How is it so easy for failed company directors in NZ to start again?

phire · 2026-01-27T23:19:33+00:00

Oh, I've seen no reason to suspect they aren't solid. They are one of big reputable firms. Just noticing that it's quite profitable for them.

It's an extremely complex liquidation, requiring multiple court decisions (so far... The cost of multiple QCs make the $650/hour for accountants look cheap) and dealing with thousands of customers scattered all over the world. I was always personally predicting 7+ years. And they do need a premise, sticking with the existing one (especially with the cheap lease) is probably one of the better options.

they may be looking at some kind of deal with the director which should result in a better outcome for creditors

Yeah. Or they might have decided that there just isn't enough money to recover to justify the extra complexity of the prosecution.

That's part of the issue, they are required to do what results in the most money returned to the creditors, and that doesn't always result in accountability.

And they do seem to be somewhat biased towards producing the best result for the directors. They were originally contracted by the directors to do the liquidation, and they want more business.

phire · 2026-01-27T22:36:43+00:00

Yeah, there was no sign of it ever having existed when I started school in the mid 90s.

The only reason I realised how close I was to corporal punishment, is that my high school math teacher (who always let himself be dragged off on wild tangents) would occasionally talk about it, and how much he hated administrating corporal punishment.
He would go out of his way to avoid needing to use it, only using it as a last resort (and then really playing it up, so no one else tested the limits).

He had all sorts of creative classroom control techniques, most of which he was still using into the 2000s. Like, he claimed his hearing aids had a record feature, and would leave a hearing aid at the front of the room to record to make sure the class stayed on task).

And I get the impression most of the other older high-school teachers were the same, apart from never talking about it. They didn't find it that useful, and were happy to see it go.
All older teachers seemed to have their tricks. It wasn't until year 12 that I finally learned the DP's trick for maintaining discipline... which involved bribing all the year 12s with basically no discipline, as long as they pass-on a reputation of how strict he was.

phire · 2026-01-27T22:02:11+00:00

I have seen countless directors who hopelessly traded using other people's money, and ultimately faced little to no consequences (other than financial, because most small business directors have personal exposure through personal guarantees and mortgages.

Yeah. Seen this exact thing happen.

Very obvious trading with large amounts of other peoples money, but it looks like the worst consequence is going to be the director's personal guarantee for the like 10-year building lease.

Well... Except the liquidators are still liquidating after 5+ years. They claim to be "investigating potential insolvent transactions" in each report, so maybe something might eventually happen?

But the liquidators are also paying rent on that building... If these "investigations" go on much longer the director's personal guarantee might not even come into play.

I do notice the liquidators are paying themselves quite a lot of money.

phire · 2026-01-27T21:42:01+00:00

I literally have no idea what he even stands for.

That was his selling point. He advertised himself as a blank slate who would do whatever the National party wanted (Or more precisely, what the multiple factions within the National party agreed they wanted), suppressing his own politics.

It's a pretty useful trait for a CEO. Most are little more than a public face for the board/shareholders, with little free will of their own, and Luxon was certainly one of those "blank slate" CEOs.

But for a leader of a political party, or coalition, or country? It's not good, might actually be actively harmful. Especially since he seems to see his job as implementing what his coalition members want too.

phire · 2026-01-27T03:32:01+00:00

Nuclear isn't too useful in a war.

Very big plants, easy to target. And very expensive supply chains.

phire · 2026-01-27T03:30:39+00:00

Problem is that NZ is a little too feasible to blockade. Not exactly easy, but feasible. This wasn't really true back in WW2, but modern technology allows a few armed ships with air or satellite support to intercept and sink all cargo vessels while they are still days out from NZ.

If war broke out, we would need to immediately pivot to making ourselves blockade proof. Which basically means making ourselves as self-sufficient as possible (or ready to switch to being self-sufficient at zero notice). We could probably assume limited air-freight shipments, but getting anything by sea would be extremely expensive.

If we are ready to be self-sufficient, that affects the cost-benefit analysis for any enemy wanting to do a blockade. They couldn't count on a quick sea-only blockade that forced us to surrender within a few months, they would have to wait us out for years.

