Remember a little while ago, Family Fist were crowing about a poll that showed “Almost half of parents with children under 12 have smacked them in the past year”. Don’t remember? Here’s their press release.
What you might not know is that, before the law was passed, a whopping 78% of people said they would not comply with the law. Now it shows that 52% of parents have actually complied with the law.
In their press release it discloses that the poll was commissioned by Family First. Good. Know that polls exist to prove a point for whoever commissioned it.
What you might not know is that Family First employed Curia Market Research to conduct the poll. Ring any bells?
What you might not know is that Curia Market Research is run by our very own David Farrar, author of Kiwiblog. The Kiwiblog comments section being home to some of the worst right-wing, conservative and religious wing-nuts our society has to offer. Although I don’t lump DPF in with some of the scum that lurks at his site, he’s a vocal opponent of the government.
What you might not know is that Curia Market Research is allegedly run out of National Headquarters in Wellington.
The amount of spin applied to that poll result is simply ridiculous… Statistics can prove almost anything you want when you bend them the right way.
Family Fist like to tell everyone that they’ve missed the point. In fact, it’s they who have missed the point. Nobody has been dragged off to prison for stopping their child from performing digital electrical socket investigation. Innocent parents are still innocent. Parents who abuse their children now have one less defense and I would think that anybody who actually puts Family First would get behind that.
Prog-blog is back and in a recent post, in amongst some other waffle, is a tidbit from Jim Anderton’s speech…
Let me give the House one example:
This week I’m going to announce a decision about dolphins.
Good! Hopefully it’s the right decision – stick it to the fisheries. Apparently, it’s not a businesses job to care about the environment it operates in. Things are changing and if you won’t help us help everyone there will be consequences. Fortunately the consequences look like it’ll end up being a slap on the wrist for some fisheries, some inconvenience and change to business as usual instead of being the extinction of an entire species native to New Zealand.
The movie industry (and music industry as well) have recently become obsessed with filthy, freeloading, artist-livelihood-destroying, rum-drinking, organised crime-funding internet pirates. These enemies of freedom sail the seven ISP’s cutting profits of the honest middlemen with their cutlasses.
An interesting thing popped up today with regards to movie studios trying to discourage pirates. It seems that they are trying out a method to watermark the films – because this idea to make the film undesirable to copyright infringes is quite simply ridiculous for some very obvious reasons…
“Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in order to deter and track piracy.”
Deter piracy with a few gaps in the soundtrack? Have any of these people actually seen what a movie looks and sounds like recorded by a consumer-level camera in the theaters? You’d be lucky if the only thing wrong was a few gaps in the soundtrack! People that are willing to watch a movie recorded by a hand held camera in a theater are simply not going to be bothered by this – they already put up with coughs, splutters, shhush’s, hairdos, moving people and a camera man who appears to be afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. In fact, the only people that it’s going to upset are the poor suckers that just paid $15 to watch your crippled movie in the theater.
Seriously bad idea. My idea would be to throw an infrared floodlight against the theater screen. Invisible to the human eye but you can be sure the camera’s CCD will pick it up
In other copyright news it seems the New Zealand Government has been invited to discussions regarding ACTA, the Anti-Counterfiting Trade Agreement. This treaty, in negotiation with UK, US and Canada, has been drawn up in secret and has only just come to light. You can read the discussion paper here and it seems to be just a thinly veiled assault on privacy in the name of Intellectual Property Rights protection.
I can only hope the New Zealand government is not involved with this, as the paper is full of very scary provisions…
“Cooperation†is the “key component†to ACTA, which means governments agree to exchange information with each other about their citizens in order to protect the IPR industry (although the data exchange won’t be limited to that goal)
The big problem I have with this is the fact it was negotiated completely in secret with no transparency. It’s also misleading all the way up to the title. Since when did counterfeiting have anything to do with Intellectual Property Rights (I hate that saying…)? It seems what they can’t put into international law they enforce in trade treaties. For instance an FTA with the USA is almost always conditional on adopting their broken patent system and their draconian DMCA-like laws. Copyright enforcement should be a purely civil matter, not criminal.
This is seriously bad news and can spell major issues for both consumers and other parties such as ISPs and public services should they have to comply. I hope NZ doesn’t touch it with a 10-foot barge pole.
Update: Ars Technica has a very well written analysis of the problems to be had with ACTA. Go Ars!
Our favourite National Party Hack unbiased political commentator weighs in on rat hygiene when the Bloody Mary’s it seems he had for breakfast appear to catch up with him…
There is more noise about tax cuts being made from both sides of the fence. Of course, this is the time to make noise about it as the budget is right around the corner. Labour has a chance here to inoculate of National’s key “policies” in the upcoming budget, but I wonder if it’ll be enough.
Tax cuts, as with almost any political pivot, is a mixed bag. It’s a great vote winner as everybody loves free money, but it can end up very costly to the Government coffers and can often cause more trouble than they fix with regards to inflation and driving up interest rates to soak up that extra cash-in-hand that Joe Sixpack now has.
Of course, the T-word is all the more relevant these days as a lot of people are finding it harder and harder to get by with fuel, food and housing prices being up and looking to keep rising (perhaps excepting housing) and people see a third of their paycheck disappear to the government. To this end, the National Party appear to be pushing their ideas for across the board tax cuts as a form of social welfare where as Labour seem to be looking to target relief to those at the lower end of the scale.
The funny thing is, Labour doesn’t seem to want to touch the tax system but instead offer support to the needy via rebates, benefits and subsidies. National, conversely, want to fiddle, with ideas being thrown around such as a 0% tax at the low end of the scale, and moving/eliminating the top bracket.
Now, I generally support the progressive approach to taxation and, although it’s always nice to have some extra money, what is the real cost of that tax cut? I don’t need it to survive, there are people that need it more than me. It’s confusing to me to see the sense of entitlement that people believe they have to societies money. Tax is the cost of being in a society and although people moan about taxes being high (they aren’t, look here) and I don’t think it’s wrong to ask the people who have benefited incredibly from this society (money movers, I’m looking at you!) to cough up a larger chunk of their income to keep everything running smoothly.
Remember, Global Warming is just a theory – like the Metric System!
Who’s This Guy?
I'm Chris. I live in Auckland, New Zealand.
Web Developer by hobby, then by trade. I am currently rendering my services to the great Mighty Ape with one or two personal projects currently in early stages. Hopefully more on that later.
I work on Mac's, but game on my PC's - can currently be found on Borderlands, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect:2 or occasionally W:AR.
You're likely to find posts here about my life, my work, technology and some politics - all with a New Zealand twist!
