Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Polity: Four thoughts on polling in…, in reply to Sacha,
A fairly large percentage of active cellphone numbers are electricity meters (most smart meters have a GPRS/3G 'modem' as their comms method and because all GSM endpoints need a number, they have one).
Still, electricity meters might have more sensible political opinions than many voters.
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I guess the issue is that you get a sample of people that respond to your polling which isn't congruent with the people that vote.
Does robopolling acquire any demographics? It would seem hard to (beyond simple stuff like analysing address, name, maybe age if you have the electoral roll - is a candidate allowed to provide their electoral roll data to a contracted polling company?)
Once you've got this, the special sauce is in how you compensate for the sample - and if there's a big pool of voters where you have a miniscule amount of data (voters with no answered landline) then there's a question as to how much the knowledge you do have tells you about the unpolled groups.
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If you've got a database like Uber's (or even from publically accessible resources like Google Maps) then it's fairly straightforward to estimate within reasonable margins the journey time/distance and give the passenger a firm quote - which wouldn't often lose the driver money. If they want to reroute, they get a new price (what happens if you book a conventional private hire and decide you want to divert?)
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considerable fleet of DJs
I thought the collective noun for a group of DJs was a "flange", like baboons.
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Trump doesn't seem that far behind on average (is this site real?).
Could still win - there'll be a lot of voters who won't admit to a pollster they support him.
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Hard News: Trump's Dummkopfs, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Surely you need *low* level sources to detect demons?
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How it came down to this clown being the best the Republicans have to offer is just an indictment on their party
It's more that, for the second half of the twentieth century, the middle-class American worker did very well - they had job security, could afford a reasonable house and all the consumer goods they could aspire to. If they wanted (e.g) a snowmobile, they didn't have to save up, they went out and bought one.
That's all been eroded, and people are legitimately pissed off. For the wealthy, who've largely benefited from the erosion of workers benefits, this is a worry - the working classes might start supporting something close to socialism. So people like the Koch brothers have sponsored this astroturf movement to create a right-wing 'revolution' that turns workers on each other and away from the rich.
This happened before: Henry Ford, Alfried Krupp and many others were enthusiasts for a workers revolutionary ideology that didn't attack capitalism.
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“media” workers have only ever had a very basic understanding of how STV works
And as this thread demonstrates, people who understand STV haven't cracked being able to explain it to anyone who isn't a voting system geek.
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Onehunga - is there still one crammed and not very good cafe on the whole street?
In general, I don't think NZ does distributed night-life (or any life) districts very well. If the council doesn't explicitly ghetto them off as a Problem Drinking Area (as Wellington City have done with Newtown) then any bars that dare to open will suffer from all the local meatheads (possibly banned from the CBD and/or its bars) descending on the place and creating such mayhem the bar loses its license.
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Hard News: Friday Music: After the…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
We have "quarters" in Wellington. I'm surprised the council didn't decide to go with "arrondissements" but maybe they felt they'd already hit Peak Wanky.