Hard News by Russell Brown

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Hard News: Scuffling and screaming on The Left

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  • Kyle Matthews,

    And what the hell is Ron Mark - chopped liver?

    If wishing made it so...

    Since Nov 2006 • 6243 posts Report Reply

  • InternationalObserver,

    we will go on to the state-owned farms, into the forests, to the wild places where very few people live, and we will say: 'This is ours, now try and stop us taking it. We've been patient, we've believed your fine words, for too long. We know what is right'".

    Is this land not previously covered by a Treaty settlement, or is it land covered by a Treaty settlement but a settlement not recognised by this generation of Maori? And will urban Maori be entitled to a stake in those State Forests, or just local Iwi?

    Since Jun 2007 • 909 posts Report Reply

  • Michael Fitzgerald,

    I/O a related issue is the state in its various guises are not paying rent for what they recognise & are under contract to local maori to for the use of their land(there is no contest as to ownership). Any other land owner would expect to be paid. The state is not paying up presumably because they are maori land owners. This is the level of contempt and societal schisim existing in BOP.

    Since May 2007 • 631 posts Report Reply

  • BenWilson,

    Finn
    It increases the likely ongoing expenses and risks involved in owning the code for the client, and therefore decreases the value of you writing it.

    It also means you're entrenched. If I'm the employer, I agree with you. As a worker, what you say only works in theory. Yes, some employers really like programmers who write beautiful code that anyone could understand. But anytime that programmer wants a pay-rise, then they can be replaced more easily. So hence I say that it is clearly to the advantage of many programmers not to make their stuff easily accessible. What I'm saying is Machiavellian, but that doesn't make it untrue.

    Indeed the very best, most open programmers are the open source coders who get paid absolutely nothing, and don't even own the source. God bless their kind and generous souls, but when you gotta eat and want job security, face facts - many people see it more in their interests not to be so trusting of their employers.

    Furthermore, I'm not actually convinced it makes a great deal of difference, except in the disaster cases, when the coder become incapacitated. By and large a person looking after the shit they made is the most efficient way, and sharing it all around is just an overhead. I've so often been faced with code that has been written in what is supposedly an open and wonderful way, and found it no less impenetrable than some spaghetti shit written by some hack.

    To me the main reason for good coding is actually for yourself. You develop a consistent style that you can read and rapidly debug. You can support and write more code that way. As for fixing up other people's code, that's the stuff of nightmares, no matter how elite a programmer they think they are. In fact, the more elite, the harder it is.

    Just my perspective. I'm sure there's a million academic studies on why great coding in great teams is great and really serves the company. What I haven't seen is any studies in what is the best path to being a well-paid programmer. From my experience, the best programmers are usually the least well paid, and that especially includes academics.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 10657 posts Report Reply

  • rodgerd,

    What I'm saying is Machiavellian, but that doesn't make it untrue.

    It makes me think I'd never, ever hire you in the first place.

    Personally I've done quite well as a contractor thus far by documenting and sharing knowledge. My clients appreciate it and keep asking me back.

    Watching _Life of Brian_ tonight has been enlivened after reading some of the stuff that's come out in the past few weeks, and some of the nonsense Russell is covering in this post is a prime example.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 512 posts Report Reply

  • BenWilson,

    It makes me think I'd never, ever hire you in the first place

    Why is it I'd want to work for you?

    You're following Machiavelli's first law. Always rag on Machiavelli. But the zeroth law is to pretend never to have even heard of him.

    Personally I've done quite well as a contractor by having knowledge that there's no point documenting. Every time I even begin to explain it, the employer's eye's glaze over and he just goes 'so it works then?'. 'Yes, sir, it works'. 'Good then, keep up the good work. It's good to know someone understands that shit'. 'Very good, sir'. But I document it anyway, for my own sake.

    The number of times I've listened in to other departments go on about their amazing clean-room procedures in the 4th year of not delivering what I've already completed and is being used by thousands of satisfied customers, I can't count on fingers. Then they're always 'hey, we must get together, share the knowledge, write some libraries, do a peer review, work out some standards'. And it's always 'yup, sure, sounds good <goes back to cutting code for the man>'. Perhaps I'm jaded, or perhaps I'm just realistic. 25 years of code cutting will do that to you.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 10657 posts Report Reply

  • Sara Noble,

    I/O - There are vast tracts of land owned by the Crown (such as the conservation estate) and State Owned Enterprises (the remnants of the old government monopoly services/businesses, including forests and farms) that are subject to unresolved Waitangi Tribunal (Treaty) claims. What Mutu refers to is the possibility of Maori re-occupying these relatively unoccupied, under utilised areas. Sadly I don't share her confidence in the likelihood of this occurring.

