Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
What about rental properties? Won’t any tax increases will just end up being passed on to tenants?
Depreciation deductions already got nailed down and it didn't result in a massive increase in rents. The market for housing actually works moderately well in most of the country in terms of the price of rental housing, because there's sufficient supply. If a landlord is trying to gouge, there are options.
Auckland and (particularly) Christchurch are exceptions, because there's insufficient supply of housing in most areas to meet the demand. Which means that rents can jump hugely in short spaces of time because renters have few options and landlords have a large pool of potential victi^Wtenants. -
Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Deborah,
Couldn't you just round up the median marginal rate of the beneficiaries to the nearest bracket? After all, the beneficiaries of a non-charitable trust are a discrete class so it's a relatively trivial exercise to determine their marginal rate and do the calculations.
I understand that the trustees are legally the owners of the income-earning assets of the trust, but it seems a nonsense that the law treats the trustees, rather than the beneficiaries, as the ones whose taxation status matters.I guess that it could be rorted by having all beneficiaries totally discretionary and then adding in a bunch of extended-family minors who have no income and might get a few dollars from the trust every Christmas, but that would also smell a whole lot like avoidance to the Commissioner.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I'm told (reliably) that there's a Cisco factory in Mexico which exists for the sole purpose of allowing people who know the correct item code to order network hardware which has been manufactured right from the silicon level in premises that are acceptable to the most paranoid arms of the paranoid US government.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Couldn't follow the code (I'm not a programmer) but the explanation is pretty clear. Certainly a good lesson, and interesting that the USAF was talking publicly in 1974 about the risk posed by not having total control of every level of the software build stack.
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
does anyone know if candidates for Maori seats have to be on the Maori roll and vice versa?
Section 47, in the absence of anything else (which I haven't found), suggests that there's no requirement to be on a particular roll in order to stand as a candidate under elections against that roll. That you couldn't vote for yourself would be a bit of an own-goal, though. Graeme might know definitively.
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Sacha,
I’d also like to see the next Labour leader firmly punish anyone like Shane Jones who slags his party’s natural coalition partner – or at least be honest enough to back him explicitly if that’s what they also believe.
Well, at least if Shane Jones becomes leader, we know where he stands on the matter of the Labour-Greens relationship. Much as I'd hate to see it happen, it would at least be interesting to watch how he'd deal with the reality of Labour not being in a position to gain power if they don't have the support of the Greens. Bit different when one is holding the reins instead of carping from the back seat.
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Samuel Scott,
only about half of our country has fluoridated water, so what is happening to the other 50%?
Interestingly, Onehunga doesn't have fluoridated water courtesy of having its own bore. Could make for quite the control group to an empirical study if someone from the School of Population Health were so inclined.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Not your general conspiracy theory, thanks very much. Never been a big fan of the whole "The NSA pwns Windows" crap, but there are some pretty serious issues with the way that MS is using UEFI to lock users out of their own computers.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to nzlemming,
The biggest advantage of rolling your own keypair is KNOWING that there was no compromise in the process, IMHO.
Provided you assembled the compiler from scratch and verified the source code of the tools you're using the build the keys, of course :P
You're right, though, that the only way to know the key hasn't been compromised is to have control over the whole process of creation - including complete control over the system used, which rules out Windows 8 courtesy of MS-supplied back-doors.
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OnPoint: Ich bin ein Cyberpunk, in reply to Adam Shand,
Get a client that supports OTR (Off The Record), on the Mac that’s Adium. So long as you’ve clicked the “generate key” and both people have OTR installed, messages are encrypted.
But it’s only worthwhile if you take the key verification seriously, because if you don’t you could be getting man-in-the-middle’d by “them” and not know it. My experience with OTR is in both Adium and pidgin (Adium is the Mac version of pidgin), and both implementations provide for verification through shared-secret, question-and-answer, and manual (off-line) verification of the identity of the key’s creator. I’ve done both Q&A and manual (via SMS) verification of different people with whom I use OTR.
As with anything related to public-key encryption, the assurance OTR provides that you’re not being MITM’d is only as strong as the effort one puts into validating the association between the key and its purported owner.