Posts by Moz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
people wouldn't make a fake Uber app that instead erases the phone
That would be hilarious. I'm tempted to make one just for the humour value. Think of the laughs when all the drunken punters hit "wipe my phone" instead of "get me home" on a Friday night.
Appropriately, this is my 666'th comment here.
-
Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Lilith __,
Sugar is a nutrient, not a poison.
The dose makes the poison and the evidence that some people eat too much sugar, and the great majority of those people eat primarily refined sugar.
I have seen people get "citrus trots" when they eat too much fresh fruit and it's both amusing and gross, but you have to be pretty dedicated to do that. Whereas it's very easy to sit down with a box of sweets, chocolate or soft drink and keep the sugar plateau going until you stupefy yourself. I don't know if you could actually give yourself diarrhea that way, but I'm sure you could make yourself very unwell.
-
Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to James Butler,
the link between sugar and obesity is tenuous and poorly understood
It's at least as well understood as the link between environmental estrogens or psuedo-estrogens and obesity, or between soot and global warming. Viz, the question is not whether there's a causal relationship, it's on how strong the effect is.
But as with all these statistical effects, it's very hard to point to a single factor and a single event and say "caused". Often it's impossible, even in theory. One of the major issues is that the death rate is 100% so it's difficult to find a control population that doesn't die from other causes. With sugar intake it's further complicated by the prevalence of sugars and the expense of eliminating some or all of them. Personal experience here, I find the low FODMAP diet helps my digestion but gosh it's tricky to do.
The is political "science" rather than medicine. "if we change these 200 things, one of which is introducing a sugar tax, what happens?" You'd never get a university ethics committee to even consider a proposal to form government, let alone approve one.
-
One caveat is that when we started the whole emphasis on "low fat food" manufacturers responded not by pushing fresh food, but by substituting sugar for fat. Insofar as they focussed on fresh food, it was making it cheaper by producing varieties that suit the food industry at the expense of nutrition.
I'm somewhat cautious of sugar taxes for fear that they will simply divert the problem into another area. It's pushing on one part of a balloon, while the underlying society-level problem of "we'd rather have cheap than good" is not addressed. That leads to many individuals having to choose either good food or enough food, never both.
-
Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to william blake,
not pay a sugar or fat tax, that would be penalising the victims of the consumerist hegemony. The manufacturers of products that cause the harms should be given the hospital bills,
At best that is similar to a tax, except that the amount is uncertain and the cost is only applied long after the profit has been spent. Look at asbestos for an example - the health effects only became obvious long after the industry started, and when those costs were applied the companies declared themselves bankrupt and that was that.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to BenWilson,
It's what makes it so hard for enforcement to do anything about Uberers. They are nearly invisible against the general population of cars.
Surely enforcement is less of a "swoop squad" and more "download the app, get the Ubnik to come to you"? If anyone is in a position to obtain large numbers of Uber accounts legitimately it would be the Police, surely?
If they were going to be nasty about it they'd just check for the app on every phone they investigate, and call for a ride as part of the processing. For a police officer on the go it'd be "Bonus Uber prosecution with every arrest!". But I'm sure Andrew Geddis will explain how that would exceed their powers, leading Idiot/Savant to ask how that would be unusual.
-
Hard News: How the years flew by ..., in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
people can get round my proposed LVR restrictions by setting up a portfolio of shell companies
It might be simpler to require that beneficial owners be identified. I suspect that alone would collapse many of the problems.
It would probably involve punitive taxation of money moving to or from vehicles with no identified beneficial owner and quite probably a wealth tax. That way at the end of every financial year NZ taxpayers would have the choice: claim their assets in vehicles here and overseas and pay tax accordingly, or get taxed vigorously when they move money in or out of said vehicles. The sequence I see is: send money overseas to tax haven = 20% tax payable; bring that money back = 20% tax payable; bring asset purchased overseas with unverifiable funds back = 25% tax (so you bought if after paying 20% tax on the funds).
