A review of things you need to know before you sign off on Tuesday; oceans warmest, tax fraud punished with wet noodles, property investors return for residential, scarce for commercial, swaps unchanged, NZD slips, & more

DC - have you any idea how much heat-energy is required to raise that mass of water one degree? 

I've sailed the oceans - 18 days to Tahiti, 18 more to Hawaii, 13 to Tonga, 3 to the Auckland Islands, up and down the coast many times - there's a humungous volume of water. To raise it a degree - or more - is astounding. Not over a few hundred years, perhaps, but within a small portion of one human lifetime? 

Perception. 

The really interesting bit is if the response that is heating the ocean is delayed by decades then what humans are doing now as a counterpoint to help prepare for the future heating debt and what can we do that will have significant effects in the already existing level of heating to come. Admittedly there is some minor benefits for a few species by the heating & deep water is less affected (may actually experience a boost in resources), however for most they will be negatively affected. So long term what are we doing in both conservation & species management, what are we doing about sustainable harvesting etc... or do we as a whole simply rename all the industry that is more then decimating the stock as cultural and research to speed up the process of large scale extinctions. Now NZ cannot set up a new marine reserve far out of reach of most kiwis to save anything and our weight with international Asia Pacific nations that come by our waters is pitiful at best, but neighboring countries can and have been doing more which is interesting to take note of. 

Meanwhile there are avenues to make sourcing food and resources more efficient and with less harm to the ecological systems overall. If only we also had a better use as well for all those large kina as well. :)

On the subject of weather resilience NZ long stopped developing & maintaining much of the basic infrastructure for living (see our water, & power systems that were so past the use by date decades and deaths have occurred since) and most resilience based infrastructure was so poorly maintained that failures were inevitable. We introduced more high risk dangerous conditions, e.g. forestry slash & building & storing more by key waterways and in known floodplains, with no consideration for downstream effects including the effects on the ocean ecosystems at the end. We have no large scale investment in township resilience for even surviving past large scale flooding & storms (the original infrastructure was built for but at much lower tech levels). We have photographic footage still from more then half a century ago of flooding & other events 10 times worse then what we have experienced in recent past, yet even with that knowledge we did nothing after the degradation of key skills.

It was just always assumed at the time social mobility would be much easier and people could afford new homes even if they walked away from old ones with nothing and move to more resilient areas. We have in many ways completely ignored and let infrastructure & the skills to maintain it degrade and so we have crumbling essential services. At least the military still exists as for over 60 years it has been a key participant in many civil defense & large scale disasters but even their tools & transport is poor at best. If anything if we cannot even get our councils to focus on essential infrastructure & our power systems for public use are designed to be highly susceptible to weather & theft what chances do we have in them looking beyond to larger weather resilience systems to respond to things that have less frequent occurrence then everyday. We saw how it played out in Auckland, Wellington, Hawke's Bay, Otago, Christchurch etc. Every single council is willing to chance it by not preparing and doing silly mistakes (e.g. like putting pump power systems below most ground level so water will shut down the pumps). If we were always going to experience more events, and in future with higher frequency, it pays in the billions (for each event) to be spending hundreds of millions in preparation for most of them adequately.

NZ has even worse preparation for key community areas then most the OECD. Lets not kid ourselves each disaster or crisis storm is one we willingly did nothing to prepare for and may have intentionally defunded basic infrastructure so failures will occur that have severe effects. Every time you see communities scrambling for generators, fuel, water, medical care & being left with a clean up or property destruction they cannot afford that is one we could have planned better for locally. Yet sadly we rely on the direction by council staff more then the councils themselves, and neither of which are very practical in their approach for even preparing for typical weather & service use. Yet we get our music festivals we like so much more then being safe from danger & destruction, we got many projects that have less priority and effect, we even canned waterway maintenance to fund more social vote buying avenues. All because who votes for ground infrastructure they often cannot see. 

I think there will be a resurgence in discussion about inheritance taxes around the world over the coming decade.

Housing shortage is going to be solved real quickly. Imagine once the tradies start leaving.

What data is this?  From customs data, the net people flow (arrivals less departures) in June was -20,841.  Net people flow for the YTD is currently -95,694.  It will be interesting to see what the second half of the year holds as this is traditionally the time of year for people inflow. 

we get the full data in 15 hours!

Love it. State-owned Vietnamese telco Viettel has launched their own ride hailing service with a difference. 

- Commission free for drivers + labor contracts, social insurance, and free data usage. Main ride hailing provider Grab takes 30% with no labor contract and social insurance.

- No surge charging for customers. 

First thing people will say is that the service will run at a loss. Precisely. And that is the idea.

- Viettel has approx 50% market share for telco services and makes ginormous profits. The ride hailing service embellishes the brand.

- Foreign competitors lose market share but will have to right to offer a better service to customers. 

- Viettel benefits from the data collection, not foreign companies.  

Waymo has been operating in Texas for some time now, and is now rolling out in California.  It wont be long before these are standard everywhere (except maybe NZ because we are so technologically backwards).