Posts by tussock
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Farmer Green,
I was thinking more of the effect of a very large amount of renewable electricity becoming available , and its effect on household outgoings.
They can't shift it, there's no lines. Less than 1/3 of Manapouri can get anywhere but the smelter (or Invercargill, which has nothing to use it).
Like, ideally electricity would become a running-cost enterprise in Invers until enough factories set up to take the slack, upgrade the port at bluff to take the big container ships, and drag down enough population to work it all.
Or they could build another HVDC connection from the dam up to the Waitaki one, upgrading the giant inverters to handle the load. But that still doesn't spread it far enough, because you're adding the extra generation. They'd need to add more HVDC and get it all the way to Auckland. Length of the land load sharing, let them shut all the coal and gas plants for good. But it's an incredibly large project, billions in cost, and all it does is trash the profits of the electricity companies for a decade. The government likes those profits, so ... ?
Add the high lake storage at Onslow, we'd all have cheap power for a century or more with hardly building anything. Easy transition to electric transport, electrify all the rail, ... imagine a left-wing government.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to ,
You know the old pre 1970s left wing Labour governments presided over some pretty inequitable laws and economic policies.
Horrible stuff, but there's still plenty of it now, just differently targeted. Used to be homosexuality got you some years in prison (as if that would achieve something), while a working man out of a job was the state's fault and they'd pay him enough to feed a large family in a free house on a giant section by way of apology.
They were left wing, that's different to being liberal or progressive. State involvement in wages and prices, state infrastructure projects and job creation, state direction of trade and production and international money movements and exchange rates and banking, state redistribution of wealth to ensure the "righteous" poor had plentiful money without need for charity, crazy high taxes to ensure no one would be allowed to become "too rich" and have any personal power over ordinary people.
State housing that put the private stuff to shame. Compulsary unionism, local boards for everything. Free schools, universities, hospitals, free public swimming pools at every school to teach people to swim to cut the drowning rate back, not to mention the huge public sports grounds everywhere. National too, because that was how you won elections, by picking a "worthy" majority subset of the population and ensuring every single one of them could live decently (while ignoring the others).
Right wing is where you leave all that shit to the market, blame the poor for it's failures, and hand the most cash to the people with the most cash. People sleeping in their cars because the rents have gone insane is just a problem of people not being flexible enough in their hours, don't you know. If they wanted to be rich they just would be. It's only natural. Being poor is simply a moral failure of the individual.
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Labour and National really still want it to be FPP with two parties where they scrap over the median voter and can ignore everyone else, but what Social Credit and the NZ Party did to them in '81 and '84 resp. means they can't.
It's funny, they set up the 5% margin to try and generate four parties, hold the two big ones in the center and get a wing each for the radicals. But it didn't stick, Winston wants the center, the left is too diverse here. A 4% margin would have let five parties stick to add Winston on the cross, but then Dunne the eternal minister and the crazy Christians are there too, and the left didn't even last their first war in office.
So what we need is a tiny margin for micro-parties where almost everyone votes National anyway, and the fogies, the left, the liberals, the greens, their various fragments sometimes block and drag them around a bit. Sometimes Labour even gets in if National is stupid. Like the old days.
And the current 5% threshold just messes with that vibe terribly, always trying to find four parties that just can't work in NZ. The Majors are trying to wait it out, National hoping for Winston to die, Labour viciously stabbing at the constant stream of splitters on the left.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2014: The Special…, in reply to Kevin McCready,
30% of enrolled voters don't vote!
Fuck you, by the way. I'm so cynical I thought National would only get 43% on carelessly biased polling that favours the advertiser's interests like last time. And then people went and did their jobs like professionals, the polls were right, I was wrong, and the election came out as expected with Labour's long downward slide in the polls the last 18 months showing up clearly on the day as well. Life, it goes on.
Plus, 23% of people (100%-77%) enrolled don't vote. Some 5% of enrollments were late, so didn't even get a card. Most people who don't vote still collect their mail. There's not 30,000 cards lying around. There's certainly not 300,000.
It is naive in the extreme to imagine that of the 2500 (?) Voting Places in NZ there is not one who will try it on.
With people coming and going all day? Under the eyes of multiple party scrutineers? As a conspiracy with everyone there, the local judge who oversees the count? The press sniffing around for a story? People like you expecting it despite the difficulty?
With the polling places having their counts all match the long term expected turnout and voting trends as expected? With the swings going to National in every polling booth in every seat across the entire country? With the boundary changes reflected in the new electorate totals?
Yes, the small booths have less eyes watching, the odd period when no one turns up to vote, but they still only produce 100 votes. The really tiny ones, where it might be easy enough, they get six votes, and all those people know each other anyway. They can tell who voted for who because there's six of them. Not your extra quarter million all stuffed in one box from some backwater polling site.
