Posts by Paul Campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Polity: Unity, success: Chicken, egg?, in reply to Samuel Scott,
I bought a small cottage by the ocean (Waitati, Dunedin) in 1980 for $8,500 - took me 3 years to pay it off (would have been sooner but my car was stolen during the '81 tour, cops weren't all that interested in finding it) - it had an outside bathroom and toilet, hot water from a coal range.
Remember it was a time of hyper-inflation and petrol shortages, salaries went up crazily (until Muldoon's disasterous price/wages freeze).
My Dad had a 3% 30 year house loan, he waited to pay it off.
In the US I had 30 year loans I could always pay principal off whenever I liked, refinancing was trivial, we followed the rates down refinancing several times over 10 years.
NZ mortgages suck, short terms, penalties for paying them off early, high interest rates.
When we moved back to NZ we got a mortgage (we put down 80%) that was at a slightly higher rate but also tied to our chequing account -the ATM showed a large negative number that slowly decreased as we paid it off.
-
Hard News: Friday Music: About Apple Music, in reply to Russell Brown,
To be fair, they’ll launch Apple Music on MacOS, Windows and iOS and will have an Android client in a couple of months. That’s a lot of people covered.
but still no Linux support I guess - no music for me I can't buy on CDs I guess
-
I'm not an Apple customer, they don't have an iTunes that runs on any platform I use day to day, they're sort of a foreign country to me. I used to be a fan, even a developer, but they've closed off their world from the rest of us.
-
Some times despite hundred thousands of good and honest people wishing as hard as they can the evil black witch still kills the beautiful fairy
(Who probably didn't need any more
of this crap any way) -
Oh come on, the main purpose of jaffas in cinemas in those days was to roll them from the back row down the (uncarpetted) steps during quiet moments ....
I'm sure the theatres swept them back up and repackaged them for later resale
-
I'm with Hillary, my favourite too, but I don't think Key's flag panel would consider it, not jingoistic enough
-
All NZ Post Offices used to always fly a NZ flag ... I remember walking up to the NZ North one one day and noticed that the flag was upside down, I walked in and asked very quietly "are you being robbed?" ....
More generally - I think the way we think of ourselves is kind of a sensitive thing - I remember coming back from 20 years of OE and finding myself walking on eggshells for a while, finding there were things I couldn't criticise, or at least not too loudly, there's kind of a brittle sensitivity about some things, we're very proud of NZ, but it's hard to talk about making it better by comparing it with other places
-
did he really mention her "long blonde hair"? how creepy
-
having watched the OAG trip around the various pokie scandals (like the TTCF), and other financial, umm, irregularities here in Dunedin and mostly just do nothing I can't decide whether they're being nobbled, have way too few resources or just plain don't care. Maybe it's a case of "don't rock the boat someone might notice us"
It's almost like we need a 4th branch of government - a "keeps government honest" branch that would be independant, and would include things like the ombudman's office, oia requests, the investigative branch (and maybe more) of the OAG, - and someone who does a general ongoing review to see if government departments are fufilling their legal requirements etc etc - at the moment there are a whole bunch of things that mere citizens have no standing in - you have to persuade the OAG to investigate and then prosecute
-
More Tremain ....
