Was Paula Bennett in the wrong
NO. So we have two whiney bitchs complain that national have pulled the incentive to study at uni for solo moms. boo hoo.
If you need an incentive to get off your ass and work your ass off to better your life, you can gtfo.
Mean while I have worked my ass off to study and better myself. I even had a 30 grand student loan to show for it and now I see that if I was i girl I could have just openend my legs and got knocked up a few times and earn the same amount.
I am a farther of two childern and i work my ass off to support my kids, Jennifer Johnston and Natasha Fuller need to get their shit together and work if they want a better life , as far as i am concerned they only deserve around $350 a week to raise their mistakes and if that aint enough " Get a job" we did....
so
Bernard Hickey has got big rocks.
Not that I belong to any sports club and seen for my self but in his nzherald column he has come out hitting hard at the baby boomers saying what i have been feeling for a long time , the baby boomers are screwing this country up.
http://blogs.nzherald.co.nz/blog/show-me-money/2009/6/23/dear-generations-x-and-y-leave-asap/?c_id=3&objectid=10580241&commentpage=1
"
Dear Generations X and Y
Did you realize the baby boomers running the country have just decided to make you poorer for decades to come so they can retire early with all the assets and high incomes?
Did you realise your taxes are going to rise and you won't be able to afford your own home? Did you know the baby-boomers are refusing to save their own money now for their retirements so they can live off your hard work?
Did you know you will be slaving away paying high taxes in your 40s and 50s to pay for their pensions and health care? Did you know you're wasting your time trying to build a family and life in New Zealand? Did you realise you have huge student loans while they received free tertiary education?
Do you realise they voted themselves Working for Families so they could have children and afford to pay the high mortgage costs of their borrowing to buy property? Do you know this cannot be afforded in the next 20-30 years?
You didn't? Let me explain.
There were two big decisions in last month's budget that guaranteed this intergenerational transfer of wealth, but they are not the only factor.
Prime Minister John Key and Finance Minister chose to abandon contributions to the New Zealand Superannuation Fund (the Cullen Fund) for the foreseeable future. Yet they also guaranteed their fellow baby-boomers (they were both born in 1961) they would keep their pensions at 66 per cent of the average wage and could still retire at the age of 65. John Key has even promised to resign if he breaks this promise.
There is another unwritten rule that no baby-boomer politician will break and that will guarantee many in generations X and Y will never be able to afford to buy a house. John Key again ruled out this month that his government would ever introduce a capital gains or land tax. Any change to the massive tax break in favour of residential property investment would immediately reduce the wealth of baby boomers who were able to buy cheaply in the 1990s and early 2000s. They will never give this up voluntarily and they will continue to vote for politicians who support that view.
So the two budget decisions, the unwritten rule on capital gains/land taxes and the decade of slow growth forecast by Treasury will combine to cement in a massive transfer of wealth. There are other forces at work here. Our banks are congenitally conservative about lending. They will lend up to 100 per cent against the value of land and buildings, but are reluctant to lend to back the business ideas and entrepreneurial vigour of Generations X and Y.
The dream of baby boomers is to keep buying rental properties and renting them out to generations X and Y. They can even afford to make losses on them because they can claim the tax losses against their personal incomes and make their money back with capital gains. That baby boomer dream was looking wobbly earlier this year when prices fell 10 per cent from their peak. A smidgen of light appeared for Generations X and Y. But it seems those hopes are now dashed because the banks are back lending to the baby boomers, who are even more convinced now that property is their only hope because of the collapse of finance companies and the stock market.
Now you can look forward to steadily rising taxes over the next 30 years, particularly from 2020 onwards, to pay for the increased costs of an expensive universal pay-as-you-go pension scheme and much higher universal 'free' health care costs. You will pay as they go into the retirement homes.
You could try to overturn the baby boomer bias in our political system by voting them out, but you'll fail because there are too many of them and you don't vote much.
Your only choice is to migrate as soon as the global economy starts recovering and the jobs become available again.
This will be the best revenge you can get. They will have to watch their grandchildren grow up by email and the occasional flying visit.
I'm not kidding. Leave ASAP.
Kind regards
Bernard Hickey (42)
P.S. The other option is to leave and earn enough money working overseas to afford to come home to buy a house. That's what I did. But will your children be around to have their children (your grandchildren) here?
"
And time and time again I see the same baby boomer oppression tactics in his comments of his readers insisting that gen x and y are greedy and lazy. This coming from the era of no student loans and paid dinner breaks and so forth, New zealand has some serious issues on the horizon when a young family earning double the average nz income cannot afford a home in the burbs. The most concerning part of his story is he is right , this problem isnt going to fix its self and the government will not make any drastic changes to resolve the issue either as baby boomers will be taking a serious hit to their investment portfolios.
What can be done to avert the crisis ?
Well oddly enough there are two problems here that can be combined to fix each other, rising unemployment and housing shortages.
We need education programs that allow for rapid training in those sectors a basic program could go something like , enroll and get 3 months theory in a class environment while collecting $300 a week then work placement under a supervised project for another 6 - 9 months at $450 a week.
Allow for fast tracked resource consent for pre approved standard building plans.
Subsidy's for houses built with a high percentage of NZ made products.
or do nothing and watch gen x and y leave this country taking our kids as well creating a 3 generation gap, in fact thinking about it this would almost be new zealand's own little genocide. Good luck changing you bed pans in 20 years.
flop.co.nz Review / Rant
The most difficult part of this review was actually finding the site after running across it earlier, I had given up after 20 minutes of googling only to find it again advertising on facebook.
