Posts by Rich of Observationz
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I am a huge fan of Banks, except when he allows the sci-fi to cross over (The Bridge, Song of Stone).
For me the characterisation and background is good, but his plots do seem to lose direction sometimes.
I loved the whisky book though. It's not really a book about whisky, it's a 300 page blog in hardcover.
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Why haven't the people said "enough!" and stuck the lot of them in jail?
There's a lot of ppl pinning those hopes on an Obama Administration.
They're electing Obama, not Castro.
And throwing the capitalists in jail doesn't work, coz they eventually get released and return, zombie-like. Look at Russia.
You need to execute them. With spades.
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only rich people own shares?
If you look at the Household Savings Survey, half the population has negligible net worth (of any sort). 20% of the adult population owned shares, and these are concentrated amongst the richest.
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conspiracy theory that Rupert Murdoch was forcing his newspapers to take a pro-Iraq editorial line, using the truly eccentric methodology of looking at editorials on the subject . It simply wasn't true -- at least in New Zealand
Rupert Murdoch doesn't own any papers in NZ.
Was this a while ago?
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You don't accept that there is a newspaper monopoly in every NZ city Craig?
Where can I buy a copy of the Wellington Times, the Wellington Herald or the Wellington Guardian then?
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England in the 1950s
- No central heating
- No double glazing
- 20/30 year old cars
- Motorcycle gang panic
- Amphetamines
- Fizzy beerI love it here really!
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You think NZ papers don't cover netball? Look at the coverage of the sport in one UK national paper over the past year:
http://browse.guardian.co.uk/search/Sport?search=netball&sitesearch-radio=Sport&go-guardian=SearchNone at all?
Outside NZ, Aussie and maybe Jamaica it's an amateur minority sport. Which is great for NZ because there will always be one game where we're more or less guaranteed world champions.
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total no-brainer to invest in finance companies for a 10% return
Except that if the finance company is rated below BB, then they would have to pay a 3% insurance premium. Plus (I think) they'll be putting half that money in the Reserve Bank at base (7.5%). Which means that to pay 10% on $10,000, they'll need to make $925 in interest from $5k, which is 18.5%. Plus margin, plus an allowance for defaults.
I don't think that'll work, so there won't be any below-BB rated firms around. Maybe the higher rated ones will stick around, but like I say they'll be essentially banks.
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the country where people walk on their hands with hats on their feet
I convinced a North American that the reason a dryer was hung upside down was that it was a northern hemisphere model and they didn't work in the southern hemisphere unless you inverted them.
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Why do US newspapers come out and endorse candidates and ours do not?
Well, not explicitly.Because ours are worried that if they explicitly declared themselves to be National party pamphlets, a non-National government might notice that they are an unregulated and abusive monopoly?