Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Took you a bloody long time to count to three?
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Hard News: Things worth knowing, in reply to Richard Aston,
this global corruption index
I would take that with a metric fucktonne of salt.
Switzerland at #7?
Singapore at #5?
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You can see how riled up the right are that no less than three Tories are doing spin in the first hour this was up.
I'm not sure how innovative or sustainable flogging $20 milk is (milk that won't be exactly farm-fresh by the time it's been airfreighted, cleared customs and delivered to the shop). It would seem to be predicated on their dodgy connections staying in power, on people in China continuing to be rich 'n dumb enough to buy $20 milk, and on nobody in China working out how to rear and milk a cow.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Maybe not in NZ. I worked with a coder in London who doubled as an Essex publican. He wrote great code in the morning, but not after lunch. I once commented his code with:
#ifdef BARRY_IS_SOBER
..lines and lines of it...
#endifAlso, he punched the CEO out at a Christmas party and got away with a final warning.
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Maintain data centre plant?
Mining today isn't done by headbutting ya way through't seam with pick'n shovel if ya lucky, you know. They use electrics and computers and geology and stuff. I worked with a programmer many years ago who'd started off with the Coal Board - the PDP/11 was apparently capable of continued operation when almost full of coal dust.
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I'd love to see a comparison of how many people can tell an HD audio file from at 320kbps Mp3
That isn't really the issue (for me anyway). It's transcoding - if you ever want to go from MP3 to another lossy format (like Ogg Vorbis), then the quality will be screwed up. Which may not matter now, but it might in 10 or 20 years time.
(Also, I assume this also hits sampling/mixtapes. If you make a mix that incorporates MP3 inputs and then compress it, you'll degrade quality - anyone know if this is a real problem?).
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They see family ties, community, place of birth, job,history, much as Labour supports and stemming from way back in Waihi I imagine
Maybe a few, but I know a guy who works at Stockton, and he has no background in mining and got into it because he gets paid a decent chunk of money to work a block of 12 hour shifts and then gets several days off. He isn't really part of the Westport community, drives in from Nelson once a week and stays in a motor camp - and has lots of mates doing the same. I think that's probably more typical than the idea of a tightly knit community of tenth generation miners.
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coal for making steel
has not been doing very well either. The price was driven up by the demand to make rebar for all those Chinese construction projects (ghost cities and so on). Now that's collapsing, which is why after cheming up the ground of the Denniston Plateau, Bathurst are deferring production and firing staff.
If you make steel from scrap instead of ore, you don't need as much coal, and in a declining market, it's cheaper to use scrap.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to BenWilson,
Off the top of my head and without looking stuff up, you have:
Macroeconomic measures:
- fiscal measures such as a capital gains tax to reduce property inflation, allowing:
- lower interest rates, possibly QE (the actual settings would depend on the circumstances, appropriate settings after a China crash will be very different).
- also requirement for Reserve Bank to prioritise employmentMicroeconomic measures:
- a house building plan
- a plan to build more renewable power, such as wind farms, which will both employ workers directly and reduce future input costs for imported fuel- plus investment in education which will make NZ workers more employable (not sure if the Greens have committed to make university education free again).
And generally, if Labour put forward good policies, the Greens will support it. If it's moar coal and oil, they won't (remind me how mining and drilling is going again?)
