Posts by Keith Ng
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finally, they make reference to "bushmaster" which is probably the 25mm variety of autocannon (i still need to watch the remainder of the vid)
I think Bushmaster was the callsign for the ground team.
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big, big call keith.
surely you're aware of the tales that have emerged from falluja?
Yes, and that was an attrocity. But that was some serious off-the-reservation shit. My point - the point of this post - is that there are distinctions between a) a deliberate strategy of terrorising the occupied population, b) a general lack of discipline or competence, c) individual sociopaths going mental, and d) geniune mistakes; and also, that attrocities committed by individuals don't automatically equal systematic war crimes, nor the reverse.
Like I said in the post, the attack on the van trying to load up the wounded was inexcusable. But I'm less certain about the identification in the first place.
They said there were men armed with AKs. This was true (from what I can see). Even though they were wrong about Namir and Saeed, the two guys trailing behind were carrying assault rifles.
They sought permission to engage, and they received it. Did they give bad information to their commander? Was it the commander's fault? The crews'? The RoE? Did they balls it up because of poor training? Because of poor intelligence? Because they don't give a shit about Iraqis?
None of it makes it right, but they are real distinctions, and it should make a difference to how we feel about the situation and the people involved.
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Wouldn't even need to change the tourism slogan...
LOLZ. I feel a photoshop coming on...
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The irony is while trying to be funny about mining, you make a valid point about drug legalisation, and the role of the black market economy.
No, really, I didn't! My point was that random measures like "divide product value by land area/number of employees" and one-sided revenue analyses are pretty retarded, and you can make practically anything sound good with them.
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All we need now is David Haywood to outline how the Reserve Bank can get involved.
It's very true. I overlooked the monetary impact of this proposal. Naturally, it'll only be good.
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Let’s not go insinuating that NZ is anything more than a primary produce basket…
I am, after all, ambitious for New Zealand.
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Rich: that's certainly what mining companies think. Mining economics is all about optimising extraction to maximise your long-term rate of return.
Not sure about that. It's what the resource *owner* thinks. Doesn't matter to the mining companies, as the more valuable the material becomes, the more royalties they'll have to pay.
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Not quite. "Economically utilised" means "someone in NZ is digging it up". The actual value is based on the lifetime of the resource, i.e. total stocks. For minerals with "unknown but large" stocks (e.g. aggregate), they assume a lifetime of 100 or 1000 years, because it makes very little difference to the value.
What they're doing is that instead of going "x tons at $y per ton", they're treating the "resource rent" of a particular mineral - the net operating surplus of all companies extracting it minus cost of capital - as an annual income stream for the lifetime of the resource, and then taking the NPV. Which tells you why the analysis doesn't include unutilised resources - there's no way of computing the resource rent.
Brownlee's BOTE method treats minerals as a bank account. StatsNZ treats them as an annuity. The latter reflects reality far better than assuming we can extract them all at once.
Aye. Just like to confirm that, after our back and forth on Twitter, you are correct.
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Excellent prompt for me to recommend Idiot/Savant's brief piece on the actual mining economics from Statistics NZ.
The figure that I/S cited was of the value of "economically utilised" resources - minerals with mine shafts already sticking out of them. Brownlee's figure was how much do we expect in the ground x current prices.
Obviously, the whole point of expansion and exploration is that we go beyond what is currently utilised. But Brownlee's is a theoretical - and purely theoretical - maximum. It is not based on what's been found, but on the probability of finding it in a given kind of terrain. And even if this estimate is correct, the "value" of the resource doesn't take into account the cost of extraction or the fact that most of it will never (in practical timescale) be cost effective to extract.
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Or to someone who's back from overseas, or just moved to Auckland, or was living with their parents, or has split from their long-term partner...
[Puts on Harry Potter costume, takes out magic wand]: "ceteris... paribus!"
Of course when you add more people to the housing market, more people are added to the housing market. My point was that when a landlord sells up, all other things being the same, that does not change the total housing stock or the total demand for housing, as long as that residential property remains a residential property.