Posts by Kumara Republic
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
It may be that the future leaders of the Labour Party - Cunliffe, Parker, whoever - don't want to be leader now because of a near certain election defeat, but that shouldn't be the only calculation.
Conspiracy theories abound that Goff's leadership was a deliberate strategy to tank the match while the Cunliffes and Robertsons had time to build up their heavy artillery.
Seriously, any doubts I had about Goff being more than just a stop-gap leader have evaporated with the handling of the Hughes affair. And does anyone see similarities with Mike Moore in the 1990-1993 term, where his biggest millstone was that he couldn't, or wouldn't, shake off his association with Rogernomics?
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Che Tibby,
you're assuming that's not what codders-type people want.
the alternate view is that the welfare state means that 'these types of people' have enough money to get within 5 km of people like herself.
I was basing my theory off nations where the welfare state is non-existent or otherwise threadbare, and where an elite monopolise all the wealth. Like Bolivia or Peru.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Sacha,
Simpering Actoid ninny Deb Coddington argues that if the well-off white folk of Sumner can organise themselves then why have a government response at all.
Coddington has written some saner columns of late, but this is not one of them. For all its faults, a welfare system exists so that the well-to-do don't have to live behind a razor wire comfort blanket, or have the SAS drive their kids to school.
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Legal Beagle: Hidden in plain sight, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Our debt is largely private, not public, Shon Key's conflations of the two notwithstanding.
And financial illiteracy is being willfully exploited to justify cutting and running. The whole 'international financial hub' thing is little more than an embellished John Frum prayer. The only antidote, it seems, to crass materialism without resorting to 'nanny statism', comes from Iceland.
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to Sacha,
So why is the Welfare Working Group proposing its beneficiary bash-fest?
Maybe they have shareholdings in gated community developments?
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Hard News: It Began ... in Chicago, in reply to Russell Brown,
Get that Detroit stuff outta here! ;-)
And not a Linn LM1 in sight. Then again, that was mostly a Los Angeles thing.
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Clearly it's ambitious if we gut the public sector and expect a historically-unwilling private sector to step up and fill the void.
Oh, wait, you didn't mean that kind of ambitious :|There's Silicon Valley ambitious... and then there's Kath & Kim ambitious.
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to Matthew Poole,
That one's very definitely not National's fault. Labour signed that contract, and it's not the kind of thing that you can suddenly say "Yeah, sorry, we're a bit too broke" even 18 months out from the kick-off date, never mind fewer than six.
For sure. But didn't Australia manage to self-finance their RWC with minimal state funding? From what I know, the Aussie stadium upgrades were mostly paid for by the stadium companies themselves. Also, rugby doesn't seem to have as wide a global audience as, say, soccer.
It's a different kettle of fish to the America's Cup defence, where most seemed to agree that the financial returns were assured.
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Hard News: Libya, in reply to Russell Brown,
I get the impression Putin never really relinquished control of post-Yeltsin Russia. The guy seems to think of himself as Tsar 2.0.
Also, Libya would seem to be a military steamroll in comparison with Myanmar and Zimbabwe. There's also Belarus, but it just happens to be on Russia's backyard, and no-one would risk pissing off Moscow.
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So why is there no money left for scientists and public transit, but there is somehow money for pet project highways and a sporting tournament of dubious profitability?
Probably for the same reasons that robbing a bank at gunpoint will earn a prison sentence, but doing the same thing by gambling it on CDO's will get you off scott-free.