Posts by izogi

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  • Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to chris,

    I am not suggesting denying you the right to vote via ballot box, it’s that creating the option for people with disabilities or anyone wishing to vote online doesn’t affect your vote.

    There’s a case to provide alternatives for people who genuinely can’t use a ballot box, but to simply let people choose to use a less secure system risks affecting the result in a corrupted way. Maybe some people only care that their individual vote is tallied correctly, but personally I care about the integrity of the entire election.

    One of the most important properties of the ballot box is that it’s impossible to prove how you’ve voted, even if you wanted to. (In practice, however, NZ’s electoral law really needs fixing to clearly address issues of people photographing their ballot papers.) If it’s reasonably possible to choose to vote in a way that’s not secret and anonymous, then this property becomes meaningless because voters could simply be coerced to use a non-ballot-box method for the benefit of whoever’s coercing them to have evidence of how they voted.

    As it is, at least for a ballot box election, I can tell my employer or my abusive partner or my coercive union workmates or the guy who’s giving away bribes in exchange for votes anything about who I’m voting for. Then I go into the voting booth and vote, and by the time I have contact with anyone neither I nor anyone else can prove how I've voted. But the minute they can pull out the iPad in the office, or pressure me into attending a “let’s all go and vote” party around someone’s laptop at the pub, there’s a problem.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to chris,

    anonymity – no one here seems too concerned

    I am, just for the record. I don't mind telling people what I think of an issue including the flag stuff, or at least what I want them to believe I think of an issue. How I actually vote is none of their business.

    Privacy of voting can't be reliably protected with a postal system anyway, unfortunately, but I strongly hope we never drop the secure ballot box system of voting any further than we already have.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Speaker: The government's Rules…, in reply to Steve Barnes,

    Yes I agree. Proof would have been if we'd seen the signed-off documentation for something which clearly wasn't up to spec. We never made it as far as seeing that documentation and I'd expect it at least as likely that the vendor was outright lying to try and sell a house. I was more interested in a wider perspective of how bad it is.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Speaker: The government's Rules…, in reply to WSW,

    I dread to think what would have happened - how long we would have been in dispute with these people - if we hadn't had a neutral Building Inspector.

    Is there much in the way of dodgy dealings out there with council building inspections?

    I've never had to deal with the process directly, but when we were buying a home 12 months ago we had a trusted mate (who owns & runs his own building and landscaping business) look over one property, where he reckoned there was no way in hell that a particular deck could possibly have been signed off if he'd built it, because it was clearly about 2m off the ground and the foundations under it were completely wrong in some way.

    The whole house including the deck had been built by the vendor himself for an investment. We asked about it and were assured by the agent, who'd asked the vendor, that it'd all been signed off by council as required, which really just made us stay completely away from it. I might've had it out of context, but the mate reckoned that a few builders out there have council inspectors in their pocket.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Polity: “Everest”: Reviewing the reviews, in reply to AndrewJ,

    I remained dry-eyed during the phone calls between Rob and his wife – which seemed specifically intended to wring tears out of the audience.

    At about 22m into the 38 minute interview with Kathryn Ryan a week ago, Jan Arnold more or less said that there’s no way she’d have said some of the things she was portrayed to have said, and during the actual event (20:20) "knew straight away that it was extraordinarily unlikely that he’d be able to be rescued or make it down".

    She also thought that Scott Fischer’s portrayal was somewhat unfair, based on how she knew him.

    In context though, she sounded generally content with the accuracy apart from those things.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Polity: “Everest”: Reviewing the reviews,

    Ugh. Vertical Limit brings back uncomfortable memories of a blind date during which I couldn't stop giggling because it was so mind-numbingly absurd. I didn't hear back.

    I first learned about Gary Ball and Rob Hall thanks to their writings for School Journal, and despite being relatively young it really registed when I heard of their respective deaths. I wasn't sure if I wanted to see this film (I don't see many films lately), but I'm starting to have second thoughts after some of the attention it's received.

    On the topic, one other work I'm eyeing up is Lydia Bradey's (auto)biography Going Up Is Easy. She was the first woman to summit Everest without supplementary oxygen, and the only New Zealander ever to do so. To top it off she did it solo, but had a very hard time of things immediately afterwards. Partly because she returned to find a couple of good friends had died elsewhere on the mountain, and then because many people didn't believe she'd pulled it off, and she was pressured into renouncing the claim for a time. (For complex reasons, Ball and Hall further muddied the issue in media.)

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: A better thing to believe in, in reply to BenWilson,

    Perhaps it was the timing – I was about the age to start rugby in 1981 and he was strongly anti-tour (although he sneakily watched every game in the delayed coverage, after coming back from demonstrations).

    I have a maybe-skewed memory of mum telling me she didn't want me playing rugby because it was such a rough and violent sport. I took that at face value and it didn't occur until much later that it would have only been a few years since 1981, and maybe that'd also had influence on her thoughts. So through the years I've ended up playing cricket, soccer and ultimate frisbee, none of which have stuck, although now I'm really into tramping, which for me ticks lots of the boxes that team sport used to but it's less structured.

    Despite all of the above I did really enjoy watching rugby and cricket for a while, as dad was keen on following them as I grew up. It would have continued after leaving home except I objected to paying a subscription for TV, plus I eventually married someone who has absolutely zero interest in watching other people playing sport. Today I can rarely name a player in the top teams let alone know what's been happening from one result to the next. I only know of Richie McCaw because of all the non-rugby press he's generated. I think I'd really struggle to tell the difference between a sports news bulletin from now compared with 5 years ago.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: A better thing to believe in, in reply to Rich of Observationz,

    Heh. 5th Test at Durban, 3rd to 14th of March 1939. Match drawn (by agreement). That was 10 days of play in total, after subtracting rest days and another no-play day. England was 654/5 in the 4th innings at the point of stopping. They'd only needed 696 to win the game, but still won the 5 match series 1-0. Apparently it was only the 5th test which they'd agreed to be timeless, and nobody had expected it to go beyond 5 days.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: A better thing to believe in, in reply to 81stcolumn,

    Appointed in 2007 Steve Tew is a pragmatist you could love to hate, but he is not a fool.

    You’d probably know better than I do and yet I’m still confused with the logic behind what seems to have been happening with the All Blacks’ brand and politics lately, regardless of whether it’s been actively pursued or simply allowed to occur.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: A better thing to believe in, in reply to Katharine Moody,

    But of late one can only wonder how All Blacks management have allowed this politicisation to get quite out-of-hand. It denigrates the team and the sport.

    It was soon after the hosting of the 2003 World Cup was chosen that I decided those heading the NZRU must be as thick as bricks. The attitude of "NZ is so important to world rugby that they’ll beg us to co-host whatever our demands", and trying to use that insane logic to bluff against the RFU, ultimately resulted in NZ losing the co-hosting contract.

    I haven’t been following closely enough in recent times to know who’s there now. If it’s anything like then, I’d really not be surprised if those at the top are too daft to see a problem with the flagship team becoming politically tangled, even in such a polarised political environment. If anything they probably see what’s been happening as nothing more than a harmless positive outcome for a favourite political party.

    Wellington • Since Jan 2007 • 1142 posts Report Reply

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