Dark Brightness

If Bill English runs deficits over the next year to stumulate the economy he willbe contradicting the Rsereve Bank.

The economy technically pulled out of recession in the second quarter, snapping a five-quarter streak of contractions and the longest downturn since the recession caused by the first oil shock in the mid-1970s.

Earlier this month, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand kept the official cash rate at 2.5% but signaled it would start raising interest rates in mid-2010 rather than the previous guidance of the second half of 2010 if the economy continues to recover. The central bank had expected the economy to expand 0.4% in the third quarter.

via HeadlineText – WSJ.com.

This is sort of good news. TheIRD won on wht`at looks to have been a comlicated tax issue.It would be interesting to see what Cactus Kate says: this is her area.

As a mere research clinician, If I can’t explain it back to my advisor and show you how it works on the back of an  envelope, I don’t understand it and should not be involved.

More inetersting is that we needed this windfall to go into surplus. We need to be balancing our budget — even if you are a Keynsian (I’m not) then we are moving into recovery and stimulus is not needed.

lancing the books New Zealand's big four Australian-owned banks and the Inland Revenue Department have announced a settlement of their disputes over structured finance deals that involves the banks paying the government a gross NZ$2.2 billion.This represents 80 per cent of the amounts owed by the banks and is the largest commercial settlement with the IRD in its history. Updated with comment from ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Westpac and the IRDThe settlement follows years of legal fights and two high court rulings in favour of the IRD. The banks will not pay penalties and the full details of the settlement are confidential, although they are paying 80 per cent of the total tax owed plus interest. The amount was enough to boost New Zealand's current account into a surplus in the September quarter for the first time in almost 21 years.

via Four banks to pay IRD $2.2bn – Business – NZ Herald News.

I don’t get comments here. But this is the best from the kiwi blogs I found this week. On the warmists….

I’ll believe there’s a crisis when the people telling us there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis”.

I think this goes to the heart of why nothing will come out of Copenhagen, and is why I gave this post its title. If you’re still considering a private jet and a limo service absolute necessities, I’m not particularly interested in hearing how you need me to bung you wads of cash to reduce carbon emissions (through some obscure, magical process).

The science is another matter. It seems obvious enough that carbon emissions are going to cause us trouble, I just suspect a lot of what we're hearing right now is rank alarmism based on computer models that aren’t worth sh_t. Propose some useful mechanisms to reduce pollution and encourage moves to renewable resources and I’ll be all for it – but propose jacking up prices so money can be traded by financial scammers and handed over to corrupt Third World officials to no useful environmental effect, and strangely enough I’m not going to be enthusiastic.

via Blogger: No Minister – Post a Comment.

I appreciate that Kate Ross (who works here) has had a year where keeping going has been hard. However, the screening that she mentions is (for most businesses, who cannot afford to have a huge HR department) a good reason to use her service

An example of this – last week we advertised a middle management role. We had 9000 views, 750 applicants read the advertisement and over 300 applied statistics from Seek. 300! We have numerous positions to fill and this is incredibly time consuming when 90 per cent of the applicants do not even meet the brief. When clients have a few roles to recruit they will approach an agency and ask for the “best price.” Fair enough, we all need to be flexible.

via Kate Ross: What have recruitment agencies learned from 2009? – page 2 – Business – NZ Herald News.

In health the problem is getting enough quality staff. It takes at least 14    years to train a spccailist. It takes at least 7 -10 years to train a nurse or social worker (I know their degrees take three years, but they need a lot of supervision for at least some years). Good people are hard to find. Hiring bad people is very very expensive both emotionally, financially and often not acceptable from a risk management point of view.

So, we have been recruiting in health. For empty jobs. However, the ceiling on these jobs is shrinking, as we are being asked to make even more cuts.

Kate sees some hope for next  year, based on what she is seeing happening over the last few months. This timing fits with a typical recession. The risk, however, is that the recession elsewhere will be prolonged and worsened by US and EU policies. As we rely on exports, the recovery elsewhere is as important (or more so) than our domestic situation.

Icebergs may again reach New Zealand | Weather Watch.

Just talked to Sara. She says no snow yet in Manitoba.

But… we have icebergs coming…

Yay. Not.

Over the afternoon, the weather turned nasty. The staff were talking about snow. To 300m. Have not seen any, but it is unseasonally cold.

One son, who has cross country tomorrow, is praying hard for snow. The other is praying for no snow because he has  a school trip.

Regardless, it is unseasonably cold.

Which reminds me of this article. To quote them:

Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

Go read it.

The UK fascist socialists banned it. Good reason to mirror it, I say.

YouTube – New Nazis – New Pigs -Same Old Corrupt Lying Politicians.

I’m glad my IT department has a clue. Note to any police: clt-Alt F3 (or any function key apart from f7 will bring up a virtual terminal. These are useful for big jobs when you don’t want a graphic interface. The term for this is a command line.

And any parent who works from home should have seperate logins for the kids and him or her: the spouse may not inadvertantly trash you data, but the kids probably will type rm -rf * at least once just to see what it does….

A bunch of folks have submitted various versions of a story in Boston, involving Boston College police being granted a warrant which they used to confiscate the computers of a student as part of an investigation over an email sent to a mailing list. The troubling part is that the warrant was given without any real reason. In fact, part of the warrant application focused on the scary fact that the student in question used a command line on his computer:

Mr. Calixte uses two different operating systems to hide his illegal activities. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.

There are other accusations in the filing, but reading through it, it seems clear that this is a pure fishing expedition by the police, rather than any real probable cause.

via Use A Command Line At Boston College… Have Your Computer Equipment Confiscated | Techdirt.

Lake, Gabriel's Gully

Over the last week my server and domain name had to be renewed. At the same time I was getting feedback from Google that there was “malware” on the old site. I do not like this: I also did not like having the blog at the top domain… I would like to do some other things there?

But I still like an online weblog…. in my view the best tech weblog remains Jerry Pournelle’s. When I started bright and shiny thinking (now defunct) there were only a few people interested in the intersection of conservative thinking, reformed theology and medical research… now there are a series of blogs about every one of these topics.

So… backed up the old blog, deleted it from the server, set up a fresh version of wordpress, and began to theme it.

Let’s see it this works better