Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Sacha,
Why on earth would anyone borrow against savings? That's just gifting money to the bank
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Matthew Poole,
You really think it's a good idea for banks to lend on intangible business equity and bright ideas?
That's venture capital, and the success rate is about 1 in 10. (The model is that perhaps 1 in 30 do really well and compensate for the failures, around 1 in 10 get the money back and the rest sink with little trace). I'm not sure how that works with people wanting to put money in a bank and take it out again.
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Currently most mortgages are financed on fixed terms. These are funded primarily by overseas investors from countries with even lower interest rates (< 0.5% in Japan). This relies on the belief that the NZD won't decline against the investor's currency (a small drop could easily wipe out several years profits).
If those investors went away (because their country restricted overseas investments, their domestic interest rates increased, they needed to withdraw money to live or the NZ dollar became downwardly unstable) then the supply of cheap fixed-term money will dry up.
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Interesting discovery that Auckland has one of the lowest car ownership rates in NZ: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10888174
I suspect that it's distorted by all the places in NZ where the average is a home that's mobile and five cars that aren't.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I know that, but given that all our mass-media owners *are* foreign, it's easier to attack foreign right-wing monopolists than just right-wing monopolists.
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do the lefties who wanted Al Nisbet's unpleasant, unfunny newspaper cartoons put down with the full force of law
Who?
What I object to is that a foreign multinational is able to operate monopoly newspapers that, as a matter of policy, encourage the proletards and toryscum in their worst prejudices (to the great benefit of the newspaper owners and their friends). We need a media ownership law that removes that. If they want to put offensive cartoons on a website or handbills, fine.
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WLG is pressing ahead for a consent to lengthen its runway.
It's a huge waste of money, and I notice that it's *our* money not Infratil's.
Christchurch has a full-size runway, it's a bigger city and further from Auckland. With Air Asia pulling out, the only long-ish haul flight is a daily service to Singapore. Nothing to the US, and no one-stops to London. (It's three hours quicker to LHR on Air NZ via AKL and LAX).
No city of 300k people gets long-haul flights, unless it's got a much better beach than Oriental Bay. You can't fly long-haul from Pittsburgh, Bristol or Lishui.
But maybe Peter Jackson will snag another tranche of taxpayer dollars and buy a 767 to make use of the new runway.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Alastair Thompson,
I'm very opposed to a Wellington supercity. I actually think the opposite and that we should remove Tawa and J-ville from the city to create an actual urban community.
Councils aren't sports teams - the idea is that they provide good services and appropriate regulation - not to demonstrate what a cool place the city is or what a Big Swinging Dick(ess) the mayor is.
If we look at ultimate efficiency, then with a country smaller than most world cities, a single Ministry of Local Government could probably do it all more cheaply. The reason we have local councils is so that decisions can be made by and for distinct communities, which implies that councils should represent such distinct areas, not arbitrary large regions with nothing in common.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Auckland was unable even to accept a free rugby stadium from Trevor Mallard
Hang on, I know there are a lot of tax dodgers in Auckland, but are you saying that nobody in the AK pays tax at all?
Because they way I saw it, the 1.5 million Aucklanders were going to be paying 40% of the billion dollar cost of the palace of rugby they had planned, were understandably unkeen and expressed this through their elected reps.
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Hard News: Modelling Behaviour, in reply to FletcherB,
More or less. Although controlled drug *analogues* which are currently illegal *can* be approved for sale as psychoactive substances. In theory.
I reckon a great experiment would be for a party pill/synthetic cannabis supplier to drop an entirely inert placebo into the supply chain and see how many moral panic stories of hospital admissions, crazed psychopathy and so on it generated.