General Debate 25 February 2010

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LeftRightOut

What will be the DPF spin/ beat up today to try to take the heat of National’s pretend urgency? Off the profligacy of ministers? Off the attack on democracy in Canterbury?

The colour of houses, maybe.
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February 25, 2010 10:02am
Chthoniid

Just a wee reminder today that if you have family photos you cherish, it’s a very sensible idea to make good prints of those you value, and upload backup copies to a web-host service. Theft and accidents can easily wipe out irreplaceable images- especially now when the favoured storage medium is typically a computer or laptop.
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February 25, 2010 10:06am
david

Received a postcard from Phil Goff yesterday.
Apart from the lovely photo of Phil and Mary and another photo of Phil in full “facial concern” mode, there was a nice logo of the House of Representatives, which presumably means that I am paying taxes so that NZ Post can be paid to deliver postcards to me from Phil.
The postcard had three questions with “true/false” tickboxes.

1. Would you like to see the Government take stronger action to reduce power prices, including asking the state-owned power companies for a lower dividend ?
O Stronger Action O No Action
2. The Government has stopped putting aside money to make sure NZ Superannuation will still be available when you turn 65. Was it right to do this?
O Right O Wrong
3. Do you agree with the Government’s increases in your ACC costs and cuts to your ACC cover?
O Agree O Disagree

There are two things about this that disturb.

Firstly: This postcard is not about informing the electorate but is (if one was to describe it generously) a poll designed to assist a political party with policy formation. Is that a proper use of Parliamentary Services funds?

Secondly, the second question particularly is a savage distortion of the truth as I understand it. Am I correct?
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February 25, 2010 10:12am
stephen

Chthoniid does Facebook count?
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February 25, 2010 10:27am
Tassman

The human face of labour under the authority of a modern repressive regime.
Orlanda Sapata Tamayo 1968 – 2010.

Oppression is real in the presence of a dictator
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February 25, 2010 10:31am
Chthoniid

I’m not fond of Facebook for a few reasons. First, the file-size limit means you’re stuck with snapshot size photos. Something you can print out ‘big’ later’ is ruled out.
Second, you have no copyright protection from Facebook using your photos- you assign your photos rights to them.
Third, the upload system is quite cumbersome.
OTOH, it’s better than no backups whatsoever 🙂

Something like Flickr is a better option than Facebook.

Even then, for the best privacy controls & upload sizes/speed, outfits like SmugMug or Zenfolio have even better options (but now you have to start paying annual fees). I ended up going with Zenfolio.
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February 25, 2010 10:35am
Jack5

Is “biodiversity” the new global warming cult?

Two conservationist-scientists in today’s Christchurch Press cite the UN 2010 Year of Diversity and identify what is now climate “change” to be the most dramatic manifestation of the “biological diversity imperative”. They say:

Diversity, be it biological, cultural or linguistic, is undoubtedly the fundamental basis of sustainability and human welfare.

As a layman, I don’t understand how if we all evolved from a few fundamental life cells, and why the rocks are full of layers of various species that have died out, that freezing the world’s current diversity is so important.

I don’t see why preserving cultures is so important either. Ur, Egypt, Ancient Greece, Rome passed into history, but humans continued to develop. Probably thousands of languages have died out, and ours and all others eventually will, too, leaving traces, a few words and parts of words and grammar to continue. Has the death of Etruscan or Manx been end-of-world threatening?

Perhaps academics in subjects threatened with extinction are hyping “biodiversity” as a way of retaining livelihoods. They are helped by bureaucracies like DOC, socialist politicians like Klark and her H1 team at the UN, and gravy-trainers like the various activists around the world for indigenous “rights”/demands.

Prophets of “biodiversity” play on people’s susceptibility to guilt and people’s dreams of perpetual life. Just as the various strands of Christianity that previously have done this in the West.

