
The Mega Rich Have Found an Unlikely New Refuge - dmmalam
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/the-rich-have-found-a-place-to-escape-the-horrors-of-the-world
======
jorblumesea
The modern world has such a ridiculous disconnect. The people fleeing to
remote places because of instability are the very same people causing these
issues in the first place. Hedge fund managers selling toxic assets bemoaning
the uncertainty of the financial world? And what will your island paradise
look like with no one to trade with or if the world economy collapses? NZ
doesn't have much of an economy in itself, what are you going to do, go back
to farming?

It's even more hilarious because the reason NZ is a desirable place to live is
because there is little money in politics and there are few class
distinctions. How will that change when all the billionaires move there and
want to get their way (and are used to the world conforming to the bank
account)? Just another place for the wealthy elite of the world to slowly
ruin, maybe the next step is the moon?

The system is rapidly growing out of control and no one seems to be able to
stop or halt the insanity. It's like we're all marching towards oblivion and
everyone knows it but no one has the will to turn the ship around because the
system incentivizes short term greed.

~~~
beachstartup
> _And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or
> if your financial firm collapses? NZ doesn 't have much of an economy in
> itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming?_

these locations aren't just for vacations. they are stocked with supplies and
probably guns and ammo. if the SHTF, they'll be on the first (private jet)
flight out of london, hk, zurich, or new york. why do you think they chose a
place so remote? there are nicer places a lot closer. they just don't have the
infrastructure that new zealand has, and the natural oceanic protection.

as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth
crown. how convenient.

it used to be normal to prepare for disaster. in california they taught us how
to do it in elementary school in the 90s, for earthquakes. now people think
it's crazy. it's not. normal people do this too. who do you think is buying up
all the ammo before elections? i know people who have boats, trucks, etc. for
the purposes of preparedness.

one thing a fund manager or CEO knows how to do is hedge against risks.

~~~
LouisSayers
"as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the
commonwealth crown. how convenient." ... well seeming NZ is a commonwealth
country it's not some convenience, it's history.

And it sounds like you think NZ has some huge military power. I think we have
like one jet plane, so stock all the guns you want, I imagine in the case all
the allies die and Russia invades we'd probably just give them a welcome
ceremony.

~~~
beachstartup
i didn't mean 'how convenient' in any sarcastic way, i was literally saying..
it's convenient that your getaway island also has a military. most don't.

and nobody said any of it was rational. it's just what people do. i live in
earthquake country so i have water and canned food and a means of defense.
some people have taken this mindset to an extreme, including buying large
homes on remote island countries and a private jet for trips there.

------
te_chris
Fantastic. As a NZ expat currently resident in London it's depressing the way
global market conditions have sent house prices skyrocketing in the places I'd
like to live. My partner and I are doing well here, and we plan to go back to
NZ one day, but in just 6 years since my partner's brother was here what we'd
go back to has changed immeasurably.

He and his partner managed to come over here when the pound was worth $3 NZD,
rent was cheaper, save well and move back to Auckland when houses were
depressed (2009-2010). Since then they rode the wave and now have a beautiful
home with a view straight down the Waitemata harbour.

My partner and I? We came here when the pound was at $2.10ish, not so bad I
thought, not as good, but y'know, we make good money, we can deal with it.
Then BREXIT. BOOM. Now the pound is $1.70, our salaries are, of course, still
the same. Also a shithole house in Auckland in a bad suburb now costs at least
$700k NZD - the first house that my partner's brother bought cost $650k NZD,
in a nice suburb on transport links.

The world is mad.

~~~
pyre
The fact that you're talking about $650k - $700k being in your price range
means that you're doing better than a lot of people.

~~~
AvenueIngres
Is that the metric you want to choose to decide how happy you should be about
a given situation?

Comparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range
seems a lot better. Otherwise you can pretty argue ad absurdum that yeah, you
aren't starving, you aren't dead so everything is good! R-r...right?

~~~
tudorw
well, the reality is that level of optimism is required for the 800 million
people living on a dollar a day, and if they can do it then perhaps those more
fortunate could learn something there, as the Somalian I met said, 'nobody
promised me tomorrow', or the popular 'yesterday was better than today, and
today will be better than tomorrow'...

~~~
AvenueIngres
Oh please, I am barely holding back my tears.

Is that unreasonable for people to improve their living conditions and be
disappointed when those don't even match the ones of their parents? Or should
they just accept the extreme poverty threshold as the sole upper bound
required to be content about their lives.

