That’s where a wealth tax works better. Because this tax only applies if you sell, if you have enough assets and lenders are confident they’ll continue to grow in value you can just keep buying more and then borrowing against them to cover your expenses year on year.
They probably don’t sell it back in a lot of cases as we have all sorts of rules around pasteurisation of imported products don’t we? Which would also mean they’re not using our milk powder to make any high value cheese / butter type products either.
I would expect most of the ingredients business goes into milk powders, baby formulas, sports supplements and then as inputs to bulk production - say cheese flavourings, bulk cheeses or butter/margarine mixes etc.
ETA - as an example, Buldak’s Carbonara noodles are listed on Fonterra’s marketing as using some of their bulk ingredients for the creamy flavour. So think packet mac 'n cheese & stuff like that :)
https://www.fonterra.com/nz/en/flexible-shareholding/supply-fonterra.html
You have to eventually hold 33% of your 3-season average milk supply in shares. And you have 6 years to get to that level of holding.
I can’t find an easy guide to work out what that actually works out to in money for a typical farm. I think there are Fonterra shares on the NZX but I don’t know if they’re the same as what the farmer’s hold.
Yeah I spent a day helping clear up at an orchard after Gabrielle and there was a whole field where some younger trees were all just gone. I think what had happened in a lot of places was debris from upstream just washed through at velocity and broke everything above ground level away then pushed it down until it hit a barrier it couldn’t get over or around.
And in some places, where that barrier was a bridge the weight of water & debris was enough to wash that away too.
That was the maths I was working with too - but seemingly there’s two parts to it, capacity between the banks and flow rate of the river in flood and for the latter wider is better.
So presumably you can build lower, cheaper stop banks further apart for slower flood velocity and less risk of stop bank failure at the expense of more risk of stop bank overtopping.
From what I understood of the article one of the issues is that the vegetation - particularly willow - causes sediment buildup and soil comes in over top of the gravel bed. That suggests to me that the soil isn’t particularly deep and in a Gabrielle level flood could see anything planted in that deliberate flood zone ripped out and shifted down to the next bridge.
In most of those “reclaimed” areas especially upstream of Fernhill the land is pretty scrubby and I would guess not especially good horticultural land. But downstream from there where the stopbanks have protected it for so long I think there’s a much deeper bed of soil - probably by that point the rivers would ordinarily have been going much slower so less often gouging out the dirt.
It obviously adds up in cost because of the overall land area, but my dumbies math does sort of suggest the benefit in retreating stopbanks 15-20m either side would mean being able to contain that much greater volume of water during floods, reducing risk of overtopping.
A lot of the land lost since the 1950s upstream of Fernhill isn’t exactly top quality stuff, but allowing the rivers to meander downstream from there will likely mean some folks have to give up some pretty valuable & fertile land. Better that than continuing to get flooded out given repeat Gabrielle’s are more likely.
Rice, beans, split peas & lentils. It might feel like its not that well rounded on the face of it, but you’re actually getting carbs, protein & fibre so its better than you might think. And the peas & lentils are dried so last ages, are cheap and cook relatively quick too.
As Dave mentions below adding some stock power for flavour could help to make it more interesting, or if you’re going the lentils route a curry powder (if you like spices) would add variety too.
Just to add to Dave’s price list, looking at Woolworths (as going by google maps that’s likely the nearest supermarket):
ETA - just a thought as well, I would guess Papakura probably has an Indian grocers (often small dairy sized) or other non-main stream grocers. Particularly the former you can often get a far wider variety of dried legumes, beans etc for a good price.
Live in a place like Heretaunga Hawkes Bay where in winter you get very still nights with a pocket of really cold air that traps the smoke from wood fires from dispersing and its pretty apparent just how polluting using wood to heat homes can be.
At times in winter a 15 minute walk from town to home and your clothes will reek like back in the old days of smoking ciggies inside in pubs.
Not as much as pro wood burner would be.
Setting aside any possible privatisation moves, anybody doing business with Serco given their record is suspect.
Yep that’s the map where my screenshot came from, I got sucked down a rabbit hole yesterday & ended up exploring all over the place.
