Posts by Kyle Matthews
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It's very easy to rack up many gigs by setting up bittorrent downloads of movies and TV shows and letting them go at night while you're asleep, or during the day when you're out. (And I'm sure having teenagers in the household contributes too)
It's not quite the sign of a lifeless nerd.
Oh I didn't mean the torrenting. When I get home I'll start downloading Ducks vs Blackhawks from last night. It's the figuring out your current usage in 1995 costings that was more of a concern.
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I sometimes like to amuse myself by totting up what my current monthly usage would have cost me back in the old days. 60GB a month, anyone?
Seriously. Get out more dude. There's a whole world out there waiting for you.
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Kyle: You can imagine whatever you like. I prefer to use Treasury's figures on Who pays tax... and how much?, and a calculator.
OK, well you need to get your calculator checked. That table clearly totals up to 3.2 million people, but 237K of them are labelled as paying zero taxes. So your 3.2 million is actually 2.995 million.
The table also gives you a fairly good indication of the percentage of people that don't earn enough money to pay $200/month in tax, which would make getting that much back pretty impossible. In fact, at $20,000, you pay just a tad under $3,900 income tax - only $300 more than than your $3,600. 47% of the 3.2 million earn less than that much.
I think we can assume that it's not these people that Key is offering $200/month to. It's the other half (or probably, the top third) that would be looking at $200/month or more. These people would be lucky if they got back $100/month.
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It's the interpretation I got by taking his promise of a tax cut of "2 - 3 hundred dollars a month" for most New Zealanders at face value. $300 a month x 12 months x 3.2 million odd taxpayers (if you go with the bottom end, its "only" $7.8 billion a year - still crazy talk).
I can't imagine that your maths works out in reality I/S. There's just over 4.2 million people in NZ. I'd presume the 1 million gap between that and 3.2 million is non-income earners - kids, "homemakers", imprisoned etc. According to the 2006 census, about 22% of our population are 14 or under. For people 15 and over, 6% of them earn no income.
While there might be 3.2 million people who pay some income tax in NZ, a heap of them must not even earn $300/month, and certainly heaps wouldn't pay $300/month in taxes. High school and uni students working part time, people holding down part time jobs, beneficiaries and superannuitants - they're not going to be looking at a tax break of that size.
I presume he would mean that that amount would kick in at the $40K-ish income. Still a large tax cut, but at $200/month, probably 4-5 billion, depending on how much the lesser, and higher income earners took from it.
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Why not? It has worked for the opposition for 5 years.
I think the tactics are pretty different whether you're in opposition or government. When you're the opposition you're sniping at the government so therefore you're sniping at lots of ministries, thousands of public servants etc.
When you're the government, you're just snipping at other MPs and a political party. And what national does might annoy me, but it doesn't affect me very much until they get in power. What labour does in power does affect me, because they're running my health/education/police force etc etc.
It's like Labour have forgotten how to be a popular government, so they've decided they're going to be an opposition a couple of years early. Can't see it's going to help them either in the election, or after they lose.
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Whether or not someone becomes violent is a combination of genes and environment - like everything else.
Which doesn't change my point that this kid wasn't born destined to swing a baseball bat at his mother. He was taught it. Or more accurately, he was taught to deal with a particular situation by reacting in that sort of way.
There is always more than one factor, but if Russell, and thousands of other parents can struggle through all sorts of complicating issues in this area with their kids, and produce kids that don't swing baseball bats at people, then it's not impossible to do. Harder and more work for some, but not impossible.
And given that this person I understand has no problem using violence on her son, I'm going to come to the obvious conclusion that she (and her partner/s) bear some responsibility for him dealing with stress by violence. Because that's the model that she showed him, when she used violence on him. It's bad parenting and it should be called.
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I can't believe identical twins brought up in Brixton and Beunos Aires would sound alike.
I bet they're more likely to sound alike, than the possibility that they'll both end up axe murderers. Or attacking their foster parents with a baseball bat.
being a tall skinny kid pretty soon resulted in my realising the fruitlessness of violence, no matter how angry i became...
There's also a fair few smaller kids who get aggressive to compensate for lack of size. A young man at my ice hockey club must be about 5' 8", probably 75 kg at the most. He's always the first one to start a fight against someone 6 inches and 20kg bigger. Gets right pounded sometimes too.
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Perhaps they don't 'learn it in utero' but I query the assumption that if a kid wigs out and gets violent it is all down to the parenting.
No. But my point is, you also shouldn't hold the parenting (or lack of it) completely blameless.
Even in a situation, as Russell point out, where through some sort of mental or genetic or other issue, a kid does have more violent tendencies, if Russell had just let that occur and not made any attempt to manage it and help his kid deal with stress/anger/confusion/whatever in a better way, then we could still call that "not very good parenting".
i apparently walk, talk, and act in a remarkably similar way to my father. but, he died when i was less than a year old.
Well the way you walk, talk etc, is pretty different to your violent/nonviolent tendencies. There's a lot more genetic influence over how you look and sound, than your choice to pick up a baseball bat and try and hit someone with it. Violence, sexual and other forms of abuse, are largely learnt behaviours - violent foster homes are just as bad for kids' futures as violent birth homes.
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After all , Russell exactly what would you have done if your own teenage son came swinging at you with a baseball bat?
I'd start to think about where I'd gone wrong over the past 15 years of being a parent. Children don't learn that behaviour in utero after all.
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Especially notable for the polar bears; although granted in 30 years they'll only exist in zoos.
Somewhat ironically, the polar bear's natural habitat is rapidly becoming more and more like the climate at the Auckland zoo. His old zookeeper should go teach whoever is trying to save them what their future behaviour will be like.