Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Scott A,
I'm with Richard. And I'm not someone to leap to defence of our 'boys-own-in-blue' club, but I honestly do see this as just as likely being at the hands of 'concerned citizens' or other prisoners (though that wouldn't excuse the police leaving him in a cell to suffer).
Well, the two of you you could conjure some hitherto-unreported "concerned citizens" to help the hypothesis along. And it could have been cellmates, although again you'd expect someone to say something. But I suspect the most likely explanation is the most straightforward one.
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Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Ross Mason,
I am a poster who said they should throw the book at looters when this story turned up. Hindsight is a powerful weapon. I wonder how many others thought the same thing as me. I suspect half the bloody country.
Oh, look, me too. It has taken me a while to work this out.
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Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Scott A,
Do you have any evidence it was the police who beat this young man, Russell?
No. I'm simply at a loss for any other explanation.
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Hard News: About Arie, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
I hope it was not the police taking the law into their own hands, or any variation on that theme
I can't see any other explanation. And, you know, a police officer in Christchurch may have seen some things you wouldn't want to see, and be feeling very emotional. But the idea that we just wave this through is awful.
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Hard News: The digital switch-off, in reply to Jackie Clark,
As for Sky etc – where did the Doco channel go?????
It's now BBC Knowledge and Richard Driver is about $6 million richer.
The BBC's intractability -- or, rather, that of its commercial arm, BBC Worldwide -- is an interesting feature of this debate.
The BBC might still do a very god impression of a public service broadcaster, but it is basically hostile to public broadcasting anywhere else. TVNZ 7 could (and, i think, should) have launched with more BBC content content and ideally a relationship with with the Beeb, but perhaps that was never really going to be possible.
Via BBC Worldwide, BBC public service-style content is extraordinarily difficult to acquire -- it's either too expensive, buried in unattractive packages or simply not available at all to other public broadcasters.
The BBC Knowledge move suggests that the plan all along was to leverage pay TV. Like Documentary, BBC Knowledge will receive a share of overall subscriber revenue by stocking a Sky channel with with its back catalogue. It's easy, steady money. And anyone who can't afford Sky can get lost.
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Hard News: The digital switch-off, in reply to giovanni tiso,
God forbid we should have done that with, I don’t know, Feltex. Obviously Feltex workers weren’t knowledge workers and therefore they were utterly worthless.)
Feltex's problems weren't a consequence of a lack of government support. More terrible management, near-criminal investors and a collapse in the market for carpet. How much of that should we have spent money propping up?
It also seems worth noting that Feltex gaily poured industrial effluent into our waterways for decades.
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Hard News: The digital switch-off, in reply to giovanni tiso,
They don’t buy our produce because it’s sustainable, they buy it because it’s cheaper. One of the reasons why it’s cheaper, is that we are so desperate to produce it and export it (since we killed pretty much all our other industries), that we are quite happy to let farmers pollute at will just so they ship said produce out.
Another reason it's cheaper is that they're often obliged to keep their livestock in sheds heated via oil-fired power stations, with foods shipped in in trucks that burn fossil fuels.
I am strongly in favour of Fonterra being held to account for its environmental impact. Our products would still be cheaper if it was.
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Hard News: The digital switch-off, in reply to Matthew Poole,
It’s pretty self-evident, I’d have thought. If the State is legally required to purchase from local suppliers, the locals can jack prices up because they have to be used.
They don't even have to do that. They could simply be more expensive because they're not big enough or not good enough at producing the things we need to buy. This is all money that comes out of desirable policies.
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Hard News: The digital switch-off, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But if you insist on always buying local by preference then you can easily get to the point where inefficient and sometime crap quality local suppliers are being favoured and efficient overseas suppliers (energy efficient, labour efficient and “good”) are being excluded. That situation has existed in my memory in NZ.
Indeed, it nearly ran us into the ground as governments were obliged to employ increasingly creative means to encourage import substitution: tariffs, subsidies, import licensing. The Post Office used to build its own trucks, at considerable expense.
Are we really going to build and market our own computers? Or dictate that only parts, not whole computers, can be imported, the way we used to do with cars? How much extra cost and wasteful diversion of resources away from things we’re good at making are we prepared to wear? How much money are we taking away from desirable policies in doing so?
Another way of looking at it is: is it a good idea for industrialised countries to shun our (relatively) sustainable primary products in favour of producing their own via subsidies and grossly inefficient and unsustainable practices?
So as an idea it’s cool. But there are times when I’d rather our local suppliers made something else and left overseas supplier to supply things they can make better.
As a principle to be applied where it makes sense – and, dragging things back to the topic, cultural and media works are an example, because they add the kind of value that economists don’t understand – it has its place. But it’s not like we didn’t give it decades and a whole lot of economic theory to work. We loved the idea more than almost any other Western country. It just didn’t do what it said on the label.
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Hard News: The digital switch-off, in reply to Jan Farr,
Um – and the occasional decent drama? Could we maybe add a small Culture category?
It would probably have to be old drama. Drama's effing expensive to produce.