Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Yes, that's enough groksucking from me. It's really against the spirit of the English language to insist on any rules at all.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to william blake,
Collective noun of dildi: a parliament.
Owls already took that one. Also - clutch is taken by eggs, and hand is taken by cards.
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Up Front: What's the Big Idea?, in reply to Emma Hart,
OK, I'm going to stop feeling guilty about taking the call for a big idea seriously and failing to even deliver a small one. Maybe, just maybe, it will actually be dildos that save the world. The Dildocalypse is coming. Dildogeddon, when consciousness emerges in the Dongularity. Good Vibes coming!
But! Beware the Dickening!
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You've nailed it Emma. I don't know whether to write an epic post or continue just sorting out the minutiae ATM. I do know this - I won't write it while I'm paying for parking, and I really should fix that fucked door handle in my tenant's bedroom and fix the fuse that's blown first. Then it will be kids and dinner and homework and assignments and shitloads more statistics study, and then it will be Friday evening, my one night out with the lads. Perhaps I should do it after then. Or perhaps not at all. I haven't felt so indecisive about writing in 20 years. I don't know if this is a middle-aged thing, an X-gen thing, a Left wing thing, a cautious statistician thing or dismay at international politics.
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There’s another reason we need to be talking about this more seriously. And that’s that cannabis is everywhere. It’s in the culture in a way it has not been before.
It's high time.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Doesn’t this tend to support the prime minister’s comments that unemployed kiwis are all lazy or on drugs?
No, it doesn't. That's quite ridiculous. You'll need to provide a bit more evidence for that claim than a third hand story about a guy hiring cheap immigrants in his kitchen and no Kiwis.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
People who aren’t lifers are more likely to have a positive attitude to the job, precisely because they wont be doing it forever.
Awesome though that sounds for any employer, it's harder to see it as good in the social balance.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Lynn Yum,
I don’t buy this argument, especially not as it stands right now.
It's not an argument for things to stay as they are, just an acknowledgement of where we are.
Raising wage up to the living wage is simply a necessary cost to pay for a humane society.
It's an end I agree with. The devil is in the path to get there.
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Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Lynn Yum,
Their argument for more migrant work force is that the Auckland taste buds will be the loser if they don’t get more migrant workers. I thought it was BS.
The worst part is that it's probably true. I remember my favourite Indian restaurant for ages had stunning quality at insanely cheap prices. Then they got busted for exploiting their staff badly and it brought home that there's no magic trick to making a high quality low cost things - you just have to turn up the exploitation index massively. Is that really how we want our country to work? Perhaps we could go for "high quality fair cost", on the way to "high quality high prices because we're all well paid enough to afford it".
But it's easy for me to preach about how I wouldn't mind higher prices, considering I also have reasonable income. The worst part about the idea of forcing work standards is that it can certainly enforce a lot of suffering directly onto the poorest people in the short term. WOFs for rentals would almost certainly increase homelessness in the short term. We should, of course, never have let it come to this.
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FWIW, Uber drivers are entirely under the radar. Uber is not an official employer in NZ at all. Drivers can, and do, have their income directly deposited into foreign accounts, and the origin is an offshore company. The passenger payments are all directly to Uber BV, so there is literally no way at all that our systems can track how many people are employed as Uber drivers in NZ, nor how much money they are making, unless they entirely voluntarily file tax returns. Since their employment as passenger drivers is illegal in most cases anyway (since Uber don’t concern themselves with the laws of NZ and don’t require drivers to have any of the correct licenses or training or keep any of the required work time records), there is little reason to think they would go out of their way to pay taxes that they can easily avoid. Not even GST is being paid, unless you do it voluntarily.
These are not good things about Uber.
ETA: Unless, of course, you think that having an extremely cheap and efficient service is the only consideration here.