Posts by izogi
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I also find that not expressing insults at people is a good way to reduce the likelihood of them insulting me back. He was probably at fault in the first place and maybe even realised that as he nearly hit you, but I doubt he turned around and started arguing with you because he disliked your ability with using a pedestrian crossing.
And maybe he was a jerk. Roads and the world are filed with jerks no master what their mode of transport.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
My view on the justification for a threshold is influence. A single MP can, by acting as sand in the machine, achieve policy and office that an MP for a larger party would struggle with.
I think that's an issue with large parties and small parties working together, as Graeme suggested. I'm not convinced small parties always have as much influence as is sometimes made out by complainers, but the influence they get is a consequence of a dominant party having few choices of those they want to work with.
Personally I think big parties like National and Labour don't help with MMP, because they take the power of expression away from voters and shift policy decisions behind doors instead of in open debating and negotiations. Big parties are a hangover from FPP that hasn't completely died, but I'm sort of hoping they do die as generations change. Labour's seemingly already started with its former support being split between several more specific parties, which is great because some former Labour supporters can now positively vote for what they specifically liked about Labour instead of just voting for a big black box. There are parts of what remains of Labour that could easily work with parts of National if they had such freedoms, but in the current form, Labour will never work with National. And that's why Winston Peters had so much fun in '96, because living through decades of FPP meant that National and Labour had evolved themselves into two giant mutually exclusive gelatinous blobs.
Single-party MPs will always be possible through electorate voting, so there will always be the potential sand-in-the-machine issue if they're in a position of high influence after an election. I don't think we'll ever end up with 120 parties in parliament though, because wannabee candidates will always try to flock to a party with an established name (just as with National and Labour now, but they'd have more choices), so I think if lowering or removing the threshold will give MPs of larger parties the confidence to jump ship and form more specific smaller parties to take support from the large parties, it'll be a good development.
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Hard News: The Huawei Question, in reply to Russell Brown,
I think it's a given that the NSA has gone over the source code in Huawei hardware with a fine-toothed comb, but there doesn't seem to be anything there.
Without meaning to reduce your main points, I wouldn't presume the NSA and its friends would necessarily tell anyone if it'd found a useful back-door in a set of widely deployed network communications products. An independent commercial organisation might.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Sacha,
cos why would we want to encourage those in NZ?
Heh. It was just what came up after going through a geophysics degree. Apparently the maths is very similar whether it's above or below the ground (different constants, though). One of the theories CSIRO's modelling in the super-computers at present is to do with masses of pollution from China having an effect that temporarily muffles some of the more extreme effects of climate change above Australia. Most of that krud drops out of the atmosphere within a couple of weeks, and with China investing so hugely in cleaner technologies and power generation, it's thought things could change dramatically in the next decade or more. I've been informed she's been ensuring New Zealand's included on the edge of the maps, but it's a shame NZ can't seriously collaborate on this kind of stuff.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to 81stcolumn,
FWIW I no longer advise students to undertake PhD's in New Zealand.
PhDs in New Zealand are fine as long as there's no expectation of finding a job in New Zealand at the end of it. The main reason we're in Australia right now is because my wife spent a year being dragged through the mud by CRIs, frustrating recruitment agents and occasional companies for months at a time, without them being clear about whether there was a job or not. There are very few serious science jobs in NZ, few organisations want to hire anyone who's not already established at the top of their game (too much effort to get them established), in some areas it's necessary to wait for someone to die---seriously---before one of very few positions opens up, and then it means competing for the job on the international market.
Once we finally decided we could tolerate leaving NZ, she found an Australian government climate science job at CSIRO very quickly, as part of an ongoing intake of quite a few relatively young post-PhD graduates from Australia and overseas.
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OnPoint: SECRET MILITARY LULZ, in reply to Jeremy Eade,
But the other problem is what the hell are the poor people working there expected to achieve.
Well, to start with the obvious, MFAT is responsible for administering overseas Embassies and High Commissions and so on, employing most of the people who work in them, looking after communications (regular diplomatic mail bags and stuff, although much of that gets delegated to Australia) and providing the necessary support from New Zealand.
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OnPoint: SECRET MILITARY LULZ, in reply to kiwicmc,
Why are they sending work emails to an xtra account? Sackable offense in some companies I have worked for.
Sackable offence in most of government, too. Especially for the sorts of communications McCully would deal with day to day.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
And I don't have too much problem with requiring staff to be better educated about the nature, relevance and importance of the stuff they create. Which might lead to them being more likely to only create stuff that was relevant and important.
Yep, well educated staff is always good. I just think it creates new points of failure which will need to be addressed somehow, like mistakes potentially having much worse and more immediate implications, and like having to trust the entire staff to get this sort of thing right early on all the time instead of being able to delegate a few specialists to check things out for certain when and where they're needed.
I guess I'm skeptical about the 'only relevant and important' thing, too. All that information's just there because it happens one way or another, and it won't go away. Otherwise you'd just have departments full of robots. At best people will just create it or store it outside the official places, which are often still official information regardless and which usually contradicts best practices that document managers are constantly trying to make people stick to.
Anyway I'm not meaning to be too critical of the ideas and I think it could happen with enough commitment and careful organisation, but I'm not sure it's as easy-an-adjustment as is often made out. Merely having the EDRMS systems in place doesn't solve all the problems with making info public, and enough agencies are still struggling with getting the EDRMS's in place.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to nzlemming,
"Publish everything unless it shouldn't be published as it will save time in the long run"
I'm not sure. I like the thought in principle but there's probably a significant up-start cost to get something like this going. That's not an excuse to avoid it, but it'd need a big shift for many agencies towards classifying all their internal information extremely carefully immediately upon creation and during drafting, instead of just doing it approximately for most things early-on and then double-checking the classification if it's ever requested, which I think is what often happens in practice.
Maybe there's also a risk if it means nearly all staff being needed to classify info properly, instead of having just a few people who are qualified check and rubber-stamp it. Making mistakes potentially has higher consequences if there's less slack to correct them (personal info floating around in the ether, etc etc). It depends what you mean by 'publish everything', really, given that potentially millions of revisions of hundreds of thousands of drafts and millions of email threads and internal application source code and intranet pages and wikis meeting minutes and staff christmas party food preparation assignment lists and all sorts of junk are requestable under the OIA. That's a lot of stuff to be certain can go out as soon as it's created and every time it's edited.
At the very least, I'd be keen to see responses to most OIA requests published immediately for everyone to see, except when there's good reason not to. I doubt journalists would enjoy a loss of exclusivity, though, and I don't think many agencies would go for it without being pushed. But hey, that one's just a small change by comparison.
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Speaker: Properly Public: It's our information, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
If Izogi feels my comment was in any way personally abusive, s/he should feel free to contact me privately and I will issue a sincere and fulsome apology my return post.
Not at all. I just think it skirted the point. You're welcome.