Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Sacha,
Working For Families is essentially a subsidy for employers so they don’t need to lift their game to produce higher sustainable wages.
I’m relieved to have discovered I'm not the only one who thinks so.
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So I go away for a few hours and you guys are all quoting Nietzsche and Keynes to each other ...
Lolz.
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Hard News: Friday Fever, in reply to recordari,
The second half was more like Tackhead vs Trent Reznor than what I expected. They were all great musicians, and he is sure a showman, but it just confused me, to be honest. 'Are Friends Eclectic' was pretty special, but the lack of familiarity made me feel there was a boat somewhere that I'd missed.
The Pleasure Principle part was, I realised, basically Brit-rock with synthesisers. They didn't seem to reinvent or explore the originals, but it was okay.
The second part started well with my favourite Numan song, 'Down in the Park', but I didn't dig the NIN-style stuff and left before the end. I did feel that playing LCD Soundsystem's 'Losing My Edge' over the PA just before the band came on set the bar kinda high.
I felt a bit guilty that I was there as the +1 of a friend who did some work for the show, while most of the people around us were mad-keen Numanoids (some of them quite a bit older than me). I'm not sure what they made of some of his newer stuff.
I think the way Numan used synthesisers, and the sounds he made, endure and are justifiably sampled the hell out of. But: yeah, nah, as a live act.
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Hard News: The Political Lie, in reply to Hadyn Green,
Plunket, Edwards and Slack. Jesus that’s a hell of a line-up!
Indeed. Imagine if they formed a consultancy.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
This makes me wish I could ride a bike.
Bikes rule.
And for the first time since the quake, it’s made me want to return to Christchurch. Not for earthquake tourism, but because despite the shit, it’s still a lovely city.
I felt less bothered by the earthquake tourism thing than I expected -- without the people coming to the fenceline to look, the south side would be much bleaker.
On the Sunday, I got the impression that many of the people there were actually locals -- we tend to forget that many Christchurch people still haven't seen their desolate city centre up close. On the Monday, it looked more like inbound tourists, with their cameras.
It didn't feel right taking photographs of damaged houses though, whether or not they were abandoned. That was just too sad.
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Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I worked in that Holiday Inn you passed, right through university. It is one of the many places that made me cry.
I hope you won't be offended if I say it was perhaps the only place that made me smile, with its ersatz columns all skew-whiff. The abandoned houses a little further around, they did make me feel like crying.
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Just for clarity, I deleted Islander's last comment while Ross was replying to it. It was just a bit abusive for a Monday.
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Fuck. I thought I'd grab The Big Payback via the IPad Kindle app -- but for the first time, Amazon couldn't deliver an e-book to New Zealand. Previously, the iPad app has been a handy little back door to the US Kindle store. How irritating.
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Hard News: Friday Fever, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I resemble that remark. Nothing wrong with a bit of Foreigner.
Here, Jackie, we must lovingly and respectfully disagree.
There is everything wrong with a bit of Foreigner.
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OnPoint: Budget 2011: A Credible Path to…, in reply to bmk,
This is a common problem with future technology. Standard cost-benefit analyses don’t work as for example when the copper phone network was put in New Zealand fax machines, dial-up internet, broadband didn’t even exist. And so these huge benefits wouldn’t have shown up in a cost-benefit analysis.
Hells yes.
This a very good point. Telecom has generated billions of dollars in revenue since the early 90s from a copper network conceived and installed before the internet even existed. The Telecom SOE conducted an extraordinary upgrade before the privatisation, digitally connecting nearly every exchange in the country. We now have fibre to the cabinet, but it's still that copper to our houses that's the magic string. (It is, for one thing, Sky TV's backchannel from its users.)
The thing has paid for itself, frankly.