Posts by Russell Brown
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Whoops – missed this.
Coachella is streaming live all weekend. Lorde plays 4.50pm Monday NZ time.
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Hard News: (Good) Friday Music: In and…, in reply to andrew r,
Imagine The Flaming Lips headlining !
They would be startling in that setting.Yeah, and it would bring in a whole extra crowd.
Even though some of the acts didn't work for me, I get why they were programmed – you bring in a legendary hip hop artist, he brings in a chunk of people – but I reckon they could go wider yet.
Dave et al actually fought pretty hard behind the scenes to get this show to happen. But they've done it once and their iwi partners are keen for more. This could be pretty special.
Allowing, of course, for weather. They got a beautiful evening this year, but even 24 hours either side might have been trickier.
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Hard News: (Good) Friday Music: In and…, in reply to nic.wise,
Perfect Oro summary. Lots right, some things wrong, some things SO SO wrong (above). I’d go back, even without underworld.
Me too. I think it's really got potential.
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Hard News: Media Take: the poor health…, in reply to william blake,
Is the government running down services to encourage privatisation in the mental health sector?
The "social bonds" model has huge ideological appeal to many governments, but it's distinctly unproven.
I can see it could work somewhere where outcomes are discrete and measurable – building low-cost housing, for example – but it seems dangerously experimental to try and save money by playing with it in the field of individual mental health. There are really strong incentives to "create" outcomes for short-term gain.
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Hard News: Media Take: the poor health…, in reply to JWT1,
Very good episode on Media Take. One technical issue. There seems to be a small lack of synchrony between the video and audio that I found quite distracting.
Sorry about that. There have been problems with the new technical specs we have to supply to.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Disruption, in reply to Hugh Wilson,
I sense there’ll be some reflections on what seemed to be a great Underworld show @ Woodhill
There will be indeed. The event itself had stronger and weaker points, but Underworld really blew all that away. They were amazing and it felt like art.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Mikaere Curtis,
Of course, immigration is a major driver of GDP growth when you have a government of incompetent group-thinkers. National loves the “free” GDP growth plus IIRC each National MP owns 2.3 houses so they quite like the current settings because of the tax-free capital gains. And it’s not their friends and whanau who are living in overcrowded houses, garages etc.Win/win for them, methinks.
To be fair, The Clark government's economy did quite well out of immigration-fuelled GDP growth. But, yeah.
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Hard News: Behind those Herald…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
It’s not a supply and demand thing. If it were, then at some point (as with out of season tomatoes or imported Japanese cars) a price level would have been reached where people weren’t prepared to buy Auckland properties any more. By any rational standard, a shack in Avondale is not worth over a million dollars.
It’s a bubble, pure and simple.
It can be (and, I think, is) more than one thing. Rents haven’t followed the steep trajectory of house prices, which suggests that it’s not solely demand-driven.
But they have gone up, and there are houses in South Auckland where 20 people live, and barely-habitable garages being rented out for top-dollar. And for years, Auckland’s population has grown faster than the housing supply. We’re starting to see strains on infrastructure too – traffic issues seem markedly worse lately.
A fair proportion of that is internal migration to Auckland, which we can’t control. But we can control external migration – and with net migration at levels not seen before, it does seem there’s a case for adjusting the settings of immigration policy. Governments have done that periodically for a very long long time.
I really do get weary of the Twitter scolds (mostly people who don’t live in Auckland) who instantly equate any suggestion of adjusting targets with outright racism. What they don’t seem to realise is that it’s the newest Aucklanders who suffer most from housing shortages. It’s not me. I’ve got a house and its value is only pumped up further by extra housing demand.
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Holy shit.
This Companies Office entry indicates that Ron Hoy Fong recently re-registered a company in the name of Richmastery, the get-rich-quick “property education” company that left a trail of victims before the GFC.
Here’s the Herald’s 2009 report on Richmastery going into liquidation. By, er, Anne Gibson.
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Spam deleted and user banned. And no, I will not be using any services from Starlinks.nz, ever.