Posts by Tom Beard
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Wealthier households will pay a greater absolute amount of GST, because they spend a greater absolute amount on food, but relative to their income, they pay less GST.
Depends upon the household. At a rough guess, I spend about 17% of my after-tax income on rent, less than 10% on utilities, 10% or so on clothes, books etc, and the rest on food and drink. Well, drink mostly.
But I'm not sure about how certain things would apply. Would restaurant and takeaway meals also be exempt? What about beverages: tea, coffee, milk, juice, vermouth?
If you try to define "staples", then you'll run into all sorts of cultural and socioeconomic complexities. For instance, some people obviously count butter as a "staple", but I never used the stuff when I ate at home. Olive oil was much more of a staple for me, but presumably that's a very middle class thing (at least for us Anglos). Soy sauce is clearly a staple for lots of people, but what about expensive balsamic vinegar?
And let's not get into all the tangles about what defines "prepared" vs "unprepared" food: unless you pick it, dig it or kill it yourself, someone has already started to put effort into preparing it for you, and it's a continuum from there to readymeals.
Has anyone actually done a costing on how much administrative overhead is saved by having a blanket GST rather than targetted?
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a Hogarthian unter-menschen beyond redemption
Funny, that's the image that always springs to mind when I think of Garth McVicar.
And after a brilliant piece of "give 'em enough rope" interviewing from Steve Braunias some time ago, I propose a ban on the use of the words "sensible" and McVicar in the same sentence.
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The two also seem to go hand-in-glove in a literal sense.
What? PR women have sex with gloves? Or with gloves on?
The excerpts that were (not) printed don't sound all that shocking; well, not to anyone who follows links from Fleshbot. Whatever that might be. Besides, it all sound like just another Saturday night in Newtown.
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Was ever a word more heavy with the promise of tedium, more swollen with delusions of relevance
"Sunday"
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Does $1000 left of my Visa credit limit count as a portfolio?
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I wonder whether there's going to be a backlash in some suburbs when these cabinets start appearing on their pavements: they're B I G.
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The problem with absinthe here is that you can't get the good stuff. And by "good stuff", I don't mean absinthe with thujone (locally available absinthe does have thujone, but thujone does bugger all anyway) but absinthe where the herbs are distilled, rather than just added to raw alcohol.
According to a source (who may want to reveal herself), Bohemian absinthe does make you hallucinate. The Czech republic never banned it, so they're still using old recipes in the old way, doing whatever they used to do in the C19th (while still being subject to the EU thujone limit).
Most "Bohemian absinthe" is rubbish: tasteless and rough, and based on marketing more than tradition, hence the ludicrous recent practice of setting it on fire. Absinthe's notoriety is based largely on false notoriety (though anything that uses the word "louche" as part of it's lexicon and inspired decent writing by Aleister Crowley is all right by me), but if you can get some reasonably good stuff (La Fee Parisian will have to do for most of us) it's a very pleasant aperitif. The thought of banning it in the 21st century is laughable, and Paul Hutchinson ought to watch some Chris Morris on the real "killer drug from Prague".
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For those currently ranting online against China, in most cases itd mean giving up their computers and sitting at home in the nuddy.
True, it'd be hard to find electronics not made there, but there isn't quite the same problem with clothes. Clothes made in NZ, Europe etc are much more expensive, but quite apart from the ethical issues, they'll be better made, last longer and look better. I'd rather have one $300 shirt that feels good, looks sharp and lasts for years than three $100 shirts that you'd have to throw away after a year and look nasty anyway.
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Tom - your pertinent examples of blog-based primary research, combined with some other examples coming to my mind, make me wish to revise some of my earlier comments that bloggers often/usually only comment/analyze. It was a poor generalization on my part.
I think that the generalisation is Ralston's: he may be intending "blogger" to mean "political blogger". It may indeed be the case that political bloggers do less investigation of primary sources than political journalists, but when it comes to fields such as technology, the environment, the arts, sport, economics and a whole host of other specialisations, there are plenty of bloggers doing their own research and writign based on their own experiences.
Besides, the whole idea that the value of journalists lies in them doing primary research is flawed. Do we expect science journalists to be the ones using test tubes, telescopes and radiosondes? Of course not. But we do rely on them to compare and examine the literature that comes from scientists, and to critique their methodology where appropriate. Come to think of it, that's the sort of thing that's much more likely to occur in the scientific blogosphere than in the general press, where coverage of science seems to be either "Shock horror!" or "Golly gee whiz!". Or worse: Muriel Newman.
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He does seem to rant a bit, and even plays up at being a curmudgeon
When did the media start to think that "curmudgeon" no longer meant "a crusty irascible cantankerous old person full of stubborn ideas" and turned into a positive term? Both the DomPost and Listener have self-described curmudgeons on their rosters (Karl du Fresne & Hamish Keith), so I guess they're all going for the "grumpy baby-boomer" market.
As for bloggers not doing any primary research, Ralston ought to do some research himself on what bloggers do. In my time writing WellUrban I spent what must have been hundreds of hours not just studying reports, aerial photos, GIS data, census data and historical records, but getting out there and investigating sites & buildings myself. I spent a lot of time correcting factual errors in the local media, and get frustrated when they continue to get things wrong. Case in point: today's Dom has a headline "Flats may overshadow historic capital church". Unless they've discovered that the sun now shines from the southeast (and that would be a real story!), there's no way in which the proposed building will cast a shadow over St Mary's.
The 100-mile diet thing might be worth trying for primary ingredients (which are bulky and inefficient to transport), but doing without a range of spices and special ingredients seems unneccesarily limiting. Besides, while NZ now makes some passable gins, until there's a good local vermouth a 100-mile diet will just not be feasible.