Posts by Paul Campbell
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I'm pretty sure that satellite freeview is using the same bitstreams (in fact the same transponders and bits on the same satellite) that Sky use - that means they are HD (when broadcast that way) - but are more tightly compressed using a less efficient, but more standard, compression method than what terrestrial freeview uses - a non-HD decoder would letter box or clip the signals to SD though
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Apologies if this has been asked before, but if I buy a freeview box will it fix my rotten TV reception?
There are 2 sorts of freeview - satellite (which will solve your TV reception problem) but has not-so-good HD - and terrestrial, from a local TV tower which will either give you a great signal or crap but has a more bandwidth for better HD - borrow a friend's and see what you get
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I think you should keep Coraline for bed time stories ....
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"Offica I habve a bwain tumour, i wuv you" - please, oh please use that in anger at least once .....
In the mean time I'll be completely selfish and look forward to more hospital stories ....
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Rich - exchange's "recall" only works with other exchange servers, the rest of us get the original email and a second one recalling it .... which of course makes us all run and read the original email to see why it was recalled ....
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oh just you guys wait .... TVNZ8 bound to be TVNZ-CourtTV ..... best do to over watch these trials least the TV demographers get any ideas ....
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If we tax everything (not just property, all capital gains) the same then give long term capital gains a ~10% break because we want to encourage them (this is the US system) - then investment will tend go into things like startups rather than property/etc - investing in property doesn't make more property - the planet doesn't expand if we invest in its surface - starups on the other hand are limited by the number of bright ideas.
The US system recognises that people's houses are a special case and provides an exemption to capital gains on the sale of a primary residence if you put the proceeds into a new primary residence withing a reasonable time - and over the years has tried a number of ways to handle retirement (variously a one-time-in-your life everything writedown and a periodic fixed value - $500kish writedown - the last of which I took when I moved back to NZ)
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Yeah pedestrians get a real bum steer here - partly I think it's our reliance on give way signs to do what in the US they would use a stop sign for.
In California there are pedestrian crossings everywhere - and i mean EVERYWHERE - even if they're not marked in there's a legal pedestrian crossing at EVERY intersection, in every direction - that's why people stop - because the law requires them to always yield to pedestrians at intersections - how civilised - the downside is that not using those spaces means pedestrians get ticketed for jaywalking
Now if someone can show me how one can safely get off the Maori Hill bus stop's traffic island, past the roundabout without dieing - I'll loan you a wheel chair and you can try again
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I think you're missing my point - by not taxing capital gains we can't give incentives for long term investments - so long as short term real estate churn is treated the same as investment in a new factory we're going to get more real estate churn and less new industry
Also I don't see why people who create companies shouldn't be taxed just like everyone else (and that would be me - I'm in the middle of trying to do a startup). Profits from capital gains should be the just same as profits from trading
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While an R&D credit is a great idea it's really only useful to those who are paying enough tax for a credit to be useful - most startup companies are not trying to make profits in their early years, instead they're pushing them back into growing the company .
I'm more interested in getting the tax system to reward long term capital investment - that means not playing the market to make a quick buck but putting money into the growth of companies over the long term.
Anywhere else this is called a "capital gains tax" it's a LOWER tax on long term capital gains (in the US it's ~25% compared with ~38% marginal) - our problem of course is that we don't tax capital gains at all so we can't reward the people who invest in the future over the people who watch too much house-porn on TV and want to make a quick buck flipping property