Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Thanks Stephen and Ben - something like smartshares is just what I'm looking for. I don't have anything like the discipline required to accumulate 5k in the bank. I'm impressed and a little frightened by people who can exercise such self-control - who knows what else they're capable of?
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Okay, here's my newbie question for the day about shares and trading - any answers would be appreciated.
I'd like to start investing a reasonably small sum (~$25/week) into an index fund. My bank has an online trading facility and it looks like they'll charge me $49.50 US for every US based trade. Even I can see that this isn't a terribly smart way to invest, so what IS the best way to make a small weekly investment in an index fund?
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I can't help thinking that the poor old Labour government should pull some of its comms people away from reaching out to the masses and updating websites (or whatever they all do all day) and put 'em to work defending their besieged MP's. For a government that's supposed to be 'based on spin' they've been REALLY bad at managing the media recently. Hell, they can't even pull off the New Years honors list without having it explode in their faces.
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I'm not so sure that's really so accurate. National's breaches of the intent of the 1992 Electoral Act via the use of anonymous trusts, and the parallel EB campaign are clearly established. I'm much less convinced that O'Brady's rulings that caught out ALL the other parties seems were reasonable and fair interpretations of Parliament's intent at all.
The thing is, it wasn't just that mean old Kevin Brady who decided Labour's activities were illegal - the Electoral Commission explicitly warned Labour that the use of Parliamentary Service funds to pay for their pledge card would be illegal before they did it. They spent the money anyway. The police then investigated and found their was sufficient evidence to establish a prima facie case of an offense.
Naturally Labour supporters prefer to ignore all of these bothersome points and imagine that their party was as pure as the driven snow while those evil right-wing Nats tried to buy the election. And National Party apparatchiks entertain the same fantasies about their own team. From my viewpoint its hard to see how either party acted with any ethics whatsoever.
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The EFB has tightened restrictions around the ability of individuals to anonymously publish electioneering material, but in return we are ALL better informed and are better placed to judge the credibility and motives behind these exhortations. In sum I can see very little detriment to the individual, and a very real gain to the collective.
It's a no brainer really.
The EFB doesn't really compromise any of my freedoms at all, since I'm unlikely to ever publish electioneering material, anonymous or otherwise. It still seems staggeringly unethical to me though, simply because it involves the present government rewriting the countries election laws to convenience themselves and hamstring their opponents.
After the last election there was an obvious need to revisit the current election laws - there was evident corruption and illegality on the part of both of our largest political parties. However, the responsible thing for the government to do would have been to convene a commission, throw an ex-GG and a couple of retired judges at the problem and try and build cross-party support to adopt their recommendations.
Instead they've come up with legislation that totally undermined whatever moral high ground the Labour Party may have enjoyed in the wake of Nationals Hollow Men debacle AND given the opposition a gigantic stick to beat them with all throughout the election year.
And the media will gleefully help them out with this - although the Herald have gotten pretty silly with their 'assault on free-speech' scaremongering, many political reporters seem pretty sickened by the hypocrisy behind the EFB - especially the notion that nobody in the Labour Party was charged over the pledge cards scam yet this year we're likely to see members of the public charged with utterly trivial violations of election funding law. It stinks.
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The funny thing about Mr Moore's website is that it's being (erm) heralded as his own work but the domain name is registered to Cameron Slater (aka Whale Oil) the National activist behind the KIll the Bill campaign:
Slater not only registed Moore's blog, he's hosting it for free.
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But cocaine in New Zealand is an urban myth, everyone knows someone who knows someone but no one has ACTUALLY ever got any.
A few years back a friend was raving about the great stuff he could score - a quick sample (informed by years in London working in the banking industry) revealed he'd just paid $800 for fifty bucks worth of speed. I got the impression he'd been buying it for a while and also supplying his fellow workmates/suckers in the ad industry. Someone sure cleaned up there.
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I'm not completely clear on [Obama's] policies, but my god he has charisma ....
I'm also an Obama fan, purely on the basis of his charisma - but I do worry that what people like me see when they look at Obama is what people on the right saw in George W - someone who is inexperienced and vague on details but is attractive as hell and says all the right things.
And I have doubts about Obama's endless rhetoric about 'a big table' and healing the rift with the republicans. The GOP is sailing towards the borders of clinical insanity (I cite the Iowa caucus nomination of Huckabee as evidence) - I really don't see the point of healing the gaps with a party that is praying itself into electoral annihilation.
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The Huckabee phenomenon is interesting on a number of levels; his economic policy is all over the place - he wants to abolish income tax - but in general he genuinely appears to be the 'compassionate conservative' George W pretended to be, and is an advocate of large-scale state based solutions to social and economic problems (The Libertarian Cato Institute gave him an 'F' for spending and tax policy in 2006). The only thing that differentiates him from the left is that he feels the solutions should all be 'faith based'.
If he wins the nomination it will signify that the transformation of the GOP from a conservative party into a Christian party is complete.
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So what are we to make of Herald editor Tim Murphy's refusal to talk to Colin Peacock of Mediawatch for the programme's report on the paper's campaign against the Electoral Finance Bill?
I assume the Heralds editorials on this subject were written by Audrey Young; its possible that Murphy doesn't want to be interviewed on the subject because he simply doesn't know very much about it.