Page 9 - Peter Saxton News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Europe still has community transmission and an inadequate covid response. I mean, I'm all for lessening flights further due to climate change, also happy for NZ to be forced by covid into a more regenerative way of living, but those are different rationales. Cricklewood 2.2.1 Ive been thinking about international air travel, I like the idea of a progressive taxation system as you dont want to make it impossible for people to visit family etc so for example you get one 'free' flight per year then for every subsequent flight you are taxed at an ever increasing percentage ...

Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:34 am, December 20th, 2020 - 22 comments New Zealand like most countries across the world in the last year, has gone deeper and deeper into public debt. It’s pretty clear that the New Zealand government’s response to economic crisis from lockdowns and global trade crashes by spending tonnes of debt money has been extremely effective. Yet for some, it’s simple: debts must always be paid back. We can still remember how Greece was treated by Germany during the GFC: pay the public...

"We have won so far because geographical isolation gave us about a week of decision-making space to lock down hard." The extra week was helpful – but much more important was being prepared to make that decision to lock-down hard. The Tory party would have been incapable of such a decision no matter how many extra weeks they were handed – and that was Ed's point. A National government here would have (most likely) been unable to make that decision. Scomo looked like he wasn't capable of that decision – but fortunately state premiers took it out of his hands. It took some guts to defy th...

Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive (often quite nicely) because they rarely approached their local resource limits, but the invention of agriculture changed this dramatically. The next 10,000 odd years of recorded history is a long story of local competition for fundamentally constrai...

A great read Robert, thanks. This idea of the gift economy is deeply culturally bound in Asia, where at least twice a year families gather, and gifts, usually of money are exchanged. The head of the family (usually a grandmother) gets the bulk of the serious giving, and status is attached to generosity to her. Children also receive gifts, for which they bow to the responsible relative. One need not give gifts, but if not you lose the opportunity to gain status, and the children will not bow to you. Grandmothers often recycle some of their gifts to the grandchildren or single adolescents. Gove...