Posts by Rich of Observationz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Conveniently enough, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 people
Yes, and once we had the atom bombs, we wouldn't need to spend anything on defence until someone invented a working ray gun.
I think we should start now. Tauranga would be great for the test site.
-
My estimate is based on the concept that if a firm has 10 workers, they need 100 person days of work a fortnight to keep them productively occupied.
If sales only allow for 90 person days, then they would normally need to lose a worker.
If instead they put the whole place on a 9 day fortnight, then everyone is fully occupied again.
This doesn't allow for fixed costs, though.
-
Unemployment benefits of 80% for 2 years, for the mooted 125,000 people, would cost about $8 billion.
If we confiscated the wealth of the NBR rich list ($44 billion), we could keep that going for 5 years.
-
Does cocaine improve your rugby?
If not (as I suspect is the case), why should sports entertainers be singled out for drug testing? Rock stars and actors aren't.
-
manufacturing jobs are bloody hard to get back once they've gone
Because the businesses were unsustainable and only kept going by inertia?
Face it, manufacturing most consumer and lower end industrial goods in NZ (or any other developed state) is never going to be an economic proposition. We have to find things to do that add enough value to cover reasonable wage levels. Like inventing Broadband radar, for instance.
The only other alternatives I can see would be:
- moving to some form of autarchy where we make our own clothes, food and vehicles in tiny factories. We'd have to save for a month to buy a pair of jeans and five years to buy a car, but I guess it might guarantee employment.- the world economy will eventually level out at a state where India and China have roughly the same standard of living as the current OECD states. This will mean that we'll have a largish portion of our population living in ditches and eating grass, but it will be sustainable. I think it might spark a revolution first, though.
-
That's not revealing anything. Everyone there is a National or ACT supporter and Keith hasn't said which. It doesn't say you can't differentiate between prominent right-winger and right-wing nonentity.
Anyway, as the people funding the talkfest, aren't we *entitled* to know who said what?
-
Their innumeracy is laughable:
- as already pointed out on the Herald, the 3,700 workers on the cycle way would make no more than $2.50 an hour over two years.
- the government figure of $40mln per 10,000 workers for the 9 day fortnight is about right. However this only "saves" 1,000 jobs at a cost of $40,000 annually a job.
- the working population of NZ is around 2.1 million - the cycleway would employ just over 0.1% of that, so it's of no real help.
- It's expected that unemployment will rise from under 5% to over 11%, equalling 126,000 jobs. To prevent that with the 9 day fortnight scheme would cost $5bln a year or about 4% of GDP.
I guess we *could* borrow that, but I think the government should come clean about it. The real problem is that businesses wouldn't restructure (indeed, the whole plan is designed to remove the need for them to do so) and thus it's likely that this would go on until we run out of borrowing facilities.
-
Keynes wrote:
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment
The Nats seem to be working on various variations on this:
- dark fibre to every urbanish home (quite likely to stay dark, in many cases) - pork for Transfield and the like
- a cycle route through NZ - pork for the construction biz
- one training day a week in manufacturing companies (presumably not those who have products people want to buy)I guess that their friends (those who are not Friends Of John not having been invited to his party) will be busily discussing how to maximise the amount of said pork that winds up in their pockets.
Call me silly, but wouldn't it be easier to just spend the money in areas that need it - smaller classes, more doctors and nurses, housing improvements, etc. Of course that would be less efficient in helping those that really need the cash - said Friends Of John.
-
NZ isn't a police state (yet, the Nats have only been in office for 3 months), but it is a place where if somebodies given a mandate to do something, they probably will.
So it's highly likely that if s92c gets implemented, there *will* be RIANZ functionaries looking for torrent seeds with NZ IP addresses and banging out disconnection notices.
-
Obama getting tough on banks and bankers
Don't you think that a *tiny* part of the blame might be with people who were keen to buy houses on 99% mortgages that they couldn't actually afford to pay, but that didn't matter because the price would rocket and they could refinance.
Or with governments that did squat to prevent it.
But no, it was evil people (cunningly disguised as ordinary kids from places like Romford and Brooklyn) who conspired to rip everyone off.
And of course, cutting back wages so that all the smart people leave is totally the way to sort out the situation.