Posts by Steve Withers
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No surprises the "case" against global warming from the Heartland Institute is ethically challenged. But I'm left wondering WHY, if they have a solid case, these people need to be misleading and deceitful?
The case either sands up or it doesn't. If it doesn't, then why be dishonest about it? Where is the "win" in deceiving people about climate change?
I can understand owen mcShane or anyone else having honestly held views and making their case....however one-eyed or wrong-headed it may be. But to misrepresent the level of support for your implies that you're aware you don't have the support you're claiming. So would not a rational person re-examine their claims if the support isn't there?
Lying about it doesn't make it real. Maybe it worked for George W Bush for a while, but it ends up badly for those who knowingly follow that path.
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Whew! I'm abit relieved to read your post. Watching the demos last week, I thought much the same things and wrote about it in my own blog : [url]http://truthseekernz.blogspot.com/2008/04/beijing-olympic-drama.html[/url]
I differed in that I didn't have any serious expectation that Chinese would think too deeply about democracy and freedom right now. I'm concerned aout the risk of China being (somewhat pointlessly) humiliated through the Olympics by a hypocritical West. I can readily understand how that might pecipitate a backlash both inside China and against some outside.
The nationalist narrative you describe is real in the minds of enough Chinese that it is reality. The West is silly to not understand that context and treat it as real.
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Idiot / Savant : I left them a comment suggesting they make a case instead of spewing abuse, but like good freedom-loving folk, they have comment moderation turned on. It will be interesting to see if the facts I presented and the advice to reduce to abuse and instead make a case is will meet their approval.
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tim kong: Brilliant! Love the apple-bowl story. :-)
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Mikaere: I agree. Exempting the first "X" amount of taxable income is the best way to give benefit to those who can make best use of it. Anyone suggesting tax cuts at the top end of the income scale is making it VERY clear who they intend to benefit and it won't be the low-income folks who are already struggling.
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I look to what happened to rail or Air NZ after their ownership went overseas. They were milked for cash and then discarded. As they play an important role in the NZ economy, they had to both be rescued by the taxpayer....who has, in effect, underwritten the profits of the investors. Worse, we had to buy - again - what we had already paid to build. Someone else gets the money rach time these things are sold, but the customers end up paying for each and every purchase....but never get ownership and control.
I'm not focused on the bank account itself. It's more about the whole of business stake in the country I live in. My movements are limited by my nationality. I can't got get a job in Bangalore. So it is prudent for me to support and reward companies and individuals who demonstrate they also see New Zealand as their base and the place where they count their profits and pay their taxes and provide jobs and skills and industry.
I grew up in Canada and there was a story every week about how some S company or other would ignore Canadian law and follow US law in order for the Head Office to avoid being prosecuted back home for actions taken in Canada and that were perfectly legal in Canada....like exporting locomotives to Cuba.
It ends up being an issue for democracy and bears directly on accountabilty. If the people making the decisions don't live here and aren't accountable in any way here....then there is clear risk.
None of which has anything to do with Kiwibank's campaign specifically, though their campaign is tapping these sorts of concerns.
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Leave the GST alone. It's nice and simple as it is. Creating exceptions to it will only encourage fraud and black markets and other compliance dodges and lurks....not to mention the additional cost for law-abiding merchants (which ends up in the goods). How can you remove the GST completely anyway? If everyone UP TO the retailer is paying it and claiming it, the retailer still ends up with the GST cost from their suppliers included in their costs....even if it isn't added on top of the final price.
As for the cost of food, we went out to the fruit and veggie market on Mokoia Road the other day and bought a trolly-load of stuff for $66. Veggies and fruit are much cheaper than meat or packaged / processed foods. A 10kg or 20kg bag of rice, even now, is a massive amount of food for what you pay for it. It will feed you for months.
We have 300kgs of homekill (ours) steer in the freezer that cost us $750 all up....for the equivalent of $3000 worth of supermarket meat...and ours is organic. The beast was mine, the land wasn't sprayed or chemically fertilised. That's roughly $2.50 / kg. It will last us a year. Then we get another one. There are ways to buy good food VERY cheap and they usually involve getting it raw and fresh and, where meat is concerned, investing a little time and thought into it. The price you pay in the supermarket is the price of either ignorance, laziness or both. How much time would you invest to save $2000? Few of us have tim so valuable this this wouldn't be worthwhile.
How can we ever hope to be a "knowledge economy" if we're all passive supermarket/chain store/logo-driven sheeple who moan about the cost of everything but don't think for 5 seconds about we might do it ourselves better and much cheaper?
Do you know anyone with a few acres in the rural areas around Auckland your town? Might you be able to pay them to graze your $300 steer or raise your $60 bobby calf for a year or so? Or offer to share half with them if you buy the animal? Find a registered homekill butcher who will do things the way you like them done? You could cut your meat bill in half or more. Sure it takes a bit of planning.
Pigs gestate for 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days. They take 6 months to reach freezer weight. Kune kunes take a year. The meat is great...and you feed them leftovers and table scraps from yourself and your neighbours. Good...and cheap. You know hwat it ate and where it came from.
Yes, you have to buy a 700 litre freezer. Even if you buy it new, you save the cost of that (and more) with your first beast.
I've done these things. I'm amazed more people don't.
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Your Chinese lecturer's comment about China sounds like quantum theory.
In Toronto last year, every two weeks, there was a Falun Gong parade down Spadina Road in Chinatown. A full blown parade - elaborate costumes / uniforms, marching bands, floats, banners......all of it.
On the 4 corners corner of Spadina and Dundas there was a group of elderly Chinese men and women playing tapes on amplifiers, handing out pamphlets all day, every day.
There has been speculation that Falun Gong gets cash from the CIA to create "leverage" with the Chinese leadership for the US. I don't know whether it is true. But everywhere i see them, they are well-resources and very well organised.
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Craig makes a good point about ANZAC Day. I hadn't seen tat angle when watching these ads. I saw it more as an allusion to an insurgency against foreign invaders a la Iraq, combined with the very real sense that many people of our sovereignty being compromised by the ever higher levels of foreign ownership in the economy.
Maybe I think too much.
The campaign didn't make me switch my "millions" to Kiwibank this past week. The ANZ move in sending 500 jobs to Bangalore did that. I'd been an ANZ customer for 23 years, so it wasn't a trivial move on my part.
"Xenopobia" has nothing whatever to do with it, either. That's a NZ Herald epithet that to me is just cheap name-calling. It avoids facing the real issue: Sovereignty in our own country. Can we make local economic decisions for local benefits?
Increasingly, the answer is no. The big decisions that rule our lives are increasingly being made by people who are utterly unaccountable to us and who don't even live here. That cuts the guts out of democracy here in very real terms.
Being concerned about that prudent and realistic.....not "xenophobic".
Kiwibank's ad agency must have done some polling on this and worked out that there IS a sense of concern out there about the way the country is going and how we are perceived to be losing our ability to direct our own future in our own country, while the foreign-owned print media cheerlead for the "invaders".
But they should have taken a break from the campaign over the Anzac Day period. That, too, would have been prudent.
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My youngest daughter came close to dying of pneumonia when she was 4 years old. I spent about 10 days and nights at Kenepuru Hospital in Porirua until she was well enough to come home. That was hell. I can only imagine (barely, dimly) what months of such a life with several / many such episodes might be like....and no guarantee of a good outcome.
Gutting.
Great post, David. Thank you.