After watching the final Harry Potter, I felt like I should go back and watch the first again. It has been years since I have seen it. I remember seeing it with my kids when they were probably far too young to remember it. We've had the DVD forever and the kids have watched it many times in the first couple of years we had it. But during all that time, I never really watched it with them. It was just on in the background while I puttered around cleaning or something. I'll guess that we picked up the DVD when the kids were 3, 4, and 5.
I was surprised that watching the original would make me think so much of my own kids and how they've grown. It felt very much like Harry, Hermione, and Ron were old childhood playmates of our own kids and we had a 2 hour film of them in our collection. I thought a bit about parents of the actors and how these films will be like the best family vacation films ever. I can imagine how much I would love a two hour film of my own children as they grew up... one a year for 8 years. Even if they were playing characters totally unlike themselves. There is just something about seeing the look in my children's eyes when they are happy and playing. Oh they were all so young.
They grow up too fast. Time slips by too fast. There will always be new stories to tell. But I do feel a real sense of mourning for the stories that end. All too soon my own children who are now 11, 12, and 13 will race through their final years of school. Hopefully there will be less danger in the world than poor Harry and friends had to face! But the story my children write will be more precious to me. I am afraid to start it. I don't want it to end.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Corp America(tm)
This is a bit of satire that I wrote last night, but like all good satire it has a degree of truth… But for the record I have no means to establish Corp America and it is not a real entity.
I am tired of dancing around the issue. The current system of smoke and mirrors controlling our politics is inefficient and a bit childish. So I’m going to call a spade a spade and design a better system. I’m going to establish Corp America™*.
Corp America is going to have one purpose; to absolutely control American politics and policy. I’m not going to flinch from that fact at all. Corp America is out to buy votes, make laws, and secure our interests. Buying stock in Corp America will allow every share holder to exercise more voting power than they have ever had at the ballot box. Working for Corp America will put you on the front line of political influence and impact to our society. Our agenda will be clear, published, and voted in by the share holders.
Our capital will be used in strategic investments to make profits and foster our agenda. Our intent will be to make the USA better for Americans, a more respectful member of the global community, and an earnest proponent of profits for the middle-class. We will have a legal department, HR, accountants, consultants, assistants, executives, project managers, and a healthy benefit package. We will strive to be the America we want the US to become. Our physical projects will focus on improving America’s infrastructure (transport, utilities, and resources). Our soft products will focus on improving education and access to education. As an employee, it will be your job to get smarter. Corp America projects would emphasize green energy sources, technologies to reduce emissions, secondary education facilities, and projects to develop public transportation. Corp America will participate in the stock market, investments, and a company credit union.
Our headquarters will be located as close to Congress, the Whitehouse, and Supreme Court as is financially possible. Bonus pay will be given based on traceable influence to policy makers. We will never be covert. All of our salaries will be public knowledge. We will stand out. We will be visible, vocal, and determined. All of our profits will be spent on gaining control of the US government—including placing our employees in to the government. Our employees in government will continue to earn Corp America paychecks as long as they voluntarily continue to participate in Corp America policies set by the shareholders.
Corp America will not discriminate on the basis of sex, religion, orientation, race, shirt size, pet preference, or favorite color. We will not seek to influence these areas of society other than to insure there is no discrimination in America for anyone.
We are neither Republican nor Democrat. We seek to be neither Conservative nor Liberal. We speak for all Americans with focus on restoring the middle-class and working to move more from poverty up and more from ultra rich down. Equality of economics is not the goal, just a smoothing of the curve. There will always be rich and there will always be poor. We will endeavour to do all we can to limit the extremes.
All employees will be required to participate in all elections. Individuals must vote to their conscience, but we would hope that conscience aligns with Corp America™ shareholder policy. Voting is a minimal condition to receiving any bonus pay. To be clear you can earn your bonus for any vote on any issue—you simply must vote. Each member of your household must vote if they are legally allowed to do so. Our corporate training will focus on getting the best information and education around our agenda issues to our employees. We will maintain a website detailing how our corporation wishes to vote on all issues on the ballot in every district where we operate. Again, you always vote the way you wish, but we will document what we feel is the best vote and back it up with unbiased reasoning and analysis freely available to Corp America employees and publicly posted on our web presence.
