Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Legal Beagle: Voting Referendum: Jus' Sayin', in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I'd actually favour removing coattailing and having a threshold of the votes needed to elect 2 or 3 MPs.
Reason: it takes more than one to be a party. If somebody (like Dunne or Anderton) can get support in one electorate, then they can be an independent MP, but to be treated as an actual party, they should attract more substantial nationwide support.
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The general answer is that things tend to even out over the the whole country.
Doesn't that rely on parties having stronger support in some areas?
If a party got 30% in one 5 seat electorate, that would give them one or two seats. If they got 15% everywhere, they'd get nothing.
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MMP is the only system that is actually *designed* to deliver a fair result where the number of MPs reflects the vote for each party. With all the others, that only happens by coincidence.
I plan to vote for MMP and on the second question to vote tactically for the least popular/attractive option (possibly STV or PV) with the hope that the contender system is less popular and has been chosen by a small margin.
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…has the Stuxnet worm been found in NZ yet?
…any Siemens controllers in our infrastructure?
No, because a fat bloke in wellies (NZ’s concept of a plant controller) is immune to worms and viruses of that kind.
(OK, I know Fonterra probably has a whole lot of cheese making high-tech going on).
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I've got this cognitive gap around what SAP is actually doing for $600mln.
I've worked at firms that use SAP, and it provides a workable, if clunky, way to enter expenses and timesheets, order stuff and do payroll - all those sort of functions. I'm prepared to believe it also keeps track of assets and produces all manner of useful accountancy reports.
But that's not much more than a big Xero. Xero costs $30 a month to run a one person business - a crude equation would suggest Auckland Council, which has 8,000 employees, spending $240,000 a month, or $3 million a year. That's a couple of orders of magnitude away from $800 million.
$600 million is 4,000 IT people paid and housed for a year. For way less than that money, I reckon NZ could build a SAAS system from scratch that could run all the local authorities (I assume they all have much the same business model - collect rates, fines and fees - provide services).
I know there are issues with scaling, but this just sounds like hundreds of consultants and business analysts chasing each others tails while 20 or so people do the real work.
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Muse: Hooray for Wellywood (Really!), in reply to Tom Beard,
@Tom:
Why is a hillside some distance past the end of the runway considered part of the “airport precinct”? I imagine it may have been reserved to prevent high buildings (although there are specific rules to prevent those), as a site for some sort of aviation equipment or to prevent houses being built whose occupants would then object to the noise.
I can’t see why that then puts it in the same category as the terminal car park? Not to mention how, if the site was acquired under the Public Works Act (how does one check) a vanity erection qualifies as an ‘airport use’.
The other, bigger question concerns the right of the Wellington community to control our city. One of the negatives that got Kerry unelected was this very sign – having expressed that opinion, why can’t we as a city set planning rules that allow us to regulate such things. (Not to mention using our 35% holding in the airport to make our disapproval clear).
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why is the airport company dabbling so amateurishly in tourism promotion anyway? Isn’t that someone else’s job?
That's the easy one. Infratil are a bunch of glorified accountants and HR people. They think that by cosying up to the movie industry, some of their glamour might rub off on them. I'd suspect the prospect of getting laid by someone other than a Jetstar flight attendant (of any gender) might be not far from their minds, also.
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Southerly: That CERA Rumour, in reply to David Haywood,
London manages an outdoor ice rink, although it has slightly cooler average winter days and a lot less insolation.
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the jump from dial-up to basic broadband didn’t enable any new services or businesses to develop?
Undoubtedly. Whether they were economically positive is another question. Are there more people working at TradeMe than used to work at all the record stores and bookshops that have closed?
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arcane grandfathered obscure apps used by two people
It's when the arcane grandfathered app is SAP or something, is used by everyone, was bought in 2003 and will cost tens of millions to upgrade that problems occur.
(Before AJAX was really practical, a lot of technologies replaced their fat clients with pseudo-thin clients based on ActiveX and the like. These are the reason much of the world is stuck in IE6. Of course, they could support dual browsers, but that would cost money purely to provide an employee benefit).