@Tim said in Sportswashing:

American universities are fucking disgusting, especially the bigger sports schools. just brothels by another name.

@MiketheSnow they'll eat the farmers meat but want to tax them for farting. They have no credibility.

Not sure where to put this, related to inflation, recession and politics.

@chimoaus said in Tax rates:

@antipodean said in Tax rates:

@chimoaus It's hard to tax paper wealth.

No doubt, I guess I just struggle to hear the profits of the big banks being 14.4 billion and wondering if more of that should be redistributed to services and community.

Just nationalise them, wait a year or two and there'll likely be no profits at all and the problem of distributing the profits will vanish as well.

@Kid-Chocolate Looks like a typical noob to me.

LOL.

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@Bones

I know I am but don’t care

@Tim

I don’t know the answer, but if they’re evangelicals it certainly would be unsurprising that they’re anti-vax. My mennonite relatives (new order) are absolutely the most hardcore unvaccinated people I know. I know others (especially of protestant faiths whose churchs are movie cinemas rented on Sunday mornings) who will have nothing to do with the jab. Still, I’m not convinced this makes them child abusers and molesters. You’d never know it by our modern-day guilt-by-association news and social media though, where anti-vax means pederast every bit as much as free speech means nazi. Just the way it is.

@booboo said in Black Lives Matter:

@Catogrande said in Black Lives Matter:

@booboo

Oli London or catgender person? I was referring to the former.

Oli London

Oli certainly has an interesting Wiki page and on the face of that I would say a complete piss taking troll and hats off compadre. But the radical surgery seems taking the piss taking a little far?

For an ordinary person, the unprovoked assault probably would have been home-detention worthy depending on how badly injured the female victim was and her views at sentencing.

It's not uncommon for people to escape jail on fraud charges in the vicinity of $100k , especially if reparation is ordered or they have some ability to repay the money. Also (sadly) especially if they're white and middle class.

He’s dragging this role out, doesn’t want the play to end…

Mar 16, 2022  /  Entertainment Jussie Smollett Walks Out of Jail Pending Conviction Appeal Jussie Smollett Walks Out of Jail Pending Conviction Appeal

The “Empire” actor had served less than a week of his 150-day sentence for staging a fake hate crime against himself.

@dogmeat said in The CCC And Cycleways (vs Light Rail):

@shark The counter argument is accurate for bus lanes but not so much cycle paths. Akl Transport do have 26 counters up around the city. Unsurprisingly cycle activity peaked during the 2020 Lvl 4 lockdown.

As a result that year was best ever with a 11% decrease in 2021. However there were still 3.2 million cycle movements recorded which sounds like a lot but averages out at a daily figure across the 26 sites of 337. In mitigation it includes some very quiet suburban and rural routes and quite a few sites were down for some of the year. The busiest street recorded 1,200 per day.

The one Hoskings famously targeted was Nelson St FFS. Riding down that quasi motorway without lane protection would require balls so big you wouldn't be able to get on a bike. It averages 524/day.

Well put 🙂

@jc said in Bank Lending/CCCFA:

@godder said in Bank Lending/CCCFA:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/127657685/ir-reports-sharp-drop-in-first-home-withdrawals-from-kiwisaver
This seems relevant, and is put squarely on the change to reduce 80% LVR exemptions as part of the banks' loan portfolios from 20% to 10%.

Mortgage advisers and property experts say the dip is not the result of changes to the Credit Contract and Consumer Finance Act (CCCFA), which have seen the proportion of home loan applications that are approved fall.

Instead, they blame Reserve Bank Te Pūtea Matua​ limits on how many low-deposit loans banks are allowed to make.

Obviously not the whole story, but no doubt it's some.

It's not an either/or thing. As you will know better than most, the legal framework that the government controls dictates what the RBNZ sets as banking regulations and operational parameters for themselves and the financial institutions. Then there are other, overlapping legal frameworks that dictate directly what the financial institutions are able / obliged to do. The financial institutions set in place processes and mechanisms that they use to make sure they comply with those laws that directly govern them as well as the operational directives from the RBNZ.

The CCCFA amendment didn't change any of the directives from the RBNZ, but it did set in place new expectations for how the banks executed their internal procedures. Effectively this means that the RBNZ says things like reduce your exposure to non-80% LVR loans to 10%. The process of bringing their loan book into compliance is subject to the new terms in the CCCFA amendment. If they look at a loan they are obliged to check for affordability.

