Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Superannuation: Back to the Future, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
The idea of the actuarial approach seems to be that by putting money aside now we'll save having to pay more tax in the future when we have a larger retired population. But when that future point arrives, won't we then have to be saving money for an even larger retired population - we don't know all that well what's going to happen to life expectancies 50 or 100 years in the future.
Paying for superannuation out of current tax has the advantage of avoiding this uncertainty (as well as investment risk and the issues I discussed briefly above).
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They had boys and girls portaloos at a gig I went to recently, and the boys side had urinals - presumably a combination of blokes wanting to wave their willies and an improved extraction rate for recently drunk beer.
The nicest toilets are the ones in the truck they had at Newtown festival.
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I said some of this elsewhere, but it bears repeating.
In real world economics, the working part of the population has to produce the goods and services used by the working, retired (and school age) part. Whether we purport to pay for pensions through tax, saving schemes or property inflation, this doesn't change.
But the positive thing is that we are continually developing advanced technologies that allow us to produce more goods and services with less labour input. So why is an ageing population even a problem? Much of the answer is that we have invented unproductive jobs to compensate for the "loss" of productive ones. Selling "electricity" door to door, for instance. If we stopped doing that type of work, more of the workforce would be producing useful goods and services and we would have no problem with an increasing retired sector.
There's some of this in Graeber. I'd also note that migration can play a part in lowering the average age of the population and increasing the number of workers - as does better education to enable the working population to add more value.
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Do the various rights packages allow for wholesaling, though? I'd be surprised if the UK Premiership would want Vodafone/Sky to take a margin on selling their content through other ISPs when ideally they'd want this business themselves.
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Hard News: Sky and 2020, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The concept, I guess, in the 90's was that an ISP would bundle a 'portal' which their users would prefer to third party sites and that this would drive revenues in their direction. The trouble with that concept was manifold:
- ISPs like Telecom typically addressed a small fragment of a domestic market.
- They are monolithic companies with no aptitude for technical innovation.
- They are always terrified to cannibalise their legacy revenue (calls and texts) - they've got cannibalised anyway, but it isn't the telcos doing it.
- Competitors (Google) with global ambitions would always destroy them on functionality, simply by being able to spend more money. -
Hard News: If this was ever funny, it's…, in reply to Adam H,
English appears to be clumsily but probably successfully using some Trump technique
...and then Labour and the Greens (who really should know better) supporting repealing our health and safety laws (specifically brought in to protect people from their own and others stupid) to allow workers to go down Pike River looking for corpses and "evidence".
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Hard News: If this was ever funny, it's…, in reply to andin,
Teddy Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst: "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war"
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Maybe the NZRFU should merge with a larger global sporting organisation with expertise in monetizing their ball game. Man U springs to mind - they're quoted on NYSE and have their own TV channel.
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I remember in the UK getting Demon access for GBP10 a month (plus call charges) and then cancelling after (UK) Telecom introduced a system where they would share the revenues from a national toll call (0845 number) with the recipient, allowing "ISPs" to operate on a "free" basis (users just paid for the toll call). You could set up an ISP very easily, so there were hundreds if not thousands to choose from.
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To put Trump in perspective:
- there are 167 countries in the world, excluding microstates
- 51 (31%) of these are full on dictatorships
- 97 (58%) are authoritarian states that have some semblance of (manufactured) popular consent
- 15 (9%) are liberal capitalist states with regular elections and some sort of human rights oversight
- 4 (2%) are progressive states that are actually trying to move beyond late market capitalismAll Trump has done is to move the US from the third category to the second.
(Figures from here, but adjusted for my personal prejudices which differ from the Economist) E&OE