Utopia, you are standing in it!

For just over six months now I’ve been on the trail of questionable appointments to the new Reserve Bank Board. Most of the Board members aren’t really fit for office in anything other than ornamental roles – this in the midst of the worst monetary policy failure in decades and the Board being responsible for key appointments and for holding the MPC to account. But my main focus has been on the appointment last October of Rodger Finlay, while he was chair of the majority owner of Kiwibank, with a lesser focus on Byron Pepper, appointed in June this year while also serving as a a director of an insurance company operating in New Zealand (the largest shareholder in which was another insurance company subject to prudential regulation by the Reserve Bank.

The Reserve Bank has spent months trying to avoid/delay answering questions about these appointments. For any first time…

While discovering electricity was part insight, superstition and serendipity, harnessing it for good came down to the laws of physics and sound engineering.

Exciting as it might be, feeling your hair stand up during an electrical storm was never going to alter the course of human affairs. Whereas the ability to generate and then deliver electrical power at a given frequency and voltage over time and on demand was an inevitable game changer.

Once thermal energy was used for that purpose, wind power was then and thereafter utterly redundant. Productive work could then be carried out at any time and without the need for a favourable weather forecast in advance.

The dismal history of early efforts to use windmills to generate electricity ought to have provided sufficient evidence to future generations attempting to do likewise. But, as they say, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Parker Gallant…

Stardate: 5784.2 (2268)
Original Air Date: November 22, 1968
Writer: Meyer Dolinsky
Director: David Alexander

“Plato wanted truth and beauty and above all, justice.”

In response to “desperate distress calls from an unknown planet,” Enterprise crewmen Kirk, Spock, and Bones beams down to a planet rich in kironide deposits, a high-energy substance. Supposedly, the Enterprise scanners show no life forms on the planet. However, they find towering columns and statues a la ancient Greece and the crewmen are quickly greeted by a small-sized court jester named Alexander (Michael Dunn). He explains that there are beings on this planet. The sun near their home planet Sahndara went super-nova a millennia ago. They had instituted a a mass eugenics program focused on longevity (they are each over 2,000 years old). They transported themselves to ancient Greece on earth to study under Plato. After Plato died, they traveled to this new…

In a couple of weeks it will be 2023. And then in a couple of years it will be 2025.

Those with longish geeky memories may recall that there was once talk of closing the gap between New Zealand and Australian incomes/productivity by 2025. Without any great enthusiasm no doubt, the incoming National government led by John Key agreed to ACT’s request for a (time and resource-limited) official 2025 Taskforce that would offer some analysis and advice on what it would take to achieve such a goal. The Taskforce’s first report had been dismissed by the Prime Minister before it was even released and after the second report the Taskforce was quietly disbanded. I held the pen on the first report and had some input on the second one (itself written by the current chair of the Reserve Bank Board), and since the reports were written when my kids were…