Open mike 23/09/2015
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6:00 am, September 23rd, 2015 - 22 comments
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Property rights – which enable decisions over tangible and intangible assets – are critical to an economy as Why Nations Fail pointed out. Not just private property rights for, as we shall see, they are more complicated than that. Neoliberals argue that private property rights lead to the maximum economic ...14 hours ago - The Hoon around the week to November 22
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Record Numbers: The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti, which began at the tip of the North, and the tail of the South, on 11 November, culminated outside Parliament on Tuesday, 19 November 2024, in one of the largest demonstrations in New Zealand’s political history.ACCORDING TO TE ARA, the Ministry of Culture ...23 hours ago - The Rush To Blame “The Activists”
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Kua hinga te manawa kairākau o Te Rua Tekau Ma Waru Tiwhatiwha te po! Kakarauru i te po! Ka rapuhia kei hea koe kua riro! Haere e te Ika a Whiro ki o tini hoa kua ngaro atu ki te Pō ...2 weeks ago
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The opposition parties stand united for an Aotearoa that honours Te Tiriti, rather than seeking to rewrite it. Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori are working together against the Government’s divisive Treaty Principles Bill. ...2 weeks ago
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Ka nui te mihi kia koutou. Ka mihi ki te mana whenua ko Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. Kia ora and good morning everyone. Thank you Fran and Simon for inviting me here today, and importantly your leadership of this forum over several years now. I want to acknowledge David Gehrenbeck, Deputy ...17 hours ago
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- District Court Judge appointed
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Tēnā koutou katoa – it is a pleasure to be here today. I would like to begin by acknowledging the important leadership role you all play in ensuring a quality health system New Zealanders can trust. There is enormous clinical expertise in this room covering a wide range of disciplines. ...3 days ago
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- Police stats show promising change
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The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.
And the latest ACC levy drop once again seems to be lowering levies for employers but not for the non work account funded by employees . Both pools pay out roughly the same level of claims so why is only one lot of levies going down.
Because National and Labour have, over the last thirty years, been putting ever more costs on the workers so that the bludgers at the top can have higher profits and less responsibility.
Morena, about a week ago I was reading a thread on roading, trucks, damage and funding.
Someone was quoting from an official document.
If anyone recalls this can they plz point me in the right direction.
Than.
In consumer news.
This compound methylene chloride, is readily available in NZ . Predominate in paint strippers. Heck go on down to bunnings and grab some.
http://www.bunnings.co.nz/diggers-paint-stripper-500ml-_p01567239
The only problem is – this stuff kills, quickly, and quite simply. It deprives the brain of Oxygen, a then you have a heart attack.
Having check the labels here, they almost as lack lustre as the one this article is complains about in the USA.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/09/21/17991/common-solvent-keeps-killing-workers-consumers
How about we – stop with the Bullshit and start putting real labels on products which are dangerous, and especially those which are lethal. I’m not saying stop selling them. Just put labels which tell the truth about a product. For example.
“This paint stripper, if used incorrectly will kill you in a really painful way.”
Or
“The death from this product is quick and nasty, so follow the instructions.”
In case anyone is not quite sure how dangerous this chemical is this from the net.
In many countries, products containing DCM must carry labels warning of its health risks.
In February 2013, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health warned that at least 14 bathtub refinishers have died since 2000 from DCM exposure. These workers had been working alone, in poorly ventilated bathrooms, with inadequate or no respiratory protection, and no training about the hazards of DCM.[8][13][24] OSHA has since then issued a DCM standard.[25] In the European Union, the European Parliament voted in 2009 to ban the use of DCM in paint-strippers for consumers and many professionals.[26] The ban took effect in December 2010.
Why is it not banned in New Zealand as an over the counter product?
Oh! I forgot we are busy with fluttering flags and possible Pandas.
Oh! &; nearly forgot ,the debt figure is now $105,179,280,000.
and rising as we speak.
WE have a double diversion.
Look over there FLAG
Oh shit
Look over there PANDAS
Paul Henry put the boot into the P.M over both this morning.
