Posts by Sacha
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Islander,
the link seems well-observed, to me
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Andre Alessi,
providers will have to work overtime to provide even a moderate level of service to business customers who will be (at least according to the rhetoric) the "wealth generators" in this brave new world.
Yes, you'd have expected this government if anyone to differentiate service levels to match revenue timing. Might also avoid the need to bribe providers with a regulatory holiday.
Home-based work would in time mean similar imperatives for services like real-time hi-res videoconferencing, which would keep the rollout rolling. However, no balls and no vision, even on their own narrow terms. Pathetic creatures.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Jarno van der Linden,
having a large media company like MediaWorks fail would scare off potential investors in TVNZ
That seems plausible. Thanks.
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Cracker: Send in the Clowns, in reply to Islander,
Ur, I understood that was the base? The requisite?
nope. anything that can access te internet will do
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And The Standard add Bill English being put on the spot on telly yesterday:
A little while later, MED realised that when the government lets someone pay a fee over time and charges interest on it, that’s a loan and requires the Minister of Finance’s approval under the Public Finance Act. So, English must have signed off on it, which makes his comments on Q+A yesterday interesting:
"GUYON Another bailout in the news this week and for some weeks – MediaWorks. Why did you loan MediaWorks $43 million?
BILL Well, I think as it’s been explained there, that’s not a loan.
GUYON But it is a loan, because you signed a document saying it was a loan under the Public Finance Act. Otherwise it would have been unlawful. Do you remember that?
BILL I do remember being— I do remember the Cabinet discussion about it, of course.
GUYON So it is a loan."
English will be pissed off that he is being drawn into Joyce’s dirty little deal.
Happy to see a journo calling him on his (frequent) lying too.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Russell Brown,
I was prepared to accept a case that the risk of Mediaworks' failure was such as to justify financing.
Same - though that industry seems better placed for non-disruptive ownership changes than many others are.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Kumara Republic,
can't be good for our Transparency Intl rankings
For that we have Joyce's dodgy dealings over Mediaworks - and Idiot/Savant is delving into OIA responses that among other things show that it was not Key who over-rode official advice against lending out dosh at favourable rates. And that the company would have survived anyway, just not so profitably.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
There would be no compensation
Unless "free" trade agreements like TPPA allow foreign-owned corporates to sue our government. Not local companies, just overseas ones, mind.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Andre Alessi,
In an ideal, rational world we'd have started building a publically-owned national fibre network a couple of years ago
You'll recall generally right-wing thinker Rod Drury proposing some years ago a government-owned, fair access, cost-plus, wholesale network because it just made more sense.
If we insist on private monopolies then they need regulators with balls, not locked in their kennel for ten years so some ideological free market fantasy can appear to work out. This nation should have had fibre more than a decade ago if we hadn't had feeble neolib wastes of space like Maurice Williamson acting as the public's custodians and letting Telecom under-invest for the previous decade while merrily exporting profits in the form of 85% dividends.
Cunliffe finally seemed to have sorted out a functioning market and now wonderboy Joyce has spent two and a half years re-fucking it. What a genius.
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Hard News: Locking in the Future, in reply to Andrew E,
how is a proposed 10 year regulatory 'holiday' consistent with that principle?
It's no more inconsistent than some of Rodney Hide's changes to local government legislation to allow 35 year private water contract terms, and no doubt some of the outcomes from the corporate farming water-grab in Canterbury after ECan was replaced.