IMHO, helicopter loads of DOC staff flitting about the country with bird eggs and attempts to save (rather than merely record) dying languages are examples of extravagance, delusion, and futility in the name of diversity.
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February 25, 2010 10:35am
nickb

Wow, what a performance, first man to break 200 in an ODI

http://www.cricinfo.com/indvrsa2010/engine/current/match/441828.html
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February 25, 2010 10:36am
Jack5

Before Chthoniid splatters me on a slide for my criticism of the diversity enthusiasts (10.35 post), I would like to ask him a question about preserving pictures from his 10.06 and 10.35 posts…

What of pic files written to CD-ROMs and DVDs? How permanent and secure are these media? They aren’t like the CDs and DVDs mass-stamped out, but burned into, I think plastic?
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February 25, 2010 10:38am
Tassman

The government is restructuring the water council in preparation for private ownership and user pay…
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February 25, 2010 10:39am
Jack5

Re Tassman (10.39)…

More like individual user pays. Users (as ratepayers) already pay for pipes, extraction and treatment.

Given the amount of water being used for agriculture, we need user pays. Better if we can get private enterprise in on it, too. Then we might get entrepreneurs doing something like carrying out the idea suggested of a tunnel to bring West Coast water to parched Canterbury.
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February 25, 2010 10:42am
stephen

Heatley was this week forced to apologise and repay around $1200 of taxpayers’ money after wrongly putting personal expenses on his ministerial credit card. He then had his stuff cut up his card in front of journalists.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/3372681/Housing-Minister-stood-down-by-PM

Who edits this stuff again?
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February 25, 2010 10:45am
wreck1080

Heatley is getting the sack…wonder what he did?

Must be pretty bad.
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February 25, 2010 10:46am
stephen

nickb I thought some maniac like Sehwag would do it, really, as Tendulkar seemed to be a bit sedate as of late. QUITE something, man.
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February 25, 2010 10:46am
MT_Tinman

Tassman (117) Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 10:39 am

The government is restructuring the water council in preparation for private ownership and user pay…

Shit, I hope so.
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February 25, 2010 10:50am
Chthoniid

@Jack5

I also make backup copies of photos onto DVD. In a good storage environment (dry & cool) they are pretty secure but are not considered permanent media. That means don’t expect to last them 100+ years, but 20-25 years shouldn’t be a problem. I haven’t lost an optical disc yet. That actually makes them a bit more reliable than hard drives 😉

The advantage of discs is that you can store different file formats (RAW), store them away from the computer (reduce risk of theft) and have easy access to the photos.

The trick really is to have a backup system (anything) and not be afraid to print out valuable photos. When years of irreplaceable photos get stored on computer hard-drives, losing that media is really going to hurt.
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February 25, 2010 10:52am
Monty

Heatley gone – major news – Good to see the PM holding his ministers to account. No excuses for fraud or mis-use of public money. I wonder what the reason is.

And being sacked should mean remaining sacked – unlike under clark where it was only ever token gestures.
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February 25, 2010 10:54am
MT_Tinman

stephen (3451) Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 10:46 am

nickb I thought some maniac like Sehwag would do it, really, as Tendulkar seemed to be a bit sedate as of late. QUITE something, man.

By far the world’s best ever batsman in all forms of the game.

A month ago I suggested he retire, because of both his age and he appears to be carrying the Indian team single-handed, inhibiting new talent from emerging.

I was wrong.

May he continue forever.
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February 25, 2010 10:54am
stephen

MT_Tinman, you were wrong then allright!! *shudder*
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February 25, 2010 10:58am
Bok2

Chthoniid
Never a truer word…

When I moved to Aus I had 4 terrabite drives with footage and photos on. (Footage collected over 25 years of film making.)
The original stock was
1) To bulky to ship over and store
and
2) Or on formats that are increasingly difficult to play back.

Suffice it to say that at the moment I am in a right panic trying techs to get two of those drives to deliver up any good what so ever.

It will be a crushing disaster if they can not.
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February 25, 2010 11:01am
Brian Smaller

LRO – why don’t you start your own blog so you can put your own spin up? Oh yeah – you have and nobody reads it.
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February 25, 2010 11:05am
Chthoniid

@Jack5

As an addendum to the biodiversity post, there are a few points I’ll make.
First, the conservation objective is not to freeze current biodiversity in some kind stasis, but to preserve enough biodiversity that evolution can continue. In military parlance, we are try to free up evolutionary fronts so that they can continue to advance, not lock them in some Maginot-type fortress.

