Posts by tussock
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Hard News: Time to Vote, in reply to krothville,
I was just genuinely curious because I would have thought that the easier it is to vote, the more people would be likely to do it. I was/am interested to hear why that idea might be mistaken.
Chicken Nuggets, eh. When the inventor tried to give them away, people were insulted at the big baskets of chicken scrap meat in batter. So they sold them, which still didn't work well, because obviously they were an inferior product and the customer could afford better.
So they got a marketing person in, and he told them to put them in tiny packets and charge a premium for them. The scrap meat. It worked, and everyone around the world loves chicken nuggets now, because they're so expensive and you get so few of them. It's quite the privilege just to eat their garbage, can't really afford them for the kids.
Lobster is the same. Diamonds. All sorts. Stuff that used to be almost rubbish because it was so common and ugly, and then someone cornered the market for a moment and charged a premium, suddenly it becomes valued.
Those crack-like facebook games that your mum plays, they're designed to specifically restrict when and where you can play. How long you have to wait, how long you can play at a time. Because that makes people play more. Makes you value the time you have.
Voting, people have to value it. Work a bit. Read some policy, listen to some debates, put some time in. Talk to people who care, know someone who's passionate about it. Then organise their time to vote, where, what time of day, who with. You make one part of that just a bit easier, it decreases people's engagement, lowers the effort they put in.Less effort, less money spent, less time spent, people don't value those things as much. For some people, it could tip them into not voting. Which is crazy, because holy shit, pick a government, but there it is. People, whatchagunnado.
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Hard News: A call from Curia, in reply to Keir Leslie,
It's not a push poll --- it would be a complete waste to do a push poll that lasted more than 30 seconds.
Unless people are suspicious and you're trying to reassure them. Let's see. ~200 call staff from what I've seen of the joints, take an interactive dialogue line that goes longer for people that are hooked, do ~30 people an hour, that's over fifty thousand targeted calls today alone, on people that listened and interacted well. Use a dialler to optimise staff time.
Could easily be a seat, party vote is everything and it's very close.
Wikipedia:
For instance, a push poll might ask respondents to rank candidates based on their support of an issue in order to get voters thinking about that issue.
Targeting bloggers who might reprint the list, that catches thousands more, doesn't it. Maybe target some old-media people too, try to turn a few stories today. If you were being an amoral marketing genius, like, say, David Farrar. Got everyone here thinking about everything that the right wing parties like, at least for a while.
Or, yeah, just trying to dig something up on a slightly bemused Russell Brown. But today? It's not over, but maybe they're working on which TV ads they'll run tonight? Maybe? If you were inclined to believe in the honestly of the current National party's "oh, just a blogger" media management crew.
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Cold change later on tomorrow in the deep south, snow to 500m. Get out early if the weather might affect you or you have a drive.
Rain on the West Coast by the look, gets thundery with snow to 700m later, so go early.
Gales and thunderstorms in Wellington should clear in the afternoon, high winds in the ranges.
Severe gales central North Island. Thundery showers in the north and Auckland.
Eight weather warnings in place for the country. OK, then. Help everyone get that wants to, eh, there might be a few need it, but hopefully people have gone early if it was going to be too much trouble. Or vote today yet.
http://www.metservice.com/ -
Here's one for the Greens, totally unofficial, just me, off the top of my head.
* Which party do you most feel has principles they'll stick to?
* Which party do you most feel would never abuse the processes of government for petty political gain?
* Cares about the future generations of this country?
* Would start real investigations into the illegal spying and dirty politics undertaken by the current government?
* Understands the looming fuel crises and need for economic transformation?
* Supports local democracy and regional control over their future development?
* Behaves honestly and really tries to get it's policies across in the election campaign?
* Will help farmers and rural communities to clean up their own streams and rivers with substantial government support and science-based guidelines?
* Values principles of fair access to government services?
* Accepts the validity of massive scientific predictions of future problems?
* Can work with parties across the political spectrum to implement good policies with every other party, even in opposition?Come on, someone do Labour. I'd do Internet-Mana, but it's hard enough picking one to vote for tomorrow. Who cares, vote left, love 'em all.
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It's an old fashioned push poll, Russel. It's not about finding out what you want, it's disguised as a poll to get around the electoral advertising laws and to tell people to vote National.
Seriously, every single one of those 20 questions at the end are specifically designed to get old right wing voters to feel better about the shitty state their party is in and vote for them anyway, because they're basically trying to do the right thing and have a good team and mostly do all right and will beat up the poor for you and come on ... just one little tick ... just the party vote.
Should be illegal, probably is, but Farrar would explain how they were really interested a couple days out from the election in changing all their messaging. Which is to say, he'd just lie and the police wouldn't care anyway. -
Where is the inspiration in that?
Sort of doomed at that, aren't you? Not allowed to stand up for policy. It's the policy that actually changes people's lives, which is why certain parties minimise the presence of theirs and work on personality games.
