Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: A fiction of unalloyed darkness, in reply to Simon Grigg,
But it runs, doesn’t it? ‘There be monsters over the sea’ has worked since the dawn of time. Now it just makes the NYT.
Meanwhile, in the US ...
In 2000, Smithfield created an internal company security force with “special police agency” status under North Carolina law that enables company security officers to exercise public police powers. In 2003, the company police used trumped-up charges to arrest workers who were active union supporters.
“The company has armed police walking around the plant to intimidate us,” a Smithfield worker who came to the United States from El Salvador told Human Rights Watch. “It’s especially frightening for those of us from Central America. Where we come from, the police shoot trade unionists.”
That was in 2006, but the lives of workers in the US meat processing industry remain very, very grim. People also get poisoned and die in explosions.
It's just not as attractive as a news story as iPad factories are.
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Hard News: Fame Friday, in reply to Tony Kennedy,
Ok, so how does the embed a youtube video clip work on the PA site? Please
Just paste in the long URL, not the youtu.be one. Nothing else.
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Oh, wow. This is gorgeous.
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Hard News: Fame Friday, in reply to Danielle,
Hee, 'The Real Nitty Gritty' sounds WAY different! And nifty! Please keep finding remixes of awesome older pop songs I like, Russell. KTHX.
You're welcome!
I've been trundling around on various Saturday errands today, and I have been loving that tune in the car.
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The Home Brew controversy makes the paper. Lolz.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to David Hood,
“What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic – not a theatrical – enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations.”
What a load of bullshit. Daisey traded endlessly in the media on the fact that his was a first-person account, and he was scathing of anyone who sought to question or qualify it. Now, it turns out that he fabricated quite a lot of it and deliberately frustrated fact-checkers.
TechCrunch has meanwhile just published its own The Future of Foxconn series.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Ross Mason,
Did RB contribute to the speech writing???
Nah. I actually have a picture of the room: David Shearer and David Farrar are sitting next to each other! About 40 people there, from various sectors. Shearer had the innovation theme in mind and was looking for ideas.
I observed for about an hour, it went on quite a bit longer.
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Hard News: Fame Friday, in reply to 3410,
Since we're on Home Brew, this* programme was strangely affecting.
(There were other eps, but I can't find them).Tom's vocal style on that was essentially half-tempo rapping. It was kind of a revelation, actually. And it gave me an idea ...
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Hard News: Fame Friday, in reply to Lilith __,
Might as well upload that MP3 ...
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Dear God, man. What do you call this:
Number one: our community must take care of the needy. They deserve a share of the pie.
And if people fall on hard times, we will help.
But equally importantly, number two: everyone who can help to make that pie needs to be involved, and fairly rewarded for doing it.
Here’s a hint: it is indistinguishable from what John Key has always said about welfare in his speeches.
I must honestly disagree.
Here’s Key’s November speech on welfare reform. I’d submit that the language is really different. The only time Key uses the word “fair”, for example, is in declaring that it’s “fair” that the parents of DPB children aged 14 to be forced to seek full-time work “because when children are 14 they can be left without parental supervision.”
Key also explicitly offers the view that “many” beneficiaries are workshy and won’t work unless they’re forced to. I could go on.
It’s reasonable to be suspicious of Shearer on this, but to describe his words as “indistinguishable” from Key’s seems objectively incorrect.