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Kent Duston

@kentduston.bsky.social

740 followers 890 following 1.6K posts

Walking the fine line between cool and dorky in Aotearoa New Zealand. Also: left-leaning neurodiverse ADHD Boomer, tangata Tiriti, LGBTQIA+ ally, spending my professional life working on wellbeing - and Toitū te Tiriti, dammit

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Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3h

Well sure - but how to people in Ōpōtiki get their groceries if they can’t drive?

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3h

I don’t know why you’re continuing to bang this drum. Literally no-one - not the regulators, not the politicians, not the wider sector - agrees with you

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 7h

Yes, you’re right … but imagine living in Ōpōtiki and being told you’re no longer allowed to drive. How do you even get groceries? We’ve built a transport system where we have to give people licenses because there’s literally no alternative, which is nuts

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 7h

Despite the many merits of the idea, we’d have to take account of the fact that the vast majority of NZers outside the main centres would have no way to get to work or school or anywhere else without driving, because there are no PT options

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 12h

For the record, the study and the supporting economic analysis concluded the four Aussie-owned banks constitute an oligopoly with low levels of competition and exceptionally high profits

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 12h

You’re just rehashing the same tired arguments made in the ComCom market study, which were completely discredited:

www.comcom.govt.nz/regulated-in...

Market study into personal banking services | Commerce Commission

www.comcom.govt.nz

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 22h

But it’s not a competitive market, as both the Commerce Commission’s year long study into personal banking and the full Select Committee inquiry concluded. Or is that something else you’re not aware of?

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 23h

That’s an impressive piece of historical revisionism … because RBNZ only started the process in 2019. So why were the NIMs in NZ some 50% higher than across the Tasman for all of the preceding decade? Is it because the Aussie-owned banks are rapacious parasites?

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

So explain to me why the NIM in AoNZ is 2.6% when it’s only 1.7% for the identical bank in Australia, other than profiteering

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

In our OIA requests around the MODA, it’s become apparent that there was political will to replace the legislation after the Law Commission report - but it appears Ministry of Health officials really didn’t want to do the work, so killed all progress

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

Alternatively, convener -at- aroreretini -dot- nz

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

Superb and totally on-point cartoon, Sharon

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

www.thepost.co.nz/business/360...

www.thepost.co.nz

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

Unfortunately, that’s not what the Commerce Commission nor the Select Committee found in their respective inquiries into banking. There are high barriers to entry, negligible competition, and very high margins - largely thanks to RBNZ protecting the Aussie-owned banks

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 1d

As it turns out, it wasn’t the Minister that killed it - that was done by MoH officials, who decided the Therapeutic Products Bill would suffice. And the last document has a hand-written note from the Minister saying he’s not happy with that, and requiring a meeting

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 2d

These companies seem to be hallucinating shareholder value in the same way their products are hallucinating answers to basic questions. Although the phrase circle-jerk does rather come to mind

Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 2d

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Hardware or Software / Investment / Services / Venture Capital
Circles sized by market value
Microsoft
$3.9T
Ambience
Healthcare
Harvey Al
Anysphere
Nebius
OpenAl
$500B
CoreWeave
OpenAl to deploy 6 gigawatts of AMD
GPUs. AMD gives OpenAl option to buy up to 160 million shares.
Nvidia agrees to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAl.
Intel
Nvidia
$4.5T
AMD
OpenAl inks a $300 billion cloud deal with Oracle.
Oracle spends tens of billions on Nvidia chips.
Nscale
Mistral
Oracle
Figure Al
XAI
Source: Bloomberg News reporting

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 2d

DM me and I’ll send you all the sordid details

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 2d

And I have all the OIA-generated receipts for how Ministry of Health officials stalled and then killed the repeal and replacement of the MoDA following the Law Commission review, if you’re interested

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 2d

Currently, they’re holding us for ransom for Australian landlords and Australian tobacco companies, as everyone who can leave gets on a plane and does so

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 2d

As OCR rates have come down, bank net interest margins have gone up - the OCR is at 2.5% and the NIM is at 2.6%. As a point of comparison, in Aussie the NIM is about 1.7%. So - as you say - mortgage rates are about 1% too high, solely due to profiteering

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3d

It’d be great to catch up!

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3d

This is the sort of policy that can only exist at the nexus of power, incompetence, and bad faith

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3d

Not anywhere near Otago, but DM me when you’re Auckland-bound so we can catch up

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3d

Also: I’d love to figure out what the correct citation approach is when I quote your stuff in Serious Documents 😂

Kent Duston @kentduston.bsky.social · 3d

In the short term, take the excess dividends off the banks and the gentailers and use the proceeds to install solar PV+battery systems on every house in the country.

People pretend this stuff is hard and complex when in fact it’s a piece of piss