Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I think the ABs lost due to insufficient hype.
Why couldn't Air NZ paint all their planes black and have the staff fly and serve coffee wearing rugby kit? Couldn't Telecom change all the dialtones to play snatches of patriotic music when you make a call? Why couldn't Parliament switch location to a big tent in Paris for the duration of the cup?
The corporate hype was obviiously a necessary part of getting as far as we did, so a bit more of it could have taken us to victory. No?
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I actually think that the proliferation of nukes is both inevitable and less scary than people think.
They're like bubble wrap - even if the US manages through military effort to stop Iran getting one, there are plenty of other states that might get them: Pakistan already has them and could have a revolution at any stage. Any state that feels itself threatened by the US and isn't utterly bankrupt could probably acquire one eventually.
The reason it's less scary is that deterrence will stop these states from using their weapons unless their national existence is threatened, and equally stop others (i.e. the US) from threatening that existence.
So we'll just settle down to a similar situation to the Cold War - and hopefully there eventually be a global initiative to disarm.
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...eventually we started telling people they were, and as the day went on, we then said they'd just played (and they were AWESOME).
So I like to think there are people who will have a false memory of having seen Rage Against The Machine at the Big Day Out in 1994.
That would work so well at Burning Man. I think I will try it next year.
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It does occur to me that if the Iranians are pursuing an enriched uranium route - as has been reported - they could readily disperse their enrichment facilities in hundreds of locations. Equally, it's not unbelievable that if Iran was attacked, sympathisers in Pakistan could make up their losses with fully or partly enriched uranium.
Once they have the 90% U235, making a bomb, especially a non-airdroppable one, is relatively straightforward (unlike Pu bomb manufacture, which has lots of niggles in implosion and initiator design).
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(oh and for the record I use 00000 as a zipcode a lot - especially usefull if you have a NZ credit card in the US and want to use one of those petrol pumps that insist on a zipcode ...)
Does that work? Wish I'd known!
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I used CA 90210
Apparently when Serbia was subject to sanctions, Serbian kids would order from Amazon with an address like:
<i>1286 Milosevic St,
Belgrade,
CROATIA</i>Amazon would ship the goods, a postal person somewhere in Europe would think "stupid Americans don't know which country Belgrade's in", correct the address and send the stuff on.
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It does strike me that given the fact that a massively hands-off approach to governance of public enterprise seems to have become part of our unwritten constitution, there seems to be little point in a having a lot of SOEs under public ownership. In terms of return on capital, we could get more in the Cullen fund.
The alternative would be that the government reassert why these organisations are in public ownership in the first place.
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Hi Duke!
They got Internet down there then?
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SOEs are in a strong position to raise debt if they need to.
Does anyone know how that works? Do they have "full faith and credit" behind them, allowing them to borrow at sovereign lender rates? Can Kiwibank fund it's home loans on that basis - or have they got the ability to borrow directly from the government?
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If they get to keep Israel powerful, maybe it's not such a big price to pay. Only the Jews that don't want Israel (or at least not at the cost it currently incurs) get annoyed.
What people don't realise is that there are actually Israelis who hold progressive left-wing views and at the same time believe in their country and the Zionist project. I met a few people like that on my holidays. It's to be remembered that some of the original founders of Israel were in fact socialists (e.g. the kibbutz movement).