Posts by Matthew Poole
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No doubt Clifton could point to WhaleOil's blog as an indication that a blog is a much worse forum than a newspaper.
Only if you don't consider Granny's "Your Views" to be an extension of the paper. After all, some of the hysterical comments in YV drive and/or are driven by stories that Granny publishes. Look at how hard they bag the cops, ably supported to legions of rabid YV'ers who think the police are marginally less competent than a retarded goldfish, and marginally more socially-acceptable as an organisation than Pinochet's death squads.
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I just don't think most New Zealanders look kindly on the security services being used by the government of the day to spy on its political enemies, especially when they're elected members of Parliament. Helen Clark certainly took severe exception to the insinuation.
I'm not surprised she got rather tetchy about it. After all, as minister responsible for the NZSIS, the law requires that both she and the Commissioner of the NZSIS sign off on domestic interception warrants. So the allegation, if true, dropped it squarely on her desk with zero wiggle room.
There's also the small matter of the law requiring that the Leader of the Opposition be briefed regularly, and the allegations by implication impugned either the integrity of the Commissioner or the integrity of (then) Don Brash, since one or t'other would've been staying mum about what was going on.Toss in the fact that the law (see section referred immediately above) says that the NZSIS isn't to be used for "furthering or harming the interests of any political party", and I'd say that the Operation Leaf bullshit far outweighed the age of consent issue.
With one, the SST is throwing shit that can be deflected by a moderately competent PR flak whispering in a few ears. With the other, the SST is alleging high-level political interference in the operations of a part of the national security apparatus, implying that its head or the LotO have absolutely no integrity, and doing it in a way that's almost impossible for Labour to disprove because, of course both Helen and the NZSIS will deny that they're bugging the Maori Party. After all, that's very far on the dark side of grey, and, if it were being done, it'd be ostensibly on the grounds of national security in a country where we don't even get government acknowledgement of the deployment of the SAS until Dubbyah's already announced it to the world. -
Cate Brett working for the Law Commission? As a research wonk? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
This is the same woman who ran the "the SIS are spying on teh maaaris" story with such gay abandon and never mind the facts. To her credit the retraction was front-page, above-the-fold, but it should never have been necessary in the first place.
The thought of someone so utterly incapable of validating sources working in a role around privacy law is somewhat terrifying. -
I have to confess to being able to see some (albeit very twisted) logic in Grant's position, aided by the evidence that demolition of the welfare state does awful things for infant mortality.
If you do away with welfare, only the rich will be able to afford to raise children. Only rich children will survive. The children of the poor, who don't deserve to survive because they're poor, won't. Iterate over a handful of generations, and voila you have only deserving children being raised in wealthy families.Of course we then have to find the dusties, and cleaners, and secretaries, from this pool of privilege and expectation. We've seen what happens to the pay rates of tradesmen (not knocking them, but they're traditionally not paid like accountants or lawyers) when there are serious supply-side shortages - plumbers and sparkies earning $80k+, for example - but what would happen to the wages of cleaners if suddenly there was a shortage? Someone's got to do it, after all, and the traditional way to make under-serviced jobs attractive is to increase the pay.
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Shut off student loans and benefits in a similar way....
Ah, so you want an uneducated, unemployable, poverty-stricken population? Do you have a degree, Grant? Did you pay the full cost of it?
The great thing about all the right-wingers your age is that you were quite happy to take your state-funded education but heaven forbid that my generation be allowed the same benefit. And that's just the ones who think that partial-funding is too much. You want to go further, and make people pay the whole cost and do it through the private loans market. At least people such as David Seymour (who tutored me for economics in my first year) aren't preaching from a very flimsy high horse on matters of education funding, unlike yourself.
Who's going to be able to afford to visit a dentist when dentistry students have to pay the whole cost of their education? Or doctors? Coz I'm sure your utopia does away with fee maxima and state funding of doctors' visits for children or low-income earners.The countries with the lowest infant mortality rates are all welfare states.
But, Russell, so long as the children are allowed to be born Grant doesn't give a flying fruitcake whether they live to see their second birthday. If they do, more slaves for his buddies to exploit. If they don't, well, he's fulfilled his calling to ensure that abortions are banned and after that the state should just stay the hell out of everything. Kinda ironic, really. "Abortion is bad, but so long as the baby's born I don't give a damn if it lives or dies beyond that."
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A) There is more to the situation than simply switching a bunch of people from not looking for work to looking for work.
You have evidence that most of the recipients of the dole aren't looking for work? I'm sure their WINZ case managers would be fascinated to hear that there're vast fabrications of interviews and job training going on.
B) A cheaper workforce does not mean I will have to take a pay-cut. Why would it?