The workers of Corp America will automatically be unionized as a free benefit for the first year of employment. After the first year, the employee will be responsible for dues to be set by the Corp America Union. Corp America will establish a pay ratio between the highest paid and lowest paid employee regardless of where that employee sits in the organization.
Should you gain elected office as a Corp America employee, your immediate duties will cease and you will assume your new role as a public official. You will uphold all legal and ethical obligations to your post. Your job at Corp America will become being an effective leader in your role. You will gain access to our political advisors and educational resources. Corp America will determine what actions to take should you violate the law or ethical policies—this may include termination and notification of proper legal authorities. Corp America will not attempt to hide any of your actions and will actively seek to bring all such actions to public view.
Buy American. Shed the illusion of democracy and embrace the real democracy of our times. Invest in Corp America. Recruiting today!
*A real trademark will be selected later; suggestions welcome.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Mid 2011 in NZ
Folks always arrange the stones in the tidal flats to say different things. So far all of them have been pretty good messages.
Including short holiday with the boys to Abel Tasman / Nelson
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Counting Bytes
Let me start by saying I never thought per byte billing was a good idea. But it is what the industry is largely stuck with. Why? Because we're too dumb to understand other methods. Nevermind that we're too dumb to really understand bytes, but it is a concept we think we understand. We don't. Here's a a brief attempt to explain.
It seems simple to say you get charged a fixed rate for a chunk of downloads. Say 10 cents for 1 gig of data. Use 10 gig and pay $1. Totally cake, right? Well... did you mean gigaBITS or gigaBYTES? A byte is 8 bits... so if you bought 10 gigabits you got 8 times less than 10 gigabytes. Now... does gig mean 1,000,000,000 to you? or 1,024,000,000 to you? You see a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes... not a 1000. Back in the day this difference was tiny and easily ignored. Today we see the error maginified as kB moved to MB and then to GB and someday to Terrabytes.
So immediately we find potential confusion in byte counting without even getting in to the technology. Let's look under the hood... Let's focus on download bytes as that is what most of us care about and pay for. We go to YouTube and download 1 gigabyte of video for 10 cents. So our usage should be 1 Gigabyte, right? Wrong... While it will be pretty close to 1 gig, we run in to problems with overhead. You see the video you watched was "user data" or "payload". It was packaged up by YouTube's servers and then sent to other network devices that added their own information in order to send it. There are some control messages also be sent back and forth to verify all the data was received. This extra chunk of data is considered "overhead" to you and I, but we couldn't get the funny kitten videos if we didn't have overhead. So who pays for overhead? Me or the Provider? Well usually consumers do. So if I was just counting video size, I'll be a little low of the actual bytes sent. How low? Well that's a really hard question since it depends on dozens of factors. How many clips did I download? One big download will have less overhead than many small downloads. How busy was the line between me and YouTube? If the line was busy, there is a chance a chunk of data got mangled or dropped and had to be re-sent (more overhead). These factors go on and on making exactly how much overhead experienced impossible to predict. So again, without looking very hard we've found confusing areas in byte counting.
Now consider malice. As in, malicious software. You may be running the cleanest PC on earth completely free of viruses and spyware, but thousands of other users are not. Their PC's are frequently scanning zombies sending out megs of probes to random address ranges looking for other unprotected hosts. This background noise on the Internet is constant and unstoppable. The best we can do is filter out the worst and tell consumers to use various protection techniques. But a Provider can not fully stop all the background noise. These unsolicited bytes are sent to you and the Provider counts them against your bill. The full amount of these will also vary widely on conditions.
Lastly, we have plain ol' boneheaded ignorance. We don't know how much we're downloading. We don't realize that CNN's homepage is a few hundred megabytes. We don't know how big the pop-up ads are. We don't know how big that video stream really was. We don't know how big Window's Update really was. There are million things communicating on consumer PCs these days (and Playstations and networked game consoles). We are woefully unaware of these transactions.