Yeah I think they’re usually a very old legacy thing, but i’m not sure if it was at the point the land was parcelled up or in later subdivisions. Or perhaps at some point someone did a map based roading plan.
There’s a few to the north of the town I grew up where they were clearly planning a road with a bridge to provide additional connectivity and it just never happened. You can usually follow the paper road and it’ll get a certain way along and either end across the river or stream from the other end, or sometimes turn into a driveway some distance from the other part.
yeah the folks I know don’t have a sign either; they’ve explored getting rid of it in the past but its a whole shambles to do so even though its an extremely pointless unformed road.
Here’s an example of one I know really well to explain what I mean a bit more, i’ve blacked out a couple houses to protect the owners identity a bit, though I doubt anybody would traipse around here, given the state of it.
Starting at the top you can see the green line - that’s the side of the river which is also public land, but the purple line actually stops on the other bank of a very steep gully that a creek cuts through. That last short section to the north east until it ends drops at probably a 45 degree angle or more. If you tried to take a vehicle over that crest you would not stop until you were upside down under a metre of water and the only way of getting the vehicle out again would be a helicopter.
To get there you would somehow need to drive around the side of a bluff that’s at least as much of an angle or more in the 2nd section that points directly at the green line. But to get to that you have to pass the third section starting on the very left hand side of the image where it goes up about 2 metres, then drops down about 5 metres over the space of about the same.
The owners have never even taken a quad bike along the entirety of that purple line I would bet, and likely not even a two wheeled dirt bike would safely do it; and all to get to a point where you can’t stop and can’t turn around :)
I walked it once to get to the green bit to go fishing, but it was so sketchy I spent nearly an hour finding a way to get down & then back up the other side and came away with very scratched legs from all the blackberry and brush, no trout.
In terms of access I believe paper roads function pretty much equivalently to public roads. This makes a bit more sense if we use their actual term - paper road is just the colloquial. They are just unformed legal roads.
https://www.herengaanuku.govt.nz/types-of-access/unformed-legal-roads
What I don’t know is whether all roads are obliged to allow vehicles of all types or not; I would assume not as there are plenty that are marked not suitable for either weight, length or both. And it would be interesting to know if the vehicle has to be in road legal condition - ie normal tyres at road inflation etc. Beyond that though most of the unformed roads I know of are wholly unsuited for vehicles other than quad bikes, tractors etc. Their gradient is often well beyond standard, and they’re not even gravelled like a farm track let alone formed with a nice hump to keep water draining off into the non-existent ditches on either side.
Usually they’re just some lines on a map relatively devoid of the context of topography.
Despite the interest the bylaw received - thanks to a very well made campaign against it - this most likely impacts a fraction of the 3500* people that submitted, and of those its really only a fraction that have been tearing up the land either side of the road. So the solution of just blocking it to vehicles seems to me to be the most pragmatic.
Tony looks like he’s having a ball in this.
I was wondering if it would be possible to utilise the same unit design for longer distance journeys, but I suspect based on what i’ve seen that they rely on being able to use the Wellington overhead network where it exists to get the range to go as far as Masterton & Palmerston North so probably can’t take journeys as far as Napier or New Plymouth.
If anybody else was curious about more of the details - the product spec is here: https://www.metlink.org.nz/assets/Campaigns/Projects-Timeline/North-Island-Rail-Connection/Alstom-Product-Data-Sheet_LNIRIM_FINAL.pdf
and they’re based on an existing product: https://www.alstom.com/solutions/rolling-stock/adessia-commuter-trains-backbone-urban-life
Diverse high bandwidth fibre connectivity is probably as big a concern as diverse electricity supply. Invercargill only got diversity in the late 2000s I think, before that I was delivering bonded 2Mbps copper services just to get some 10Mbps connections into some offices I supported down there :)
Yep CGT is a simpler system to apply I think, but doesn’t address the real problem which is that once a certain amount of wealth has accumulated wealth begets wealth and the vast disparity ends up with a small class of people fully insulated from the problems their horading causes.