Posts by Finn Higgins
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All politics aside, if your ongoing income relies upon computer equipment then you'd better be taking that particular area of risk seriously regardless of whether or not the police want to take your stuff away. Hard disks fail. Off-site backups are a wonderful thing when you need them, and a relatively cheap insurance policy when you don't.
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It's striking how similar the rhetoric employed by guys like James George and the various left-activists who've popped out of the woodwork over the last few days is to that of the various right-wing nutters dotted around New Zealands blogo-sphere - the absolute contempt for anyone that doesn't buy into their fragmented and delusional worldviews is identical.
I think it's popularly referred to as "being a bit of a prat", and it knows no political boundaries. What amazes me is how identical the activist anti-capitalist left is to the activist libertarian right about 90% of the time. They both seem to think that somehow conforming to their idea of ideological purity will magically fix all the woes of the world, and all of their discussions assume this conclusion as a premise for further argument. It's virtually impossible to actually have a conversation with them, because the minute you question this rather massive unsupported conclusion you're immediately labeled as a collaborator in some kind of vast left-slash-right-wing conspiracy that wants to enslave the world in its fascist grip.
What I don't get is the seemingly irresistible urge these people have to misspell every word they dislike, and preferably with a "K" if one can possibly be fitted in somewhere. It's like they're working from the same corporate writing style guide...
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Of course, with all those houses coming on to the market at the same time prices must fall, surely?
You'd think so. And as Russell pointed out, you'd also expect rental prices to go up around the same time. Various outlets have been reporting evidence of an oversupply in the rental market in a few parts of the country, which might explain why rents have been largely so flat when compared to the price rises in the sales market of late.
More expensive rent + less expensive mortgage (particularly if the housing bubble popping lets Bollard take the interest rates down a bit!) = more incentive towards home ownership? And ultimately a shuffling of more wealthy renters into ownership, freeing up the remaining rental properties for those at the bottom of the ladder who're realistically not in a position to buy?
That would strike me as the whole idea.. And to be honest, it seems solid enough. Various people have been arguing that this represents unfairness to property investors because the same favourable taxation arrangements exist for other investment vehicles, but I note some of those complaining are the same people who were pointing out quite noisily (and expensively) back in 2002-03 that property had all kinds of leverage and depreciation advantages that didn't apply to other forms of investment... funny that...
The big innocent losers in the whole thing would strike me as being the people who bought at the peak of the boom at the maximum their income would permit. Which is, admittedly, a harsh situation. But still - it's a marketplace, and how many years of "Oh my god, it's still going up!?" in the Herald around the 18th of the month did they ignore?
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But Che, you're forgetting: Public Address is a hotbed of unemployed/unemployable leftists who wouldn't know a thing about creating jobs if it came along and bit them in the bum. With its large and non-metaphorical teeth. If I wanted to get a job from Real Productive People I'd obviously be hanging out on Kiwiblog...
Also, I figured I was just going to pick up your job after you got hired as a professor based on that stunning performance of yours.
(as an aside, I'm only slightly unemployed - in the sense that I'm temping since moving down from evil Auckland in March. You can tell when I have something on because... uh... I don't post here all day)
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I can't say any more on the subject due to pieces of paper I signed, but believe me there are a number of different people in NZ working on that.
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Again, I'm not buying that it's all about the country kids. All I'm saying is you seem to figure their needs are irrelevant. So you call them preferences. Well, I *prefer* not to walk to the supermarket 7 kms away too. I don't *need* to. I could spend several hours carting goods to and from, sure. I'm sure people in the middle ages had to do shit like that.
I live up the top of a fuck-off big hill in Karori. I have, on occasion, carried stuff up it after a supermarket shop. I prefer not to and tend to take the car down if I know I'm going shopping. But I'm not under any illusions about "needing" a car to move shopping. I survived years in York and London moving shopping with my hands or with a bike. You just change your habits: you do five-minute shops every 1-2 days on the way home instead of doing a big weekly shop, for example.
If I don't feel the urge to change my habits I can always move.
There are some things I need a car for - moving a few hundred kilos of musical equipment is a major one. That's the sole reason why I bother owning one, because taxi drivers won't drive gear for me.
