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6:00 am, August 31st, 2026 - 41 comments
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Step up to the mike …
Well that was fun. The hosting site was getting overwhelmed with resources – mostly very short sharp spikes going over resource boundaries.Spent a large chunk of yesterday proving that was where the problem was.
That shouldn't be a problem now. It is on one of my home servers running a Ubuntu 7 on a 12 core + 12 virtual cores and has 128GB of DDR4 RAM.
Currently it is running direct to the server, but that was just to allow me to get certainty about configuration.
I'll be pushing it on to a more aggressive CDN profile with a better firewall tonight, which might cause some slowdowns running into tomorrow morning. It will want to load that CDN.
The search will be off at present. I have to hook it up again. But I'll do that after I have a look at loading. So far the highest was 2.2% of CPU, and half of that looked like it was from a SQL server instance.
Well done and thank you.
Thanks lprent. Good doctoring, my heart was troubled! Do you need some new donations to upgrade some of your equipment? Give us a chirp like the smoke alarms do if you are needing 'new batteries'.
The nice thing about it these days is that I'm largely self-employed and semi-retired. This is all equipment and services that I mostly use for work purposes, or has been retired from it.
The costs are very low because everything is dual-purpose, has no incremental cost between the cost of using it for my contracting and not. I have to buy multiple site licenses – so I usually buy lifetime and enough to cover foreseeable work. What doesn't fit the work use criteria is usually r&d anyway – I have to use some tools before I can find out if they are worth the price.
The hardware it is on is completely depreciated. It is running on a 2021 workstation machine that I upgraded the DDR4 RAM on for running virtual machines for specialized embedded builds – which I seldom do anymore.
The power and the data would be hard to separate and probably infinitesimal anyway. I can't even see the computer power costs over the heating costs in Southland. And the computers are efficient fan heaters anyway. My data costs are a monthly 'all you can use' fixed cost running at 2.5Gb because that is the speed I need to work effectively on the Sydney servers I do most of my paid work on.
I am going to get new batteries 🙂 Lithium uninterruptible power supplies. But that is because I don't want to stop working just because the Southland grid is a sometimes a little flaky and replacement parts have to come from Auckland or Christchurch. I regularly get brownouts and the odd power cuts in high winds and lightning storms. Lots of brownouts over the last week with all of those lightning storms.
The largest cost I have is my time – but I'm semi-retired and doing part-time remote contracts…
I didn't understand a word of that, but thank you.
I got 4 responses in the down period – a 404 and 500 response, then maintenance, then something about the site platform for CloudEdge.
I'll put up some graphs for August that explain the increasing resource constraints.
But the little cloud site that I put up last September has done pretty well up to date. It was put in place so I could load my home computers into a trailer (and a bed, cat, and some assorted household stuff) and spend a week driving to Invercargill from Auckland.
It stayed there because it was mostly working, and why move it if it wasn't really broken. But election time…
Two media items tell a dark story about modern NZ.
The first, and most recent, is “Rot never sleeps” (NZ Herald, 29 August). It records how the leaky building saga is continuing, with shonky houses and apartments still being erected. There is no licensing or regulation of people who do pre-purchase inspections either.
The second is “Milk and Money”, a 6-part documentary made in 2021 by Baz MacDonald. Available at NZ Onscreen (https://www.nzonscreen.com/all-series/milk-money/ ), it tells the true cost of milk production in NZ and shows the appalling environmental damage that has been done.
The upshot is we have houses not fit to live in and rivers unfit to swim in. But the myths persist, with Tourism NZ still pushing the line that we have a pristine environment and great scenery.
On top of all that we have a government that seems determined to trash the environment for the sake of economic growth. The government’s draft National Policy Direction, released on 28 August, is clearly taking that line: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/consultation-launched-illustrative-national-policy-direction
The whole leaky building saga is just horrific.
And, it plays a very large part in the reluctance of Aucklanders (in particular) to invest in apartments for long-term living.
Not only do you risk having a major asset (for most people, the largest asset they will ever own) needing expensive repairs; you may end up hostage to a body corporate, for remediation that you can't afford, and a timeframe that you have no control over.
If the 'worst' happens to your stand-alone dwelling, you at least can decide what you can afford, and when (and have some capacity to DIY repair at least some issues)
If we are ever to move to apartments being anything other than short term housing solutions, then we need to address these concerns:
I broadly agree, particularly about the need to make apartment ownership a less terrifying long-term proposition.
My concern is where we ultimately allocate the risk.
