Friday Economics Joke
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11:46 am, January 20th, 2012 - 8 comments
Categories: economy, humour -
Tags: smbc
8 comments on “Friday Economics Joke ”
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- When a RNZ Host gets it terribly wrong
..With perhaps one (or maybe two) exception(s), the journalists, producers, technicians, and hosts at RNZ are folks I hold in high regard. They have tough jobs to do - especially when trying to elicit some semblance of comprehensible answers from our robotic Prime Minister, programmed to give automated responses to ...1 hour ago - Don’t let Beijing’s AI charm offensive fool us
There’s one thing China’s ambassador to Australia got right in a call to add artificial intelligence to the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA): ‘China has always viewed Australia and China-Australia relations from a strategic and ...2 hours ago - Workers absent from government’s AI “strategy”
The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi is concerned that the artificial intelligence (AI) “strategy” document released today by the Government ignores impacts on working people and replicates the corporate hype of Microsoft and other tech giants. “It is crucial that no workers are left behind as ...3 hours ago - China’s ‘Taiwanese separatist’ hotline shows expanding lawfare strategy
Beijing’s coercion campaign against Taiwan is entering a more litigious phase. While military drills and cognitive warfare remain staples of its coercive playbook, China is now intensifying the systematic use of law to target Taiwan’s ...4 hours ago
- “There is no corruption in New Zealand…”
A government lavishes corporate welfare on a project managed by one of its donors, then appoints him as a director of a government body. The USA? No, its National's New Zealand: A newly-appointed KiwiRail board director is associated with a company which donated to NZ First. Scott O'Donnell is ...5 hours ago - Pacific maritime policy could mend fragmentation, increase resilience
The Pacific’s patchwork of national policies and voluntary regional frameworks often falls short of delivering unified, timely and effective responses. A comprehensive and legally binding regional maritime policy could build a more cohesive and resilient ...7 hours ago
- Unbelievable
The things, you sayYour purple prose just gives you awayThe things, you sayYou're unbelievableWriters: Ian Dench, Mark De Cloedt, Zachary Foley, James Atkin, Derran Brownson.Things are a bit strange right now. Don’t you think?With the right emboldened, the usual standards of decency, evidence, and logic have been abandoned, lying in ...7 hours ago - Bernard’s Pick ‘n’ Mix Sixes at 7am on Wednesday, July 9
Briefly for paying subscribers at 7am on Wednesday, July 91, the key scoops, breaking news, deep-dives, Op-Eds, analysis and other news links in Aotearoa-NZ’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate are:Top Six Pick ’n’ Mix for Wednesday, July 9Emma Ricketts for Stuff: Health NZ backtracks on proposal to reallocate ...8 hours ago - Peters heads off to the trade war
Foreign Minister Winston Peters heads off today to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting with South East Asian foreign ministers, which will now be ground zero for the trade war with the United States. It is the annual Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers conference, and New Zealand ...10 hours ago - Fact brief – Is global warming just due to El Niño?
Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is global warming just due to El Niño? El Niño Southern Oscillation is a short-term and cyclical weather phenomenon caused by alternating wind ...21 hours ago - Think about defence spending like this: when risks rise, so do insurance premiums
Australia’s strategic risk has increased significantly, and the government needs to increase its defence spending to match it. Defence spending is the premium for Australia’s defence insurance policy—it underwrites Australia’s protection from external threats, with ...21 hours ago
- In their dreams
Order of Ceremony for the Jacinda Ardern Show Trial and Ritual HumiliationMs HDPB-Allen will rise to say:I want to hear you apologise for showing empathy during a crisis. She may, if she chooses, add: This made me feel very uncomfortable.Mr M Hosking, wearing Armani and looking as though he has ...22 hours ago - Enter a title40 years on, the Rainbow Warrior, the bombing and French colonial culture in the Pacifi...