Byte counting is terrible. It is always going to be open to very wide interpretation. Your Provider is always going to seem a bit high and what you're really downloading is (for now) always going to be largely a mystery unless you're a network monitoring professional with a packet analyzer connected on your outgoing link... which is a challenge even for hardcore geeks to get good analysis on DSL or Cable modem lines.
So far this has all been pretty simple concepts. From here it gets much more complex, but no less confusing and significant. There are a million valid ways your Provider could be counting bytes. It will barely make sense to them let alone the customer. The only thing they have going for them is that whatever system they use will likely be consistent across all consumers. That is if it 10% wrong, it will be 10% wrong all the time. As consumers we have to live with it. Don't ask your Provider to tell you how they do it. It is unlikely you'll get a coherent answer. Even if you were an expert in billing systems it would likely take you weeks of research to plot exactly how the byte counting is done from one Provider to the next.
Counting bytes is what we're stuck with for the short term. But don't get too hung up about accuracy. The question is too subjective. I think the only thing we can tell our service providers is "we want it to cost less". We don't care how. Just make it cost less... OR be more valuable to us. But please... lose the byte counting. It has become meaningless.
It seems simple to say you get charged a fixed rate for a chunk of downloads. Say 10 cents for 1 gig of data. Use 10 gig and pay $1. Totally cake, right? Well... did you mean gigaBITS or gigaBYTES? A byte is 8 bits... so if you bought 10 gigabits you got 8 times less than 10 gigabytes. Now... does gig mean 1,000,000,000 to you? or 1,024,000,000 to you? You see a kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes... not a 1000. Back in the day this difference was tiny and easily ignored. Today we see the error maginified as kB moved to MB and then to GB and someday to Terrabytes.
So immediately we find potential confusion in byte counting without even getting in to the technology. Let's look under the hood... Let's focus on download bytes as that is what most of us care about and pay for. We go to YouTube and download 1 gigabyte of video for 10 cents. So our usage should be 1 Gigabyte, right? Wrong... While it will be pretty close to 1 gig, we run in to problems with overhead. You see the video you watched was "user data" or "payload". It was packaged up by YouTube's servers and then sent to other network devices that added their own information in order to send it. There are some control messages also be sent back and forth to verify all the data was received. This extra chunk of data is considered "overhead" to you and I, but we couldn't get the funny kitten videos if we didn't have overhead. So who pays for overhead? Me or the Provider? Well usually consumers do. So if I was just counting video size, I'll be a little low of the actual bytes sent. How low? Well that's a really hard question since it depends on dozens of factors. How many clips did I download? One big download will have less overhead than many small downloads. How busy was the line between me and YouTube? If the line was busy, there is a chance a chunk of data got mangled or dropped and had to be re-sent (more overhead). These factors go on and on making exactly how much overhead experienced impossible to predict. So again, without looking very hard we've found confusing areas in byte counting.
Now consider malice. As in, malicious software. You may be running the cleanest PC on earth completely free of viruses and spyware, but thousands of other users are not. Their PC's are frequently scanning zombies sending out megs of probes to random address ranges looking for other unprotected hosts. This background noise on the Internet is constant and unstoppable. The best we can do is filter out the worst and tell consumers to use various protection techniques. But a Provider can not fully stop all the background noise. These unsolicited bytes are sent to you and the Provider counts them against your bill. The full amount of these will also vary widely on conditions.
Lastly, we have plain ol' boneheaded ignorance. We don't know how much we're downloading. We don't realize that CNN's homepage is a few hundred megabytes. We don't know how big the pop-up ads are. We don't know how big that video stream really was. We don't know how big Window's Update really was. There are million things communicating on consumer PCs these days (and Playstations and networked game consoles). We are woefully unaware of these transactions.
Byte counting is terrible. It is always going to be open to very wide interpretation. Your Provider is always going to seem a bit high and what you're really downloading is (for now) always going to be largely a mystery unless you're a network monitoring professional with a packet analyzer connected on your outgoing link... which is a challenge even for hardcore geeks to get good analysis on DSL or Cable modem lines.