    The Tuhoe hold over the Ureweras could be considered a model for such occupations, but I'm sure that Tuhoe assert that Te Ahi Ka or occupation rights (literally keeping the home fire burning) have been continuous. Tuhoe have never conceded sovereignty either by Treaty or conquest, so the recent police action can be seen as an extension of the Crown struggle for sovereign dominance into the area. Tuhoe effectively control the area and, I think, would assert their right to defend their land, people and culture against incursion. So this is a real sovereignty struggle occurring right here, right now.

    Outside of this, in Treaty-land, there is a long and continuous history of confiscation, theft, trickery etc. Even when the Court of Appeal ruled (in 1989?) against the Crown selling land that was subject to Treaty claims, the practice continued. In many instances there have been multiple Crown commissions and investigations on the same piece of land that have recommended return to Maori ownership. The recommendations have then been ignored and the struggle continues.

    In one such instance, two crown commissions and other investigations over 40 years recommended returning a large and very sacred piece of land to Maori. The recommendations were repeatedly ignored and the concerned tribe registered a claim with the Waitangi Tribunal. A Pakeha farmer purchased the land intending to subdivide it at huge profit despite knowing that it was subject to a Waitangi Tribunal claim. When Maori asserted their claim by occupation the farmer took matters into his own hands by bulldozing one of the sacred burial grounds in the area to destroy any archaeological value that might have further strengthened the case to protect the land. This kind of scenario is ubiquitous. In this context comments such at those of Allan Hawera are indeed moderate and the idea that they are creepy, let alone hellishly so, are laughable. That is without even considering the issues that he must face daily as a Maori social worker.

    Given our capacity to get worked up about our granddads' war medals, or the American reverence of the Declaration Independence, or indeed the Commonwealth and the Magna Carta, the argument that Maori claims are historical and they should ignore or get over them is criminal. Breaches of the Treaty are real, continuous and contemporary.

    Russell, how can you pick at the incidental aspects of the Guardian article and call it terrible without addressing any of the substantive issues? Do you really think that talking to the insider Maori politicians would add anything to such an overview? They are institutionalised - you would get party line window dressing. The academic position is one small step removed. The outsider perspective of the Guardian article is welcome, just as, on occasion, the Privy Council was a venue in which Maori could get a relatively impartial hearing.

    I am a fifth generation Pakeha New Zealander and I want my place in this land to be founded on fair dealings with Maori. Based on that, we could take our place as the capital of the Pacific.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2007 • 127 posts Report Reply

  • Danyl Mclauchlan,

    Yes, some employers really like programmers who write beautiful code that anyone could understand. But anytime that programmer wants a pay-rise, then they can be replaced more easily.

    I worked for a bank in London who had a proud tradition of doing just that:
    'Are these trading algorithms documented?'
    'Yes Sir!'
    'Good, now get out. You're fired.'

    So I set out to write the most incomprehensible code possible. Naturally I taught myself perl. I gave all my scripts names like 'ZAP!' and 'BAM!' A friend wound up supporting the trading floor for that bank last year and told me there were still cron jobs called 'ZAP' running that nobody dared shut down.

    All this talk reminds me of The Story of Mel

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 927 posts Report Reply

  • BenWilson,

    Heh, and the reverse. When they brought in GST in Oz, a consulting firm was hired by my employer to write universal GST calculator functions. All programmers were directed to find ways to call these functions, which were all developed under the latest paradigms, n-tiered whatnot. For some reason, when it went live, this method seemed to take about a second to work out the GST every time. It was a finance company so it was working out GST thousands of times every second in various apps, web pages, spreadsheets, etc. Of course almost all systems that had been dutifully converted ground to a screaming halt, and screaming was exactly what happened when the stockbrokers couldn't trade.

    It was explained to me why it took a computer a second to calculate x * 1.10 which my old Vic20 seemed to be able to do about 1000 times faster in 1982. All the programs had to call wrapper functions, which had to be custom written for every environment. In many cases the operating system had to download the library across the network to use it. This wrapper then called metawrappers which were universally written in Java, which was running in a virtual machine (which usually had to be loaded upon each call to the function). Java then communicated over a specially developed protocol over TCP/IP to a GST server. This GST server's job was to ask the mainframe what GST was, and the interface between the mainframe and the server was apparently DOS batch files. The mainframe answered (via batches) the server spoke TCP/IP back to the metawrappers which spoke to the wrapper which returned a value to the programs. If you can believe this, even programs running on the mainframe were expected to follow this procedure (for standardization), despite the fact that the GST values were actually stored on the mainframe in the first place.

    Apparently it was all beautifully documented and peer reviewed. The testing procedures were exemplary, although load testing was never really done properly since no-one could actually believe that computers might actually struggle to calculate x *1.10.

