Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Sir Dr Michael
As a total aside, I think it should be Dr (Sir) Michael. The title of Dr, which is conferred by an open and objective process is to me far more prestigious than an imperial honour conferred through a political quota.
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The real issue is that very few land intensive businesses in NZ are actually viable.
As I understand it, a dairy farm currently makes maybe $400/hectare in operating profits off a land price of $30,000 a hectare. That isn't enough to pay any sort of mortgage - basically they're farming for the capital gain.
On those numbers, there are increasingly few buyers. Anyone who *is* buying in this market has obviously got something else going on. Maybe they've got a means of making a captive consumer base pay over the odds for milk powder? How sustainable that is remains to be seen.
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Speaker: The Voyage: The Engine Room…, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Worst that happens is we lose some deposits.
No, worst thing that happens is that the cash machines stop working. And the EFTPOS, because one bank can't accept payment off another. So most people aren't being paid and can't buy food. Even if you have cash, the shops can't pay their suppliers and the suppliers can't buy diesel to truck the food anywhere, so the shelves are empty.
Within a few weeks, we'll be 'starving with full barns'.
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The world’s ability to invent and develop new tools and techniques to increase productivity has atrophied over the last 30 years
We've developed plenty of technology - it's how the productivity increase from that technology has been used.
The amount of 'blue-collar' effort required to produce valuable goods steadily declined through the 20th century. In its place, we've seen increased 'white-collar' effort applied to design, production and marketing. As an example, in 1920, Ford employed many thousands of manual workers and a much smaller number of clerks and draughtsmen. Today, they have many less manual workers but proportionately many more in sales, marketing, finance and the supply chain.
Many modern businesses are built on entirely pointless activity. Powershop, for instance, enables customers to get a cheaper price for electricity - which has a fixed cost of production and is largely produced by publicly owned generators. Basically, it's the equivalent of Keynes' digging holes and filling them in.
What this diversion of technological gain has done is to enable a large and moderately affluent middle class to grow up - and in doing so enable capitalism to dodge the Marxian bullet of revolution - which, had we persisted with a society dominated by industrial workers, would indeed have been as inevitable as Marx thought it was.
However, as the 'benefits' of technological advance have spread beyond Europe and her former colonies, that 'wealth' has been more thinly spread. With less opportunity to keep the middle class contented with earned income, unearned incomes (from leveraged borrowing and speculation) become more important.
That lacks sustainability however, as it requires more and more to be borrowed and used to buy goods which aren't increasing in supply. Eventually, things snap, and that's when we get a financial crash.
Society (aka the 1%) might yet invent a new way to bribe the middle classes, but if not, I think we're headed along a more revolutionary path.
That was long. I'd have done shorter, but didn't have the time
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we don't have many banks to fail.
This round, we isolated the clearly reckless lending into a tier of unregulated institutions like South Canterbury. That kept the impact of the crash on the mainstream banking sector to a minimum.
I don't think we'll be looking so good after China crashes. The Aussie banks we rely on are exposed to the commodities sector and to sourcing finance from mostly Asian offshore investors. Lose those, and they're in trouble.
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Well, I've been in and out of business for many years and I've *never* come across an occasion where the travelling mayor of the town we were based, or indeed any other politician, has helped us get business.
If you make stuff people want to buy and have the sales/marketing skills to draw it to their attention, then generally they'll buy it. And for a company starting to export, it's way easier to start with the low hanging fruit of Australia, North America and Europe, usually in that order
Personally, I think Wade-Brown should stay back here and work on trying to stop the government despoiling the city with unnecessary road schemes, which I thought was what we elected her for?
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around 26% of my graduating class will earn less than $20Kpa until 2016
Because NZ doesn't need many lawyers, and needs even less grads who've learn't some law and some <strike>management bullshit</strike> sorry, 'commerce'.
(I've had the misfortunate of dealing commercially with the University of Auckland, and the concept of them teaching business is akin to King Herod teaching childcare).
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The allegations that the accused were setting up a private militia are not unproved
But is such an act illegal? I don't believe it is - the jury didn't believe that they'd gone the further step to a criminal organisation. While society might mostly disapprove of people starting such private militia, if there isn't a law that proscribes them, then they're a lawful activity.
And if a private militia isn't illegal, why isn't training one a 'lawful purpose' under the Arms Act on the basis that anything not proscribed is allowed?
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Legal Beagle: Shirking their responsibilities?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
you mean do it roughly like the Greens do
People have the option of voting Green. If they choose to vote for another party, they're endorsing whatever means that party uses to select list candidates (and indeed the resulting list).
(Having said that I just submitted in the MMP referendum in favour of open lists, not that I think many would bother ranking 60 candidates they've never heard of, but just in order to remove the argument that lists aren't democratic).
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Hard News: Reading the Numbers, in reply to James Littlewood*,
The BBC license fee is enforced by mustachioed officials in (alleged) detector vans, with a success rate of around 95%.
I guess the risk for them is that some bright spark decides they could get that to nearly 100% (and cut enforcement costs) by encrypting the signal and requiring Sky/Freeview to collect the fee as part of the basic package. Which would then lead to a whole bunch of people deciding they could live without the BBC and getting their TV by other channels.