Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Does anyone seriously still believe security-by-obscurity is a viable tactic?
If it's your only protection, you're doomed. But that doesn't mean it's not utterly stupid to publish information about network connection points and other such details. Make the bastards work for every little bit of information that they're going to need to try and break into your network.
And knowing who's considered sufficiently important to justify government protection can be confirmation of target status whereas before there was just suspicion. -
Southerly: This Week in Parliament: 14…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Also, the results of that vote didn't go as predicted. No US veto, and an Australian "no". NZ didn't participate because we're not a member of the SC until 18:00 tonight NZDT.
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Southerly: This Week in Parliament: 14…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Will they toe the US/UK veto line ?
or will they be a force for change,
and help create a Palestinian state...Uh, if there's a veto that's the end of the matter. That's what veto means. Could be 14:1, but if one of the P5 exercises veto that's all she wrote. The history of the US on all matters Israel says that they'd veto anything that looked like it had a show of getting through.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
But what I’m getting at is that it’s never suggested that they will make a change and then rescind it if it doesn’t work.
I think I understand how we ended up with this discussion. You're confusing political and economic ideology with actual science :P
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
Each time a government makes changes to policy that affect both inequality and economic growth an experiment is being performed.
Is it really an experiment if no hypothesis is made beforehand, as Rob Stowell asks?
Unless one attributes to politicians in democracies an extraordinarily-cynical level of bad faith in their dealings with their electorate, the hypothesis behind any policy change is “This will make things better for people in our electorate by delivering xyz outcome,” surely?
Economic policies changes are, generally, about encouraging increased economic activity, tempered against the aim of not triggering excessive levels of price inflation. That’s the hypothesis, in a nutshell: we pull this economic lever and the economy will perform in a more-efficient manner thus delivering growth.
ETA: As much as I loathe National and what they stand for, I don't think they actually, actively aim to make things worse for the population as a whole with the policies they pursue. That might be the result of their ideologically-driven policies, but it is easy to see the misguided belief in "the market will deliver better outcomes for all" in what they do.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
You can experiment on a single subject without a control.
To something of an extent it can be observed in the US, where different states run different policy settings inside the same national-level policy framework and economy, but even then it is easier to disprove a relationship than to prove a causal one exists.
“Proof” to the standard required by economists *cough* could be achieved with a single subject, but actual scientific analysis to the point of being able to claim causality means controlled observational experiments. Willing to be contradicted by Bart, as our resident expert on “the one true scientific method”, but as I understand it you are on really shaky ground to make a change to conditions for a single subject and then claim causation of any observed outcome.
Also, because of the time scales involved in this stuff, you would have so many other potential variables that without a control you would really struggle to assess much of anything. A single subject under observation through the period 2007-2010, for example, would have been affected by the GFC as well as whatever policy tweaks were made, and good luck trying to accurately separate the effects of the two.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
Is that the only reason a controlled experiment can’t be done, or is it impossible, even if we could get to the point of being allowed to experiment? It seems to me that in theory, economic experimentation is possible, and if questions are unsettled that could be reasonably clearly answered, it’s very, very well justified.
How would you set up the necessarily-controlled macroeconomic environments in which to conduct such experiments? You need a country-sized (or at least one the size of a large city) economy with which to experiment, and another one to act as the control.
Really you need at least a couple of each, to ensure that you have a valid sample, and the experimental economies need to be sufficiently different from each other but sufficiently close to their controls that other factors can be eliminated.It’s effectively impossible to do proper correlation vs causation experiments with macroeconomics. One can observe outcomes of macroeconomic changes within similar economies, but to achieve full control of the entire economic environment such that there can be no other agents of change except the policy setting(s) under investigation is getting into the realms of the all-powerful, all-seeing omnipotent deity of the Judeo-Christian faiths.
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Bart Janssen,
No it’s a dual function door – saving valuable floor space (and hence ratepayers dollars) by combining bookshelves with door functionality.
In addition to hiding the mayoral sex dungeon. Is that what they refer to as "nailing it"? Or is that used to talk about something else to do with the sex dungeon?
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Russell Brown,
casual meetings
As opposed to the "casual meatings" that el Granny would have us believe will be going on in Len's sex dungeon?
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Hard News: Some reprehensible bullshit, in reply to Sam Bradford,
It’s actually hard for me to imagine how pointless or ill-informed a story would have to be before they’d apologise for running it.
Based on the total lack of contrition for Wine-bottle-that-didn’t-exist Gate, I don’t think such a story exists. The editorial staff would probably offer trite platitudes in the face of a well-heeled litigator who was determined to extract their pound of flesh, but that’s about it.