Posts by Tom Semmens
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North Harbour stadium? I would doubt it would last five minutes running a music festival before some God-fearing shore denizen with a massive sense of entitlement got the whole thing shut down for noise.
That is one of the beauties of Mt Smart - it is in the middle of an ugly industrial area.Thinking about it, Alexandra park would be about the only place I could imagine moving the BDO to - it would depend on security considerations.
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It costs around $150 to go to the BDO. Trying to control access to either Ellerslie or Cornwall Park or The Domain? Forget it.
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ScottY - People say that John " Rainbows and Unicorns" Key is also just humouring the ACT party with the whole three strikes business. How long, then, until it is time for National to deliver or Rodney and rest of his lunatics throw their toys?
My growing suspicion is Key is just pleased to be Prime Minister, and is trying to run the government in a loose managerial style with him as the chief cheerleader. Already his "Cheney" is cancelling his cycleway, rubbishing his economic outlook and generally showing every sign of being the guy actually in charge.
But with it's Dubya like vacuum of authority it seems increasingly like Key's administration is going to disintergrate in ministerial feifdoms persuing their own agendas and prey to capture by powerful lobby groups - exactly same fate as befell the Bush/Cheney administration. McCully, Collins, Hide - are all quite capable of this and already are showing inclinations in that direction.
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Another day, another step closer to New Zealand repeating the Bush years in font size 6.
The similarity in the dynamics is getting downright scary.
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David Garrett is a complete arsehole. And that is about all that can be said of the man's actions.
Mind you, it has been fun watching all the various libertarian ACToids out there slowly wake up and realise their party has been subject to a Bolshevik takeover by the Sensible Sentencing Trust.
Delicious irony for Labour supporters who had to deal with the wreckage of neo-liberal palace coup in their party.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
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One thought on the HD TV as the "killer app". First, like Rich of Observationz above, I am not sure the government actually knows what it is talking about. If they are talking about IP TV then the whole thing is a inefficient waste of time, as outlined by Russell Brown. If they are ACTUALLY mean IP TV ON DEMAND then the bandwidth requirement simply gets out-of-control very quickly and is quite unmanageable.
To me the "killer app" of dedicated internet to the home will be what it has always been - the delivery of voice services. 2Mb or above will allow users to move from the ultra-reliable traditional circuit switched PSTN to packet switched voice service with little or no loss of voice quality (well, OK, some) and reliability. By eliminating one leg of the current triple play most mid to high end consumers are sold (a traditional phone line, a mobile line and a dedicated internet line) you could generate a huge saving for consumers, which in turn would stimulate takeup of the new technology.
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I've still got no idea what "fibre to the home" actually means at a hardware level. If it means actually rolling out fibre over the last mile to connect homes then all I can say is good luck to that. The cost, given that most councils these days require undergrounding, would chew though the $1.5 billion in a trice.
Personally I believe the more realistic, and urgent, requirement is to get fibre to every roadside cabinet to speed up the speeds over copper. I would rather every household have access to an AFFORDABLE 2Mb dark connection than a pie in the sky trying to run-before-we-can-walk aim for gig ethernet or somesuch other silly aim.
I say affordable because the elephant in the room of all this is takeup. The technophiles can already afford to pay for broadband and quite frankly I don't see why the taxpayer should subsidise increasing their download speeds. Most New Zealand households that don't have "broadband" (as in a dedicated internet line) because they can't afford it. I know that for a lot of New Zealanders these days those that earn under $40K form an invisible and undeserving underclass, but it seems to me that if we really want to justify the government spending this money for a public good then we need to tie this to eliminating the digital divide (with all the good economic, social and democratic outcomes that will bring). We need to be able to pirce point anything installed at not much more than what people pay now for a phone line - bearing mind a LOT of our fellow New Zealanders can't even afford that!
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"...Both the NZSO and the Ballet, Simon would know, are mandated to have national reach and both play Auckland as often as they play Wellington. Yes, they are based in Wellington but why is that in and of itself a problem?"
Because the discussion was about where the dollar are SPENT. The rent, the wages, etc etc all go into the WELLINGTON economy, even though the dollars were leeched from Auckland pockets.
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In principle I support the super city idea, because I think that local governance in Auckland now has a completely Balkanised culture that is holding back city-wide development. The sort of tiresome parish pump petty political kaleidoscope of grey haired oldies, whacky water protesters, die-in-a-ditch Greenies, philistine businessmen and obstructionist Maoris (not to mention the fact that three of the last four Auckland mayors have been happy clappy fundies) that dominate local body politics in N.Z. is simply not viable as a governance model in a fast growing CITY of 1.4 million pushing towards two million plus inhabitants. A city requires something altogether more professional than what works in Timaru.
Looking at the Royal Commission report on Auckland I can't help but get the feeling that privately the Royal Commission came to the conclusion that at least part of the cause of all the inter-authority squabbling in the '09 was the fault of the assorted fools that have been elected to the various governing bodies. From that they seem to have concluded there isn't enough elected talent in Auckland to justify all the democracy that it has, so they resolved to use their report to trim the democracy to match their perception of the level of the talent. In that light, the details of how Aucklanders are supposed to elect the pitifully few 23 councillors the report recommends is alarming. It seems to me their proposed solution to mediocre talent in gridlocked squabbles is to simply create a system that will allow as little as 20% of those who choose to vote to seize power and implement their agenda. Presumably the Royal Commission believes a bad plan is better than no plan, and better an unrepresentative dictatorship than the current "order, counter-order, disorder".
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DeepRed - True, true. but to be prime minister these days you must be an Auckland based MP IMHO.