General Debate 30 December 2008

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Patrick Starr

Is there any reason why the taxpayer (ACC, NZgovernment and LTNZ) are paying to advertise new vehicle sales (because they haveh electronic stability control) ? These ads must be running every hour on the networks

Why don’t they let the car dealers advertise their own fucken products
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December 30, 2008 9:37am
Brian Smaller

Patrick Starr – I was wondering the same thing. It is bullshit. Will they advertise sensible shoes next?
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December 30, 2008 9:41am
Ryan Sproull

I like that ad. “If you don’t have ESC, it’s only through some miraculous divine intervention that you haven’t been hit by a truck so far. Let’s look at our driver showing how you’ll get hit by a truck if you don’t have ESC. Boy! Look at him go.”
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December 30, 2008 9:43am
joeAverage

I see a hamas/taleban/iranian rocket has killed a palestinian constuction worker in Israel. Poor worker. 🙁
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December 30, 2008 9:45am
Frank

Where is the Government when it is left to Helen Clark to make a statement on tne Israeli-Hamas Gaza situation?
-Hamas
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December 30, 2008 9:50am
MT_Tinman

Listening to the views of the general public is one of the unfortunate parts of my occupation.

How long before some sensible government passes law making passing a simple intelligence test a prerequisite of voting?
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December 30, 2008 9:52am
Seamonkey Madness

Hmmmm, after seeing that ad I seem to want to go out and purchase a Hyundai…?
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December 30, 2008 9:52am
Ryan Sproull

How long before some sensible government passes law making passing a simple intelligence test a prerequisite of voting?

Dibs on writing the test.
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December 30, 2008 9:55am
Patrick Starr

Brian, I can just imagine every owner of the thousands of unregistered, unwarranted crap cars on NZ roads seeing that ad and saying “shit, I just gotta have one of those”
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December 30, 2008 9:55am
peterwn

… and the owners of registered warranted crap cars would also dearly love to upgrade but cannot afford it. I am thinking of ordinary working people. Jap imports have been their saviour but the last Labour government basically told them where to stick it to keep in sweet with the Greens.
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December 30, 2008 10:07am
Patrick Starr

peterwn… so who are they advertising to? The people who can afford it are not necessarily the ones who speed, lose control and end up in hospital
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December 30, 2008 10:17am
Ryan Sproull

peterwn… so who are they advertising to? The people who can afford it are not necessarily the ones who speed, lose control and end up in hospital

The ads suggest it’s more about sudden unexpected road conditions, rather than speeding – some loose stones on a bend, sort of thing. Though I suspect that if people took those turns at the prescribed speeds, a suddenly slick surface wouldn’t pose the kind of problem it generally does for people taking 25kph turns at 60.
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December 30, 2008 10:20am
PhilBest

# peterwn (251) Vote: Add rating 1 Subtract rating 0 Says:
December 30th, 2008 at 10:07 am

“… and the owners of registered warranted crap cars would also dearly love to upgrade but cannot afford it. I am thinking of ordinary working people. Jap imports have been their saviour but the last Labour government basically told them where to stick it to keep in sweet with the Greens…..”

Agree completely, Peterwn. I recall an article, I think in the AA magazine a couple of years ago, that pointed out that Auckland’s air was now more polluted than almost all US cities including LA and San Fran, because the Yanks drive newer, more efficient cars than Kiwis do on average. There is actually an interesting correlation between carbon emissions per unit of GDP, and average wealth. Poor countries tend to have lower emissions per capita, but this is due to low GDP, not efficiency. Their emissions per unit of GDP are actually quite high. Increases in emissions per capita as a country gets wealthier, are due to increased GDP, the actual emissions per unit of GDP tend to drop at the same time, albeit at a slower rate than the rate of increase in GDP.

Then there seems to come a point where a country is so wealthy and so dedicated to technological advance and efficiency and environmental preservation, that outright reductions in all measures of pollution are possible all the while GDP and wealth continues to increase. CO2 emissions is the last thing to change for the better, and the most difficult one. But the elephant in the room for NZ, is that for all our rhetoric and posturing, the biggest hindrance to improvements in our environmental performance, compared to the front runners, is our lack of wealth.
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December 30, 2008 10:23am
PhilBest

Oh, and Patrick Starr and Ryan Sproull make the point about the safety issue and the road toll. That too, has a lot to do with our wealth and the rate at which people can afford the latest and best cars.

The bottom line: soft, income-redistributive nanny-statism, that destroys your economic growth, has all sorts of much worse unintended consequences, than the problems you thought you were trying to address in the first place.
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December 30, 2008 10:27am
PhilBest

Mark Steyn has just made a VERY good point about the economic collapse:

“……everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Sen. Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say, ‘You just go ahead, we’ll be fine.'”