I think there is a strong case for protecting existing owners from catastrophic losses, particularly with leaky buildings where failures in the regulatory system itself contributed to the problem. Expecting individual homeowners to spend years litigating against developers, builders, councils and insurers before they can fix their homes is plainly broken.
But I'm less comfortable with the Crown simply assuming the entire remediation risk. At some point caveat emptor has to mean something too. Property ownership carries risk, and completely insulating owners from it means transferring that risk to councils and taxpayers instead.
Joint and several liability makes that particularly uncomfortable. Where developers and builders have disappeared or become insolvent, councils can end up as the last solvent defendant and therefore carry costs considerably beyond their actual contribution to the failure. A government remediation scheme could reproduce the same problem at national level, with taxpayers ultimately underwriting poor-quality private development.
So I think there's a balance to strike: protect homeowners from financially catastrophic losses, especially where regulatory failure contributed, without guaranteeing private property owners against every loss.
Going forward, though, I really like your insurance proposal.
If developers and builders have to obtain meaningful long-term structural and design-defect insurance, then the risk is priced before the building is built. Insurers also have every incentive to refuse cover to shonky developers, builders and designs.
That seems much healthier than waiting for the building to fail and then arguing about which homeowner, council or taxpayer gets left holding the bag.
"Crouching Bureaucrat, Hidden Ideologue: David Seymour’s Flu Factory"
Something that was so easy to predict. Vote them out in November.
https://andrewdicksonnz.substack.com/p/crouching-bureaucrat-hidden-ideologue
You'll have to do better to draw a link I reckon as a parent of a college age kid I think it's been tremendous the toughening up on attendance, both in giving me a boogy man to use and also less mates not bothering to go,
Basically, this from Verity Johnson:
Both political parties underestimate how broke we are | Stuff
Irrespective of what you think about her literary style or take on politics, she's speaking directly to the problems facing millennial/xillennial voters.
Not Palestine, Trump or AI, but the very real material anxieties of being unable to even afford mince. And the increasingly strong feeling that neither of the major parties either give a damn or have even a vaguely plausible plan for addressing that fact.
Marx wrote over 150 years ago about the material basis of political consciousness: how the actual conditions facing actual people shape their politics, not merely abstract ideas.
We would do well to remember it.
Right now, it's difficult for most people to afford mince (it's ridiculously expensive)
But the whole cost-of-living thing in general is way out of control. It's been driven by over-inflated housing costs, and is now being driven by inflated food prices (and, for home-owners, insurance, water and rate hikes)
The food price, itself, isn't a major concern (although lean mince at over $30kg is outrageously expensive), if we had housing costs at 1/3 or less of income. But we don't. And when housing is taking half to two-thirds of what people make – every 'minor' increase in price for essentials bites home, hard.
TBH, it's not only the major parties who don't seem to have a plan. I can't see any realistic plan from any of the minor parties, either.
Do any of them have a sensible plan to realistically cause house prices to go down (preferably gently – because a crash is likely to be worse for the economy)?
Do any of them have a sensible plan to make the staples that NZ produces available at a realistic price to Kiwis?
Because regulating the heck out of the grocery duopoly isn’t working (although, making 163 million profit isn’t an outrageous amount for the size of the Woolworth supermarket chain (with around 5 million Kiwis that’s only $32 per person, which will buy you a kilo of mince)
Do any of them have a plan to grow a high-wage economy?
I can see how the UBI could be attractive in this space. However, there appears to be no realization of how the rental housing market is likely to react.
I agree with most of that, but I think I'd push back on one thing: for a lot of voters, food prices are the major concern.
We can look at household expenditure and say that housing costs are structurally the bigger problem, and I'd probably agree. But that's an analytical distinction which doesn't necessarily reflect how people actually experience their economic circumstances.
People buy food every week. They remember what mince, butter, cheese or a trolley of groceries used to cost. They see the difference constantly, and it becomes an extremely tangible measure of whether they feel they're getting ahead or going backwards.
That's really the point I was making about Johnson.
We can tell people that they've identified the wrong economic problem, but politically that doesn't get us very far. Telling voters that the evidence of their own everyday lives is somehow irrelevant, or that they're simply stupid and wrong about what they're experiencing, is not a great political strategy.
If a large number of voters are telling us that the price of feeding their families is one of their biggest material concerns, then it is a major political problem.
We still need to work out why it's happening and what, if anything, government can sensibly do about it.
But we probably need to start by listening to what people are actually telling us.
Hmm. Telling people that their rent is going down by (say) $100/week does a lot to address their budgetary concerns.
NB: I don't know how you get there, from here 🙂
But I don't know how you reduce the cost of food essentials either.
