Posts by Andrew C
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What a great site.
Its possible I am a bit thick and have not figured out how to do this yet, but on a wish list would be (in order of preference):
1a. find some way to move automatically and start playing the "next" track. Like in hype machine. Not the next in a playlist I have created, but the "next" track in the relevant list (more on this later). I like having Hype running in the background and every so often when a track catches my ear I take a look and dig deeper.
1b. Ability to skip next/previous when listening to an automatic playlist.
2. filter in/out tracks I have voted for
3. filter in/out tracks I have listened toBy "next" I mean next in line from some list of tracks generated by the site based on my choices. For example the current chart is a list of tracks (no real choices there). Or the latest songs added by date could be another. Or the current chart after removing songs I have already voted for. Etc.
BTW, if the above are already possible please let me know how (im none too sharp on the old techno stuff)
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Im no economist, so im getting a little lost here. But how is what you talk about any different to any other form of transaction? If I sell horses and I sell a horse and make a profit, I am taxed on that profit, and the net profit is thus less than a horse sells for, so I am now in a worse of position than before I sold the horse, so I lose out, so ...?
You had a 300k house and sold it for a profit and after tax you can only buy a 285k house. But you only paid 200k, so you're still winning, aren't you?
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Steve Barnes,
Because a family always needs a home so the profit being taxed is never realised.
I don't quite understand what you mean here. If you sell an asset that makes a profit you pay a % in tax. You can still buy a better/bigger home with the remaining profit cant you? Just because you chose to spend it on a bigger home doesn't mean the profit is unrealized, it just means you spent the profit.
If you are going to have a CGT on family homes, you need to provide rollover relief each time people sell and buy, otherwise you impede labour market mobility. That gets…. complicated, especially if you are trying to work out when people are making their final sell and buy moves
why? They still make money on the sale, they just get a little less that without a CGT, and it might even slightly suppress prices (although the stamp duty in Oz doesn't seem to, so maybe not). I don't get why you need to wait until the final sale to wash all this up either.
Plus you get older people rattling around in huge houses because they don’t want to sell and cop the CGT
If they sell they will pay CGT out of their profit, not out of their savings. And I assume that if they rattle around too long and die their estate will have to pay it when it sells the house, so I'm not sure of the motivation to stay.
Anyway, not wanting to sidetrack anything here, I simply didn't immediately understand why the home should be exempt, so asked in case there was a blindingly obvious reason.
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Hard News: Press Play > Budget, in reply to Luke Williamson,
add capital tax on anything other than own home,
at the risk of getting sidetracked, why would you exclude the family home from a CGT Luke?
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Hard News: The Very Worst, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It was by no means a perfect policy in planning nor execution, but NYC crime rates actually dropped.
I read some debate around whether it was this or other effects causing the crime rate drop. For example one of the authors of the Freakanomics series says they can show that the drop was actually due to the legalisation of abortions, fewer unwanted/unloved/uncontrolled kids running around getting into crime. From memory the analysis was along the lines of the fact that other states without broken window approaches saw similar and correlated decreases in crime rates to NY.
I know no more about it other than what I read in the book, so it might be that their figures didn't stack up, but it's any interesting theory anyway.
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He doesn’t seem to be able to perceive the ethical gap between his aspirations and what he did, and does.
And to help prove your point, on the same day you post he provides this lovely example via NewsTalkZB where he lectures us about how a reasonable person would never release anything they knew would breach someone's privacy, and that if they ever recieve this type of information they would always delete it and never shop it around to the media.
You couldn't make this stuff up.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Kumara Republic,
How trickle-down economics works:
A nice pisstake on it here too by colbert.
The perfect antidote to anyone who invokes the infamous ’How Taxes Work’ urban legend.
And as discussed before Red, snopes simply tries to find the author of this annecdote, rather than call bullshit on it.
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Hard News: A storm in any port, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
It was not only misleading ,it was a downright lie.
A stevedore at 40 hrs a week at 53 weeks, $56,187.00 before tax, by my math.The $91,000 is (partly) explained here. Not shown in those figures, but I believe this to be the case, is that the figure also includes estimates for benefits like super schemes and medical insurance etc. Pretty standard stuff to include these items when talking about a 'salary package', but I guess some people will split hairs over it.
The other day some said to me that while the stevedores get a guaranteed 40hr week even if they work less, the overtime rate was deliberately set to close to the standard work rate (i.e not time and a half or whatever) as some sort of balance. Is anyone able to confirm this? If it is true then it takes some sting out of POAL's 'working half time' complaint...
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to kiwifarang,
– using a currency swap mechanism that “guaranteed” to reduce debt to GDP ratios.
Surprise, surprise… it didn’t work.
It was designed to hide the debt rather than eliminate it long term. Make no mistake, GS was doing exactly what Greece asked them to, namely cook the books so they could get into the Euro.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Angus Robertson,
Personally I think the Greeks should default and stiff the bankers
What this should read is: Personally I think the Greeks should default and stiff the holders of Greek debt
This isn't always limited to the banks themselves, shareholders in the banks get done, funds (eg pension funds) that own shares in these banks get stiffed, as too do any institutions/funds that bought the Greek debt if it was repackaged and onsold.
A default can trickle down and smack the little guys too, think of the mom and pops here in NZ who took a kicking when the developers said 'screw the finance firm bastards, the bottom has fallen out of the market so we're off'
Like you Angus my personal view is that Greece (and Ireland etc) should default, this is how a functioning banking and risk system is supposed to work. I just wanted to make sure that its clear that a default isn't just sticking it to the "rich pricks".