Posts by Matthew Poole
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And if he does become President then she'll just have to wait until 2016
At which point she'll be the same age as McCain is now, with the same concerns about being a geriatric in a stressful job.
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The whole net migration thing puzzles me. Had an argument (actual argument. The poor boy gets very precious about his "opinions" (quote-unquote)) with a mate last night about the apparent figure of 80k kiwis disappearing to Aus in the last year. My sarcastic "Because kiwis never went overseas before Labour came to power, right?" was rebutted with "But 80,000? It's disgusting!" followed by bluster when I asked "And how much has the population grown?"
Is that the quality of argument we can expect from National, too? Honestly, you'd think that kiwis leaving for destinations foreign was a recent event, and that a National government will miraculously lure them all back home again. It ain't new, it ain't changing, and if National's in power in six months time it'll just be a different group of people leaving - the ones who're terrified of what NZ will look like after the remnants of the 90's slash'n'burn National have finished what they started. My brother and his gf, and a colleague and his wife have both made fairly serious enquiries about moving to Aus, in preparation for a possible National win. Not everyone hates Labour.
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I'm seeing Palin getting some flack for choosing to carry a Downs baby to term rather than aborting which, as a pro-choicer, I find appalling. Surely we should be able to rise above our opinions of her stance on abortion and allow the woman her own choice in the matter.
Once again the pro-choice lobby demonstrating that "pro-choice" means "we won't support your choice unless it's to terminate." Honestly, the militants on both sides are equally abhorrent in the rigidity of their views. It's just that the pro-choice side don't bomb abortion clinics. Instead they decry anyone who chooses not to abort.
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And with that wee rant out of the way, Palin's an interesting choice. It's now, effectively, the black man vs the white woman, because anyone with the slightest bit of forward thinking is looking at her as the probable POTUS within 18 months of the election. McCain just ain't got the longevity going for him, and that means she has to be evaluated as a serious presidential candidate.
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The strike story I linked to earlier no longer appears on the Heralds online front page (the link still returns the story) and I, for one, am wondering why, any ideas?
I'd assume because Granny's website is probably the most inconsistent pile of festering goat turd on the planet. Seriously, their content manglement (yes, very appropriate) system is awful! Links in the side bar on one page are gone in the next. A multi-page article suddenly loses half the content when you make it a single page. Or you go from page-one-of-three to page two and it's now page-two-of-two.
I don't call conspiracy, I call utter incompetence on the part of the site designers/administrators. -
The 5 preconditions for perfect markets (as memorised for an exam in my not-very-recent past:)
- unlimited number of suppliers
- unlimited number of buyers
- perfect information
- homogeneous product
- and one other (anyone?)Taking a stab here, based on semi-recent (stage 1 micro was first semester '06, though I did only scrape a C-) economics, an equal cost of entry for all players in the market. The thing that's really killed proper competition against Telecom is the ridiculous cost of trying to replace their taxpayer-funded lines monopoly.
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AUS-FTA, as that link says, was utterly awful for Australia. The lead-in times are ridiculous (in excess of 20 years) for full implementation of some facets of the woeful reduction of import protections in the US. Howard bent over and spread wide, and the US took full advantage.
That trade agreement is fair in name only. I've read absolutely nothing complimentary about AUS-FTA, other than that Australia did manage to conclude an FTA with the Yanks at all. The industrial goods thing is something that I'd missed, but I guess commentators aren't going to spend much time talking about a glimmer of light that's surrounded by yawning darkness. And people are falling all over themselves for us to sign something that would be, at best, the same, and quite probably worse given how little we can offer in return? Why?! -
Another point on why free trade with USA is preferable to with China....
Local wages..... When any two countries go into a free trade association with one another..... that's going to hurt wages in the higher paid country and help lift them in the lower paid one.....
That point is valid only when you have protected local producers. We have barely anything that's locally-produced and still protected, and those protections were going to all be gone within the next five (I think it was five) years anyway.
So who loses? People who were going to lose the protection with or without an FTA? Don't think so. NZ has about the most open markets in the world, bar none. We have nothing to lose from an FTA with China because whatever they gain on exports to us is only a brief acceleration of things that were happening anyway.
