Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to Sacha,
I was impressed with the Coroner last night reasuring people that their deceased loved ones would have someone with them at all times in the makeshift mortuary.
Particularly appropriate in the Maori context, which I suspect is probably from where it arose. That and the simple practicalities of operating a disaster morgue.
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Robert Urquhart,
uh, Christchurch's instability is not new. Not having had a major earthquake in living memory is not the same as stability. The presence of faults under Canterbury has been known for decades.
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Greg Dawson,
However while I’d love to believe it is because they are not interested in facts intruding on their policies, it’s almost certainly a case of stupid rather than evil.
If what I've inferred about the CHC processing centre being "it" for the country are accurate, then it's very much the stupid rather than the evil. September's quake caused delays in releasing the quarterly information bulletin. If you have to have a single processing centre for a critical function, put it in Hamilton, or Palmy. Don't put it in a city that's seismically active!
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Hilary Stace,
The census has now been cancelled
Yeah, and that's a really, really bad look for StatsNZ. Relying on a single processing centre in an unstable city is stupid!
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Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Is there a team colour?
Sure. Goat-blood red. Or Goat-blood rust, depending if it's fresh or dried.
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Che Tibby,
administrative data, so it’s pretty accurate
That's what I figured. Includes some of the grey economy, too, since not everyone who's getting income from illegal sources avoids paying tax. That's how they account for income from transfer payments, since IRD are the administrators of things like WFF.
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Che Tibby,
Stats NZ reports on income from all sources and income from wages/salary. Not sure the source for those, but HLFS would not be sufficiently accurate for their purposes I suspect.
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Hard News: Welfare: Back to the Future?, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
I think the increase in the average wage is mostly due to the tax cuts. I believe the median wage has declined over the last two years.
Except that mean and median wages are measured gross, not net, in most calculations.
Also, don't mix up wages and incomes. Incomes includes transfer payments (super, benefit, etc), wages don't. So it's entirely possible, and legitimate, for median incomes to decrease while mean wages increase, and it's for the same reasons: increase in benefit recipients, decrease in part-time and low-wage workers, both due to the recession. And dragging up the mean is the upper deciles, such as our illustrious leaders who are a note-worthy fraction of the top decile. -
Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Construction material and design plays a huge part in how a building comes down. A concrete floor that was poured onto wood sheets (subsequently removed), with no internal re-bars, will disintegrate into chunks and dust. They also have no real attachment to the building shell, which is often constructed the same way, and the whole thing falls apart when shaken.
I'm speculating on the construction of the CTV building, but as you say there's no obvious resemblance between pre- and post-quake appearance and that's one way that this could happen.
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Hard News: Again: Is everyone okay?, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
RPGs
My first thought was "The city doesn't need our help with stuff being blown up", then realised you meant Role-Playing Games.