Posts by linger
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Nice try, IO... but I think David was asking for a more absurd real-life fear-of-terrorism situation...
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I've got Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency playing on a Mac (system 9.0, RealAudio8 player) with no problems -- but you may have better luck if you go through the BBC radio homepage, click "open BBC radio player" (which I gather is just a front cover for Real Audio, so you'll still need that installed), select the program (Type of Program: Comedy & Quizzes + Go), and then the title. The only other thing I can think of is that the most recent episode was broadcast on Oct 10th; if you were trying to access it on that date (or, depending on timezone, up to a day later) it might not yet have been in the archive.
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Those more recent tertiary funding figures don't half make depressing reading.
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jeremy: true, the course fee charged is only 20-25% of the true cost for most undergraduate degrees; but my point was that the student is only presented with a "debt" in financial terms, not in social terms -- and precisely because there is a visible financial debt, the student is that much less likely to consider that there may be any social debt to repay.
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Don:
It's not the pseudonyms, it's how we're pseudonyming.
In my own case (though the same considerations apply to other individuals such as "Idiot/Savant"), there are several reasons for using "linger":(1) more people know me by this name than by my birth name. I've been online in some form under "linger" since 1993.
(2) my personal name is quite a common one. (And it's not a secret; I have signed several of these posts with it. But there are already several "Robert"s here, so why not use something more distinctive?)
(3) I have never had any other username, so it is still, in an important sense, me. In some ways, I hope, the best aspects of myself. When posting under "linger" I make more of an effort to stay rational, calm, & open to other opinions than I sometimes do in person. This is possible precisely because this is a written forum, and we have the opportunity to reflect on what we write before hitting "Post".
--Robert.
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"Student debt" is no longer such a hurdle, as it is now interest-free (which means paying it off is less urgent than for any other debt).
But we do seem to be looking at "student debt" in the wrong way by focussing on the student as a "user" and sole beneficiary of a service.
Ideally, we want to provide citizens with an education because that will improve our society. However, to get that benefit, we need those educated citizens to remain in, and/or actively contribute to, this society. That is the really important "debt" to society. And it goes completely unanswered if we end up encouraging graduates to go overseas to work (either to avoid, or to afford to pay, a commercial "debt").
Not that graduates working overseas is automatically a bad thing. NZ as a whole can still benefit from the experience thus gained -- provided that those individuals eventually return for some portion of their career.
Would it be utterly unfeasible to adjust the balance somehow, so that education costs less financially, but may attract other conditions on "local service"? This would be especially useful for professions such as nursing where we struggle to retain sufficient staff; but it might be more generally applicable too.
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kowhai: would that be the Fonda de la Madrugada in the Villa Bianca?
From review in Metropolis 691:"Tokyo’s best Mexican restaurant is also the best place to find icy cold beers from the finest brewers south of the border. Sample favorites like Corona, Tecate and Dos XX along with hard-to-find beers like Bohemia, Sol and Negra Modelo. Fonda de la Madrugada serves authentic Mexican food in a festive, country-style setting complete with live mariachis. Specialties include the heaping plate of nachos (¥900), chicharron con salsa (crispy pork skins with salsa ¥1,000), and carnitas estilo michoacan (spice rubbed pork, guacamole and beans in warm tortillas ¥2,000) to go along with your beer."
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oh, yeh -- the larger branches of HMV and/or Virgin Megastore also used to offer free internet (you'd have to sign the register and book a time, but no charge). (But I'm not sure if that's still true. Haven't seen a Virgin store for a few years, they may have been sold off.)
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Random dinner is exactly what you get when you have to rely on the pictures. (Thai or Vietnamese cuisine generally travels well, even to Japan, but I've heard Tokyo described as "the place where bad things happen to good Mexican food", and my experience bears that out: dishes that looked authentic but tasted nothing like. It's a new low to have it happen to sushi though!)
Re public Internet in Japan: yep, not easy to find ('cos it's assumed --and actually about 60% true-- that everyone has an internet-capable cellphone). But I suspect you really had to seek out a solution quite that seedy (if so, worth it for the tease of your opening paragraph). There are a number of outfits originally set up as manga libraries that have added internet cafes to their service; most in the 100-500Y/hour range (depending on the level of service; what you describe is at the deepest end of that continuum).
Or you could try what I used to do and simply walk into one of the larger hotels, such as the Metropolitan in Ikebukuro. This is one of the few ways that I have found being an obvious gaijin is a distinct advantage, as it is simply assumed you are a guest and therefore eligible to use the computer room. The computing facilities are often not that flash, but they are entirely free. Possibly not such a good idea to do that when billing for work though.
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I don't think NZ needs tax cuts as such. The percentage of income tax we pay doesn't seem to me that onerous compared to the services we (expect to) get from government. If anything, there needs to be more funding of, e.g. health, education, and scientific research & development.
That being said, it is well past time the income tax bracket boundaries were readjusted. Both major parties have been pussyfooting around that issue for far too long (most obviously just before the 2005 election, when Cullen promised to do just that, then changed his mind -- but it had been previously mooted some years beforehand). In the past 10 years, the proportion of NZers with incomes over the $38,000 threshold (at which some qualifies for the middle bracket -- and at which it becomes mandatory for the individual to file a tax return) has more than doubled (it's now close to 30%). This must have led to an increase in costs for tax collection, as well as an increased administrative burden on the taxpayer.
On the third hand, I would argue against the 2005 proposal of annual (consumer-index-linked?) readjustment, as that would tend to increase the administrative burden, by changing the tax regime unpredictably every year, and creating irregular boundaries (like $46,728.71). Instead, I'd favour a regular (say, 5-yearly) review, creating clear, easy-to-remember boundaries (rounded to, say, the nearest $1000). Again, for me it's not primarily about reducing the tax, but about making the tax system clearer and easier to use.
[NB: to get our tax tiers back to where they were in 1990, in terms of proportions of income earners on each level, we would currently need boundaries of around $50000 (for the 33% rate) and $75000 (for 38%).]