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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I have mixed emotions over all this.

    To start, I agree, flat taxes are regressive and a bad way to tax people.

    However, NZ gets a lot of tourists and GST is an effective way to collect money from them to fund the things they use. You could say just tax them directly, but I think a $1000 entry fee would put off many tourists that otherwise would come here and happily pay that much GST in their spending.

    We also have no true capital gains tax. Without this, GST is practically the only way we get tax from the ultra wealthy, right?

    So instead we could leave GST alone and provide subsidies to make fresh food cheaper, but that seems to also be making the system more complex by balancing tax collection against subsidies for the same thing, and also creating a whole chain of questions about where the subsidies go. Do we give them to potato farmers that then get pressured for cheaper prices from the duopoly, who don’t pass along the full discount and end up subsidising their profits? (This will likely happen with removing GST too, but we won’t have to work out which farmers get subsidies and which don’t). If we subsidise farmers then we also subsidise overseas consumers that they sell to.

    So do we just hand cash to supermarkets to make certain products cheaper? This seems more complex than just removing GST.

    I have no view on what’s the right thing here because it seems complex and like there might not be a right answer. But I am curious how subsidies would work in practice.






  • This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).

    And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.

    Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.












  • I’m heading to bed now, but it’s looking good!

    screen shot of lemmy.nz design on canvas

    Canvas ends 4pm tomorrow. Perhaps some touch ups to do tomorrow depending on what happens overnight.

    Tomorrow, if it’s still intact, I’ll probably try to fill in some more background around this area of the canvas with some colour or spread the blue, to try to make it look less empty in the gaps between different projects. If anyone sees projects worth contributing to I’m available for hire (as much as I can be on a work day, anyway).