Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Does anyone know how many actual convictions there have been for "looting" in Christchurch?
Like the Australian bushfires (where there was a massive flurry of media/police arson accusations, but only one person ever charged), the media/police are quick to use a natural disaster to raise fears of the "criminals in our midst". It's a fairly transparent social control tactic - create an "other" to scare people into thinking they need protection.
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I'm not sure if the ones who don't get caught are the same kind of benign(ish), not-for-profit braggards
Well, there are the ones that work for, inter alia: the Chinese secret service, NSA, GCHQ, GCSB, the Russian mafia, News International or various permutations of the above.
(In the days of the former Soviet Union, the Russians had a bank, Moscow Narodny. [it still exists]. They were very successful on the money markets, which was generally thought to be due to their access to information collected by the KGB).
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Ok, so what were the Bletchley Park team? Geniuses or script kiddies?
The Germans made a schoolboy error – no letter could be encoded as itself – which opened Enigma up to attack through frequency analysis, along with the system enabling various Wehrmacht grunts to make further operating errors (I summarise here).
They then built a huge infrastructure to brute force their way into the keys.
And is the traditional classification of them as geniuses influenced by them being on the Right Side?
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(sorry, long, but it could be a 300 page book)
Capitalists want to maintain capitalism. Way back in 1867, Marx predicted capitalism to be hosed. The vast majority of the population were oppressed workers and peasants, with a small minority of land and business owners living off their toil. Obviously revolution could not be far off.
How did capitalism dodge the bullet? By creating the middle classes. Your average cotton mill (like Engel's dad's business) ran lean - a few dozen clerks and a few thousand workers. Modern capitalism changed that by creating a whole new class of marketers, designers, consultants, accountants and the rest, churning powerpoints and emails and taking home far better money than the old millhands got. All those people felt themselves to have a stake in the system, they "owned" a mortgaged house and identified with the owners, not the workers.
That cozy arrangement kept capitalism going through the 20th century. Increasing productivity and moving real production overseas kept it sustainable. But now we've reached the point where the middle-class jobs are also getting retrenched and outsourced. Suddenly the settlement is threatened.
The only hope for capitalism to keep the tumbrils at bay is to give the middle-class an alternative way of identifying with capital. Property speculation is that dodge - lend billions into speculative housing bubbles, saturate the media with house-porn and convince people that even though their job sucks, they can make a (tax free) fortune by simply buying and selling houses. They make money (even if all of it stays locked up in properties) and stay soundly Tory.
Pull the rug from under that, and capitalism starts to look decidedly shaky. So the right are never going to be keen on capital taxes - turkeys, christmas and all that.
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If I could hazard an answer, it’s that ACT basically dislike democracy (see this blog from a Libertarian as to why), believing it to be a means by which the unworthy masses steal from the overclass.
Given that, any subterfuge to gain power is justified, and if that means being in a government with Maori, so be it. (Because if they withdrew confidence and supply, Key would run a serious campaign in Epsom, and ACT would be out of parliament next time. Which would in turn put the kibosh on the plan to merge with National and install Brash as PM a year or so after the election).
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It doesn't really take much smarts to violate security, any more than it does to break into a car or house
Depends on the security, really. If the car's a late model BMW bristling with Thatcham Cat 1 alarms, then it would be pretty impressive to be able to twoc it.
It's the same if someone found out how to break Snapper and ride the buses for free, for instance.
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Thanks.
(you know, it would actually be easier if the site just linkified links, like twitter, rather than all thet [ [ xxx | yyy ] ] business. ).
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Field Theory: 65 bottles of beer on the wall..., in reply to giovanni tiso,
Yeah, http://www.greens.org.nz/press-releases/auckland-sweeps-homeless-streets-rwc.
I'm surprised not to see tenders for a great firewall of NZ to prevent online violations of sporting rights during the event. Still, I guess it would be easy to repurpose the existing internet filter.
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there is more to New Zealand than rugby and dairy.
Hey, we should hold some sort of dairy-based event:
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Um, a lot of those events were happening anyway. the page for Wellington features World of Wearable Art, which is on every year.
Or are we to understand that the IRB started WoW by travelling back in time to 1987, Dr Who style?