Are you banned in China?

China, the great capitalist powerhouse of Asia is also the great censorship powerhouse. The freedom loving guys at Pacific Empire have an excellent post on this, including the link to the Great Firewall of China website - where you can check to see if your website or blog is banned in the People's Republic of China. Pacific Empire is, this blog is not as of ... right now.

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However if you go to my blog through the firewall and THEN connect to Pacific Empire there doesn't seem to be a problem. Technological barriers to censorship are, by their very nature, subject to many many holes.

Steve Jobs on TV and education

Julian Pistorius has an excellent post on Steve Job's views on TV and how public education has contributed to it... his basic points are:

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Most TV is of poor quality because most people want to switch off their brains.

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Educationists want technology to fix their problems, when the problem is people, incentives and unions and administrators that don't want to confront poor performance.

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He said "The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy".

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The full post Julian quoted from is here. As long as teacher unions continue to think that teachers cannot be paid and evaluated based on performance, they will continue to be defenders of mediocrity - and who in their right mind thinks all their teachers were equally worthy.

Charles not fit to be King

Prince Charles’s environmental fetish is well known, but I believe his latest outburst proves how completely unfit he is to be King. He wants McDonalds banned.
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According to the Daily Telegraph, when visiting the United Arab Emirates he said “Have you got anywhere with McDonald’s, have you tried getting it banned? That’s the key”.
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Fascist! So you want a dictatorial kingdom of old Charles? Well frankly you are not fit to be King – how can anyone trust you to legitimately be the sovereign and accept the advice of your democratically elected government when you’re just a rather loopy leftwing nutter? You’ve never had to work a day in your life, the work you have done is by choice – you are one of the most privileged people in the world, you have not the slightest idea of what it is like to risk your own money on a business franchise (and risk bankruptcy), or to have to get a basic job. Your children don’t either.
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How you express such an explicitly political point of view, condemning a legal business operating in the UK?
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Set aside your own prejudices about McDonalds. The bottom line is that it gives a lot of people pleasure, and a lot of people jobs. Many of you have gone there, and those who don’t are fine – you don’t have to eat at fast food restaurants. If you want to get it banned, then fine, be a fascist – be honest about it. Charles is meant to be apolitical – but he is not, and as such he is not fit to be the constitutional monarch of the UK or indeed New Zealand.

Local government - fascist and wasteful

Recent reports of the latest Auckland City Council junket are not surprising. Sister City status is nothing more than a way for councils in both cities to justify expensive holidays in each others’ cities for nothing more than a junket. The trip by three to Hamburg to discuss an “economic alliance” is bullshit – absolute bullshit. For starters, what does Auckland sell that Hamburgers (yes yes) want to buy? Is Auckland City going to Hamburg to demand that Germans lobby for the EU to open up its agricultural market? Does Hamburg have so much in common with Auckland that Auckland can learn? Hardly. If Auckland wants expert advice on anything it ought to turn to its own advisors, who get paid for the job and for consultants on a case by case basis. Would they hire three consultants from Hamburg to fly over and advise Auckland on… whatever? No. It is what it is – a junket – a junket that Auckland property owners pay for compulsorily because Auckland voters chose that council and the Labour led government gave carte blanche for councils to do what they want.
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Of course Daily Telegraph reports the UK faces the same, petty fascist councils wanting to interfere almost endlessly. Prosecuting people for not recycling a piece of cardboard, or putting an envelope in the street rubbish bin that a person carried from home, charging exhorbitant parking fees because you have the wrong car.
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The thing is almost nobody standing for local government wants councils to do less and spend less. Seriously, even the non explicitly leftwing candidates are, almost to a T, big government oriented.
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New Zealand adopted the UK model for local body powers – so watch and learn. Local government in the UK is responsible for far more than in NZ (education and police for example), but its standards are lower than what I’ve seen in some NZ councils.
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Rodney Hide had a Bill that would’ve been a useful first step to dealing with this, but we see what happened to that. Maybe this year you’ll all vote for councils that want to do less and do what they are meant to do, better and more efficiently. I’m not holding my breath.

Do you care about the roads?

Well respond to Transit’s draft 2007/2008 Land Transport Programme, which lists the road projects Transit will be seeking funding for in the coming financial year and the priority given to them. Remember Transit does not fund anything, Land Transport New Zealand does, and Transit is purely state highways, not public transport.
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You can be sure that politicians who go on about their pet projects don’t bother to make a submission, but you should if something you think is worthwhile has a low priority or vice versa. Transit is seeking to spend $1.25 billion next year, of which £1.16 billion will come from your road taxes (the rest from borrowing against future toll income). The draft programme gives you maps showing where projects are and lists of projects and descriptions of what it sees as major issues.
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However Transit has taken a different approach to presenting all this information. You no longer get the estimated costs of future projects, lest it show that costs escalate year by year. You no longer get proposed exact years for starting construction, lest a project be advanced or another dropped. Much of this makes sense, but there are estimated costs behind major projects that Transit is not publishing
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You have until 30 March to make a submission.

Given my Wellington heritage, the main points for Wellington appear to be:
- Starting the Dowse to Petone interchange on the Western Hutt Rd (gets rid of the first two sets of traffic lights leaving Wellington and provides a new entrance to Hutt City from the south, relieving Melling bridge);
- Completing design and starting construction of Stage 1 of the Kapiti Western link road (a new route starting halfway between Waikanae and Waikanae Beach to Raumati via Kapiti Road, taking local traffic off of the highway);
- Designing and starting construction on an interchange at Haywards to replace the traffic light intersection between SH2 and SH58;
- Investigating and designing a major improvement to the Basin Reserve, meaning probably a flyover from Mt Victoria Tunnel to Buckle Street across the northern corner of the Basin (relieving bottlenecks around the Basin in the AM and PM peaks);
- Investigating and designing Transmission Gully.
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Hardly grand road building when only three major construction projects are set to start, (given one is complete and two more are about to be completed in the current year, it is really about maintaining the same level of activity). Of those three, two are just about getting rid of traffic lights on four-lane highways to make them run more efficiently, and the third is about providing a safer local connection in Kapiti Coast so that traffic (including cyclists and pedestrians) don’t have to mix with highway traffic. I’d be interested to see what Tom Beard thinks of this.
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Aucklanders can take heart that it is full steam ahead with a bunch of projects to be completed in the next year, and more to start such as the Hobsonville deviation (which will link the NorthWestern motorway to the soon to be completed Upper Harbour Bridge duplication and Greenhithe motorway to build a complete Upper Harbour Motorway from the North Shore to Waitakere), and Brigham Creek extension pushing the North Western motorway further towards Kumeu. Meanwhile lots of large motorway projects continue to be under construction, from the ALPURT motorway extension from Orewa to Puhoi, to extending SH20 north to Mt Roskill and south to the Southern Motorway. Most of this is a backlog of work that should have been built years ago.