Thursday, February 11, 2021

A fly on the wall of the 9th floor - 2021.

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PM: Granters, we simply Have to Do Something about these house prices. 19% in a year, and much more in some provincial localities. This is g...
Wednesday, February 03, 2021

Steel Wheel Dreaming

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  The eternal 'boost Rail' mantra runs into a lot of awkward spatial facts in Godzone. No rail ever to: West coast SI south of Hokit...
Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Massive violence - the solution to 'Inequality'

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It's worth slogging yer way through  Scheidel's 'The Great Leveller' . Contra to the simplistic strain running through so m...
Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Pike River - a fatally flawed design mandated by Gubmint

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Pike River was at base a Gubmint-enforced faulty design, and any regulatory 'failure' was well downstream of that. The seam at PR...
Saturday, May 16, 2020

Machinery Training in the olden days

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I look back on my machine-operator training: operating dozers, loaders, scrapers, graders, rollers, crusher plants, excavators, rock quarry...
Thursday, May 14, 2020

Old-style Gubmint versus the current risk-averse, high-cost model

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An Interest commenter avers that in the olden days, if the Gubmint got involved, Things got Done, referring to my exploits on the Cat D7 in...
Saturday, April 25, 2020

Muddling through the Transition

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Opening up means asking - to who, under what conditions. Most comments are simply tribal reflexive so far: red/blue, prepper/unprepared, su...
Wednesday, April 22, 2020

We should always demand that local government runs the ruler across all spending - article rejoinder

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As a former (pre-1989, so old-world, prudent-rural-Council) LG Treasurer (no fancy CFO titles back then) I have been quietly appalled at th...
Monday, April 20, 2020

Green's High-Speed Rail dreams

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Well, the Greens have come up with a $9 billion plan to electrify the main trunks (NI plus SI) at least around the major cities and get hig...
Tuesday, April 14, 2020

The 'economy' is not a Machine, but an Anthill (sort of)

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A common failing is to think of the economy as a machine, which is subject to controls - levers and dials - which can be twiddled or pulled...
Wednesday, April 08, 2020

Councils, CEO and Staff - once again, I wearily explain their relationships

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This was a response to a comment which confessed that 'As voters we are failing'.  My reply:  No, don't be too hard on yourself...

Autarky - flavour of the 2020's?

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Let's draw out some Consequences of the 'all for it' themes - all varieties of  autarky  - a common characteristic of medieval ...
Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Covid and Councils

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Well, we're not gonna need Conference Centres for a while either. And as several Councils have declared themselves to be in a Climate E...
Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Define 'essential'

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The Gubmint's definition of 'essential services' (tucked inside the  Covid19 Levels blurb here ) includes the airy statement ...
Monday, March 16, 2020

The Reverse-Bill-of-Materials conundrum

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This is a reverse-bill-of-materials moment for the economy. A BOM is usually intended to show what one needs to Build something, and often ...
Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Those Canterbury Plains - many centuries of change

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All environments are local, and the Canterbury Plains have been through many centuries of vast change - affecting climate, sedimentation, r...
Wednesday, June 05, 2019

A Tale of Two Gabbys

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Gabby Hakoops, esteemed slack-key guitarist to the King of Diamonds, stood before the Witchsmeller Pursuivant, accused of playing Gabby Fau...
Sunday, May 26, 2019

A Baseline for Wellbeing Accounting

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In a scoop, Interest has been made privy to an important advancement in the Wellbeing Accounting space. All wellbeing measures, to be cred...

Millenarial Movements

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The Historian Norman Cohn, in his 1957 book,  The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Midd...
Friday, March 29, 2019

The bitter fruit of the 'Personal is Political'

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Jeffrey Tucker writes that " The attempt to turn every subjectively felt personal issue into a collective cause with a collective a...
Wednesday, March 27, 2019

The mathematical futility of long-term climate projections

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The entire climate-prediction edifice as currently promoted, is founded on quicksand, as time-series research at LSE demonstrates - the  Ha...
Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Zoning Causes Commutes

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 "We must strive to provide employment close to where people live” Parfitt (of Auckland Council) says. “Long commutes place a huge, unp...

Christianity and Islam - the differences

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The difference between the Christian and Islamic systems is that the former has had a Reformation, and the latter hasn't. During the co...
Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Angelo M Codevilla on the new American Revolution

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Two articles, both by Angelo M. Codevilla, both in a distinctly elegiac tone regarding the fate of the USA. His core theory is that a revol...
Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Tertiary Funding

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In answer to a question about why SIT needs an Auckland branch... The zero fees model (I was there at the inception) depended on the orig...
Thursday, August 16, 2018

A Fly on the Wall of the 9th floor...

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An imagined Fly-on-the-wall conversation:  The PM and the FM. PM:  Granters, I've just come back from talking to those Teachers.  Can...
Sunday, June 17, 2018

Gubmint tax-funded balm tor spiritual cancer

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Contra to Jason's article wherein a weary acceptance of MMP is argued for,  it needs to be recalled that Godzone has no Constitution (un...
Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Coos, Culls, and the effect on NZ Inc

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Michael Reddell has a good point to make, although the phrase 'gifting' could also be applied to beneficiaries, pensioners, Waiheke ...
Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Government cluelessness about the Time Value of Money

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The issue with Gubmint large-scale anything which has to be built physically (as opposed to redistributed with a hefty ticket-clip) is that...
Friday, January 05, 2018

Christchurch CBD - lack of development therein

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.. a lot of people financially lost businesses as business interruptions claims often are not successful. Therein lies a tale. Folks who ...