However, none of the political parties have a road map forward. Perhaps the first one which does, will gain an groundswell of support. Which is (or should be) a concern. The rise of the Nazi party in Germany was directly driven off the hyper-inflation and the belief that they had a sensible plan to address it.
NB: Not saying that any of the current parties are the equivalent of the Nazi party (I shouldn't need to say, this, but just in case…..). The risk is that a lot of other policies may be camouflaged by the popular appeal of bread, cheese, butter and mince, at affordable prices.
I think that's exactly the point. It won't even need to be 100% correct, simply plausible enough for voters.
If people feel that their material circumstances are getting worse, they'll eventually gravitate towards whoever can offer them a convincing explanation for why, and a believable story about how they're going to make things better.
Whether that explanation is actually correct is, unfortunately, a separate question.
Correct non of the political parties appear to have a Road Map, every decision is Ad hoc and made on the Hoof.
Tops land tax would
A. Stall house inflation, and probably lower prices
B. Realise alot of hidden wealth to use liftvthe bottom.
Im not keen o it being applied to productive assets like farms though, I don't own any farm land btw
How would Top land tax lower prices?
Any landlord incurring the tax is going to pass it straight onto the tenants- who now have the UBI to pay for it.
Oh stop with the boogy man act, most of the land values are probably in owner occupied remuwera and the bachs of Omaha
Pretty certain that most of the landlord-owned rental accommodation isn't in Remuera.
Borrowers would have less money available to pay the interest on land ownership loans. The banks would have to reduce the amounts that they lend for land purchases.
PS: it would help if we were able to prevent the banks creating money from nothing. Perhaps by legislating against such practices. The government could then lend money to the banks to cover their lending, but it would come with a stipulation that it would be re-lent for productive purposes only.
I'm not particularly convinced that commercial banks creating money through lending is the problem we're trying to solve here.
You can certainly make an argument for directing more credit towards productive investment. That's something government can influence through the tax system, regulation, guarantees, public lending institutions, or other incentives.
But that's a rather different proposition from abolishing commercial bank money creation altogether.
I'm also not sure that redesigning the entire monetary system is necessary before we can make housing, food and energy more affordable.
You can certainly make an argument for directing more credit towards productive investment. That's something government can influence through the tax system, regulation, guarantees, public lending institutions, or other incentives.
Bank credit lending may not be the only thing bringing about increases in land prices, but it's a sort of sine qua non. I find myself sceptical that land price increase prevention can be brought about by means other than by such credit creation prevention.
We've had higher LTV restrictions I the past – hasn't slowed down the housing market one bit.
If the landlord has a higher cost to running their business (due to land tax) why wouldn't they put rent up to compensate for it?
A land tax ensures that much of the land's rental value is grabbed by the government, where it can be used for the development of infrastructure, or for the reduction of income tax, or (I dare say) for the payment of a citizens' income.
Problem is that "…much of the land's rental value is grabbed by the government…" also means that there will be either fewer rentals available or higher rental costs. Probably both.
In the end the cost of rentals will be borne by those who are renting either directly or as a result of tightened availability or by the government in lower tax takes from income profit on rentals. Both residential and business leasing.
Not sure where the trade offs economically or in redistribution are. What I am sure about is that another land tax (rates are mostly a land tax already – so there will be a double up) is that it is a good slogan – but probably not that productive in economic effect.
What it, or a more effective capital gains tax will do is to drive investors into other forms of investment – that is beneficial in getting rid of the pyramid schemes in untaxed residential, business and farming property gains . Especially while the property market is low.
Longer term it will cause significant increases in the cost of owning property and rentals. Not sure how much that will improve our lousy productivity record.
Problem is that "…much of the land's rental value is grabbed by the government…" also means that there will be either fewer rentals available or higher rental costs. Probably both.
It would mean more houses available for first home buyers, and high leveraged landlords exiting the market.
Why would "highly leveraged landlords leave the market"?
Why wouldn't they just put the rents up?
After all, thanks to the UBI money, tenants could afford to pay more.
Both National & Labour have been eating up the country's capital and resources over the past 40-50 years and achieved F*ck All. In the past Governments built hospitals, schools and critical infrastructure. Today's Government's spend $100's of millions of SSS's on Consultant's and still can not come up with any recommendations.
I like Verity Johnson's work generally. Reading that article, mostly I'm thinking ok, so 66% or people rate CoL as the number one priority, but how many people have been living like that for years and where were the millennials then?
We've had an underclass for decades, welcome to it.
Now what are you going to do? Because rhetoric about selling off Granny won't change fuck all. If Labour do get in, do you think much is going to change?
