Posts by Matthew Poole
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I reckon most people live their lives without reference to laws, in communities, as human beings. Laws are an imposition that serve the interests of the ruling classes.
Speed limits and other road laws serve the ruling classes? Most people in modern societies deal with that class of law every day, and they're a solution that has arisen as a response to people dying on the roads.
Taxation serves the ruling classes? Really? Who gets the most bang for their buck from the public health system, public education, public libraries...? Sure as hell ain't the rich.
At any level of society, from the multinational to the individual, the only reason that your property is yours is the law. The very concept of the serfs owning property is a legal construct. Take away the law, and we'll be back to fealty and real ruling classes before you know it. Humanity has demonstrated a near-total inability to operate societies larger than tiny villages without resorting to law-of-the-jungle, you-own-what-you-can-defend systems of "justice". Or, worse, appointing a leader who's above the law.
Even in very, very small societies, such as rainforest tribes in the Amazon, blood feuds and absolute power vesting in a leader are fairly normal. -
Ah, my bad on attempted murder. For some reason I had the idea that its maximum sentence was also life.
That's some very bizarre legal reasoning, and we're not going to see the downstream effects for at least two decades. Hopefully sanity will see that repealed, but I'm not holding my breath. The trend to vengeance isn't exactly new, after all.
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Garth is a bit antsy about revealing SST funding too.
That's certainly something I hope Russell will ask about: how does SST justify its obsessive secrecy about funding sources while also pretending to be a charitable trust? Is it really so shameful to let the public know from whence the money came?
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I have a sneaking suspicion that crime reporting might decrease slightly in the next 5 years ... With the police slowly but steadily rolling out encrypted digital communications that the media cannot listen to
I wouldn't count on that, actually.
If it does play out as you predict, it'll be considerably less than five years before we see the results. The nationwide roll-out of the digital radios is happening this year, after trials in a few locations around the country. Tactical squads (AOS, STG) and the DPS have been using encrypted digital for several years, and the project to deploy it to every portable and mobile radio is now in the final stages. I can state this with some degree of authority, as I have an acquaintance who works as a radio engineer at Police national HQ and is closely involved.My hesitation is based on apocryphal stories from Australia (Sydney, I think it was), where after rolling out digital radio and refusing to accommodate the media in any way - after all, getting those annoying camera monkeys out of the way is a huge benefit to police officers - a major murder investigation encountered a wee roadblock: a press conference was held to ask for public assistance, and all the major news outlets agreed amongst themselves to not attend. Their argument was that they need action footage to retain eyeballs. People want to see officers in tactical clothing, pointing firearms, or people being cut out of cars. They don't want to see file photos or shots of an empty street every time there's an event worth reporting. So the story goes that the media sent a message, and the police heard it, with the resolution being that newsrooms of reputable outlets were given the ability to listen in on police comms.
Assuming that this is a semi-accurate account, and I certainly see no reason to disbelieve that the major players would collude on something like this to achieve a long-term benefit, I wouldn't be too quick to conclude that the cops going to digital radio will keep the media in the dark. -
*A Judge sentencing a strike three offender must give the maximum sentence unless it is ‘manifestly unjust’ to do so
A Judge sentencing a strike three offender must give the maximum sentence.
That Judge must order that sentence to be served with no parole unless it is 'manifestly unjust' to do so. But it has to be the maximum sentence. There is no discretion about that at all.
There's a big comprehension gap between what you say and what Act says. Huge gap. So we now have attempted murder, manslaughter and murder as crimes that, as third strikes, will attract automatic life sentences regardless of the circumstances?
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It's worth pointing out here that the IRD requires you to declare all your income, not just the legal stuff. If you check the helpsheet for the IR3 income form you'll see that 'illegal income' is specifically mentioned as one use for this form. I believe the IRD is prevented from notifying the police about illegal activities (someone correct me if I'm wrong). They don't mind how you got the cash, they just want you to pay the correct taxes on it.
Yes, I know that the IRD just wants their share, but that doesn't mean that people whose money comes from less-than-legal sources are all lining up to pay their taxes. The IRD has an entire department dedicated to "vice" income.
And you're right about the information sharing. The Tax Administration Act makes it a criminal offence to release information about a taxpayer's affairs except to their tax agent, for the purposes of determining benefit eligibility, or for enforcement of a couple of cross-border agreements. No exemptions for tipping off the fuzz about someone's illicit income-generating activities.
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Still do know some prostitutes that never paid their taxes in the IRD sense
Hence the tongue-in-cheek comment about the fictional prostitutes being all compliant with their GST. Now that it's legal I'm sure more of them are paying their taxes, but I doubt it's anywhere near all of them.
Moral taxes aside, they're using taxpayer-funded medical care on a regular basis (if they know what's good for them), and taking advantage of taxpayer-subsidised condoms. Why shouldn't the rest of us expect them to pay income tax too? -
So - civil servant hide is it?
There's nothing civil about Hide, and he needs some reminding that he is, in fact, a servant of the electorate. You'd get quite a few sandwiches out of him, though.
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Between 2000 and 2009 he made profits of $4.6 million and returned $510,000 to the Crown through GST on what he spent on prostitutes.
(pulls out handy divide by nine calculator) he spent it ALL on prostitutes? I'm impressed
I'm more impressed that the prostitutes were all fully compliant with their tax obligations, and that they registered for GST. But that's just me.
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Weta, for example may choose to employ people overseas to work on digital animation on line, the downside of that is that more money goes out of the country. The reverse is also possible that Weta could do more overseas work from Wellington thus earning valuable foreign currency but then you get to the point of running out of actual people to do the work and you are back to square one.
Weta would be quite happy to just be able to upload daily runs to foreign clients in an hour instead of a day. When you have companies seriously considering using international air freight to send hard drives full of content to the other side of the world, something is very, very wrong. It's the equivalent of digital pre-press and graphics artists using couriers to send their work across town instead of sending it by FTP or a web site - something that very definitely happens in this country, courtesy of our backwoods internet.
One thing that the PF project would be great for is affordable link diversity for major companies. At the moment the only choice for high-availability terrestrial connectivity is to buy a protected circuit on the SCC. That's expensive, both because it can be (courtesy of the monopoly) and because the hardware to do that over the SCC is expensive. If companies can get link diversity on terrestrial services from competing providers at the physical level, they'll take it. They may even save money doing it, in addition to getting real diversity of service.