Students don't watch TV

Melissa Lee just made another fuck up.

I'm at the Auckland Uni debate with the 4 main Mt Albert by-election candidates.

When asked whether she stood by her comments that a motorway would divert south auckland criminals away from auckland, she said:

"Well you guys are all students, so you probably don't watch TV..."

What an outcry... the whole audience started yelling at her.

One call i heard was "that's the second group you've offended now"

She really doesn't have a clue, does she?

Banks and the OCR

"the OCR, not counting last week's 50 basis-point cut, has fallen 5.25 percentage points. Variable residential mortgage rates by comparison fell from 10.9 per cent to 6.41 per cent over the same period."

This presumably shows that

"major banks have been dragging their feet in passing on OCR cuts to business borrowers."

The RBNZ lends at 0.5% above the OCR and borrows at 0.5% below it.

This means that when the OCR is above the free market intrest rate, like it was when it was at 8.25%, it artificially inflates it to its borrowing rate, so 7.75%. When the OCR is below the free market rate it artificially deflates the free market rate to 0.5% above the OCR, so 3.50% before last week.

so the artificial intrest rate had gone from 7.75% to 3.50%, a decrease of 4.25%. Over the same period residential mortgage rates fell from 10.9% to 6.41%, a decrease of 4.49%.

Since 4.49% is greater than 4.25% I conclude that major banks have not been"dragging their feet in passing on OCR cuts to business borrowers."

(http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10570612)

P.s. i have seen no data on actual wholesale credit rates, which would be interesting.

UN Peacekeepers from Fiji

Damn Helen Clark works fast. Her first day working at the UN and she's already kicked the Fijians out. Maybe they'll be replaced by "private security companies", judging by who her heir apparent is. And you know, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Phil (In) Goff Says:

From http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10569090:

He said having 30 community boards with no power was totally irrelevant, "you need six or maybe a dozen quite strong local councils under the region wide Auckland council".

Oh, you mean like, exactly what we have now only without the community boards? Then why did we bother having a royal commission in the first place? Nanny Helen should have just abolished the communities and been done with it.

What a good way to "keep the local in local government".

Well, that sure caught on.

OK, so i knew i wouldn't do much blogging this month. But i didn't think it would only be one post, and that one being mainly about not blogging!

Especially given what's happened in the meantime.

5 days after my "Hello World" post, which is now 2 weeks ago, i finally moved out of home. A big enough deal to blog about, you would assume. Well yes, i always meant to blog about the multitude of reasons behind that, but fell into my usual cycle of procrastination.

I have so much more i want to blog about on this topic (probably in april, possibly may), but for now I'll just add my main observation:

It's not such a big deal.

All the hype, all the scaremongering, the disbelief from people. All this led me to expect more of a challenge, led me to expect more of a transition, something that i would think about.

So many times when i was talking about thinking of moving out, people (of my parents' age) told how it was so hard, such a challenge, that i wouldn't last the first week, I'd be coming home to do loads of washing. It was a waste of money, it was pointless, i already had everything etc. etc.

It does influence your thinking, and your decisions reflect it. For years, it put me off.

Eventually, i insisted that despite what everyone else was telling me, my own logic told me it was the right thing to do. I was moving out.

Suddenly, they all change their tune. 

They start talking about the lighter side of it. How much fun it could be, how much it opened up your options, how it it wasn't really so bad after all. how none of the problems were a big deal anyway.

Not only is that a much better description of how I'm finding it, i barely even feel like anything has changed. The main difference is that now, i know exactly what i have and where it is, and i now have complete control over what i do and when i do it. Everything in town is so much easier to get to now as well.

My only regret is waiting so long.

Hello World

I now have a blog. Wow.

That was unexpected.

I have to say, I'm pleased with the name i managed to think up on the spot. I was kind of expecting to end up with some meaningless combination of words, but it turns out i have something meaningful to me. Not What, But Who. It's about how the difference between what is and what otherwise would have been, comes about because of decisions individual people make.

Yay.

I even got a rather logical URL :D

I don't expect to be adding much to this blog any time soon, but at least i no longer have the excuse that i don't have a blog.

Hello World!