~~~
hueving
Ok, if you go that route, don't complain about rich people wanting more and
more. They are just "improving their living conditions".

~~~
xenobioticants
There's 'sweet, a promotion, I can finally afford that nice car' "greed" and
then there's 'lets destroy 6000 people their jobs to make the shareholders
happy so I can get a $1.000.000 bonus' greed.

~~~
gohrt
So, accumulating ever more amounts of personal wealth is fine as long as you
aren't the the top 1%, er 0.1%, er 0.01%, er, as long as you have less than
someone you know.

~~~
ryandrake
There has to be a line somewhere. I don't claim to be the person qualified to
draw it, but society has to be willing to define it and say "Wealth
accumulation on this side of the line is OVERALL healthy for promoting fair
and evenly distributed prosperity, and wealth accumulation on the other side
is OVERALL destructive and benefits only a small few."

~~~
chii
And what if that line was drawn and you are on the wrong side?

~~~
ryandrake
That would be a nice problem to have.

------
clydethefrog
The ultimate NIMBYs. The same people that are responsible for the many
uncertainties multinational corporations bring and therefore stimulate the
dangerous populism in this global age now go to Queenstown, have a pint and
wait for this to all blow over.

Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way...

~~~
tluyben2
> Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way...

Always thought it must be something with my taste but every time I see houses
by 'the (super) rich' I think; why didn't you hire an actual talented
architect?

~~~
jonnathanson
There's a method to the McMansion madness: the houses are designed in a sort
of modular style that assumes the owners will regularly reconfigure and
remodel to keep up with the latest trends.

Kitchen out of date? Gut the kitchen module and replace the parts. Home
theaters are out, and home gyms are in? Gut the theater module and reconfigure
it into a gym. Sticks-and-drywall construction can be demolished and rebuilt
in practically a day. Room "pods" can be torn down, merged, or separated at
will, with little impact on the livability of the rest of the house. There's a
lot more (ostensible) flexibility in an amorphous blob of room modules than
there is in attempting to maintain a coherent, symmetrical, balanced
architecture. The traditional house is a fixture; the McMansion is a living,
changing, multicellular organism.

McMansion developers aren't selling houses; they're selling services. All of
this runs parallel to, and feeds off of, the macro-social trend favoring
interiors over exteriors. People care more about kitchen appliances and
countertop surfaces than they do about architecture. It's crass, tasteless,
and economically silly. But it's the prevailing culture. And it's designed to
_keep selling things_.

~~~
ska
McMansions aren't bought by the rich. Mansions are.

McMansions are an exercise in echoing certain features of the latter on the
cheap, but they are primarily an embodiment of social positioning within the
upper middle class.

~~~
briandear
Exactly correct. McMansions are expressions of middle-class "success" yet are
often just "normal" cheap houses built on a bigger scale -- same contractor-
grade fittings and finishes.

For example, I bet you'd rarely see actual Venetian plaster in a McMansion,
but you'd see a "faux finish" version of it. McMansions are movie sets and the
owners are playing a "role" of a "successful" person/family.

~~~
differentman
> McMansions are movie sets and the owners are playing a "role" of a
> "successful" person/family.

Ah, I love that. Applies to so many people I know. Well, at least, it DID
apply to them before they lost their McMansion and, in some cases, went
bankrupt.

------
okreallywtf
I've long expected these kinds of stories. The same people who have benefited
from climate change and bred a lot of the chaos we're now experiencing will be
able to live quite comfortably while the rest of us are left to deal with the
consequences. This is one of the most distressing things about climate change:
so much wealth was created at the expense of the planet and so little of that
will ever go into fixing it. We will pay for it in terms of higher energy
prices a million other ways instead.

As the arctic continues to melt I expect there to be some nice openings in
northern canada that are even more remote.

~~~
hueving
Nearly everyone benefitted from climate change. The only people who didn't are
the ones living in remote villages that don't have electricity or any other
modern technology.

~~~
dv_dt
For some time now, we have been in a era where we have the knowledge and
incentive to act, yet we haven't acted strongly enough to combat climate
change.

