A whole new genre?

I want to read that. What's your take?

__Take student loans. They are celebrated as having opened up education to more people, but Dean writes: "A significant proportion of the growth in tertiary education over the last twenty years has come in areas that were once…

Our businesses have got away with that for decades, just like their under-investment in R&D. Take more profit for themselves as dividends and high exec salaries instead. Expect government to pick up the slack for them with…

Which brings us back to an earlier point I made: that it's far easier for companies to hire people from overseas instead of…

when those in power have no conscience, they put on the appearance of fretting about the cost of social contracts. As the cost is all that matters.

Come to think of it, if there's only one thing I need a crowdfund for, it's retraining for a career change before the industry I currently work in goes the way of the TV repairman. Those…

https://www.facebook.com/events/834805423267108/

Professor Jane Kelsey, Faculty of Law at Auckland University, will update us on the ramifications of the TPPA (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) and what…

http://www.bwb.co.nz/books/ruth-roger-and-me

Great interview with the author on Natrad this morning.

*and this article as well:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/9616663/Yurt-now-a-realistic-alternative

Me too.
I was sent…

Here....http://www.breezepod.com/

Well worth a look if you're driving past.

Very tidy, very clever, very versitile....and too clever for…

Here....http://www.branz.co.nz/cms_display.php?sn=41&st=1&pg=14034

I still have a much used and abused copy of of the first edition...circa 1993...

By far…

Sort of like boy racers and their cars? Practically every modification is at a loss... :-)…

Back in the day, there was the…

Ye've only to believe in the little people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFN-y5AB6fs

Of course. My neighbor on both sides are like that, and it's not because they're poor. They renovated to massively extend the dwellings, and the whole range from little babies through to grandparents are all…

If you can automate a car (and off-road self-driving cars have been a thing for a while, and you can have industrial robots capable of a wide range of quite delicate manipulations, then it isn't too hard to imagine a fully automated harvester (and a…

The modern world cannot function without massive dependancy chains. It is literally impossible for a human being to understand how to make an ipod, let alone an iphone. There's simply more than a century of advanced education behind the components once you add them all up.…

They might help though. Part of the reason the extended family might all be in one house is because grandparents and young adults can't find anywhere small and affordable. Not that I'm a fan. I'd suggest apartment blocks for maximum efficiency for…

Sorry, derail ahead:

Giving people skills to build? Great. Tiny houses? Well, they have their place, but their ability to solve New Zealand’s housing problems is extremely limited, for the following reasons (and possibly other reasons…

You got me there :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flge_rw6RG0

I'm glad to hear that. I hope it gets sorted in a timely manner.

Cars are made by robots, designed by multi-national consortia to spread the immense costs. Houses come in large pieces which are snapped together on site, the wood being cut by machines directed by computer programs which juggle the cuts in every…

Which nudges up the other point: Too big to fail. And the associated sub-point about privatising the profit and socialising the risk.

As a total global event it never has been, but as a localized action it absolutely is an option. It’s no secret that our army is made up 4290 full-time specialist professionals, we have over 11,000 police staff,…

Yup, there would be enormous variance, depending on the conditions. A starving animal will do every thing it can all the time to get food. A big predator sitting over a kill can do nothing all day except lie…

I just don't think it's necessary to invoke evolutionary arguments in this discussion. Especially given the level of uncertainty in the validity of the data.

Awesome typo :)

Please remember hunter gatherers died young.
Any estimates of their work ethic are wild guesses at best.
And evolutionary arguments to justify behaviour are usually utter bollocks.

We can talk about…

To be fair, while I'm strong on raising taxes and particularly for the well…

Ooo-kay, well, when you get a moment ;)

It's the same for economists. The ones who stand up and claim to know what's happening are generally just pushing their own theories. They take the credit if their predictions…

And it's troubling that sell-off recommaendations are being made. They don't tend to die off quietly…

and the deliberate rather than the accidental.

http://rankinfile.co.nz/rf98_Tax66cMyth.html

So there was high inflation in the late 70's that parked a bunch of factory workers in the top tax bracket by '82, which Muldoon fixed by lowering taxes and adding a new surcharge bracket higher up (rather than just shifting the brackets).

After…

Until the job losses and cuts in state services became apparent, eh.

10-20 hours a week, I recall reading somewhere. I like UBI as a concept. Has any nation done it yet?

Sorry about that, I wasn't really sure what you meant, glad you've clarified.

It is absolutely NOT a binary option.

Agreed, Bart. And I totally agree with:

And hence we should try something else, which might also not work.

Although I'd…

One argument he makes is that neo-liberalism isn’t more efficient than socialism (or indeed Muldoonism), it’s just differently inefficient.

A canonical example of Muldoonist inefficiency was compulsory rail freight. That cost businesses and (mostly wealthier) consumers, with the proceeds…

The “incoming Labour govt” only did what National Party figures…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQvKIHV6n4

Otherwise known as 'cargo cultism'. The cargo cult we've imported right now is straight out of Wall Street and London's Square Mile.

Our advantage is being small enough to change direction quickly. We do not seem to use that, and instead import foreign plans which can be far too over-engineered.

To which my response is – oh didn't we give you enough of our money to make that happen? Well damn – here, why don't you tax us a…

It is absolutely NOT a binary option.

There is no question that the Soviet system failed, but that should never be evidence that the opposite must succeed.

The ideal is to do what works, to hell with ideology and ideologues, just do what works. Find…

You will, of course, be able to give a reference for this.

New Zealand government revenue as a proportion of GDP isn't markedly different now to what it was in in 1980. The difference between that and…

It was introduced to pay for the cost of unification – surprised it's still there, but the Germans were happy to pay the vast costs of integrating the East German economy into the BRD (with East…

I've no time right now to comment at length, got to go avail myself of one…

No that's a lie as well. We have been conned into thinking we can't have higher taxation until after X or Y or Z happens.

Whereas the opposite is true, we will never get a high wage economy (except for the very…

Now we are one of the lowest taxed societies in the world

Had all those ideologues been right we would now be one of the most successful nations in the…

Having been a primary school kid in the 60s in the US and then moving to NZ a couple of years before the Springbok tour – all I could think in 1981 was how this country really didn't know…

Indeed. It was also the time of the The Tour, massive and wasteful subsidies to farming, quixotic wage and price freezes, Dawn Raids, crippling interest…

(Not saying that things are just ducky today, but the 1970s and early 80s was not a golden age I would want…

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, that 'even more insidious political/ideological premise' is likely neo-feudalism.

Though people like Nick Hanauer – who's made it many times over in tech – and Robert Reich…

I smiled at the analogy :-).

Thing is – from a political ideology point of view, I'm with an academic named Steger, who…

Now we have many loaded with huge private, personal, household debt, while the government presents itself as a supposed “master of good economics”, pointing the finger at those “failed” European states, where things are supposed to be sooo…

Well, if it was so long ago that it's no longer an issue, perhaps you won't mind pointing to a period or periods between now and…

But states with no regulation are all…

But NZ's economy has always existed in an international context. Much of the prosperity of my youth (mostly the 60s and 70s) was due to patronage from a country that my grandparents (all…

Its not to say it doesnt happen for special groups, mental patients, special needs patients, those with cleft palate and others with face or neck surgery.
Oncology and pediatric patients and those injured in accidents. and…