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To: Mary Cluney who wrote (58097)	1/2/2005 5:39:29 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

<How many bridges have you bought (or sold) lately?> Hi again Mary. Heaps! Over the past 40 years, I've helped pay for miles of bridges. You can see them spread across New Zealand. My parents and grandparents and great grandparents paid for lots of bridges too. Just last year, for example, I paid for a swanky new bunch of bridges around Spaghetti Junction in Auckland. As did tax-paying recent immigrants. After enough decades, [about 10 decades], they and their tax-paying descendants will have fully paid their share as assets older than a century are not worth much. Unfortunately, I have sold NO bridges. Not only that, Tauranga Harbour Bridge, which I helped pay for, and was being sold, has even had the toll stopped and the booths removed, resulting in traffic jams most of the time and a lack of funds for another bridge which is needed there, and motorways in the area. That was ridiculous and an example of the stupid Kiwis' attitude which is that everything should be free, as though assets are manna from Heaven, in unlimited supply. Another stupidity was the same deal with tolls on the Auckland Harbour Bridge, which were originally suitably high. The tolls were lowered and finally stopped resulting in 30 years of traffic jams on the bridge approaches for kilometres, backing up across Auckland, and transferring value from the bridge builders [all of us] to the North Shore property owners [a minority] who scored a huge windfall. If the tolls had been maintained, there would have been sufficient funds for another 3 crossings [bridges or tunnels] and motorways the length of New Zealand. Instead, stupidity ruled. <where would NZ be without the founding prisoners? > You've got the wrong country. And anyway, the prisoners of Australia didn't "found the country". < //If we want more people, we should sell to the highest bidders, not give it to illegal entrants and random lottery winners.// Write a book on it. Do the math. See if anyone will buy it. I think it is hooey - but that is just me.> Mary, over a few decades, I've had many ideas which I have tried to explain, which were rejected, but subsequently, after the event, a day late and a dollar short, turned out to be good ideas and were adopted. The process is very plain and I know just how it goes. After an instant consideration, people know it's a bad idea. Which strikes me as odd, because I whack away at the ideas for ages, looking for possible failure modes, and I know my brain works pretty well, but they can just instantly know it's no good. Without even having to reason and they can't come up with reasons. It's called NIH syndrome in corporate circles. One could also call it flat-earth syndrome - the knowledge that the world is flat, it's heresy to say otherwise and anyone denying flatness should be burned at the stake. It seems to be normal human reaction [for, I guess, about 80% of people - maybe 90%]. I know not to waste too much of my time trying to explain. Better to just use my understanding to feather my own nest and protect myself. A tsunami for example would not get me but would end umpty thousand lives in NZ. I don't bother going around all day warning people - they've got a warning now, but will assuredly nearly all ignore the warning. They just laugh at me with my silly racist ideas - which is some compensation; it's nice to make people laugh. They aren't laughing so much now. Notice how they are now shutting the cockpit door after Al Qaeda has bolted through? Oh, a tsunami just killed 150,000 - hey let's build a warning system!! Duh! Tradable citizenship? Hahahahahaha!! Oh man that's a giggle. Mqurice PS: Believe it or not, people are still building houses around Lake Taupo [enormous caldera], and at Pauanui, Papamoa, Mount Maunganui, Whakatane ... never a dull moment. There's no government warning about the hazards. AFTER the disaster, bossy bureaucrats will ban building houses around Taupo or near the beach.