Nearly everyone benefited in the short term, but those with great wealth also
have much more power to speed or slow the change away from fossil fuels. I
think in general that power has been used to slow the fight against climate
change.

~~~
andrei_says_
According to studies, public opinion has almost zero effect on politics in
contrast to the opinion of the very few wealthy individuals and businesses who
can focus their influence and lobbying and have custom legislation written for
them.

At least in the USA.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-
echochambers-27074746](http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746)

We are ruled by a small oligarchy which sees itself as invulnerable to
economic and climate change. This is why we're incredibly late to the game of
correcting it.

------
fatdog
Funniest thing I ever heard about it was a girl from Cornwall saying "Ah, New
Zealand, the thinking man's Australia."

~~~
jazoom
I don't get it. Is that a Kiwi joke?

~~~
nibs
Australia is dumber than NZ. So the "dumb" NZers are leaving, and leaving
makes them dumb, but their presence in Australia makes Australia smarter.

~~~
pklausler
So the average IQ rises in both countries, then. Sounds like a win to me.

------
neaden
"House prices in New Zealand increased 12.7 percent in the year through
October, and the average price in largest city Auckland has almost doubled
since 2007 to more than NZ$1 million." That's about $730,000 USD which would
make me worry if I was a New Zealander.

~~~
doldge
I believe most folk are worried, and the media has been referring to it as a
"housing crisis". Notably the price increase has been limited to Auckland
though (and Queenstown, but Queenstown is the NZ equivalent of Aspen,
Colorado; which is to say it's a bit of a millionaire's club).

Unfortunately the currently in power government has done a lot to court this
outcome, and so has mostly been avoiding doing anything about it. I think they
did recently step in to make it harder for Chinese investors to purchase
property in NZ though.

~~~
EdwardDiego
Average house prices in Christchurch just hit half a million, so it's not
limited to Auckland and Q'Town, it's just that they were already crazy markets
in the first place.

------
mahyarm
When vancouver adopted a %15 non-resident house purchase tax, prices and
demand dropped a lot. Maybe nz wants to adopt something similar, combined with
singapore's for citizen public house purchase program.

~~~
EdwardDiego
We really do, the amount of foreign money in our housing market is quite scary
(China is prominent in the internal debates, but there's a lot of money
flooding in from the UK also, not to mention all the cashed up ex-pats coming
home), as locals are ultimately competing against the entire world for
property. A capital gains tax or land tax would be a good idea also. But our
incumbent government is very reluctant to do any of that. Some people would
suggest that large donations from foreigners with financial interests here may
have influenced their thinking, but in reality most of it appears to be
catering to the Kiwi baby boomers who a) own a large proportion of the
"investment properties" (did I mention no capital gains tax?) and b) are the
largest voting bloc. As their perception of their wealth is intrinsically tied
to property values, anything that would depress property value increases would
be politically bad.

Same reason we're not doing anything about the pending state funded
superannuation crisis - we don't even means test the bloody thing, which means
that millionaires and paupers alike get the same level of government money
when they hit 65 - but touching national superannuation is political suicide.

This does imply an onus on the non-baby-boomer generations to get more
involved in politics and start voting way more than they (we) do.

I'm also starting to think that five year terms instead of our current three
year might be worth a shot, as our politicians are very much focused on short-
term never the long.

~~~
briandear
A capital gains tax a good idea? No -- that would decrease market liquidity
and make the problem even worse. France has high capital gains taxes and it
means that people are less willing to sell houses because capital gains taxes
eat the profit, so people tend to hang on to houses in the hope that in many
years they'll appreciate enough to make swallowing the capital gains hit worth
it. I have a place in France that I'd consider selling but I am not interested
in giving the government a huge percentage of the profit.

Meaning if I take a risk in buying and renovating something, my profit has to
make the whole affair worth it. If I'm giving the government 34.5% of my
profit, if my house was bought at €500k and my target profit is €100k, then
that means I have to sell the place at roughly €635k instead of €600k. That
knocks many potential buyers out of the market, thus means that the house
won't sell as quickly. That also means that my capital is tied up in the house
instead of moving the market in some other deal or otherwise putting that
money into the economy some other way. The net gain from a capital gains tax
is actually a negative when you count the lose of market liquidity resulting
from capital gains taxes.

Increasing the price of something lowers demand. If you increase the price of
selling, less people will sell, causing house prices to increase.

