Posts by Walter Nicholls
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Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to mark taslov,
I'm sorry Walter I missed the inference there.
Sorry for coming back a day later .. this is the problem with keeping comments too short.
What I meant was that you don't need "an argument for treating men who have transitioned to women as women". They literally are women at that point. It's not recognising this that needs justifying, and good luck finding a way of expressing that argument without sounding bigoted.
I would hope the majority of the people reading this already understand this, and the thread has moved on anyway. -
Hard News: Lost Men, in reply to mark taslov,
treating ... as women
Given this is entirely the point, it doesn't seem to need arguing.
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gee, a 30,000-capacity ground in the city would be great.
I also get the arguments FOR a bigger stadium, but Eden park's existing financial troubles don't inspire me to believe that it wouldn't be an even bigger white elephant.
Ironically, while I have zero interest in rugby, I have quite a bit in music, and also in architecture ... so have to admit that an iconic waterfront stadium able to host the likes of Adele might possibly be a good thing. But would a few concerts be enough to pay back the massive investment? I doubt it.
I've been to events at 1200-seat venues with 40 in the audience, and similar concerts that packed a 400-seat venue, which would seem to be clear evidence that the size of a place is not an important contributor to its success. -
I'm a middle class straight white guy with a bike I hardly ever ride ... so I can only nod in clueless agreement and keep to a simple "thanks" also. I did feel the need to read this post (and some of the comments out loud) to the entire family, and the females in the audience nodded too, no doubt much more cluefully.
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Access: GTFO of Our Accessible Bathrooms, in reply to Moz,
Might also be available through ACC or MOH - I know it is in the catalogue of accessable who are a big provider of such things. I won't even begin to wonder what it would mean for any of you to be assessed as needing one on the public purse, and how long before you had it in your hands..
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Speaker: Polling 2017: life beyond landlines?, in reply to Walter Nicholls,
I'm no statistician
Probably obvious, and now I've checked my facts, I'm guessing you're not pointing out relative differences in minor party votes.
That recent Newshub poll is looking like a complete balls-up, though. At least the Newsroom poll has the excuse of a sampling a completely different set of people.
For anyone watching, there's a good table of poll results at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_New_Zealand_general_election,_2017 -
Speaker: Polling 2017: life beyond landlines?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The problem is we are seeing 10% differences and that realistically means one or more polls are very wrong.
I'm sure it has been pointed out by articles linked to from PA recently, margins of error are usually simplistically reported. So the results for Nat&Lab (near to 50% of answers) are much more accurate than the results for minor parties . If you take say a result "3% would vote for the Purple party" then what that means is that of their sample of 1000 people, 30 people. I'm no statistician, but I think that means the confidence in the Purple result is more like 1/√30 than 1/√1000 - or 18%. The only way to reduce that number is to ask more people.
If they are both asking the same questions of literally the same people at the same time, though ... then the variation between is caused by them f**king with the data and it all depends on the accuracy of their assumptions multiplied by their competence.
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both big parties' internal polling can be summed up as "bloody close".
And I can't help feeling this is an indication of proof that the polls *are* influencing voting, or at least subsequent poll results. It's like putting a hot object next to a cold one .. after time they will reach equilibrium i.e. the same temperature / voter share. A sign of MMP maturity perhaps ? (Along with the major parties shedding their "extremists" into minor parties, and moderating their policies to satisfy the middle hump of the voter bell curve).
A bit of an aside: Thanks to the MMP 5% threshold, another effect is occurring for the the smaller parties. Say I and my 24000 friends are dithering between voting Green and something else. If a poll says they're at 4%, then I might consider a vote for them wasted. .. they'll drop to 3%. If they're close to 5%, then we'll all say "OMG must help the Greens" (especially if we would like their likely coalition partner(s) to govern) and they'll go up instead; if they're at 6% or more, we might conclude they don't need our help (and hopefully vote with our conscience, which probably means they'll drop toward 5% again).
This might be why there are high-profile parties sitting at a fraction of a percent right now. Or it might just be that their sole asset is an high-profile egotist, not that this would explain the party currently at 7%.
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whatever reason phone polls have seemed to provide more credible results
The obvious reason is that people participating in online surveys are self-selecting in the first place, and even if they start a survey, they can abandon it partway through and their opinion then counts for naught. I doubt there has been sufficient research on why people choose to participate or not online. The second you allude to, on the phone it is much harder psychologically to both give up, and to lie or just give a stupid answer.
But the real problem here is the totally non-transparent scaling & fudging to get the simplistic 'poll results' When the opinions of 18-24 year olds are being reported based on statistical correlation with the opinions of 40-60 year olds and the three younger people who happened to answer Mum and Dad's phone the day the surveyor called... no wonder the results are 'volatile'.
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Up Front: The Surprisingly Sincere Up…, in reply to Moz,
I assume there's a latinisation requirement for names as well? How far does that go - are Maori macrons ok?
Using Gööglə I didn't find anything quickly, but my first thought was that your name should be such that Births/Deaths/Marriage would also accept it. All I could find here was "it is ... a name (for example, it must not include numbers or symbols)." which doesn't really answer your questions.
The macrons on the other hand strikes me as obvious - it's an official language of NZ and the macrons are part of the spelling, so any Government entity that can't deal with that is severely deficient (maybe even breaking some law somewhere) . And people genuinely can get by with only a Māori name.
Following that point of view, NZ Sign Language should be ok for everything as well, but that's probably trickier (finding people so every polling booth has at an electoral officer versant in each of Māori and NZSL is almost certainly unrealistic)