Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Petrol is already heavily taxed here
We have the sixth lowest fuel tax in the OECD. A lot of the problem is urban sprawl, making public transport inefficient and slow and leading to extensive car commutes.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to BenWilson,
Extra turns. Like in pinball, or space invaders.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to AndrewH,
Yeah, I think that's fairly well known. I've never used the same bank for business and personal, or even voluntarily told the personal bank anything about where my monthly checks come from.
But it remains that unsecured lending to business is risky (as South Canterbury's creditors, which I guess includes us all, have found). Holidays in the sun, less so. That's the stats - obviously individual points are outside this, but banking is like insurance, it works on the aggregate.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Sacha,
Bit of a moving target, that. If we had FTTH now, people would complain that we didn't have 4G/LTE rolled out, as they do in country X.
And it's hard to see how consumer broadband will drive that level of economic growth when businesses have been able to get as much bandwidth as they want (and can justify paying for) for some time. What do you think Kim Dotcom has, ADSL?
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What I think does work is for government to create the environment through sensible policy: so for instance a policy of moving electricity rapidly to 100%+ renewables would help, because when everyone else has rapidly rising fuel bills, we wouldn't. As would improving public transport, taxing property speculation, free tertiary education and the like.
Putting huge dollars into a film industry that won't exist if the world's teenagers go and see Skyfall on Saturday, less so.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Russell Brown,
Most things work when you're industrializing. Look at Soviet GDP in the 1950s, for instance.
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$83.5 million funding 965.7 hours..
So about 500 times cheaper than a certain two hour movie (or is it a three hour movie, I haven't been paying attention?).
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Statistically, a large portion of people getting car loans pay them back, and if they don't, repossessing the car will provide an alternative payment method. The profitable interest rate is easily calculated.
Most bright ideas, as discussed above will fail. So the bank would need to either charge a huge interest rate or rely on the borrower paying for their turned-out-dumb idea out of other forms of earnings. Which they'll happily do on a credit card, provided the borrower has the earnings and so forth to make repayment likely.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The banking system basically lends on tangible security: property, plant and the like. It's role is not venture capital provision, for the very good reason that when people put money in a bank, they want it back.
Typical VC firms (especially the minority that work in innovative areas, as opposed to investing in bus depots and the like) expect a success rate between 3% and 10%. The rest of their investments will to some degree fail. That doesn't fit with "banking".
It would possibly be a good idea for the government to provide $5k level investments to people that want them, possibly in the same fashion as student loans, where you pay them back in income tax. Any other model is unlikely to work.
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Hard News: Fact and fantasy, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I don't know anywhere that a conscious, government directed industrial policy has succeeded long term. The best you seem to get is the US approach of spending a fortune on weapons and hence creating a huge high-tech industry that then has spinoffs (even that goes wrong in places like the UK and Soviet Russia where the defence industry sucked up all the investment and skilled workers to the detriment of non-defence technology).
More typically is the Aussie car industry, where huge subsidies and import control keep them making gas-guzzlers that are twenty years past their sell-by date.