Posts by Paul Campbell
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right - but it would also make Bollard happy as it would cool the economy.
One of the things I've always wondered about - raising interest rates cools the economy by slowing down the housing market ... but it also heats it up by making imported good cheaper (despite my annoyed comments above) - what I don't know and don't know how to find out is how does that balance work out? are there situations where dropping interest rates suddenly actually cool the economy more than raising them?
OTOH maybe the reserve bank could do better with the housing market simply by using their money to pay the TV channels to stop running those "buy a house, do it up and make millions" shows
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I consult for a company in the US - my income goes down every month - it's gone down 20% in the past year - but my mortgage goes up ... can't win. I've bitched about that here before, but it's life I know I have to live with it ....
What I've been wondering more recently is why the imported stuff I buy hasn't gone down by 20% - in particular why aren't CDs 20% cheaper? (or iTunes or ...) I bought the new White Stripes CD in Amoeba in Berkeley last month for $US9.99 - Real Groovy (who seem to get some of their cheapo 2nd hand CDs from Amoeba if I believe the stickers) still charge NZ$30+ - admittedly that was a special price - normally I'd expect to pay US$13-15 which would be OK back when a NZ$ was US50c but it's not now - that $15 ought to map to NZ$19
Someone's making out really well somewhere
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actually my kids were covered by insurance in the US from birth - just had to let my companies HR person know.
On the other hand my company would often shop around and change insurance providers every year - when my first was born that meant that a month before his birth we had to change doctors, midwives and hospitals (because each HMO has its own list of which of those you can go to)
In fact I had to change my doctor almost every year for 20 years, which meant in practice that I ended up cycling through the same set of 4-5 doctors offices - people there were amazed that I'd had the same GP in NZ for the first 20 years of my life
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Ben - I was more referring to totally non-urgent stuff, no sane hospital in the US or NZ is not going to do the same thing (but woe betide you if in the US your HMO thinks you possibly could have rung them to get permission first, you may be stuck with the bill).
Like anywhere they do triage at the hospital, I sat in the waiting room in the ER once for 12 hours one Sat afternoon/evening with a broken toe - not the best medicine on the plant despite what people say
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well I'm late to the party .... but I have lived under both systems - there's good and bad - I paid tax at a higher rate in the US and my bosses always paid for good health insurance in the US on top of that, here it's included in the lesser tax I pay, good deal I say - dealling with an HMO (insurance company) there is like pulling teeth - both my doctor and my dentist had a person on staff full time who's sole job was to harass HMOs so they could get paid. Seeing a specialist took 6 months, first to get the HMO's OK then to get in line for the specialist to see me, in pain several times every week, mind you once they'd decided to pull my gall bladder they whipped it out right away. I haven't had to do the same since I moved back to NZ but I hear it's just the same, except you wait at different places in the process.
Mind you from an economics point of view queues are healthy, not having a queue means there are expensive people and machines sitting on their hands waiting to see you - you want to have queues that occasionally dip down to 0 length if you can - the big decision is really "how long do you want the average wait to be?"
Which comes to the main point I wanted to make - one of the healthiest things I've seen in NZ after coming back is the public discourse about health care, people are up in arms about X being covered and Y not and why do I have to wait and ..... frankly is wonderfull, no one needs to make a Sicko here - we argue about it on the nightly news every day .... it's the way a democracy in a caring society ought to be - I think we all understand that there's no way we collectively can afford to pay for every health procedure and we argue to decide what we will do, and if we don't some group raises money for the kid down the road that needs the 1 in a million operation that's not covered, or to buy a body scanner for the local hospital because the govt can only afford 3 or ....
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'6' & '7'? it's digital TV for heaven's sake, not that clunky rotary dial on the side of the old black and white TV. Don't they know on digital TV are now allowed to use letters, even more than one at a time.
Personally I see it as a massive lack of imagination on someone's part.
I do this stuff for a living - modern TV protocols use multi-lingual strings, at the very least they should be capable of useful names in both English and Maori and probably a dozen other commonly used languages as well
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To be honest I should add there was one other place I'd meet Kiwis, or at least hear kiwi accents - on the ski slopes at Tahoe - in the 90s there would always be kiwi snow-kids running the rope tows and serving at the lunch counters - never got to meet any though.
Other ex-pats I've met have mentioned the same experience of sitting in the departure lounge on the way back home straining to listen in to other's conversations just to listen to the familiar accent ....
Now we're back in NZ we're very happy - the kids love being in NZ and have adapted really well to school (over 2 years now) - my son is sitting NCEA this year (and thankfully not staring down the SATs next year) for all the fuss after actually reading up on how NCEA works i don't have a problem with it - I think the main problem is that the complexity throws parents off while the kids seem to understand it.
Still the kids do see themselves as American too, living in the US in the future seems to still be in their future world view - but that may be because we've taken them to see the larger world and broken down a lot of the scariness about travel and given them permission to do it which was part of our goal - potential downside is that we'll end up with a family spread across the world
Slightly back on topic - saw the FoC on HBO last night (I'm on a biz trip in Seattle - this I've already spent almost 2 months off and on this year staring at the walls of the same Comfort Suites room, or its mirror inverse) - they were great - the bits that were stolen from the radio show sort of jarred, but only because I've heard them before - I do hope the dead-pan will play here - Sunday night is a great slot for them to have
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I noticed that - they've been getting big plugs around the Sopranos on HBO too (or at least were when I was visiting last month)
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Reading your post I was thinking about the nature of kiwi ex-pat community ... and how it may be a generational thing - my experience of moving to the US didn't involve grand gatherings of wonderfull kiwis, in fact it didn't involve many gatherings of kiwis at all .....
My first year there I met 1 kiwi - an older gay guy on a bus in SF - he was very disdainfull of NZ, well shut of the place, and somewhat of us as noobs .... given that it was 1984 and the very day before we'd left Marilyn Waring had crossed the floor and voted with Labour eventually bringing down Muldoon and the (for good or bad) societal changes that followed he was probably right to feel that way.
The only gatherings of Kiwis I can honestly say I attended were both showings of 'Patu!' the movie about the Springbok tour - the first at the PFA a small theatre on the UC Berkeley campus - there were older people behind me who couldn't understand how this could have been happening in the NZ they remembered .... felt it was staged .... having lived it it was a very different vibe. The second was in the old UC Theatre (just before the Rocky Horror show) - a full sized theatre - there's a scene where Muldoon comes on - somewhere up the back someone started hissing, it was taken up by several people around the room
That was it, my sole experience of groups of Kiwis in the US for the first 15 years I lived there .... people somewhere in darkened theatres
I think for the current generation of people doing their OE things have changed - the 'net makes everyone more connected, they can find each other in among the masses .... the crowd of somewhat younger Aussies I go to Burning Man with have all stayed connected and even congregated as a result, and in fact Burning Man is probably the only really kiwi group thing I've done in the US - there the kiwis have gotten their act together and meet and 'pub crawl' every year
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just wait until you drive out of town at night - dodging the unlit bikes and people - I finally decided the the reason they kept dipping and undipping their lights was half warning and half a sort of echo-location for unlit fellow travellers