Posts by Rich of Observationz
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OnPoint: PREFU 2011: "What credit downgrade?", in reply to Ian Dalziel,
You can’t just store substantial quantities of methane in tanks like petrol, or even LPG. It boils at -161C and typically has to be cryogenically refrigerated, which is complex, expensive and energy wasting. Or pumped underground into salt caverns - if we had any salt caverns conveniently placed.
Also, I would say that in terms of pipelines and powerlines, we suffer from sparse population. If we were running gas for 20 million people, there’d be several pipes and failure of one would be acceptable. With just 2 million or so people in the upper North Island, a full-size spare would spend most of its time idle.
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OnPoint: PREFU 2011: "What credit downgrade?", in reply to Craig Ranapia,
No he just:
- is heavily entwined with the government of a corrupt Central American tax haven- was a UK politician while not actually fully resident there for tax purposes – representation without taxation, as it were
- runs his political spending through an offshore firm, again to avoid paying tax
- makes his money through corporate raiding that even raised the eyebrows of a British High Court judge
- I won't even mention various grey areas around US investigative agencies, as he seems to have managed to "prove" himself nominally in the clear on that, and I wouldn't regard said activities as immoral anyway
I find it interesting that he’s starting to participate in *our* politics, obviously without doing anything ridiculous like moving here, taking residency or filing a tax return.
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They served no masters, neither church nor king
That might have been the case for a hundred or so years between the abolition of mandatory state religions and the introduction of substantial government funding,..
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OnPoint: PREFU 2011: "What credit downgrade?", in reply to Bart Janssen,
Not to mention that keeping people in important jobs (like maritime regulation and oil spill response, just as a for instance) reduces unemployment, builds our skill base and ensures essential public services.
Reacting to an economic downturn by sacking people from those jobs and employing others in filling Keynsian holes (cycle paths and fanzones, for instance) is irrational.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to Russell Brown,
'@' and '.' are legal characters in the path part of URLs. In fact, I think everything except ampersand, equals and space are.
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Don't know about white South Africans (although I might have well founded suspicions -
However I'm bloody sure that a lot of my fellow English (and other UK) migrants moved here under the misapprehension that NZ was the white monoculture they weren't getting in the UK, and would prefer that it became so. If you want evidence, pick up (don't even think of buying) a copy of the weekly editions of the UK tabloids that sully our dairies.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to Russell Brown,
In the UK, there are 54 billionaires. One amongst them, James Dyson, pays more tax than all the others put together. I haven't seen similar figures for here, but I'd suspect the same thing goes on.
I'm sure the many public servants and corporate managers on six-figure salaries pay an unavoidably large amount of PAYE, which would increase the value for tax paid by $150k+ households. The asset rich, OTOH pay virtually no tax in NZ.
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It only takes a law to pass through parliament, and bang, we’ve got a transactions tax
And all the speculative trading moves to a state that doesn't have one. Even if the US and EU were to bring in a Tobin tax, there would still be tax havens (which are after all sovereign communities entitled (I suppose) to run their own affairs).
A graduated wealth tax and a corporate turnover tax would be far more effective.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to merc,
Um:
"... its authority is derived from the U.S. Congress and is subject to congressional oversight. Additionally, the members of the Board of Governors, including its chairman and vice-chairman, are chosen by the President and confirmed by Congress. Thus the Federal Reserve has both private and public aspects. The U.S. Government receives all of the system's annual profits, after a statutory dividend of 6% on member banks' capital investment is paid, and an account surplus is maintained..."
That doesn't sound like "privately owned" to me. But then, if one is paranoid enough, one can believe anything. It's owned by the I11umin4t1, or the Elders of Zion. Banks don't have to pay interest on money "created" through fractional reserve lending. The Queen of England's a lizard. Etc.
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Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest, in reply to BenWilson,
I think any benefits of FTAs are grossly overstated. If we produce stuff that people want, they'll buy it, FTA or no FTA. And a typical FTA with the US involves massive concessions from the victim state and none from America, where protection rules.