Posts by Nat Torkington
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I'm in the US at the moment. As other commenters have noticed, the bulk of US imports come from China which has the RMB pegged against the USD. This situation isn't likely to change because China has so much of the US debt--devaluing the USD against the RMB devalues the treasury bills that China bought. This article explores what might happen if that day ever comes.
The trouble for the US came when the world began abandoning the USD as the benchmark currency. The first sign of trouble I remember seeing was a report that drug dealers were starting to demand Euros instead of USD. Now everyone's doing it--latest is Iran telling Japan to pay for oil in Yen and not USD.
The housing market here in the US is in deep shit thanks to the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. In a few places there's still more demand than supply (e.g., San Francisco). But here in the heartland, Fort Collins CO, there's a huge glut of USD$300k-ish priced houses. This is, uncoincidentally, the range my house fell in when we moved back in late 2005. We took a serious loss just to get out of the collapsing market.
As mortgages become harder to get (in theory--I still hear "refinance for low low rates, and we've talked our lenders into relaxing their credit requirements!" in ads on the radio), the builders who had built a few houses to sell suddenly have inventory and no buyers. The foreclosures here also drive house prices down--for every two existing homes sold in the Denver metro area during the first half of the year, another went into foreclosure. Excess of supply, shortage of demand.
I could see this coming, I just couldn't get my family back soon enough. See the great roller-coaster video for a visceral demonstration of just how unrealistic US house prices have become.
Cost of household supplies here is still low. The only exception is meat--the Americans feed corn to their cattle and the corn supply is being pressured by a growing ethanol industry. End result is higher prices for steak. And don't get jubilant thinking this is an opportunity for Kiwi beef--the corn feeding process results in meat that's way more marbled (fatty) than NZ's grass feed produces and the difference is easy to taste. I know that returning to NZ, I found it hard to appreciate the taste of NZ steak at first.
Food's astonishing. Today I'll head to the supermarket and get you some prices of some typical consumer goods so you can compare. Despite the plummeting USD, it's still cheaper to eat here than it is to eat in NZ. I'm astonished, in fact, at how painfully high the cost of living is in laidback old NZ compared to here. We moved partially because we couldn't afford to live here, but it's become clear that housing was the reason we couldn't afford this lifestyle. The other stuff we consume is still cheaper in the US than in NZ.
Even petrol is cheap here. Americans whine about their $3.20 petrol, but that's USD$3.20/gallon. That works out to USD$0.85/litre, or NZD$1.07/litre. According to Pricewatch the NZ price is about NZD$1.60/litre. This goes some way to explaining why I still see SUVs all over the roads. In our small sampling of liberal-leaning eco-aware ostensibly-green friends, SUVs and minivans still greatly outnumber plain old cars.
So Americans just aren't feeling the hurt at home. As someone pointed out, travelling makes the pitiful USD painfully transparent. I remember visiting London two years ago, changing money at the airport, and thinking I was being shortchanged because of how few bills I got for my USD$100. Then again, that's London--it also has insane house market and sky-high cost of living. Brits can move to NZ and still giggle at the house and food prices.
The flipside is that America might be able to benefit from its low dollar in tourism. Only, of course, the Transportation Safety Authority makes that impossible. The visitors they don't fist on entry are fingerprinted, searched, made to stand in interminable lines, forced to discard their contact lens solution and shaving foam, and generally get the whole Disneyland Bergen-Belsen experience. Ah, Department of Homeland Security: bringing the luxuriousness of interrogation in the Former Soviet Union to the everyday modern traveller. Needless to say, foreigners aren't falling over themselves to visit.
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Anyone going to archive the footage? If nobody else will take it, I'm sure the Internet Archive folks will save a copy if you upload it. Failing that, I bet the CityLink people would be approachable ...
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Ugh, meniscus surgery isn't fun. My wife had it done when she got her ACL fixed. The good news is that you eventually get back to full strength--unlike some other injuries you could sustain. Does NZ healthcare cover your meniscus or is it considered optional surgery?
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I'm personally more concerned that Key does have an agenda, he just won't say what it is. If he doesn't, and is happy to leave it to watching the polls, great.
Hear hear, Ben. If there's one thing I learned from Nicky Hagar's book (other than the risks of broad CC:ing) it's that there's a big pro-America pro-nuke pro-taxcuts anti-welfare anti-education anti-centralization agenda lurking beneath the surface in National's rich supporters. It'll take a strong politician to deny them their quid pro quo for financial support, and it's yet to be demonstrated that John Keys is that strong politician.
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I'm (unusually for me, I swear) a free-market loon when it comes to this. Solving the world's climate problem seems like it has only a few steps: (1) measure the harm in a consistent fashion for every action we take, (2) make price include harm, (3) let people then choose the environmentally better course of action because it's also the cheaper course of action. Yes, shipping food across the world might then make it cost more and it might even force NZ to do something other than ship meat across the world--but isn't shipping food across the world exactly the kind of environmentally harmful activity we want to limit?
Actually, we don't know that it is. We're not even up to step 2 where prices reflect environmental damage. We've barely touched step 1, measuring the harm. We can't figure out what to measure. "Carbon footprint" is a pretty crude measure of damage, and nobody's yet agreed upon where to stop the infinite regression of "but to get the food to the store you need to ship it in a truck and that truck had to be made and the parts for that truck had to be flown in and the aircraft had to be made and its parts had to be flown in and ..." so as to avoid idiotic situations like that one.
Until then I advocate ignoring guilt other people would foist upon you with their poorly-made arguments about the damage you're doing the world. Do what you want to to improve your effect upon the world, but turning the global course from World Fucktitude will require a larger change than "those who understand the problem and can change their small part of it voluntarily do something".
(Written from an air-conditioned house in Colorado with three SUV-class vehicles out front. No liberal guilt here!)
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I think you're hanging out with a different class of Kiwi than I am, Anke. Everyone I know is a heavy drinker and many are smokers. I only know one (1) guy who exercises like the guys I knew in Colorado. Ditch the boot camp, move to Leigh, join the lazy brigade :-)
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Labour churn is a similar problem in Indian IT jobs, where salaries have risen 10% each year recently.
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I'm astonished people are still talking about it. It's obvious that Bertarelli wants to have a story every few days that the Kiwi team has to respond to and think about ("oh shit, are we yobbos?", "what do we say about having it in Auckland?", "can I call Chris Dickson a tosser yet?"). It's just to tip the Kiwis from even keel, so to speak.
Expect a few more. I fully imagine boat design will be mentioned (Alinghi revealing a new design, or questioning the legality of something on the Kiwi boats). Just remember that complaints or discussions about anything the Kiwis can't control is just a mind game.
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You get more Kiwi culture in NYC than I do in Warkworth!
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Russell, I strongly recommend Google Apps for Domains. Haven't had a problem with it yet on torkington.com (touches wood, prays to Allah, and offers a small sacrifice to Mountain View)