Telling young folk to dig through reams of it, it's bullshit. I've done it, it's hard work and I end up feeling I don't really know enough about it to know if it'll work anyway. Well, some parties have policies that have been tried around the world and always failed (which roughly 96% of people understand), but which new bits will really come off is mostly a matter of ... looking at the various group's running history of successes and failures.
Which is why people vote for tax cuts, really. Pretty obvious what that does for you. Nothing. But you can imagine being rich enough for it to matter, which totally feels good.But as I was sort of saying, nearly. Some of them have policies that are going to be a massive and highly useful investment in the future of the nation in the face of generational challenges, and others are building giant roads to nowhere while kicking the poor for shits and giggles. And if you can't talk about that, you're not really going to inspire everyone to vote the bastards out.
/hard not being political, this time of the thing. Keep getting inspired.
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So, is all this stuff basically an admission that John Key signed off on having Daryl Jones murdered because ... metadata?
You know.
https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=cia%20kill%20metadataAnd we give them all our metadata, so when some dude, who no one local thought was at all radical despite the beatup in the press, when he took a trip to a friendly allied country, Yemen, and hooked up with a few Aussies for a date cruise (there's no booze, but they have lovely dates), and one of five people in that group may have gotten on the watchlist by ...
Being in the same building as someone on the watchlist.
Getting a phone call from someone on the watchlist.
Reading a website that is visited by people on the watchlist.
Being on the same plane as someone on the watchlist.
...And then they all phoned each other, and met up, making them a conspiracy of people on the watchlist, so we dropped a giant bomb on them and killed them. Because Al Qaida. Ter'ism. Etc.
I mean, they were soooo sure about Ahmed Zaoui. Because when he said "FIS", they thought he said "yes". In an ambiguous way that totally gave up the game that he was a terrorist. For years. That's their actual recorded standard of evidence. Got accent? Need bombed. Totally a secret terrorist. And no you don't get to see the evidence against you, because you'd just lie about it. Terrorist.You're all on the list now, BTW.
Not to worry, if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear. Unlike the GCSB, who've got everything to hide.
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Hard News: Vision and dumbassery, in reply to Jake Starrow,
"I'm pretty certain that innocent people had or have nothing to worry about."
First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and I did not speak out, because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out, because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left, to speak out for me.
Organisations who do these things, they have always abused their position. Always. Every time. It's so easy, you can target anyone at any time, you define your task as avoiding the innocent, so obviously everyone you target is guilty of something. They must be, innocent people have nothing to worry about.Why would you defend the guilty anyway? What are you, some sort of sympathiser? Perhaps we best keep an eye on you, too, and your family, and everyone you meet, or pass nearby, or who reads the same books.
When the Nazis burned all those books, the ones from the libraries, they checked the slips in the back, for who had borrowed them in the past. Make a big list. Just to keep an eye on them. What have you been reading? Because this looks pretty subversive.
But don't worry about being on the list, if you're innocent, that would never get you raided or anything. Operation 8 was just a blip, not a trend.
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to llew40,
So it seems to me if that is the case - vested and political interests and spin aside - entirely plausible that most if not all of the parties involved in this may be telling the truth.
The Government here is lying by omission.
GCSB collects our allies data, our allies collect NZ data, from the same buildings, including in NZ. Then everyone looks at the combined data stored on the same servers from everyone's countries by "asking someone else to do it for them", or just doing it themselves by ticking a box, because it's all run from the same places. No one is technically spying on their own citizens in a way that makes mockery of the language: they're all helping each other spy on all of their own citizens all of the time, and they need almost no excuse to dig through things even if you are a citizen and they care to follow the rules for a change.
Not just metadata. The NSA is running a rolling copy of all internet traffic for months, years from the millions of people they're "watching" (say, because you read Keith's page about TOR and PGP), and expanding that time as budgets allow. They can read your emails, log on to your facebook, browse your cloud storage, track every search term and website visit, and they routinely do that to pass information to US businesses for economic advantage, and to pet politicians for political advantage. Terrorists found? Approximately zero.
The GCSB has people from the NSA working in their buildings here, and we know John Key uses their secret squirrel crap for political gain because that's what he's doing right now, by responding to the allegations before they were even made.
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OnPoint: "Project SPEARGUN underway", in reply to Ian Dalziel,
How do you 'probe' an optic cable, without breaking it to insert a splitter or somesuch?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifierNote that most submarine cables have dual landing cables built in, as the landing is the section most often broken so it acts as backup. There's already a complete copy of all transmitted data landing in a second maintained but "unused" building in most western countries. You don't actually have to physically hack anything at all, just set up a server farm nearby and do some trivial forwarding.
But if you did want to break them? Physically, for teh sneakies?Oceanic optical data cables have powered signal boosters every few kilometres. The optic cable is surrounded by a copper sheath which carries the power for the boosters (amongst many other layers). You've only got to tap into a signal booster to get the entire signal dump with perfect clarity, they already collect, analyse, and resend the optical signal at those points, and have built-in systems for checking that they're working, and they are all physically replaceable.
So, you know, just replace one of them with one that copies the signal, like they already have at most of the landing points, make your own landing, and that's done.