Posts by Stephen Judd
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Nat is on the money, but there are far less draconian ways to deal with the housing link in the chain of currency death.
1. Just enforce existing law. Ie, collect income tax from people who trade property for income. Pursue dodgy trusts, depreciation claims, and LAQCs.
2. Make some minor changes to the law: capital gains tax with exemption for family home, changes to the depreciation regime.
3. Housing policy changes that increase the supply. Although I'd very much like to know to what extent there is genuinely an accomodation shortage.
4. Make the Reserve Back change its rules on capital adequacy for banks, such that they can't lend so much against residential property. That needn't be a flat cap as proposed by I/O, it can just be an overall ratio, leaving banks the possibility of lending 100% mortgages for a deserving few.
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They were incompatible because they were actually 3" drives (assuming you mean the Amstrad CPC, rather than a later Amstrad PC).
Yup, CPC. It was a long time ago!
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Roland! Ah, good times.
We had the colour Amstrad with the disk drive that was from some Asian manufacturer's odd lot and had 3.5" diskettes that were physically, as well as logically incompatible with the 3.5" format everyone else used. But it was a major advance over the ZX81, where you lost all your work if you accidentally bumped the 16K expansion pack.
16K. That was such a LOT of memory.
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Actually dense large cities are probably most sustainable: you can heat and light apartments far cheaper than the equivalent suburban homes and leave the food growing to specialists.
Specifically wrt to the dairy farmers, if their costs go up, they'll put their prices up - and then consumers will indeed pay. You seem to think that costs will never end up with the end user, but that's actually the whole idea.
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can we sell them more beef? Those prices seem steep.
Not without some creative thought.
As Nat said, Americans are used to and prefer marbled meat, with lots of fat throughout the muscle. You simply do not get that with grass-fed beef. There are feedlots in New Zealand, and we could do it, but the economics are far different without subsidised grain and cheap fuel.
What we could and should be doing is selling grass-fed New Zealand beef as lean. We should be stressing that grass-fed beef has a different (and far healthier) lipid profile than grainfed. And we should be using words like "free-range". Given that The Omnivore's Dilemma has been such a hit, we should be riffing on the themes in that book in our marketing.
Now, whether the NZ meat industry can do that... I dunno.
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Otherwise your Oedipus will be terrible, so bad that the very smell will cause passing car drivers' feet to swell and spasm on the accelerator and crash their vehicle, leading to the well known problem of Oedipus wrecks.
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Well, if we could discuss this without reference to any particular case - in most corporate or government jobs it would still be proper to let the employer know of your relationship. The employer can then extend their trust to you about how you deal with any conflicts. But journalists have a n important relationship with their readership as well as their employers. That makes them a bit different.
After all the classic solution to conflict of interest is to excuse yourself from situations where your judgment might be called into question. A journalist who owns a company's shares, or is married to a newsworthy subject always has the option of not writing stories about that company or their spouse. Why is it so onerous for a journalist who insists on being in those situations to at least let their readers make up their own minds?
Sue: I CAN HAS INTEGRITY?
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I think it's not only absurd, but somewhat sinister, if we're going to expect every journalist and civil servant to list what their spouse/partner/CUPcake/'friend with benefits'/casual fuck buddy does for a living.
That is absurd Craig, but as so often happens there is a middle ground which is worth discussing.
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However, at this stage we can't vouch for what happens after the age of 9 (years, that is).
Perhaps I'm just an old soppy, but I was always bewildered by people who would enquire how old my daughter was, be told, and then reply "x is such a good age, isn't it?"
Every age is a good age. Really. And the older they get, the quicker those ages pass. Unfortunately that's something you can only appreciate after it has happened.
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Craig, I think that the Street case too is another where disclosure would have been an ethically righteous thing. It is as bad and objectionable in a leftwing connection as in a right one, and I'm afraid the only reason I've never been concerned about it is that until you blew their cover, I never heard about it.
Whenever I read business reporting, I expect to see declarations of interest from the reporter if they have ownership or other interests in the subject of the article. Why should political reporters be held to a lower standard than business reporters?
By all means let reporters report on people they have personal relationships with - but let the reader know. That would really demonstrate professional integrity. Full disclosure has always been better than "just trust me".