So far this has all been pretty simple concepts. From here it gets much more complex, but no less confusing and significant. There are a million valid ways your Provider could be counting bytes. It will barely make sense to them let alone the customer. The only thing they have going for them is that whatever system they use will likely be consistent across all consumers. That is if it 10% wrong, it will be 10% wrong all the time. As consumers we have to live with it. Don't ask your Provider to tell you how they do it. It is unlikely you'll get a coherent answer. Even if you were an expert in billing systems it would likely take you weeks of research to plot exactly how the byte counting is done from one Provider to the next.
Counting bytes is what we're stuck with for the short term. But don't get too hung up about accuracy. The question is too subjective. I think the only thing we can tell our service providers is "we want it to cost less". We don't care how. Just make it cost less... OR be more valuable to us. But please... lose the byte counting. It has become meaningless.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Learning about Me
I made a bit of a profound discovery today while working with Chandler on homeschooling. We just finished reading "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and I want him to do some sort of project to express what he thought was important out of the book. I bet most of us ended up doing a book report on it. That was pretty lame and I don't really care about a written report as much as I care about Chandler making a connection with the book. And then it hit me...
All of our learning, all of our lives has really been a self discovery. All this time I thought I was learning about the topic (e.g. how to do maths, how to break down a problem, etc.) and I was partly, but for the larger part I was actually learning about me. I learned problem solving quickly and so I discovered I have good analysis skills. I read and write well and so discovered that I can express myself that way best. When I fell in love with the works of Mark Twain and J.R.R Tolkien, I discovered even more about me through their characters. Each iota of learning clings to a part of me and helps me see it more clearly. The comparison goes on and on.
Things I struggle with tell me just as much as things I pick up quickly. As strange as it sounds, it is all about me. And it is all about you too. I once read, "The process of learning is only taking that which we already know and making us conscious of it." I can now add to this sublime phrase and say that all that we learn is a discovery of ourselves.
It seems all our life is a discovery of what we are and what place we hold.
All of our learning, all of our lives has really been a self discovery. All this time I thought I was learning about the topic (e.g. how to do maths, how to break down a problem, etc.) and I was partly, but for the larger part I was actually learning about me. I learned problem solving quickly and so I discovered I have good analysis skills. I read and write well and so discovered that I can express myself that way best. When I fell in love with the works of Mark Twain and J.R.R Tolkien, I discovered even more about me through their characters. Each iota of learning clings to a part of me and helps me see it more clearly. The comparison goes on and on.
Things I struggle with tell me just as much as things I pick up quickly. As strange as it sounds, it is all about me. And it is all about you too. I once read, "The process of learning is only taking that which we already know and making us conscious of it." I can now add to this sublime phrase and say that all that we learn is a discovery of ourselves.
It seems all our life is a discovery of what we are and what place we hold.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
World Changes
In the early 1900's the political and economic face of the Western world was radically changing. Populations were exploding and industrialization was providing technology never before possible, but the old political scheme of monarchy was still wide-spread. The old political scheme failed and WWI was the fire to the gasoline that ignited changes to the core of what we know as society today.
Now, 100 years later, we see again radically changing world events. Populations are even larger, industry is massive, technology and communications have created a "Globalized" world. Again we find ourselves in the perilous position where our style of governing is ill-suited to our environment. Resources are strained. Economics are being widely exploited by organizations that transcend national governments. Critical events on the other side of the globe have massive impact on those on the other side.
We're standing in a lake of gasoline. We better take a look at who's holding matches.
The unwritten Social Contract can not be ignored. As the unrest around the world has graphically demonstrated, governments that fail to provide for the people fail spectacularly. Today one could argue that often business conglomerates now function more as a government than traditional borders have in the past. But with this change comes the new responsibility of those conglomerates to assume the burden of the Social Contract. Wealth remains the primary power in human governing. Those with the wealth must take a great interest in millions of people that support their vast fortunes. Even if populations do not overtly revolt, a broken Social Contract results in broken workers without any more wealth to give.
These are interesting times.
