Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I agree with celebrating Flem though; we will miss him.
There's been a fair bit of comment about how captaincy affected his batting. It'll be interesting to see if that flows through now for the rest of his one-day career (another year or two perhaps?), and if he also drops the test captaincy in a season or so and then keeps on playing there as well.
All the stuff that is regularly tossed around about him being such a good batsman, who's results don't reflect how good he is - it'd be nice to see that follow through if he picked up averages in the 40s in one days, and 50s in tests for the rest of his career.
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Personally I think owning rental property is the greatest scam currently running in NZ. Mortgage it to so that the repayments wipe out most of the rent, use the rest for maintenance and repainting once in a while. If you start making too much, add something on like heat pumps or a deck. The name of the game is to make no profit on it, hence no tax. If the mortgage gets wiped out buy a second one and try and tie them together legally so the income from the first one goes towards the mortgage of the second.
Then if you ever sell it at some stage, you've made a couple of hundred grand, and that doesn't get taxed either at present.
It's the best way to invest $50K and come out ten years later with $250K not having paid a cent of tax.
It might be that the housing bubble does 'burst', and you only make 50K rather than 200K, but it's not like the stockmarket doesn't have horrendous crashes every few decades. At least with a house you're still left with something useful rather than almost worthless bits of paper.
Having said all that, most people are still going to buy a first home for a hundred reasons which aren't to do with money. I've tied myself down really tight to get into a first home (only possible with Dunedin prices), but it's still great.
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I can agree that one-off games in semi-finals and finals really are a bit harsh. A bad wicket and the toss decides the game. Cricket is probably the sport where winning the toss has the greatest influence, so increasing the number of games to best-of-three would reduce influence and allow the quality of the play on the day to have a greater influence.
Would Ireland have made it to this tournament if only the top 12 ranked teams were invited? This website: http://www.icc-cricket.com/icc/odi/archive.html only lists the top 11 before the tournament, so I wonder if they were the 12th team. It would be a failure of a system of inviting the top 12 ranked teams if they weren't on that list, because a draw to Zimbabwe, and beating Pakistan and Bangladesh clearly shows they should have been here, whatever their ranking.
I don't see any reason why, whether it's 12, 14, or 16 teams, why there couldn't be two games a day most days. That'd still give teams at least two days between games, would allow for rain days to follow set days. The number of people that would watch every game in the world cup must be pretty small.
The super 6/8 scheme makes about as much sense as whatever bizarre system the NPC used last year. Whether it's top 8 or top 4 go through, it should just be round-robin pools followed by quarters/semis. If you can't front up at crunch time (ie, Black Caps unfortunately), you don't deserve to win.
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I'm torn between throwing up and needing to head out to google images to look for artwork.
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Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail
She's a greenie!
Are there people around who print off auto-respond out-of-office email messages? Do they file them or something?
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“Nov 1942, many consider the turning point in the Second World War. Four major campaigns were undertaken during this period, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and sending the enemy, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, on the defensive for the first time in three years. The battles were Alamein, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Torch.” Without a doubt the Battles of Britain and Midway were critical as well.
I suspect if you went to 10 different web sites on this topic you'd come up with 10 different lists. For victories I'd put the D-Day invasion well above Operation Torch. I think I'd almost put the invasion of Sicily and the withdraw of Italy from the war above Torch.
Most lists also ignore significant battles that weren't victories. Pearl Harbour, and the missing battle ships that the Japanese weren't able to hit (indeed attacking Pearl Harbour at all, how long would the USA have stayed out of the war without it?), Barbarossa, which came close to, but failed to take Moscow. Dunkirk, which was a military disaster, but morally provided an 'escape' which led the British to believe they still had an army. The Bulge, which got bogged down through lack of fuel, but which came very close to turning around the Western Front, and had an impact upon the post-war world through influencing where the relative end points of Russian and Western forces were.
Monty had about 1200 tanks, so about 25% were American made and delivered. Rommel had 500 tanks, so in one go the Yanks gave Monty 60% of Rommel’s tank strength. I think most people would call that a significant contribution.
Che's point was that America was only physically involved in a some of the major battles of the war. Some their only involvement was selling arms which were used in the battles, through a lending scheme. James you've quoted several examples which just back up his point.
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Sub is commonly used as a prefix to mean 'under', as in submarine. It can also be used to mean 'small' however, as in submachine gun, and subcontinent.
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But would you ask for them to all be removed from every library and put in a special pron-only library so kiddies couldn't touch them?
A porn-only library. Can't see that getting through a city council budget meeting ;)
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It just requires a Mod chip. Pirated PS1 &2 games are freely available everywhere in Asia so it can't be that tricky. My daughter has an Indonesian purchased PS2 which comes with the chip as factory standard (probably since you can't buy the legit software here).
I didn't say tricky or impossible, just a lot more difficult than digitalising CDs, which my computer does automatically when I put it in, without even asking, and no additional hardware or software required.
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Who interestingly also has one of the largest private collection of firearms in New Zealand.
And is also fascinated with old warplanes.
He'd look much better hunched over a WWI biplane, machine gun firing red hot, goggles and scarf, strafing suits on Lambton Quay, than wandering around Victoria University with a couple of pop guns and shooting scarfies from the top of the Hunter building.