Provide a desJournalist and former university professor Dr David Robie reflects on the 1985 Rainbow Warrior mission to Rongelap atoll to help US nuclear refugees and the bombing of the Greenpeace campaign ship by French secret agents. His analysis is that far from the sabotage being an isolated incident, it ...23 hours ago - ASPI Defence Conference: Putting the ‘national’ in national preparedness and resilience
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- Qantas hack: limits to the government’s reach
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- Prison for One: Accepted
A very, very nice bit of writing news today. Prison for One, my 3,250-word piece of Space Opera, has earned itself an acceptance by Bullet Points (https://bulletpoints.nathantoronto.com/), a magazine specialising in speculative military fiction. To call this an exciting acceptance is to understate the case. You see, Prison for ...1 day ago - Tuesday 8 July
The Supreme Court has begun hearing arguments on whether it should uphold or overturn previous court rulings that four Uber drivers were entitled to be treated as employees of the firm, rather than as contractors. Hospital workers are pushing back against a trial to reduce the number of maternity beds ...1 day ago
- Uber drivers taking a stand on behalf of all platform workers
As the Uber drivers have their case heard in the Supreme Court today, the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi believes that the outcome of the case will have lasting implications for people working the in the platform economy and workers who have been misclassified as contractors. ...1 day ago
- Capital gaps and complacency: investment imbalance undermines sovereignty
Australia’s ability to generate breakthrough ideas has never been in doubt. But despite increasing recognition of the need for national resilience, the country still lacks a capital system built to serve strategic purpose. The failure ...1 day ago
- NZ economy sliding back into recession
There are clear signs from leading indicators that the economy is sliding back into recessionary territory in a third consecutive winter of economic discontent. Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāBriefly in the news from Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Tuesday, July 8:On the eve of an ...1 day ago - The great acceleration debate
This is a re-post from the Climate Brink The publication of an article titled “The World Is Warming Up. And It’s Happening Faster” by the New York Times kicked off a pretty heated debate among climate scientists over the evidence of acceleration and how strong a claim can be made based ...1 day ago
- How to fill a 155 mm hole in Australian defence strategy
In Canberra, it’s called taking out the trash. Late on Friday, 27 June, the Department of Defence quietly issued a media release with news it must have hoped would get little media attention: it had ...1 day ago
- Gordon Campbell On Using The Tax System To Boost Funding For The Arts
Despite the myriad concerns being expressed about the Regulatory Standards Bill – including misgivings by his own Regulations Ministry and scorn from constitutional law expert Sir Geoffrey Palmer – David Seymour has professed to find no merit in any of the objections. Sure, he’ll add in a reference to the ...2 days ago - Horses for courses: where quantum computing is, and isn’t, the answer
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- A good way to say goodbye
It can feel as though I'm often saying goodbye here. Friends who have gone; and I remember when.I’m at an age where I have more years behind me than ahead, and I'm writing for many people in the same position. But it's not always or ever just goodbye, I hope. ...2 days ago - The psychosocial imperative of food security preparedness
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- Legislating For Liberty.
Revolutionary Intentions: The Regulatory Standards Bill sounds like one of those pieces of legislation debated on a dreary Thursday afternoon in an almost empty House of Representatives - it is anything but.FOR A BILL set to transform New Zealand into a libertarian nightmare, it has an extremely boring name. The Regulatory ...2 days ago - Reality Check Radio’s Unhinged Petition
Reality Check Radio’s petition to prosecute former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, alongside Chris Hipkins, Ashley Bloomfield, and a cadre of public health experts, is a bewildering display of political theatre. Launched on the cusp of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into New Zealand’s Covid-19 response, this campaign is less a call ...2 days ago
- Whose cloud is it, anyway? Rethinking sovereignty in the shift to cloud infrastructure
Cloud infrastructure is now the backbone of everything from social services and emergency response to critical industry operations and defence. The shift has been fast, and often invisible to users. What began as a convenience ...2 days ago
- Another attack on the rule of law
Over the past few years New Zealand fisheries ministers have been repeatedly found to have acted illegally in their quota decisions, ignoring the Fisheries Act's environmental and information principles and setting quota at unlawfully high levels to pander to the fishing industry. But current fisheries minister Shame Jones has a ...2 days ago
- Monday 7 July
The PSA are saying that months after commissioning a report into sexual harassment, Corrections has not moved fast enough to address its “old boys club” culture that has impacted a quarter of their staff. A survey of student nurses has found almost 62 percent are considering a job overseas if one ...2 days ago
- Willis eyes more tax from banks
