Posts by Matthew Poole
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to Alice Ronald,
“But we’ve already been tested on that!” came up in one review session.
Fortunately I didn't ever encounter that. I was a late starter, entering uni at 26, so like you I came through under the old system (left mid-6th form, though) with all the attendant differences.
Perhaps it was also that big age difference (27 vs maybe 20) that gave me the different perspective on the value of breadth of education, but it still bugged me (clearly) that someone who's going to university would have a mindset of "If it's not directly related, it's not relevant". -
Busytown: School bully, in reply to Mark McGuire,
The governments intention to reduce the size of University councils and to increase the number of ministerial appointees , despite considerable opposition, makes it clear that changes are planned for the university sector, too.
The opposition is pretty much universal, too. Even Stuart McCutcheon, VC of U.Auckland, is opposed, and he's the epitome of a corporate honcho who thinks education is something you do by the numbers. I was listening to an RNZ piece late last year where every representative of tertiary education on the show was against the idea, from McCutcheon through to academics and off to a third group. Every single one of them said (paraphrased, obviously) "This is a bad idea, it is completely unsupported by the evidence, and you cannot run a university council as though it's a company board."
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Busytown: School bully, in reply to JonathanM,
Maybe it’s rose-coloured glasses, but it seems that with the cohorts since NCEA this is increasing?
Sample size of one and all that, I was part of the first year of students at U.Auckland that had to undertake general education papers as a component of our first under-grad degree. In one of the classes were a bunch of architecture students, taking one of the only GenEd papers that could fit in with their timetable. One day we were having a general discussion about the paper and what people thought of it, and one of the arch students had a moan about how the paper wasn't relevant to their degree so why were they having to take it? It was a chemicals and materials engineering paper, so I would have considered it at least mildly related, but it was also just generally good to be learning things outside my degree. That "I don't need to know this to pass my core degree" attitude is what you're seeing more widely, perhaps? As a B.Arch student she only had to take one GenEd paper, too, unlike most under-grads who have to take two.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
they must have misunderstood.
Probably. The income limits apply to the kick-starter funding that may be received above what's in KS, but the KS money is yours.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Farmer Green,
It makes good business sense to spend the money where it provides the best return.
But what’s good for the business is not necessarily what’s good for the owner in the short- to medium-term (in the long term, lower staff turnover and better morale and engagement result in higher profits). Investing in staff is good for the business. A new boat for the owner is probably not good for the business in any term.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
I think one of the reasons NZ is so bad for this is simply that we have far too high a proportion of small businesses
A source of a lot of our employment woes, I suspect. Small-business owners are frequently running a partnership, or they're the sole director and shareholder of a company, and their income is entirely from drawings on the business. Every dollar "wasted" on employees is a dollar that's not available for them to use for their own purposes. It's hard to see investing in staff as a good thing when you're bombarded with messages about how employees are lazy, good-for-nothing bludgers who want everything for nothing (fuck you, National) and there's a direct 1:1 relationship between money spent on staff and money not there to be spent on you.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
Another couple I know are just as furious with it because they’d joined assuming they’d be able to use it as deposit on first-house (which again was how it was marketed) only to be told their income is too high.
Their information is incorrect. You can always use your KS for a first-house deposit, up to a cap of not being allowed to take out the government's contributions. The income cap relates to the matching funds and other extra money, not to what's in your KS account. KS is your money and it is entirely within the rules to take out all the employee/employer contributions and investment returns to use as a deposit on a first house, even if you earn a million dollars a year.
As for it costing your friend income up front through a lower rate of pay, that only works for a single pay review round, and is probably only good for a thousand or two dollars a year. It's also only a "loss" if the money that they would have got from the pay increase would have been invested for a return equal to or higher than the return from your friend's KS fund; which is incredibly unlikely, so your friend is still ahead of their co-workers.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Kumara Republic,
a lot of these ICT shortage jobs seem to require degree-level qualifications
Which is frequently cookie-cutter HR ignorance of the roles for which they're hiring.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Sacha,
the IT industry’s potential, for instance.
Which is already contributing at least as much to GDP as do extractive industries, but without the huge pollution footprint or shipping costs.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
But really, if you live in Westport and you would quite like to get work, being told “you’re a dinosaur” by a well-off urban liberal isn’t very satisfying.
No, it's not, but if you care about getting work you might want to pay attention to your long-term prospects rather than just what's getting food on the table today. Everything is pointing to low-grade coal for burning (as opposed to coal for making steel) being very near to death, especially where it's been previously destined for China. The US has plenty of dirty coal of its own.