Posts by Matthew Poole
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to James Bremner,
Where is Houston in Mercer's 2012 infrastructure (Auckland is 43rd) and quality-of-life (Auckland is 3rd) rankings? Oh, it's not there? Why the hell would Auckland want to do anything like Houston when we're already a better city in which to live and better-served for infrastructure (despite not having 12-lane freeways)?
Housing might become more affordable if Auckland sprawls from Whangarei to Hamilton, but it will become wildly more unaffordable to live here because transport will be drastically more expensive. Sprawl is very, very costly, and someone has to pay. It's also much more expensive to serve well with public transport (Houston's is, as Danielle observes, notoriously awful), so people are forced to own multiple cars per household with all the fixed and operating costs thus attendant.
ETA: There appears to be concern from within Houston about its degrading quality of life, too. It has lower-than-national-average incomes to go with the lower-than-national-median house prices, and features poorly for health outcomes.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Matthew Poole,
go through two sets of traffic lights (plus ramp signals)
Sorry, three sets. I forgot about one that is nearly always green for the left-turn I have to make.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Ramon Lewis,
Ummm 20 minutes would get you to Te Atatu or Henderson out west, I know I did it everyday for way too long!
Not in any morning or evening peak I’ve ever seen. Again, peak. I know that 20 minutes gets you a good, long way off-peak, but our peak traffic is pretty ghastly. I do Ellerslie-Parnell and it is a pretty consistent 25 minutes early in the morning peak (I normally leave in about 20 minutes’ time). ETA: I also live and work quite close to the motorway, only having to go through two sets of traffic lights (plus ramp signals) on the whole journey.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Stephen Doyle,
How many versions of Romeo and Juliet have there been? She was only 13.
And anyone who tried to produce an explicit version that wasn't the written word would have to find an actor and actress who were at least 18 in order to not be breaking the (current) law. What's scary is that this proposal would make it illegal to produce an explicit version where the leads simply look under 18, regardless of their actual age.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Interesting discovery that Auckland has one of the lowest car ownership rates in NZ
I do wonder how much that is affected by cars that are no longer registered because the owners cannot afford to and/or don't want to. It will be an issue everywhere, but Auckland is home to some of the poorest people in the country who also have few realistic alternatives for transport than the private car.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Emma Hart,
under 16
Under 18, surely? Legal to have sex at 16, but cannot legally be depicted sexually until 18.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to BenWilson,
heinous crimes ... planetary destruction
Who's got jurisdiction on that one? A successful attempt would render most prosecutors unavailable.
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This piece in the Herald on Saturday highlighted just how little real problem there is with true greenfields land inside the MUL at present. The five blocks listed in that article total 167.45 hectares which, at a section size of 350sqm, is over 4700 individual sections not accounting for roads and parks. It's only five sections, too, but is over 40% of the land required for a year's supply of dwellings.
We don't have a shortage of land, we have a gross oversupply of greedy fucks who are incentivised by an utterly bizarre tax loophole to sit on land for a decade.
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Orsman should be interesting. The man has been leading Granny's fact-free, ratings-driven charge against the DUP, willingly assisted by Roughan. They make an interesting (and depressing) contrast with Fran O'S's much more sensible take on things.
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Hard News: A plea for sanity on the…, in reply to J Browning,
explain how the Unitary Plan actually flowed from the Auckland Plan.
Can you explain it?
Sure. Legislation requires the two documents, and in short order. How much more "one flows to the other" explanation do you require? The deadlines for this were imposed by statute, courtesy of Rodney, not by Auckland Council. Are you particularly surprised that there's a disconnect given the statutory environment created and fostered by the current occupiers of the Treasury benches?