Posts by Rich of Observationz
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And, just in case you think those nips in the graph represent actual real benefits of movies and ball games, above are the Australian figures for the period. They have different boondoggles, but their data tracks ours remarkably well
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Hard News: The Sky is the limit, in reply to bob daktari,
the same modeling
Exactly. There’s a whole industry of economists who can produce back of an envelope calculations with the fudge factors on warpdrive to justify spending taxpayer dollars pouring some more concrete.
If there is a huge untapped market of people wanting to fly across the world for conferences, why won’t they pay enough in hall rental to make the centre viable? And if the conference centre is a loss leader for hotels, then why don’t the hotel industry get together and fund it themselves?
Over the last decade or so, we’ve had well over a billion of public money (along with designer legislation) gifted to various corporations for events and productions that would, allegedly, transform our economy with a flood of tourists. Did this work?
The visitor arrivals don’t seem to show that – they creep slowly upwards with occasional slumps when the world economy tanks. I don’t see a return here that justifies the hype.
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Apparently the report has been released, Stuff and Labour have seen it, but it isn't up on the CAA website or Scoop.
From what I can gather, Brownlee got the staff to open the Koru Club exit door and breezed past them before they could tell him to stop.
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Hard News: Terror panics and the war imperative, in reply to mark taslov,
It can't be a problem. He's got a gun license, and in NZ, that lets you buy not just one gun, but an entire battalion's supply of weapons and as much ammo as you can transport. Plus you aren't under any obligation to account for where this arsenal went.
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Three incidents in the last few days:
+ an armed hostage incident in Belgium
+ six people shot in Pennsylvania
+ and an axe attack in the HuttAll of them tragic cases of damaged people losing the plot (although the Belgian incident might, I suppose, have been entirely rational people acting to advance their illegal business operations).
But none of them getting much media and police attention because the perpetrators didn’t declare themselves to be muslim jihadi’s?
And something which society can’t avoid, but can reduce by more attention to the healthcare, social welfare and justice systems. A much better idea than buying billion dollar aircraft and sending them to bomb peasants thousands of miles away.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Incidentally, this article by Geoffrey Wheatcroft discusses something I've thought about for a while - the narrative of WW1 being an exceptional "bad war" while WW2 and, by extension, the various colonial conflicts of modern times are seen as "good wars".
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A word we haven’t had but I would like is a term for text bugs introduced by a programmer into source code through not realizing the editor has focus, e.g:
data.each do |datum|
datum.update_special 12, hey do you want to go for a beer eh?
endFingerpoos?
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
The day we stop using ‘beltway’ to refer to NZ politics cannot come too soon.
Have you not seen the proposed route?
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Legal Beagle: Wellington Super City? Not…, in reply to Sacha,
Indeed it is. So logically it is also the best.
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will it fix your crappy rugby team
Most Wellingtonians (as in the actual city) would not care.
We have the best professional soccer club in NZ, however.