Also, it's mostly only valid in labour-intensive industries. We cannot compete with China on availability of labour, and will never be able to do so. Even if they impose a minimum wage they've still got a population so large that adding all of NZ to it would be a rounding error in their census. We need to forget about trying to compete on low-cost, and start trying to compete on high-tech. High-tech pays better and is usually hard to emulate overseas. Value-add is the money-maker, as many luminaries (Lord Winston being on the most-recent) have stated.
I'd rather the US was outsourcing it's work to us rather than us outsourcing it to China....
Won't happen. We're a low-wage economy by western standards, but still many times more expensive than China or India. An FTA wouldn't change that. They export knowledge work to the cheapest source of competent labour, and that's primarily India. The things that they get done in China, we mostly can't do at all. We have very little heavy manufacturing, very little textile manufacturing, and so on. We have to offer the US unique, high-value services. Like Tait with their military radios, or Rakon with their GPS crystals. Things that can't be done cheaper by anyone who can throw more low-skilled labour at the problem.
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Well, let's do a compare and contrast on copyright and intellectual property; environmental and labour standards and so forth.
Well, for starters you're making the very erroneous assumption that I think IP law, especially around copyright, as it currently stands in NZ is vaguely fair and useful. I don't. I think it's a total abomination, largely driven by US business interests. So why would I want us to align with a country that will force us to extend even further the already-ludicrous duration of copyright and limit what consumers can do with media they rightfully own? For me, IP is a complete non-starter. China's tidying their act up, slowly, and they have to do so and be seen to do so if they want entry to the WTO.
Yes, I'll grant that China's got a long way to go on environmental standards. But comparing them to a country that, with 5% of the world's population, uses 25% of the resources and has only just been overtaken by the most-populous nation as the world's largest polluter, seems a bit disingenuous to me. How does it look to you, Craig?
Labour standards? China's biggest failing. But guess what: they're not asking us to drop our standards to meet theirs. And they don't have people who hold down three jobs and are still unable to afford adequate healthcare. I wouldn't get so sneery about China, if I were you. They've got a lot of very bad aspects, to be sure, but the US is awfully ugly too. And unlike the US, China doesn't try and proclaim to the world that they're a model that should be held up for emulation by all. They certainly don't try and force others to do things their way as the price of trade access.
I've got no objection to FTAs, as a concept. My objection is when a large country bullies a small country into doing things that are only beneficial for the business interests of the large country but distinctly bad for the citizens of the small. Such as Australia being forced to cease reference-priced purchasing of pharmaceuticals. Good for Big Pharma, very bad for Australian health consumers. But, hey, Big Pharma ain't Chinese so I guess that makes it OK, right?
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See, everyone just assumed I meant the US was as bad as China on human rights. Which I didn't. The US is far from perfect (capital punishment, abolition of habeus corpus, torture, political interference with the justice system...) but they're still a long way from China.
What I meant, but phrased poorly due to being about to rush off to a lecture, was "If we put aside the human rights issues, what other possible grounds are there to object to an FTA with China but be desperate to get one with the US?"We got an FTA with China, and we didn't have to sell our souls to get it. A non-reciprocal working holiday visa scheme, with the non-reciprocity being due to China's lack of capability for doing such a thing at their end, another 1000 Chinese workers a year (how many tens-of-thousands of them migrate here annually to start with?), and the removal of the last vestiges of protectionism over clothing imported to here from there, and that's it. That's the sum of the negatives (and I don't see them as all that negative) that flow from the FTA. In return we get improved access to their markets for our agricultural goods, concessions on behind-the-border measures, and the kudos of being the first (western?) country to negotiate an FTA with China. We have so little protection already that we have little to concede.
To sign one with the US, we'd have to agree to gut Pharmac, "reform" copyright (longer durations, for a start, and probably abolish the little fair use we've just been granted), and get not much more access to their markets. That's the template set by the AUS-FTA.
Notice the difference? China didn't particularly take advantage of its size to negotiate positions strongly in its favour. They could have, and we probably would've accepted, but we didn't have to. The general consensus from commentators who know a hell of a lot more about international trade than I ever will is that it's actually a pretty fair deal, and really fair not just relatively fair. Whereas nobody (except probably the Yanks) thinks AUS-FTA is even relatively fair. It was a rogering, ably assisted by John "Sheriff-of-the-51st-state" Howard.