And the directive to reduce the exemptions doesn't ban them, it just limits them: it is still within a bank's discretion to issue an 85%, 90% or even 100% LVR loan if the circumstances are right. But if they are having to do affordability checks on someone with a 20% or bigger deposit (which they are), imagine the due diligence they have to do on someone who only has a 10% deposit. Looking at it from their POV, if they can be deemed reckless by offering a $400k loan on a $500k property, there would need to be near certainty of affordability before they offered a $850k loan on a $1m property.

I also find it ironic that QE and the Support For Lending specifically put large volumes of cash onto banks' balance sheets. If they weren't supposed to be lending it out what on earth did the government and RBNZ think they were going to do with it? And why didn't they spread it more widely? As "picking winners" goes this is even worse than the lockdown windfalls for supermarkets IMO.

Absolutely fair, especially that last point about Funding for Lending, should have closed that months ago (and I did say that the article was not the whole story of the reduction in lending). One of the exemptions to the 80% LVR is new builds, so those aren't counted, but I assume they also don't make up a large portion of mortgages. Reducing from 20% to 10% of the loan book as high LVR mortgages obviously doesn't prevent that lending, but if a bank was already at or above 10%, does put an immediate stop to further lending above 80% LVR (other than new builds) until the bank gets down to the 10% limit.

Edit: https://stats.govt.nz/information-releases/property-transfer-statistics-december-2021-quarter

This also shows quite a reduction in actual property transfers of homes.

There were 41,460 property transfers involving a home in the December 2021 quarter (down 19 percent from the December 2020 quarter)

Sarah Waris  /  Nov 27, 2021 Mark Butcher: Michael Vaughan Can Be A ‘Piers Morgan-Lite Twitter Personality’ But He Is ‘Not A Racist’ Mark Butcher: Michael Vaughan Can Be A ‘Piers Morgan-Lite Twitter Personality’ But He Is ‘Not A Racist’

Former England batter Mark Butcher, speaking on the Wisden Cricket Weekly Podcast, explained how, in his view, Michael Vaughan is “not a racist”.

If you can’t be bothered reading it the gist is exactly what I suspected. Vaughan can be a bit of a cock but he’s not racist.

I finally made good on my intent to explore some of the human interest angles of 9/11. I recently finished The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett M. Graff. As with most things 9/11, it's a tough read, but even tougher to put the book down.

@chimoaus said in Diabetes, Should Govt Do More?:

I think what irks me the most is how much choice and free will do we really have? We all like to think we can make well informed choices, but I can't help but feel it's not a level playing field.

These companies spend a small fortune engineering food that we can't resist, they then use a variety of marketing tricks to get us to buy, all the while spending a fortune influencing politicians, and the general public to avoid any heat coming back on them.

Bang on IMO - it's very difficult to resist everything forever, and genetics make it harder as some people just can't touch anything or they gain weight very quickly, while others don't have that problem.

@victor-meldrew oh hell yeah, my only issue with it is the hypocrisy, that it's embraced and encouraged by everyone, and the not straight blokes occasionally do it too, but if a straight bloke as a judge said about getting tingles watching a female dance, or said about how she should wear less all the time, they'd probably be thrown out of the country.

@kirwan said in New Lynn knife attack:

@godder said in New Lynn knife attack:

@booboo said in New Lynn knife attack:

@godder said in New Lynn knife attack:

Grant says IPT clearly got it wrong in accepting the claim originally, and there should obviously be an offence in the antiterrorism legislation for planning attacks, so it's not like he's suggesting those parts were good, just that he's pleased that the law as written was complied with.

@kirwan said in New Lynn knife attack:

@godder said in New Lynn knife attack:

Grant says IPT clearly got it wrong in accepting the claim originally, and there should obviously be an offence in the antiterrorism legislation for planning attacks, so it's not like he's suggesting those parts were good, just that he's pleased that the law as written was complied with.

Which is not seeing the forest for the trees.

2021 ... where the lefty is defending Damian Grant and the conservative is disagreeing ... 🙂

🙂 Mistrust of authority is not exclusive to either the left or right wing, there is plenty of history of both being poorly treated by governments. Labour parties and trade unions often use red as a signature colour to represent the blood shed by workers in struggles for decent working conditions. Whatever I can say about modern NZ politics, nobody is suggesting sending out the police and/or army to attack the workers' strike/picket/march or anything like it.

Drama queens

Very Victor Hugo

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