Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Thought: maybe Bjork is the better comparison.
Yup.
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Russell, think the link to the nethui video is munged?
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Southerly: Continuing After A Short Interruption, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Cheers Bart, interesting. That somewhat matches what was said to me at the pub.
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If a government makes a stupid, stupid cripplingly expensive deal, and the next government decides to can it, I don’t have a problem with that. It might teach the corporations not to be so greedy in future.
I've been waiting most of three decades for the government to come to this realisation about some of the assets that the 4th Labour government hocked off to the Business Round Table in some criminal deals, but nothing seems to have been done.
Not tampering with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty would be a good starting benchmark.
I don't buy this argument. Parliament is still sovereign, the government has just signed up to a deal allowing compensation if parliament exerts it's sovereignty. Parliament can wipe the law any time it wants, and if it really wants it can go further and say "fuck you" and not pay the compensation. But the last step I think would be wrong, and if we wanted that end result we should have paid for the convention centre ourselves, or not had one - I don't care either way.
The idea that parliament can't bind future parliaments in this way is nonsense. Governments sign up to all sorts of agreements and deals with corporations and other countries - trade etc - all the time which bind us for the future. In as much as any parliament can be bound - the government could tomorrow go around and nationalise ever major asset across the country. But there would be consequences.
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I was out last night with some people who put forward the theory that gluten issues were sometimes caused by people thinking they have a gluten problem (when they don't), stopping eating gluten, and then the body adapting and then having problems when they start eating gluten again - creating coeliacs.
I will have to do some searching later tonight to see if this is tosh or possibly real.
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Basically it comes down to this: do the people of NZ tell multinational companies what to do in our country, or do they tell us what to do? It would be nice to vote on that.
I think the Sky City deal was appalling. But I'd be equally appalled if the next government reformed the gambling laws and didn't give Sky City compensation. Sky City are spending lots of money on building a convention centre in return for umpteen years of stupid gambling laws. This was agreed on by a democratically elected government and passed through parliament in a democratic manner. Stupid, but there you have it.
If our government is going to renege on the deal, we should expect to have to pay. That's what happens when you go back on your word.
Can you believe that the Maori are still allowed to employ Koreans to catch their fish instead of employing Maori youth for multiple years to come?
I object to any response to about 150 years of colonialism, wresting land and other treasures from an indigenous peoples, which involves compensation and then telling them what to do with that compensation.
If Maori have the same rights as everyone else, then they can do what they want with their money/land etc, as long as they follow the law and the rules of their own structures. If they want to employ Korean rather than Maori, that's up to them and their bed to lie in. No one gets to sit on the sideline and carry on telling them how to use their own assets any more. That's just more of the last couple of centuries.
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At West Ham's ground, Upton Park, the atmosphere can be a tad forbidding and special treatment was always saved for traitorous local boy David Beckham. The chants were mercilous including repeated references to the adventurous sexual habits of his wife and the hope that his children would die. How did Becks react? He laughed it off and talked about how much he enjoyed playing there as the atmosphere was second to none. Paul Ince, another traitorous swine copped it in the worst way forever and took the whiner's path of requesting it to stop. That didn't work.
I hate this attitude.
I'm a volunteer in my sport, though if I was a well-paid professional it wouldn't make a difference. This year I've worked at the top level - last weekend I was one of four officials calling the national senior final in Dunedin.
If people want to tell me that I'm blind, that I make awful calls, that I shouldn't be allowed to referee a game again, fine. There might be consequences for them if I have power over them or they might get away with it.
If they were to bring up my wife or my kids, they're likely to find the game stopped until building management turf them out of the building.
Buying a ticket to watch a game of sport doesn't give you the right to be a complete and utter fuckwit, and the sooner it's stamped out of sports the better sports will be. Sporting culture only changes when sports stand up to them.
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Capture: Two Tales of a City, in reply to Gudrun Gisela,
Hi Gudrun - nice photos of the guys. The final was unfortunately a bit one-sided - it wasn't until 10 minutes to go until Dunedin scored a goal, game was gone by then.
I was supposed to be sideline supervising the officials in the game, but 15 minutes before it started one of the linesman had a serious equipment failure and couldn't take the ice. Luckily I had my gear in the car so I got to skate my first final as a linesman.
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That’s a rather foolish presumption to make – there is no constitutional or practical reason why the Greens should do any such thing, as opposed to doing nothing more than guaranteeing a Labour minority government confidence and supply, and everything else contingent on case-by-case negotiations.
I've got 10 bucks and silly hat for the loser on election night if the next labour led government doesn't end up having a coalition agreement with Greens.
My Green vote is not a vote for Labour dressed as a tree.
I also vote Green and deliberately don't vote Labour. But you'd be foolish at this stage to vote Green and not be looking at a Labour led coalition being the way your party is going to be in power.
Also, reading on, what Russell said.
The media, too, seem to still be thinking in FPP terms of National and Labour being the obvious, natural major parties.
Also the electorate. I'm happy for there to be three major parties, but we're not there yet.
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We do have 88 potentially illegal spying incidents. There’s no ruling from a court, so it’s not certain whether they were or weren’t illegal. And what’s been revealed by a former head of the GCSB subsequent to the report as to how assistance was actually rendered makes it that much less clear. It’s not “2013-PR’d-to-death-by-National”, unless you’re suggesting that Sir Bruce (who has been extremely outspoken about his disapproval of this legislation) is part of the National spin machine?
It's unlikely to ever be tested in court, as we don't know who the people are, so they can't take the GCSB to court.
And by 2013-PR'd-to-death-by-National I mean that the line that they've been taking is "the law wasn't clear, we're just tidying this up". The law was pretty clear. GCSB could not spy on NZers or NZ Residents. Allowing them to be seconded to other organisations doesn't overrule that.