Posts by Steve Barnes
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And Chch water is indubitably the best of any NZ city.
Yeah Right
Ok, it may not be the city but................. -
Cheers Gio, We try.
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I think the reason this thread has gone on for sooooo long is because the root of the discussion is so polarised.
On one hand we have a person who believes the world owes him a living for being a middleman and on the other, people who like to listen to music, or enjoy other entertainments, and really don't give a stuff about how it is produced. A parallel on the latter would be people eating mutton and not giving a damn about the fact that a sheep died for their satisfaction. The former is akin to a financier complaining about poor people not working 24 hours a day to pay his 29% interest rate.
It is unfortunate that our middleman comes from the part of our loverly country that only has bagpipes to listen to and the rest of the country despises bagpipes.
Then there is the distinction between Art (note capital A) and commercial content. An Artist strives to convey a concept to the rest of the world in the, sometimes erronious, belief that the world would be a better place if viewed through the eyes of the Artist. The driving force is not material gain but acceptance of an ideal or the destruction of a fallacy and the recognition that such work can garner.
The commercial artist, on the other grubby little hand, is motivated by the desire for fame and fortune, although these days fame can be found in less creative ways, dying of cervical cancer diagnosed on a reality TV show springs to mind.
To demand that the general public should pay some kind of premium just in case a random teenager may copy an autotuned fart and giggle insanely with his schoolyard chums is patently ridiculous. As ridiculous as claiming you have the right to continue to be the only people allowed to depict a cartoon mouse. As ridiculous as composing the most beautiful piece of music that will bring an end to all suffering and enlighten the entire world. Then locking it up in a drawer in case someone copied it. -
On the subject of the 'Rich & Powerful" running Auckland.
Bill Ralston, everybody's favorite political commentator, had this to say about who can afford to win the Mt Albert by-election.National has the advantage of being in government and can therefore summon up money from business contributors who want to curry favour.
Ah, the best politicians money can buy eh?
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Criminal lawyers will know of the case - anyone else, type Mouat into Google.
Spooky, I got This
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I suppose one solution could be to raise the cost of gaining a liquor licence to be based on the amount of liquor sold from the premises and use that income to fund better policing of current laws.
I think you can guess by my earlier comment how likely I consider that policy is to be adopted. -
Area size of your shop is indeed a bizarre measure by which to deny someone a licence to sell alcohol.
if we want to go after any branch of the liquor industry responsible for the multi-billion dollar a year bill the NZ taxpayer has to pay, it should be the big companies, not the small merchants.
Yeah Right!
The big players in the liquor industry (and the supermarket chains) are powerful lobbyists and I could almost guarantee that it was a submission from that quarter that suggested the store size restriction.
I suppose it is just another of those instances where the obvious is ignored because, well, it's too obvious to be true, life is far more complicated than that. A mere peasant, such as myself, could not possibly understand the real and quite sensible, reasons for such a policy. -
Why it's more efficient to have three companies with the same owner pretending to compete escapes me.
Smoke and mirrors Rich. Keep the punters scared and confused.
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an added layer of profit taking going onto that power price, which perhaps wouldn't need to be there.
Which was , kinda, my point. A nationalised power system (and Gas and water for that matter) would be more equitable. Some would say that that system has been tried and failed through inefficiency but those are the same people who actively destroyed that system for private profit.
Personally I would like to see solar panels on every roof feeding back into the grid and efficient users paid for the excess power they supply. I would also like a Pony and World peace. -
Retailers are there because the alternative would see us all shafted (even more) for our electricity
Not if it were owned by the people for the people, as God intended.