Posts by Paul Rowe
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Oh sorry. Magic-box-which-gives-gravity-to-whole-ship then. With tights-don't-ladder-on-our-ship module attached.
It's not a module, more a way of life.
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Zoe Saldana wonders who thought a mini-skirt and go-go boots were practical for a starship
Aah, but in the early days of space travel, who's to say they weren't? I never once saw Nichelle Nicoles with a ladder in her tights suggesting some sort of low-grav advantages may apply up there.
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As part of Shakespearean lit, we were treated to a screening of the highly regarded Russian version of Hamlet
Back in 2000 I went to the Globe in Southwark to see a Brazilian street theatre troup do Romeo & Juliet. It was one of the highlights of my time in London to be honest. All the dialogue was in Portuguese, the set consisted of an old Volvo Stationwagon and the fight scenes were performed on stilts.
Very powerful, to me at least.
The fun continued after the show, with a South African guy asking his partner why all those people were standing in the yard watching the play...
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Brian Gaynor in the Herald back in July:
Vibrant capital markets depend on a high level of integrity and investor confidence.
Investor confidence was extremely high in the 1980s when individuals dived into the sharemarket and bought large quantities of shares in a plethora of high-flying companies including Chase, Equiticorp, Judge Corp, Robt Jones Investments, etc.
Unfortunately, after the October 1987 crash we discovered that most of these companies had little substance. It was as if these investors had bought a loaf of bread but when they got home they discovered the loaf was hollow; there was nothing inside the crust.
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Most ordinary investors in New Zealand have little confidence in our capital markets because they have been misled, pillaged and raped since the mid-1980s. They have also received almost no regulatory protection, with the Securities Commission being notably quiet during the finance company debacle.
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Imagine if the Super Fund owned Telecom, Rail, BNZ, Air NZ, V/42 Below, NavMan, and Watties
OK, so imagine if the super fund, worth say $13bn, is required to invest 40% in the NZX, by my maths, that's $5.2bn. So if that $5bn is spread amongst all companies on the NZX in proportion with their size, then you'd invest 9% of it in Telecom (these are all real numbers, numbers from NZX, this is really rough), means you've got around $470m invested in Telecom. Given that unbundling the local loop knocked around 20% off Telecom's value in March 2006, how willing would the government be to pass regulations that knock say $100m or 0.77% off the value of its portfolio (1.9% of its NZX portfolio)?
It's the politicisation of the Fund that worries me most, what happens when you've got 40% in NZX, and the next crash happens? You'll get some wide boy politician suggesting we should have 50% of NZSF in it, or 60%, and so it goes. Try selling back to 40% after that :)
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Wasn't he pet economist at the Business Round table too?
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Bring back Crawlspace, somebody
Amen, Paul.
I was gutted to come back to NZ and discover Stu & Gonzo had disappeared.
I'd also put in a plug for Pretty on the Inside, in Palmerston North, though I believe Paul has decamped to Aus in the last few years...
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I think the last week has given this fiscal conservative ample reason to be entirely cynical.
Maybe, but I think your cynicism should be directed at human nature, rather than the politicians exploiting it.
It seems to me that fiscal conservatism is well out of fashion in NZ at the minute, so I do have some sympathy. The neo-Lib reforms of the 80s & 90s have given it a bad name <they're not the same thing, I know, tongue in cheek> Act feel this need to jump on any populist bandwagon that might get them elected, no matter how incompatible with their livertarian roots, and the Nats are stuck in some half-life where they want power(maybe they even need it to survive in their current form) so have to compromise to an extent that drives their supporters crazy. Interesting.
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Governor of the Reserve bank has no part to play in fiscal policy, and the Minister of Finance is more hands off with monetary policy, as a rule...not completely hands off, but they do pass a lot of responsibility to the RB when they set interest rates.
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Totally in keeping with the "slash the bloated bureacracy" meme he's been riding for a while.
This was the first thing that sprung to mind:
Lyrics here if you can't be arsed listening to the whole song.