Posts by Tom Semmens
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We huddled in the doorway in total darkness as pictures fell from our walls and crockery smashed in the kitchen.
The zero deaths were not just a result of fortuitous timing. All those drills at school from an early age, all that earthquake education - it meant in an emergency people knew what to do.
I've read of a couple of people who saved their own lives by leaping from their beds and heading to doorways moments before masonry walls collapsed onto their beds.
No deaths may be lucky, but we've also made our own luck.
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I'll give you a clue: throat cancer.
But what a headstone!
"Here lies the one they called Big Tex,
killed by to much oral sex" -
The contrast in how uninsured homeowners and Allan Hubbard's investors are recompensed from the public purse will be interesting to watch as it unfolds this week.
Actually, I can see the dilemma here - the whole EQC system relies on people first having insurance. To pay out anyway would undermine what is currently thought to be an important component of how we pay for disasters in this country.
I am more interested to know if he just made up his position as a result of an instinctive bias (given his instinctive bias was to help out the National party's rump squatocracy that had money in SCF), or if it was a thought through response.
Key does have a bad habit of saying stupid shit when he shouldn't be saying anything at all.
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The reassurance so carefully spelled out by Prime Minister John Key of Earthquake Commission funding and of central government assistance will help to provide hope of resolution.
According to Bomber over at Tumeke, Key has categorically ruled out any government/EQC money for uninsured households in Christchurch.
Assuming he is correct, was that a "carefully spelled out" position from the PM or an off the cuff response to a media question?
Because 10,000 households appear to have been thrown to the wolves with absolutely zero assistance and zero mention...
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They managed to SBW up to Auckland in a Chopper for a Commercial shoot, he even had time for a fly over his mum's house in Pt Chev apparently.
But I heard SBW was arrested for looting!
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I keep my piggy bank partially as an emergency source of cash. When full, my yellow plastic piggy friend holds about $800. He is about half full right now.
Bricks are an object of horror to my entire family. Fit for only for paving.
I refuse to live in a brick house.
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It is interesting how, in times of crisis, people still tune to TV One and the state broadcaster is still, well, the state broadcaster - TVNZ had coverage, TV3 when I checked it was showing a Zumba infomercial.
RNZ was excellent.
The quiet efficiency and laconic professionalism of our emergency services is inspirational to see in action.
And one only has to look at the death toll recently in places like Chile and Haiti to know every structural engineering expert in the land should get a free drinks at the pub tonight.
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it was already out of control by mid-2008 as a result of Hubbard's decision to allow his wonder boy manager Lachie McLeod to bet too much of the bank on property investment, over-valued dairy farms and (of course) related party transactions.
Perhaps we now have an idea of who the "out of control" manager Mr. Hubbard is referring to in the media today, as he changes tack in his defence of what remains of his reputation.
He really should get his story straight. Either he was done in by the gummint when he could have made all better with a minimum of fuss, or he was sidelined last year by out of control managers and had lost control of his own company.
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I'm curious - sssuming for a moment that I have money to invest - are there any finance companies that would be worth investing in?
No.
And we should punish you for buying property to - even though your real estate agent is unlikely to dismantle your house and make off with it in the night, leaving you to wake up in the morning on an empty lot.
The bottom line is your place in society is to pay for the lifestyle of our largely absentee landlord class, heroes like Eric Watson and Graeme Hart.
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I saw this in today's paper, and thought about it in relation to Allan Hubbard and SCF, and how the appearance of these two stories at the same time offer a serendipitous illustration of the totality of failure that is the New Zealand business class.
In the case of SCF, we've got a 1.7 billion business being run by a pair of octogenarians in the same way they might run a dairy or a small chain of hardware stores. A classic Kiwi business tale characterisitc of our deep, lazy cultural predilection to anti-intellectualism (expressed in the form of scorn of properly implemented management systems, and the ignoring of business best practices and standards in favour of "better" empirical local methods) and a desire to do business on an informal, ad-hoc, handshake basis.
In the case of our Citizen & Ratepayers friend, you've got a classic example of the warp and woof of the Auckland business community - grasping, shady and self-entitled shiney shoes wannabes who all happily play fast and lose with the truth, in the process revealing an utter failure to understand or pay cognisance to accepted norms of ethical standards and business behaviour and an endemic hubris.
Today's two stories - the lethal juxtaposition of lazy anti-intellectualism and self-entitled sharp practice - is the story of New Zealand business writ large.