Posts by tussock
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In Oz as a young lad, we had remembrance day on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, because it was funny to keep shooting people for a few more days and hours until it came to a tidy number.
The story we got told was of the troops having the first Christmas truce, and then not being allowed to again because it was bad for morale to learn the "enemy" were just scared young kids like yourselves. That men don't actually want war at all, from the first moment they have to live it. That it's only fear and ignorance makes people fight. Rather red teachers union in Victoria, all too many relatives names on the town war memorial.
But it's all much worse than that in reality. We conscripted 18 year olds to invade countries on the far side of the planet, then had them run at machine guns and left the resulting corpses to rot in the mud. They didn't even have helmets for a start, because a nice hat was cheaper. It was disease killed most of them, because they had to live in an open sewer, and everyone had trench-foot and lice that constantly itched and hurt.
But the thing they talk about, it's the boredom. War is the same faces, the same food, the same tiny bit of trench or same tent when you're rotated out, nothing to talk about, nothing to do. You wait for weeks, or months, the odd person you vaguely knew getting blown to bits, and then you kill some people who look just like you and your mates, and then they make you do it over again. In WWI, the people it broke, wandering about asking how to get home, we shot them as cowards.
The soldiers didn't make a sacrifice, the country sacrificed all those young men for the glory of the British Empire. To run at machine guns until they ran out of ammunition, which the central powers finally did late in 1918. -
Guys, no. Just no.
The modern world cannot function without massive dependancy chains. It is literally impossible for a human being to understand how to make an ipod, let alone an iphone. There's simply more than a century of advanced education behind the components once you add them all up. One person cannot possibly learn to even really understand them all in one lifetime, let alone design them all.
If you're imagining the world will collapse into a pre-modern existence at some point, that's insane. There's worst-case scenarios involving cycling to work for the week on grass-filled tyres, in the hope the electricity will be on enough to get something done, but you don't make that better by trying to feed enough horses to pull everyone's home-made carts to work in the Auckland hinterlands, because that is starkly less efficient than putting biodiesel in the tractors and trucks we already own, and burning some more for some mid-day electricity.
Really.
@Stephen, home 3D printers are not replacing fab plants dollar for dollar for a very long time yet, certainly not to cut timber (and where the hell are people getting the logs? The primeval forest?). It's the materials, eh, not everything is a primitive sliding tube made of ludicrously expensive easy-melt alloys, and some things are extremely large or even made of materials that react with each other at high temperatures.
No one is ever going to 3D-print a lithium-ion battery, for instance, with the highly explosive nature of the components, which you can't even buy. If we move onto Sodium-Sulphur, that's going to get worse (and also better and cheaper from actual fab plants with experts working at them).
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Mark, your skills list is terribly out of date.
Cars are made by robots, designed by multi-national consortia to spread the immense costs. Houses come in large pieces which are snapped together on site, the wood being cut by machines directed by computer programs which juggle the cuts in every log for minimal waste, while industrial builds are all tilt-slabs and cranes. Meals come in packets with instructions on them that young children can follow to make something you have to have years training as a chef to beat. Furniture and clothing is made by people earning $2/day and all the local producers are gone. Electricians are fitting circuit boards into boxes and figuring out why your copper line connection can't see them by cycling through the tests on a line-testing machine, while trying to fix your own $10 toaster takes hours and risks invalidating your insurance as it burns your house down.
Many of those jobs require registration. You can't just build a house, not because it's difficult to put tab A in slot B, but because you're not allowed to by law. People who get into it on TV report that takes fucking years and costs 2-3x what a company can deliver one on a truck for in a week, plus the income you lost during that time. It's not the 1950's any more.
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On the 60c tax rate...
http://rankinfile.co.nz/rf98_Tax66cMyth.html
So there was high inflation in the late 70's that parked a bunch of factory workers in the top tax bracket by '82, which Muldoon fixed by lowering taxes and adding a new surcharge bracket higher up (rather than just shifting the brackets).
After the '85 wage round by the new Labour government (everyone's wages used to be fixed by agreement between unions and the state, under compulsory unionism) a bunch of people ended up in the surcharge bracket, but the rate was slashed in '86 and replaced with GST.
So by 1980-82 and again in 1985/86, a lot of people in civil service and factory jobs were paying a good bit of their wage to a 60% and then 66% top tax rate. That's 30 years ago so they're all retired or dead now, but it's also true.
So the 86 tax changes did reduce taxes on middle class families at a time of stark new uncertainty in employment, but they also massively cut taxes on the rich (from 66% to 33%) and left us with a very low top tax bracket which we have to this day, at a modest $70k which over half the workforce beats, and much the same from $48k.
Ancient top tax rates here would have started at the equivalent of ~$200k or more, no one's going to cry if you drop 60% up there, other than the odd cabinet minister.
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The important thing here is that Jerry's personal housing portfolio rises in price. If building a convention centre will do that, then you will build a bloody convention centre and you will like it.
The fact the people who'll be building it have already donated to the National party through various secret trusts is merely a happy coincidence.
