Posts by Alex Coleman
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Some comments in this piece claiming to be from the anon group involved:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/27/anonymous-splinter-group-antisec-waging-war
I'm not sure how I feel about it to be honest. I'm not outraged, I know that much. I think it's interesting, and I don't think it's journalism. Therefore I don't think the 'public interest' stick is the right one to be using. Whatever I think about the grous goals, I think i should judge it's actions on their effectiveness, or something like that.
I do think it's funny that Stratfor were pushing to get on the 'gravy train' provided by wikileaks et al, and found that their own systems were not immune from the people regularly described as 'know nothing script kiddies' by various pundits and insidery types. That the credit card details got leaked is a part of that. There is a puncturing of egos and carefully maintained images going on.
And sure, it sucks that people will have to get new cards, but there are greater collateral damages in the world. I'm also pretty sure that if any of those responsible for the leak are caught, they'll pay the price, and that they are aware of that fact.
Also, I personally think that the main responsibility for keeping secrets secret belongs to the people promising to keep them secret, not with hackers and people like WL.
But again, I'm ultimately undecided, and watching with an amused interest.
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So the Electoral Commission has replied, and basically said they can’t make a judgment on a radio show without seeing a transcript. But they have been pretty clear about putting the responsibility on the broadcaster, which is useful.
Emph. mine
http://thestandard.org.nz/pms-office-cuts-radio-dead/
That little note about usefulness, made by someone in the PMs office prior to the broadcast, sticks in my craw.
Are there cabinet manual implications there? Thinking about high ethical standards and what not. It certainly looks, right there, that they are far from sure that the broadcast will be legit, but go ahead with it because the broadcaster will be the ones on the hook.Or is it not a cabinet manual thing because it's political rather than policy work?
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to 3410,
No, it's a trick. The 10% figure that Key claims is "after tax"; in other words, most of that is counting cuts in PAYE rates, but not counting GST increase.
Is he still counting the pre election tax cut from Labour in that? He was for a while.
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I do think we should get rid of the threshold, and I'm therefore not happy about Goff's proposed fix, but I also think he's not too far wrong with his smuggling claim that everyone is high horsing about.
From memory, and i'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong, but the exemption from the threshold for parties that win an electorate is designed to maintain proportianality. It's not some sort of admission that the 5% threshold isn't real, or doesn't matter. I don't like the threshold being so high, but it is there for some reason.
There is little reason for National to be having cups of tea and talking about being 'not unhappy' about things except for the fact that it grants access to the exemption. It's like, to me, tax law. The deal does seem to go against the spirit of the threshold rule using an artificial deal in place simply to get an exemption to the general rule. And again, it's not a general rule that I like, but it is the one that's on the books.
The Wigram example isn't really a good one, for reasons that plenty of people talk about. Banks, nor Hide before him, were to Epsom what Anderton was to Wigram. It certainly wasn't a widely believed idea that Labour could have taken the seat off Anderton at a canter if they just asked the voters for the seat.
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Hard News: About Occupy Wall Street, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
No, but you didn't exactly have to be Ron Paul at his ding-battiest worse to ask whether eye-watering levels of low-quality-debt-fuelled consumption -- cheerfully enabled by banks who I can't believe didn't know better -- wasn't going to leave one hell of an bitter aftertaste. I don't think that's all on the Evil Trolls of Wall Street.
I do think the nut of it is "should have known better". we live in a highly complex society with specialists right? People pay mortgage brokers, financial advisors and the rest for a reason. When the professionals are telling you that it's good, and that you'd be a mug not to be borrowing more, and can show you all sorts of charts that seem to demonstrate that, then I really do think that the culpibiity is nothing like 50/50.
The 'borrowers are just as much to blame' meme, misses the crucial (to me ) point that the borrowers should not be expected to be responsible for the financial system.
They are responsible for the loans they take out, even if they did so after relying on what they had a right to expect was good advice. Sure. But an individual bad loan is not a problem.
The lenders not only made many many thousands of bad loans, but they leveraged those loans into even more concentrated forms of toxicity. That was what caused the problem. Add to that the fact that the banks could no longer seem to be able to legally know who held the mortgage on any given property, and the borrowers culpability, in my view, is simply an insignificant distraction.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to merc,
Good lord. So now McCully is just pretending that his initial announcement of a government takeover never even happened.
It was that announcement that took everyone by surprise, and yet it's all their fault for him going off half cocked.
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Field Theory: Four Years Ago, in reply to chris,
Not sure I’m following you Chris.
Not World Cup games, not at home, not ABs.
IN any case, my point was a silly one, but I stand by it none the less. It’s no more silly a record than the ‘choking’ one.
Edit: Oh. I see now. The fact that SA wasn't here is by the by. They weren't here. And a good thing too.
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Is all rubbish. This talk about choking and what not.
Or at least it doesn't mean anything other than that the ABs are what this little party is always about.
Think about it.
If you are any other coach in the world, when the draw gets announced, the first thing you do is work out when you are destined to meet the ABs.
Everything else is secondary that. You hope like hell that it's the final; if only because that increases the odds that some other bastard will knock the ABs out for you.
Your game plan for the cup is your game plan for beating the ABs. For every ten minutes you spend on analysing other teams you spend an hour on the ABs.
No wonder we have a high 'choke' history. Every team we play, sees that game as their final. We don't have that luxury. We can't. We can say we do, and get the psychologists into the lads' heads to try and make it so, but it's fake. For our opponents it's real.
The ABs meet every team at their best. It's the game they pull it all out for. It's the game their players have dreamed about since they were kids.
It's a good thing for us. Let 'em laugh and troll about choking and what have you. We know. They know.
We own this tournament, even if we don't 'win' it.
And has been noted, we've never lost a single world cup game on home soil. Not one. So chin up.
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OnPoint: Other People's Wars, in reply to George Darroch,
Here’s the Goff quote RNZ extracted for it’s text version:
"I think it would be shock, horror, surprise if you didn’t have intelligence facilities designed to keep New Zealand Defence Force personnel safe in an area of deployment.”
I’m not sure that is what Hager reports his sources as describing.
Mr Goff says he has not seen Nicky Hager’s book.
Me neither. But if I was Goff, (or Key) I’d be sure to do so before dismissing it.
Edit: RNZ link: http://bit.ly/r7y1hV
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Isn't a major theme of the book supposed to be about how the military runs its PR and media strategies?
Which would include what Espiner was exposed to "in Afghanistan" innit.