In the pre-WWI era, war was a viable means of political control. Battles were limited to soldiers and the posturing was mostly a matter of pride among nobles. "My army is better than yours." But the huge population growth of the industrial age allowed for vast (in the time) military forces. The weaponry they could use was a quantum leap in effectiveness compared to single-shot rifles and swords. The monarchy system gravitated to armed conflicts, but when this finally occurred, the result was a war no one in the day could have imagined. WWI changed forever how wars would be fought and virtually erased monarchy from the political scheme.
Today the weapons of mass destruction we face are not the deadly sort. Our issue in 2011 isn't a nuclear war; we're all pretty aware of how that would turn out. Our threat today is global finance. How we earn a living today depends on workers in China who depend on cheap resources in the 3rd world and oil producing nations. Those resources and workers are not (directly) controlled by the governments of those nations, but rather by the "private" industries that employ them. These industries are bound to the financial sector and ultimately to the investment firms which now control our world economy.
Using the WWI analogy today applied to the financial crisis you could say WWIII has started. It isn't being fought with nuclear weapons, it is being fought in Stock Exchange markets around the world. The results could well alter the face of the political world as greatly as WWI.
What brings me to these thoughts today? Well WWI started with a fairly insignificant event--the assassination of Archiduke Ferdinand of Austria. No one could have predicted the next 4 years. This week we have seen a potentially mortal blow to the Japanese economy. This earthquake is already sending financial shockwaves in to the depressed global markets.
Maybe this event is not the assassination that starts the domino effect of a financial WWIII. But is such an event only waiting to occur? Soon our stretched economies will reach a point where there is nothing left to give and support will end. National governments will attempt to reign in private resources to remain functional... But will the private sector allow them? What is to prevent a global corporation from simply stating, "Sorry, we have the resources and we'll continue to profit as we please."
What form will the conflict take? I can't say. It isn't too hard to imagine a worker's revolt. That would follow the pattern of French Revolution. But I think such a revolt would suffer from having no clear enemy to revolt against. There is no monarchy to depose. The rules of the Social Contract apply to the workers as much as it does to the ruling class. Worker needs have to be met. But we can't exist without the wealthy to fund our lives. So workers could not just pull down the structure of the financial world. Well... they could, but what would replace it? Communism or Socialism? These are possible and that would change the political scheme of the Western world. Communism doesn't have a great history of being able to fulfill the Social Contract. So if it did occur, it would have to be a Communism we have never seen on the global scale. It would be comical if Marx turned out to be right.
I don't think Communism will win out. I don't think we'll see an armed workers revolt and therefore we won't see a radical dismantling of "Wall Street". No... what will survive will have assume that Wall Street survives, but now Wall Street needs to expand its powers to the lives of the workers. One can not exist without the other and even the most miserly of Scrooges will see the cost of doing business in the equation. Strange to think that perhaps William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) may have guessed more accurately than Marx.
Regardless of the options. The nut of the issue remains. Changes are necessary. We are not islands of sovereign nations. We are sovereign nations 100% dependent on the barons of our financial system who now operate without borders. They control our resources, our printed money, and our governments. They may not have precision control yet, but it is only a matter of time. They may not even be aware yet of their new potential role. They probably imagine they are still just doing what wealthy people do--make money. Sure they fundamentally grasp they have power and wealth, but it could be that the time is coming where they must acknowledge they have now acquired the third component to the ruling class in the Social Contract... power, wealth, and responsibility.
I welcome our new alien overlords.
Now, 100 years later, we see again radically changing world events. Populations are even larger, industry is massive, technology and communications have created a "Globalized" world. Again we find ourselves in the perilous position where our style of governing is ill-suited to our environment. Resources are strained. Economics are being widely exploited by organizations that transcend national governments. Critical events on the other side of the globe have massive impact on those on the other side.
We're standing in a lake of gasoline. We better take a look at who's holding matches.
The unwritten Social Contract can not be ignored. As the unrest around the world has graphically demonstrated, governments that fail to provide for the people fail spectacularly. Today one could argue that often business conglomerates now function more as a government than traditional borders have in the past. But with this change comes the new responsibility of those conglomerates to assume the burden of the Social Contract. Wealth remains the primary power in human governing. Those with the wealth must take a great interest in millions of people that support their vast fortunes. Even if populations do not overtly revolt, a broken Social Contract results in broken workers without any more wealth to give.