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There were a lot of pretty terrible regulations in the late 70's, the Douglass gambit was they'd never get rid of the worst of it if they did it piece by piece and it was better to throw everything out and start again.
But states with no regulation are all theft, ruin, and corruption, and we're all either a thief or their mark in the wake of that. If you don't have to sell people a safe car then you sell them a cheaper one that kills them instead, a house that leaks and rots where no one can see it happening, clothes made by half-starved slave children that fall apart in a couple of weeks, food loaded up with addicting crap that has people dropping in their 40's. For a while people sold bicycles that fell in half when you rode them at speed, neatly removing all the teeth of a good few children.
So we got some of the good regulations back, but so many of the new ones have created the great Ponzi scheme of Fonterra, closed down so many of our regional jobs and services, put more and bigger trucks on the roads, built highways to nowhere with the scale of money that at least used to build productive infrastructure. Kickbacks abound, far bigger than the 70's and 80's ever managed.So we lost all the good stuff, and got all the bad shit anyway. Fucking great useless convention centres and sports stadia with gifts of public land on the cheap, sweet deals on prices for the well connected few. Monopolistic markets fixing prices to fuck over producers and consumer alike, obscene profits drifting overseas to be borrowed back at high interest for the next round of consumption.
Just as well we got that inflation under control though, eh.
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Y'all should try the Bible. It instructs people to murder their children when they talk back, murder (or forcibly marry) rape victims, keep slaves and kill them if they don't submit, kill any uncircumcised men, kill people who reject god, and unsurprisingly has been used to justify the murders of hundreds of millions of people over recent centuries thanks to it telling you to kill everyone who reads it the wrong way.
Obviously a manual for torturing children is a bad thing, but you're going to need an awful lot of stickers on things if you set the bar that high, and I recall putting things on the Koran is officially frowned upon, with even marking the Torah as a manual of criminal instruction and not for children is unlikely to go down well when you think about it. With the genital mutilation of babies and ritual murder of apostates and shellfish eaters and people who mix fabrics and various others detailed.
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So if non-voting comes down to not voting when you're young, why did young people vote in the 80's, 70's, 60's, and 50's?
I couldn't get to a booth in '93, so first voted in '96. Youf then didn't vote because Labour was the crazy right wing party being voted for by the people who liked unions, while National was the crazy right wing party being voted for by people who didn't like unions, so it was pretty crazy. Everyone voted for the Alliance, and kept voting for them until Jim trotted them off to war.
The 80's was modernism and an end to the command economy, or not.
The 70's was, oil crisis, future energy, that retirement stuff. Boomers.
The 60's was, uh, people born during WWII, might have valued democracy.
The 50's was the just-missed-the-war crowd. Wool boom. Baby boom.Are they bigger than what we have now? Bigger direction changes, bigger inspirations? We're kinda getting our butts kicked economically by China with it's slavery and authoritarian 50-year-plan, while we languish in cutting public services to promote neo-liberalism with it's "invisible hand" metaphors for God solving all our future problems for us, like the looming oil crash and water supply issues and climate fuckery and so on that no one even talks about.
In the 30's, the 50's, the 70's and 80's, people did vote to radically reshape NZ society. In '99 Clark got in on being a less-cruel version of National, and in '08 Key got in on being just like Auntie Helen only with a smaller government. What are people even voting for there?<spoiler>To some extent you're voting to remove all the cabinet ministers every 9 years because it's gotten pretty obvious this lot are also corrupt and self-serving.</spoiler>
Because what we could be voting for is, say, switching to renewable energy and going all-electric (or hydrogen, or ethanol) on our transport networks, full employment for twenty years building the associated infrastructure. Instead of casually off-shoring our capacity to grow.
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Translation's getting better faster now because they've crowdsourced it and you get to enter improvements into the translation engine as you translate things. At least for babelfish, or whatever google calls it now they've lost their soul.
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I have seen the odd use for censorship that basically worked, you just have to accept that everything under the censor bar is equal, so you have to stop adding terms very quickly. The C-word, N-word, and F-word (no, not the four letter one, but the one you don't use) can just enjoy their timeout together. It's not that they're bad words, it's that certain people so often do terrible things with them of late. Of course, I find that I use them more often when the censor bar will save me.
Like, cunts are lovely, Niggas With Attitude was a revolutionary group, and old books sometimes use faggot correctly. Words are not bad, but people totally are. Same as you might ban swastikas just because of all the Nazis who like waving them. </Godwin>
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It might be worth pointing out that a hell of a lot of modern farmers aren't in it for profits. Debt loads and whatever else don't matter because they bought at 30k/hectare (or 20k, or 10k, or 5k, or 2k if you go back just a few years) and will sell up when it reaches 50k for untaxed capital gains in the tens of millions. Just keep inflating those land prices by fair means or foul and get out before the whole pyramid collapses.
Damn right there's a lot of them against making it sustainable at the cost of lowering land values. They're not planning on being a farmer in another ten years, what do they care for sustaining it all?