The real Alan Bollard
Tell you the truth – this is gold! (ht Not-PC). The full set of adventures are caught here (*).
Archive for month: July, 2008
Did ANZ-National attack the public service?
It appears that the Standard is unhappy (*) (*) (*) with the ANZ-National piece on government sector spending (*).
Now the criticisms of the ANZ-National line appear to be:
- Its only a 4 page insert in there weekly report,
- The definition of backroom and frontline is self-serving and wrong,
- The report relies on the belief that all spending on backline staff is waste.
I can understand the Standard’s irritation at some of the headlines that have been taken from the piece – but nonetheless I feel that their criticisms of the actual discussion that ANZ provides are off the mark, here’s why:
4th Annual Condliffe Memorial Lecture
Eric Crampton from the University of Canterbury pointed out that there will be an interesting presentation on tax policy on the Tuesday the 15th of July. It will be hosted at the University of Canterbury (further details below the flap).
The lecture will be presented by Professor Joel Slemrod and is titled Tax policy in the Real World – a very topical issue!
Anyone interested in attending should RSVP to Virginia McKenzie (virginia.mckenzie@canterbury.ac.nz) by Friday the 11th of July.
Further details about timing, the paper, and the authour are provided below the flap.
The price of a 3G iPhone – one more point
Agnitio discussed a number of the important points surrounding the price of the 3G iPhone that is coming to Australia. If you are one of them you might want to also hire one of these phone plan deals.
For goodness sake, it is a discretionary item. If Apple and Vodafone want to charge a whole lot of money for the thing and you still buy it, you must value it enough to pay that amount of money. People have no implicit right to an iPhone, it is not one of the “necessities of life” that a proper society may wish to provide to all its citizens, as a result whining about the price is just plain irritating.
Some people may say, “hey, it is a monopoly, it is charging to much and selling to little compared to the socially optimal level”. My counter would be “if they hadn’t created the product in the first place, then no value would be created, so calm down”. Hell, the reason these companies invest in creating the product is so that they can extract some surplus at some point – just be glad that this overall transaction creates value for everyone involved!
So instead of moaning about the asymmetric bargaining position, just realise that since there exists a market and since the trade is voluntary, everyone is still better off when the iPhone is avaliable than when it is not – creating and releasing the danged thing at this price is pareto superior (*) to not doing so.
Seriously, is there nothing more important to discuss on TV than the price of the iPhone! I would have thought that society is more concerned about the fact that we are in a recession, and there is the potential for large scale job losses.
All men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains
My favourite quote by Rousseau is the title of this post “men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains.
When I was a young boy of 16 I interpreted this with predetermined judgments, namely freedom is good and chains are bad. As a result my feeling was that I should try to break these “chains” and rediscover the freedom I was born with.
In this quote it seemed implicit that chains where the restrictions place on us by society (rather than the physical restrictions in nature – if we included these then freedom truly would be an illusion), while freedom was the absence of these chains.
However, as I grew older I came to realise that not all “chains” are bad and “freedom” in this sense (the absense of chains) may not be good. Read more
3G iPhone: It’s all relative
I’ve been watching all the hysteria surrounding the cost of the new iPhone with great amusement. There’s an article on stuff saying the prices are way too high (see the available plans here), a petition to get the iPhone on prepay here and John Campbell was having a good crack at the guy from vodafone about it too.
The thing that has bothered me the most is that the comparison’s being made are with what you would pay for an iPhone and a data plan overseas. This sounds like a reasonable comparison at a first glance but it isn’t. The first question I asked when I saw these plans was “what are these plans like relative to other mobile data plans available in NZ?”. The clued on Gen-Y blogger over at playing to win points out that the cheapest plan (the 250mb plan) actually offers more data then his current plan.
My general impression (although I haven’t researched this in any great detail) is that the plans are at least comparable to current plans. And if you get the cheapest plan you will have to pay $699 for the 16gb phone. Given that the 16gb iPod touch is current going for $599 at dick smith I can’t see why people are complaining about the price, you are getting alot more for that extra $100.