Wellington City not endorsing Transmission Gully

My views are pretty clear on this, but at least Wellington City Council is showing a bit of sense in digesting the Hearings Committee report before deciding what it thinks of it. It shows that once in a while, a local authority can have more common sense than MPs, which have jumped up and down like excited children at the chance to spend lots of money on a big project they would all claim is because of them - regardless of where the money came from and what projects lost out as a result. Porirua can't wait for its free ride, Kapiti can't wait for the thousands of new residents and the Hutt? Well, can't see quite what it gets out of having virtually no money for any new projects out that way after the Dowse to Petone project is finished.

.

The report is full of holes, and with journalists who don't even understand the transport funding system, questions don't get asked. Even DPF has discarded his usual willingness to weigh up the opportunity costs of policy options, and just wants the next three bureaucratic groups to rubber stamp it.

.

When you are talking about spending $1 billion - money that isn't just lying around, and more than any other roading project in New Zealand's history, and on a project with a benefit/cost ratio of less than 1:1 - you don't just rubber stamp it, unless a former rather authoritarian Prime Minister from the early 1980s is your role model.

.

and no, the Option 3/Green/anti-car crowd have it wrong too. A lot of money is planned for rail to Kapiti, it will enable the line to be fully utilised without being ridiculously uneconomic. There needs to be road construction, the question is how much and where.

Vodafone CE opposes more telecommunications regulation

Yes, it's true. The CE of one of Telecom's major competitors has been quoted in the NZ Herald saying:

.

"If we want true broadband, we're not going to get it by regulation alone. We need investment."

.

Of course, unlike almost every other competitor, Vodafone has a parallel network to Telecom. It was built from scratch starting in 1993 with BellSouth, later bought out by Vodafone, and expanded. Vodafone went from Telecom having a mobile phone monopoly (since 1987) to sharing the market roughly 50/50, and good on it. There are frequencies held by Telstra Clear and others to build more mobile networks, but the government has already taken steps to force Vodafone and Telecom to share their networks with competitors. You see, when a mobile competitor reaches 5% coverage with its own network, it can force a competitor to sell it wholesale capacity to get nationwide coverage. That was a little deal stiched up so that the Maori/Zimbabwean consortia set up - Econet could operate. Here it is in the Herald bleeting on about how it needs the regulatory environment to compete, not good enough to get discounted radio spectrum. You might have noticed that five years after getting its nice little cheap spectrum deal, there is little to notice from Econet.

.

So you see, Econet is another second-hander - a business demanding another business share its property, for it to exist.

Foolhardy airline entrepreneur #236

or something like that.

.

Paul Stoddart has, once again, proven that the airline industry attracts fools like flies to decaying meat. The closure of his airline – Ozjet – is a classic example of ego and excitement over reason and hard headed investment. In New Zealand, the example of Tasman Pacific airways (which used the Qantas New Zealand franchise before going into receivership and then liquidation) was our most recent example of wealthy businessmen setting fire to dollar bills, but that didn't deter Mike Perot pouring plenty of his personal fortune into Origin Pacific Airways and seeing it disappear in barely visible plumes of exhaust behind the planes.
.
Ozjet failed because Stoddart got the market badly wrong. He didn't like tight airline seats on domestic flights and poor service, so he thought far more people would pay loads to go business class on a 1.5 hour flight if it was REALLY swish, in fact a whole plane load. He forgot that most business people don't fly business class, a wealthy minority do, others use frequent flyer points for upgrades, and most have contract rates with Qantas. He forgot that with airlines, networks are very important, he only flew Melbourne-Sydney. He couldn't afford new planes, so got four old Boeing 737-200 series, gas guzzlers (Air NZ replaced its ones in the late 1990s) - as the price of aviation fuel soured. He certainly had comfortable planes, wide seats, plenty of legroom, meals - but no lounges to relax in before the flight - instead you hunted around the terminal looking for somewhere to perch. Leisure travellers wouldn't pay high fares, business travellers usually didn't either and those that did were tied to Qantas -so it was very very dumb, but it WAS his money. Stupid, but his and his investors' loss - not your money, which is the difference. Oh and no doubt unions will be upset about the staff without jobs, and not the entrepreneur who lost millions of dollars in creating those jobs, for the time the airline lasted. The employees walk away with salaries, CV entries - the entrepreneur with burnt fingers and less money. Capitalism is SO unfair isn't it?

.

However, there is something bizarre about the airline industry that attracts mavericks willing to piss money down the drain, because planes are exciting and prestigious and sexy. They never seem to notice the graveyard of airlines that failed due to lack of capital, or sheer stupid management. Sir Richard Branson hasn't done a bad job, but then don't forget Virgin Atlantic Airways is 49% owned by Singapore Airlines (sacre bleu - why didn't the Brits stop that - fortunately Aunty Helen and Dr Cullen stopped Air NZ being tainted by such a failure of an airline).

.

Oh well, there will be another fool willing to put his money in the engine of a jet, there always is and they are always men.

