The Daily Blog Open Mic – Monday – 10th February 2020

1. Theft by cuzzie update

   The latest case of high profile corporate mana theft was performed by Donna Grant, whose slight of hand included inventing students for which she received a million dollars in grants from TEC (Olley, 2020). In sentencing Grant to a vacation at home for 12 months, Justice Graham Lang explained that Grant faced pressure for having celebrity ancestry and thus it made ‘absolutely no sense’ to throw a ’61 year old like her’ in the clanger.
   The sentence was not at all consistent with the other fraudsters who were thrown in the clanger outlined below, but was similar to the holiday at home given to the unnamed ANZ fraudster who stole $190,000 from the bank and was sentenced to 11 months home detention.

   Ngatata Love, $1,500,000 theft, sentence 2 years 6 months jail

   Wallace Te Ahuru, $1,200,000, 3 years 8 months jail

   Stephen Henare, $1,000,000, 5 years 2 months jail

   Shaun Keenan, $480,000, 3 years 8 months jail

   Toddy Shepherd, $111,000, 3 years jail

   Thomas Tawha, 39 trout, 12 months jail

   Olley, S. (2020). Home detention for Sir Howard Morrison’s daughter Donna Grant. Retrieved from
   https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12306664

2. *sleight

3. I have thought of a cunning plan for each person to consider and decide what their basic view of society is.l
   Are you a Nurturer or Destroyer of society (and the planet). If you decide you want society to continue and be a good place for all, then you check yourself each time you do something to see if it will nurture or have a destructive effect.
   I’ll give you a sweet little song to go with your day. Make your choice. Only sad cynics would sneer it is destructive.
   The Beatles – Because.
   (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOt11pyktgI
   Acapella with bird background and takeoff.
   (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bdqdO5LAIA
   Here’s looking at you folks!
   (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GU_91eHFX7E

4. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/409178/wellington-introduces-cashless-parking-machines
   Oh great. We get sucked further into Card Control – we have you magnetically stuck to the machine.
   There is theft from parking machines – WTF. What’s new about that. We have theft from politicians – same response. It is part of life in the money-grabbing economy. Probably someone in admin in WCC has a nice little arrangement going on with some tech company. Happens a lot I reckon. I want cash to stay. It is my right as a free citizen. I do not want every easy-access for individuals without devices, to be wiped. How can citizens retain their lives and desired services from this gobbling mad trend with its growth gobbledegook, and it’s illusory patter about making life better and faster. Everything comes with a cost the vigilant part of my brain announces.

   I see that a NZ entity has had an expensive program development project halted. ‘That’s the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel.’ https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/119340915/antarctica-nz-loses-nearly-500000-on-software-failure

   A notable case from 2000: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=141867
   Incis gobbled $66m of big fund blowout

   Reliance on software makes you soft in the head. True, everyone knows it, but won’t admit it. Hardware allows you to make brutal decisions. ‘ It wasn’t me, it was the program, the designer, SEP. It’s the way of the world is what I hear quite often.’ HAL queried naively in 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Will I dream”? Not if you have been designed by a machine mind lacking that imaginative facility you won’t.

   A piece from the Atlantic 2017 : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/saving-the-world-from-code/540393/
   (Has it reached the vision and mind of tech mad machine minds here, there or anywhere?)

5. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/409210/prime-minister-jacinda-ardern-frustrated-by-rnz-concert-proposal-timing
   Jacinda Ardern said she’s frustrated RNZ pushed ahead with announcing proposed changes to its Concert radio station, when the government had asked for time to discuss alternatives.
   RNZ is proposing to remove Concert from its FM frequencies and transform it into an automated nonstop music station which will stream online and play on AM radio.

   Let’s share the channel between youth and concert – they learn from each other already. Don’t just feed the young what they have developed as in an echo chamber. Get them to improvise and develop and make concert available to them. Two hours of concert to three or four of youth inspired music. Does concert include the blues, Eric Clapton is into that; jazz lots of NZs; brass bands – want young people to join.
   This separation is like a disassocated brain with its left and right hemispheres not working together.

6. I look for humour wherever I can find it. Fletcher Pilditch, the lawyer for Sir Robert Jones (Bob and weave to his associates), is a name that would grace the pages of an imaginative crime story. A series could be written about Sir Robert, after he is dead, that would give him and Pilditch a place in similar to Rumpole’s Chambers or equal Wodehouse for entertaining legal brouhaha.

   Sir Robert believes in free speech for himself, but anyone else has to pay.
   https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/409187/sir-bob-jones-maori-gratitude-day-column-clearly-tongue-in-cheek-lawyer

7. I admire Trotter’s analysis of ze situation but think he should concentrate on presenting the people’s point of view. A la Minto, I suppose, but with his language.

   I think you, Martyn, should spin from the back of your mind rather than spluttering aboot what’s new. Some election campaign back it was all about the sale of a public whatever, and that wasn’t anything.

   By the way, I support you 100 % , as a fellow real traveller. Just read about the truly miserable daughters of the great poets Coleridge and Wordsworth. It wasna allowed for intelligent women to be happy back then.

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