Capital gains taxes are always a bad idea. Capital liquidity is critical for
an efficient economy. The only people who support capital gains taxes are
typically people with little capital -- they don't actually understand how it
works and the stunting effect it has on an economy.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> A capital gains tax a good idea? No -- that would decrease market liquidity
> and make the problem even worse.

Depends on the level. At the moment, the big problem is that nearly all of
NZ's capital goes into housing - the significant tax advantages (no tax on
your profits and LAQCs/LTCs) are one factor in this - inflating the price of
living, and starving our businesses of capital to grow and actually be
productive with.

I'd ask you why it's a good idea for an economy that profit from running a
company is taxed along wit the incomes of all your workers, but not the profit
from trading houses - especially as a lot of our property investors are
rolling by on the minimal amount of capital necessary - their debt is liquid
more than their capital.

------
JustSomeNobody
So, now NZers will not be able to afford to live in their own country.[0]

The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the
housing prices affordable to the rest of us.

[0] Or at least not own a house.

~~~
dave_sullivan
> The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the
> housing prices affordable to the rest of us.

If housing prices are unaffordable, blame property developers and/or
government. If they are unaffordable, that's usually a market signal to build
more housing because "all these property developers in city X are making lots
of money, let's build there too", which lowers the prices as more people get
in, etc. Unless "Ah, but dealing with government there will cost more money
than there is profit in the development, let's not build there"

Also, the term unaffordable is relative. Downtown San Francisco is very
expensive. It's not "unaffordable" because people have purchased most of those
units. And that's just how markets work. You've got a set amount of X (like
habitable living space), you've got a certain amount of people that want that
thing with a certain amount of money to spend, put it to an auction to
determine a fair market price. What's wrong with this equation exactly?

Blaming people for outbidding you in buying a house is ridiculous, even if
they outbid you because they simply have more money.

~~~
pitaj
Yeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. All of these people blaming the
buyers for buying and the politicians for not passing laws to disincentivize
them from doing so.

The solution is to build more housing. Full stop.

------
RandyRanderson
In BC, Canada we laugh at your measly 12.7% and raise you a ~18% [0] for a
total of +31.4% 2015aug-2016aug. Yes, you read that right.

It's funny how this article's impression is "prices are returning to normal"
when in fact the government's new token rules haven't had a chance to take
effect and certainly haven't had time to be analyzed.

Sadly, these new rules are just for show (an election is nearing here) and
until effective reforms are put in place the bubble will continue to rise.

[0] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump-
in-v...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump-in-vancouver-
real-estate-sales-called-a-return-to-historically-normal-levels-1.3745825?kkk)

------
FrancoDiaz
_...have helped make the South Pacific nation -- a day by air away from New
York or London_

Isn't that essentially anywhere on the planet?

~~~
hash-set
"A day by air" doesn't really connote how arduous a trip it is from the
states. It's a long trip, even by air.

~~~
sevensor
I'll bet that flight is less taxing in the company jet.

~~~
crummel
There's not a lot of corporate jets with that kind of range. It's more
Gulfstream ($60MM+) than Embraer, Lear, or Cessna (~$20MM).

------
FuNe
“The world is heading into a major crisis,” said Internet entrepreneur Kim
Dotcom in an Oct. 31 Twitter post. “I saw it coming and that’s why we moved to
New Zealand. Far away & not on any nuclear target list.”

It will probably ruin his day but the good thing with nuclear fall out is it's
globalized nature.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29)

~~~
arethuza
You do realise that _On the Beach_ is a completely fictional account of the
aftermath of a nuclear war? Fortunately nobody ever stockpiled cobalt salted
H-bombs.

Mind you _On the Beach_ is excellent, but not as a documentary on what might
happen after a global war.

~~~
pitaj
So the "source" the OP posted is based on something more like the doomsday
machine from Dr. Strangelove than a real nuclear attack?

~~~
arethuza
Yes, the book _On the Beach_ is from the 1950s not long after H-bombs were
invented - it is mentioned in the book that a lot of weapons used in the war
it describes were salted with cobalt to create large amounts of long lived
fallout. This is perfectly possible but fortunately was never actually done -
I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the
direct effects of weapons.

