New Zealand. What a back water shit hole.

[Ocean1]

Well when chine wants to do some infrastructure built they do it.
They don't worry about the minor details...... they just do it.
Whether that is ahead or is harking back to the old ways is debatable but they are decisive and they get shit done.
not years or legal wrangles and environmental reports and legal battle that just get the lawyer rich.

That's true.

But along the road between individual and societal rights/responsibilities they are a little too much towards the herd mentality for my liking.

Which, (in their case) doesn't prevent some rather poor budgeting, including but not limited to massive misappropriation of resources by authorities.

[husaberg]

That's true.

But along the road between individual and societal rights/responsibilities they are a little too much towards the herd mentality for my liking.

Which, (in their case) doesn't prevent some rather poor budgeting, including but not limited to massive misappropriation of resources by authorities.

Yeah but if you follow the right wing ideals to its very end what they have is progress.......
I am not saying china is right but it does get shit done.
Would I want to live there NO.

[mstriumph]

China?

Ahead in which ways?

crossed wires, sorry ... I was talking about New Zealand

[Ocean1]

Yeah but if you follow the right wing ideals to its very end what they have is progress.......
I am not saying china is right but it does get shit done.
Would I want to live there NO.

The right/left thing ain't necessarily the same road.

China may be a nominally communist state but they're also the world's single largest capitalist entity. The communist bit is where you work for the state, or you starve. The capitalist bit is where the state spends pretty much all of your earnings on shit you may or may not approve of whether you like it or not.

As you say, we do the opposite, we support individuals not contributing to the economy, producing both less public income and higher unproductive costs and we expose every non-welfare spending decision to as many official and unofficial committees as possible, the natural example being our RMA.

In China, I took heart from the satellite dishes attached to the dirt huts I passed in the middle of nowhere, their owners still out in their single paddy field behind the communal oxen. They're fiercely proud of their country, sometimes to the point of a worrying xenophobia, but their govt no longer has exclusive access to their sources of information, and they're already demanding answers to questions they didn't even know to ask 5 years ago.

It's generally true that whatever you tax you get less of, and whatever you subsidise you get more of. I'd be a bit happier if both systems rewarded productive behaviour a bit more and rewarded unproductive behaviour a bit less.

[Ocean1]

crossed wires, sorry ... I was talking about New Zealand

Oh, yeah. Our standard of living is a touch lower than some places but part of the reason for that is we don't actually work very hard.

Outside of that, ripper place to live.

[Maha]

New Zealand. What a back water shit hole? I blame Reefton.

[Stylo]

Leave Reefton alone, first place in NZ to have electricity and will be the last town in NZ to have traffic lights.

And a KFC

[oldrider]

Yeah but if you follow the right wing ideals to its very end what they have is progress.......

Spot the difference ... we just keep on heading down the same old pathway irrespective of Left/Right ... that is just there to make sure we keep voting the same way!

In motorcycle terms AJS/Matchless? ... still the same brand in the end and that's the way of politics in a so called democracy like ours!

The real difference is that we have lovely quiet country with nice people and beautiful scenery but choked to death with imaginary debt!

[Swoop]

Surely in Asia it would be either emissions trafficking or counterfeiting?

With that simple fact, it explains how their carbon-credits are created and traded!

[scumdog]

The right/left thing ain't necessarily the same road.

China may be a nominally communist state but they're also the world's single largest capitalist entity. The communist bit is where you work for the state, or you starve. The capitalist bit is where the state spends pretty much all of your earnings on shit you may or may not approve of whether you like it or not.

As you say, we do the opposite, we support individuals not contributing to the economy, producing both less public income and higher unproductive costs and we expose every non-welfare spending decision to as many official and unofficial committees as possible, the natural example being our RMA.