Sadly, there is a tendency for public sector organisations to send dollars after evolutionary dead-ends (if the species is charismatic) and not evolutionary fronts (if the species is scaly, crawly or otherwise non-charismatic). That’s the political economy of conservation. and something I fight with constantly.

Second, sadly in my experience to date biodiversity conservation is a lousy way to earn a living, and quite a good way to catch tropical diseases or attract the attention of people who are not averse to killing you. Albeit the incomes earned by the heads of some large conservation NGOs are somewhat impressive. They don’t have to get people waving guns at them either.

Third, biodiversity means more than just species diversity. It also includes diversity at ecological levels. Destroying ecosystems with over-fishing or deforestation has big human impacts.

Fourth, it’s often not appreciated that many human communities depend on biodiversity for food, for protein, for fibre, for building materials and for medicines. Aboriginal communities in Australia are losing food sources- like lizards- because canetoads ware reducing biodiversity in those areas. Wild foods and products matter.

Fifth, a lot of genetic biodiversity matters for us also. We depend crucially on a small group of plant and animal species for food. Wild races, original stocks, biodiversity, is preserved so that things like disease resistance can be bred back into soft, modern (& very mutated) species.
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February 25, 2010 11:17am
Chthoniid

@Bok2

Suffice it to say that at the moment I am in a right panic trying techs to get two of those drives to deliver up any good what so ever.

It will be a crushing disaster if they can not.

Wince… really hope that the images/footage can be recovered. That’s a lot of irreplaceable material.
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February 25, 2010 11:22am
jaba

David at 10:12 .. I hope you Phil ed it out and returned it .. I hope I get one.
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February 25, 2010 11:29am
MikeMan

Chthoniid.

I use Google’s Picasa for this purpose NOW.

I lost 18 months of photos of my daughter when one of the three identical HDD’s in my PC died and it had to be the photos one.

I now have a RAID array and online storage for all photos and I upload important documents to Google docs.
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February 25, 2010 11:46am
Chthoniid

@MikeMan

Well RAID arrays & offsite are pretty much the most secure way to do it :), but ow, sorry you lost those photos in the first place.

I think you kind of reinforce the point that backup systems aren’t hard to setup & it’s good to have them.
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February 25, 2010 12:07pm
MikeMan

What makes it worse was I brought 3 disks in the first place to do RAID-5 but the supplier was out of the RAID-5 capable Asus board and I was in a hurry 🙁

So I ran without any RAID planning to buy an add-in RAID-5 SATA card and never did.

Now sitting on a RAID-1.
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February 25, 2010 12:17pm
Jack5

Re Chthoniid at 11.17 on diversity…

Good explanation, thanks. You forgot that diversity research also provides us with great pictures of crocodiles, and birds, and bugs.

Addendum to the addendum:

Is the core problem then that there are too many human beings? If so, will scientific and political efforts to protect diversity merely worsen the problem by enhancing the environment and thus allowing the human population to keep increasing?
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February 25, 2010 12:19pm
wreck1080

Raid is no good if you get hit by lightning and all your drives are fried. I don’t trust online storage, some online services have gone bust. But, it does provide another level of protection if you can afford the data charges (c’mon telecom, increase your caps).

My backup strategy- Firstly, i only care about data. Programs/OS can easily be reinstalled.

I made a new folder on a 2nd hard drive called “Personal Documents”. This contains all my photos/music/email/software ISOs/important data. Probably it is about 300 gig in size .

I use “Beyond Compare” (good mirroring software) to mirror my “personal documents” to an external enclosure ( esata 2.5″ 500 gig ). This runs every 4 hours.

Then periodically (once per month), I make a copy of “personal documents” to a 2nd external drive , which is only connected during the backup.

Really, this takes very little effort on my part. The only time I get involved, is the monthly back up to the 2nd external drive.

So, usually i can recover if my main documents drive fails (and it has failed twice in 6 years).

If the PC is hit by lightning, i’ll probably lose everything connected to the PC. But I can go back to the periodic backup sitting in my storage cupboard.

