Posts by Don Christie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Juha - present company excepted, of course.
-
Interesting interview with Peter Sunde (Swedish Pirate Bay Party) over on the Webstock blog.
we learned that the White House had pressured Sweden to take action or end up in being trade embargoed like Cuba(!). In Sweden it’s actually illegal for politicians to decide which individual cases the police or prosecutors should prioritise, but they did in ours. There’s been lots of wrong doing in the case, it’s all a big mess.
http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/
(the more artistically minded can scroll through to the Amanda.Fucking.Palmer interview).
On the topic of government procurement. Of course it should be open. I say that as a vendor. The worst deals we pay for as taxpayers are the massive ones with huge multi-nationals that fall very short in terms of value and have zero transparency.
-
One of the obvious ones is commercial confidence. Companies will be loathe to tender on state contracts if they know that their pricing models and terms will be available to the competition, even if the competition didn’t bid on a given contract, through the simple expedient of an OIA or equivalent request.
If companies are of this opinion then they should not be bidding for tax payer funded work. My company is sometimes asked by govt. agencies if there is anything in the bid that should not be revealed under OIA. We always say "no".
-
That is problematic, and from my understanding the failure of some stories to appear is indeed a failure at certain news organisations.
Er, Hager can publish on the web, can't he?
BTW, I should also have said, nice review and analysis. Agree about the Davies/Assange tiff. Egos colliding, I guess.
-
These seem to have dried up. I guess Hager is either sitting on them for the election campaign or writing another book.
It's pretty frustrating, and certainly one reason I am sure WL wanted more out than less. Journalists have their own, often narrow, agendas which are not generally those of the public interest. For example, it is only now that cables about ACTA are being released. They contain quite useful information, not least for NZers and NZ businesses who might fall foul of this and similar trade agreements with the USA.
Looking forward hearing the revelations on Media 7 about the drying up of Hager's releases.
-
‘Well, they’re informants,’ he said. ‘So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.’
We have no idea whether quotes like the one above are taken out of context or quite what the scenario was. They certainly contradict many of the public statements made by Wikileaks.
What we have seen is many journalists, including an editor of the NYT, claim that what Wikileaks does is not journalism and therefore not deserving of the same free speech protection that the NYT gets. This is breathtaking.
I have found the extracts of this book running in the Guardian badly written and uninformative, with little insight or analysis to redeem them.
Much better has been the analysis by Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, of Wikileaks and Assange, including Assange's own fairly surreal world.
-
After a sixteen year hiatus, some of us are rather enjoying having a tenant in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who is as smart as his wife, and noticeably more mature than his children.
Nice...
-
has some pretty fucked-up gun laws.
Oh come now. You really *are* politicising the debate. Mad gunmen don't kill people...
-
Bob and I will see you in court.
No need for that mallarky. Send 3 infringement claims to his ISP and get him cut off. Bwahaahaahaa.
Oh yeah, Merry Christmas :-)
-
I must say, I deeply admire The Guardian’s approach to these matters
Agreed. That said, I really am not sure I am comfortable with journalists being the arbiters of what the public get to see, any more than the government.
There is some very useful information coming to surface, and only from a very small number of cables. For example, NZers and NZ businesses should be interested in *all* references to free trade because that is a very big elephant right now that is dictating all sorts of domestic policy.
It would be nice to be able to make better informed decisions on how much of it will be good for NZ and how much it will harm us.