Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to
What would be to stop the GCSB from playing silly buggers with the internet, leaving the supply of money and similar necessities untouched, but severely restricting access to less essential services
Lack of skills and information, as in not knowing which IP addresses were part of essential infrastructure.
Or solidarity: what we need is a tech equivalent of the National Union of Miners who brought down the UK government in 1974 by a strike that disrupted electricity supplies.
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OnPoint: Budget 2014: Yeah okay., in reply to
a big increase ($180m) for Defence
We must be strong.
For if we are weak, we are not strong.
And if we are not strong, we are weak.
So we must be strong.
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Hard News: Snowden and New Zealand, in reply to
Yeah, but they probably didn't have large chunks of fairly important infrastructure like supermarkets and banks sending traffic over VPNs rather than leased lines.
Having the supply of money, fuel or groceries dry up might actually convince NZers not to vote for the government that caused such a situation.
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Wasn't there a big thing then with hugely rich people and their kids buying their way to poptastic success? I wonder how Paris Hilton gets on with her session musicians?
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Matthew is right - SH1 south of Drury and north of Albany are as low-risk as any road globally. (The wide medians on the former are, I think, safer in an accident than a physical barrier). I'd also argue that a lot of rural roads have a low risk of two-party accidents because of the very low traffic volume.
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Isn't it par for the course for a session musician that you have to work with crazy egotistical talentless people? It's just that usually the money comes from either their past musical success or a record companies betting on their marketability.
Could be worse. Could have been Ian Watkins, right?
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Maybe there should be an opt-out request protocol, whereby one can request to be no longer reported on as a public person. It would be easy to program publishing systems to block any article that mentions a person who has made such a request.
To be fair, this should be for a five year minimum, so that people don't toggle themselves in and out of public status when they, for instance, have something to sell.
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A UBI could include progressive taxation without the need for 2nd job tax codes, though.
For those on low incomes, there would be a higher basic rate of tax which would be offset by the UBI income.
As incomes increased, this effect would reduce.
For high incomes, say $100k+, a higher rate could be brought in which, for multiple jobbers, would be charged at end of year (assuming that us on $100k+ can reasonably be expected to budget).
If you look at the chart above, which actually surprised me, you see that a 40% flat tax rate and $20k UBI would approximate current tax rates above $50k.
I also did a 35%/50% split rate at $100k for the upper threshold. -
∫ | A tan( B * x) | dx
(where x is income) -
I think people are perfectly entitled to use whatever names they like in an informal context.
But the Companies Office wants your full "government name", and for good reason. Either Mr Shi has changed his name officially to "Stone" or "Stone De Yi" in which case he should put that on all his directorships, or he should put his original name.
If one wants to take a charitable view, his accountant might have done the filing unknowingly. One would have thought that this would have created issues when they tried to open a bank account and couldn't produce a matching directors passport, but maybe the banks treat National Party insiders differently to mere mortals.