Worst case, the house burns down – I would lose everything. I do need to buy another drive for this situation. Store it somewhere offsite – but it would only get updated every so often.
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February 25, 2010 2:42pm
Luc Hansen

Publicity spiced with irony for the director of a “mediation service”: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10628448

He and his missus throw a wobbly over a $40 bill travelling time bill for a tradesman and get so incensed that he sets up a website t excoriate the tradesman’s boss!

His new motto: 24/7 – for an offer they can’t refuse!!
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February 25, 2010 3:25pm
Jack5

Maori Party claims for virtually a separate health system for Maori silently imply Maori are discriminated against by the present system. However, some of the bad health statistics for Maori and Pacific Islanders and their descendants may be genetic ….

From the Wall Street Journal – Health section 23 Feb 2010 edition:

The current epidemic of obesity also has prehistoric roots. Our hunter-gatherer forbearers were tall, lean long-distance runners who subsisted on plants and protein. When populations shifted to agriculture about 10,000 years ago, a carbohydrate-rich diet became the norm. Early farmers had more calories but less nutrition, and average heights dropped from 5-foot-9 to 5-foot-3 for men, and from 5-foot-5 to 5-feet for women. Metabolisms adjusted over the millennia—but populations that shifted to agriculture more recently, like Polynesians and American Indians, have the highest rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes today.
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February 25, 2010 3:32pm
Luc Hansen

@Jack5

I find the human overpopulation theory is simplistic. For a start, the major problem is consumption of planetary resources rather than population per se, and one sector of the population, about 20%, consume 80% of the resources. No prizes for guessing the dominant skin colour of that 20%!

Anyway, overpopulation is self correcting. Eventually, overpopulation would reduce numbers by eg starvation, disease, war etc. So the topic is a little bit irrelevant, unless you are offering forcing solutions like mass sterilisation, in which case I assume you would target the worst offenders first (consumption-wise) and reduce the European component of the population.

Right?
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February 25, 2010 3:35pm
dime

those evil whiteys!
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February 25, 2010 3:48pm
Chthoniid

@Jack5

I don’t think that overpopulation is the core problem. There are a variety of extinction pressures, and some have more to do with mismanagement of resources than they do with population.

NZ is a country that is well over-represented in numbers of endangered species, but that’s got a lot to do with invasive pests rather than population.

There are certainly parts of the world though where local concentrations of people (in and around some Indian reserves for instance) do look to have over-shot the ability of the ecosystem to sustain them.

Papua New Guinea is making me nervous as well, as while current harvests form the wild (e.g. bush kangaroos) look to be marginally sustainable (if illegal), the human population is tracking to rise much higher. Human birth rates haven’t adjusted down fast enough to prevent a large ‘bulge’ appearing.

And in a lot of places, mismanagement of natural resources, via deliberate Government policy or corruption- have made things a lot worse. Fisheries and forestry globally, is largely a public or state-owned asset. Can’t say that the outcome there has been a ringing endorsement of public-sector regulations.
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February 25, 2010 3:51pm
Hurf Durf

Labour launches new campaign to attract voters.

I don’t think it’ll work.
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February 25, 2010 6:27pm
Fale Andrew Lesa

hahahahaha

that almost reminds me of National’s opposition campaign in the last 9 years of the former Labour government and how many leadership crises occurred during that particular era.
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February 25, 2010 6:31pm
Chthoniid

I am of course, reconsidering my position on the need for more vigorous measures to curtail the population density of Labour supporters… 😛
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February 25, 2010 9:44pm
RightNow

Willis Eschenbach to a mainstream climate scientist:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/25/judith-i-love-ya-but-youre-way-wrong/

“The problem is that 71.3% of what passes as peer reviewed climate science is simply junk science, as false as the percentage cited in this sentence. The lack of trust is not a problem of perception or communication. It is a problem of lack of substance. Results are routinely exaggerated. “Scientific papers” are larded with “may” and “might” and “could possibly”. Advocacy is a common thread in climate science papers. Codes are routinely concealed, data is not archived. A concerted effort is made to marginalize and censor opposing views.

And most disturbing, for years you and the other climate scientists have not said a word about this disgraceful situation.”
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February 25, 2010 10:08pm
TimG_Oz

Isn’t it time NZ became our 7th State?

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/world/3374308/Average-Aussie-pay-hits-1580-a-week
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February 25, 2010 10:51pm

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