Some characters are so iconic that even representing them as the simple bands of colour, they’re instantly recognisable. I have such powerful, fond memories from my childhood of Lucky Luke & the Dalton Gang; Asterix, Dogmatix & Obelix; Ber & Ernie; and so on, that I recognised all of these instantly. Amazing things, brains.

It’s interesting to note how completely contrary these designs are to the modern approach to Lego, where they appear to design specific pieces for single uses – which is nothing like the approach they used to take, where the creativity was in making something from universal blocks, not in merely being able to follow a blueprint.

Compare these characters to bionicles, for instance.

//via Creative Criminals

From article “Govt puts the squeeze on councils” by Kate Chapman and Kay Blundell in The Dominion Post:

Local Government Minister Nick Smith today released his “Better Local Government” plan which he said would provide clarity around the role of councils and improve efficiency.

A major focus of the plan is introducing new fiscal responsibilities for councils.

“The rapid rise in council expenditure and borrowing over the past decade has seen some councils reach unsustainable levels of debt,” said Mr Smith.

He said the reforms would help keep rates affordable following an average rise of 7 per cent a year since 2002.

Last week, Wellington City Council said rates could rise by 4.4 per cent.

The aim was to limit expenditure growth to no faster than inflation and population growth. Except in extraordinary events such as disaster recovery expenditure.

The government’s justification for this change is that council expenditure is out of control, however the Department of Internal Affairs says something different, from a (now suspiciously deleted) page in the Our Policy Advice Areas section of their website on Rates Increases, they specifically say:

Why are rates increasing?

Rates have risen an average of nine percent this year. This includes commercial and residential properties.

Infrastructure provision has been the main reason for rates increases in the past few years and for projected increases over the next 10 years.

That’s right, the Department of Internal Affairs says that rates have been rising because councils have been investing in infrastructure projects. Not because councils have been running music festivals or swimming pools or programmes to reduce the impact of child poverty in their communities. Infrastructure.

The reason for this rise in council spending on infrastructure? From the DIA site again:

Past under-investment in infrastructure and maintenance.

There are other reasons listed, they include increased external costs for fuel, rising population, and lower tolerance of pollution.

The government try to tell us that the increased spending is because councils are out of control and wasting money in areas they have no business being in, and that they’re proposing these changes to force councils to get back to core business.

This is a lie.

The Department of Internal Affairs policy advice tells us that the spending increase is because we’ve had years of under investment in infrastructure. They’re spending so much now, because they’re trying to put that right.

The National government will try to tell spin it, they’ll say that the problem is that councils are wasting money supporting festivals, public swimming pools, running social programmes, and on providing local art and culture.

How do I know they’ll do this? Because they’ve already started.

This morning National Party mouthpiece* David Farrar posted (“An example of why local government reform is needed“) on his popular site Kiwiblog about Horowhenua District Council engaging in a joint venture with Focal Point Cinema to re-open Levin’s only movie theatre. A movie theatre which had been closed by its owner, leaving the town with no operating cinema at all.

Farrar is pretending to be care about this cinema partnership because the towns of Shannon & Tokomaru, which are under Horowhenua District Council control, have received “Precautionary Boil Water” notices. David’s suggestion is that if it wasn’t for the Council’s cinema partnership, those towns would have water treatment plants turning out deliciously sweet and crystal clear water.

Now, the cinema was re-opened in 2010, and the ‘Boil Water Notice’ was issued in 2011. So why it’s coming up now is a bit boggling until you come to the obvious conclusion is that it’s politically expedient, the government is receiving push-back on their planned changes to the law, so they’re trying to seed controversy. The fact that they had to delve so far down into the bottom of the barrel to find anything that even appears to support the Government’s claims of council profligacy should be revealing.

It doesn’t matter to David that according to the Horowhenua District Council’s own boil water notice the problem isn’t that they have no water treatment, but that the area was running on reserve supplies because the water treatment plants supplying those areas had been overloaded by flooding.

