Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I'm sorry. David Farrar complaining that media didn't identify a person as being a partisan of a party? Pot, meet kettle.
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he wasn't confident about the SH16 > Southern motorway transition
I reckon that if you want to be a professional driver and carry passengers, you should need to do an advanced driving test and some form of local knowledge test - not London taxi standards, but knowing local landmarks, motorways, etc.
The two Uber drivers I've had were fine, but I've had several regular taxi drivers who didn't strike me as confident, and you see many taxi drivers with bad habits - like coasting at 20kph with cars behind them.
Having to do that would mean that in return for the effort of learning the neighbourhood and how to drive properly, there would be more chance of earning a decent living.
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Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Those places (Redfern, Bondi, CBD) are all in the inner suburbs.
Try living in Cronulla and working in Chatswood?
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Foster satellite business centers so there are plenty of good jobs out closer to the burbs so commuting to the center is required only for a shrinking % of jobs.
What happens when a couple both have jobs in Manukau and buy a house in the area, and then one of them finds a job in another "satellite business centre" in Albany and is faced with a two hour commute?
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Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
By which I really meant relative cost of living for wage earners - it's obviously very cheap to live in places like the West Coast or Central North Island, but unless you manage to find a job as the local doctor/solicitor/accountant it's also hard to earn a decent wage.
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Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to Rochelle Wilson,
Wellington's fine. The only people who think it's doing badly are landlords and property developers who want more unearned income. For those of us that actually work, there are lots of opportunities, and a way cheaper cost of living than the rest of NZ.
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Legal Beagle: Fact-checking Parliament:…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
The system that used to apply in some places overseas was that you had a local education authority that was elected (often it was the local council) and supervised schools, employed staff and did a lot of work that was easier to scale across several schools.You also had boards of governors, but they were limited in their powers - it stopped heads from behaving as if the school was their personal property.
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Legal Beagle: Fact-checking Parliament:…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Not to threadjack, but I think everyone in a school's catchment should be able to vote for school boards. Education isn't just a service to the children currently at school, it's a service for the whole community.
Equally, councils are elected to serve a community and happen to be able to levy taxes from property owners in that community.The members of that community (as determined by principal residence) should be eligible to vote. (I assume ratepayers who aren't eligible to vote in NZ because they aren't citizens or permanent residents can't vote as ratepayers?)
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The other issue with decentralised employment is that, from experience of somewhere like the Thames valley where employment *is* very decentralised, it makes it impossible to get to work by public transport. As a lad, I worked in Aldershot and lived in Haslemere, which are about 16km or 20/30 minutes drive apart. By public transport, it was several buses and trains taking well over an hour.
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There are tracts of abandoned housing on the fringes of cities like Vegas. They got built in the boom (driven of course by unchecked price inflation) and then after the crash, their "owners" walked out on their unaffordable mortgages (as many US state laws let you) and the properties belong to bankrupted banks. They aren't even that attractive to squatters, as they are so distant from the core city.
Closer to home, you've got Sydney's concentric rings of edge ghettos, getting steadily more deprived and downtrodden until you finally hit the Blue Mountains horse country.