In China, I took heart from the satellite dishes attached to the dirt huts I passed in the middle of nowhere, their owners still out in their single paddy field behind the communal oxen. They're fiercely proud of their country, sometimes to the point of a worrying xenophobia, but their govt no longer has exclusive access to their sources of information, and they're already demanding answers to questions they didn't even know to ask 5 years ago.

It's generally true that whatever you tax you get less of, and whatever you subsidise you get more of. I'd be a bit happier if both systems rewarded productive behaviour a bit more and rewarded unproductive behaviour a bit less.

Found all the above to be true when I was there - and living out in the country with the 'peasants' showed me how much you DON'T need to live comfortably.

[avgas]

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11337642

It's not the first time NZ's major city has had a severe power cut. What a bloody joke.

Still its better than losing entire states every year.
Only a month away buddy - you ready?

[avgas]

100% uptime isn't possible I agree, but does that excuse having a network that has multiple Single Points of Failure AND having a similar issues occur within recent memory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Auckland_power_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Auckland_Blackout

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...r_outages#2009

Do you see a pattern here? The pattern is half-arsing number 8 wire fixes, with a good dose of She'll be right mate instead of actually doing shit properly.

It's not that bad actually. Single points of failure are bound to occur when you spend a TINY (yes tiny in comparison to the rest of the world) amount on building it.
But you see NZ spends a tiny amount and still get stuff done. In Auckland - how much power-lines are on poles? How much infrastructure is older than 50 years? How much of it is actually world leading? How much of it is safe?

When you look into these aspects - and you see the tiny budget allocated.....they haven't done too badly. When you compare it to the US its actually not bad. Hell even Europe (yes the whole of it) lost power not so long ago.
Shit happens. We learn the lesson, we fix a problem, we move on.

Hell Sydney shut down 5 times in Dec 2008 when I was working on a (power) project there. That was fucking bad. 4 million people going "What the fuck?".

If Auckland loses half a million houses worth of power - that shit is barely a drop in the ocean when you think about whats being spent.

(not getting into the bullshit about consultants taking money and not fixing problems - but if you wanted NZ to have more efficient power engineering - look there first).

[husaberg]

It's not that bad actually. Single points of failure are bound to occur when you spend a TINY (yes tiny in comparison to the rest of the world) amount on building it.
But you see NZ spends a tiny amount and still get stuff done. In Auckland - how much power-lines are on poles? How much infrastructure is older than 50 years? How much of it is actually world leading? How much of it is safe?

When you look into these aspects - and you see the tiny budget allocated.....they haven't done too badly. When you compare it to the US its actually not bad. Hell even Europe (yes the whole of it) lost power not so long ago.
Shit happens. We learn the lesson, we fix a problem, we move on.

Hell Sydney shut down 5 times in Dec 2008 when I was working on a (power) project there. That was fucking bad. 4 million people going "What the fuck?".

If Auckland loses half a million houses worth of power - that shit is barely a drop in the ocean when you think about whats being spent.

(not getting into the bullshit about consultants taking money and not fixing problems - but if you wanted NZ to have more efficient power engineering - look there first).

Nz gid infrastructure costs more to maintain than almost all others around the world that they try and benchmark with we always explain to them this is because we do not have the clean belts underneath so have a huge amouunts of access track also lots more vegetation to maintain and a temperate maritime climate.
All the people that realised this are slowly going from Transpower.
So Transpower are actually trying to drive them down to match the rest of the world now though. Which will result in the inevitable.
Also the people that maintain the grid networks are paid a lot more overseas for their skills.
The companies that are contacted to Transpowers maintenance are having their budgets slashed all the time.

[unstuck]

We had a powercut that lasted 20 mins once, can't remember what year though, was the 90's anyway. Still not fully recovered from that one. I think that was the last one we had.

[FJRider]

We had a powercut that lasted 20 mins once, can't remember what year though, was the 90's anyway. Still not fully recovered from that one. I think that was the last one we had.

A fuse went in my place once ... the 45 seconds it took to reset it was sheer hell ...