Posts by tussock
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to izogi,
It just seems strange to me that there’s apparently no effective type of authority holding the PM and Cabinet to account when it comes to actually following the law and the documented rules, except themselves.
Us. We. The public. The voters. The ballot. We officially did not give a shit and just put them back in office. Majority of people who cared enough to vote. The minority opinion representatives get to ask them questions about stuff which they have to answer, in public, for the next three years. Maybe they'll do that, maybe they won't.
Edit: Parliament holds the PM to account, see. We basically told them not to worry.
It works much better than the Mullahs in Iran. Those guys are terrible.
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OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to nzlemming,
Because "the media" (with damn few exceptions) didn't cover Dirty Politics as much as National's dismissal of Dirty Politics.
You know, there was almost no one on the Dirty Politics side. The Greens put in a complaint to the police about the illegal bits. Labour said there should be an inquiry into the book and went back to being positive. Winston probably couldn't talk too much about how leaks get to the press, in case the press called him on all his leaks.
So, you've got Nicky Hager asking people to read the book, because he needs sales for rent money rather than people just talking at it. And you've got National saying they haven't read it and don't need to because it's all ... message varies by the day, but "mistaken about our intent" is an approximation.
The media can't just read a book on air. It's copyright. So they put the accusations to the accused, and those accusations were ... skirted. When Rawshark gave out the original emails, the media did more questioning with them. But it's questioning. The accused, including the Prime Minister, bloody well get to answer. That's really important.
The fact that most people didn't care at the end of the day, even though we here in the great echo chamber totally got it and saw the problems and told each other everyone else would see things the same way, that's not really the media's fault. National lied and spun, they changed their stories, and the press pointed that out in great detail just before the election: but most people simply don't care about this stuff. -
OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm always amused/appalled by those people who declare that they registered a protest against the system by refusing to vote. No you didn't, dude. Everyone just ignored you.
Well, no. The people who get the biggest share of the voters worked to discourage them from voting for anyone else. Spent a lot of time on it, really. The people who had very little votes worked to encourage them to vote, on the grounds it couldn't possibly be any worse.
But when you look at the history of New Zealand voting, when our main parties move together to chase the same centre voters, we get low turnounts. When they diversify and present genuinely conflicting options, we get high turnouts. The trend for low turnouts since MMP is simply a trend for the main parties to chase the centre voter rather than work their geographically isolated bases into a fever by being different.
The left loses votes this way because the centre voter in NZ is moderately conservative and very right wing, mostly because of our hourglass age profile and all the 30-somethings living overseas. -
OnPoint: Sunlight Resistance, in reply to CJM,
Much of the "Meh" comes directly from the choices the MSM make in the collation, presentation and dissemination of political news.
They're not experts. In anything. Journalists. Other than journalism. They don't know how spying works. If some guy who saw something a while back gives them one story and the Prime Minister who is in charge of the actual spies gives them a different one, we're lucky they even ran both.
Expecting them to figure out that the PM is talking a bunch of crap is actually asking a lot. Because they're not experts in that. All those people you saw who it just confused, the journalists are just like that too. High court judges, senior science researchers, they get a little outside their special field of knowledge and they're not smarter than anyone else.
Neither am I. I've just been suspicious long enough, and read enough history of governments going back centuries, to bet on the random guy who saw something once ahead of the Prime Minister and his spies every time. You can tell the Mr. Random is right, there's so many governments want him taken out because of what he is saying. It's dangerous. It harms relationships. Treasonous. All that. Those guys always turn out to be right, usually post-mortem. -
National's landslide victory means that the media's reporting of Dirty Politics has had no effect.
That's untrue. National dropped a long way in the polls, almost all after Dirty Politics, and there's a bunch of wasted vote too that's given them extra seats.
The polls weren't wrong this time, a few months back National was really sitting on about 50 to 53% for a long time. That would've been around 66 seats, a long way down that party list.
Not to mention, despite Labour's "positive" message, the campaign ended up being more negative than almost any we've seen. Personal attacks on credibility and the basic institutions of state, rather than policy. That is, historically, not good for the Left.
National party stalwarts, they turned out big time. They're never going to hear that National is creepy and corrupt, they love them, and the media attention on revelations of impropriety meant they couldn't hear anyone else's ideas for government either. National's campaign worked with that nicely.
You know, the "reckless spending commitments" that are less than the holiday highways and also fully costed and budgeted for, and also with notes about which would be dropped if conditions deteriorated. And then three days of news on Dotcom having a, ... meh, so no one heard that.
Face it, the middle class majority are never going to give a fuck about state spying. Even the Nazis didn't send their middle class to the camps (or even the Russian Front), it's just not a real threat to them. Attacking Judith Collins because you don't like her for attacking people she didn't like, that's not a vote winner either. It's just not. When Key says everyone does it, it's a dog whistle, "look, they're doing it now, poor Judith".
National nailed it. Perfect campaign, beautiful responses, glib brush-offs because their voters didn't want to hear excuses and explanations (if you're explaining, you're losing, they know that). Dirty Politics still cost them a bunch of seats.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Deborah,
Yeh. There's studies show poor people are much better with money than rich people. They just have much less margin for error and relatively higher unexpected costs, and to survive at all they have to get good at it.
"Eating well" is largely defined by each culture as eating the things only rich people can afford, while the poor get by on highly efficient calories per dollar without even thinking hard about it, because you know what fills you up given how little you have left after the final warning bills are paid.