Stop being ridiculous. Random people do try shit on, but not in mass conspiracies because people like us would hear. They still get caught, and there's fuck all of them anyway.
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Legal Beagle: Election 2014: The Special…, in reply to Brian Dixon,
and a very high chance the valid voter (on holiday at their parents' home up in Auckland) wasn't going to bother going out to cast a special vote.
Bullshit. It's ludicrous. University educated young people vote around 80% of the time. You're talking about people using thousands of cards to make any sort of difference, there'd be at least hundreds of people in on it, and thousands extra duplicated votes.
Last time I recall they caught 3 people in the whole country. Hell, maybe it was 30. It wasn't 300. Even 30,000 fraudulent party votes is barely one seat, and how the fuck would you hide that? Think!
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Emma Hart,
We have a fantastic culture of making it as easy as possible for people to vote
Speaking of: prisoners are mostly poor men, poor men mostly vote Labour, convicted all taken off the enrolment, ... I know it wouldn't have mattered, but there's a lot less enrolled people this time, eh.
We make it easy for most people to vote, and impossible for a random, about eighty thousand convictions per year. How many never got back on?
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Rob Stowell,
If they don’t believe in the policies, they should leave the party, or stop pretending to be a party of the left.
Labour hasn't been a party of the left since the 1970's. Jim Bolger was our most left-wing prime minister in the last 30 years. People under 50 have never even voted for a left wing Labour party.
The Alliance was a left-wing party. They imploded over joining the war on poor brown people, as you do. They had 20% of the electorate on a good day, when we had 95% turnout. Now there's 75% turnout. You do the math.
While you're doing it, note that Labour still needs to take vote off National, even if the left could reappear in a dignified fashion (from some old Labour party splitter like last time, if only their olds weren't all Rogernomes that secretly love the National party, and Labour didn't keep stabbing them all in the back).
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to brin murray,
One and a half hours of solid well-argued cogently presented convincing evidence is too much for the soundbite generation, or maybe even the average person.
That's not true, and it's not how messaging works anyway.
People don't just trust ads and messages. Modern advertising is about getting the dense information set to the people who care, the ready-talky folk, and also giving them a pat message to help them remember it, help them spread it. That message goes in the ads, and the journalists and bloggers and union reps and that guy at the office and chronic nerds everywhere are already using it because it really is representative. Someone you know checked.
So it rings true for the people who care a bit less, don't have the time, which is almost everyone, because everyone who is in a place to check on it already agrees on the message. The nerds are happy about it. See Apple's stuff for a great example.
The ads just reinforce that. Your message has to match your policies, and your policies have to make the ready-talky folk happy about using your messaging, because it's a memory aid for them.
That's 2011 Greens vs 2008 Greens. Basically doubled their long term vote trend. Same policies, better message. The question is, does Labour actually have a punchy representative message that could possibly encompass their broader policy set?To me they should do.
CGT: Productive investment, protect homeowners.
Minimum wage: Productive investment, protect incomes.
Top tax rate: Productive investment, protect future generations. -
Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to llew40,
When they stripped out the party brand names and asked the students to vote for policies in a blind taste session, the students majority voted for Internet Mana.
They did have the best policy suite. It's kinda weird that free public transport is cheaper than building more overpasses and skyways, until you actually check the cost of running buses vs the cost of a skyway (including the opportunity cost on the land it takes up).
The climate voter debate was classic. Minto nailed the policies over and over again, but it was internet only, so whatchagunnado.
To National it's terrible how much we already "subsidise" a long train trip in Auckland by totalling up a bunch of vague opportunity costs: to everyone else it's insane we don't immediately halve that "subsidy" by completing the loop underground and doubling the throughput on the same lines.
More trains is a lower subsidy per passenger, full trains is lower still, and free train rides, weird as it seems, is the lowest cost subsidy per passenger we can have. But then you don't need to build the roads, and then where would National get it's kickbacks from, eh?
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Keir Leslie,
He's not, no, Bomber Bradbury was a couple days out from the election. They went Nationwide with a party-vote campaign and tried to manage the local budget to allow for that, with the opponents not putting up much fight it didn't seem like an issue. Then once the millions were almost gone, a huge coordinated cross-party bunch of money went into their seat to oust them, with neither time nor money to respond.
Various labour pundits openly gloated. Rob Salmond considered it hilarious, as it added two more seats to National's total. As, I don't know, you may be here.
To me that's incredibly fucking stupid for anyone thinking of maybe being in government, but I guess they never were, so stabbing the splitters in the back instead is so very Labour, isn't it. There's a lot of hate in our tiny little red party for anything to do with those upstart little poor-folks unions, after all.