I can't remember if the cobalt bomb element is mentioned in the film versions
but was definitely mentioned in the book.

~~~
hga
_I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the
direct effects of weapons._

Not based on my understanding of H-bombs. For one thing, you need a tamper
made of _something_ dense, and depleted uranium U-238 is used if you want to
roughly double your yield while massively increasing the fallout created, then
it becomes a fission -> fusion -> fission bomb. Lead is substituted for
weapons like the one off 50 Gt Tsar Bomba, even the Soviet weren't willing to
damage that much of their territory, and there were minor details like pilot
survival
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)).
That tamper could perhaps be made out of cobalt, or you could wrap the
"physics package" in cobalt.

But it would be a fairly daft thing to do, cobalt-60 has, compared to normal
fission products, a long half-life of 5 years, so that which would eventually
fall out of the stratosphere would make things uncomfortable for you (normally
it will decay to a _de minimis_ level by the time it comes back down in
quantity).

On the other hand, it was pure propaganda to suggest such weapons would kill
all life on earth. Ignoring details like the impossibility of getting even
enough distribution, and that the earth is _big_ , really only issue for
humans who want to survive it, who'd be in heavy fallout areas, and who had
any time to prepare is having enough food until it decayed enough, more of a
lifeboat ethics sort of thing instead of the all but explicit message that we
should surrender to the USSR because we and they were so crazy we might do
something like that (and evil; if we, the far more evil _nuclear_ power after
JFK and McNamara changed our policy to MAD, weren't going to do it, there was
no danger).

------
thompo
expensive, isolated, absurdly beautiful...

i guess "unlikely" probably isn't the word i would use in this situation.

~~~
doldge
I wouldn't exactly call New Zealand expensive? It's more expensive than say,
south-east Asia (or similar regions), but then most places are.

I would consider it cheaper than the US and parts of the EU for most things.
Exceptions being certain imports (like cars) being more expensive due to the
cost associated with shipping them. From experience this doesn't hold for
smaller tech devices, for example I priced up a camera there vs my current
residents (Dublin, Ireland) and it was about $1,000NZD cheaper to purchase in
NZ (most likely due to being parallel imported from South East Asia).

Reference: grew-up in NZ, and have been living in Dublin for the last year.

~~~
adwn
Food is a lot more expensive in NZ than in Germany (to give one datapoint).

~~~
doldge
That's fair, and it's something I've noticed at supermarkets in Dublin as
well. I think the price of eating out is comparable though.

That said, I've noticed the portions of food tend to be smaller here in Dublin
as well (I suspect being a metropolitan area the supermarkets cater more to
individuals whereas the supermarkets back home tend to cater to families). For
example, it's next to impossible to buy 1kg of Cheese here in Dublin as the
largest you can get from a supermarket is 400 grams.

~~~
EdwardDiego
> I think the price of eating out is comparable though.

Eating out is cheaper in Germany (if you weight prices relative to wages) than
NZ.

------
EdwardDiego
I really like it when Russian oligarchs buy entire beaches here. :/

~~~
netrus
Do you prefer locals to buy the beaches?

~~~
maxxxxx
How about keeping them public for everybody?

~~~
pitaj
It depends on what your priorities are, but the tragedy of the commons is a
real thing.

------
XJOKOLAT
Really sad to read this in a "wish I could preserve it just as it is"
protective kind of way. It's a beautiful place.

If any of you mega-rich are reading this. Please don't fuck it up.

Consider your impact - and I'm not just talking about the enviroment.

~~~
ryandrake
If the mega-rich considered their impact--they wouldn't be mega-rich.

------
1_2__3
I know nobody wants to admit this but this is only going to get worse. India
and China are going to eat the world, because this is a numbers game.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's much more a game of _wealth_ than of _population_.

India and China were the largest countries (or regions) of the world for most
of the period from the fall of Rome through the early stages of
industrialisation -- say the 17th century. But they lacked the global reach
European nations established -- Portugal ("Bombay" comes from the Portuguese
"Bom Bia", or "good harbour"), Spain, the Netherlands, and of course England.

What India and China will need to compete with the West is a large wealthy
class. That's going to depend on both the absolute size of their economies (or
their capabilities to extract wealth by other means), and the size and wealth
of individual members of their wealthiest classes. China's economy is pulling
even with that of the US, though how sustainably it can do so remains a
question. It has over three times the population, though, so the _mean_ wealth
will be smaller.

What we're looking at though is the stratum of the ultra-rich. Here there's a
fair argument that, say, China could produce more billionaires than the US,
and if I'm remembering recent stats correctly, it's approaching that count.
Again, though, that's somewhat shakey, and it helps to remember that such
standings aren't based on _liquid_ wealth (cash and equivalent holdings), but
on the valuation of held assets. Should the Chinese or Indian economies
collapse suddenly, those valuations will fall (of course, the same caveat
applies in the US, UK, or EU).

