Posts by Russell Brown
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Another right formally accorded to journalists and not the general public is the right not to disclose sources (at the judge's discretion) in the Evidence Act 2006:
informant means a person who gives information to a journalist in the normal course of the journalist’s work in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium
journalist means a person who in the normal course of that person’s work may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium
news medium means a medium for the dissemination to the public or a section of the public of news and observations on news
public interest in the disclosure of evidence includes, in a criminal proceeding, the defendant’s right to present an effective defence.Assuming that we don't want, say, white-collar criminals or malicious bloggers to use it as a loophole to avoid answering questions or producing documents, this would seem to bring us back to the need to answer the question in the title of this discussion. We need to define who the news media are.
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While we're complaining about service ... Vector's bar set-up is absurd.
Not only do the poor staff have to hand-pour every beer in plastic cups as they are purchased by increasingly antsy punters, they have to wander away to fetch food from the kitchen if anyone wants to buy that.
Seriously: get a decent tap beer, pre-fill the cups and separate the food and drink.
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Grant McDougall,
The harsh reality is that New Order are now in Rolling Stones territory: people go to see them because they were once great, as opposed to still being great.
Nah. I was totally going for Barney’s droll Manc humor. Wish it’d been me who called out for ‘World In Motion’, but.
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
No, it’s that at a proper level of volume, you can’t hear anyone talk unless you’re the person being spoken to. People shushing is another reason not to go to granny rock gigs.
I felt it was loud enough for me to put in my earplugs (which greatly improved my subjective listening experience), but Vector's a weird venue for sound, especially at the back of the room.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Crunchy Weta,
The beneficiaries of the bailout are the banks who should never have lent what they didn’t have.
Sorta. Some of those banks have been obliged to write off 50-75% of the Greek debt they own, courtesy of the bailout deals.
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Field Theory: When last you saw me, in reply to Edward Siddle,
If you haven’t already, do yourself a havour and watch those last 25 minutes again. I did, the next day, and what was appalling at the time was actually stupendous.
I watched the whole game again the next day and, like you, thought the All Blacks defended superbly as per the Plan B they'd clearly adopted. I was still bloody anxious for the last half hour though.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Bonus points – NZ, thank goodness we don’t have any banks.
Indeed. And, er, wow.
The degree to which shit is fucked up is really quite hard to grasp.
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Ah. I’m finding the Greek Default Watch blog quite useful.
Ten Surprising Facts About the Greek Economy is quite … surprising.
These two:
Fact #7. When you add private debt, Greece’s overall indebtedness is low in Europe. Everyone knows that Greece’s problem is debt. But it is, in fact, public debt that is the problem. A graph shown in a presentation by the former minister of finance adds public and private debt – when the two are combined, it is clear that Greece is at the low end of the spectrum. What distinguishes Greece is not high debt overall, but high government debt.
Fact #8. Greece’s debt was mostly accumulated in the 1980s and early 1990s. Greek society has yet to have a serious debate about how it got into this mess. What is amazing is to see just how recent this debt accumulation is: in 1980, Greece’s public debt was merely 22% of GDP; by 1993, it was 98% where it stayed (plus or minus) for over a decade before going higher in this crisis. In other words, Greece’s debt problem was mostly created over a 13-year period and it was perpetuated thereafter.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Stephen Judd,
We have Scandinavian-level taxation with North-African level public services. You’d be avoiding taxes too.
Ouch.
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Let’s just put it out there to start with. New Order weren’t very good.
That’s going to sound like heresy to some, and I’m sure others will emphatically state that they thought they were bloody fantastic and they had the best night ever. Of course it’s possible to have a great night and enjoy seeing the band you love simply because you love them, not because they’re doing a particularly good job.
But I expected them to be rough as guts -- I've seen them several times before.
They rocked along, I really enjoyed myself and so did the people with me. And I actually thought Barney was quite funny.
"Start the drum machine Stephen!"
"World In Motion? No chance."