Posts by izogi
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to David MacGregor,
In fact the media value from the reporting of their withdrawal was probably more significant than the air-time they cancelled
That's true. I doubt we'll see advertisers actively and pre-emptively withholding their ads from his pending return... to MediaWorks, unless there's guaranteed good publicity for doing so. To be fair, we'd probably not hear of some businesses' decisions to do so if that were the case.
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Anyway, it’s a silly idea whose time has passed
I, for one, happen to be ultimately proud of my 69th-ranked blog. Take that, Rodney's Aviation Ramblings! Nobody cares about your numerous photos of various aeroplane models landing and taking off from Wellington Airport! :-P
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It seems really common in this day and age for journalists to go direct to people’s Facebook profiles and other similar stuff (instagram, twitter, etc) for info and photos on their and other’s profiles, and then report it to everyone. In this particular case, it’s not just possible to trawl through the lives of those accused, because with some digging it’s also really easy to find info and pictures and videos of at least some of the alleged victims, whether they put it there themselves or it was put there by other people.
For facebook specifically I know people complain about privacy (and then continue to use it), but do many people actively try to have their facebook pages locked down? I always assume that it’s public but I still checked mine out just now, which I thought was reasonably locked down based on stuff I'd set not that long ago, and found that about a random third of my various posts were flagged as public. Apparently for me, once something’s set to Public when I post it, or once an app (like a photo uploader) decides to push something on as Public, everything that gets posted afterwards gets automatically preset that way.
Or are those people in media offices simply very generous in making and accepting Facebook friendships for the specific purpose of being able to spider through profiles when they want to?
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I read the statement which on my reading includes the words
Oops. Thanks, Graeme, for correcting my mis-quoting of the press release. My bad.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Rageaholic,
I genuinely don’t understand why no charges can be laid unless a victim makes a complaint. Is this specific to rape?
According to the just-released statement from Police, the Facebook site "did not provide evidence that could be put before a court".
Presumably it's evidence of that nature which would be relied on if the victims aren't willing to make statements and if the men themselves won't make official statements. (Screw calling them 'boys', as far as I'm concerned, if they're 17+.)
Any ideas of why Facebook bragging would be inadmissable or unsuitable?
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Chris Waugh,
An apology?
Here's the original relay of the apology to which the Herald is referring.
Yah, whatever.... -
Excuse the ignorance, but is there any word on how isolated these guys are in what they're doing?
As in, are there heaps of other similar groups of guys around who are independently doing the same thing, and so-far getting away with it for similar reasons?
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Legal Beagle: Fact check: Q+A on mayoral…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I'm a bit mystified why the death or withdrawal of a Mayoral candidate in an STV election doesn't just continue in the same way that an STV council election does - simply transfer any votes made down the voter's lists.
I think the clearest argument I've seen so far is Scott A's assassination argument. If the existing ballots are simply to be re-counted but ignoring the initial winner (whether it's FPP or STV), then there's an ugly but potential incentive for the candidate who is most likely to benefit from the mayor's demise to do something that ensures the mayor must stand down. In STV, this might not be second place, but it would be someone.
The other possible reason, I think, is still the one I suggested earlier. If you could imagine Jack Yan possibly picking up the Wellington mayoralty after Celia unexpectedly resigns or gets incapacitated. That'd be great for him, but in the current environment it seems unlikely that he would have become mayor if Celia wasn't running in the original election, probably because the factions that got behind Celia would have made sure there was an alternative candidate to attract their marketing and support on the ballot, similar to her.
I'm not totally convinced by this argument, especially under STV, but I think it's because I dislike the idea of factions and partisans driving candidate selections. With FPP, at least, there are clear reasons why an individual might choose not to run, if they think they'll merely split the vote of another similar candidate who's more likely to win. With STV, the vote-splitting problem doesn't exist (at least as long as everyone votes to theoretical perfection). Therefore if the mayor becomes incapacitated and an also-ran becomes mayor on re-distributed preferences, it's easier to say that it was the secondary choice candidate's own fault for not standing to begin with.
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I agree with the really really stupid comment in an FPP situation, main reason coming to mind being that if the elected mayor ends up not being sworn in and the mayoralty were awarded to the runner up, it completely invalidates the votes of everyone who indicated a preference for the mayor on good faith that that person would actually carry out the duty if elected.
If it were an STV election, like in Wellington for instance, are there additional reasons why it would be stupid? Perhaps the runner up shouldn't automatically get it, but in such cases it should be possible to reallocate all the preferences as if the initially elected candidate didn't exist.
In Wellington, if Celia had stood down, that might have resulted in someone like Jack Yan picking up many of her votes rather than John Morrison and he potentially could have become mayor, so it still doesn't deal with all situations like how the makeup of candidates might completely change if a particular person never stood to begin with, but in some situations I could see it being a reasonable alternative to a by-election.
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Hard News: Everybody's Machiavelli, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
As bored as I generally am of all this for reasons others have mentioned, this one grates for me:
I assume Chuang and Brown had a legitimate working relationship if they were able to avoid suspicion at the time. So a reference wouldn’t necessarily be out of place.
I've always understood when giving a reference to the potential employer, the relationship is important so the employer can assess what they're getting in that context, and relationships like family members are usually frowned upon. With this sort of thing I'd have intuitively put it into that category. It doesn't exactly seem to have been the smartest thing for Ms Chuang to put him forward as a reference to begin with, but both seemingly knew it was being given without total honesty of the connection.
Anyway it's a minor point in the scheme of things. For me at least I've often found that by the time references are checked, employment decisions have virtually been made pending the discovery of a good reason to re-assess.