Month: August 2020

  • Local / Democratic Representation Important In Government Services

    Last time we talked about the Government’s “centralist authoritarian path” as described by Dr Ian Powell, former head of the senior doctors’ union ASMS, in the context of funding challenges at Canterbury District Health Board. As we know, in the year 2000, the Government set up the 20 District Health Boards to run local health…

  • General computing update – week 34, 2020.

     Since writing early July about about the need to replace the disks in mainpc I have finally progressed towards this stage by purchasing the first of two disks. As noted in the earlier post, this was prompted by an I/O failure of one of the disks that resulted in it dropping out of the RAID…

  • Serious Health Sector Questions Raised By CDHB Funding Debacle

    In the news for the last few weeks has been the debacle over CDHB’s deficit. The issue is driven by underfunding of CDHB in recent years, and questions are due as to why the present Government has failed to address this matter, despite expectations. In fact, there is a much greater picture brewing over government…

  • A Tale Of Two Electricities

    This post is about electricity and how the Government has taken a cavalier approach to it in the last 30 years or so in NZ. Firstly in electrical safety, and secondly in the provision of electricity at a cost that people can afford. So let’s look at electrical safety. We can remember Consumer magazine reporting…

  • PDF Editors For Linux

    This post is brought to you by the new Blogger interface Google has forced on everyone! Which is dreadful! The only way I keep my sanity editing posts on Blogger is to create the post in a separate editor (LibreOffice Writer in this case) and then paste the completed article into Blogger. There is much…