Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Heh. That used to be a very insecure system. My old job used to involve finding people who had slipped off a database. We discovered the electoral roll, you could enter names and dates of birth, and it would give you a street name and ask for the number.
You then went to whitepages, looked up the name, got the number, and entered it in. It logged you in and you could look at all their details held.
After about two weeks of us using it to find 500 lost people, they phoned us and said "umm, what are you doing, and can you please stop it?". And obviously since they've made the system more secure in that you have to enter your address.
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Want to know if you're registered to vote? Click here.
No clickage-ability Russell.
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Recording Industry Association chief executive Campbell Smith said that would not be acceptable as it would require copyright holders to sue infringers to prove their guilt. "That is just impractical and ridiculous. I don't think that is what was intended."
The guilty until proven innocent theory? Nice.
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I also wish I could get Bookbinder in a bottle - terribly tasty and yet lower alcohol than most beer.
Clearly you're living in the wrong city.
I don't think I've binge drunk since I became a father, about 10 years ago. I regularly have a wine or beer (sometimes both) with dinner - almost every night to be honest.
But even when I go out, which is most Friday nights, I'm driving home, so I have 3 or 4 drinks at the most. At about that much the worst I get is that I get louder and start swearing, which my friends find entertaining.
I don't particularly get binge drinking after about 25. Doing largely the same thing every weekend for 8, 10 years? Kinda done isn't it?
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Russell, unfortunately someone who KNOWS how to spell has been out and about in Christchurch and covered up/replaced/stickered over all the Emmisions and Tolerence billboards, so now photos to be had
There's a tolerance one on the Port Chalmers highway near Maia down here, and driving home last night it looked pretty likely that it had been fixed.
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Any hard questions about what it's going to cost (really) and how it's going to all be paid for (really)? Don't be stupid.
I think how much it's going to cost is $210 million, and based on my preliminary analysis, that's a fairly accurate figure. How it's going to be paid for is out of government coffers. No further hard questions needed.
Btw- I meant "free again." I mean, it hasn't been free to anyone since the guys in parliament were finishing Uni! And it would be utterly unfeasible today.
There's nothing unfeasible about it, it's just a matter of priorities. Fees for attending all tertiary institutions could be eliminated for about a billion dollars, possibly slightly less. Or much more sensibly, brought down to an administration fee to discourage wasteful enrolling.
What I want to know is whether John Key will actually address the students in Dunedin in an address-type situation
Very unlikely. He'd get a bad reception - partially because a lot of the people involved in student politics are Labour Youth (a lot of them yesterday were running around holding helium-filled balloons - my first thought "hullo Clowns"), but partially because it's National and their policies aren't very student-friendly.
And if National know anything about running campaigns, they won't want the footage of their leader that night to be him getting booed and arguing with students a couple of days after Helen Clark got a good reception and offered something big for students.
If you're going to say something unpopular with people, you don't need to say it in front of them. Don Brash went to Orewa to play the race card, not South Auckland.
And here's another question nobody seems to be asking: Wouldn't there be more "social good" (as Russell puts it) if $250 million a year was being put into tertiary institutions to provide high quality courses, and recruit and retain quality staff? I don't see the point of universities bursting at the seams -- and the Keys and Englishes with student allowances in hands -- if the qualification they come out with are only fit for arse-wipe in the nearest long-drop.
Actually, the VC of Victoria put that very point this morning on Morning Report shortly after you posted.
From working in one of the "ivory towers", someone should find a way to cut the useless fat that Universities still have, after a couple of decades of bitching about being poor and then passing those costs onto students. Some parts of the system really are struggling, other parts spend thousands of dollars near the end of the year on stuff that they don't need that much, just so they get the same budget come next year.
Throwing $200 million at the universities wouldn't lead to better quality etc anyway, that sort of amount of money would have to lead to a reduction in fees.
If National was promising John and Bronwyn Key's kids student allowances there would be a most healthy scepticism. But, hell, it doesn't matter how fiscally irresponsible and flat out unfair it is, we're all pissing our pants with glee as just how clever Labour is.
I don't know how old John Key's kids are, but if they're old enough to be at university, what's unfair about them getting an allowance? If they were unemployed they'd get a dole, with no parental income test. Why should students be the only people tied to their parents until they are 25 financially?
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Kyle, I know the point you're making but how do you ration public investment? The educational benefits of early childhood education are huge and yet its not fully/universally funded.
Yes, but no one argues "well there's a private benefit to early childhood education, so the kids/parents should have to pay".
It's entirely valid to say "there's limited money, so we need to prioritise". Absolutely lets have that conversation. That's a debate about more funding for students or more funding for something else. Or more funding for students and more taxes.
Private/public benefit basically only appears in tertiary education because it's bagging 'rich varsity brats' who don't need government support anyway. Which is both not the case, and not fair. It's language settling the political debate rather than need, benefit, principles, etc etc.
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I know that many people will eat their broccoli first at dinner so that they can finish on the good thing, but I think in this case two things should be considered:
3. you might get rescued and then you'll look like an idiot if you started off with Rodney Hide and the rescue crew leaked it to the media.
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Kyle: and certainly as we move even further into mass tertiary education, its a distinction we should just give up on, just as we have for secondary school.
Ironically, as numbers into tertiary education exploded in the 1990s, we moved the other way.
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So, hang on a sec, previously both parents could be working full time on the minimum wage (thus earning 47,000 gross), and their kids wouldn't be eligible for a full student allowance?
And it certainly was the case (not sure if it still is now) that those parents could be separated, living in different houses etc, and their income would still be added together. National Party Student Loans 1992: A fascist regime.