Posts by Rich of Observationz
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many people feel the place is to big
I wonder if those people would rather that country was run by a CERA style board of 'highly-qualified people' with a handful of MPs to act as a rubber stamp.
Operating Parliament, including buildings, salaries and expenses, costs a tiny, tiny fraction [edit: approx 0.2%] of public spending. Our parliament is actually quite small; Ministers need to be recruited from the governing parties, should have some level of experience (like at least a term as a backbencher) and an affinity for the department they govern. Delivering that would be a lot easier with a few more MPs.
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review - The Proposals, in reply to Idiot Savant,
Not really, I don't think it's a value judgment thing at all.
Anderton got a ministerial role on the back of his microparty and electorate showing (even as the former tended to miniscule). If he'd stayed in Labour, he probably wouldn't have done. So those Wigram voters (not to mention the 20,000 JAPP party voters) could be seen as being super-served by the system.
The Maori Party don't make any serious effort to seek list votes. While this is their right (and I don't think Pakeha and others have any standing to interfere with the disposition of the Maori seats) it does have a (slight) distorting effect.
So does National's promotion of Dunne and ACT as 'support partners'. Maybe they'll continue do do this even for single-electorate MPs, but it's less of a rort. (If they (or Labour) scaled it up and had 30 'minor-party' candidates running for electorates, it'd become a huge rort and have to be suppressed, I suppose).
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I love this (p18)
That some voters choose not to avail themselves of the information readily available to them in party lists does not alter the fact that list MPs are elected.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to DexterX,
Doomsday Device
(server version)
I'd be interested to know how that would work, technically.
I'd guess they might have ~100T on a server (about the most you can get in commercial kit, although they might have big boxes of disks or custom built giant boxes of disks). At 100M/s, that's 11 days to erase the whole lot.
(Maybe the disk controller can run low-level formats on multiple drives in parallel - mine can't).
One could, I suppose, have an encryption key on each server that gets erased when The Button is pressed. But an unbutton that deletes the keys unless it gets the "da big man is all good" message is equally possible.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
The idea of a "Justice Precinct" indeed sounds very Judge Dredd.
Indeed:
"Since the abolition of democratic government in Canterbury in 2011, Mega-City 03 has been a dictatorship run by CERA. ... Its ruler is Chief Judge Gerry Brownlee. He is accountable to nobody. The citizens are permitted to have an elected city council and mayor, but with no significant power: the idea is that a facade of democracy will placate most people"
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Iain Banks had his rock star character in Espedair St receive his Eastern Bloc royalties on a barter basis in the form of bulldozers and the like, which he stored in his deconsecrated church in Glasgow. I'm sure this is based on fact.
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Hard News: Future shock for the media, in reply to Danielle,
Auckland University of Tautology.
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Hard News: Future shock for the media, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
United World Colleges, University of the Western Cape or United World Capital? Or even Ultimate Warrior Challenge?
(I did a stint in marketing once, and besides horn care and lying by omission, I was taught to spell a three letter acronym (TLA) out in full before use).
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Hard News: Future shock for the media, in reply to Russell Brown,
the level of evil as a hedge fund
Yeah, but I don't really buy the idea that corporations are on a scale of evil/not evil.
If you have capitalism, then you actually need agressive financial market participants like hedge funds to make it work. A consequence of a dearth of these is the kind of backdoor dealing that went on with NZ finance companies (and is, I notice, being repeated on a larger scale in China. That won't end in tears, right?)
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while I do not at all begrudge expat New Zealander Victoria Ransom's success in selling her company
Would you be so generous if she were male, American and ran a hedge fund? Just exploring thought patterns.
[digital circulation revenues will] go from $1 million last year to $59 million in 2016.
Sounds like a figure a management consultant pulled out of a hat - do these guys advise John Key? I don't know anyone who spends a bean on non-professional media subscriptions. If content's behind a paywall, that means I'll read something else. Those dollars might be easier to collect if they came through an ISP-linked (micro-)payment system, but the biz has been round that loop many, many times with very little success. My guess is that that those revenues will be in the low seven figures indefinitely.