These are interesting times.
In the pre-WWI era, war was a viable means of political control. Battles were limited to soldiers and the posturing was mostly a matter of pride among nobles. "My army is better than yours." But the huge population growth of the industrial age allowed for vast (in the time) military forces. The weaponry they could use was a quantum leap in effectiveness compared to single-shot rifles and swords. The monarchy system gravitated to armed conflicts, but when this finally occurred, the result was a war no one in the day could have imagined. WWI changed forever how wars would be fought and virtually erased monarchy from the political scheme.
Today the weapons of mass destruction we face are not the deadly sort. Our issue in 2011 isn't a nuclear war; we're all pretty aware of how that would turn out. Our threat today is global finance. How we earn a living today depends on workers in China who depend on cheap resources in the 3rd world and oil producing nations. Those resources and workers are not (directly) controlled by the governments of those nations, but rather by the "private" industries that employ them. These industries are bound to the financial sector and ultimately to the investment firms which now control our world economy.
Using the WWI analogy today applied to the financial crisis you could say WWIII has started. It isn't being fought with nuclear weapons, it is being fought in Stock Exchange markets around the world. The results could well alter the face of the political world as greatly as WWI.
What brings me to these thoughts today? Well WWI started with a fairly insignificant event--the assassination of Archiduke Ferdinand of Austria. No one could have predicted the next 4 years. This week we have seen a potentially mortal blow to the Japanese economy. This earthquake is already sending financial shockwaves in to the depressed global markets.
Maybe this event is not the assassination that starts the domino effect of a financial WWIII. But is such an event only waiting to occur? Soon our stretched economies will reach a point where there is nothing left to give and support will end. National governments will attempt to reign in private resources to remain functional... But will the private sector allow them? What is to prevent a global corporation from simply stating, "Sorry, we have the resources and we'll continue to profit as we please."
What form will the conflict take? I can't say. It isn't too hard to imagine a worker's revolt. That would follow the pattern of French Revolution. But I think such a revolt would suffer from having no clear enemy to revolt against. There is no monarchy to depose. The rules of the Social Contract apply to the workers as much as it does to the ruling class. Worker needs have to be met. But we can't exist without the wealthy to fund our lives. So workers could not just pull down the structure of the financial world. Well... they could, but what would replace it? Communism or Socialism? These are possible and that would change the political scheme of the Western world. Communism doesn't have a great history of being able to fulfill the Social Contract. So if it did occur, it would have to be a Communism we have never seen on the global scale. It would be comical if Marx turned out to be right.
I don't think Communism will win out. I don't think we'll see an armed workers revolt and therefore we won't see a radical dismantling of "Wall Street". No... what will survive will have assume that Wall Street survives, but now Wall Street needs to expand its powers to the lives of the workers. One can not exist without the other and even the most miserly of Scrooges will see the cost of doing business in the equation. Strange to think that perhaps William Gibson (author of Neuromancer) may have guessed more accurately than Marx.
Regardless of the options. The nut of the issue remains. Changes are necessary. We are not islands of sovereign nations. We are sovereign nations 100% dependent on the barons of our financial system who now operate without borders. They control our resources, our printed money, and our governments. They may not have precision control yet, but it is only a matter of time. They may not even be aware yet of their new potential role. They probably imagine they are still just doing what wealthy people do--make money. Sure they fundamentally grasp they have power and wealth, but it could be that the time is coming where they must acknowledge they have now acquired the third component to the ruling class in the Social Contract... power, wealth, and responsibility.
I welcome our new alien overlords.
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Student Visa: Denied
Well, I've run out of any school options in New Zealand for Chandler. What I find particularly maddening about it all is everyone acknowledges that if the paperwork was filed correctly, and all the fees paid, then he would be allowed access to any public school in New Zealand. The only catch is that filing all those forms will cost $3000 and 6 months of processing. By which time, my visitation is over and he'll be on his way home.
