Posts by Stephen Judd
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Damien, you are hereby explicitly crossed off my shitlist, which has a generic entry for all pandering promoters of emoto-porn. Bless you.
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Accepting I/O and A S' points for the moment - doesn't it still seem that the current focus on tagging is disproportionate to the crime?
Tell you what would interest me anyway. Have penalties for wilful damage kept pace with inflation? Are prosecution rates what they used to be? Maybe I/O is on the money, and old deterrents aren't what they used to be.
I don't know whether current penalties and chances of getting caught are the same as when I was a teenager (80s) or not. That would be very relevant to this debate, I think.
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20 years of initiatives to give taggers dedicated spaces in neighbourhoods
Have these worked in places where they were tried?
I was impressed with an analysis I read that discussed tagging as essentially the personal application of branding (hence the obsession with stylised logo-like text). Taggers want visibility and prestige to establish their brand. I can't see where the motivation is as a tagger to confine myself to a designated area.
But anyway, you can't explain the passion aroused by tagging unless it's a signifier for something else.
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Don't you know the difference between depraved and perverted?
Yes, the latter involves a feather, the former the whole chicken...
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Katherine Rich was on NatRad this AM, and when asked about the pension thing replied that her intake of MPs would not be eligible until age 65.
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In her last years at primary school I simply stopped investigating whether homework was set, supervising it, or having anything to do with it. Didn't make a bit of difference as far as I could see, and family life was less stressful.
It makes me sad that children have such structured, planned timetables nowadays. Liberating half an hour is well worth it.
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"forty-five minutes homework a night"
Damnit, haven't we had a bunch of studies showing that homework makes no difference to outcomes?
Down with homework. Liberate your kids AND their teachers.
Apropos holidays: I've been lucky with employers, but jeez it's hard as a single parent these days. And the four term year makes it worse.
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by banking the difference between the amount we pay for rent, and the amount we'd be paying to a bank if we had a $350k mortgage.
You could, if, and only if, you have the fiscal toughness to do so. Many people find that very hard - expenses somehow accumulate to fill the income available. So one of the traditional arguments for buying a house is that it'll force you to build equity instead of frittering it away.
Having said that, renting + rigorous saving is exactly our strategy too.
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I know many 30-something couples with combined incomes of $200k who still face the prospect of 30 mortgages and having to borrow upwards of $500k.
If you can't pay a $500k mortgage out of $200k pa, you are managing your money very poorly, it seems to me. At 9.5% over 20 years, you would have monthly repayments of $4,660.66, which is about 40% of your after tax income and leaves plenty of money for gourmet food and stocking the wine cellar.
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"affordability" is the extent to which you can't buy the home you want.
That's one definition, but there is another, crude but objective one, which is the ratio of median income to median house price. It is at a historical extreme in NZ right now, as we all know.
A question that arises then is, will affordability regress to the historical mean, as prices in most markets eventually do, or is this a permanent change? All I know is "it's different this time" is the classic slogan of the expanding bubble.
Having said that, I don't see that the 1/4 acre section can ever come back, since NZ's population shifted and grown. All sorts of things I recall from my 70s childhood, like the big suburban sections and the unpopulated Coromandel and the size and quantity of fish I catch are permanently out of reach now, thanks to the extra people and the drift north.
Affordability measures don't capture the quality of housing one way or the other; I certainly would rather have a small house on a big section than the other way around, and I can't see that being a real proposition near the CBD of anywhere I can get a job, ever again.