    What had not been carefully documented by most of the programmers was that whilst developing the interface to the wrapper functions, they had also written coding stubs, while they were waiting for the contracting team to write the exceedingly difficult function to calculate GST. Most of the time, this coding stub was a barbarically simple x=x*GST_CONSTANT; Disgusting, huh?

    On the day it all went to hell, the programmers were told to go back to the undocumented coding stub, and the system fired back up to it's former glory. This GST calculator project was sent back and told to improve it's performance. After a week they had made 10-fold improvement, a magnificent achievement for a hard-working team of contractors (although I'm told the documentation suffered a bit during this week). But unfortunately being able to calculate GST at only 10 times a second was not enough, and again the programmers backrevved after some management apoplexy. This repeated once more before the team decided to sacrifice a little of the abstract perfection of the system. Systems were allowed to cache some of the values returned (which in 100% of the cases turned out to be the value 1.1) and perform the calculation locally. The performance improved drastically. Some machine were able to calculate GST up to a thousand times per second (we've reached 1982 standards by now). This was deemed good enough, and the contractors dispersed to the four winds. When the GST server went down the guy who could fix it turned out to have taken a job contracting in London.

    Fortunately he had left 200 pages of excellent doco on how to get this server up and going, which the guy whose job it was looked at, fiddled around a lot with various settings, but couldn't ultimately fix. It seemed that every couple of hours the server would shit itself. So he wrote a batch file to rekick this server every couple of hours. This is apparently the live system today.

    Everyone who needs to calc GST more than 1000 times a second (which unsurprisingly is almost everyone) has reverted to the undocumented coding stubs. Some bright spark decided to go around documenting all these stubs, which turned out to be a 2 hour job. If and when GST changes (something that usually comes with several years warning), they will have to pull out his one page document, go through a few dozen programs and change a constant. Hacky, huh? But management decided to live with that.

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 10657 posts Report Reply

  • WH,

    There are vast tracts of land owned by the Crown (such as the conservation estate) and State Owned Enterprises (the remnants of the old government monopoly services/businesses, including forests and farms) that are subject to unresolved Waitangi Tribunal (Treaty) claims

    Do such claims fall within the ambit of the Treaty negotiations process?

    the argument that Maori claims are historical and they should ignore or get over them is criminal. Breaches of the Treaty are real, continuous and contemporary

    Are the claims capable of being resolved by negotiation? Or is the struggle for sovereignty the only means by which these claims can be resolved?

    I am a fifth generation Pakeha New Zealander and I want my place in this land to be founded on fair dealings with Maori.

    What does that require?

    Since Nov 2006 • 797 posts Report Reply

  • Jeremy Andrew,

    Can Tuhoe use the Waitangi Tribunal, and still claim that the treaty doesn't apply becasue they didn't sign it?

    Hamiltron - City of the F… • Since Nov 2006 • 900 posts Report Reply

  • kmont,

    Can Tuhoe use the Waitangi Tribunal, and still claim that the treaty doesn't apply becasue they didn't sign it?

    What would you do in their position?

    There are vast tracts of land owned by the Crown (such as the conservation estate) and State Owned Enterprises (the remnants of the old government monopoly services/businesses, including forests and farms) that are subject to unresolved Waitangi Tribunal (Treaty) claims.

    A Pakeha farmer purchased the land intending to subdivide it at huge profit despite knowing that it was subject to a Waitangi Tribunal claim.

    For an example of this I recommend the documentary "The Last Resort" which you can find here.

    If you take the time to look at that doco you may find that you learn a lot. I did. These issues effect all NZers. You can come at these issues from lots of angles but I predict that most people would find they have large areas of agreement with the Maori in that film.

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 485 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    Why not? It's called "politics."

    Getting permanent redress involves working with the Crown. And that is pretty much the only avenue left open for doing so. If I were trying to advance the Tuhoe cause I would favour action towards a long-term goal over staying ideologically pure.

    I personally would prefer that sort of pragmatism to an ultimately futile campaign of violence.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Russell Brown,

    See THIS JUST IN ...

    Auckland • Since Nov 2006 • 22850 posts Report Reply

  • Neil Morrison,

    You can come at these issues from lots of angles but I predict that most people would find they have large areas of agreement with the Maori in that film.

    I agree most people would but agreeing with the need to make redress for colonisation does not mean being unable to question the motivation and judgement of some of the more strident advocates of Maori rights.

    Look what happened when Hone Harawira's family took over a Maori mental health unit at Carrington hospital. He jumps up and down about alleged Sate terrorism but had no problem when his family were beating up Maori who had a mental illness - all in the name of some spurious Maori tradition/spirituality.

    Iti is most likely not nasty in that way (the people I know who know him say he’s a gentle, if dramatic at times, guy) but he does appear to have a rather inflated sense of his own importance and sense of mission. And some of the people he has attracted look plan crazy and dangerous.

