Posts by Matthew Poole
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Could we burn effigies of John Key and Rodney Hide, too? Bags not supplying the yellow jacket, though.
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Just for shits'n'giggles I ran the TVNZ site through lynx (a text-based browser), and it's actually very usable. So kudos to the designers for making something that looks like it'll probably be very accessible to the visually-impaired. I'll have to have a look at home tonight and see how it looks on a browser that's got no Flash plugin available. Will report back.
One of the things I really like about PAS is that it's light-weight and makes very few assumptions about what my browser will support. It looks the same and works the same on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD, across various browsers. That's my test of a good site. I can use it completely without having to have anything extra installed, which is something I wish could be said about a wider range of sites. Nothing puts me off quite as fast as a site that I can't use because there's no consideration given to non-Flash browsers. -
if heavier on the Flash that some people will like
Me being one of them. I despise Flash. My primary platform at home is FreeBSD on amd64, and Flash support is a little flaky, at best. So I just don't bother. Some sites offer alternatives, but many don't. And it's getting worse. How they cater to the visually-impaired is beyond me, but it seems that website designers just don't give a fuck about anything beyond pretty, shiny, more! Photo collections on the Herald site are unusable without Flash, unlike Stuff's photo collections which work just fine at home.
News flash to the fucktards: Not everyone who comes to your site has (or wants to have) Flash. Not everyone who comes to your site - at least not all first-time visitors, and the aim is usually to get people to come back - can see the pretty clicky shit that you've got going on. Learn to play nice with the rest of the world, y'bastards!
I should point out that this doesn't apply to PAS, which is highly usable even in a text browser (which is the real test of accessibility).
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Ah, but with a job, you'd probably be paying off the balance in full every month or something devious like that, which the card companies won't stand for. As a student, you're much more likely to accrue lots of lovely interest.
I got offered it because, although a student, I was paying the balance off every month. Living within one's means is a wonderful thing. They didn't know I was a student, they just knew that I paid my card off every month and had an adequate credit limit. I doubt it'd happen these days, what with credit being tight, but it'll probably become possible again in a few years. But it won't be happening to me :P
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I should add, given you're probably not familiar with the financial situation of my household, that this amounts to a SPECTACULAR lowering of the standards for platinum status.
Hey, I got an ANZ Qantas Platinum card a couple of years ago. While a full-time student. With no job. The delicious irony was that I'd applied for the predecessor Gold card when I did have a job, and got declined. Twice.
Unless it's an American Express Centurion Card it's really not worth getting excited about.
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what you want to do is encourage long term investment - in particular investment in things that create real real wealth
Completely agree. It's this that makes me so stridently against people being able to own 10, 20, 30 rental properties. That's not growing the economy. It's not contributing to the means of production. It's just depriving real wealth-makers of possible funds by tying the money up in unproductive assets.
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When the OCR gets cut by 1.5%, how come the banks only drop their rates by 0.5% or 0.75% ? (Yes, I'm economically under-literate.)
At least in part it's because they mostly have to get their funds from offshore, since there's far too little cash sloshing around within NZ bank accounts to cover our prediliction for property. That cash is harder to get at the moment, and must generate a greater return than would be available within its home country/countries, ergo is more expensive. Interest is the cost of borrowing, after all.
The OCR is the cost of borrowing from the Reserve Bank, and the RB won't lend to banks as a long-term proposition. So the OCR is indicative, not determinative.
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Paul, rental property is excepted here, too, because there's an exemption on property bought for the purpose of investment (investment meaning generation of income, not capital gain). However, when you've got people who are serial owners of rental properties for fairly short periods of time it gets a bit distorting. They're technically not subject to the tax, but everyone knows they're actually speculating. That'd need to be closed.
Also, the "capital gains tax" as it exists here is just that the gain becomes part of your income and is subject to tax at the appropriate marginal rate. Just like in the US. The difference is that there you're pretty much forced to declare it, whereas here you have to be fairly unlucky to end up having to declare it. Other than that, there's no real difference in the tax treatment.
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we need to tax long term capital gains less than short term ones (like flipping a house for the profit)
The provision for taxing capital gains on property that has increased in value due to a zoning change has a 10%-per-year abatement (sDB28 Income Tax Act 2007), allowing that after 10 years the gain will be tax-free. A wider application of that principle would achieve what you're after, though 10 years is a long time to have to hold onto your primary dwelling.
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On the topic of the trampling, OverLawyered has a couple of pieces about that most American of reactions to such an event, the lawsuits.
One hopes that the claimants are charged, and sued, for their part in the unlawful death. After all, they're making statutory declarations that they took part in the fatal stampede. Sounds like a total slam-dunk to me.