So he can praise his realignment later as ‘responsive’, ‘in tune with the mood of nz’ etc etc.
henry/hoskins do this as a setup for the ‘what an awesome PM’ memes that follow.
start a petition for the panda flag to be the 5th option
+1
A bit weird in the House yesterday. Trevor Mallard kicked Nick Smith out of the House – twice. Andrea Vance’s report does not reflect the measured behaviour of Trevor but Nick is furious.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/72314260/nick-smith-enrages-assistant-speaker-and-gets-booted-out-of-parliament
Have a look at this:
http://www.scientistsforlabour.org.uk/en/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=137:jeremy-corbyn-leadership-candidate&catid=53:labour-party&Itemid=141
This is one to watch
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/72324474/chinese-investors-may-pour-3-billion-into-christchurch
A recipe for future infrastructure failure.. we know what happened with our diesel locomotives right.
People Power-
“Turing to roll back pricing for Daraprim amid controversy”
Turing Pharmaceuticals will lower the price of its drug Daraprim amid backlash over a sudden spike, NBC News confirmed Tuesday.
The company’s decision to hike the drug’s price by more than 5,500 percent was the subject of a recent New York Times story. In a phone call with NBC News, Turing’s Martin Shkreli said he will cut the cost of treatment in response to the public outcry, but did not specify by how much.”
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/22/oll-back-pricing-for-daraprim-amid-controversy.html
To play with million’s of lives over the cost of a drug which has been around since 1962, tells me that the person who is doing this has no moral or ethical compass and they will deprive the people of a necessary treatment.
What is this reject thinking, other than to profit off a person’s misery?
This technique of announcing a decision or policy and then shifting according to the amount of backlash is a technique that our government does. With this unspecified backtracking, “seeing what the market will bear”, are we seeing business practice being used in politics?
As for the ‘excuse’ offered by Mr Shkeli- pfffft.
“Yes it is absolutely a reaction — there were mistakes made with respect to helping people understand why we took this action, I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people,” Shkreli said, 32.
Notice that it’s not the policy or action that was wrong- it was its marketing. The anger felt by people was the fault of either the people for not understanding, or the marketing. (Not the fault of the extortionate action.) If they understood why the company made this unbelievable increase in a 63 year old drug, then they would not be angry. FFS.
Yes I agree, also that there is a trend to hike the price of some medication, some examples are 500%.
Is it going to be the norm of drug companies to ask for a ransom on medication that they produce?
It is my understanding that 12 people were prescribed Daraprim in NZ last year and there is a $30 government sibsidy for the drug. I am left wondering if the government would subsidise the drug if it was $750 – $1000 per tablet.
Price gouging needs to be settled in the US courts.
I hope he is not right.
If so we are looking down the rabbit hole.
FirstHome
Make your first home one of our FirstHomes.
Housing New Zealand is regularly selling a selection of its properties across the country. The FirstHome home ownership initiative sets out to help eligible buyers afford to buy one of these homes with a grant of up to 10 percent of the purchase price of the property, capped at $20,000.
http://www.hnzc.co.nz/buying-a-house/firsthome-properties
Nice tax payer subsidy to help low income into their first home, with HNZ as the insurer covering the risk, not unlike the subprime mortgage deal is Key trying to be the NZ fannyMae or Freddy Mac? tax payer fronts the deposit, also covers the risk and national transfer state assets into private hands, when the low income families are unable to pay who ends up with the property?
This is in relation to the thread “Housing Corp’s privatisation by stealth” that’s your 2,000 houses right there.
“Since being re-elected we’ve introduced our HomeStart package, which has helped more than 2,000 Kiwis into their first home following its 1 April launch.” National website.
Sorry about the outage. One of the RAID drives decided that it really didn’t want to run at full speed, and turned its write cache off. It was making everything rather slow when writing to the disk.
First reboot in about 2-3 months, so I found a startup issue. It tried starting up on a encrypted microSD card with no operating system. I have taped off off the jack. I guess that is what happens when you have your server in the living room.
You call that living?