Posts by Moz
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Russell Brown,
They've [Oz] just begun a crackdown after acknowledging they have huge avoidance problems.
But a fair bit of the avoidance is lawful, which makes it difficult. The two big holes you can drive a truckload of cash through are that residents can buy existing houses, and that no-one is actually required to track this stuff to enable enforcement.
All those foreign students can, and many do. I've been to a few inspections where there was a student arguing with parents that the house was too far from where they would be studying. Not many, because we were not looking for the sort of house that buy'n'hold investors find attractive (property developers, OTOH, we saw a lot of).
The enforcement is as much of an issue. There's no point in the process where you have to prove anything more complex than "I have the money", and if you have it in the bank the whole deal could be done by writing two cheques (possibly one, if you got your solicitor to handle all the paperwork). If real estate agents had to see proof of residence at some point that might help, but when we bought that was not the case.
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What scares me here is not so much "they're buying our houses!" but "they might en masse sell our houses". If/when the Chinese sharemarket corrects/crashes there will probably be a lot of people needing to liquidate those investments very quickly, and the Chinese government will probably be very keen to help them. In a staring contest between the NZ government and the Chinese one on the question of currency controls or "will we let the Chinese government buy 5% of NZ's houses this weekend", I'm not betting on the locals.
Just as bad from my PoV would be to have those houses/apartments actually dumped on the market. Seeing the asset behind my mortgage halve in value would be somewhat tricky for me, and catastrophic for all the smug *ankers who came through the GFC so well. Watching a major Australian bank after its mortgage portfolio went significantly underwater would be scary. Watching them all do it at the same time would be terrifying.
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Polity: House-buying patterns in Auckland, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thus while on the face of it the Aussie rule that a foreigner may only buy a newly built house or apartment sounds like a grand idea, it could leave the housing supply situation unchanged from a no-rule regime. Thus, were we to adopt the Aussie regime we would need to add in an extra clause along the lines of apartments having to be made available for rent, actually rented, or something like that.
As someone living in the Sydney Property Market (I thought I lived in geography, but apparently I'm a consumer living in a market. Who knew?). Anyway, the empty property problem is real, especially for apartments. We need an "empty bedroom" tax instead of stamp duty. NZ should do the same, remove any tax that discourages trading homes because it's hard enough as it is without the govt throwing sand in the machinery.
Being somewhat in touch with the squatter scene here, I think encouraging that is a very valuable thing to do. It means that someone with an empty house has to actively manage it. Apartments somewhat less so, the strata fees do a similar thing (can be high, $200+ a week in multimillion dollar apartments). I think giving squatters tenancy protection after 6 months would be very handy here, because it ups the cost of keep your "investment" empty. Or just outright tax the snot out of them. Let/encourage councils up the rates on empties (set a cap of, say, 10x normal rates to hint at the size of the increase that's expected), and introduce a national housing tax (AFAIK councils tax the land, govt should therefore tax the house).
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http://www.theguardian.com/music/video/2015/jul/03/briggs-children-came-back-gurrumul-archie-roach-hip-hop-video
Todays gem from The Guardian. They offer an iframe embed that doesn't work, sorry. -
Hard News: Apple Music: Taking a dump on…, in reply to BenWilson,
people confuse problems in the underlying level of sampling with micro-dropouts and blockiness due to data streams, disks, memory and algorithms not keeping up with the speed.
Surely the solution there is to use dedicated decoding hardware in the phone and local storage? Or at least a bigger buffer - there's no reason I can see not to have ~30s of music in RAM. That's what most Android phones seem to do, there's a sub $2 audio chip that decodes most of the free formats as well as mp3 and it seems they've all decided to whack it in there. Making it rare to find and Android phone that won't play ogg, flac and all the rest.
I haven't actually tried to play 24/96 WAV, but allegedly my phone can do that. Crazy people can apparently stream lossless 24/192 at 4Mb/s which should unpack to about 10Mb/s (24 bits stereo = 48 bits* 192kHz = 9216kb/s) and a class 10 SD or uSD card can (just) do that.
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Polity: Gay marriage, weed, and death…, in reply to Moz,
on a less happy note, in Australia
... the christian wrong are using the threat of polyamory as a reason to oppose gay marriage. At least it's a backdown from the threat of beastiality.
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jul/02/tony-abbott-digs-in-to-frustrate-any-posibillity-of-same-sex-marriage-vote -
Envirologue: Making a Killing – New…, in reply to Dave Hansford,
So fishing boats are taking food from the mouths of starving sea lion babies. Hooray, we have an economy!
The sea lion population at the Auckland Islands appears to be in freefall
Isn't this the only measure that counts? People can waffle about anti-kill devices and fishery health, but what we're actually trying to acheive is a decent population of sea lions. So we should measure that and manage the fishery to get the outcome we want.
The economists like to talk about "revealed preferences". Ignore the mouth noises, look at what people actually do. In this case, accepting that the needs of the economy simetimes create externalities that need to be managed but luckily cheap mouth noises can do most of that.
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Polity: Gay marriage, weed, and death…, in reply to Craig Young,
Thanks Craig, I know there are a lot of people like you who do care about equality.
I suspect given what happened in the case of monogamous gay marriage equality and same-sex parenting,
Yes, time. But those kids exist now, and have done for a long time. Plus we have a huge number of blended families now, making the argument that "every child must have exactly one mummy and exactly one daddy, forever" seem possibly even stupider than I made it sound. NZ has a fair bit of experience with "more than two" families, if we choose to look for it.
And on a less happy note, in Australia we're apparently still discussing whether right wing MPs should be allowed consciences. Unfortunately that is limited to the issue of gay marriage rather than more important stuff like whether rape camps for refugees are good (the right wing position), "our leader has problems" (Labour) or bad (The Greens)
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Polity: Gay marriage, weed, and death…, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s been a little irksome seeing some queer activists dismissing marriage equality.
Come on Russell, give it a break. Let the monogamous monosexuals run round congratulating themselves on being progressive and liberal while pretending that there are no problems with marriage as it now is. How can you be so mean as to bring up this subject now, when we should be celebrating the amazingness of slightly expanding the legal definition of marriage? Marriage equality can wait, we have gay marriage and it's Faaabulous!
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You're not selling me on the iSuck experience, Russell. I'm waiting for a 256GB uSD card to arrive so I can reconvert my FLAC to higher quality ogg than is currently on my phone. That way I can have almost my whole library available, this time at a quality I can't distinguish from the FLAC (limitations of the phone). Luckily my music library is growing more slowly than the increase in phone memory. Well, non-Apple phone memory, anyway.
In Australia, that 256GB card will cost me the difference between my current data plan and a 6GB/mo plan for nearly 4 months. Streaming FLAC 6GB is only about 10 hours of music. I listen to that most days... the economics just aren't there. I'd rather pay musicians for music anyway, rather than piddle for each stream and salaries for the parasites.