And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nose-dived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Sen. Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these past few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-elect Barack Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the U.S. economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then-Sen. Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They’re aghast, they’re terrified, they’re on a one-way express elevator down the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand……

“…….The message from the European political class couldn’t be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don’t ramp up the demand, we’re kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

“Much of the load will fall on the U.S.,” wrote Martin Wolf in The Financial Times, “largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak.”……”
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December 30, 2008 10:33am
PhilBest

More from the same column by Mark Steyn:

“I was at the mall two days before Christmas, and it was strangely quiet. So quiet that, sadly, I was able to hear every word of Kelly Clarkson bellowing over the sound system “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” Don’t get me wrong – I love seasonal songs. “Winter Wonderland” – I dig it. “Rudolph” – man, he’s cool, albeit not as literally as Frosty. But “Grown-Up Christmas List” is one of those overwrought ballads of melismatic bombast made for the “American Idol” crowd. It’s all about how the singer now eschews asking Santa for materialist goodies – beribboned trinkets and gaudy novelties – in favor of selfless grown-up stuff like world peace…….

“…… the striking thing about their “Grown-Up Christmas List” is how childish it is. The vocalist tells Santa that what she wants for Christmas is:

“No more lives torn apart,

That wars would never start…”

Whether wars start depends on the intended target’s ability to deter. As to “lives torn apart,” that, too, is a matter of being on the receiving end. If you’re in an African dictatorship, your life can be torn apart. If you’re in a society that values individual liberty, you’ll at least get a shot at tearing your own life apart – you’ll make bad choices, marry a ne’er-do-well, blow your savings, lose your job – but these are ultimately within your power to correct. The passivity of the lyric – the “lives” that get “torn apart” is very revealing. A state in which lives aren’t torn apart will be, by definition, totalitarian: As in “The Stepford Wives” or “The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,” we’ll all be wandering around in glassy-eyed conformity. “Lives” will no longer be “torn apart” because they’re no longer lives, but simply the husks of a centrally controlled tyranny.

To live is messy but liberating: free societies enable the citizenry to fulfill their potential – to innovate, to create, to accumulate – while recognizing that some of their number will fail. But to attempt to insulate free peoples from moral hazard is debilitating and ultimately fatal. To Martin Wolf’s list of a Europe “too inert, too complacent, too weak,” we might add “too old”: Healthy societies recharge their batteries by the aged and wealthy lending their savings to the young and eager. But Germany is a population of prosperous seniors with no grandchildren to lend to. Japan is a society of great invention with insufficient youth to provide a domestic market. That’s why if you’re Sony or IKEA or any other great global brand, you want access to America for your product. That’s why economic recovery will be driven by the U.S., and not by euro-Japanese entities long marinated in Obamanomics……..”
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December 30, 2008 10:35am
PhilBest

Read the whole thing:

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/christmas-apart-world-2267866-lives-grown
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December 30, 2008 10:36am
PhilBest

The latest Wall Street Journal Editorial is a very good assessment……

“Israel’s Gaza Defence”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051140769338457.html?mod=djemEditorialPage#printMode
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December 30, 2008 10:39am
Brian Smaller

“… and the owners of registered warranted crap cars would also dearly love to upgrade but cannot afford it. I am thinking of ordinary working people. Jap imports have been their saviour but the last Labour government basically told them where to stick it to keep in sweet with the Greens.”

Before Jap imports we had so many very crappy old cars ont he road itwasn’t funny – fuck I drove enough of them. As a young guy all I could afford was a rust bucket EH Holden Special that I took to a garage out int eh sticks to get warrants as the joker there would basically warrant anythign that had four wheels and a motor. It is little wonder that the road toll has come down, because in my opinion, cars are generally better – on average. I talked to a guy at work who is a volunteer fireman in Upper Hutt. He said, and this is anecdotal of course, that he goes to just as many accidents now as he did in the 80s. It is just that more people survive them. I would love to see how the rate of accidents has fared per 1000 drivers since the government started spending millions of our dollars tellign us to drive safer, wear searbelt, drink nothing, have ABS, have ESC etc etc. I have a gut feeling that the increasing safety of modern cars has more to do with the lower road toll than a reduction in actual crashes. Does anyone have the figures?
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December 30, 2008 10:53am
PhilBest

Agree, Brian Smaller. Bob Jones made an assertion some years ago that if speed limits were abolished for a week, the road toll would be unaffected, and it would be obvious that they were irrelevant. You didn’t say it, but speed limits have become more and more about revenue gathering and less and less about the road toll, if they ever did have much to do with it.
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December 30, 2008 11:46am
fatnuts

