Posts by rodgerd
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According to Prebs the Government should have said to Toll "you fix it".
Is this the same Richard Prebble who headed up the ACT party, the party of private property rights?
Just so I can be clear, the government should have forced a private property owner to do what the government wants via legislative fiat, rather than negotiating a price the owner considers fair, buying the asset from the owner, and going from there? Is that the idea?
I wasn't aware Prebs had lurched back so far to the left. Perhaps we'll hear him championing the RMA!
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What Rich said - there were actually a huge number of positive outcomes from WW I. Hell, the acceptablitiy of widespread anti-war movements was another he skipped. And the loss of the Ottoman Empire is often downplayed (I guess we're too busy berating white people for horrible things they did in the Middle East during the 20th Century to worry about the horrible things the Ottomans had been doing for the previous few centuries).
The loss of monarchies all over Europe was a huge win, as was the disintegration of the Autro-Hungarian Empire.
As far as causes, two of my favourites are:
1/ Railway timetables. Deploymnet of men was by railway. This actually effectively locked the continental European powers into a war footing - a MAD, if you like. The German millitary knew that if the French mobilised more than a couple of hours beforer they did, that the French could advance deep into German territory before the Germans could respond, and vice versa. The ability to pause and think was negated - once Russia decided to back the Serbs, France knew they had to move, because if they didn't they'd pretty much lose if Germany did, and the Germans knew the same was the other way around.
2/ That WW I was the best argument against monarchy. The more I've read about Wilhelm (__Dreadnought__ and other pieces on the era) the more apparent it's looked to me that the guy was looking for a confrontation with Britain and his cousin. You name it - inferiority complex, delusions of granduer - the Kaiser had it. And, unfortunatley for Germany (and, ultimately, most everyone else), Bismark's structure for a united Germany left no real checks and balances short of a coup against him.
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when we were told our stories had an endorsing (of science) tone.
*blinks*
That's it. I really do live in a post-Enlightenment epoch. Guess I better start stockpiling ammo for the next Dark Ages.
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but it kinda gets old, man.
Not for some people.
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People in China have a right to better themselves, to escape rural poverty and to earn themselves more choices
Sounds great. Pity people in rural China live in a totalitarian state where the ability to move from rural areas to urban areas in search of new opporunities is subject to central government planning controls on internal migration.
Or the ability to "earn more choices" is constrained by same. Try organising a union or going on strike for better wages and conditions in China without Part approval.
Your excitement seems to be making you reality-blind.
The number and bitterness of complaints over the price of dairy products could easily be turned into votes
We had relatives who are living in Singapore come visit the family a few weeks ago. One went shopping with my mother-in-law and noted that butter and cheese prices for the same New Zealand branded products were substantially higher here than in Singapore. "Meeting the international market" my arse. I wonder how long it is before supermarkets start importing low-perishable products from overseas for their own product lines.
("Don't fucking come crying to me for money next flood or drought, Mr Farmer. You ought to be stockpiling it" is my other thought.)
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New York benefits greatly from having a Little Italy and a Chinatown etc. Is not being completely integrated always so bad?
Well, it is when poor integration in Little Italy and Irish communities fed into the importation and development of the Mafia in the case of Little Italy, and gave rise to Irish gangs, the attempted Fenian invasions of Canada, and the like. So I would suggest that's about the worst throwaway example you could have come up with.
NZ had changed, a lot, even white-bread Dunedin
You know, if I was one of the numerous Chinese descended Kiwis whose families have live around Otago and Southland for around 150 years, I'd be getting pretty fucking tired of people pretending me and mine didn't exist and using my hometown as an example of "where there are no non-whites."
Neil: in my mind the "real grievances" are only real in the sense that they are genuinely felt. Otherwise, they seem to me to be proxies for economic anxiety.
You reckon Native Americans in the US who are pissed off at the way they can't get any traction on their greivances because Black and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic immigrants on what was once their land seem to have captured all the available political capital on matters of race and wrongdoing are operating purely from economic concerns?
Similarly, people who used to only having to think in terms of their own Christian faith having pre-eminence in a society can get quite snakey about being asked to accept that Muslims or Hindus may have quite a different view about which rituals can be utilised in the public sphere as being universal. Again, hardly an economic concern.
Nor, I think, do you need to be especially hysterical to be, say, a gay Kiwi who's a bit disturbed by how many Polynesian immigrants (or kids thereof) to New Zealand turned up to Parliament with Mr Tamaki a few years back. I was there and while the speakers at that event may have confined themselves to demanding recriminalistation, more than a few of people in the crowd weren't shy about screaming "We're going to fucking kill you!" and similarly delightful sentiments.
I could go on (FGM clashes in countries with greater immigration from countries where it's practised than ours, arranged marriages, honour killings, et al), but I don't think the point needs belabouring.I don't think the answer to any of those concerns is "close the gates", not least because so many of the problems one can identify are a minority within the minority, if you will, and the last two are, strictly speaking, independant of race. But there's scope for concern well beyond the economic.
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Ahh, O'Connor. The man who characterised Rickards as an 'isolated incident' in direct contradiction of the Beazly report; who saw nothing wrong with the detective leading the Ellis investigation having propositioned one mother during the case and having sexual relationships with two of the parents of children involved in the case later on.
I wonder what an officer would have to do, other than being a woman working as a hooker on the side, to earn censure?
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Public Murals very really get tagged. Why is that?
That would be nice if it were true, but more than a few of my favourite murals in Wellington have been destroyed by taggers over the years.
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I have noticed that on the Herald myviews site there was a lot of talk about capital gains tax, and I wonder whether that's where their interest is coming from
Well, there are two components when people talk about the badness of the housing market.
One is the developers. They are, you are quite correct, not the people pushing up prices as such. But it is very frustrating to go looking for a home and finding that you basically can't buy the home you want, if the home you want is a traditional New Zealand home with a bit of a section and a decent sized house and so on, because the people competing with you is some fucking wanker who's going to bulldoze it and throw up half a dozen shitpile townhouses on concrete slabs.
In that sense "affordability" is the extent to which you can't buy the home you want. That's about the fact that, say, a two-income family earning multiples of the average income in 1970 could quite likely have picked up a nice house on a quarter-acre section in a part of town they wanted to live, but will barely scrape into something a considerably less good match in 2008. To the extent quality of life is where you live matching what you want, developers have helped it plummet. And that's before we go to leaky homes and all the rest...
The capital gains tax is less, I think, about "bloody developers" and more about the feeling that there's a bunch of baby boomers out there soaking the bejeezus out of their kids and grandkids generations buy leveraging their homes they bought thirty years ago to pick up three or four heavily leveraged properites they expect to flick on at a big capital gain, hoovering up all the available housing for a tax-free income.
Now, that may or may not be a fair or accurate picture (the only boomers I know who own more than one house got that way by working their arses off with 2 - 4 jobs between them for 30 years, so not so much of the unearned wealth there), but it's certainly been the hype around boomer-focused property marketing, so one can hardly be surprised if "I can't afford a house because some fucking wanker is getting rich without even paying tax on their swathe of properties!" is a common sentiment.
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But there's more than just business considerations in buying your own house.
General social effects, for starters, which Habitat for Humanity are big on citing, for example.
Home ownership culture, on the surface of it, seems to be a New World Colony thing.
Well, yes. In Europe there have been hundreds of years of serfdom for people to become enculturated to the idea of being an extension of a landlord's wallet. The people who shipped out of Europe for parts abroad were quite unreasonably interested in leaving behind a variety of ideas.