Posts by Ben McNicoll
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Retailers are there because the alternative would see us all shafted (even more) for our electricity - it's a realisation that there will only ever be one set of "the wires" in your area and leaving the owner of them to charge you for the power they deliver wouldn't be a recipe for lean pricing.
But the generators are charging the retailer, so you're paying in the end... all the retailers are competing on is how much they will cut the markup to buy the right to bill you.
But even that is dodgy. And just like the Telco's their main strategy is confusion. Try comparing power plans to see which one comes out cheaper for you sometime.
So that's where this new site comes in I guess.
However my experience of prepay power has been been totally coloured by someone from Mercury cold-calling me, and attempting to get me to quit my account, and go to their Glo-Bug prepay service, suggesting that i might save money. I asked how much, and neither she nor her supervisor could tell me the price for my area and usage. When i finally tracked down the info (3 phone calls later), I found that the prepay pricing would cost me approx $20-30/month more than on my plan.
In fact, when I worked it out, it turned out the Glo-Bug pricing was more expensive than all Mercury's plans for anyone using more than 150kwH per month. Check your latest bill if you want to see how ridiculously low that usage is. Despite this, everyone i talked to at all stages of the process suggested that some people were saving money by switching.
Of course this price difference doesn't even count them having the use of my money for the month while they were delivering the power.
Plus they cut the power as soon as your credit runs out.
This was in the week that the coroner's report into the death of the woman in South Auckland who died when the power was cut off came back.
I got quite worked up about it at the time, and was going to write up my experience, but fizzled out. I think i still have the spreadsheet i graphed it with somewhere.
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Given that TVNZ pays the taxpayer a dividend, isn't Russell funding the taxpayer, rather than the other way?
Until you count the charter money I think.
What is the difference between TVNZ's dividened to the gummint, and the charter money they are given to fund public good broadcasting?
(and I'll say publically I think Russ's show is good)
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Cheers Gareth... that's what i suspected was the case.
It seems to my Friday brain, that nominally splitting the generation into 2 tiers when the resource is pooled is silly, and won't result in any sort of market pressure on generators to make their new generation renewable, particularly when it's such a small segment of the market that you are applying the difference to.
Perhaps what is needed is a way of accounting for cleanness at the generation source across the whole market... A "tax" on the "carbon", if you will.
Or, it could even be arranged into some sort of market where clean generators were able to monetise their cleanness directly, and trade the surpluses to those who were less clean.
I'm sure I've heard that sort of idea talked about... I wonder what happened to that?
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I think Kyle is asking the question I have:
If you buy the cleaner option, does that increase the amount of clean generation, or is it simply an accounting trick, where your purchase of clean generation is just allocated out of the general "mixed" pool of power available, thus making the remainder proportionally less clean?
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I would say this: his performance on Close Up on Thursday night in his interview with Mark Sainsbury, resurrected Tony Veitch. Tony suddenly became the most interesting man on New Zealand television. It was a gripping, edge-of-the-seat watch.
I am quite religious, though not in a churchy sense, and here is what I actually think this whole thing has been about. I think that last year, with Tony on the verge of becoming the major New Zealand television presence, God said: "No, no, Tony. Not yet. There is something that has to be paid for. You have to pay for it and it's up to you to find your way back." I think Tony Veitch will find his way back.
- Paul Holmes
That goes way beyond apologist...
God made him do it?
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... and then won with approximately the same votes if I recall correctly.
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I vote Helen!
no, wait..
oh crap.
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My unsolicited verdict: I think you'd want to have read the book.
But on the spectrum of comics/graphic novels that have been made into movies, I think it's at the worth seeing end.
Gets points, in my opinion, for staying fairly true to the source material (or my memory of it), rather than just using a catchy name people recognise name as an excuse to make a (sub)standard hollywood movie, like so many of the other comic to film adaptations have proved to be.
But, I'm not a fanboy, so weight my opinion accordingly...
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And yet, it appears no-one has coined Simpsons' Law.