Posts by Matthew Poole
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At least it'll be the first Mayor of Megatropolis who makes the appointment, not the ATA
Sadly, no
Well, kinda. The law says the Transition Agency must, as soon as practicable, appoint a chief executive for the Auckland Council for a term ending no later than 29 June 2012. So it's a bit between both of our statements, but that doesn't make it any better.
And, sadly, that bit is the law, not just a draft law. Fucking Rodney! -
A former associate of Rankin at the old East Coast Bays City Council, Graham Parfitt, said he showed "total disdain for the democratic process" back then and this had characterised his term as chief executive at Auckland City.
That makes him pretty much the top contender, I'd have thought. At least it'll be the first Mayor of Megatropolis who makes the appointment, not the ATA, or he'd definitely be a shoo-in as opposed to just probably being one. Certainly if Rodney was doing the appointing it would be a one-horse race and Rankin would be the horse.
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but rather specific issues with the route from here to there that more bandwidth won't necessarily fix:
Youtube Performance on TelstraClear
Cable is shared bandwidth. Note that there's no consistency with who's seeing those issues and who's not in the comments? Yet they've all got the same path to YouTube. To my inner-IP engineer, that says congestion on the segment from the head end to the premises. It'll be affecting the people on particular (over-subscribed) segments, but not everyone. The solution is more bandwidth, but since it needs to be added to the "last mile" it won't be helped any by a new international cable.
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I still can't believe that 7ms is going to make that much difference
Try this article on how much difference a few ms can make with modern, automated, supercomputer-based trading systems.
Traders here are too small to justify the expense of putting a full trading system into the US, but that doesn't mean they don't want every ms of advantage they can get their hands on from this side of the world.
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RoO, I'm going on the assumption that a real CGT isn't going to happen here. That means that we have to live with what we've got, and that means a bright line that sets a minimum term of ownership below which it's assumed that all profits from sale of a house are taxable. At the moment there is no minimum term, even though there's provision to tax proceeds on sale of a house, and that makes it significantly harder for the IRD to enforce the law.
You want the perfect solution, I want the solution that can happen right now. The solution that National, in all their spineless, gutless, visionless glory might actually implement. -
they need local caches to deal with the fact that we're separated from most other networks by significant distances, and latency will always be a factor.
Except that latency is irrelevant for most of what consumers do today. It doesn't matter if latency is 50ms or 500ms, or even 5s, if you're watching YouTube. What matters is the size of the pipe, not how long it takes the request to get to the far side.
Latency matters for real-time interaction, like video conferencing and financial trading, and those things can't benefit from a cache at any point since they rely on end-to-end connections between parties.
Caches reduce load on the connection, but they don't replace the connection. The connection still needs to be there, and be as quick as possible, for utility to applications that matter. It doesn't matter if your email takes a minute to be delivered, or it takes five seconds before that clip on YouTube starts to buffer up (especially if it only takes it 10 seconds to load fully), but it does matter if your video conference is like trying to have a phone conversation with the moon or your automatic trading computers are several fractions of a second behind everyone else's in getting information to process into buy/sell orders. -
My understanding is that Southern Cross has substantial unused capacity, but its owners ration that to keep prices high.
Given that, it's questionable how the new cable is going to pay its costs back.
SCC is thoroughly paid for. It was paid for several years ago, in fact, and now is just producing cream for the owners. Bandwidth doesn't have to be expensive, so it actually won't take much income for a consortium to pay off a new cable if they take a long-term (10-15 years) approach to recouping the investment. Making $100m/year is not a big ask, especially since, as Sam Morgan has pointed out, the 7ms latency drop against SCC will appeal to major financial institutions - people on the trading floors there would run over their grandmothers with steamrollers to get a 7ms reduction in trading latency. That's worth huge money.
Also, with the NBN plan, we need all the capacity we can get. Statistics NZ projects that the number of households will reach 1.84m by 2021. If 75% of those are connected to the NBN, that's 1.38m households. If average speeds on the NBN are 25Mbps (I sincerely hope that it's more like 250Mbps by then, but I'm a realist), that's 34.5Tbps of bandwidth demand if everyone is saturating the average connection speed simultaneously. The capacity of SCC coupled with the upgraded capacity of Pacific Fibre would satisfy about two-thirds of that demand, but that's if they're dedicated entirely to serving residential requirements. Obviously they won't be, and shouldn't be, but it shows just how much capacity we really need if the NBN is to be more than just a big let-down. It's no use having a fire hose to water the garden if your pipe at the street is a straw.
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is anyone going to mention the fairly obvious "solution"?
stamp duty or CGT.
Actually, it's even easier than that. Change the law to have a bright line rule on what constitutes "flipping", as people have called it here. At the moment, it's subjective and easily disputed. The law provides for a CGT, but avoiding it is simple.
If the law deemed a purchase to have been made "with the purpose and intent of resale" if the house were sold within x (say three) years of the date of purchase, that would simplify the IRD's task greatly. Have a provision so that objective conditions requiring sale (such as divorce, another child, death, long-term migration, redundancy) could have the "deemed purchase" waived, and suddenly there's a huge loophole closed. It has even been suggested by National, so there's hope that it might happen.
Extend the regime to include houses bought for the purpose of renting, which is another loophole, and suddenly you're capturing a lot of property speculators without unduly harming owner-occupiers.
It could also be extended further to say that the sale of more than one property in the same "x years" period, including by associated persons, is a deemed purchase for the purposes of CGT. That'd knock the use of trusts on the head.Hell, give IRD another $10m/year for enforcement of the existing law and watch the money flow. They'd pay for that extra money in the first six months, I'm sure.
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The CAP costs Europeans 100billion Euros against a GDP of 12 trillion, so something under 1%.
Hence it's pretty sustainable, and a reasonable trade off for food security (one must remember that starvation is an actual living memory for people in Europe) and maintenance of landscape values.
Sure it's good for Europe (ignoring the inefficiencies created by subsidised production), but it's not good for the third world or for open market producers such as NZ that lose trade opportunities.
Subsidies are always bad for the market in the long run, and the CAP is no different. Toss in its serious distorting effects on the global agricultural markets (coupled with the US' hyper-hypocritical position on protectionism) and you've got third-world farmers who cannot make a fair living from their produce because inefficient European farmers can still sell their product in the domestic market more cheaply than super-efficient subsistence farmers can get their product on the shelves. That NZ is able to out-price European produce on European supermarket shelves is testament to our ingenuity and the cohesion of our trade bodies, as well as an indictment on the CAP. -
But...but...but you seem thoughtful and articulate and rational and altogether too sane to "like" that steaming pile of very expensive and shiny shit.
How could it not make you furious?
Maybe the same way it doesn't make me furious: it's a work of fiction. I watched it to go "Ooooh, aah, pretty, shiny", not to go "This is a horrible, condescending depiction of the assumed intellectual inferiority of native peoples, perpetuated by an industry that glosses over some of history's true horrors in the name of 'entertainment'."
If I wanted to analyse movies, I'd go and study film and media at university. I watch fictional movies for the same reason I read fictional books: to be entertained. Sure I watched District 9 and thought "That was one seriously fucked-up system", but I didn't go looking for every last nuance that I could find. When I want to find outrageous things to be, well, outraged about, I come online and go surfing for news. I don't feel the need to be presented with accurate portrayals by every fictional means of entertainment with which I avail myself, sometimes I watch mindless shit for the sake of watching mindless shit.