Posts by slarty
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How about this.
1. Most of you will be driving with under-inflated tyres. The pressures quoted in your manual are generally for cold (tyres are warm by the time you get to the petrol station) + the inaccuracy of most guages at forecourts means you are probably sucking down 10% more fuel, let alone the safety issue.
If we paid attention to tyres we could shave 10% off the nations fuel consumption. Overnight. But people just don't seem aware of it.
2. Wind drag effect is exponential (a cube). One implication of this is that if you reduce speed from, say 110 to 95 you will save something like 15% of your fuel consumption. On your 40km commute in the morning you will add less than 5 minutes to your journey.
So there you go - pump the tyres up, slow down and cut your fuel bill by 25%.
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In the UK (notably much safer place to drive than NZ) you are taught specifically NOT to indicate unless there is a clear purpose in doing so. Never understood why it was mandatory here.
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Saying that you are GST auditors from IRD on a fraud training course has always been a favourite.
Yes! Please - everyone, can you do this from now on?
Che, sorry mate but sounds like you just never got invited to the right parties :)
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Let's be fair: a HUGE amount of money gets wasted in the public sector. For example, most IT projects cost triple what they would in the private sector.
The extra cost comes from an extended process to buy stuff (in case there is a media beat up) and padding to ensure that, should a mistake be made, the extra cost can be managed within the orginal fee.
The real story here is that this type of pointless beat up always ends up costing the taxpayer more - communications advisors, all-conferences-in-Wellington from now on, the meeting / enquiry that will inevitably be called on the topic... <sigh>
I wish you'd just let them get on with catching villains.
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- tax deductible private health insurance
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- income splittingGood points!
income splitting is under consultation at the moment: personally I think children should come with a tax allowance that can be allocated to one or both parents as long as they live with them. We could wind back a chunk of WFF if we had it.
health insurance I was recently a recipient of a blend of public and private care, and most impressive it was. But when I was laying on a table about to go in to 6 hours of private surgery, I was very concious that if it went horribly wrong it would be the State that covered the cost. And that means I should still contribute through tax. And I'm better off because of it: I probably wouldn't be able to afford premiums that covered emergency care...
Oh, and I have British and Australian passports. The reason I live here is that I find it relatively cheap to have a damn fine lifestyle... and we have a few nice social things I like.. the right to silence, I don't have to carry an ID card, the same assault law applies to adults as children...
Wouldn't it be nice if we could deport some of the whiners on sabbatical to, say, Birmingham for a month so they could experience real crime, real racial tension, serious taxes, awful restaurant food, dreadful coffee and wildly overpriced, um, avocados.... because you have to remember most Australians don't live on the Gold Coast, and most pommes don't live in Chelsea.
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More likely it's the fact that my flat is on Go Large, and we're thus competing with the remaining people on the plan for what is, I'm sure, a shrinking pool of bandwidth. The ComCom case against TCNZ over Go Large will be interesting, when it finally gets to court in twenty-something-teen. Such a useless system :/
Aaah. You see, information really is everything.
Add up your estimated cost differential, send them a bill, send them a warning then file an action in the small claims court. It'll be faster (it's open and shut breach of contract)...
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Yeah, take your point about YouTube - the way you get this stuff to work is control both ends of the pipe... so your video distribution box is in a cabinet at the end of the street. Sounds pricey but may actually be cheaper than getting good quality copper / fibre over a long-ish distance.
Main thing that stuffs up video over IP is inherent in the nature of the protocol - unlike old fashioned stuff like SNA there's no QoS built into the packet, so you do it all at the choke points... and there's no management of those on teh internets...
Hence get your control point as close to the consumption as possible. It's probably not the last mile or the pacific wholesale that's stuffing up your video, but the contention within the NZ backbone (download PingPlotter and have a look. It's interesting!)
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Captain Anal here...
- Amsterdam has a wonderful ducting system in place: they're called canals :)
- Careful with the "Mbps" (millions of bits) "MB" (millions of bytes - a factor of 8 larger...) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbit/s#megabit_per_second
- Streaming HDTV needs 28 Mbps to eliminate all artifacts BUT (as Motorola discovered when they ignored GSM) people will tolerate much lower quality
- The handshake / error correction tips HDTV up to those sort of demands: put in a bit of decent buffering (say, 30 seconds), combine it with a variable quality mechanism (e.g. the credits, blank bits and so on get compressed much more) and you can get away with 10Mbps easy...
- The NPV of empty ducts is huge. From an accounting point of view, these things are a significant asset.
- Don't dismiss things like blowing fibre down gas / water pipes. It's been done all over the place and makes a huge difference to the cost. When I lived in Portsmouth in the 90's Council partnered with the CableCo. to put reusable ducts down the middle of the street. It could then be reused for all services except waste. I expect its on their books as an asset!
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I'd be very surprised if they relied on the 1/2 Bil being there in a years time.
Ooops.
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So many of my favourites all on one list. What a pleasant cooincidence, and I so rarely end up in Cin Cin's...