Slobodan Milosevic - nationalist thug

Slobodan Milosevic’s death should not be mourned by anyone with any sense of civilisation and justice, and certainly no friends of liberty. Milosevic was a calculated purveyor of racism – of a vile murderous kind, only Radko Mladic and Radovan Karadjic are more responsible for the slaughter of innocent Bosnian Muslims in the war in Bosnia.
.
Milosevic was a socialist, having inherited his position in the post-Titoist Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as the communist party tried to find a future without their personality cult. Yugoslavia, through Titoism, hadn’t been as badly damaged as the rest of the eastern socialist states, largely because it was outside the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet bloc (Tito rejected Stalinism in 1948 and adopted a soft socialism – allowing small private businesses to remain and develop). However, after the fall of socialism in the Soviet bloc, there was enormous pressure to move to multi-party democracy. It was in 1990 that Milosevic, representing the Serbian branch of the Communist Party, advocated greater centralism – multiparty democracy, but dismantling the federation. By contrast, the presidents of Slovenia and Croatia wanted more autonomy, multi-party democracy and liberalism. Milosevic won the day – he had already supported the racist hysteria propagated by the Serbian Academy of Sciences and the Arts. The Academy promoted the view that Serbs had a golden age, which came about before the Serb defeat by the Turks in Kosovo in 1389. Milosevic had already just about obliterated the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina, as he kept Serbia in the socialist dark age. He encouraged the idea that Kosovo Albanians were dirty, thieves, rapists and not worthy of governing Serbs.
.
He used racist nationalism to scare Serbs, particularly rural illiterate ones, into thinking the Croats, Albanians and Bosnian Muslims were out to get them. He provided fuel for his racist opponents in Croatia (Franjo Tudjman did his best to spread nationalist filth amongst Croats) and ran the very well equipped Yugoslav National Army as Yugoslavia fell apart. He used the army to attack Slovenia when it seceded, but couldn’t sustain it – but then led a prolonged war, arming Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia against the secessionist governments. In Croatia – it was a war between nationalist racists – both seeking to conquer territory, and rid that territory of those not of their ethnicity.
.
This was the start of the coining of the term “ethnic cleansing”. It was applied most disgustingly in Bosnia, with the slaughter of men and boys in Srebrenica – as Bosnian Serb troops, armed and backed by the “Yugoslav National Army” cleared non Serb males from the town. Milosevic supported and encouraged Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadjic in his project of ethnically cleansing Bosnia – and no, all sides were NOT equal. The Bosnian government tried hard to promote a colourblind Bosnia, with the cosmopolitan Sarajevo as capital, Milosevic promoted a greater Serbia. He demanded peace through expanding the borders of Serbia (under the rubric of a new Yugoslavia), encouraging other ethnic identities in the former Yugoslavia to act the same way.
.
However, he lost. Despite the disgusting appeasement of the European Union, helped by New Zealand, in maintaining the arms embargo on the former Yugoslavia (meaning Bosnian Muslims and Croats found it very hard to get arms for self defence, while Serbs had the resources of the Yugoslav Army), ultimately air strikes on Belgrade, and NATO intervention in Kosovo spelt the end of Milosevic’s rule in Serbia. Serbs in Belgrade became sick of having a bankrupt economy, ostracised by western Europe – as they watched their neighbours to the north (Hungary, Czech republic etc), liberalise, grow and look towards joining the EU.
.
Milosevic was a racist, but not the insanely stupid National Front type, but an intellectual power hungry bully. I doubt he ever believed the racist nonsense he promoted, but he certainly hated his rivals in Croatia (Tudjman) and Bosnia (Izetbegovic) and outlived them both. His politics are the crude politics of national identity – he used fear and the brainless psychological fiction of nationalism to motivate people to vandalist, assault, terrorise, rape and kill - because of ethnicity. Yugoslavia under Tito lived under fear driven by the communist party, Milosevic replaced it with fear based on national identity - he should be remembered as the final blood thirsty gasp of barbaric nationalism in the Balkans.

Why ban nude cycling?

Maybe if you look like this, you don't like your own body very much. Tasman District Mayor John Hurley is trying to ban a nude bike ride according to NZ Herald.
.
Why? Who are they hurting, besides risking sunburn or hypothermia or a rather nasty injury somewhere if they fall off? He said it is because it has offended locals before. Fortunately Takaka police have determined it isn’t illegal – but the fascist mayor says Police will look like fools if they DON’T arrest them.
.
What does John Hurley want? Iranian style morals police covering up people who offend him? 200 people signed a petition against it – why don’t they damned well mind their own business? What nosey pathetic snivelling busybodies that sneer at the human body, show hatred for people minding their own business. All you have to do is look the other way.
.
John Hurley offends me by wanting the Police to act against the law, to be enforcers of his Victorian age, Taliban style morals. Naked bodies are harmless, we all have them.
.
So let people bike nude, particularly fit women, but not John Hurley. Who wants to see his bits flopping about?