A Nautical Miscellany

All new! All Improved! (Well mostly)

Yes it's true, the tactmarine site has been taken down, given a good scrub with a stiff bristle brush, spray painted with a noxious primer then coated with paint till it's shiny as new.

Actually most of the changes are fairly minor, mostly to bring the site into line with the work that I've actually been doing (as opposed to what I THOUGHT i was going to be doing). I did add an Arctic specific page and also hung off a couple of brochures, the existing Arctic one that I made up for the Lloyd's conference in Montreal and a new one of a more general nature. 

Thanks to FCR in Sydney for their advice on content and images, and as ever to the long suffering webmeisters at EdgeFlow Media for the never ending change requests from me, (after all it's a journey not a destination!) and for knocking together the ad so quickly.

If anyone has any comments on the changes to the site, please let me know, all feedback gratefully accepted.

'nuff said

Who's on top?

I subscribe to an RSS feed for a blog known as the "New Economist", a fellow who posts on "New economic research, data, events and analysis.." A post he made back in November was called Who's on top?, dealing with international competiveness and recent rankings by the Economist (the magazine not the author), World Economic Forum etc. I won't redo his analysis here but what I find particularly fascinating about these sorts of rankings is how the high tax Nordic economies have percolated up to the top for one and secondly how New Zealand, a country that went virtually bankrupt due to over regulation and "planning" has now restructured itself such that it regularly tops these lists. What will be interesting (for people that are interested in such things) is how NZ moves forward from here. I recently read an article in the NZ Herald on their agricultural production that stated basically that they were farming every square inch that could be farmed and had maxed out their agricultural production so where do they go next?