~~~
pitaj
I think there are some good arguments to be made that economic mobility is
much more important to a healthy economy than any other metric, and this seems
like one place where China may have a handicap. India, though, depending on
the way their social structures move in the coming years, may have a good
chance at surpassing the US in terms of economic strength.

~~~
hga
_India ... may have a good chance at surpassing the US in terms of economic
strength._

I would think sufficient and reliable electrical power would be a prerequisite
for that, and to my knowledge that isn't going to happen in India in the
foreseeable future.

------
dharma1
I've heard this story in the past. People buying farmland and building air
strips in NZ. Makes sense, it would be fairly isolated from turmoils in the
rest of the world

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931325/Super-
rich-b...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931325/Super-rich-buying-
property-New-Zealand-bolthole-case-west-goes-meltdown.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-
network/2015/jan/...](https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-
network/2015/jan/23/nervous-super-rich-planning-escapes-davos-2015)

------
wmeredith
Isn't the irony here that the world isn't becoming more uncertain?

~~~
zardo
Here in the US, people seem less certain about the future than they were a
year ago.

~~~
hash-set
The US Debt to GDP ratio has turned us into Japan. It's stagnation. It's hard
to be optimistic in such an environment because nothing feels right and then
we have a lying-ass government to further obfuscate the facts.

------
kseifried
Stupid question but how much medicine/drugs does New Zealand produce? Does
anyone produce insulin in New Zealand? What about electronics? Components to
repair electronics? Cars? Car parts? Lightbulb manufacturers? I'm guessing
like most countries New Zealand is very dependant on global trade to make
basic things work. If things are so bad you need the remoteness of New Zealand
to survive I can't imagine global trade is going to be working all that well.

------
santaclaus
I always thought someone could make a fortune introducing insulation to homes
in NZ. Loved living in Wellington, but my god, the homes there are the
draftiest coldest places ever!

------
mountaineer22
ISP pricing/caps?

~~~
doldge
In the major cities you can get unlimited fiber with 100Mbit/s connection for
around $90 NZD a month.

in more rural area's the internet tends to be standard ADSL.

(side note; the governments "fiber to the door" roll out is apparently 68%
complete for urban areas as of June this year).

~~~
lostlogin
As an anecdata point, I don't know anyone with fibre and I live in Auckland. I
get 3mb on a good day when it's still and sunny. Rain and wind lead to dial up
speeds.

~~~
shavingspiders
Really? Similar anecdata, except nearly everyone I know is on fibre. 100/20
for $79 a month, or 1000/500 for $129/month.

~~~
lostlogin
Wonder if the rollout has targeted certain areas first - newer suburbs first
or those with the dodgiest copper? It really is dire where I am. I tried to
get on the Rural broadband (4g) bandwagon but the people at Spark I talked to
just couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't want the copper connection.

------
mishkinf
^^^^^^^^^ THIS IS More evidence that the condition of the world is degrading.
Making huge sums of money is immoral. The 62 wealthiest people in the world
have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people. This is completely
immoral and should be illegal. The mere fact that a person has billions of
dollars is evidence that there is tyranny in the world. The paradox of
capitalism is that the more a capitalist succeeds in reducing his costs
(labor), the less money the mass of people will have to buy the very products
by which a capitalist produces and thus cannot sell the products and services
he is producing. It is bound to fail in time... and after it does, we will
have to find a system which puts morality and love for one another at the
center of its goals.

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fbreduc
What i think is funny is that the mega rich thing in a collapsed society they
will be able to hold on to these areas? People... will just come and take it.

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ColonelPhantom
They'll probably hire some security to keep people out.

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fbreduc
Why wouldn't the security people just take it then? in a time like that,
clearly asking for help is a sign of weakness...going to someone stronger and
begging to keep you in power? doesn't make sense.. in chaos people will
_take_.

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imron
Rubbish. New Zealand's not that great. It's rubbish in fact.

Please everyone stay away.

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kodt
Just don't try to plant your own garden!

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EdwardDiego
Can we not do that here please. :/

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branchless
How odd. A former British colony with a land price problem washed through
banks that are making life worse for working people.

Most unusual. /s

