intern

WHAT the actual! Haven't seen explosives deployed like this for some time. Word, dawg.

Some old boys in here eh. Oct 2006, something over 1000. Man a lot has changed since then.

That's magnificent!!

Here's a ray of light. Emigration takes a really long time (unless you are hired by a firm that really needs you) so the planning and action can take a year or more. Getting your ducks in a row is a big and expensive job, so take your time with it, spread the cost, cover your bases (and something something more jargon) and then be ready to shift when the time is right. You also make the time right yourself. Of course, there is no denying that emigration is risky as a matter of course. It is now doubly so as we can expect a massive wave of unemployment which as WP says, will make it harder for emigres to find work. Best of luck to you.

The renters with lumpy sums as yet uninvested in property are in the pound seats now. Though you do face currency risk and a devalued dollar with the largesse being dished out and just recently Grant Robertson saying 'banks have not met our expectations or those of small business' and making available low/no interest government loans to one of the riskiest customer bases.

Brah when it comes to half finished degrees, I've been led to believe it's the second half you want to have in the bag. Not that I have a degree. CAD monkey meet typist.

Thanks - we like it too, but houses and cars etc are not things to which you should form an emotional bond. Bicycles and motorbikes of course are in an entirely different category.

Patches definitely the kind of guy to read the TV manual

Selling purely because of the economic chaos New Zealand is about to encounter. A few things: Tourism is gone. AirBNBs, which have put the squeeze on the long term rental market, are about to flood back into the market as there are a ton of landlords who have daisy-chained AirBNBs thanks to cheap finance and positive cashflows. They're going to find those cashflows seriously reversed and as small investors highly leveraged, they do not have the capital to carry more than 2 or 3 months before something's gotta give. Not all those rentals will be in demand, because set up as AirBNBs, they will be more expensive ones. Also, demand is likely to drop as we won't have any new immigrants for a while because we are expecting up to 230k more unemployed NZers. In short, I think there will be a housing glut soon, with prices coming down and difficulty selling. Bear in mind, post-2008, when tourism took a knock because of the GFC (Global Fried Chicken), you could buy a beachfront 4-bed house in Ohope for around $380k. Until recently, the same sort of property would run you north of 800k. With tourism now completely deleted, the outlook is grim. So I want to become a renter again.

I'm sorry to hear that Kranswurm. All the best.

Yep; I only have the 1 ;-)

In anticipation of the coming economic bloodbath, I have listed my house for sale today. It is a reluctant move but if I can get a sale now, I will be pretty happy - and I will take 50k less for it than I might have expected to fetch 6 months prior.

Bloody awesome. Love the engineers approach to DIY; were it me, there'd be no planning, just some seat of the pants stuff. I have the same or similar AEG mitre saw. One of my favourite tools; when you need one, you really need one, and when you have one, you need it often.

Haaahhahahahahaahahaa thanks for the awesome belly laugh WP!!

But more to the point, they are figuring out 'new logistics' in our post kill-the-economy world...

Yeesh bru I still remember how you unleashed on Garmin for the poor quality Sapphire Crystal on your Fenix 5!

I totally broke Level 3 this past weekend. I hung out with my mate Grant and his family, we had a braai (pizza on the weber). Then I've hung out with my neighbour Tau and his daughter has been coming over to look after my boys for the past week while me and the Mrs go dirt biking down at Coastlands/Thornton (you're going to have to come Patches, you'll love it). And even when I visited the vet because my dog is unwell, I handed him the dog's medication and neither of us was wearing gloves. Around the country, people everywhere are breaking cover in their own small ways. Totalitarianism might feel kinda nice and even necessary for a short while. But people's patience only goes so far and it doesn't take much or long before people get bored or start asking the questions they should have been asking from the start. Like, for example, why and how are Maori roadblocks permissible? Or is it legal for the police and the government to quarantine healthy people and close their businesses? Or is it worth destroying the economy to save a few hundred or a few thousand lives? May you live in interesting times - so goes the Chinese curse. And oh boy, do we.

In other words, the government isn't confident the advice it was given will stand up to scrutiny. Remember, this is the same government which, when Ardern was anointed by Winston Peters, said it would be the most open and transparent government ever. There's a bottom line emerging here. In the final analysis, we'll discover that very few people die from COVID, most who have had it won't even know they had it at all, and only those who are hospitalised and or are sick enough will be tested, creating a self-selecting group. Compare to flu (and yes I know that's a risky one). Normal flu season sweeps up some 800 New Zealanders every year. My 35 year old healthy neighbour was very nearly one of those last year. Let's say there are 1600 people who have the flu bad enough to require hospitalisation. Does this mean the case fatality rate for the flu is 50%? Of course not. So apply the same logic to the WuFlu and what do you get? Mass death? Or a disease that Swedish numbers seem to indicate better than 99.9 percent will recover from. This whole thing is a ffing disaster of epic proportions, and the juice most definitely wasn't worth the squeeze. This will become apparent only when people feel their own pocket pinched, because we all only feel our own pain. Until then, the Labour love in will continue...but money has a habit of running out real fast, so I think September is a bridge too far for them. Great piece by Damien Grant in Stuff, too, if you're interested: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/121362657/simon-bridges-qualified-to-tear-down-most-popular-prime-minister-in-a-generation

So, remind me again why we destroyed our economy and trialed totalitarianism? And now there's this (either Hamish Rutherford or Hamish quoting David Seymour): "The Government's refusal to release the advice it used as the basis of its decision to place New Zealand into a highly restrictive lockdown is coming close to an abuse of the extraordinary trust the public has granted it."

Staggering, isn't it. And now we are seeing figures from Sweden - a sampler: Of the entire population 50 or over, less than 0.065% has died of Covid19.

We're so screwed. I'm seeing the worm turn as people start feeling the effects personally. A nasty dose of reality. Businesses are closing. People are out of work. The few grand the government dished out is gone. And now it's winter.

Hortly? There's your neologism for today. Meant 'shortly' of course

Yep, aware of that; a week, as they say, is a long time in politics. The wave of enthusiasm for having 'won the battle on community transmission' and the feelz that destroying our economy was worth it, will hortly give way to the cold harsh reality of a great leap backwards in prosperity for a great number of people. Right now, we're still awash in government cash. But as economists like von Mises, Hazlitt and co. will note, it is the long run effects of any policy which must be weighed. The thing with pollies is they are only concerned with short term effects. After all, the electoral cycle, which doesn't generally provide sufficient time for the long run effects to become clear. In this case, with such drastic action taken, I do believe we shall get a good idea of what those consequences are within a few short months. September may...or may not (predictions are hard, especially about the future) be a bridge too far. For sure, though, we are in for an exciting election.

Nub haha, should have used the opportunity to say nipple.

This gets to the nub of the buy local fallacy. Great read here for those interested: https://fee.org/articles/the-buy-local-fallacy/ An excerpt: The late liberal economist Adam Smith took mercantilism to task in The Wealth of Nations over 200 years ago, explaining that increased productivity through specialization and economies of scale - not money - was the key to prosperity. The exact opposite of what the buy local movement espouses.