OnPoint: There is no depression in New Zealand. Apparently.
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Also - I need you over here. Bar chart, damnit!
I'm afraid, Graeme, that discrete data can be plotted on a line graph when the sample is a rugby player.
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Sigh. Russell can you please get your Cactus folk to fix whatever is logging me out today every now and then when I go from one page to another (without having altered a single setting or upgraded any components at my end).
I suspect this has to do with how cookies are being handled.
If you have bookmarked PA without www. as an appendix and login to PA system it remembers you as being associated with that URL only. BUT, if you browse to and article from PA System the "www" gets added to the URL and the login association is lost.
This is a bug in PAs configuration.
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welcome back keith, i knew you'd be back on the wagon sooner or later.
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oh, and while keith is talking rss, is there any chance we could get the entire post sent out?
googlereader only captures the first sentence or so, and with work blocking the site, i'm not getting any reading done...
however. they do have kiwiblog. if they don't unblock paddress i'm going to *demand* they block dpf. (nothing personal to david, but we can't have double-standards).
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Thanks, Don. It happens going from one page to the next - like p2 to p3 - and it only started yesterday. Might be session handling in general but it sure seems like a change at the Cactus end of things, not my machine. I'm hoping their developers are susceptible to cheap bribes or restoration of pride..
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Hmmm. I know this is SUPER OFF TOPIC, but does anyone recall criticism of the reserve bank selling NZD in June last year? Because, uh, following their own policy, I don't think they'll have started buying yet, but they're sitting on a pretty monstrous paper profit by now.
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further to what Sacha was saying, twice when i tried to post a comment yesterday the comment disappeared and i was logged out. the third time i was lucky. something is on the blink...maybe it only affects people whose name begins with s...
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It happens going from one page to the next - like p2 to p3 - and it only started yesterday.
Has someone bought a load balancer?
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Nation states are for the benefit of their citizens, not the other way round. States and their governments don't have a right to our loyalty and support, they have to earn it.
It's the job of the opposition parties to oppose the bad things that National do. Like locking up innocent people on supposition. Which they want to bring in under urgency, without going to Select Commitee and overriding the Bill of Rights Act.
They're doing this *with* the full support of the Maori Party under their confidence and supply agreement. So next time the cops suspect any Maori kids of playing with petrol bombs in the forest, they can throw them in jail for two years until the case comes to court.
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Back on topic
Sixteen hundred more New Zealanders die every winter than during other seasons, with researchers pinning part of the blame on cold, damp and poorly maintained homes.
That's a lot of excess mortality, a lot of preventable sickness, and a lot of cold children and elderly.
Not for nothing does the Economist describe the neglected 'negawatt' as the
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...the low hanging fruit of the energy sector.
In a feted University of Otago study (BMJ, PDF), the health and other benefits were found to be significant.
A conservative cost-benefit analysis of this intervention
trial indicated that the tangible health and
energy benefits outweighed the costs by a factor
approaching 2It was also found that NZ has a much worse housing stock, of old wooden buildings, than other OECD countries, and that insulation tends to be deferred in favour of other spending.
If there is a need for infrastructure in this country, insulation is it.
Labour fought the Greens on the insulation fund, and thus didn't put enough money into it to really give it the spread and depth it would have needed to really have a political impact. It's a pity, because it's far more necessary than most of the motorways we're building, and could have been begun years ago. It's not hard to put in place a funding scheme that includes everybody, such as low interest loans for all, with graduated imposition on rental owners. As is significantly increasing the standards for new homes. Labour were coming round, but as is so often the case, it was taking a long time, and they went halfway rather than back a strong scheme with greater potential (and some risk).
Warm people are also happy people. I'd wager that people who live in warm dry houses are less likely to get on the next plane to Australia in search of a warm dry country.
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Keith is back.
does that mean the other half of the antipodean crime fighting will also be seen?
