Posts by Bart Janssen
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The frustrating thing about these discussions is they all seem to devolve into binary options. Super or not. Age X or Age Y. Means testing or not.
Most of us are adults, we live in a world of greys and compromises. Day to day we make judgement calls and think sharing is good.
But get into a political discussion and it's all black and white, all or nothing.
So here's my reckons (valueless and hence free). Superannuation serves two purposes, first it acts as a safety net so that when people get old they don't have to work, our socialist state looks after them. You can take an actuarial approach to who gets it and/or use a UBI, but in a morally sound country we don't force old people to work beyond a certain point and we let people relax a bit before they die.
Second, superannuation serves as a reward for contributing to the country over your working career. It was your taxes that made everything possible and the country chooses to reward people for that.
So means testing makes the first part work better but sacrifices the second, so find a compromise, means-test up to a certain point eg the UBI and after that yeah you are being rewarded for what you contributed even if you are rich.
As for the age, it's pretty clear 65 is too low for some people and too high for others. So find some compromise. Make the UBI portion (or whatever) activate earlier and the reward part activate later, yes I know that's somewhat unfair on those who die earlier but that's what a compromise is about - being somewhat unfair to everyone.
As for paying for it, the morons who stopped paying into the Cullen fund should be taken out back and something embarrassing should happen to them, and frankly the idea that we're taking their ideas seriously now after that fuck up is insane. We need a combined approach that leverages the power of compounding inherent in a large independent fund like the Super fund. And yeah we also need to bite the bullet and realise we (those of us who are rich) need to pay more taxes, it pisses me off when folks wibble about their taxes as if they have no idea what sharing is about.
TLDR: We need some adults in parliament. Children like English and Little and Peters need to be booted out.
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disdained the idea of "borrowing money to invest"
That made me laugh out loud. Are these the same people who run workshops on how to borrow money ... er I mean leverage your assets ... to invest in capital gains-free property?
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Speaker: Vodafone, Sky and the Commerce…, in reply to Paula Browning,
we should be mindful that many of the sports that NZers not only value viewing, but also participating in (along with children, family and friends) rely on rights revenue.
From what I understand of what happens overseas when sports are limited to pay TV participation rates drop as does live attendance (probably because folks often watch sports they play). In NZ cricket has been the big loser when compared with Netball.
While the big lump sum that sports get from Sky would disappear I'm not certain that most sports would lose overall from widening the market for their sport away from pay TV.
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Hard News: Hep C: When doctors do the…, in reply to James Freeman,
Sadly, times have changed.
Sadly true.
Meanwhile none of that explains SDHBs behaviour, all it would take would be for them to admit they have been doing it wrong ... oh wait.
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Hard News: Hep C: When doctors do the…, in reply to Worik,
I would like to add that the expensive research is no longer (in general) done by big Pharma
The cost for any drug is never the primary research, it is the cost of doing clinical trials. These are the trials developed after the thalidomide disaster. Those trials tend to cost 100 fold+ more than the primary research.
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Sorry I came across as saying big pharma is good and that isn't what I meant or think.
I do think the simplistic cost profit analysis for any successful drug is unreasonable.
But I also heartily agree that the big pharma model of health care is broken. Where I differ from a lot of folks is that I think it is utterly broken - it cannot be fixed by any method that allows private enterprise to profit from health care. The problems always stem from the imperative that companies (by law) are required to maximise profit. That means they will always sacrifice humans for profit.
The only answer I can see as viable is to research and develop drugs and health care products under government funding and managed by scientists and clinicians (NOT businessmen (yes always men)). It won't be perfect but it will be better than the business does it.
That means paying more taxes.
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Hard News: Hep C: When doctors do the…, in reply to linger,
Yeah I edited to add that as you were typing Linger.
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Hard News: Hep C: When doctors do the…, in reply to James Freeman,
so the total ROI is now 160x funded by government and insurers.
I'm torn by this kind of stuff. Yes absolutely these companies are making huge amounts of money from successful drugs and it's really trivial to see how unfair that is on patients.
But for every drug that is successful there are many that fail completely and somehow these companies have to cover that cost.
The real problem, and one that isn't being fixed, is the shareholder push to maximise profit. If at any point a company doesn't do that they get sued by the shareholders.
Underneath it all is the cost of doing the basic research that leads to these drugs, that cost is almost always borne by the taxpayer and if any money is returned to the research teams it's at a very early stage and a tiny amount. That's the part of the system that is broken in the worst way.
The basic research engine is starving for funding while at the other end the companies are maximising profit. It's a system that isn't working anymore as can be seen by the lack of funding for novel antibiotics which are low profit drugs.
I'm not particularly defending these big companies just that only assessing the successful drugs is unreasonable.
Overall I'd say using businesses to develop new drugs is well and truly broken in so many ways (bad reporting of trial data is another issue). But unless we can figure out a way of funding it through taxation then we're screwed.
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Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to Farmer Green,
A definition of beneficiary may be helpful to the argument.
Essentially the term is being used to describe the sample of 8000 job applicants that WINZ (or whatever they are called this week) keeps data on.
It is probably pretty representative of all job applicants. To go from .17% to any significantly large number as to be meaningful would be ... interesting.
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Hard News: Drugs, testing and workplaces, in reply to Tinakori,
The rate of positive tests for beneficiaries is relevant only to the beneficiary population. What about the positives for non-beneficiary applicants and also those beneficiaries and non beneficiaries who avoid jobs where they know they will be tested?
So you are going to argue that beneficiaries are not representative of the overall job seeking population.
Furthermore you are going to argue that beneficiaries are less likely to be drug users than the rest of the job seeking population.
You are also arguing that Bill English's staff are so incompetent that they can't get hold of the same data that the online community found in 10 minutes.
I have to say I am impressed by your ability to argue all those thing at once without your head exploding.
You could be right, all your arguments could be true, or Bill English is a liar.
You know I'm going to go with Bill English is a liar because nothing you've said comes remotely close to being anything other than fantastically unlikely.