But the huge advantage of that for the honest citizens is that there would be no change. Kurt would be like "dat, dat my house", John Key would be all "who? No, no, nothing to do with me" but then when he goes overseas and someone gives him an expensive "gift"... he pays 25% of the value as tax, or he doesn't bring it back. Actually, that would also help with corruption :)
-
Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to James Bremner,
In a democracy, you can't ram massive unwanted change down people throats, which is the point of democracy, so I can't see how densification is a viable solution
I don't think that's how democracy works, or should work. You seem to be talking about some of the more vigorous forms of propertarianism: "a man's home is his castle and society has no right to tell him what he can and can't do in it". I think the point of government is exactly to override the will of individuals for the good of society as a whole.
I see this more of a question of which group of people/level of government should make the rules. If it's a council or smaller area then yep, the NIMBYs win. Once it's at a city or state level, though, it's easy to ignore most NIMBY groups because they just aren't big enough to matter.
One example is the massive state appropriation of property rights, without compensation, that happened when the anti-smacking bill was passed. Sure, a small group of NIMBYs was very, and vocally, offended - "I can't hit MY child? Waaaahhh!!!". But most people supported it. I reckon you'd see the same in Auckland.
-
Polity: Geography and housing options, in reply to Sacha,
Trains work where there is sufficient population density to make high frequencies economic. Sprawl is the enemy of rail.
You have it backwards: trains are the enemy of sprawl.
Building train systems after the city is established is insanely expensive. Tunnels cost a lot of money ($100M/km is towards the cheap end) but they're cheap compared to demolishing houses. Even cheap houses. Dual track needs about 10m wide, so 1 hectare/kilometre. City land sells for between $100 and $500 per square metre, so you're looking at a minimum of $10M/km just for the land, before you start re-routing infrastructure, often building bridges/underpasses for roads (and bob help you if there's a big water main or gas pipeline).
If you can get in while the land is clear you save a lot of money. Surrounding infrastructure can be built to suit the trains, rather than built then dug up and re-done after the train line goes in. Plus you can (ideally, anyway) capture a lot of the value increase that comes from the rail line. That's hard to do if you force a rail line into a NIMBY neighbourhood.
In Sydney we had the fist of god approach to densification and it seems to be working. One of the higher levels of government just made a spreadsheet and gave each council a number: you will accommodate X new residents in the next 20 years. So instead of councils being able to pretend that their neighbourhoods would stay the same while the next council over turned into skyscrapers, everyone had to play the game. We have seen a lot of rezoning around transport hubs as a result. A 1200m2 section+house next to the railway station where I live (30 minutes from the CBD by train) went from $800k to $1.5M the day that zoning change passed. Viz, their rates bill doubled... but now a developer can go 8 storeys there rather than the previous 3-4
OTOH, there's a new major airport going to be built at Badgery's Creek in western Sydney. Without rail. Even though it's barely 10 years since the privately built rail line to the existing airport went bankrupt because build cost so far exceeded passenger revenue. The value-add there was "don't have to build an 8 lane motorway" not "passengers will pay". At the new airport it's "$30B project, or $25B without the rail... oh, and another $25B for new roads" (watch what happens. I bet my numbers turn out to be closer than the official ones)
-
Polity: Lady luck smiles more than we think, in reply to llew40,
Heh. I was born white, and male, into a family that both valued education and was well equipped to deal with my personal oddities. For the most part (family history of what I suspect is now Aspergers, at the time was hyperactivity, and before that was PITA). Oh, and family who could and would support me when I needed it, even if that was very much on their terms.
Better than my partner's situation, helping her mother out financially since she started uni. And various other things. Lots of time and money.
Do I blame those who have decided to invest in property? ... Do I think property needs to be properly taxed
That's pretty much where I am. I still recall two die-hard members of (one of) our local socialist groups actually apologising to me when I delivered their groceries a few years ago... they'd bought a house. How bourgeoisie.
The choice faced by a lot of people is between jumping on the subsidised bandwagon or poverty. I don't blame anyone who looks at that and says "BANDWAGON!". That's a choice I've made more than a few times myself, for the same reason. I choose not to choose poverty. Buying a house? A secoind house? Putting money into subsidised superannuation? Tick. Tickticktick.
But I also pay tax (how very... retro, I know), and I think everyone should. Woz did a recent interview where he said the same, which I found interesting.