Posts by David Slack
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Flubber? The very idea.
<a href=”http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/techsploder” target="_blank">Juha</a>
Oh.
Here we go:
<a href="http://www.stuff.co.nz/blogs/techsploder" target="_blank">Juha</a>
Small characters. The slight tilt is easily missed.
As for the Tubing, they all work from my machine. Could you be being stymied by the mighty Fairfax Firewall of pron?
It would hurt more if you used your skillz to pwn his wi-fi.
He made a hostile neighbour in that respect, although to be fair he did let me know when he was in my hard disk, riding my lolcatz.
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That's assuming people recognise you with your clothes on, of course.
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I can join those threads in a further way.
Kim Scheinberg and I used that very laptop to give a presentation in the Michael Fowler Centre about this amazing new thing called the world wide web. It would have been 1995 or 1996. Some kind of computer world conference. We arrived with minutes to spare (we first took a detour to Lower Hutt to visit the electrical goods importer who was negotiating to buy ICONZ. That’s a whole other rollercoaster story). We found the organiser who showed us to the podium. "You got that ethernet connection for us?" we asked. "Actually, no," he said.
With two minutes to go, we decided how we might demonstrate the internet to a few hundred people without using said internet. We told stories. We told people what you could do on the internet. We showed them things we had downloaded from the internet. We told them how you would one day be able to book your entire holiday online yourself - plane tickets, accommodation, car, the lot. People drifted out the door as the hour ground on.
Afterwards an angry looking middle aged man in a suit made his way towards us. He pulled out his business card, shoved it in my hand. It announced him as a travel agent. He told me it had been highly irresponsible of me to be saying such things. I wonder what he's doing now.
I also remember stepping into a lift after another visit we made to demonstrate the internet to Roger Lampen and his headhunters. They were very impressed. As we got into the lift Kim said “did you hear what Netscape stock debuted at today?” From memory I think it was 60 dollars. We said to each other Holy Fuck, this is big. A few months later, it seemed entirely realistic for some Wellington wide boys to offer me millions of dollars for the automatic speech writer. Friends who know that whole sorry saga will know that its never as straightforward as it sounds when someone makes you an offer like that.
I last had an email from Kim four or five years ago. She was living well in Northern California, raising a family and still buying the latest Mac gear.
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Here are a couple of interesting grabs from an old Kevin List interview with John Key. The first makes his position on productivity a good deal more clear:
There are two fundamental issues around New Zealand. One is around productivity, and we have an economy that's not productive in the way that it could be. Certainly there's a lot more to eke out. If you can develop productivity, then wage rates actually grow. That's the really driving issue for New Zealand. We're fundamentally quite a low-wage economy, and that's the gap which you'll quite often hear Don Brash and myself talk about.
He also has this to say later in the interview, which is quite interesting in a The Selling Of the Prime Minister way. My emphasis added. Identifying with the battlers, or making the most of a marketing angle?
KL:: Okay. I've got your bio here from July 28, 2002, and it's the official National Party bio. It says you grew up in a State house. That's disappeared from your 2006 one. Is that just an oversight or a rewrite of the bio?
JK:: No, it's still on.
KL:: Not on the website.
JK:: Oh, is that the National Party site?
KL:: Yeah.
JK:: They rewrite their own. It's on my site. It's on my site. I look at it as a great marketing ploy for me. I'm very happy and very proud of my background.
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I think Labour's greatest enemy is our sense of fair play. They've been on the swing for too long and it's time to give someone else a turn.
They may also be victim to our insatiable appetite for all things new. Could voters be so conditioned by the marketing machine to want the new model that they apply it to politics as well?
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And this reply would make me the third man.
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With the “War on Taggers” (coined by the “delighted” Gordon Copeland),
But for his lacking in hipness he might have thought to coin it the war on otara tagg3rs
How do those trends look if you split the 'violence' figures into more specific categories of severity, Keith? Does it change things in any significant way?
I may actually buy the Sunday Star times! :-)
If you also pick up a copy of the Herald on Sunday, you'll be putting a little more rice on Keith's table. (Or is this your subtle lawyerly way of exacting revenge for his Werewolf algorithm?)
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A couple of emails I've had are worth adding here:
1. On the economics of modern employment:
Why is it so easy for people to acknowledge that the "rules" of home ownership have obviously changed since our parents embarked on the adventure, yet the just as obvious corollary that the rules of earning a livable household income have also changed is either resisted or avoided? I thought economic policy was meant to reflect social reality, and obviously I'm a dreamer, but if we legislated to remove tax breaks for property speculators and made childcare a cost of working and thus eligible for total tax subsidy, you might start shifting the balance.
2. On Katherine Rich, one asks:
Don't you think it all smells a bit like a pre-emptive jump?
And another:
Sure after 3 terms and now she gets a pension.
Sorry I believe her as much as I believe Nandor.
Isn't it funny how so many politicians need 3 terms to discover that politics isn't really the right career for them. But it's Ok because they have done so much for country in their 3 terms that they really deserve the lifetime pension.
Have to go wash the sarcasm off my hands now.
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What we need is government provision of cows.
I draw your attention to an old post of mine, and the words of George Bernard Shaw:
I just want to ask: why not distribute it freely? This is very important in New Zealand. A little loss on milk doesn't matter. It is of enormous importance that all your children should be a generation reared from first class children. When you have done this, when you have distributed free milk, which is just as possible as free water, I would then suggest that you should go on from free milk to free bread. If you have free bread, and anybody can go to a store and get it, such a thing as a hungry child will be impossible in New Zealand.
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Is McCain able?
And if he were your brother would you be game to be his keeper?