Posts by Rob Stowell
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New song from Shaft is kinda mellow 'indy-pop' Meteor in your mind
Should be something they play Friday night at the Darkroom? -
Hard News: Friday Music: Back on the K, in reply to Mike O'Connell,
Their first tour here was in I’m pretty sure 1984.
1984 would be right. Great gig. I don't remember The Chills or Sneaky Feelings - for some reason I thought it might have been The Great Unwashed - memory can play odd tricks.
The Sandridge was a funny venue. We smuggled in a mate who couldn't get a ticket through a toilet window. But VF were on fire. I seem to remember hearing they did some busking round town beforehand. For a stripped back 3-piece they were very danceable. -
Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think I saw a poll where he was running at 10% vs Stein’s 5%,
He’s starting to poll above 10%. 538 puts Johnson at 10% currently. But I’ve seen 12 somewhere. No money, but a small chance he’ll get on the ballot.
He also says he’ll give up the pot during the campaign and continue if elected president. "I want to be completely on top of my game, all cylinders." -
Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to nzlemming,
Leaving aside how one defines ‘peacetime’ (the US has been engaged in near-perpetual war since at least 2001
The US has been engaged in perpetual war since 1942.
I wrote 'pretty much forever'. Then thought: NEVER WRITE ANYTHING ON THE INTERNET YOU'RE NOT WILLING TO SPEND HOURS DEFENDING WITH RESEARCH, YOU DILAPIDATED GOOSE.
Yeah, I sometimes shout at myself. It's necessary - I'm subject to selective deafness :)
But what Sanders does that no-one else in US politics dares - at all, I can think of - is explicitly tie some of American's sense of the world getting worse and their lives collapsing to the endless clamour for tax cuts.
All while Donald Trump straight up lies that the US is 'the most heavily taxed nation on earth.' -
Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Deborah,
What’s not disingenuous is thinking about how big tax increases play out in an election campaign.
Sure. But there's got to be a way - because MOST VOTERS would be BETTER OFF in terms of money in their pockets. Call the 'tax increase' better and cheaper health insurance ... ?
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Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The implications of his tax proposals have never really had a major public airing, because he wasn’t the frontrunner, Clinton didn’t want to go hard and it suited Trump to pretend to sympathise with him. The Atlantic looked at it in February. It would have been a bloodbath.
That Atlantic article appears to get a lot of things wrong, very simply and quickly, regarding the Sanders' tax plan.
Eg:The taxes Sanders is calling for are in a different league from any peacetime Democratic candidate in history.
Leaving aside how one defines 'peacetime' (the US has been engaged in near-perpetual war since at least 2001 - coupled with tax decreases) income tax under Roosevelt in the depression went from 25% in 1925 and finally to 24% in 1929. In 1932 the top marginal tax rate was increased to 63% during the Great Depression
And talking about Sanders' single payer health-care as a massive tax increase when most economists agree it would decrease the overall cost of healthcare in the US is beyond disingenuous. -
Thanks for writing this. It’s sad and terrible. And then the painful silence.
Not the same, but I lost my brother to suicide/depression, and it’s also been hard to talk about – except with some remarkable people, who just who get it. 20 years ago this May, and I still miss him. -
Southerly: A Tale of Two Iceblocks: Part…, in reply to Idiot Savant,
I think you’re onto it Ian. Part of the point of a carbon tax is to signal to the world that we are serious about reducing carbon – so hey, how about you? Price signals to consumers* are one part of the project – but only one part. International signalling is important too.
Clearly to have any chance at a decent impact, taxing carbon needs to be global. Trade agreements in future will almost certainly work along these lines (unless the world sees a Trump presidency. In which case, all bets are off. For pretty much everything!)
[*A carbon tax isn’t just – or even primarily? – aimed at consumers, but at producers, too, of course. Isn’t it possible that the NZ iceblock manufacturer will (in response to a carbon tax) even further reduce their dirty energy consumption, install a wind generator, avoid any carbon tax at all and end up doing ok – especially as dirty energy gets phased out in China?] -
Good work Steven. Again basic innumeracy at the Herald - they seem to jump from the cited figures that 33-75% (ridiculously wide so probably dubious anyway - especially at the high-end which is 'self-reported') of CS abusers were victims of CSA (at least a tiny bit plausible) to 33-75 of CS victims will become abusers - which is a completely different category.
A/ they've got the wrong end of the stick, and b/ it's damaging and it's complete nonsense. (You only have to consider that most victims of CSA are female, and most abusers male, to see how this can't make sense.) -
Hard News: Back in Christchurch, in reply to Sacha,
Word returns
Ace. Always telling myself to get to more next time – now it’s arriving :)