It doesn’t matter that Horowhenua District Council has a 3 million dollar water treatment plant for Shannon funded and in the design process, with deployment planned for 2013. Or that Horowhenua District Council has an even larger water treatment plant & reservoir planned for nearby Levin, budgeted at around 10 million dollars.

It doesn’t matter that they very clearly aren’t distracted from their infrastructure obligations in the slightest by the cinema project.

It doesn’t matter to National that the water infrastructure projects have a combined cost of something around 26x more than the trifling little cinema partnership.

And it also doesn’t apparently matter that the cinema project is what would popularly be called a Public Private Partnership, which you’d think would be eagerly supported by a right-winger.

They don’t care about the details, because they know that most people won’t look them up.

Most people will read the headlines and they’ll think “I pay rates and I don’t want them to be wasted, so let’s get these council lunatics under control”.

Well guess what, my dear rate-paying friend, those rates you pay aren’t being wasted. On the contrary, in the majority of cases, your rates are being put to exactly the sort of use you’d hope. You’re being lied to by your government. But don’t feel bad if you believe them, they’re very convincing because they’ve got so very much practice.

Now, of course there are bad projects out there. Councils can be dysfunctional. They’re full of people, after all. But those misuses of funding appear to be a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. Breaking the entire system in order to get rid of those edge cases makes no sense.

Note that nowhere in their spin does the National government ever say that once they restrict our councils’ funding will they pick up any of the slack.

No, once the central government stops the district & city councils from providing services, they’ll just hope that private business picks it up.

Spoilers: they won’t.

Levin wouldn’t have gotten their cinema re-opened without their council stepping up. They previously had a cinema run by a private business. It closed it down.

Which business will pick up the pieces if Porirua City Council is forced to end their child poverty programmes?

No one will.

But then we come to the second prong to the central government’s attack on the councils.

Because National’s not only squeezing councils’ funding, they’re also changing other parts of the Local Government Act 2002, which is the rule book on how councils operate.

Where the Act currently makes references to “social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of communities”, these will now be changed to “providing good quality local infrastructure, public services and regulatory functions at the least possible cost to households and business”.

Spot the glaring differences.

So even if councils are somehow able to find the money to continue work on their current social or cultural programmes to benefit the community, they’ll no longer be allowed to.

We elect our councils democratically. If they have programmes that we don’t like, we can vote for someone else.

In Auckland we’ve seen regular swings from one side of the political spectrum to the other, no single ideology is ever in complete control permanently.

The point of democracy is that sometimes you get your way, and sometimes you have to suck it up while the other guy has his, but what the current National government are doing is changing the rules so that councils are forced to behave the way National wants, even when the local voters haven’t voted for National.

We need to send them a message that this isn’t the way it works.

National failed to get their way with the Auckland Supercity, losing control of the mayoralty and the council, but they still want to be able to tell us what to do.

If the National Party wants to control what councils do, then they should do what everyone else has to do: win council elections. Then, and only then, should they get to decide the focus of any city or district council.

Convince the local community of your programmes, win an election, implement your proposals.

Otherwise, leave community issues to the local community.

* David Farrar has repeatedly protested that he’s not on the National Party’s payroll, I believe him. However that doesn’t mean he isn’t gladly doing their bidding.

Make sure you watch this instructional video before the giveway rules change, it provides important additional information.

My first give way rules video ‘If you’re turning right, give way’ is also available.

This is a matter of pride for many of us, I’m sure, but it simply does not suit the National government’s “private is best and nothing the government does is ever any good” ideology, so let’s do all we can to break it, how about that for an idea?

According to this article ‘Class size life could help education’ (NZ Herald) the latest claim out of Treasury is that if we increase class sizes by “about 3″ students, we’ll be able to have less teachers overall, so we can pay the ones we still have more, so we’ll then (somehow) have more gifted and master teachers, and that will somehow make things better.

