Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Sacha,
My understanding was that the alleged fraud was allegedly discovered by the Electoral Commission picking up on an increase in voter registrations in one ward, when all others were falling, and then investigating IPs, etc.
In a ballot box system, such a fraud would be much harder, as you'd have to bus your voters in from far districts to vote in person, or generate a large number of applications for special postal votes, which would be clearly suspect.
Voting in person avoids many fraudulent practices, ranging from vote harvesting as above to a dominating family member influencing the votes of the rest of the family. (Ever seen those 'My Whanau supports the Maori Party stickers')
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Hard News: The non-binary council, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Are you looking at the same edit? Looks pretty factual to me - just reporting what the candidates said. They missed a trick on captioning that photo of Morrison on the wharf in the rain though - a smarter sub would have put "In the shower".
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A mandate is a plurality of the votes, if one is dumb enough to have FPP elections. The councillors all also have mandates.
What we really need is:
- mayors (or leaders) elected by councillors, as we choose the government and the leaders of remaining regional councils.
- council elections aligned with the general election and held by ballot box
- an end to the ridiculous idea that councillors may not take a stand on issues for fear of pre-determining something they have to decide - as if they were judges, rather than democratic representatives. -
Hard News: Who Guards the Guardian?, in reply to Russell Brown,
In the Auto Trader business, they have the Trade Me-like model of being the dominant player in B2C / C2C vehicle classified advertising in the UK (possibly other markets??). That's a pretty solid business, except insofar as people stop buying cars. Similarly, Top Right Group (formerly EMAP) have a pretty solid legacy business, albeit one without much growth opportunity.
This model of having a non-journalism driven cash-cow funding a newspaper business makes a lot more sense for the Scott Trust than for e.g. Fairfax. The Scott Trust has an underlying charter to run a newspaper and seeks to employ capital to fund it. A shareholder-owned organization will always have to ask itself why it bothers with the newspapers at all.
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Before MMP, the government always had a majority on every matter (except in the case of a rebellion by their own MPs) and the need to veto legislation would never arise.
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What was the cause? Youthful disillusion? Or a paper by an American academic objecting to "Whaling" as a thinly disguised attack on People Of Size?
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Speaker: TPP: This is a fight worth joining, in reply to Russell Brown,
Cause and effect? The Chinese economy has grown rapidly in that period. In particular, the middle class (who consume our dairy products) have grown greatly in numbers and wealth. Consumption of raw materials (such as timber and coal, especially before construction and hence the steel input complex slumped) has also grown.
I think that has more to do with import growth than the FTA.
The US does not have an FTA with China, right? Their exports have also grown similarly:
http://www.ibtimes.com/us-exports-china-have-grown-294-over-past-decade-1338693 -
A TPP between the "small" pacific countries was a good idea for NZ
But they already buy lots of stuff from us, and are mostly constrained by having no money.
Generally, if we make things people want, they'll buy them, free trade agreement or not. Even if they hate and despise us and refuse to deal, they'll buy them from someone else, using up their production, so we'll sell more elsewhere.
I've never found a free trade agreement of any use in selling things overseas. The only thing that would be useful is an open border agreement like the European Single Market, so that goods can be shipped between states without customs inspection, but that has never been on offer, even with Australia.
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OnPoint: The Big Guns: Truecrypt and Tails, in reply to BenWilson,
OTP is the only encyption system that's been mathematically proven to be unbreakable.
But how it's practical to encrypt a stash of documents is very questionable. You need a key as big as your document set - where are you going to keep it? If you bury a memory stick with it on in the garden, you could equally bury the documents in the garden (I suppose you could bury both in different gardens).