Posts by James Butler
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Cracker: Another Capital Idea..., in reply to Danielle,
And I really do think we have an utterly luxurious lifestyle, the kind of thing I could only dream about when I was younger (were you ever hand-to-mouth? Do you remember what that’s like?). I’m not entitled to this, either: it’s pure dumb luck and privilege. So I couldn’t possibly whine about increased taxes in the higher bracket: I would welcome them. The whining is not only embarrassing but really unjust to other people who are subsisting on so much less.
I just lost a lengthy post due to a network outage at work, but Danielle has mostly said it for me… Considering that at one stage we were bringing up two kids on the student allowance, our current single-income-a-bit-south-of-the-top-bracket mostly feels pretty sweet.
That said, there are some things about having a modest income which can make it harder to save money in the long term – when we urgently needed (ding ding! privilege speaking!) replacements for our TV and computer recently we couldn’t get secondhand ones, because we have no savings and can’t get a credit card because of (minor) bad debts from a more straitened past; but we were given free rein to spend up to $5000 on HP on new stuff. Only just managed to restrain myself.
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Russell, the other day I was going to compliment Cactuslab for enabling YouTube redirect on iOS, but I forgot. Now it's gone again...
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Up Front: P.A. Story, in reply to recordari,
Silly, everyone knows only the Clone Warriors are Māori.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to BenWilson,
I have something like it on my Android. You point it and it shows the sky stars, and other objects.
OTOH it seems like another great way for geeks to avoid going outside and looking at the sky. Where do I sign up?
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Hard News: A nation bullied, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
The Fox News website ran a leading headline about fractions in the Republican party for a short while today. They never do that.
What? Basic numeracy? Agreed.
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Up Front: P.A. Story, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Including embedded images, like YouTube clips can?
Only if you have a PAS Gold Account.
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Up Front: P.A. Story, in reply to James Butler,
Replying to self: Gah, how could I have missed that I was quoting from a chapter which is almost called "The Manatee on Sun Street"?
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"Enlightenment came to Reverend Overbridge on the rugby field; nothing could ever be the same after that."
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Hard News: Meanwhile in Epsom ..., in reply to A. Theo Logian,
Rodney Hide is already the Minister for Local Government...
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OnPoint: Why Rightwingers Should Support…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
That’s not my understanding of what we’re likely to see. Capital gain is profit you make from your house value increasing just because houses do that.
Investing money by improving the property would be exempt from the capital gains tax wouldn’t it? Otherwise if you buy a empty bit of land, build a house on it, and then sell it, you’d be taxed on the whole house value as a capital gain.
If the tax is a tax on profit, surely it would be on the whole house value minus the cost of building the house? Anyway, IIRC the largest increase in capital value in recent decades has been on the unimproved value of the land, so house improvement is likely to be a relatively small portion of the taxable value.
That said, I am rapidly wading out of my depth on economic issues, so take everything I say with a handful of salt.