And yes, I appreciate the point about voting and what matters to this demographic but that just makes them look selfish like everyone else.
Yes, I get it. But for a lot of these people poverty and economic insecurity were things that happened to other people, hidden behind a reassuring story about how they and their families had worked hard and therefore deserved what they had.
Now Nan and Grandad can't afford the rates on their house, Mum and Dad are stretched thin despite having decent jobs, and you're discovering that a degree doesn't guarantee you a decent career, let alone a house.
And you're right: none of this is particularly revelatory. We've had people living with that kind of insecurity for decades. What's new is who is experiencing it.
And politically, that matters. Not because millennials are uniquely selfish. They're probably no more selfish than anyone else. But because material conditions have a remarkable ability to change what people suddenly regard as an urgent political problem.
The interesting question is what we do with that discovery. Do we lecture them about the sad realities of life: "soz, not soz, but the economy is kind of cooked." Or do we say: "Yeah, we get it. The system is rigged, and far too many of us were OK with that until it started being rigged against us."
Because the latter at least gives us somewhere to go. And, perhaps more importantly, it makes people feel like we actually give a shit about what is happening to them.
Neoliberalism wins every time a Coconut the top 10% keep getting richer and the rest are constantly going backwards. The middle class here in NZ are becoming the NEW POOR.
Yes. And that's precisely why I think this moment is politically important.
Because neoliberalism isn't successful because it's some inevitable force of nature. It's successful because its basic story has remained politically popular and legible, often in defiance of the material evidence.
Work hard and you'll get ahead. Get a degree and you'll get a good job. Buy a house and you'll build some security. Let markets work and prosperity will eventually follow.
That story becomes much harder to sustain when people do all the things they were told to do and discover that the promised security still doesn't arrive.
And when an old political story stops explaining people's material reality, there's an opportunity to tell them a better one.
That's not a crisis for the left.
That's a political opportunity.
Perhaps. And perhaps if voting citizens before their first choice, were to take two courses on practical macro and national economics and how government starts everything or stands behind the greater financial system, so we don't think it is all 'Pennies from Heaven'.
All the education that we have had dished out for so long and we are not yet financially literate about the basic monetary and investment system that makes everything go beyond bartering; and also that the sharemarkets are a rich gambler's excitement parlour which can lead on to parliament! There is a strong thread relating to our wealth and resources that we could all follow just the same as blind people, if we knew about it and could grasp it to keep us from being completely in the dark as we now seem to be.
Let's take a deep breath, start doing better before the election, and listen to some guys sounding good. Perhaps Love – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toYfeN0ACDw John Denver and Placido Domingo
Yeah, nah.
Better economic and civic education? Absolutely.
Making people's right to participate in democracy contingent on demonstrating that they understand economics sufficiently well?
We've tried variations on "only the propertied, educated and respectable should have political power" before.
It didn't end particularly well.
Besides, have you met a first-year economics student?
They've generally learned just enough economics to be absolutely certain they understand how the economy works, while not yet having learned enough economics to understand how little they understand.
I'm not sure that's the electorate I'd design deliberately.
If it is about what government can do about food costs
then it is about policies
*MW increases at the level of the CPI increase, or more
*a proper Food in schools programme
*government support for Food Banks
*Fair Pay Agreements (which includes pay equity)
It is not even a contest, the coalition government needs to go.
PS
*Export food costs (beef and lamb and cheese are impacted by the global market), governments cannot do much about it.
*As for energy – the National 1990's Bradford model and then the Key 49% sell-off model was not designed to provide lower power prices but ensure the consumer was a cash cow for government.
^Those paying attention noticed this was their model for water – first to generate revenue for water infrastructure from higher cost to the public, then later the profits for a sell-off.
Sure. And I'm not really arguing that we're short of possible policy interventions.
We can argue about the merits of minimum wages, Fair Pay Agreements, school lunches, competition policy, housing, electricity market reform, tax, transfers and a dozen other things.
My point is that policy has never existed independently of politics.
You can have the finest policy programme imaginable sitting in a manifesto somewhere, but unless you can assemble an electoral coalition willing to give you the power to implement it, it's just a document.
What interests me about the present moment is that the constituency for a different economic settlement may be getting substantially larger.
People who previously thought the existing system basically worked are discovering that it doesn't work particularly well for them either.
That's the opportunity.
The question for the left isn't simply "what policies would we implement?"
We have plenty of answers to that.
It's whether we can persuade enough people that those answers offer them a more credible path to material security than another three years of the same.
Because we can't implement any of this from opposition.