I think it goes something like this:

1. Increase class sizes
2. Fire a bunch of teachers
3. ???
4. Profit!

Step 3 is left to sort itself out, but we’ll probably hear the phrase Public Private Partnership at some point. Don’t you know that private business never do anything stupid or wrong, never mind that about 80% fail in their first year. Because privately run businesses are SO EFFICIENT, and the public sector is mumble-mumble-let’s-sell-it-all-off.

Something along those lines. (We’ve heard this all before.)

Treasury say that “master teachers”, through their skill at the job, teach so well that educational outcomes for students turn out to be about the same as students who were in smaller classes.

Their number is that it’s the equivalent of about a 10 pupil reduction.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this were true. Gifted teachers are inspiring. I think we’ve probably all had one (or if we’re extraordinarily lucky, 2) at some point. They make you strive, they show you the way forward, and they help you figure out how to get there.

But here’s the thing, maybe 1% of teachers is really gifted. You can’t send a normal teacher on a week long training course and turn them into a gifted teacher.

So we’d still only have about 1% of these amazingly high performing teachers. But the class sizes for all teachers across the board, including the very large majority who are merely good, and the few who are (frankly) bad, would also increase.

In other words, we’d have worsened the likely educational outcomes for 99% of pupils.

Exactly who do they expect to buy the rubbish they’re trying to sell us?

I’ll give you three guesses which kinds of schools will remain entirely unaffected by these changes, and continue to have wonderful educational outcomes for their (mainly white, mainly rich) pupils. Some valid answers will rhyme with words like “Drammer Bone”, or “Brivate Stools”.

There is literally no education system in the entire world where teachers are paid so little, yet perform at such a high standard that their students come out topping the global educational outcome rankings.

Don’t understand how good our system is? Check out this revealing chart (as seen on DimPost):

New Zealand’s education system is a top performer, and by comparison with other countries that perform anywhere near our standard is headshakingly underfunded.

So I have a different suggestion than Treasury:
Don’t mess with a good thing, don’t try to fix something that already works, and just as an aside, maybe leave the design and future of our education system to education experts, not bean counters.

One very important note, as good as I believe our education system to be in the main, it’s clear that many Maori & Pacific Island students, and students in lower socio-economic groups generally, have much worse educational outcomes than desired.

Our system is not perfect, I’m sure it’s possible to make changes that will make the results for our people even better. But the idea that increasing class sizes is the way ahead is completely boggling.

But if any improvements are identified, it’s the teachers who are the ones who are qualified to tell us what they are. Then Treasury can do the vital job of helping find the money to pay for it.

But until that happens, they should stick to their actual job which is advising the Government on economic matters, not on education.

Updated to note that there is some discussion on YCombinator about limitations of the design of the study behind the Pupil score as a function of teacher salaries chart. I don’t believe those design limitations change its relevance in this context, just don’t read too much into the chart in terms of greater causation. Thanks to Keith Patton on Twitter for providing the YCombinator reference.

This is very important info.

My second give way rules video ‘Top of the T goes before me’ is also available.

I got this handsome chap in Art Museum shop in the Mori Tower in Tokyo, you’re meant to colour them in and customise them to suit yourself, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to sully his milky perfection. One day.

Check out this gallery of customised Munnys, some of them are completely bonkers. Not many Raffys though.

Including one of them there silly ring lights. So then while I was playing with them I may have gotten a bit pouty. C’est la vie.

Tonight I’m getting the band back together.

Since Discourse has been on hiatus I’ve moved to a standing desk (the desk top here is right around my navel height), I don’t know how this will affect the show, or if it will affect it at all. Maybe my voice will sound different? Maybe I’ll be more impatient.

Regardless, the show is going to be a train wreck, we’re doing it live, and once again doing it with streaming video. But I’ve set things up to be a bit more flash than last time we did that (though still not nearly as flashy as the Election Show, which was ridiculously flashy), with clever video switching, multiple video angles in the studio, Skype co-hosts calling in, and interacting with whatever audience is left following the break, who will be heckling us from the chat room.

It’s all very exciting, you know. I hope you can make it.

Gazpacho sorbet. Watermelon and cucumber salad. Curd. Feta.

