Posts by Rich of Observationz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
Echelon bait. Comes into fashion every few years,
-
Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I'm sure the bank teller will have taken your comments on board. All bank tellers are educated to at least MSc level in the design of cryptographic systems, as well as their training in finance and economics. It's amazing many of them look so young after 14 years at university..
-
Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Jarno van der Linden,
If they did that, they'd give themselves away to the first person who wanted to dig deeply (e.g. by obtaining the (imaginary?) publicaddress.net SSL certificate via a side channel, like visiting Russell and asking for it on memory stick and then comparing it with the one the site is serving to you).
What they need is the actual certificate and private keys from e.g. publicaddress.net which would let them extract session keys and read encrypted traffic. (What the perfect forward secrecy thing, as implemented by Google does is to ensure that they can only read traffic *after* obtaining the key).
-
Cracker: Johnny Foreigner & the Auckland…, in reply to Konrad Kurta,
I don't believe it makes any difference at all to NZ citizenship whether or not you own property. You have to be a permanent resident and have mostly lived here for 5 years. Owning somewhere might make a marginal difference if you don't meet the physical residence requirement, but only marginal, and you have to have got PR first in any case.
Which isn't to say people aren't conned by real estate agents and the like into believing that buying their overpriced investment properties will get them residence in the promised land.
-
I wasn't advocating total confiscation of wealth over a mill, at least not before the revolution. The forfeit would only happen if you refused to file a (true) tax return or pay.
A wealth tax of 2% on net assets over a million, rising to 10% at 100mln would be reasonable and compensate for past untaxed accumulations. And deter wealthy foreigners from buying NZ rental property.
-
If you could borrow NZ dollars at much less than the prevailing mortgage rate, you could just put the money on term deposit and pocket the profits, without bothering with an actual building (arbitrage, in other words). It's possible that people are borrowing in foreign currency to purchase in NZ, which of course exposes them to currency risks.
Anyway, I think there's a simple, non-racist, solution here, a wealth tax on any NZ tax resident with assets over a million. Anyone owning property here is deemed an NZ resident for tax purposes, with the property being forfeit for non-payment or non-cooperation.
-
85% of all local councillors in NZ are independents / No Party
Do you have a reference for that? Even if they purport to be non-party, many of them have thinly hidden party affiliations and have often run for parliament as party candidates (Prenderghast, for instance). Not many people get far enough into politics to run for council without having settled on some sort of party alignment.
-
But you'd imagine that it takes a play by every music listener in Korea to pay for a cab ride home from/to the Shore, especially when the record company and others have taken their cut.
-
The problem I have with STV is not so much the use of the system for councillors (although I think MMP would be better) but in the direct election of a mayor per se.
By electing a figurehead directly, rather than having a person with the confidence of a majority on council act as leader/mayor we:
- remove through-term accountability. An indirectly elected mayor could be replaced by a vote of council, a directly elected mayor can't.
- turn the election into a popularity contest on who can make the biggest short term impact (even worse with FPP)
- prevent effective governance by electing mayors who do not have a majority in council (and resulting in a situation where the permanent staff lead policy rather than the elected representatives) -
Hard News: Tooled Up for Food, in reply to Islander,
Awesome. Yes, I will drag the microwave out on my next storage unit trip and let you know.