Posts by Andrew C
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think the council is explaining this poorly, but I don’t think there has been intent to deceive.
Perhaps. But maybe you had to be there. When someone stands up and says 3 stories are possible and are told, no its 2, that's a bit worse than mumbling your words or cocking up your marketing of an idea...
I was there for other reasons though, Significant Ecological Areas (sea's) was the topic that interested me, so I am only going by what I saw with my eyes half closed.
BTW if anyone has an SEA across your property, and you can check here, it wouldn't be a bad idea to get up to speed with what it will mean to you.
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Tom Semmens,
The manipulative dishonesty of it's opponents and the disingenuous outrage
Not sure its all been one way in that regard Tom. I went to a meeting about the Unitary Plan in Beachhaven about a week ago, and the officers there still, despite being repeatedly told by members of the public present that 3 stories was possible, tried really really hard to stick to the line it was only 2.
Maybe my definition of "genuinely consult" is different to yours...
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Hard News: The Waterview Bore, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Those are quite serious hurdles.
Not to mention the fact that I can often count on one finger the number of off-peak passengers traveling with me on the ferry to Birkenhead.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to duke,
“Ministry chief executive Brendan Boyle says private company Dimension Data was hired to test the security of the kiosks prior to Mr Ng’s experience and reported no problems.” RadNZ
There was a little more to his statement than just this. He also said that he had yet to verify exactly what they had tasked Dimension Data to check.
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Speaker: The Voyage: Dutch Disease –…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
A bad idea for several reasons:
At least part of the idea of a Financial Transaction tax is to STOP the speculation from happening in the first place (slims margins). So the fact it moves away etc and doesn't generate lots of tax doesn't mean it hasn't done its job, in fact quite the opposite.
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Hard News: Friday Music: This stuff works,
What a great site.
Its possible I am a bit thick and have not figured out how to do this yet, but on a wish list would be (in order of preference):
1a. find some way to move automatically and start playing the "next" track. Like in hype machine. Not the next in a playlist I have created, but the "next" track in the relevant list (more on this later). I like having Hype running in the background and every so often when a track catches my ear I take a look and dig deeper.
1b. Ability to skip next/previous when listening to an automatic playlist.
2. filter in/out tracks I have voted for
3. filter in/out tracks I have listened toBy "next" I mean next in line from some list of tracks generated by the site based on my choices. For example the current chart is a list of tracks (no real choices there). Or the latest songs added by date could be another. Or the current chart after removing songs I have already voted for. Etc.
BTW, if the above are already possible please let me know how (im none too sharp on the old techno stuff)
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Im no economist, so im getting a little lost here. But how is what you talk about any different to any other form of transaction? If I sell horses and I sell a horse and make a profit, I am taxed on that profit, and the net profit is thus less than a horse sells for, so I am now in a worse of position than before I sold the horse, so I lose out, so ...?
You had a 300k house and sold it for a profit and after tax you can only buy a 285k house. But you only paid 200k, so you're still winning, aren't you?
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Because a family always needs a home so the profit being taxed is never realised.
I don't quite understand what you mean here. If you sell an asset that makes a profit you pay a % in tax. You can still buy a better/bigger home with the remaining profit cant you? Just because you chose to spend it on a bigger home doesn't mean the profit is unrealized, it just means you spent the profit.
If you are going to have a CGT on family homes, you need to provide rollover relief each time people sell and buy, otherwise you impede labour market mobility. That gets…. complicated, especially if you are trying to work out when people are making their final sell and buy moves
why? They still make money on the sale, they just get a little less that without a CGT, and it might even slightly suppress prices (although the stamp duty in Oz doesn't seem to, so maybe not). I don't get why you need to wait until the final sale to wash all this up either.
Plus you get older people rattling around in huge houses because they don’t want to sell and cop the CGT
If they sell they will pay CGT out of their profit, not out of their savings. And I assume that if they rattle around too long and die their estate will have to pay it when it sells the house, so I'm not sure of the motivation to stay.
Anyway, not wanting to sidetrack anything here, I simply didn't immediately understand why the home should be exempt, so asked in case there was a blindingly obvious reason.
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Luke Williamson,
add capital tax on anything other than own home,
at the risk of getting sidetracked, why would you exclude the family home from a CGT Luke?
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It was by no means a perfect policy in planning nor execution, but NYC crime rates actually dropped.
I read some debate around whether it was this or other effects causing the crime rate drop. For example one of the authors of the Freakanomics series says they can show that the drop was actually due to the legalisation of abortions, fewer unwanted/unloved/uncontrolled kids running around getting into crime. From memory the analysis was along the lines of the fact that other states without broken window approaches saw similar and correlated decreases in crime rates to NY.
I know no more about it other than what I read in the book, so it might be that their figures didn't stack up, but it's any interesting theory anyway.