I don't get the distinction you are trying to make. Humans have needs/preferences, and when making decisions about the public interest, you have to include the interests of all the public.
That's exactly what I'm trying to say. You seem to think that the only interest in play is whether people want to drive, not the negative impact that them driving could have on the rest of the population.
I tend to err on the side of caution when it comes to putting people in a situation where they get to make life-or-death decisions for others. We wouldn't trust a fifteen-year-old with a job in air traffic control, or in a key role in a medical environment, unless they proved themselves to be seriously exceptional. It doesn't matter that they might have done the training, there are certain things in life where you are expected to gain a bit of age and maturity before you get to make decisions that could, if you fuck it up, kill somebody.
At fifteen you are not considered prepared or responsible enough to make decisions about your own body. You can't have sex. You can't smoke. You can't drink. But, inexplicably, you're allowed to make decisions behind the wheel that are, no hyperbole, life or death. That's arse-backwards, if you ask me. If you want to introduce a kid to responsibility you don't start with the ones where fuckups cause death for themselves and others...
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This is where we part ways. I think it does make a difference what other NZers want to do. Even teenagers. Shitting on country people for being country people isn't fair. Their needs are not irrelevant.
It's not shitting on country people for being country people, it's just stating that people below a certain age are not responsible to drive vehicles. Any family moving to the country (or couple in the country planning to have kids) has to deal with how their children are to get around for the first fifteen years of their lives, and requiring them to be responsible for the transport of their children for a couple more years is considerably less onerous than any number of other laws we have that are widely held to be in the public good. Compulsory education, for example. The kids don't like it, it's inconvenient for people living in the middle of nowhere, but we generally accept that it's good for our society as a whole.
Their needs, as you put it, are not needs. They're preferences. The law being what it is allows certain activities, but it's no more a need for a kid of fifteen to drive than it is a kid of fourteen. There has to be a line drawn somewhere, but you seem to be shutting down debate on the issue because somehow, by magic, a fifteen-year-old in the country needs to drive. Beats me why - I was living in Hawkes Bay for some of the time when I was fifteen, I don't recall needing a drivers license at any point during the whole affair. Saying that kids need the ability to drive is like saying that they need mobile phones. Sure, if they have one they'll probably find a use for it, but they seem to have survived fine without them for centuries.
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Victor, but is your assertion actually backed up? Are countries where people learn to drive earlier actually producing better drivers?
The mechanical, muscle-memory skills of driving safely within the realm of legality are not particularly hard to learn for somebody at any age. They take some time and experience, but in all honesty not that much. The major problems with road safety arise not in physical control but in mental discipline and plain common sense, and that's something teenagers aren't exactly renowned for having in abundance.
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Finn, you were on a partially comical point that people with kids shouldn't live in Taranaki because it limits their options and makes it hard for us city folks to legislate against kids driving. I'm saying the argument scales. People shouldn't live in Auckland for the same reason.
Which is reductio ad absurdum, of course. I'm saying it's a silly argument, although I'm not convinced it wasn't meant to be anyway?
Well, to a degree - some of it is just being bitter on the sheer tedium that is being a teenager in the central North Island, something I thankfully only had to tolerate for a fairly short time. Cars or no cars, it sucks.
But I didn't say that people shouldn't live in Taranaki because it restricts the ability to legislate, so I feel quite comfortable pointing out that you are, in fact, putting words in my mouth. People are quite welcome to live there and it shouldn't make any difference to whether such legislation is discussed or passed. If they don't like the results they can move somewhere that suits their tastes better - i.e, which has better access to the things their teenagers want to get to.
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Frankly, much of my favourite music comes from people with that attitude
Likewise. As I said, I'll take it from musicians, but not from critics. For a musician having strong opinions about music is, in effect, like having an immune system. What you let in tends to come out in what you do, and if you don't care passionately enough about music to hate a whole lot of stuff then you probably won't play what you do like with any real passion either.
But critics? What do they have to offer from an attitude of deliberate ignorance of and ambivalence towards whole swathes of music, other than communicating that attitude on to their public? I'm all for the promotion of giving a shit about your music when it comes to people who play it, but utterly against the promotion or glorification of musical ignorance by people who don't do anything but listen...