Posts by Stephen Judd
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If gays really were biologically different then it would be wrong to discriminate
I have always felt that is a very dangerous proposition to agree to. It is giving in to the fallacy that only what is "natural" is permissible.
Fundamentally it's an issue of civil rights. We cherish and protect freedom of conscience in all sorts of areas of life. Bluntly, why should where I put my penis be any different? Whether biology compels me or the whim takes me is irrelevant.
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That's extremely reductionist, Bart.
I absolutely believe that when a large group is sampled, these tendencies in preference emerge. But how strong is that preference? What is the deviation in the range of preferences? I suspect that any given person's preferences are likely to differ from these statistical averages substantially.
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And check out the monumental failure of taste in Paul Henry
That sentence works just fine if you stop it there.
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The Listener's own editorial staff has got that one well covered.
Robyn Gallagher noted earlier this week that the Listener should rename itself "Concerned Grandparents' Weekly".
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Apropos Melbourne: I was talking to my daughter last night and she told me she has several friends in "quarantine."
She's also arriving on the plane this afternoon, so watch out for sneezing curly-haired teenagers...
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I have a mortgage, but I also I pay into Kiwisaver, so effectively I'm borrowing to save.
Yay Slarty -- over dinner I was mentally composing a comment to enquire how many people both have a mortgage and some kind of savings, and how they justify diverting money to saving over mortgage repayment.
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"the risk of borrowing to invest in the sharemarket"
But, that's not the only or necessarily even the main asset class for the fund. Cf the famous foreign pension funds and endowment funds buying up our forests right now. Shares are a very risk asset class, but a fund the size of the Cullen fund has many others to play with.
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How does that compare with the Imperial shitload?
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Tell it to investors in the Nikkei.
I knew you would say that. But the fund is not supposed to invest in one share market, or even one asset class. So yeah, we can find examples of markets that never recovered, comparing the peak of a bubble to the present, but I don't think they prove much at the scale that the Cullen fund is supposed to operate at.
Ironically the closest it's likely to come to something as foolish as putting everything in one basket is the proposed policy of putting 40% into NZ...
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This SF has lost $4billion in the last 12 months. Why should we invest $billions in a fund that has delivered such apalling losses?
1. Those losses are largely unrealised losses, caused by a decline in market prices for shares. Over the period of decades that the fund is supposed to invest for they are very likely to be recouped and more.
2. If the price of an asset is depressed, but it yields an income, and you don't intend to sell it any time soon, who cares? Eg, to use an example we can all relate to, if your rental property is still tenanted, who cares whether the housing market is down at the moment or not? And furthermore, even if you have a paper loss on the current house, why wouldn't you buy another one? Assuming you are not leveraged to the hilt, this may make perfect sense.