So, as part of signing up for a new job I’m also signing up for KiwiSaver. I’ve managed to put off learning about this for a while now but last night I finally put the time in to do a bit more reading. I knew the scheme is reputed to be generous and is generally seen to be well worth it for the individual but I needed to choose a provider and a scheme.
As my government-enforced retirement age of 65 is some years off I have chosen a growth-oriented scheme with a concentration in the share market. My understanding is that, over the long term, share markets have historically given the best returns. Of course this won’t go so well if we have an economic collapse triggered by climate change or runaway gray-goo or whatever and slide into a post-technological world - but my retirement plans are going to be in trouble if that happens anyway.
More importantly, I have chosen a ‘passive’ fund. This is one where they don’t have smart managers who wheel and deal to choose the best stocks/investments at any given time. Instead they just invest in shares/securities so that the fund tracks well-known indexes like the NZX 50. Therefore if the stock market as a whole goes up you’re winning, and vice-versa. It’s easier to manage so fees are a lot less.
Now, the interesting thing about ‘dumb’ passive funds is that they typically out-perform the ’smart’ active funds. All that wheeling and dealing costs money (in transaction and management costs) and any increased returns are typically eaten by that. Indeed, I seem to recall that actively managed funds typically perform worse than passive funds, even *before* transaction and management costs are taken into account. Most people aren’t Warren Buffett and are apparently pretty crap at investing. Of course, the managers still get paid their lovely salaries so at least they’re happy about it.
The only major flaw in KiwiSaver (from my selfish perspective) is that the government doesn’t guarantee the investments - but also doesn’t let you spread your risk by splitting your KiwiSaver contributions between 2 or more companies. So, it looks like all my eggs will be going into the scheme run by the ASB.
[Some of the things I believe about climate change and our environment, arranged in such a way as to resemble an argument. Comments are welcome, if I find them suitably compelling I'll publish a new version with them incorporated.]
That nature has no desire to keep Earth a nice place for humans to live.
That climate change has happened in the past and will happen again.
That climate change will result in changes that make our world a place less suited to human existence.
That the climate is a chaotic system and that we can not know what will happen with it next.
That the current predictions of what is happening with climate change are the best we have to go on and are worth paying attention to.
That there is a good chance that some sort of feedback loops will interfere with predicted climate change.
That the effects of one strong positive feedback loop overrides any number of negative feedback loops.
That human activities are influencing climate change.
That the modern consumer lifestyle directly contributes to climate change.
That people greatly enjoy the modern consumer lifestyle and that many people who do not currently enjoy it aspire to do so.
That individuals can reduce their personal contribution to climate change.
That those individual changes send useful messages to corporations and politicians that will influence behaviour in wider populations.
That these individual and collective changes in behaviour are insufficient to seriously reduce the human impact on climate change.
That there will never be the political will to voluntarily give up the modern consumer life style.
That humanity would rather ride the spiralling corpse of the current ecosystem down into the abyss than voluntarily give up the modern consumer life style.
That this is likely to happen.
That I don’t want it to.
That we can possibly develop new non-damaging technologies to both replace those that contribute to climate change, as well as ameliorate the effects of other technologies’ contributions to climate change.
That these technologies will need significant funding to be developed.
That commercial bodies may not see the benefit in funding the development.
That some form of collective funding (i.e. government) will be required.
That it is is better to spend more of our current resources on developing these technologies than to spend them on reducing activities that contribute to climate change.
That this doesn’t excuse us from trying to reduce activities that contribute to climate change.
That we should get on with it.
My first computer was a 1990 i386 with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive, scrounged from the offices of a local shipping company. Complete with serial mouse, IBM Model M keyboard, and 15″ color VGA monitor, it was my parents’ hope for making me into a competent writer, but it better succeeded in making me a PC gamer. This ancient machine, 17 years old, is incredibly outdated in the physical basis of every technological detail, except one: its hard disk.
This is the introductory paragraph for a rather lightweight article about hard drives. It’s also a great example of a writer saying something obviously stupid purely because it suited the rhetorical framework that they had chosen to use.
