Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Housing: the Feudal Model, in reply to James Bremner,
"Sprawl is hugely expensive" As expensive as median houses at 7 or 8 times the median salary?
I think you've nailed the problem. We need cheaper houses, and that means cheaper infrastructure. Building a new house 100km from the CBD and needing to build new roads, power lines, water and sewer pipes, libraries, parks, emergency services, public transport and every other thing is just unaffordable. The train line alone will cost $50k per house.
The only affordable solution is to use as much of the existing infrastructure as we can. It's much cheaper to run trains every 10 minutes instead of every half hour than to build a whole new railway line. Ditto double or tripling the size of a fire station or other public amenity. Knocking down houses that are close to amenities and building decent blocks of flats, terraces or home-over-shop setups is the only way to go. But they need to be built nice rather than cheap in order to attract people, and that's hard in a "market economy" like we pretend to have.
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Hard News: Housing: the Feudal Model, in reply to Matthew Poole,
strengthening it in favour of all tenants would be a good start.
You know you said "Depends who "we" is, doesn't it?". Think about the damage to the priavte wealth of the Rt Hon. Nicky Wagner if residental rental property became a less lucrative investment? Just run down the list of MP's who own investment properties and try to guess which way they'd vote...
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Hard News: Housing: the Feudal Model, in reply to Paul Campbell,
and that someone has to represent the people who will go without, not the developers
This.
I've seen too many developer-controlled projects that are unpleasant-to-lethal to see any good in this idea. The simple situation where you buy an apartment and one condition of sale is handing your proxy on the owners committee to the developer leads to all sorts of problems, all stemming from the disconnect between the decision maker and the people who live with the decisions. From the developers point of view, of course, those two are the same and the setup works very well indeed. I think that should be legally forbidden, rather than extended to cover essential utilities over larger areas. Can you imagine the joy when you discover that you're required to pay a certain amount for electricity every year despite having an off-grid house using PV? Or, as Paul says, that the sewage system has been sold to a company that's now insolvent?
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Hard News: How do you sleep?, in reply to Chopper,
The world from 4.30 until 7 is a beautiful place
Yes! I love riding to work at first light because it's such a calm time. Now that I can open the gates at work I can start whenever I like (really. One coworker regularly starts at 5am... but sometimes comes in "early", meaning 4am or so).
The red light thing seems to help me - luckily you can buy LED downlight replacement lights in a range of colours very easily, so now my bedside light is 9W of red. Very RED! I also have a head torch with a red secondary LED that I use for reading in the middle of the night (because my ebook reader has a light, but it's very bluish white LEDs).
Meditation is a big win for me going to sleep initially, but if I wake in the middle of the night I read because mediation doesn't seem to help.
I have also taken to "turn the computer off at 8pm" or earlier if I'm feeling tired. There seems to be a gap of an hour or more between not dealing with the computer and being able to sleep. It's probably not colour, I have a utility that reddens my screen at sunset (it's quite noticeable), but brain activity. Playing games on my phone has the same effect. So, no computing before sleep. And no computing in the middle of the night. I have a paper notebook and occasionally work in that if I'm full of ideas in the night.
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Legal Beagle: Dewey Defeats Truman; or…, in reply to Steve Todd,
The questions could be something like these—
In Oz even in state and federal elections it's normally done as "two party preferred" or three preferences are polled when the race is close. I've never seen a report that tried to extract actual voter preferences in such a laboured way, Steve. If that's what they want they'd almost certainly go with "number your preferences". And I suspect the reason they don't is that a great majority of the respondents don't have any idea, they're just going to vote for one of the major parties. Hence the NSW donkey vote being blown out recently because the first box on the paper was "Liberal Democratic Party", 5% of voters saw a party with "Liberal" in the name and ticked the box. So now we have a reactionary Catholic senator...
Polling at all when most of the candidates have very little profile and there's no real party involvement is going to be hugely problematic, and a lot will depend on what information the poll gives the respondents about candidates, and how long they have to choose. It'd almost be more useful to regard it as a survey of social attitudes - is "Swetha Vapanyanisitanpynata" getting fewer votes than "John Smith" because she's: 1: Labour 2: Indian 3: female or 4: incompetant?
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So does a search warrant require you to obtain stuff for the police? In other words, if your data is in the cloud are you required to download it for them? Or do they have to run off to the cloud and get it from the cloud provider? I'm specifically thinking of the encrypted, distributed storage schemes. No one person or location has all the data, none of it is in your house, but it's all accessible to you.
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Legal Beagle: Oops: how some prisoners…, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Thank you sir, you're a gentleman.
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Now I'm curious - does this apply to suspended sentences, or only served ones? For example, if someone is sentenced to (say) 1 year suspended, can they vote during that time?
I'm curious because in the rare cases where white collar criminals are sentenced to prison it's often suspended to encourage them not to get caught again. This would be a way to actually irritate those people.
Also, does not being able to vote also mean you can't legally donate to political parties? Sorry, don't follow the law that closely (but I should, since I donate... ooops). I know those laws are toothless and rarely enforced (John Banks notwithstanding), but attacking it from the underside would be one way to get enforcement. Especially if the major penalty was effectively resumption of sentence...
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My experience was a bit magic. We had some friend of the boss come through and do Myers-Briggs plus a "personality colour" test. It was very educational, because we divided ourselves into co-operators and antagonists fairly naturally (bunch of programmers) and the antagonists went all out to bollix up the tests. At the end of the process we got to give feedback in a big group session and someone asked "could you tell who was trying to screw things up" and ... no. Even the deeply introverted guy who managed to come out as highly social wasn't picked up.
The colour stuff was loosely another spectrum-of-response thing based on organisational type I think, but it was almost useless because everyone in the company except the boss was pretty cliche methodical and precise. So we got a lot of "half of you are deep blue, the other half are pink". Really? Half of us answered as Ian, the boss. And we know that, that's why we keep having discussions about one loose cannon who keeps fscking everything up, leaving stuff until the last minute and forgetting to do essential things. Oh, and making us all waste a day doing psychometric testing.
I interviewed for a bank job in Oz and they did a huge amount of digging through stuff, including a psych test of some sort. Which was predictably useless, since I was an awful fit but the psych test said I'd be great. The hardest thing about that interview though was the "list everywhere you've lived in the last 5 years". I'd been contract programming between bouts of tourism. I ended up giving them about 10 addresses and hoping for the best. Same with employers, I just listed the ones I could trust to give good reports and cover for me when I fudged the dates. There's only so many "spent a month demonstrating that adding new staff when the project is late makes it later (got paid well)" that I can be bothered recording. Thankfully when they questioned me about it I was permitted a copy of my resume :)
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Hard News: Game Lorde, in reply to Bart Janssen,
In short it's pop music I actually want to hear. And I don't really want to hear many teen pop stars so yes she's different for me.
This. Her music is enough different that I don't feel I've heard it before, I can understamd the lyrics and for once it's not being pumped into random places I visit at 120dB.
Now all I want is to be able to buy the album as FLAC or stupid plastic trinket. I'm sure it's here somewhere, I just have to dig around and find it.