Posts by BenWilson
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The prequel could be a half hour....really it only had enough material for 2 short movies or one long one. That said, I did really enjoy the Revenge of the Sith.
LOTR in one hour? Clerks II managed to do it in 30 secs.
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Cutting GST is a very efficient way of helping poorer folk. For one thing, you don't need arbitary measures of "poorness", you don't need gangs of Government employees to determine whether someone is poor enough to qualify and as a "poor" person you don't need to waste hours filling in forms attending interviews or getting your local charity to advocate on your behalf - just to prove to these employees that you are indeed poor enough.
We already have all those 'gangs of Government employees to determine whether someone is poor enough to qualify', and we still would whether GST was altered or not. So no saving there. Same goes for the time wasted by the "poor" doing all the admin.
You add a compliance cost to all retailers. This is huge.
The most you can help anyone with your method is with 12.5% of their food bill.
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Housing *is* GST-exempt. At least, rent and mortgages are.
k...I'll believe you. My bad...I'm not an accountant, and I don't want to be paying him any more than I already am.
you don't starve to death without them
No, you could just die of pneumonia instead.
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Brash makes good points in his Herald article. As he says, it's a thin-end-of-the-wedge thing too. What is 'essential' anyway? Why stop at food? What about clothing, housing, medicine? How are they less essential?
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Boil down on flat GST:
Advantage: Simple
Disadvantage: Not progressiveSo the decision is simply 'Is the added complication worth the increase in progressiveness'?
Since we already have existing mechanisms for controlling the progressive taxes, we could just tweak those.
Someone said:
Just don't do what Australia does, I was over there when the GST was introduced and it's a complete shemozzle.
I was too, and I totally agree. The project to make the organisation I was in GST compliant dwarfed Y2K. Calculating GST is no longer 'Multiply by the GST constant'. It was 'Query gigantic database for GST rate, passing parameters indicating your breakdown of the class of this item, and multiply by that, if applicable'. You only need to think of how often transactions happen to understand the overhead this kind of taxation system creates.
It was a bit of a running gag. The GST team were very proud when they announced that their server could deliver on 100 GST calculation requests per second, and went live. Everything ground to a halt in seconds. They had a look at the number of requests per second and found it was in the many thousands per second during the day, and during the overnight processes millions of calculations were being made. Some people had spreadsheets hitting the server harder than it could handle, and there were thousands of such applications throughout the company.
They eventually came to a compromise solution which created and 'acceptable degradation' in the performance of all their computer systems.
The problem is not that the poor can't afford food. It's that they can't afford, period. Tweaking income tax is a perfectly sufficient mechanism to handle this kind of inflation. And adjusting benefits. These systems already have the complexities built in, and just need to have values altered.
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Perhaps I should make clear that in agreeing with Rich that bandwidth has not tracked other IT technology jumps, I don't conclude that it's not worth having more. Quite the opposite, I'm saying that because the technology is stable, there is absolutely no point in waiting any longer for it, other than to pump the copper monopoly all that cash instead, and suck on crap service. No thanks.
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Rich, it's so true. People tend to think that because bandwidth is something computers use that it's undergone the same kind of massive exponential explosion in power. It has not, and there is no reason why it should.
There is no analogy between cramming smaller and smaller components capable of finer and finer storage and more and more computation using less and less power, to any kind of ability to do that with data transmission. The amazing breakthrough of fiber optic cable is not something that we should expect to be repeated every couple of years, any more than we should expect any amazing breakthroughs in roading technology. The path to building bigger roads that can transmit more and more traffic is relatively well understood and stable. Costs come down as technology improves, but nowhere near as fast.
So waiting forever for fiber because we already have waited forever, in the hope that something better will come along, or the belief that it must, is akin to waiting for an alternative to existing transport technology, and not building any roads.
What has increased rapidly has been the demand for internet services. And it continues to grow. What we currently have servicing us is really bloody poor by comparison to most developed nations. It constantly sickens me how much I pay for how little data I get, when I talk to any of my colleagues anywhere else in the world. It really is an embarrassment.
In summary, do it already.
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I'm not saying this isn't a worthy project, but we're not going to have a worthy public policy or economic debate talking in airy-fairy terms.
What's your estimate on the value of it? Just to come down out of airy-fairy debate and really crunch the numbers?
I wouldn't place too much store in the guesses either - they are likely to have a huge margin of error. To my mind the project is simply a basic infrastructure one for a remote nation who would like to be selling their brainpower and services rather than praying for rain for the cows.
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Building high speed fibre to 75% of homes is like building dual carriageway roads to each home. Why would you do it?
If that was only going to cost 5 billion, why wouldn't you do it? Those would be some pretty choice roads.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I would benefit massively from both a fibre link and a dual carriageway. I work in IT from home and I drive almost everywhere.
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I'm not surprised that Wishart can keep his mag afloat. The small nut base will keep paying, and the advertising is perfect for the kinds of places you find his mag, like doctor's waiting rooms. When you're waiting for an indeterminate period a sensationalist headline, however ridiculous, catches your attention over more serious articles that you might actually be enjoying when the doc calls you and feel disappointed to put down. Wishart has mastered the art of putting 90% of his information into the title, another 9% in the first sentence, and the rest of the article contains about 1% further content. So you can flick through it, and that means lots of impressions on all the ads. If you actually read the articles you wouldn't see so much advertising.
In that vein, a magazine of this kind is of just as much value to advertisers if everyone just flicks through it in the store and never buys it.
It's a good business, probably enough to keep one man in good pay, so long as you can find a man who's prepared to churn out that much gobshite every month. He's the man, so there you go. I imagine he loves it every bit as much as most authors and journos. The book is riskier, but I'd expect anyone who is a subscriber to his mag to buy it, so that probably guarantees some profits.
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