Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Danielle,
I’m not sure what the word is.
Fallacious. Not to be confused with the closely related Fellatious.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Jake Starrow,
really, really gets under your skins and drives you mad
Well, it's true that I don't like him. Not because of his sizable (but not particularly amazing) popular appeal, but because of the things he does, and will do again, given enough votes from people like you who have clearly decided to vote for him because of his perceived personal magnetism. You're getting punked by a salesman.
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Hard News: 2014: The Meth Election, in reply to Jake Starrow,
That’s my opinion. Yours?
That one will never be able to bear John Key's children from fellatio alone.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to tussock,
Evidence. There’s nothing but evidence.
Nice rant. The conclusion does depend on what constitutes evidence, but I do love how the picture drawn by science of the universe actually IS mindboggling, compared to the oft given claim that God is mindboggling, without actually giving us anything specific to boggle about.
It segues nicely back to the original topic of the thread, I've been showing my little boys a documentary movie The History of the World in 2 Hours, as Defense against the Dark Arts, in case some Death Eater does get to them at school with religious bollocks. They enjoy it, but it's really quite a hard thing for children to roll with because it's packed from end to end with information, and it's not simple information, because it's not a simple story. The huge numbers are meaningless to them, and there's no narrative thread until we get to humanity somewhere around halfway. Its a good effort though.
It's quite a contrast to religious versions of the same thing, which are basically designed as stories to be told. They'd have undue impact on childish minds, I think, so I definitely don't want it to be taught to them as some kind of credible alternative account of creation.
Anyone know of any particularly good movies or TV series to continue embedding the scientific account of our origins for young children?
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
if you’ve been away from New Zealand for the length of time after which two-thirds of NZers overseas don’t come back, you’re probably not coming back, so you don’t get to decide what happens here.
That’s all pretty arbitrary. Why choose two-thirds and not 95%, or 99%? Why is “probably not coming back” grounds to lose the vote, and why should that only be assessed on the length of absence?
To me it seems that people only do actually vote if they feel engaged with the country. That’s a pretty good deciding line right there. Not a lot of people will go out of their way to cast a special vote when they really couldn’t give a toss who the candidates are on account of the zero impact it has on their lives. But people who feel that they do have a stake, probably through continual contact with family and friends, should still be able to vote.
I accept my line is also arbitrary. But I tend to favour lines that give people rights, rather than take them away. Especially when the right is as hard won as getting to vote. It seems to me that the people themselves are in the best position to decide how much their country means to them, much more so than an inflexible rule that is very impractical for people from a remote island.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Stewart,
No way is the nationwide median house price $500k. It might be that in & around Auckland but not ‘down country’.
I wasn't actually talking about the median price - a median can't be used in the way I used it, to find a total value. I meant the mean, and that is higher than the median by a reasonable amount. Median is a better measure of central tendency in this case, but I'm wasn't trying to make a claim about that, I was just trying to find the total house value which a mean is useful for. But I'm not going to niggle any of this - even if I used 375k as the multiplier, it would still make the point about just how much of our capital is sunk into this class of investment - it's almost a different order of magnitude to anything else.
BTW not arguing against a CGT as I think it is an excellent idea and long overdue.
I got that. And it is scary just how skewed the median is from the mean, it's a very important point when trying to understand our property ownership inequity.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Moz,
It’s amusing thinking up smart remarks that won’t upset Russell too much.
I had a horrified fascination in how many loops could be involved, and under what conditions the loop could be broken out of. I'm still none the wiser. Reminds me of the time I spent 5 hours debugging 10 lines of code. It took me that long to work out that the compiler was actually broken, not the algorithm. Many many loops through the same lines until ping under just the right conditions the code jumped back to a starting point just one spot removed from where the syntax in C++ meant that it should go to, and around and around it went.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Emma Hart,
I’m quite tempted to close this discussion thread then.
As a major guilty party in carrying on with it, I have no objections.
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Up Front: Oh, God, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Either deity exists or it doesn’t, there are no other rational positions to take.
Oh dear. Agnostics everywhere will be shamed by this.
I wouldn't, as an agnostic. Just because something either exists or doesn't exist is no reason to have an opinion either way. I'm agnostic about the poo-monster too (although there were some suspicious stains on the bowl this morning - could be a sign, in conjunction with my dream).
Rejecting it is rejecting the law of the excluded middle. Many respectable people do reject this, but in the case of this kind of argument it's not needed. It doesn't really matter if something is true, not true, or something else, when it is quite impossible to show either way. To practical purposes, such things are just best treated as not-important, rather than not-true.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
The main thing that makes me really think it's unlikely is that our non-CGT status is really quite unusual. Most of the developed world has it, and they've also had sustained property price inflation.
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