Posts by Matthew Poole
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Freight is the answer to profitablity and efficiency for rail and if the Auckland/ Hamilton and Palm Nth./ were electrified then Tony Friedlander and his trucking buddies would face a serious challenge to their long distance journeys.
Was talking to my engineer flatmate about trains and such, and he said that electrics just aren't suited to freight. They do superbly as passenger carriers because they accelerate fast, and are quiet, but they're also very light. They don't have the weight to try and haul thousands of tonnes on any kind of gradient, never mind some of the gradients that we've got going for us. A DX diesel, weighing in the vicinity of 100T, still needs a sanding unit to ensure traction on hills. The feather-weight electrics don't stand a chance.
So, really, electrifying the NIMT would be great for improving passenger carriage speeds but it would be obscenely expensive and improve nothing for the side of the equation that actually makes money - freight.
We'd be better off spending those large sums of money on re-cambering NIMT to allow higher speeds. -
Very interesting, given Telecom's confident hints that it would get the Jesus Phone.
I said to a friend yesterday, Telecom was probably unwilling to be out-bastarded by the iJobs on the revenue-shafting^Wsharing scheme. I wonder what he had to offer Vodafone to get them to shift, because as you say they've been rather uninterested in his overtures until now.
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Craig, does it matter? I know precisely where you're going with this, but remember that the architects of the plans that gave rise to those events spun off to form Act.
Also, we've seen just how spectacularly "successful" it all was. Bottom half of the OECD on broadband along with some of the most expensive telephone services, rescues of Air NZ and BNZ, repurchase of the rail and the rolling stock when their private sector owners wouldn't put in the money to do things they promised, increasing electrickery prices after being promised that competition would make the damn stuff cheaper, the banks that we did own now making stunning profits for their Australian owners...Forgive me for being deeply cynical about anyone who thinks that privatisation has in any significant way benefited NZ. The successful privatisations, that haven't materially fucked various sectors of the country over, have been the very small ones - GP, NZ Steel. Works possibly, though I don't know enough about the costs of using Works Infrastructure for Crown projects vs what could've been achieved with Ministry of Works getting corporatised instead. The rest of them, well, we're either demonstrably worse-off (BNZ and Telecom) or the benefits are somewhat nebulous. Just what does AIAL being a private company get us that an SOE wouldn't? And AIAL isn't exactly popular with its key customers, namely the airlines, either, so it's not winning on the "niceness" stakes.
For all of which we got something in the vicinity of $29 billion, if my memory serves me correctly.
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Kordia's an SOE, not actually privatised. At least, that's my understanding of their description of themselves and also what's been presented in the media. Orcon's been described as a state-owned ISP, subsequent Kordia's purchase.
Terralink certainly was privatised. I think I'd heard of them, but not entirely sure. As you say, you don't hear the wheel that doesn't squeak.
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T3h Russel said:
We return to the conclusion that New Zealand's problem wasn't privatisation per se, but some really bad privatisations.
I was always struck by how little we actually got for the "privilege" of being raped with a splintery broomstick by Fay, Ritchwhite et al. NZ got less than $30b for all the assets that were hocked off in that period of fire sales, including the corporatised-and-efficient Telecom, the BNZ, NZ Rail, etc. We've now paid a lot of that back directly through repurchases and bail-outs, and indirectly we've repaid many, many times over in monopoly rents to Telecom and the various other under-investing entities that once existed solely for the benefit of the country at large.
For the most part, privatisation hasn't delivered us very much good at all from what I can see. Can anyone point to an example of a privatised entity that isn't gouging, under-investing, and generally screwing their customers over? I'm too young to remember everything that was hocked off, I just know about the very worst bits because they've continued to bite us on the arse.
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It's not at all unusual for SOEs to run quite well, thank you. Look at Telecom, which went from utterly dire as NZ Post Office Telephone Services to providing quite good service in its post-corporatisation-but-pre-privatisation guise. That's based on a goodly number of comments from people who remember the time, rather than personal experience given that I was all of 10 when the last Labour gummint got the flick. All we gained from flogging them off was an unresponsive monopoly that happily screwed the country and its existing assets for the benefit of its shareholders.
Also look at Airways, and NZ Post. Both SOEs, both returning nice dividends, both doing their core business (well, NZ Post's latest choices on parcel post are arguable) so well that they get lucrative consulting jobs for foreign entities. Obviously the rightist dogma that the state cannot run a proper business isn't any kind of absolute.
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Rich said:
You mean a TCP connection needs 1/40 of the downstream data rate to send its ACK packets?
I didn't do the maths myself, I simply relied upon the reputations of the people making the claims. But when you put it that way, yes, that does sound about right.
There are a number of options for streaming media, including things like multicast. Their deployment within NZ's backbone has been underway for quite a while, increasing gradually. They're not quite so reliant on the upstream connection speed of the clients, usually, but they still require downstream speed, especially as their definition and thus size increases.
Regards the improvements of bandwidth vs computers in general, 10Gig-E is a mainstream standard, 40Gig-E has been standardised, and 100Gig-E is in progress. Five years ago, Gig-E was the mainstream and 10Gig-E was the very bleeding edge. Progress happens, and pretty fast. The nicest thing is that you just have to upgrade the ends, not the middle, provided you've got fibre. Look at the SCC, which just keeps on getting faster without having to be re-laid. Can't do that with copper.
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Craig, even if the NZI's bottom estimate of the benefits is out by 200%, and that would require both some seriously over-optimistic initial calculations and some very adverse economic conditions, the roll-out would still pay for itself in a decade.
Because it's infrastructure, once it's there it stays there. Unlike the roads, the network itself earns money in addition to the money made by services running atop it. Even an open-access network charges connection fees. -
Craig said:
Sorry for sounding all Cullen-ish here, but perhaps you'd like to tell us which social services you'd cut "pittances" from to pay for this -- health, education, vote Police etc.? Tax hikes? Increasing national debt?
Unlike Cullen, I have no huge qualms about debt financing for infrastructure. It'd be a multi-year undertaking, so the cost would be spread out over the lifetime of the project. And unlike a lot of infrastructure work, the projections are based on increased income not decreased costs.
As for Hamilton, I've not heard about this reported lack of business. I'm aware that shops around the circuit saw a greater drop in trade during the lead-up than was expected, because of the barriers and so forth, but they knew something negative would probably happen. Are people seriously claiming that 100-something-thousand people passed through Hamilton over the space of three days and nobody was better off? That beggars belief!
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BenWilson said:
If that was only going to cost 5 billion, why wouldn't you do it?
And that's the rub, really. Even if it costs $8b, which was the upper end of a figure Maurice Williamson quoted, that's still a pittance. It's not even 8% of GDP, and the most conservative estimate from the NZI of the financial benefits of widespread access to fast 'net is $2.5b/year. In four years it's paid for itself, with change, and from there it's all money for jam.
Seriously, the numbers are so ridiculously favourable that I'm stunned anyone actually argues against it.