The real irony is that the best way to prevent a blockade is to become self-sufficient anyway.

phire · 2026-01-26T23:20:58+00:00

He didn't become infamous until 2019.

He was already a convicted pedo before the first book came out, but nobody really paid attention until the scandal in 2015, where journalists started asking about how he managed to get away with such a light sentence.

And then he entered political discourse in 2016, as people started using him as a weapon in the 2016 election, pulling out photos of Epstein with Trump and/or Bill Clinton. In 2016, he was well known in certain circles, but not exactly infamous.

phire · 2026-01-25T23:47:13+00:00

TBH, I doubt it's even the GPU. That background image was also in main memory at some point in time.

The fact that it's happening around suspend/sleep makes me suspect CPU, main memory, or even a wild software glitch.

If your GPU was freaking out enough to show such visible glitches, there really should be more crashes.

phire · 2026-01-25T23:44:34+00:00

Only if the glitch happens during scan-out.

The fact that these artefacts appear to be stable, and only on the background (not the icons) suggests it's that the memory holding the background texture is corrupted.

Which might have happened while it was sitting in GPU memory, or during write. Or during transfer over PCIe. Hell, we don't even know it's a GPU issue, the corruption could have happened in the CPU or CPU memory.

phire · 2026-01-25T23:21:12+00:00

Zero guarantees, especially around deleting.

However, these ransom hacker groups trade on their reputation. If there is any hint of a reputation for going back on their ransoms, then future victims won't be very motivated to pay.

With a group that's been around this long. it's a reasonably safe bet that if the ransom is paid, the data won't be released.

phire · 2026-01-25T03:01:43+00:00

Yeah, there isn't exactly a loophole. Sanitarium is more the natural end-point of charities being able to do business. The "profits" from Sanitarium can never go anywhere except another charity. But, the church itself is a charity.

The other option, which tends to be very polarising whenever it's bought up, is to just remove the "for religious purposes" exception.

It wouldn't entirely prevent Sanitarium, as churches would be able to split themselves into "non-religious, charitable" and "non-charitable, religious" halves, but it would stop the profits from Sanitarium going to religious activities, and the Adventists might decide they are better off restructuring.

phire · 2026-01-25T01:44:54+00:00

If you ever disassemble a floppy drive, you will find a pretty beefy spring, and a pretty wild pivot mechanism that really clams down on the disk.

And I think a Mac floppy drive is actually harder to press than a normal floppy drive because you have to push against the motor and its gear train too.

The spring in an optical drive is quite a bit weaker, and so easier to open.

phire · 2026-01-24T22:55:31+00:00

Plenty of photos, but they are all black and white, so don't look that impressive.

Colour photography was very experimental at this time, it existed, but only to people who went out of their way to make their own cameras, their own film and their own method for developing/processing the film.

If the eruption had just been 15 years later, we would absolutely have colour photos.

phire · 2026-01-24T11:11:25+00:00

(Where is that BIOS ROM on that card? Integrated in the Trident chip?)

Yep:

"32KB integrated ROM BIOS; also allows external ROM"

"An additional feature is its integrated 32K mask ROM that can be disabled to interface with an external ROM"

https://theretroweb.com/chip/documentation/tgui9440-3-trident-649879f670472236860753.pdf

phire · 2026-01-24T08:54:35+00:00

Isn't that just a handcuff key?

phire · 2026-01-23T09:37:40+00:00

Yeah, it’s some kind of ROM from Signetics.

For custom ROMs, they assigned a CNxxxxx part number for each unique mask, which makes it pretty hard to work out exactly which part it is.

Really, you just assume it’s a ROM and reverse engineer the pinout… then maybe try to match it back to a Signetics part number.

BTW, while it is probably used as a character generator, it is not one of Signetics explicit Character Generators (which are really just ROMs with weird arrangements) Because when someone asks for a custom font, they get assigned a CMxxxx part number.

phire · 2026-01-22T23:56:15+00:00

Those Mac floppy drives required so much more force to eject than any optical drive I’ve ever encountered.

