Posts by Paul Campbell
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Can I just mention how deeply disturbing I find the use of the word Merkin to mean American?
I'm very aware of the other meaning - "'merkin" has been used online as a sneaky way to poke fun at those it describes but who probably don't know the other meaning since, ooo, about the mid 1980s
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What is, or are, "Watchmen"?
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I've had this conversation - most 'merkins are convinced that their elections cannot be done on paper and pencil
I suspect the issue is more "elections can't be counted before everyone goes to bed and loses interest in the TV"
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Craig - you might appreciate this:
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your patheticism knows no bounds - we still all love you anyway ....
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I think that partly we had an carry trade bubble on top of our real-estate/full employment bubble. Our $ went up because of all the money moving into the country because of our high interest rates. Our interest rates were up because our economy was moving along really well and the RB was trying to slow it down, esp. the money moving into the obvious real estate bubble in order to avoid inflation.
That's why my income has been going down the past 4-5 years (along with the farmers - who have been moving to dairy partly because the returns from all the other types of farming have sucked) - even though demand for their products have crashed the exchange rate is giving them some cushion
When the real estate bubble burst and the economy moved south the carry trade moved elsewhere - as quickly as they possibly could - because part of their profits have been due to the rise in the NZ$ caused by their own trading, once their bubble started to burst they ran for the door, last one out gets the low end of the exchange rate and earns the least
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well I'm in the US now, seems I can get the same amount for a $ as I got yesterday .... oh wait ....
seriously though there are swings and roundabouts here - those of us who earn the US$ that you've been spending have been hurting - my consulting income went down ~30% over the past few years - now it's come back (and a little bit more, don't know how long that will last)
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I want to be able to customise Stuff so that will render in browser .... I wonder how much QA they did off of windows
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<qquote>My only defence in writing this short post is that the journey home is a time-honoured part of the re-entry process. Almost all Kiwis take, as we are doing, a circuitous and interesting route back.</quote>
I've been there - after the insanity of packing up 20 years of your life and putting some of it in a container, and selling or giving away the rest - the luxury of spending more time getting to NZ than said container is well deserved - I think those who've never done it don't understand just how hard returning from OE after a decade or two is.
Of course in our case we arrived in NZ to discover that a legal battle had broken out between the shipping company and the freight forwarding company and our container was being held hostage ..... with ever mounting storage fees ....
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yes! as I mentioned elsewhere - my rules for working at home:
* get dressed before lunch time
* leave the house every day, talk to someone