Marinated kingfish, caviar. Apple and elderflower cider.

This was the only clunker for me, the caviar was overpowering. I felt like perhaps it was past its best, though Selena liked it rather a lot – so perhaps it’s just a question of degree of seafood fandom.

The elderflower cider was delightfully light and refreshing though.

Whitebait “sandwich”. Lemon mayo, cos, watercress. Champalou Vouvray, 2009.

The whitebait was dense – no mean portions here, that’s for sure. Moist, delicious.

Spanner crab risotto. Pearl barley, shellfish foam, mustard sorbet. Sin Palabras Castrovaldes Albarino, 2010.

I found the texture of the pearl barley to be highly satisfying, and the flavour of the mustard and spanner crab was perfect.

Selena wasn’t a fan, but I still think it was exquisite.

Quail B’stila. Poached apricot, pistachio, chickpea, cinnamon, yoghurt. Willy Gisselbrecht, 2009.

Coincidence on the wine, is Sel’s fave, and we usually have a couple of bottles in the fridge at home, though it’s getting quite hard to come by.

Seared duck breast, asian greens, mandarin puree. Vincent Girardin Rouge Cuvee Saint Vincent, 2008.

The mandarin puree was perhaps a little overpowering, its extremely pure flavour brought with it a tad too much bitterness – not a problem as it was served as you can see, so I could have as much or as little as I liked with the duck.

Instead of duck, Sel opted for snapper, toasted almonds, green beans, wild prawns, cauli cream. Domaine Emilian Gillet Quintaine, 2008.

Roasted French goat cheese on fig and beetroot tart, with a red wine syrup and edible borage flower. Greenhough Pinot Noire, 2008. Gorgeous!

Poached strawberries, buttermilk panacotta, raspberry, watermelon & rosewater granita. No wine with this course.

Delicious.

Bitter chocolate mousse, spiced cherry sorbet, chocolate crumb, coconut mousse. Puig-Parahy, 2005. Extraordinary.

The Puig-Parahy is outstanding. Raisins, dates, hazelnut. Perfect match with the chocolate in that last course.

Nine courses and eight wines later and we’re done.

Thank you, French Cafe.

I’ve been live streaming our weekly show sessions, and have made a couple of live video shows (though in about the lowest tech way possible). I mentioned my idea to a couple of my friends & collaborators on the show, Ben Gracewood & Dylan Reeve. Dylan is an old friend, we’ve made short films together – and won an award for one of them – and he works in TV as an editor on the most popular show in the country. He has a bunch of talented friends in the industry, and with his hard work and sustained effort, we made something quite special.

It’s not just me that thinks it was special either, our viewers said things like “The Discourse election special is going off.”, and “Most entertaining, loosely-based election coverage is at discourse.co.nz.”, and “Loved the Discourse live election show. Can’t wait for the next election now!”

We had our share of technology problems, but considering the truck load of gear that arrived needing installation, configuration, and operation, all in the space of just a few hours, I think we did pretty well. There were some problems that could have been easily resolved with a bit more testing, but testing was extremely difficult given that all the hardware only existed in one place on the day itself. So we didn’t have our on-screen graphics, diagrams, tickers, twitter box and so on for most of the show – but it all came up in the end.

If you didn’t watch the show live on election night, it is possible to watch it on justin.tv/discourse, but the recording there is sketchy, and broken up into quite awkward chunks. Once I get my hands on a good copy, I’ll chop it up into sane chapters, and put that up in a more readily digestible format – as well as making a highlights reel. But it will take time.

Here are a few behind the scenes photos.

Dylan working on the control centre for the show, on the other side of this desk is the Mac we used to do the live hookups, Skype and so on.

This is camera 2, mounted on a big swinging jib arm, some people in the chat room didn’t like it moving around, but it was so damn cool we had a hard time listening to those people.

This is Wendy, sound recordist extraordinaire, you can see a couple of the cameras – all Sony PDW 700s, there’s one more hiding in front of her.

And here’s a big giant gallery of grabs from the stream.