Willis says she has sought advice on whether the major banks are paying their fair share of tax. Photo: Getty ImagesBriefly in the news from Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Monday, July 7:Finance Minister Nicola Willis is considering changing the tax settings for banks in Budget ...2 days ago - The Red Flag
Then raise the scarlet standard highBeneath its folds, we'll live and dieThough cowards flinch and traitors sneerWe'll keep the red flag flying hereLyrics: Billy Bragg / Traditional.On this day in 1916, smaller socialist parties and trade unions came together to form our New Zealand Labour Party. So, congratulations to all ...2 days ago - Australia urgently needs a national security strategy
Many nations, including Australia, continue to operate as if strategic shocks are exceptional, not the new norm. This illusion of peace leaves us dangerously unprepared for the multipolar, contested, and volatile world rapidly unfolding around ...2 days ago
- “I Wanted, So Badly, To See His Face”
Hi,Four years ago on Webworm, my friend Kate wrote an essay about having aphantasia. In her words, “Aphantasia is the inability to visualise mental images. Most people who have aphantasia are also unable to recall sounds, smell or sensations of touch. That’s me. I can’t do any of it. Never ...2 days ago - FamilyBoost changes will exacerbate inequity of ECE access
The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions Te Kauae Kaimahi is warning that the FamilyBoost changes announced today by Finance Minister Nicola Willis will fail to make early childhood education more affordable for the families who need it most and will instead widen inequities. “The Government has missed an opportunity ...2 days ago
- Unresolved Questions About Epstein’s Paedophile Network
Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal enterprise represents one of the most sophisticated pedophile and blackmail operations in modern history, facilitated by an extensive surveillance network that recorded illicit activities across his Manhattan townhouse, Palm Beach mansion, Little St. James island, New Mexico’s Zorro Ranch, and the New Albany estate. Despite numerous investigations ...2 days ago
- 2025 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #27
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- Mountain Tūī’s 1 & Taking A Break
3 days ago - Common People
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The callous rhetoric emerging from this Government's housing ministers reveals a profound disconnect from the harsh realities facing thousands of New Zealanders. When politicians like Mark Mitchell and Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell suggest that homelessness is somehow a matter of personal choice, they perpetuate a dangerous myth that absolves the ...4 days ago
- The Dangerous Lie That Homelessness is a Choice
The callous rhetoric emerging from this Government's housing ministers reveals a profound disconnect from the harsh realities facing thousands of New Zealanders. When politicians like Mark Mitchell and Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell suggest that homelessness is somehow a matter of personal choice, they perpetuate a dangerous myth that absolves the ...4 days ago
- Investing in the Public Health System
What can you do when you have hit your borrowing limit and still want to spend? One option is to cut back on maintenance of your capital – say, to delay repainting the house or keeping the car in tip-top condition. The government does the same. Hence our three water ...5 days ago - The case for boosting defence spending is compelling—we shouldn’t need US prodding
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- A reminder that music lifts you out of everything
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Australia was high on the list for Britain’s revamp of its alliances after Brexit, and the stormy geopolitical climate that followed has only reinforced the need for a more ambitious partnership. Looking ahead, public demonstrations ...5 days ago
- Qantas data breach shows compliance doesn’t always mean protection and resilience
Cybersecurity requires more than legal compliance; it demands constant vigilance and adaptation. A cyberattack on a third-party platform used by a Qantas customer contact centre in Manila, discovered on 30 June, made this clear. Six ...5 days ago
- How Taiwan must prepare to face Chinese drone saturation
Taiwan urgently needs to overhaul its air defence strategy to prevent the rising threat of low-cost drone saturation attacks from China. This demands three major reforms: expanding air-defence capability with low-cost weapons; improving survivability with ...5 days ago
- Friday 4 July
NZNO says Health New Zealand’s latest pay offer is a “massive backward step” for the health system and patients, and there are “very strong indications” members will want to strike. The amount of money Health New Zealand is spending each year on locum doctors to plug staff shortages is increasing ...5 days ago
- Europe’s lesson for Australia: invest in defence now, or spend more later
Instead of learning from Europe’s mistakes in the decade leading into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—underinvesting in defence, increasing trade with a strategic adversary and expecting the United States to disproportionately carry the security burden—Australia ...5 days ago
- Make New Zealand Proud Again
Prime Minister Luxon makes Alt-Right Extremist Group Proud Boys Legal AgainPrime Minister Christopher Luxon has removed the extremist group “Proud Boys” from New Zealand’s terrorist list despite its history of violence1 and far-right extremism. Journalist Paula Penfold notes the group is operating cross border, and have made their own New ...5 days ago - Bernard Hickey, Peter Bale, Cathrine Dyer, Robert Patman & Ed Miller ‘Hoon’ around the news ...