I fondly recall some middle class reporter person on the TV "experiencing" poverty for a while, trying to live on the benefit, only without giving up their just-serviced, new, fuel-efficient cars, their nice suits, a thousand other things poor people just don't have, and thinking all they'd have to do is switch to the cheap steak and they'd last the week alight.Then running out of money on Wednesday, fuel on Thursday, but not to worry because you've got those $2000 bicycles in the garage for the whole family you'd forgotten about, and you can just use them for the last day. Cupboards started to get a bit bare by Friday, so gave up and ate out. LOL. Easy. What? Supposed to live the weekends too? Nah, the kids have sport, and they're already grumpy.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Paul Campbell,
and rather than losing 1/3 that energy going over Cook Straight they encourage industry in the lower half of the South Island by charging 1/3 less.
The HVDC link loses about 3%, as far as I can see. It's mostly a load-balancer for Wellington against the North Island to let the peak generation trend to Auckland and keep the brownouts away. You'd lose about 1% more running it from Manapouri, another 1% to Auckland.
More electricity to Auckland also reduces demand on our fossil plants, and an HVDC link for it would free up much more capacity in the conventional network as a big DC load balancer.
But local use? It generates 11% of the nation's electricity, what nearly half of a million people and their associated jobs use without the smelter. Only it's not really designed for load following, so .... Yeh, the biggest server farm on the planet, if anyone would trust us with their data after the latest revelations anyway? Plus, cost, lag, I don't see it.
Uh, cost estimates. The lines would be some small number of billions, the population shift of a large city would be ... far more than the Christchurch rebuild, so a hundred billion would be a low estimate. Lines every time.
Electric grids are hard. You can't just dump power somewhere and hope someone ends up using it because it's cheap. Handling another half gigawatt down here would require complete replacement upgrades on large parts of the network, incredible increases in high use 24-hour industries, large population shifts, and would probably take decades to complete even if we had a government that didn't just leave it to the markets. It took decades just to be able to shunt 1/3 of Manapouri's output north, and that was only economic because of growth in Christchurch that's since been levelled. -
Hard News: The humanity, in reply to Rob Stowell,
This is a form of bias that should be called: specifically bias against the weak and for the strong.
Not really. Journalists have to hold their audience. That audience is at least twice as much in favour of National as Labour, probably more. By the turnout they know every Nat voter is happy and all the Labour voters who stayed home are not. Attacking things Labour might do to shift their voter's habits right now makes good sense if you care about holding your audience. Which they do.
It's also deeply informative to the Labour voters, who may well be looking for some signs of faith, or change, or consistency, or whatever Labour's polling tells them, really. There's no such thing as bad publicity, except if you tell people how much less rat there is in the new pie recipe. Less rats is bad, as it accepts there are some rats as a point of fact.
Just because you're Labour voters and don't want to hear that most people don't like Labour right now, that doesn't make it stop being effective commercial reporting.
P.S. There's some shit from people here about Cunliffe being disloyal, that's just National's bullshit again. Just a heads up that things being in the press about Labour doesn't make them true. Dirty Politics, eh.
The party, the unions, the membership, at least some of the caucus are behind Cunliffe. He's really the only popular thing they've got. Fuck everyone else, if the older MPs can't get on with him, turf them. I'd imagine they've got some useful stories to tell about what plays well in all the National Party electorates they won though, and do in fact believe in the Labour party and want them to do well.
Unless Murray (present) has cut them a big cheque as well.
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Given the numbers I keep finding, it seems the problem will usually be the jury has an unacknowledged abuser on it. It's their personal ability to dominate the feelings of others toward blaming the victims, something they get a lot of practice at, which either hangs or sways the jury to not guilty.
The trials are just a fig leaf over that. Maybe you get a clean jury, but probably not. Judge-only trials make a lot of sense, regardless of the atmosphere they end up with, though hopefully disparagement of the victims could occur out of sight after their testimony.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The unemployed were expected to work.
The unemployed had jobs created for them, work clothes provided, and houses built to live in while they worked. Yes, those jobs were often low paid menial shit in the cold because National was in office and some rural donor wanted the paddocks weeded. Left doesn't mean good, it means left. Other times they built dams or planted incredible forests that are all worth billions to the country now.
But compare with the Christchurch rebuild, where our government vaguely hopes something will happen at some point thanks to the magic of market forces and what we really need is lower wages. Where people living in the cars they can't afford petrol for is an excellent sign for local construction empires and landlords (one of whom is the minister in charge of knocking more stuff over for shits and giggles).
Governments of the 60's would have owned that thing, men with clipboards as far as the eye could see, and people trucked in from around the country to be trained as builders, first by building their own temporary housing for the duration. Tea ladies by the hundreds, cooks, fixed prices and supply requirements, legislation requiring the union awards to be paid to everyone, getting on and getting shit done.
Our students who almost got arrested for trying to help a bit, pretend they're the government dragging down five thousand labourers from Auckland and paying them for that for years. This lot still haven't fixed the fucking sewers, because that's someone else's problem. We did better than that in the 30's.
But at least we're not sexist now, right? Totally post-racism. Never steal anything off the Māori any more, certainly not large blocks like the foreshore and seabed or anything. Lovely place the modern world. If only we could sell off some more state houses.