Well, giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that you actually a job, a "cheaper workforce" doesn't just mean part of it. Decreasing wages carries through to the whole economy, with a very few exceptions. When people earn less, they have less to spend. That means that prices must decrease in order for goods to be affordable. That works its way through the marketplace, since pretty much the whole economy is interconnected. Basic supply and demand economics. If people cannot afford your goods, you must drop the prices or you go out of business.
A pay cut doesn't necessarily mean you'll actually have your present pay level decreased, but it does mean you won't get much of a pay rise, if anything, next time there's a review. If you don't even get a cost-of-living increase, then you do get a pay cut.Again, fundamental economics. A decrease in the average wage leads to an overall decrease in wages to accommodate the reduced purchasing power of the market. The exceptions are usually very-high-end luxury goods, such as Rolex\watches or Lamborghini cars. They have a low price elasticity, in economists' jargon. Whereas staple foods and ordinary clothing have high price elasticity, and it's goods at those levels that end up dragging the economy down.
The alternative is that prices for consumer goods are inelastic and we end up with a massive increase in poverty. Which probably doesn't worry you, but it does worry those of us who give a fig about social justice. -
Grant, I notice that whenever someone shoots you down with logic, as opposed to calling you a raving nutjob (just calling a spade a square-edged earth-moving instrument), your next post complains about how nobody engages you.
Two of us have shattered (hopefully, though given your obdurateness I think lightly scuffed might be more accurate) your illusion that a) you can miraculously employ everyone who's currently on the dole just by taking the dole away, and b) that an over-supply of labour doesn't have a negative impact on those already working. You didn't respond to either of us, you just wailed about how nobody takes you seriously. If you only selectively see responses, don't expect people to change their view that you are, in fact, treading very unsteadily on the edge of the great precipice that is lunacy.
And Sacha, unless he starts being flagrantly, personally abusive to individuals on here I think we should tread very carefully around notions of banning him. Freedom of speech means his right to say what he wants, not for him to say what we want him to say. It would be nice if he'd confess to being stark raving, because at least then we could pretend to ourselves that his rants come from a mental imbalance rather than a nasty, closed mind, but I can't see that happening. Doesn't mean I think he should be banned.
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As for the American love affair with the car, no it wont go away any time soon, and why the hell would it?
I never said "car", I said "SUV". I understand that public transport isn't always an option (helloooo, I live in Auckland!). That doesn't mean my alternative needs to weigh enough to require a light-truck driver's licence, and get single-digit mpg. Detroit doesn't know how to build truly efficient cars, either (American hybrids? Anyone? No, didn't think so), but the ones they do build are still better than SUVs.
if you are upset about increasing oil consumption right now, get pissed off at the Chinese and Indians, not the Yanks.
The Chinese have only just, barely, maybe, passed the Americans as the world's largest oil consumer. Consider that they have roughly four times as many people, and you'll understand why I have no sympathy for that argument. India isn't even close to either of them, so why bring them into it at all?
American consumption per-capita is far ahead of any other country on earth. Kiwis aren't close to perfect, but we're still well behind the US (and several other members of the OECD). -
According to this site, the current US consumption is around 20 million barrels of oil per day. By my math that means that the total US oil reserves could only ever provide around 3 years worth of oil if fully exploited.
It seems to me that a more prudent policy would be to drastically cut oil use rather than manically destroying what wilderness is left on the continent in the vain hope of securing the national interest from "The Russians".
The 'merkin love-affair with oil isn't going away easily. They've got their SUV habit to break, and Detroit in general needs a good beating with a clue-by-four. If they can gain three years' of time to get their heads around the concept of small cars with efficient engines, they'll take it.
Of course, that does assume that they'll use the gained time wisely. I wouldn't count on it. Detroit cannot operate at a profit even when it makes vehicles that have margins of 40% or more (like the large SUVs, such as the Tahoe), so how they'll cope with small, complex vehicles remains to be seen. Not that the demise of Chrysler, GM and Ford would be any great loss to the world. Toyota, Honda and all the other usual suspects will be more than willing to fill the space, with vehicles that don't wantonly rape the planet.
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but if you've got mental health issues dealing with winz is about number 1 on the list of things that make you worse.
I'l that making a sensitive issue claim with ACC trumps thatACC are doing a remarkably good job of becoming as loathed as IRD once was. IRD at least has the excuse of being meant to be screwing you when it comes to behaving like a pack of bastards (is pack the correct group noun? Tribe? Swarm? Murder?), but have still managed to clean up their collective act - admittedly following much polly tubby-inspired hounding and bad press - when it comes to unnecessarily obnoxious behaviour.