The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts and talking with regular guests and about the week’s news in geopolitics and climate. This week’s Hoon featured:a discussion over research showing the sensitivity to climate change of extreme weather ...5 days ago - ‘Sleeping rough is a lifestyle choice here’
Mark Mitchell walked around Rotorua’s shops for TV cameras and said some rough sleepers did it more as a ‘lifestyle choice’. File Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāBriefly in the news from Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, poverty and climate on Friday, July 4:Police Minister Mark Mitchell says people who ...5 days ago - Australia can leverage SMEs to build national resilience
Australia needs a national strategy that explicitly prioritises the integration of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) into its defence industrial base to strengthen sovereign capability and infrastructure resilience. Despite high-level pledges to build a self-reliant ...5 days ago
- Protesters deluge Parliament
It has long been a cliché whenever Parliament is seriously discussed that the real work is done in the Select Committees. It is not anymore entirely true. The Committees are becoming platforms for political protest. One left-wing activist has recently widely circulated a document on how to “deluge” a Select ...5 days ago
- Canada’s Hikvision ban can inspire wider collective action
Canada has just made a great step forward in minimising the security risk from China. Now Australia should step forward and propose to work with Canada to create international, harmonised arrangements to protect critical infrastructure. ...6 days ago
- Skeptical Science New Research for Week #27 2025
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- A further descent into tyranny
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- Strangle it, strangle it now
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- Taiwan, South Korea and Japan also need to spend 5 percent on defence
There’s no shortage of measures that the United States’ major East Asian friends could spend an increased defence budget on. NATO allies of the US have agreed to allocate 5 percent of GDP to defence ...6 days ago
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Sea state Defence Minister Richard Marles visited the Maldives in early June and announced a present of one Guardian-class patrol boat and hydrographic equipment. They are expected to be delivered in 2026. Australia has an ...6 days ago
- An almost $20 million budget cut to RNZ is met with … near silence
Australia's national broadcaster is called Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). It's regularly attacked by Rupert Murdoch's Sky News & Australian broadsheet - as well as Atlas Network think tanks such as IPA - as "wasting taxpayers money" The last Liberal (conservative) leader Peter Dutton also labelled ABC (and the Guardian) as ...6 days ago - Take advantage of these tax credits before Congress kills them
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- Act forces Willis backdown on policy costings unit
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- OPED – Jenny Marcroft: Supporting our oyster farmers
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- Serious Response to Serious Problems
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- Healthy Homes standards need more teeth
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- Green Party pays tribute to Takutai Tarsh Kemp
The Green Party has paid tribute to Te Pāti Māori MP Takutai Tarsh Kemp who sadly passed away early this morning. ...2 weeks ago
- Government Sabotages Settlement: Te Pāti Māori Backs Te Whānau-Ā-Apanui
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- Govt abandons Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance
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- Govt’s $200mill fossil fuel handout in breach of trade agreement
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- Release: Minister should fess up on cuts
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The Green Party is calling on the Government to condemn the United States for its illegal bombing of Iran and inflaming tensions across the Middle East. ...2 weeks ago
- Luxon’s Complicity Puts Aotearoa at Risk: Te Pāti Māori Stands Against Global Military Aggressio...