I have to say, and it may not be popular, but I kind of resent that Public Address has too become a sport swamped place. It used to be a place to come and hang out and get away from that man!
kind of like a cafe with lots of clever folk with interesting stuff to say. where you might get an odd paragraph or guest post about it, but not the mainstream obsession.
ach weel. I'm trying to rationalise the Key years too. But frankly- losing ACC, the ETS, workers rights, the RMA...well we'll wait and see I guess. The last National government I remember had Winston Peters as Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister, until that changed and it was held together by the support by an Alliance list MP. So I may not have much to go by really.
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I must admit there are superficial attractions to a tax cut led propping up of consumption, if purely for the fact that this is the kind of world I've been living in as an adult. I can just remember what it was like before that, as a child in a drought struck rural area on East Coast of the South Island, and that kind of sucked. I can only imagine what it was like for the adults. Although perhaps I'll soon find out.
I think it is only during the onset of a recession you really begin to see the attractions of short termist populist measures. Playing the long term game is painful and hard work
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I think it is only during the onset of a recession you really begin to see the attractions of short termist populist measures.
Yesterday I saw plans for Xmas, shopping lists for xmas gifts and restaurant bookings. On my way home , petrol $1.43 a litre. Going down!
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Late to the party, as usual.
Welcome back, Keith!
Please, post often. -
Not strictly relevant to this discussion but I’ll pop it in here anyway. Via Andrew Sullivan there is a link to a Bianco Research estimate of the cost (so far) of the U.S. bailout in relation to other big government spends.
If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.
Adjusted for inflation it is more than the entire cost of World War II.
The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion
The $4.6165 trillion dollars committed so far is about a trillion dollars ($979 billion dollars) greater than the entire cost of World War II borne by the United States: $3.6 trillion, adjusted for inflation (original cost was $288 billion).
Go figure: WWII was a relative bargain.
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Christ.
How long before the US actually bankrupts itself? Or does it still have the global clout to zoom down into astounding negative figures and not lose its collective shirt?
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How long before the US actually bankrupts itself?
are you joking?
the US is long bankrupt.
it's just that the creditors continue to pretend that their worthless US Treasury bonds are actually going to be repaid someday.
it's a Mexican standoff. A game of "chicken".
mutually assured financial destruction, if you will. -
Hippies with calculators have this running total for the US in Iraq.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home
And more US Vets are commiting suicide than soldiers dying overseas.
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are you joking?
the US is long bankrupt.Definitely morally bankrupt :-)
I wouldn't get too happy about the US going bankrupt though. You can bet your boots if that happens, everyone else will be bankrupted first.
On the flipside, bankruptcy is actually the only known safety valve for too much debt. Or we can have slavery, I guess. Ultimately, money is only the paper crap that's used for counting goods and services. Burn the entire lot, and all the goods and services will still exist. In fact, they might be better off for more realistic accounting.
The danger is the colossal upheaval in political stability such an event could create. I can feel more wars coming on.
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One small advantage of the financial crisis is the emergence of lovely little used words. ’Trillion’ I think of as a sort of nonsense word that you used in the playground to mean ‘lots and lots’ or unimaginable numbers like the distance between galaxies.
John Key used the noun ‘contagion’ the other day. I love this word. It speaks of terrible diseases sweeping through whole populations. It’s in the traditional song, ‘Lone Pilgrim’ that Bob Dylan sings on World Gone Wrong.
The call of my master compelled me from home,
No kindred or relative nigh.
I met the contagion and sank to the tomb,
My soul flew to mansions on high.Go tell my companion and children most dear
To weep not for me now I'm gone.
The same hand that led me through seas most severe
Has kindly assisted me home. -
the US is long bankrupt.
That's an interesting concept.
The country as in govt is in deep shit but in funding the wars they took govt money and paid it to american war mongers, so while many american's are broke, some american's are loaded.
a bit of income redistribution through criminal charges might make the problem not quite as bad.
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