Join the new world

My name is SledDog, and I've been an eNew Zealander since the day that they officially opened the country for citizens - as opposed to the day when they were supposed to open it. I've also been present in the forums from before the beginning to the point where I even produced my own draft for a potential constitution. And I would have introduced myself before, but over the past few days I've been real world ill, which kind of limited my computer time (hard to write well when you've got at headache so bad that you want to crack that sucker open like a bad melon to make it stop).

I am a real life Canadian, and was an eCanadian for a long time. I was elected five times to the Canadian Congress, the first three times right after Canada liberated the first parts of our country from the British. I think that was the time that I enjoyed being in Congress the most - and I enjoy the political side of the game - so I hope to run for Congress here and be elected at the end of the month and help to build this new country. But that's really not the point of this piece Except to say NO MORE NEW PARTIES!! We already have three parties, which in terms of protecting against a PTO is three parties too many.

What' I'm really writing about is a company you may have seen in the Marketplace under Artillery. It's a Q2 company called Bren Guns owned by a Canadian based Org Toonton Enterprises. The company and the organization are both mine. And the price for the guns are as close as I can come to what I am charging pre-tax on the Canadian market. I give you my pledge that whenever I offer a product on the New Zealand market it will be exactly what I am charging on the Canadian market, which I suspect is more than you can say for some of the weapons companies currently on the NZ market. What I can't, and won't, guarantee is that the actual NZD price will stay stable.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First is the volatile nature of the NZD. The current price of the Dollar is artificially high as just about everyone acknowledges. That will change once a Congress is elected, and we can only hope that it is a responsible Congress that is neither overly protectionist nor overly Free Trade oriented. I do want to see our Import Taxes reflect our strengths, but that's something for later. The fact is that a pre-tax price of $2.17 won't be possible after Congress gets elected. You can take that to the bank.

The second reason is the Canadian Market. Canada has maintained a high operational tempo since the changes in the MPP rules, and this has meant a serious drawdown in stocks of virtually all weapons, but particularly artillery. To give a concrete example, in Q2 artillery, at the beginning of October, 6th there were 248 weapons on the market from three companies including Bren Gun; at the time of this writing there are 148 weapons from two companies. There were 894 Artillery of all types on the market on October 6th with 2099 held back and not for sale. Right now there are 555 guns of all types on the market with available stocks of 1797, all but 313 of those Q1 weapons. And the biggest secret of all is that when those weapons are gone the price is going to go way up. Wages have gone up staggeringly since weapons durability changed and the Flash combat system was dropped, as has the price of Canadian Titanium which has gone from $0.02 Cad to $0.03. If a manufacturer hopes to make a profit prices for new material are going to be significantly higher, and that's going to be seen here.

I'm not offering this as anything other than a statement of fact. I cannot guarantee the price of these Artillery pieces will remain the same in the long term, and I cannot guarantee that those weapons will stay on the New Zealand Market in the long term; I've put my excess stocks in foreign markets - China, New Zealand and formerly Australia (which until recent tax changes was very lucrative...when they were buying which wasn't often) - and I will shift inventory back to Canada to get it sold if for no other reason than to tinker with design (what do you think of a 50 Damage/1 Use artillery piece? A 30 Damage/3 Use? Or is 40 Damage/2 Use the best of a bad set of options).