Yes, the hard drive does still take the basic form that it did 17 years ago. But when kept to the same level of required similarity, so does the memory, the CPU, the motherboard, the case, the power supply, and the keyboard. Indeed, the only two major physical design changes I can think of when it comes to the common PC is the replacement of ball mice with optical mice, and the rise of the flat-screen LCD monitor.
Don’t you just hate it when reality gets in the way of a good line?
Ah, IT commentators, some of them are so young. About Microsoft:
They’ve got this new “consumer” bug where they think they’ve got to be a player in every consumer market. I think they would be better served sticking to their enterprise roots and not chase every consumer trend.
Enterprise roots? Microsoft may be the company that ended up changing how enterprises (I don’t like the term and it hurts me to use it but it’ll have to do) implemented IT but it took a long time to happen and they definitely didn’t start there. Indeed, the enterprise fought against Microsoft and their silly PCs for quite a while, and even when they let PCs in to the front office they still weren’t prepared to let Microsoft into the datacentre.
If you had to pick a term, “hobbyist roots” would probably be more accurate.
In an earlier post I complained about Vodafone’s rapacious pricing of casual data rates ($11000 per GB).
Now in the comments at this post from Rob Drury we get the Vodafone PR guy Paul Brislen boasting that “The front page of Stuff alone would cost a fortune to open…”
So, he’s using his company’s unconscionable pricing model to justify providing their own limited walled garden (Vodafone Live) that they just happen to make lots of money with.
They really do have no shame.
According to Statistics NZ, there were 21,500 resident couples who married last year while another 316 chose a civil union (103 male/male, 150 female/female and 63 male/female).
Those damn marriages are still winning!
Microsoft have included the IDT High Definition Audio CODEC as an optional update within Windows Update. Installing it killed my audio as it has done for a number of other users.
I’d recommend not installing it for now.
(I ended up fixing it by uninstalling it and reinstalling the Dell audio drivers from scratch. Other options would be using System Restore to go back to before you installed it.)
I’m kind of disappointed because Windows Update has always been so amazingly solid for me in the past.
I went down to the “Farmer’s Market” at Waitangi Park on Sunday. I use the quotes because I don’t believe that our local farmers are growing bananas and pineapples. There was lots of produce available and the prices looked ok but I think I’d prefer a real farmer’s market rather than just a collection of open-air itinerant fruit stands. Commonsense Organics a block away seems to do a better job of supplying local produce and labeling where it came from.
What was more interesting was the fishing boats tied up at the wharf. There were two of them, offering bluenose, blue cod, some shark, and a variety of other fish from Cook Strait. You could buy the fish whole or gutted, and even pay $3 extra to have them filleted for you. Remembering my own efforts at filleting fish from family holidays in the Marlborough Sounds I recommend paying the extra. The blue cod had sold out by 10am so it might be worth getting down there early.
The Vendémiaire, a frigate of the French Navy is currently docked in Wellington. It’s apparently visiting New Zealand for Anzac Day because of the following non-reason constructed by the French public relations team:
The people of New Caledonia have not forgotten the Australian and New Zealand troops that trained in New Caledonia before leaving for combat elsewhere in the Pacific during World War Two or who visited New Caledonia on their way home to Australia and New Zealand at the end of the war.
What did amuse me is that it’s in exactly the same place that the Rainbow Warrior (version II) was docked about a week ago.
Stuff is reporting that Hillary Clinton has been telling anti Helen Clark jokes!
The gaffe came in a chummy interview with American magazine Newsweek, when journalist Karen Breslau asked Mrs Clinton for a joke: “Here’s a good one. Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand: her opponents have observed that in the event of a nuclear war, the two things that will emerge from the rubble are the cockroaches and Helen Clark. [Laughs]“
Stuff is more amused by Clinton describing Helen Clark as the “former Prime Minister” even though she’s very much the current one.
Personally I think it’s very strange that an apparently serious candidate for the US presidency is telling jokes about the leaders of other countries. I mean, I know we’re not exactly allies any more, but we did send some symbolic troops to the wars she supported in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I wonder what she was thinking.