Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I thought the "not wanting Invercargill to be a joke town" bit amusing.
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If everyone got food stamps they wouldn't have a stigma.
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Not somebody else who thinks a "helicopter view" means a ride in an actual helicopter?
What's with these NACT politicians, you'd have thought with all that money, they could afford their own helicopters?
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unhealthy heavily processed "foods "
The fact is, the end to end cost of such food is often less than fresh, even though fresh food is paradoxically used as an input. If food is passed through a factory, debulked, processed, stablised and preserved so it can sit on shelves, that can cost less than dealing with fresh.
Supermarkets handling fresh food have high costs to cover in space, labour and wastage. A lot of that is to provide the convenience of being able to rock up at any hour and buy your veggies in a comfortable indoor space. If you skip that and shop at a market. it's obviously cheaper. No roof, all the stock gets shifted in a morning. (we don't have pick your own in NZ do we? That's even cheaper).
If government wants people to eat that expensive fresh food, then levelling the costs out would seem a good idea.
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@ian Contrary to your imagination, the CGI shit gets coded and rasturbated by real people. Who also get paid peanuts on the whole.
I think this comes down to a conflict between those who want to do cool stuff and aren't worried about money (the trust fund helps, eh) and those that need to earn a living. I think the acting unions are working for those on the "need to earn a living" side.
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The Employment Relations Act sets out various rights and duties of registered unions. I can't find any place where it proscribes employers negotiating with an unregistered body. Can anyone point me at this?
Secondly, I can't think of a law that stops contractors combining to negotiate a contract. There are many trade bodies, like the MTA, who produce a standard contract form for their members.
RNZ had an interview this morning with a US movie journalist who reckoned that the unions were in a pretty good position to block any notable star actors from appearing in the Hobbit. That applies whereever the movie is filmed, because it isn't going to do well at the box office with a bunch of Moldavian unknowns talking broken English.
Maybe Jackson should make it as a cartoon. With subtitles?
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There's a limit to how much fruit and veg you can eat, whether you're John Key or a student. So the amount anyone will save from this tax is limited.
Poorer people spend more of their money on food, so this change would make more difference to the poor than the rich.
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Incidentally Matthew, do you work in a call centre? Because "the computer won't let us" is the standard excuse CSRs use for business failings?
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Actually not only was Kiwisaver (which is a lot more complex on the government side than a split GST rate) brought in on time and to budget, the expertise developed is now being sold overseas. (The UK is modelling their Britsaver scheme on Kiwisaver).
I know some of the team that worked on it, and they did a great job.
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If IRD suspected a store was claiming beer as carrots, they can audit the till records, do some test buys and look for them, etc. (the auditors will also check that sort of thing). Then the store gets fined several times the tax, which is a good reason not to try it on.
I think the objection to this is along the traditional lines of "we can't do anything that males it harder for the poor oppressed store owners, they might have to spent money on new tills instead of a foreign holiday".
Oh, along with the traditional IT attitude that processes should be adjusted to fit the systems.