via Bay of Plenty Times
The online sale of a cat that has been stuffed and turned into a rug has upset animal advocates who say the auction is disturbing and in bad taste.
The ginger tabby is being sold online as a “great little gift for the mancave”. Bids close tonight.
Tauranga taxidermist Andrew Lancaster found the large male cat on the side of the Napier and Taupo highway, on the way back from a concert last month.
You need to be polite and pay $110 a week to get to sleep with Gustav, stud, from Sweden.
I made a few predictions for 2013…prediction #10 has come true.
David Farrar sees his willie for the first time in decades and celebrates by blogging about some boring subsidised liberal elite play.
So, Fairfax, it seems that after all the articles you’ve published against Asset Sales, you’re not above a bit of hypocrisy by selling some of your own?
I look forward to an editorial explaining how Fairfax selling assets to get cash to pay of debt is different to a government selling assets to get cash to pay off debt.
And with the number of NZ registered and active users of TradeMe, I’m also expecting Labour and/or the Greens to publish press releases announcing it will not allow the sale of this strategic national asset and will force nationalisation of TradeMe once they are in government.
I look forward to press releases from those parties announcing how the sale of a company that over 1 million New Zealand customers use is ‘business as usual’, while the sale of a few New Zealand farms requires all sorts of legal requirements to be met and exceeded.
And can I also look forward to a public comment from Selwyn Pellett, you know, the guy who sold his own businesses off-shore but surely will be against this one like he was against the sale of F&P?
Surely this guy must be the saddest man in NZ – that this is the pinnacle of consumerism – what’s more someone wants to buy it.
So, so, sad.
The tipline is running hot with stories of forced sales in the dairy sector, with the banks no longer able to sell off farms who can’t cover their mortgages over time. There are no local buyers out there, and the banks are starting to get very nervous about the prospects of recovering their loans.
Trademe has 390 Dairy farms over 100 ha listed for sale, and from what I am hearing from the rural estate agents, there is not much interest in buying dairy at the moment. Word is a lot more are going to come on the market in the next six months.
The socialists in the National Party, David Carter and Amy Adams, need to explain why they want to give an industry in trouble massive subsidies. They cant hide behind the economic growth argument if the arse is falling out of the industry anyway.
News is breaking out that the unfortunate and hapless first start at Wheedle.co.nz has been followed up on day two with some major security breaches, including
- the ability for bidders to change a sellers reserve (maybe it’s a feature?)
- unencrypted passwords being emailed to users who wish to reset their password
This is a commercial version of the Whaleoil scoop from last year, when I discovered the Labour Party had unencrypted access to their database through a website of theirs. Not only that, credit card information was put at risk, as was their entire email database. They blamed me for hacking, when in fact there was no hacking involved – just utterly inept website coding and a utterly contemptuous approach to security and protecting the information of others. They were more interested in attacking Pansy Wong than doing things properly. (The website with the open front door was an attack website about Pansy and her husband, which is how I found the breach in the first place).
It is alleged that Wheedle’s website is insecure because they paid peanuts for Indian coders who were sloppy.
It is far more likely that Wheedle have been using Labour Party coders.
I’m a little dubious about this new entrant in NZ online auctions - Wheedle.co.nz
Quite apart from having a bit of a failure in the naming stakes.
I wonder that TradeMe is too well entrenched with too big a community for an alternative online auctions site to prosper.
Yet, I see some very defensive comments from Sam Morgan, founder of TradeMe, that betray a bit more than just business commentary.
Sam should know. After all, there was the failure of Pacific Fibre, a company that Sam Morgan was instrumental in funding. Not only did the business fail rather embarrassingly, the subsequent tantrums blaming a government minister, that followed in the hope of corporate handouts could be best described as lacking in dignity.
It might also be applied to the middling to poor performance of Gareth Morgan Kiwisaver funds, of which Sam Morgan was a director until KiwiBank bought them out.
