Reminds me of a few years back when they had a thriving industry manufacturing whirligig type clothes lines. Certainly competitively priced with the name brands.
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Is that all you have FP? Surely that type of waste of public funds is on a far smaller scale, and less damaging, than the debacle the National Government is perpetuating with their terms in office? How many million a year is the government paying in interest costs, I wonder?
Good heavens no - when I was a young fellow I restored an Austin 7 with assistance from mates at Hillside. I would hate to guess how much each individual gear, axle, hub etc cost. s
Suffice to say a new car would have been a bargain. Hillside started with around 1300 staff who mainly did nothing. Staff was reduced by around 100 every decade until there were none. The total cost of foreigners (if that term is still politically acceptable, or more-so if it's not) throughout the decades would be many many millions. The place was a joke. the sad part was the claims that even though the place was useless they provided excellent training for engineering trades. Problem was nobody wanted ex-hillside staff because they had never learnt how to do a day's work.
FP, I worked in a CRI for a year, and the tea breaks were about 3/4 hr long at times, and some of the research we helped with was redone experiments that had been written up into papers before, the outcome was known almost before the trial started. But that didn't mean that the whole outfit should have been closed down. Always, there would be something special that made up for all the other loss leaders. Most businesses would report the same thing. Everyone working in these places is getting training for their next job if they need it, they are paying taxes, they're gainfully employed. When CRIs and the Hillsides lose money, it means that the private sector is selling them stuff at a good taxable profit, or in your case, you're gaining something. The money goes round eventually. Would it be better to lay all these people off, give up on state-funded research, manufacturing and maintenance for state assets, and pay the dole to them instead? Roger Douglas thought so, but he went to extremes. I think National is revisiting the limits of this policy, I hope the public eventually see that they are overdoing it.
I have another point about your post: I worked in a CRI, got some training that I used later, and I was employable right through until I established my own business. Many others have left CRIs and universities to go on to become big employers. It's not a black and white story, is it?
Actually yes, it would. Necessity is the mother of invention. As long as people are paid for an easy ride through life, they won't look, won't innovate, experiment or take risks. (Generally, but of course there are exceptions.) It leads to a tragic waste. It's hunger that builds the killer instinct - so necessary to form and promote businesses. Since Douglas' reforms NZ has become very much more entrepreneurial. I shudder to think of this country still with 25,000 railway employees and a similar number in Post and Telegraph.
FP
My dad told me a delightful story of the hillside clothes lines. He had a shop in South Dunedin and one of the elderly ladies who was a customer of his apparently had a neighbour with a new clothes line. She indicated it was made at Hillside,needing a clothes line herself she duly phoned Hillside and asked to speak to the manager as she wished to order a clothes line. The manager was intrigued to say the least.
Good turn out at the Wgtn march against TPPA today
EZ ...could be the catalyst for that bit of civil disobedience if the govt continues down this path.
Bugger, I forgot we mandated they can do this, uninformed and unaware of the consequences
Labour terminal
This graph sourced from KiwiBlog maps every general election result in New Zealand from 1938 until now. There is a very clear downhill trend, which matches union membership. Of course there are cycles and some weak National parties (Bill English’s class of 2002 for example), but every peak in Labour’s share of the vote or party vote has been lower than the one before and every trough lower than the one before. In this 2014 General Election Labour got 25.1% of the party vote which is their lowest percentage ever, worse than the party’s dismal 27.5% from the 2011 General Election
http://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/72...use-sales-are-
Methinks room for a radical centrist party here to become a viable alternative/competitor
If it was a share you wouldn't be buying
There's another way of looking at it: W69, (and thanks for the graph), both major dips are the result of neo-liberal thinking. This is after the Treasury-Roger Douglas reforms from 1984, which impacted on many Labour voters, and the impact of neo-liberal strategists from 2004 onwards. Worldwide though, the same trend applies, so we can't blame National or their proxies for all of it. A positive is the massive effect a Helen Clark government had on the party vote, holding it against the trend for three terms.
I went to the televised "The Nation" candidates meeting last night, where the footage for the most recent show was done. It's on TV again tomorrow morning, and was an interesting night. TV3 has taken a newsie snap of that, and implied that Mahuta and Little want to scrap ideas of the CGT, partly because it took more than 30 seconds to explain to voters, so was therefore useless policy. That's not quite what they said, they intimated that Labour needs to take a second look at it. But I agree with David Parker. If a CGT isn't the (or an) answer to sorting out the economy, what is? He knows it's a very good idea.
None of the candidates seemed to be keen to say outright that they'd like to form a strong coalition with the Greens. It was all about making sure Labour had a big party vote. I think that in view of their strong Green leaders, the IPPC climate change news of late, and Labour's 25% poll at the moment, they could do worse than starting serious discussions in 2015. If they don't, I might be tempted to vote Green next time.
W69, a bit about the TPPA, I had not researched it before. Disturbing.
http://www.itsourfuture.org.nz/what-is-the-tppa/