Posts by Rich of Observationz
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that regular meet-up was killed off over a decade ago by the embassy top brass.
I've never even *been* to an embassy of either of the states I'm a citizen of. But Americans living here do seem to get US Embassy invites on occasion.
Is there some sort of alumni office, or do you just have to live in a place with a fairly small community from the country you're from?
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I found this in an Air NZ manual for Wellington based staff:
Aucklanders have a high opinion of their own personal standing. Despite domestic Business Class having been abolished some time ago, passengers from and to Auckland may still demand to be upgraded. Showing them to their First Class seats behind the small door at the back has been found to be a good tactic. -
you’ll end up paying sooner or later, with the addition of penalties. (10% every six months is fairly standard.)
Yeah, but if everyone refused to write a check for six months, the council would fail to make payroll and things would start to go a bit pear-shaped for them.
It would be easier for them to give us our votes back than try and sue half of Auckland.
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Within a year he had defected from National. A fool and a puppet he may have been, but I think at some level he was genuinely dismayed by what his party turned out to be really planning to do.
I think that may be a bit rosy.
Peters is an old-fashioned Muldoonist, and after 1984, such ideas were on the way out in National.
He was sacked from the cabinet by Bolger after a year, and another year later dropped as the candidate for Tauranga. He didn't actually leave the Nats for another few months, after failing in a legal battle to get readopted.
So it's more that he was sacked then left National voluntarily, and the timeline was somewhat more extended than you remember.
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All I can see happening there is folks ending up in court for not paying their bills and spending a few weeks in a private prison run by the same company that owns the CCOs.
I don't think you can actually go to jail for not paying rates in NZ.
Anyway, people refusing to pay poll tax in the UK, and smashing the place up a bit in March 1990 led to the tax being abolished and its perpetrator forced into demented retirement.
All voting and whining will do is lead to a succession of National governments until enough people get bored and consider it "time for a change" again.
Get up off your knees!
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These calculations of the value of minerals assume they'll never increase in price (in real terms).
For some minerals (like iron) that's possibly true - the world could actually get along with no new iron ore just by recycling (gold and silver are a special case because of the huge stockpiles relative to production).
But for anything that's being depleted (coal for instance, or Gerry's deleted unobtainium) the value is likely to increase faster than inflation. So we're actually better off leaving the stuff in the ground as an investment than digging it up and selling it.
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The Wohler synthesis involved an inorganic cyanide compound being converted into an organic compound, proving that organic compounds could be produced without a living thing being involved. (Other than Herr Wohler, obviously).
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the key of this research was that it can reproduce some fuel from CO2, which is the waste byproduct of burning fuel.
Yeah right. Because the first law of thermodynamics is just a piece of socialist red tape.
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re-route SH1 so that it winds through every single town in the country
You mean it doesn't already?
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a LOT of Japanese will not eat cetaceans
Apparently whaling in Japan goes back only as far as McArthur, who encouraged the whaling industry as a source of cheap protein after WW2.
They lose large amounts of money whaling and piss off their trading partners.
I can only assume that the towns the whalers come from are Tauranga style rotten boroughs that are important to the government's majority.