Archived News for May 2010
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Queen Street, Fleet Week, 1908
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Looking for the 1.3 or 1.4 version of "The Definitive Guide to Symfony"?
Well, it doesn't exist. Yet. And never under that name - it's now known as the "gentle introduction". But it's essentially the same thing: comprehensive coverage of the most commonly used bits of Symfony - not too vigorous, not too limited and not too example based. An excellent middle-of-the-road reference.
The only problem is it's not quite finished. But, luckily, it's now at github. This is great for two reasons. Firstly, it's not too bad viewing the latest version right on the site - it's written in markdown, which github understands and displays nicely. And secondly, it makes is super easy to fork and correct any problems that you come across while you're looking stuff up.
Edit: The guide has now been finished and is available here.
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Tax Changes Won't Keep Kiwis Home
Fran O'Sullivan thinks that the 2010 budget may change the thinking of present and future expats:
Kiwis have been sent a clear message to stay home and build their careers here with today's Budget package that will result in New Zealanders paying less tax that Australians once they hit the $50,000 pay rate.
Later on in the article O'Sullivan mentions OECD rates of expatriatism: ours is apparently third highest in the world. But see, funny thing about the OECD: they say our tax rate was already one of the lowest in the world before the budget.
The OECD Factblog, this month, posted a nice interactive graph. It shows that, for all eight family types in the dataset, New Zealand has one of the three lowest tax rates in the OECD. Our taxes are already lower than the vast majority of countries New Zealanders leave for: adding Mexico and Korea to that list is not going to make much difference.
Expats clearly don't go overseas for lower taxes. They go overseas for higher wages.
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Marginalia
Dom, this is for you. I know how much you like Hemingway, and I know how much you hate people who write in library books:
Describing a group of men causes our friend to write "gay" in the margin.
Oh, Brett's a girl? Never would have guessed that from the fact that the next word is "She".
The best is: "I suppose you like to add them up." -> homo.
It's so much fun having a studious precursor point out the nuances of a writer's prose for you.