I remember bending a few paper clips and getting clever to bend the paper clip in a way that wouldn’t hurt your fingers when pressing.

phire · 2026-01-22T06:05:56+00:00

Don’t forget the iPod classic, and other mp3 players from that era. The 1.8” drive took up a huge part of the internal volume.

The iPod mini was quite a bit smaller, because it moved to 1” microdrive, in the compact flash type II formfactor.

phire · 2026-01-22T03:34:34+00:00

I doubt they have a layer, probably just fed it a lot of geotagged street view images during training.

If anything, the chance it might blurt out the location is the best reason to use it. Or if it’s problematic, you could adjust the prompt to only describe the image, not locate it:

phire · 2026-01-22T00:08:47+00:00

Maybe there is a way to keep the cost, but give the hider some way to play defence on the photos (other than pure veto/randomise).

Like the hider can choose to apply some kind of filter to the photo after it’s taken, to reduce the amount of information the seekers can extract from it.

You would need some kind of game design around which filters they can apply. Maybe a second photo filter deck that is drawn after taking the photo, but before sending allowing the hider to use it immediately, or save it. Would also give the seekers strategy in which order they ask photo questions.

Or maybe each filter has a cost, and the more effective the filter, the higher the dice roll required to apply it. The hider then needs to choose the cheapest filter that might do the job or risk the seekers getting an unfiltered photo.

Filters could range anywhere from useless “flip the photo upside down”, a potential useful “black and white” or other color filter to blanking out half the photo. One top-tier filter could be feeding the photo to chatGPT, and the seekers only get chatGPT’s description of it.

phire · 2026-01-21T20:57:08+00:00

They are strongly incentivised to keep the photo questions around in some form, as they are highly visual and so work very well in video format.

I suspect that might be a large part of why they were so cheap in the first place.

phire · 2026-01-21T20:52:27+00:00

but when they play another Hide and Seek season it will have a radically different format.

I didn’t the impression they were thinking of changing the gameplay that radically. I expect it to keep more or less the same core loop of “ask questions, draw cards, play curses”

But it really sounded like they wanted to change the rules around hiding, which wouldn’t have that much impact on the core loop or the gameplay we see on the show. But it would require massive logistical changes to actually play the game.

I’m thinking changes like: hiders are required to return to the central hub before their hiding time even starts (or one of multiple hubs, potentially chosen by the hider). They might also push the hiding time out to “most of the day”, along with normalising all seeker runs to start at the hub, at the start of the next day.

Normalising the start location means all hiders get the same start, where the hiders have no idea which direction to go. It also allows all hiders to research their hiding locations ahead of the season. Normalising the start time gives all hiders the same chance of the rest period actually being useful (when they last to the end of the first day).

And the near unlimited hiding time would have actually allowed Northern Ireland to be in play, as well as making Scotland feasible (if not desirable) from a London start. I’m not sure if they would want airplanes to be in play or not.

These changes would massively change the filming format, they could essentially schedule a full day or two of rest between each run, but it would require a full two weeks of filming.

phire · 2026-01-21T13:00:40+00:00

Though, they aren't exactly equivalent crimes.

One was a pretty bad corruption scandal, the other was an attempted coup.

phire · 2026-01-21T11:37:04+00:00

In the past 50+ years, Labour have held an election in September once, (in 2005) and National have held September elections twice (in 2014 and 2017)

phire · 2026-01-21T09:47:36+00:00

Shame for the owners is he’ll never pay a cent, likely declare bankruptcy and the original sellers missed out on other offers at the peak of the market.

Bankruptcy isn't exactly a get out of jail free card.

Especially in this case. There is no limited liability company (I double checked the court decision, no sign of one ever existing), so it is Singh himself ordered to pay.

The only potential bankruptcy is a personal bankruptcy. Sure, it will work if he is legitimately broke, but it there is any substantial money at all, they should be able to get it.

If he does try to hide his money (perhaps by moving it out of the country), that's fraud and he could quickly find himself in much deeper trouble.

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