Blog Bits

Poneke laments how Waterfront Watch’s campaign against the Wellington Hilton, has meant no waterfront development is likely for a decade. Instead we are left with those awful tin sheds.

Bruce Simpson at Aardvark covers the efforts of Associated Press to claim that even using their headlines is a breach of the US DMCA. This may be very significant if bloggers are not able to significantly quote articles in order to critique them.

Whale Oil detects more links between The Standard and Labour or more specifically labour.co.nz. The Standard responds. A great thread for those who get hot with talk of DNS and MX records 🙂

The Economist looks at the school system in Finland and Sweden.

And since I’m coming this far north, I want to take in Sweden too. That social-democratic paradise has carried out school reforms that make free-market ideologues the world over weak at the knees. In the 1990s it opened its state-education system to private competition, allowing new schools to receive the same amount for each pupil as the state would have spent on that child.

The Dim-Post has some solutions for the South Auckland crime wave:

• Limit numbers on all polytechnic courses teaching home invasion and armed robbery techniques.
• Increase existing levels of sedatives and oral contraceptives in Manukau water supply.
• Create an economic disincentive to homicide by amending the Emissions Trading Scheme to double carbon fees on vehicles used during a murder
• Introduce cultural sensitivity training to South Aucklands migrant communities teaching them to be more open and tolerant towards the kiwi tradition of random assault and pointless execution style killings.
• Point to multiple Asian murders as irrefutable statistical evidence for sending ‘em all back.

Also, finally not a blog but of interest to EFA watchers is this note of a meeting between Federated Farmers and the Electoral Commission over the EFA.