Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Perhaps a better way of putting that is that if I had 800K, I would not be grizzling about it, I'd be really stoked, because I could buy the property I live in now and be freehold with about 300K to spare. I'd hardly consider myself a battler at that point.
-
Cracker: Johnny Foreigner & the Auckland…, in reply to Damian Christie,
And as I said, its not a magic bullet, just one in a number of tools that can be brought in, tried out, without collapsing the entire house of cards.
That I certainly agree with. We should still, at the very least, have the political independence that enables us to tinker with such ideas. If we can't tinker, the decisions will be mostly ideological, in the end.
who live in fairly unremarkable homes now worth a million bucks, being forced to forfeit them, because they’re still on the same unremarkable income that saw them scraping to buy the house for $200k not so many years ago
The compulsion would suck, but on the other hand, they would have $800k to play with. They could rent a very remarkable place with that for quite a long time, and have plenty left over to invest. Not that I think it's a good idea, but I wouldn't cry massive buckets of tears for the misfortune of millionaires being forced to cash up.
-
Cracker: Johnny Foreigner & the Auckland…, in reply to Damian Christie,
eah, but assuming even a little bit of the problem is supply/demand – and we’re constantly told we don’t have the amount of housing stock we need, reducing demand, even by a few percent, is going to have some impact.
The question is whether restricting foreign ownership does actually reduce demand. Demand's ultimate source is "people who want to live in property". Restricting who can own them doesn't really much change who wants to live in them.
-
I don't think anyone really knows for sure what drives property prices. It's likely to be a lot of things, one of which is very unpredictable - sentiment.
I've thought for a long time that the biggest overall factor is very low interest rates. But that doesn't explain why Auckland is running away from the rest of the country.
Residential property is the single biggest chunk of capital in this country, by more than head and shoulders. The price of it is thus an entire economy problem. Slight changes in interest rates magnify into big changes in the basic cost of life. Slight rises in property value translate into tens of thousands of dollars into the pockets of people who might even have below average incomes. Money like that becoming available washes into the rest of the economy, and when it disappears, the economy stalls. It really can react that fast to very minor changes. We can drive an economic recovery very easily, so long as we are prepared to accept a recession afterward, or have no concerns about the massively inflationary effect.
Foreign investment could be a highly significant driver. We just don't know for sure. Even if most buyers are locals, that doesn't really matter - so long as there are some people around driving the cost up, that affects everyone. It only takes one person bidding against you in an auction on something you really want for it to go right up to their limit.
I don't personally think it's very significant, though. Investor greed is every bit as much true here as anywhere else. Local investors with the money to buy want to make profits just the same as foreign ones.
But we could try it to find out.
We certainly would not be doing anything exceptional by insisting on residential ownership of property. Quite the opposite, that seems to be the norm everywhere in the world. Is it racist? No. It's nationalist, which is not exactly the same thing. Since white people are the biggest foreign buyers of our property, it's actually more likely to be inverse racist, if anything.
-
Nice story, David. Until last year, I had not travelled on an NZ train since I was about 3. At that age, my parents put me and my 6 year old brother on a train to Whanganui. My grandmother vividly remembers refusing to allow the train to depart until we were found, asleep somewhere on board. Different times. I think we were put on a domestic flight the next time, no danger of ending up in some random town.
-
Hard News: Tooled Up for Food, in reply to B Jones,
you burn your tongue on the tomatoes and other watery bits.
Yes, they're perfect little heat bombs. It's a good characteristic, so long as you know in advance.
-
Hard News: Tooled Up for Food, in reply to B Jones,
A surface transferring more heat will generate more caramelisation and Maillard reactions, and more tastiness.
The thermal conductivity of aluminium is around 3 times higher than iron. It also has over twice the specific heat, so per mass it is more resistant to temperature change, holds much more energy. But it is far less dense, nearly 3 times less. So an aluminium pan weighing half as much as an iron one would have the same thermal mass properties, but with a much higher ability to transfer heat into the food. It would be 3/2 times the volume of the iron pan (despite being half the weight).
I expect that they're not used as thermal masses for different reasons. For starters, pots and pans are usually coated in non-stick materials which can't stand very high temperatures - Teflon melts at 327 C. Aluminium itself melts at only 660 C, whereas iron can take up to 1538 C. So if you like to leave your pan to warm up on a gas hob, you've got a good chance of ruining a teflon coated aluminium pan. Secondly, if you're using aluminium, it's probably because you want it light, and who really does understand about specific heat? Not most consumers.
Which comes to the main real difference - iron has just been around so much longer that all the of the recipes and techniques are built around it. You have use a different tool differently, so a recipe designed for a cast iron skillet needs to be changed for an aluminium pan. Similarly with a cast iron vessel in an oven - you probably won't melt aluminium in an oven, but a thin aluminium tray transfers heat much faster, so your cook time should probably be adjusted down, or the oven heat reduced (or both). When you take it out, the aluminium will cool faster (since it is typically very thin - you chose aluminium for it's light weight, rather than its thermal mass). This can be pretty easily avoided by not taking it out, just turning off the oven and opening the door a bit for a gradual cooling.
Aluminium is also more toxic than iron.
On thermal mass, a strange fact I learned this year. Water has an astoundingly high value. It holds ten times as much energy per kg than iron. So if you have a skillet full of boiling water, consider that there is probably more energy in the water than in the pan itself. A 2kg iron frying pan would be holding as much energy as 200ml of water at, say, 100 C. It is the water that is keeping everything in the pan at an even temperature, on the whole.
-
Hard News: Tooled Up for Food, in reply to Gareth,
And that is why I’m suffering BBQ envy.
Me too. That is a fit piece of gear.
-
Hard News: Community standards, in reply to Konrad Kurta,
apart from protecting technologically illiterate middle-aged people from hardcore porn
Except they can just watch their DVDs and old videos, and Super 8s, and read their dirty mags. There's only hundreds of millions of those floating around in the UK already.
-
Hard News: Community standards, in reply to Matthew Smith,
What conservative doesn’t hate porn!”
Heh. More accurately, what conservative doesn't hate other people having porn?
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 327 328 329 330 331 … 1066 Older→ First