    Since Nov 2006 • 932 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    That seems a bit of a non sequitur Neil - what has that got to do with the justice, or injustice of a cause? Can we ignore a just cause because some of its advocates are unpleasant and bad? I don't think so.

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Jeremy Andrew,

    What would you do in their position?

    That's why I asked.
    I'm assuming the Waitangi Tribunal itself wouldn't tell them to get lost because their name's not on the list.
    So it would come down to weighing ideology and pragmatism.

    The pragmatic side would need to work out if they thought they had a better chance of getting their desired outcome (presumably dominon over 'their' lands) via:
    1) a claim through the official channels, or
    2) by occupying it and claiming it by fait accompli, traditional ownership, that homefires burning thing, finders-keepers, and possession being nine-tenths of the law.

    Idealistically, if they maintain their position of not being a party to the treaty, than using any processes based upon it would seem hypocritical, which would limit them to option two above, or various other diplomatic solutions such as attempting to negotiate their own treaty with the crown on their own terms (which would at a glance seemed doomed to failure as the crown doesn't recognise their sovereignty).

    Hamiltron - City of the F… • Since Nov 2006 • 900 posts Report Reply

  • kmont,

    I agree most people would but agreeing with the need to make redress for colonisation does not mean being unable to question the motivation and judgement of some of the more strident advocates of Maori rights.

    At no point did I suggest that anyone was unable to question the motivation and judgement of some of the more strident advocates of Maori rights.
    I really do recommend that film, there is more than redress for colonisation at play, it is very topical because of the focus on subdividing costal land, foreign investment and camping damnit!

    Think of the campers ; )

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 485 posts Report Reply

  • kmont,

    Although the central issue clearly is about Maori ownership of the land, which is as it should be.

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 485 posts Report Reply

  • Neil Morrison,

    It doesn't have any bearing on the justice of the cause but it does have a bearing on what one finds accpetable being done in the name of that cause.

    It's a slight non sequiter, but it's a response to the view that not condeming State and Police action as terrorism implies a disregard for Maori grievances.

    Since Nov 2006 • 932 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    Jeremy, if I were a canny Tuhoe person, I'm sure I would go for both options. Certainly other iwi and hapu have.

    If you were were a black American in 1960, would you only confine yourself to legal strategies, because equal treatment was your legal, constitutional right? Or would you practise civil disobedience and break the law, which after all has failed to protect you and your rights? Or would you, shock horror, do both?

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • kmont,

    It's a slight non sequiter, but it's a response to the view that not condeming State and Police action as terrorism implies a disregard for Maori grievances.

    That is not my view. I don't think that is a widely held view. My example was simply put forward in case people wanted to check out that specific case for themselves. It doesn't have to do with Tame Iti but it does have to do with the wider context.
    I actually find quite easy to critisize the police without throwing the word terrorist around for rhetorical effect. I think focusing on the actual issues rather than the rhetorical florishes of people trying to make a political point is a lot more useful in understanding the issues.

    wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 485 posts Report Reply

  • Jeremy Andrew,

    Jeremy, if I were a canny Tuhoe person, I'm sure I would go for both options. Certainly other iwi and hapu have.

    If you were were a black American in 1960, would you only confine yourself to legal strategies, because equal treatment was your legal, constitutional right? Or would you practise civil disobedience and break the law, which after all has failed to protect you and your rights? Or would you, shock horror, do both?

    If the black americans had been making a point of saying the constitution didn't apply to them, because their didn't sign it, then they might have felt differently about using constitutional grounds.
    The Tuhoe (or the media on their behalf) are proudly pointing out that they didn't sign the treaty, so if the refuse to be bound by it where it suits them, then it seems hypocritical to to use the structures that the treaty has engendered to their benefit.
    Of course, pragmatically, the ends might justify the means, but I'd be interested in hearing the philosophy behind it.

    Hamiltron - City of the F… • Since Nov 2006 • 900 posts Report Reply

  • Stephen Judd,

    Well, I wouldn't push the analogy too far. I guess that strictly such a strategy IS hypocritical, which in my mind only goes to show that there are worse things than hypocrisy.

    Oddly, your position can be summed up in a classic feminist quotation (Audre Lorde): "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

    Wellington • Since Nov 2006 • 3122 posts Report Reply

  • Jeremy Andrew,

    That is a good quote, I'll add it to my files...

    Its not really my position though, although it could well be Tuhoe's. I was just wondering if Tuhoe do use the Tribunal, and if that makes their position on not having signed the Treaty less tenable.

    Depends if you view the Tribunal as having sprung directly from the Treaty, or if its more a part of the overall legislative framework of the country. If you are going to try to work within the system, that's the system you'd be stuck with.

    Hamiltron - City of the F… • Since Nov 2006 • 900 posts Report Reply

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