Posts by Alastair Thompson
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The Dominion FP picture story features one of their own - sub-editor Ali - who lost her dream job at Dunbar Sloan after only a couple of weeks. She left a secure job on the Fairfax sub-hub. The circumstances of that seem likely to end up in court - if that is possible.
This example makes the point you made about labour mobility issues very clearly.
I should think that this aspect of widening the law would have a bunch of negative economic impacts that even treasury and ACT would be greatly concerned at.
But this law is mischievous in a multitude of ways. The following are two more real examples from my immediate circle of acquaintances.
Example 2
Severely deaf retail assistant at a pharmacy - pharmacy gets taken over and she signs new employment contract with new owner. Owner buys another pharmacy down the road - closes it and sacks some of the newly appointed staff under the 90 day provision. She had been working at the pharmacy perfectly well for four years. Left very distressed as to why she lost job.Example 3.
Employer in Kapiti hires five young men in labouring jobs. Tells them his intention is to keep the best one and sack the rest in 2 and a half months.^^^ all of the above circumstances are not how the law was intended to act and most could (but probbably won't) be litigated.
al
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Gosh.
I just saw him in the street a week or so ago. Seemed hale and hearty....
That's really rather shocking.
RIP Paul. And thanks....
alastair
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Isn't the per second charging after the first minute? So you won't escape a minute charge for those answerphone calls which last less than a minute...
Hmmm... the devil is always in the detail. Our bill is full of 2-5 second calls. Answerphones are mobile telephone companys' best friends. :)
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@Tammy,
Thanks for the link.
Those plans look quite attractive to me. I will need to do a bit of analysis of my bill in detail to know whether I can save much but I would think it should be a few hundred a month.
At present we pay $80 odd per handset for shared calling and offpeak minutes and texts for each phone. On peak calls to non shared phones then add a fair bit to the top of the bill.
2500 minutes pre-paid would I expect make a pretty big difference to our overall monthly bill. Plus the fact that short calls and calls which are not answered (but answered by answerphones and quickly terminated) are charged per second not per minute.
The kicker for us iwill be the termination fees and signup costs for new handsets. Our N95s are not going to work unfortunately.
Very interesting indeed
al
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Joseph,
Just entered the competition myself. And yes its not a good look. If being on their list is a condition of entry - and I think it possibly could be legally - then they should not pretend that its an option.
I expect it will be clarified here shortly.
Meantime obviously today is Launch Day for the network.
So far as I can ascertain the business pricing plans are not yet available. As soon as I hear what they are I will post a link.
Meantime there is some blog opinion on the consumer pricing plans released yesterday on Geekzone Here - Here and Here. There is also a Discussion about those plans on Geekzone also
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All the real work is done by the reduced operating allowance. It’s impact will be felt more and more as time goes on. Each and every subsequent Budget will have to make do with an increasingly inadequate pool. And at the end of it, there’ll be a big-ass shortfall in the NZSF.
Fascinating and very useful analysis Keith. I should have listened to what you were saying more closely in the lockup.
My view is that this is the least credible part of the numbers produced today - and for the reasons you give above some of the other numbers are a bit dodgy also.
For the new spending track to be kept to there will be increasing amounts of cuts required to other parts of core Govt expenditure.
Organic growth in health and social welfare will soak up the 1.1 billion allowance next year without it even touching the sides. This year the increase in spending is already $5 billion.
A $1.1 billion increase is only an increase of 1.7% on Govt spending. Health and Education have traditionally grown at 6-8%. Social Welfare will of course grow in the event more people find themselves unemployed.
The simple truth is the only ways out of this mess fiscally speaking will be to restore the country to growth or to change the way we think about fiscality.
Still its amusing that Standard and Poors found it nice and compelling.
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Taking a brief break from budget coverage to alert y'all to the following announcement.
Tomorrow morning Telecom stores around New Zealand will open and customers will be able to enjoy the XT Mobile Network.
On the eve of launch, Telecom has revealed its suite of pricing plans that incorporate the concepts of One Rate pricing, per second billing after the first minute and the innovative option of shared calling plans. Some exciting handset offers are also being released.
Each plan is designed to give customers certainty, make it easy to understand what’s on offer, and provide customers with the flexibility that they have asked us for says Telecom Retail CEO, Alan Gourdie.
The press release is accompanied by some charts in the PDF Version
The PDF version contains charts which contain some information about consumer plan costs.
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@becs355 said:
Instead of a contract for every phone, you'll be able to sign up to ONE contract for your business, and add/remove phones to that one contract as you need to. So it's going to be much easier to manage your businesses changing needs (adding contractors etc). Minutes can be shared across the phone users.
I will be very interested in the details of these business account plans. At present we pay far too much per phone and have very little flexibility. It seems to me that whenever I try to adjust the plans to reduce the cost per phone something else comes into play and the overall cost stays the same.
Shared minutes sounds ideal (and I know that some families would like that also).
What would also be ideal would be a shared data cap for the business as its far from clear from one month to the next who is likely to want to use mobile data.
Finally one more question. Will there be any special deals to lure business accounts across to the new network?
al
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@Neal,
Welcome to Public Address System. Neal is one of the Telecomers - an expert in all technical aspects of XT Network as I understand it.
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@paul,
@rich of observation not sure you're right about iPhones being double locked. If you buy one from Vodafone you can put ANY SIM card in it and it'll work. You'll need to change settings but that's it.
Glad you cleared that up Paul. That was my understanding also.