Posts by Idiot Savant
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If you can't win, be malicious while you're losing I say. Fuck 'em.
I agree. At the least, commit all the money to social programmes, and dare the fuckers to cancel them. They do it, they're a one-term government. They don't, and they don't get to deliver on their promises. A perfect poison chalice, and the left wins either way.
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And why is it Michael Cullen keeps saying we have no money for this, no money for that (and by that I mean 'tax cuts'), we've got to tighten our belts and so on, then he forks out 2/3 of a billion dollars for some trains?
Because in a budgetry sense, it's not actually spending. All he's doing is moving money from one column (cash, presumably) to another (assets). The overall balance isn't affected, until the asset is revalued (and there's more than one way to value something - NPV of income stream, or full replacement cost? Guess which one the government will be using?)
I've been wondering about this for a while, but can someone please tell me, aside from 900 jobs (which is no small fry, but still), what exactly do we get out of Comalco?
Money. But in terms of the underlying question - can't we just turn them off and have hot showers instead - the answer is "no". Primarily because the national grid doesn't have enough capacity going out of Bluff to move all the power north.
They can make some savings, but things have to be pretty desperate for them to shut down a potline. But that's what a market is for.
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I cannot really see the need for high speed trains, if you're in that much of a hurry you can always go by air.
With oil prices expected to drive the cost of air travel higher, that will no longer be true in a few decades. That won't matter to business clients, but with a culture of popular travel, people will want substitutes.
Europe is ahead of the game on this - their TGV stations are the airport terminals of the future, and on some trips it is already faster to take the plane. In NZ, geography and low population density will prevent that, though there might be a role in some areas.
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BTW, if environmental concerns are involved what a shame Toll still has possession of the Tranz Link freight forwarding operation -- and it's rather large truck fleet.
Make them pay their way properly (in road user charges and emissions), and it won't matter.
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Craig:
I'm not surprised the obvious questions aren't being asked, but it's a little troubling nobody really seems to care.
What, whether the money could better be spent giving tax cuts to the rich? I think the answer to that one is "no". As for other options, remember that in government accounts, its fiscally neutral - they simply swap one asset ($665 million in small-denomination unmarked bills) for another of equal value.
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Rich: The engineering difficulties and low volume probably rule out Auckland - Wellington. But with Hamilton rapidly becoming an exurb of Auckland and the space in between being relatively flat, it might be worth linking those two. However, it would cost billions. Might be worth it if oil prices rise too high, though.
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(also, if you could see fit to work out why in the new millennium we can't get a passenger train that can go faster than either the old Vulcan railcar or a steam JA-hauled passenger train)
Hills. And bendy bits. And shitty track. If you want fast trains, you need straight, level track, which would mean a significant capital investment.
OTOH with peak oil increasing road and rail transport prices, we might need to make that investment. It would at least be worth looking at what we'd need to put in a TGV link between Auckland and Hamilton (for various reasons, the maintrunk is a non-starter there).
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The Marriage Act does not -- and as far as I'm aware never has -- put a religious qualification on whether marriages are legally valid.
Nope - and in fact it does the opposite: it's an offence to deny or impugn the validity of a lawful marriage (a clause which IIRC was driven by anti-Catholic bigotry in the early C20th, and which we should do away with as it is an affront to free speech).
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Maybe we should go to the French style of marriage where there are two ceremonies - a civil one at the town hall and a formal one usually in a church.
That implies that religion has something to do with it. Legally, it doesn't. People can celebrate their marriage in a church if they feel like it, but as far as the law is concerned, it's a purely civil affair: pay a fee, say "I AB take you CD to be my partner" ("or words to that effect"), sign a piece of paper, and you're done. If people want to bring god into it, then that's their own business.
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Any pretence New Zealand is part of the War on Terror shud be stopped now, if these 3 pacifist guys, a farmer, a teacher, and a preacher have launched an unstoppable assult on the number one intel asset in the country and succeeded, well some people weren't doing their job very well.
And that's one of the nice things about this country. We're not an armed encampment, with "shoot to kill" signs everywhere and a militaristic mindset. We're just a quiet backwater, where our spies are (mostly) ineffectual - and we get horribly upset when they're not.