Posts by Kyle Matthews
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(also, if you could see fit to work out why in the new millennium we can't get a passenger train that can go faster than either the old Vulcan railcar or a steam JA-hauled passenger train).
Hear hear. I suspect the way we'll get a decent viable rail service around the country is if the government invests umpteen million and moves us onto fast rail. I'd take a lot more trains (more than well, none), if they could get me to Christchurch inside of three hours, and went at least a couple of times up and down each day. I don't have any idea how much that'd cost, but it'd be nice to find out.
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Waited for him to notice and bring us our jackets.
Had they hidden your jackets away somewhere?
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Now we get 15 weeks of Super 14, 6 home tests and then about 12 weeks of ANZ Cup. So about the equavalent of 33 weeks of professional rugby on our shores. Throw in the Sevens weekend as well, and Pay TV showing Currie Cup, Heinekin Cup etc, and all the while club rugby is still trucking along in the background and we get exactly that watered down feel for the game. The interest is still there as stated in the original post but the passion has been eroded big time.
I think the problem is that we've built a structure which has four levels (club, NPC, super 14, All Blacks) which has four levels, three of which are professional, in a country of 4 million people. If we had 10 million that might be fine, but there's just not the population, sponsorship, numbers of people to attend rugby to support that. If the NPC returned to a semi-amateur competition (retainers etc), and the whole season got shorted by two months by playing it at the same time as the super 14 - during winter, which is when rugby is meant to be played - it'd be living within its means.
Currently it's running a structure similar to the NFL, NHL, NBA etc, which are sports that have more than four million amateur _players_, and tens of millions of fans to prop it up.
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Paul: the TV timeouts are relatively new in American football. A couple of minutes to restart after each score; a timeout at 2 minutes before the end of each half and the division of the game into quarters (with a stoppage). All of these things help TV stations who want to show the games, as you can tell your advertisers that their ads will be shown during the game.
NHL Ice Hockey has TV timeouts midway through each (there are three in a game) period. There's it's absolutely a case of the game fitting around TV's need for advertisers. Ice hockey has very long breaks between the periods to allow the ice to be groomed, so they try not to put too many adverts in that break to stop the audience channel surfing, and therefore demand to fit them in during the actual game.
I agree about afternoon games. It is really hard to take children - future fans - to matches that don't finish to close to 10pm. There should be a better mix.
I don't buy this anymore. I think the biggest problem with rugby is the idea that it needs to be played Friday - Sunday. Why would you only use 3/7 of the week to play a game? With all the crap TV that's on during the week, and people actually having their own sport and fun activities on the weekend, night time is the best time to watch sport on the television. I can't think of many sports that are exclusively weekend sports at the professional level. Basketball, ice hockey, soccer, cricket all play sport all week. Rugby, rugby league, and American Football seem to view the sporting week as only consisting of Friday - Monday. Why couldn't the Air NZ cup be a midweek competition, two games a night, one starting at 6, the other at 8?
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__Schools do useful things, the covers on the dishes are actually just cosmetic.__
So just because someone deems that something isn't useful, its fine to destroy it? That really is screwy.
Well whether or not it's fine to destroy something, would depend on the individual and the object. Personally I'd be very happy if Waihopai got knocked over in a big storm, or was torn down by enraged activists. I wouldn't want anyone who worked there hurt in that action however. I'm sure I'd be in the minority though.
But it's not a difficult conclusion to draw that you would get a different reaction to the statements:
1. I hate the health system so I'm going to blow up a hospital.
2. I hate Waihopai, so I'm going to blow up the spy dishes.from a lot of NZers. Even if they opposed both actions (which I'm sure most NZers would), we assign different values to different things, and it would be a far more whacked out activist that would try to take out a hospital, even if it was (for some reason) empty of staff and patients.
No doubt the activists will be convicted and fined, in much the same way that a person who got made the choice to get drunk and go around breaking stuff.
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Why not? The markers read it, they know it's quality research (or not).
The prime purpose of the degree is for the university to be able to say 'this person has achieved doctorate standard and is capable of undertaking a research or teaching career requiring a doctorate'.
Making the research they did along the way available publicly is a secondary consideration. Keeping it private isn't encouraged in universities, but sometimes it's the only way research can be done on a topic. Sometimes important figures won't talk to you unless you agree to keep it private until after their death. Should we not interview these people because the research can't come out for fifty years, and lose their contribution?
There's a dissertation that we hold under lock and key. Every 10 years or so someone from MFAT reads it and lets us know that they still want it kept that way. Presumably eventually they'll tell us the opposite but we know the student did a good job, and they're now out in the world advancing their career on that basis.
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Economically, China seems to have achieved the impossible by rising so quickly from such a low base to where they are now. It's hard to think of any historical comparisons to this meteoric rise in fortunes.
Post WWII Japan springs immediately to mind, but no others.
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OK now that's freaking me out. I've never seen Sean Plunket before, just listened to him.
He looks a little like, sounds a fair bit like, but has almost exactly the same mannerisms as Grant Robertson.
And given that Sean has interviewed Grant many times, now I have an image in my head of them actually being the same person and doing some sort of weird one person, two microphones radio thing.
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No its not. GST is a regressive tax that has a far greater proportional impact on low income households than higher income households. Sorry Russell, you have got that side of the argument totally arse about face.
I get... annoyed isn't the right word - frustrated... by the description of GST as a regressive tax.
GST is probably regressive to your income, but it's not an income tax. It's a sales tax of a sort. It's a flat tax relative to what it's a tax on, which is spending.
Yes poor income earners probably pay a higher proportion of their income on GST on food. But I bet the proportion is even more pronounced on petrol tax, no one seems to be arguing for that to be removed to alleviate child poverty. Car registration? Rates are probably regressive for some lower income earners.
(Catching up on posts after a week in Rarotonga)
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However, from where I'm sitting, it's looking pretty good. The bottoms fallen out of the real-estate pyramid scheme. Meaning, rather than farming affluent wannabe lords of the two acer block, the farmers might resume food production as the better economic use of land. And as David, the former energy engineer and forklift driver, said in another thread, New Zealand produces food with reasonable imported energy efficiency, compared to some of our major trading partners.
I don't see that helping much. NZ getting ahead in the cost of producing food is going to be great for farmers, but if food is still really expensive in the rest of the world, then it'll be much better for our farmers to export it and earn a heap more, than sell it domestically and earn less. It's my understanding that this is why we're paying a lot for milk products these days - not that milk is drastically more expensive to make in NZ, just that it's high internationally, and we buy NZ milk in competition with that international market.