Posts by linger
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Hard News: About Campbell Live, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
A product of boulder dash.
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Polity: Government votes not to improve MMP, in reply to James Caygill,
Would you say Parliament is doing an effective job of overseeing anything at present?
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Polity: Government votes not to improve MMP, in reply to James Caygill,
There’s a trade-off involved, given that we have (i) a small population and (ii) a frighteningly small pool of capable individuals interested in running for public office for the good of the country rather than for their own benefit.
Increasing the size of our Parliament would probably allow increased representativeness, but would almost certainly reduce efficiency of day-to-day running of the country. (C. Northcote Parkinson, in The Law, estimated 23±2 as a committee size limit above which it was impossible to do any productive work.)
For any functionality beyond representativeness, you don’t need hundreds of idiots; you need a smaller number of capable people. One weakness of democracy is that there's no separate, objective quality control on candidates other than the popular party vote (and/or electoral representative vote -- for which nominations are determined also by the party's selection process). It’s pretty damn obvious that popularity of a party with voters does not entail capability of a member in the job. (And as the Greens are perhaps now discovering, there’s no guarantee of capability even in their more direct hiring process where individuals are popular with the party membership.)
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the new current affairs show called Story
A title not necessarily prioritising fact over fiction.
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Germany can have a multi-electorate lifeboat rule because they have more electorates and more MPs. New Zealand does not have that luxury. (And, as Steve points out above, there's a federal overlay to Germany's system that is missing in NZ.)
And as for so-called “coat-tailing”: if the bigger parties can bring in friends and cronies of more popular politicians to make up their numbers as required by their popular vote (I’m looking here especially at the National party list, though Labour would have the same issue if they had managed a higher popular vote), why shouldn’t smaller parties have the same freedom? The only problem I see is the unfairness of the result compared with that for parties that fail to get over the 5% minimum – and a better resolution of that anomaly would be to reduce the minimum even further (e.g. to 1%).
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Hard News: Happy Days, in reply to TracyMac,
Hence: an editor should be a "wank champion"? (Cf. esp. Herald)
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Pffft.
As if ratings would actually kill off 3 News.
As if ratings were what killed off Campbell Live. -
Speaker: SIBs: The reality of…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Small-(government-)minded?
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Speaker: SIBs: The reality of…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
red on the outside and blue on the inside
Obvious answer: A bloody depressed former Labour voter.
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some thought Rodney [...] was a randomly chosen “special person”.
Some confusion is surely understandable when the statement “I’ve been thinking!” is noteworthy enough to serve as a title…