After clicking on the facebook ad I was presented with a nice red screen for around 30 seconds while I waited for the most engaging and dynamic flash based site to load. Oh cant wait ...
Then suddenly flop.co.nz in all its awesomeness loads. I would have been very proud of this site if I had of built it, if I was 12 and it was 1992.
The navibar icon is simply a small blue arrow that gives you no indication of what it does untill you click it.
You have no idea of the prices of the items untill you click them.
You cannot highlight any text to do reasearch.
There is a nice banner which reads "You can use the same username and password to shop flop and 735pm !" wtf is 735pm? why didnt you link to it ?
The big pixeld cammo background is insanly distracting.
When you click the flop icon every thing dissaperes. Why ? People may accidentally click this and not realise how to get every thing back so there only option is to leave the site.
If I was to change the site I would dump the flash , the only reason I can think of to use flash is to provide rich interactive sites , clearly they missed the boat here and while I am not a coder I think all the features they have can be renderd in html with some scriptaculous. Feature wise they should consider inplementing rss feeds and maybe a mailer, while they may reduce daily page hits it makes my life easier when you tell me what bargins you have in my morning email and rss checking. Rather than expecting me to check your site every day.
I would also suggest hiring a company that specialises in desgin to come up with something more unique than 9 squares.
Service wise , well I dont know becouse I will never oder a thing from a site like this despite how safe you tell me it is.
How much news are you getting from websites?
Above is a highlighted screen shot from nz herald. RED = external ads like adsense and other cpc or cpi stuff , green is the actual content. Without too may metrics It would be fair to say the page contains less than 25% of what you requested.
My take on TAX
Well lets face it , your gonna have to pay them, but here is an idea. Howabout every person gets a community card then a proprtion of your tax goes onto the card. Say 15% is credited to this card and you can use it to " upsize " or subsidize various activities like school fees, doctors or what ever.
Capitalism
Ya know the funny thing about capitalism? Well when you got into a supermarket and see cheese is really expensive and you still buy it, you screw up the system a little.
When you see a house for sale and get a mortagage and you can only afford the intrest only part, you screw up the system a little.
Its all supply and demand , want it to be cheaper , dont buy it now. Come back in a few moths and try. The biggest problem I see now is supermarkets know what you are prepared to pay for your food and wont drop prices in a hurry.
Why is being poor so expensive ?
Something really bugged me over the years is how places exploit people in poor situations.
Yeh I know this sounds like some conspiracy rant but really, how many places charge penalties to people who could least afford to pay? Think about it. You cant afford to pay a bill so you get charged more.. this is dangerous and just plain stupid. Ok I know businesses need to do things like this to stop getting screwed over but isn’t there a better way?
I think the best process if give people an option, help them decide. Try giving the people the chance to pay off the debt without incurring fees with small regular payments. Sure you may lose out of a little money but you would more likely keep a customer happy. Just don’t let them get over extended again.
Drinking Ads
You know who I think is at fault in this AD ? EVERYONE!
dont just sit back and watch some one being stupid when they are pissed , get up and do somthing.
What a day
So today started like any other except since I have been sick I have lost a bit of weight. Now that would be all good except now my jeans need a belt to keep them up properly but this morning I was running late so left for work sans belt. That was mistake 1. ( but its really funny)
The day it self was pretty average and was suprised when my partner came to town to pick me up. So on the road home I noticed the car seemed to be heating up in the slow traffic but when we started going it cooled down so I just made a B line to get it on the motorway. That was mistake 2
As soon as I thit the motorway I thought everything would be fine as the traffic was moving but oh no the car stalls and wouldnt start. Here i was stuck on the merging lane with 2 kids and a dead car pissing steam everywhere. This is where i decided to open the door and push the car to the side of the road. As i started pushing the car and sterring it I felt my pants creep down then all of a sudden two guys ran over to help push which was awesome except by that stage the car was really moving , door shut, I was on the outside kids on the inside , trying to steer it and my pats almost around my knees and hundreds of people flys past watching as i try and pull up my pants and getinto a moving car. Suprisingly I didnt fall over and run my self over but that have been a easier option to end the day.
So with the car pulled over we put the hazard lights on and poped the bonnet to see whats going on , turns out the fan fues was blowen. A call to state road rescue hoping they can simply get me a fuse and i would be on my way but how wrong could i be.
About 30 minutes later a tow truck turns up and i explain i dont need a tow I need a 20 cent fuse but no i get a tow or nothing. Up the car goes and off we go to the next exit and get put down at Shell johnsonville. Just so happens this was the same service station I worked at about 7 years ago , top job I assumed the guys that worked there would be half as helpfull as I used to be every thing wold be fine. Oh how wrong was I ? turns out the guys there were as usefull as george bush in a war. I walked in to look for a fuse and couldnt find one, then I tried asking the muppet at the counter but he couldnt understand english i was tempet to ask "dirka dirka ma-huck ji heab?" but thought better of it.
So a walk abound the meca that is johnsonville to find a frigen fuse abut the only place that stocked them was at the other end of the empire. About 20 minutes later I get back to the car a notice the harard lights sill going abeit dim ...
In goes the fuse an d dir dir dir oh no. The rest is boring .