Phil – your ‘very good assessment’ [Gaza defense] looks like it came straight out of Israel’s propaganda machine. I would Suggest the BBC web site is somewhat more balanced:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/2001/israel_and_the_palestinians/default.stm

In particular, note the ‘obstacles to peace’:

* Jerusalem
* Borders and settlements
* Water
* Refugees
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December 30, 2008 12:02pm
baxter

My view is that the Wespac Rescue Helicopters and similar services with their skilled medical staff can take a lot of credit for the reduction in deaths. I suspect there has not been a similar reduction in the seriously injured.
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December 30, 2008 12:06pm
kiwipolemicist

Baxter I agree: Getting people to the bone yard (hospital) within the Golden Hour is important, and bumpy road trips can add to the trauma (NZ has pretty bad roads by international standards).

Hopefully Nanny State won’t make stability control in cars important.

http://www.kiwipolemicist.wordpress.com
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December 30, 2008 12:14pm
kevin_mcm

add also the improvements in roads (crash barriers, more overtaking lanes, strightened roads) as well, and it is no wonder deaths have dropped dramatically. I would like to see all taxpayer funded advertising relating to driving gotten rid of. Then change ACC so that if someone is drunk/driving dangerously they are liable for any costs, loss of car (not just loss of licence) for drink driving and the road toll will continue to decline.
I would also like to see the raw data around crashes over the last 5 years, but don’t expect them to be published given the industry that has grown up advertising driving & motor cars.
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December 30, 2008 12:53pm
Patrick Starr

“The ads suggest it’s more about sudden unexpected road conditions, rather than speeding – some loose stones on a bend, sort of thing.”
Maybe so, but before they decided to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars telling everyone what new car to buy did they do any analysis on how many motorists – who may be in a position to buy a new car actually fell victim to ‘loose stones on a bend, sort of thing’ and ended up in hospital?

or are they just pissing more taxpayers dollars down the dunnie – because they still have an over inflated budget to do so.
It not the taxpayers job to advertise new car sales – it’s the dealers
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December 30, 2008 1:08pm
grumpyoldhori

Children as collateral damage, Christ the IDF is fucking sick in stating that unlike Hamas they hit what they aim at.
So three year old children are deliberate targets of the IDF ?
No better than Hamas are they ?
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December 30, 2008 1:33pm
PhilBest

Fatnuts, the BBC is a notorious haven of anti-Israel, pro-“Palestinian” bias. Would you like a link to the report that they had done themselves on this subject a year or two ago, and hushed it up when the findings were too embarrassing for them?
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December 30, 2008 1:44pm
joeAverage

grumpyoldhori ,do you miss those silly shots of hama troops running with their AK47 pointed upwards,running over a Israel flag, how many of these (troops????)are still alive , another thought when hama fire their AK47s in the air how many kids down the road get struck by the falling bullets. No tears from me over the gaza strip.
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December 30, 2008 1:55pm
fatnuts

PhilBest,

Please post the link.

I suppose the UN is a “notorious haven of anti-Israel, pro-‘Palestinian’ bias” as well?

Try a search for “west bank land confiscation” at http://www.un.org/search/

Put aside all of the extremist dogma, from BOTH sides, then a continuing root cause of the violence is Israel’s continuing expansion into the West bank through systematic land confiscation and civilian settlement.
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December 30, 2008 1:56pm
grumpyoldhori

joeAverage, funny that, in 2006 the IDF were boasting how well they were going to do against the Hezbollah, what a bunch of amateurs they were, no need to dig in they boasted, too bad about that dual warhead anti-tank missile that killed thirty of them as they hide from the night air in a house.
And then a IDF company wander into a town with weapons slung, how they whined about about being ambushed

And the IDF believe it will be easy to fight in a built up area that has been bombed, I suggest you read what happened to the kiwi div. at Casino township after it was bombed.
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December 30, 2008 7:55pm
Don the Kiwi

Yeah.
The Kiwi Div. got munched at Casino because they went in without the support and cover of their armour. Bitter lesson.
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December 30, 2008 8:16pm
southtop

Question: Have we just seen the politicisation of New Year Awards?
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December 31, 2008 10:24am
PhilBest

Fatnuts, it just happens, yes, the UN IS also a haven of the most blatant kind of anti-Israel bias. What planet do you live on, where that is not the case?

http://www.unwatch.org/site/c.bdKKISNqEmG/b.1359197/k.6748/UN_Israel__AntiSemitism.htm

Regarding the BBC, Google “Balen Report”; here is a link to the Wikipedia on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balen_Report

Sorry for the slow response, I have been unable to access any threads on Kiwiblog for most of the day. I don’t know what was wrong.
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December 31, 2008 7:23pm

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