Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Andrew E,
If I was a government and wanted to disconnect the Internet in a hurry, I’d just send troops/police to the Internet exchange and each ISP/telco hub with instructions to shutdown mains, UPS and generators. In NZ, that would be a handful of places (given that the smaller ISPs don’t have full infrastructure).
The only major hiccup would be with voice telcos where that might also drop the regime’s communications, but with very few of these it’s less work to send signals troops with an idea of what to shutdown. Many countries have emergency modes mandated for telephony that kill the public networks but enable continued service to priority customers. (e.g. ACCOLC, GTPS, WPS, GETS). Enabling these would probably kill data access on the affected networks.
Of course, if a nation has an internet filter enabled (NZ, Australia, etc) then that can easily be widened in an “emergency”. That gives sophisticated control, as a government could overnight move to a whitelist that only allows benign content and blocks anything seditious.
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The online media narrative "it's about Twitter" is simply a reflection of the traditional media narrative NZer relieved to get out of Egypt. Pick a subgroup that you relate to and write about how they're affected.
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It also strikes me that it's dead easy for a government to restrict mobile Internet to a "walled garden" of acceptable sites, given it all goes through a handful of gateways. Of course, the dominant platform helps by already providing the required facilities out of the box.
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The debt downgrade narrative is part of the Big Con: "do as we say or we won't lend you more money".
In reality, most of the reason we need public borrowing is because wealthy individuals and multinational corporates aren't paying their share of taxes. Even with slightly higher taxes on these groups, Cullen had the budget in surplus and borrowings reducing.
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The social networking narrative risks making the assumption that has dogged Western foreign policy forever - that everyone has the same aspirations as the population of Point Chev, Palo Alto or Islington. For a subset of Internet-active Egyptians, this might be true, but it probably isn't what's driving the protests.
The really key people in this are the grassroots (papyrus roots?) soldiers. By withdrawing their consent, they force the government to move. That didn't happen in Iran (or Tienanmen Square). It was the pivotal factor in many successful revolutions and reactions in the past 100 years. (The others mostly involved a collapse of will in the ruling group). These guys mostly aren't on Twitter. (Have you *tried* keying text on an iPhone with an AK47 in the other hand?)
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(back from hols).
One point I would make on this is that all of these companies operate in a space where it's hard to increase profits through operational innovation (AirNZ is trying, and some of its strategies even don't screw the workers and consumers, but in general, it's a very mature market).
So the obvious temptation for managers is to increase return on investment through financial leverage - using as much of the gross profits as possible to service increased borrowings). This doesn't improve the business, but it can turn a small bit of growth into a big return for the owners. If it works that is - in the recent case of Yellow Pages, it spectacularly didn't.
There are two problems with this. Firstly, it increases private debt (which is what we have a problem with in NZ, not sovereign debt).
Secondly, if it does go wrong, the firm goes bust. NZ couldn't tolerate Huntly shutting down, or 2/3 of our airline connections being cancelled. So the government would be forced to perform a bailout. Privatisation of return, nationalisation of risk.
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[midnight expresso] continue to make you wait for your order at the counter
That's one reason I go there - they make coffee while you wait and hence you never have to wait that long. At other cafes (e.g. Fidel's) you can sit down and have a random wait of five minutes to half an hour before your drink appears, and often it can be beaten by your food, which is unacceptable.
Also, by some magic, I've nearly always found a seat. Possibly the service time is in perfect equilibrium with the average consumption time, leading to a seat always coming free. A mathematician with expertise in queuing theory may want to make a study of this effect.
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Kate: that font stuff apparently looks good on an iPad or whatever else the cool kids are using. To go back to normal, there's a *tiny* link in the bottom RH corner that says "Fonts by Typekit [disable]". Click it and you get a proper font.
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What happens if people interpret that as a 5 way choice?
Say MMP has 45% of preference, 20% want FPP, 15% PV, 15% STV and 5% SM (just for instance). (and MMP supporters who answer the second question split 19%/14%/14%/3%).
Then that'll be 45% for MMP and 55% for another system, so it'll go to "another system" and FPP will win, even though it got 20% of support.
That seems like an unfair voting system to start with. If you don't vote MMP on Part A, you're effectively choosing whatever system wins in part B.
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OTOH, *$s doesn't charge a bank holiday surcharge, which rules out many NZ independent cafes for me.
Also, quality coffee is widely available in the North Island, but not in the South. I recently had the worst coffee experience ever in suburban Christchurch - scalding hot and tasteless. Worse than any $*s, worse than the coffee machine at work, in fact, worse than instant. Only reasonable coffee I've found in CHC is C4, and anywhere rural is a write-off.
Lack of tattoos and piercings, you see. The freakier the barista, the better the coffee. If they're clean cut, they typically won't make decent coffee. There's a mechanism for this - coffee shop workers huff whippits all the time they're not working. Only serious NOS freaks last the course and tolerate the poor wages and long hours for the time it takes to get competent. True fact.
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If the courts want to suppress names, I think it would work better if they suppressed all identifying information, so the paper was restricted to printing:
A <person> was arrested and charged with bad behaviour in downtown Auckland
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Which wouldn't be of interest, so they probably wouldn't bother and would move on to something more relevant. It would also limit the opportunity for guessing games by the sewerbloggers.