about. Check out this
Written By: - Date published: 10:30 am, September 13th, 2009 - 87 comments
There was an interesting preview paper published back in January by by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman. It sheds light on how the scientists who work in the field view the probability of climate change happening. It is pretty clear from the results that those closest to the data and who know the factors […]
Written By: - Date published: 3:23 pm, September 12th, 2009 - 31 comments
There are a couple of things that I hadn’t realised about the rather strange changes to the Auckland super-city boundaries. They are just weird and show a strange idea of what Auckland. About 50% of Auckland’s water comes from the Hunua’s. Surely the provision of fresh water is a “core service” of local bodies. Sure […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:24 pm, September 11th, 2009 - 20 comments
The most interesting feature of the Labour conference so far has been from Jim Anderton. It looks like the Progressives are now able to have dual membership with Labour. However he also talking about better organisation of the party towards campaign planning. Some of his ideas are a bit dated (well at least to me). […]
Written By: - Date published: 1:15 pm, September 10th, 2009 - 24 comments
The Labour party conference is on in Rotorua this weekend, so I’ll be heading there Friday morning. If the writers and readers want to catch up then I’ll generally be around the Mt Albert delegation – they can direct you towards my grey hairs. I’m particularly interested in people who think that they can write […]
Written By: - Date published: 8:12 am, September 8th, 2009 - 7 comments
Yesterday Infratil got their NZ Bus hand-puppets to announce that they will be going on strike. On Wednesday, if the bus-drivers refuse to donate their time freely to increase Infratil returns to investors, the company will remove bus-services from the commuters of Auckland. If the reasonable attempts of the bus drivers to increase their wages […]
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