Te Pāti Māori stands firmly against the rising tide of global military aggression. While the Luxon scrambles to appease Trump and Israel, we choose peace, sovereignty, and an independent foreign policy grounded in justice and truth. More than 56,000 Palestinians have been murdered by Israel over the past 20 months. ...2 weeks ago
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- How do coronial inquests work? Here’s what they can and can’t do
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marc Trabsky, Associate Professor of Law, Monash University Northern Territory Coroner Elizabeth Armitage’s inquest findings into the death of Kumanjayi Walker have sparked conversations across Australia. The coroner found the NT police officer who shot Walker, Zachary Rolfe, was “racist”, and she ...39 minutes ago - Obituary: Goodbye my Jaffas, goodbye my friend
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- The media is still in crisis… but one year on, the magazine I bought is doing great
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- No climate change buy-outs in future, expert group tells government
Owners should be responsible for knowing the flood and storm risks to their homes, an expert group has recommended. ...3 hours ago - What is Rocket Lab launching into space and why are people angry about it?
On Friday, picket signs bearing Palestine flags and banners about genocide gathered around three Rocket Lab locations in New Zealand. Why? Rocket Lab, founded in 2006 by Sir Peter Beck, is often lauded in New Zealand for catalysing our space industry. Today it still leads the sector, one with a ...4 hours ago
- How fried chicken food truck YFC ran afoul of KFC’s trademark lawyers
Explainer: Why does a giant global corporation care so much about the logo being used by a young Christchurch entrepreneur? ...5 hours ago
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ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour says the bill aims to improve lawmaking but critics argue the opposite. ...5 hours ago
- ‘Fuckity, fuckity, fuck’: The many riches of the Outrageous Fortune swear jar
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- Key Orange Roughy Population On Verge Of Collapse: Government Considers Closure
The scientific report from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), released last week, indicates that the fishery, known as East and South Chatham Rise (ESCR) is in a dire state, with over 80% of the original orange roughy population wiped out. ...6 hours ago
- Greek and Roman nymphs weren’t just sexy nature spirits. They had other important jobs too
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kitty Smith, PhD Candidate in Classical Greek and Roman History, University of Sydney Acteon, having accidentally seen the goddess Diana and her nymphs bathing, begins to change into a stag. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. George S. Amory, Object Number: ...6 hours ago
- How student games of SkyCity blackjack spiralled into $1m Watercare fraud
Shyamal Shah was introduced to a private poker ring, drawn in deep, then shown graphic photos of men assaulted for not paying their debts The post How student games of SkyCity blackjack spiralled into $1m Watercare fraud appeared first on Newsroom. ...6 hours ago - American science is in crisis. It’s a great opportunity for Australia to snap up top scientists
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Walker, Visiting Fellow, National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, Australian National University Stellalevi / Getty Images Science in the United States in in trouble. The National Science Foundation, a key research funding agency, has suffered devastating funding cuts ...7 hours ago
- Some young people sexually abuse. Here’s how to reduce reoffending by up to 90%
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Thanks Wikipedia –
In economics, regulatory capture occurs when a state regulatory agency created to act in the public interest instead advances the commercial or special interests that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure, as it can act as an encouragement for large firms to produce negative externalities. The agencies are called “captured agencies”.
What’s the term for agencies that are deliberately designed from the outset specifically to be captured, like ACT/John Key’s EPA?
Corruption.
Maritime NZ is the poster child for that one here.
probably CAA as well for the aviation crowd.
Then there is Mine Safety part of Labour dept. That wasnt so much capture as cut off at the knees.
Productivity commission springs to mind or doesn’t that count.
What about the fishing part of MAF?
How does Dad end up getting the power to decide the cost of labour? I appreciate the point, but the analogy does rather fall down at that point. Now, if the Dad had clearly been democratically elected and had run on a policy of $3 an hour for mail services… 😉
The question you have is that of legitamacy. And when it comes to parental child economic relationships thats very interesting indeed.