Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to Sacha,
I’d download gold.
Why bother? Gold has no intrinsic use, and if you could download everything else then I can’t see the need to use it for trade.
ETA Unless you have a secret craving for bling that I hadn’t previously noticed, Sacha (:
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Why do we need freight – all those containers are so 20th century. Now that we live in the future, can’t we just download everything?
I would download a car!
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to insider,
NZ is many things and we can debate what it is but the “set of people living in New Zealand” seems not only limited but gramatically poor. Ben seems to think it’s some form of collective that has dibs on my property and is devalued by me selling it, because that’s giving it away, whatever ‘it’ is.
I don't want to put words into Ben's mouth, but I don't think he's saying anything of the sort. I think he's saying that property is "New Zealand owned" by definition of the owner being a New Zealander. It's so simple it's almost tautological.
Well the set of people living in New Zealand have no rights to my business.
Except you, who own the business; and you are a member of that set if you live in New Zealand, and not if you don't. There lies the difference.
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to Sacha,
If you’ve heard any Rand you already know.
That's what I suspect; I just really, really want "insider" to come out and say it (:
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to insider,
Well it’s not giving it away for a start. If I own it but move permanently to Australia have I given it away to Australia? If it’s my property, ‘NZ’ has no ownership of it – I do irrespective of my passport or where I live.
You seem to have some concept of "New Zealand" being something other than the set of people living in New Zealand. I'd love to hear what that is.
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to insider,
“it means giving away a little piece of the ownership of NZ every time”
What a strange concept. If I sell my business, NZ has no ‘ownership’ of it. Only I do. How is that giving away the ‘ownership of NZ’ if I happen to sell it to a foreigner?
A question for you: how do you define "New Zealand" in such a way as to exclude yourself?
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Hard News: Unwarranted risk, in reply to Sacha,
Cheers. To be fair, no-one on this thread has been throwing around the m-word quite as freely as has been seen on Twitter today. But it's a point worth making that our political system explicitly allows governments to do what they want, and to claim otherwise is disingenuous. The election party vote question is, more-or-less, "Which party do you want to form the Government?" - no more and no less. That is the only mandate.
I'm sure there are tons of ideas of various qualities around about if we could / whether we should constrain government more closely. Ideally, a robust MMP system has that effect. But the options open to us now are limited to making enough noise that National or its coalition partners get nervous about their re-election chances, because that's the only mandate that can be withdrawn.
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to nzlemming,
I must never have sat in one of those dead spots them.
TBF, I think they're mostly a problem for unamplified music. Strategic speaker placement can do wonders.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to BenWilson,
Good show, Russell, Gio, and Rod (and the production team).
Seconded. And nice to meet you finally, Ben.
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Cracker: Dinner and a Show (Everybody’s…, in reply to Mark Cubey,
Meanwhile in Wellington, folks who know about such things say the sound in the Town Hall for the Bon Iver shows was the best they’d ever heard. And that’s with a nine-piece band and all.
Wellington Town Hall has one of the best general-purpose acoustics in New Zealand, apart from a few (small) dead spots under the gallery. It's a joy to perform in as well. One of the design briefs for the Michael Fowler Centre was to eliminate the dead spots, which they did, but at the expense of the overall experience (and the ability to use the venue for anything other than sit-down shows). Thank god they never knocked down the WTH as was planned.
