Posts by Rob Stowell
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I'm not touting global cooling- and Dutton relishes being contrarian in a quite irrational way! -but surely it's at least on the cards. This sort of data is far from predictive, but there's certainly a trend in the holocene towards longish periods of glaciation, with relatively short interglacial intervals.
Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a great three-part series on this for the NYer; not online, alas. She's hardly a global warming sceptic- quite the contrary. -
Chipping in somewhat way too late: I like the archiving project. But that booklet is a hard read. I had to get a legal opinion, which was fine for a big institution, but not so cool for an individual.
And it does have some odd (unintended?) consequences. Occasionally I'll get a request from someone wanting to buy video material, usually a library. The legal opinion is that we don't have to worry about digital deposit until material is "made available to the public".
Since any sale constitutes making it available, a single sale means two additional copies sent to Nat Lib, with postage, time, and forms filled out. Two copies cost very little, but the time and hassle add up. Apparently giving the copy to a library would still require compliance.
Consequently... there's an inclination to simply say no to the original request (haven't done this yet, but then I'm getting paid: if it were all my time and money it'd be different.)
For what it's worth, robbery, the Nat Library people I ended up talking to were sympathetic, friendly and grateful. No heaviness at all. But even in the abstract, the threat of a $5k fine is a big stick to wave around. -
It's possible that broad weather patterns change
Nope. It's certain that broad weather patterns change. And while there are a lot of theories about how and why, none of them are yet conclusive. (It's hard to do a controlled experiment on a planet over thousands of years;-)
It does seem that recent climate changes (ie the periods preceeding and immedately after the last ice age) have involved seriously chaotic "weather". And we also know that weather is notoriously hard to predict. If you've got the time ;-) this is a pretty good read on the subject (warning: pdf- the original NYer article doesn't appear to be online). -
Speaking of friends overseas... any idea when Flight of the Conchords might start screening here? Some of us are up to Ep 5 and we can't talk about it in case it spoils things for others and this is unsatisfactory.
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I'm not so concerned about house prices. If we had a trade surplus of 9% of gdp, they'd be rational, and probably affordable (assuming we had jobs...). But I'm guilty of this "living on credit" thing too. Doing it for a year might be a dangerous lark. Doing it for four or five years, it's a tough habit to break. I've not heard a plausible suggestion about how that can be turned around without serious economic pain (not an election-winning platform!)
The Water Debate sounds great. When our younger kids went to Auckland, they were intrigued to drink "swimming-pool water" straight from the tap. This winter our tap-water is cold and absolutely delicious. I hope we don't lose it. -
You mean we'll be forced to buy the Financial Times? erg!
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Hiya Raf, yeah, there are some contradictory bits of "teh theory"- eg axiom a/ money is just a commodity like any other and axiom b/ raising the cost of money is not inflationary and not an arbitrary intervention in a "ideally free" market.
In terms of money supply: isn't it the "globalisation" - the instant, electronic transnational "liquidisation" of the supply- that makes the RB so impotent? (And monetarism so lacking in answers to our current dilemma?)
Crikey, I can remember the Muldoonist days of applying to the Post Office if you wanted to send money off-shore. Heh. -
Oram is not as widely publicised, sadly, as those members of New Zealand's business community who believe anything that inhibits a pollution rich, poor-worker race to the bottom is a DISASTER FOR THE COUNTRY! AND I"LL PACK MY TOYS AND GO TO CHINA!
Heh heh!
Tell 'em not to bother packing. The toys were made in China anyway. There's plenty of room here for landfills, and they can buy brand new toys over their- due to magical invisible hand, they'll be even cheaper than the cost of transport. -
The increasing interest rates have the effect of appreciating the currency, as people invest their money here. This in turn worsens, not improves, our trade deficit, and increases overseas ownership of our economy.
In theory (cough cough- in a nice cleaned-up model of a wholely rational world market economy- as if this ever existed) higher interest rates decrease consumption across the board; people start spending less, there's an incentive to save more, production per dollar invested increases and for a host of reasons inflation stays low and trade imbalances disappear.
But there's another "rebalancing" scenario (the one we're facing): the combination of high interest rates and high dollar knocks the stuffing out of the export sector (and slows production overall); jobs start to disappear, the trade imbalance gets lunatic, and speculators buzz off towards the next peice of rotting meat leaving the kiwi $ in the dust...
Most economic theory operates on the fringes of reality- if only because real economies operate with a touch of chaos theory. Monetarism as a very simple means of combating inflation worked ok for a while. But we've bet our houses on it and (AFAIK) now things are looking ropey, noone quite knows what to do next.
The other distorting oddity at the moment is what people are suddenly calling a "glut" of investment $ looking for a home. A lot of that isn't trade-imbalance money recirculating, but boomer retirement funds. Canadian teachers paying $2b for our yellow pages!
It's spooky to think the widely admired- (well, I like it!)- "Cullen Fund" and kiwisaver could be joining a great tide of investment money sloshing around the world looking for something- anything- to buy. -
(Brief reprise) Re interest rates: of course they are a big part of the picture. But what's at least as important as how high ours are, is how low- quite unnaturally artificially low- both US and Japanese rates have been and continue to be. The idea internally has been to push money into productive investment, and to keep economies that had slowed to a trickle- Japan in the 90s, the US in 2000- growing.
But those remarkably low rates haven't been possible internally (who would save their money to get 1 or 2% returns?). They've only been possible because other countries (and here Japan and the US cases start to diverge) have been willing to "buy in" to that economy and currency. So, eg US consumers are using very cheap credit from, eg China (tho the Saudis and others are also buying in) to spend it up on relatively cheap Chinese and Saudi products- it's almost like a huge lend-lease or hire purchase agreement.
Everyone knows this can't go on forever. Noone knows how or when it'll end- but it's unlikely to be a soft, sweet landing. (I'm fairly sure most non-wingnut republicans are hoping for a Democrat to win in '08. There are so many responsibilities to off-load!)
We're a small figure on the sidelines. But our interest-rates look spectular in comparison, and while our economy has a similar imbalance to the US, there's been the feeling that NZ (via the interest rate at least) is doing something to correct the trade deficit (albeit, something that looks increasingly like it'll lead to a hard landing).
That's why Cullen is making noises about intervention: he doesn't want the market to keep assuming we'll keep on being the rational players in a global economy tilted well off-balance. The question is- how far will he take the bluff? Is he capable of acting with even calculated irrationality? I think he might be.