Posts by Rob Stowell
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Yep! Cycles of rage, adrenaline, sadness.
Then three long years in rehab ... -
Internal party polling: how do National (Curia/DPF) and Labour (Rob Salmond?) compare for resources?
National are opportunistic and appear driven by factors outside their natural policy range. Free doctors for children, no more asset sales, keeping Kiwibank and working for families, tax cuts for low-to-medium incomes- the long list of dead rats they've swallowed, digested, made their own. It feels like they're polling on policy extensively. They've gone into the election knowing well there's no appetite for more right-wing economics.
So they'll keep going with the anti-union stuff - charter schools, undermining collective bargaining. They'll keep steady on top tax rates, and undermining the RMA. But nothing that might scare the horses. And they seem to know and avoid those things. So they're probably also polling on how their PR lines are working. Which attacks on Labour are hitting home; what lines are working well (lispy cuspy specialness).
It looks like this has been a key component of National's success over the last 8 years.
How does Labour stack up? Do the Greens have the resources to even start? And since it's so crucial to electioneering, is there any requirement to declare spending on polling? -
Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to BenWilson,
What it does do is make something fair which currently isn’t, that people making capital gains don’t pay tax on them.
This is undersold. Much of the dialogue around an increasing gap between rich and poor centres on ‘income’. As such it’s based on the data around taxable income.
Which is mildly ridiculous as a measure of wealth, as pretty much anyone who’s wealthy knows. The whole point of paying a tax accountant is to minimise the (legal) amount you pay in tax. And that’s been ridiculously easy in NZ. Changes to the rules around rental housing make a small difference.
But if you looked at people worth millions and compared that to their legally declared income for taxation purposes, I think you’d see how wildly out-of-wack the current taxation regime is. -
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to mark taslov,
Addendum: "Willing to move to Foxton for a 90-day trial."
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Damn. Now I want to sign again, just for your grandad. Who is magnificent!
Will have a go at some unsuspecting rellies. -
Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to Jake Starrow,
Aucklands not currently the problem.
No. And since no one much except you lot have espoused that view, can we stop talking about it please?
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to WH,
The first is the ‘objective source of meaning’ problem.
Not sure what you mean :) but .. 'meaning' is meaningful in the context of language: this word means that, that phrase means this. It's objective at least in the sense that language is objective (without getting into the 'private languages' argument.)
But beyang language, eg in the sense of 'the meaning of life' - what does it all mean?! - it makes little sense, unless we translate the question into something like 'what is the value of life'.
Maybe then it's clearer what we're arguing about. IMHO 'objective value' makes little sense. Because values are something consciousnesses have, that is, essentially subjective. Which is another way of saying: we put values on things; the universe doesn't come with price-tags.
Which is far too much of a diversion from productive work for this time of the morning :) -
Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to BenWilson,
it’s going backwards on some important measures and obsession with a strongly neoliberal flavour of it is majorly contributing to that, and we can probably look forward to quite a few more years before that winds up.
And here I was hoping for some optimism :)
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Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to Barnaby Bennett,
the new Convention Centre Precinct in the heart of central Christchurch.
This fuelled an immediate ‘wft’ reaction to the CCDU blueprint.
We’ve been struggling to redesign the central city for decades, to bring people, business, art, culture, life back in. How could they get this so wrong?
Or put another way: if this wasn’t so obviously bad planning and a two-fingered salute to residents, why were the arguments for it so absent? -
Speaker: Telling Our Own Tales, in reply to jeremy botham,
Surely if Christchurch is unfairly starved by national television, I could assume that the locals would be watching CTV and the documentary series on the earthquakes that Gerard made in their droves.
There was a time when CTV did have a significant audience share. I could run you through the early history, but it would take a while- how it fell to pieces, split in two; how TVNZ dropped $50m on Horizon on the mistaken idea they could do ‘regional’ themselves; onto the eventual re-growth of a station, always strapped for cash, but hanging in there.
But CTV was ripped to pieces in the Feb quake. 16 staff died when the building collapsed. The fact they were back on air so quickly is remarkable. They’ve made and aired some hard-hitting television post-quake, but yes, it hasn’t found a big audience. And it’s still an open question what future they will have.