Recall that I started filing, calling, and writing to Immigration in about June 2010 and it has taken until March 2011 to finally get clear instructions about what is required for Chandler to attend a public school. Had I filed for a full Residency application for Chandler, I still would have run afoul of the time it takes to process. We ran in to this problem with our own application where the time it takes immigration to respond exceeds the limit they place on the data.. For example a medical check is only good for 3 months and it takes 6 months for them to process it... forcing you to get a second set of health checks and resubmitting your application. Medical checks are not covered by any sort of insurance as they are totally voluntary.
Here's another annoying factoid... If I were an *illegal* immigrant, the Ministry of Education would allow my children to enroll without a Student Visa. But because I have paid all my immigration fees and taxes (a Resident), I can't enroll Chandler without a Student Visa. If I was here on a 30-month work visa... Chandler would be allowed a Student Visa... But again, because I'm actually a Resident, I can't do this. I was told a few times this was to prevent the NZ tax payers from being burdened with paying for this education. Well I'm one of those tax payers and I have been for 3 years. Meanwhile illegal immigrants (not paying taxes) and Work Visa holders (protentially not paying taxes either) get the full benefit of public schools. Additional insanity results when you consider my youngest son (who was part of my original Residency application) is going to public school and has been since our arrival in 2008.
One other gripe. Legislation in NZ prevents the schools from reducing the International Student fees in any way. There are no exception cases, no flexibility for the system to handle students in any sort of special circumstance or even temporarily. This is really the key flaw of the system. I understand the need to have solid requirements for Residency and Visas... but to use a system without any flexibility just serves to dramatically limit anyone willing to put up with it.
So NZ Immigration has successfully protected NZ tax payers from allowing a student from culturally participating New Zealand schools. He won't take that experience back with him to the US. He won't get to participate in NZ school sports. He won't get the chance to meet other NZ students to make friends or plan future Overseas Experiences... I'm sure that protection will have a pay back.
In the meantime, we'll come up with some good home-study for Chandler. But I can't do anything to make up for the friends he won't make. I'll try to get him in to some other activies and we'll make do. I'm just disappointed that we've allowed forms and policies to make our lives poorer.
Recall that I started filing, calling, and writing to Immigration in about June 2010 and it has taken until March 2011 to finally get clear instructions about what is required for Chandler to attend a public school. Had I filed for a full Residency application for Chandler, I still would have run afoul of the time it takes to process. We ran in to this problem with our own application where the time it takes immigration to respond exceeds the limit they place on the data.. For example a medical check is only good for 3 months and it takes 6 months for them to process it... forcing you to get a second set of health checks and resubmitting your application. Medical checks are not covered by any sort of insurance as they are totally voluntary.
Here's another annoying factoid... If I were an *illegal* immigrant, the Ministry of Education would allow my children to enroll without a Student Visa. But because I have paid all my immigration fees and taxes (a Resident), I can't enroll Chandler without a Student Visa. If I was here on a 30-month work visa... Chandler would be allowed a Student Visa... But again, because I'm actually a Resident, I can't do this. I was told a few times this was to prevent the NZ tax payers from being burdened with paying for this education. Well I'm one of those tax payers and I have been for 3 years. Meanwhile illegal immigrants (not paying taxes) and Work Visa holders (protentially not paying taxes either) get the full benefit of public schools. Additional insanity results when you consider my youngest son (who was part of my original Residency application) is going to public school and has been since our arrival in 2008.
One other gripe. Legislation in NZ prevents the schools from reducing the International Student fees in any way. There are no exception cases, no flexibility for the system to handle students in any sort of special circumstance or even temporarily. This is really the key flaw of the system. I understand the need to have solid requirements for Residency and Visas... but to use a system without any flexibility just serves to dramatically limit anyone willing to put up with it.
So NZ Immigration has successfully protected NZ tax payers from allowing a student from culturally participating New Zealand schools. He won't take that experience back with him to the US. He won't get to participate in NZ school sports. He won't get the chance to meet other NZ students to make friends or plan future Overseas Experiences... I'm sure that protection will have a pay back.
In the meantime, we'll come up with some good home-study for Chandler. But I can't do anything to make up for the friends he won't make. I'll try to get him in to some other activies and we'll make do. I'm just disappointed that we've allowed forms and policies to make our lives poorer.
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