Posts by Chris Waugh
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There are local issues best dealt with at a national level, and national-level policies and legislation affects different geographical areas differently. Therefore I don't think it's feudal or any kind of anachronistic to have people elected to parliament to represent specific geographical communities. Indeed, I think electorate MPs are necessary.
And in The World As It Will Be When I Am Hegemon, electorate MPs won't be Mr Wilson's Prebble-style bogeymen, nor will they suddenly vanish into the rarefied air at the top of the Beehive as soon as they're elected. They will advocate for the interests of the particular geographical community they were elected to represent. Because although some people don't feel any particular bond to a local community that can be defined, even if somewhat imprecisely, by lines on a map, many others do.
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I'm inclined to think parties should focus on the party vote and leave the electorates to independents and representatives of purely local coalitions/organisations. After all, electorate MPs are supposed to represent the people of a certain geographical area, are they not? While list MPs are supposed to represent their party and the nation-wide constituency that voted for it?
Also, although I can understand me not being allowed to cast a vote for an electorate MP, I think expats should be allowed a party vote even after three consecutive years abroad (or 1 year in the case of permanent residents), as we do still have an interest in the governance of our country.
And all of the above is predicated on NZ retaining MMP. Change the system (please don't, please just tweak it a little to iron out some of the unfortunate oddities) and I'll change my view.
Then again, I have of late wondered if we're seeing the beginning of the end of Labour as a mainstream force, and the beginning of the rise and mainstreaming of the Greens as future main centre-left party, so I'm probably just mad.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Martin Roberts,
But the number one reason why all these companies are evil is because they want to be the internet. They want, like all businesses, to maximise their profits, and the way to really do that is to no longer have competition. If you're stuck inside Facebook or Google's web, all advertising profit from your internet use goes to that one company instead of being shared between several. Facebook is a Microsoft that produces nothing useful. Google is Microsoft with quality control.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Peter Graham,
Also, go to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/ to see how Google targets ads at you based on your browsing.
See, now I'm even more mystified, because following that link shows me reference and language resource categories that are so vague I can see why I'd get ads in languages I've never studied let alone used, but a little googling gets me this page, which seems to suggest that because my google interface language is English - and besides, my preferred browser is in English, alternative browsers and OS are in Chinese, and if it were Facebook-style tracking everything I read it would see English, Chinese, French, and perhaps a tiny smattering of German, so even if Google did look beyond the user's interface language there's no way it should be giving me ads in Hebrew or Arabic or scripts I can't even identify.
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
How do you know? Perhaps it’s giving you an ever-narrower subset of results, tailored for optimal ad response.
Considering Google regularly serves me up ads in Hebrew or languages written in Arabic-based scripts - languages and scripts that I have never studied and do not read or write in - I doubt their algorithms are quite that sophisticated. Yet.
ETA: Even so, a narrower subset or results is actually helpful considering just how much information is out there, and the information google collects is at least supposed to be used to improve our experiences of the service (no matter how imperfect its algorithms may be) instead of merely serving us up to advertisers. And we're not talking Baidu, which has been caught out taking money to improve companies' and organisations positions in Baidu searches (be that by pushing them to the top of the search or simply removing them or bad news about them). Google at least maintains a clear distinction between search results, which are supposed to improve as it gets more information, and ads, which are supposed to become more relevant. Geez, I can't believe I'm defending Google...
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Hard News: The price is that they get to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
And then I thought, actually, this data improves the quality of my searches …
Well, exactly. I can not for the life of my see how Facebook's data collection helps anybody other than Facebook and its clients. With Google we at least get something more than just ads. And as Islander and David Hood pointed out, we all have non-Facebook ways of keeping in touch.
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About the only thing that bugs me about Facebook being blocked in China is that I can't delete my account without a VPN - and a VPN, apart from being unreliable, raises still more security and privacy issues. But not only has Facebook proved to be an almost completely useless waste of time, absolutely everything it does makes me think it is quite actively evil. So the next time I can get to Facebook VPN-free, I'm deleting my account. Until then I think I'll continue my perhaps rather naive gamble that my lack of activity will keep me safe.
But I do wish people would notice how long it's been since I was active before adding/friending/following/whatevering me on Facebook and Twitter (I quite enjoyed Twitter, I just don't miss it enough to bother jumping the wall).
Then again, considering I have a dormant Kaxin001 (Chinese Facebook clone) account and a semi-active Weibo (Chinese Twitter, but better) account, I guess I can't really get up in arms about privacy. But Facebook has creeped me out way beyond what any Chinese company or service has done.
And I'm with Russel in that Google may be just as evil (and Google is evil), but at least it provides useful and (mostly) good quality services. And last I checked, it doesn't go broadcasting your searches or reads or watches to all and sundry.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Sacha,
is that just retaining the rhythm of their own more intonation-based languages?
I don't think it's the tones so much as the sounds retained in the Cantonese, Hokkien and related dialects, but lost in Mandarin, that are written as final -t, -k, -p, etc. The way they pronounce similar English sounds sounds to my ears like a kind of glottal stop, hence the staccato. But that hypothesis isn't even close to half-baked yet, and I haven't done even the most informal research into it.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to BenWilson,
Germany, a popular contender, had data that I didn’t even want to read, their guesses on overseas population are deeply Godwinned since they were used to justify several of the invasions in WW2.
Really? Still? I would've expected the post-war ethnic cleansings of the Sudetenland and East Prussia to have left a few sore spots, and have read of Germans visiting Kaliningrad to check out the ancestral homeland, and perhaps even see if they can get some of the ancestral property back. But for such data to still be so Godwinned seems a bit odd.
And is overseas the right word? Overrivers, certainly.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Islander,
Trouble with migrants, whether they're expats or repats or moving one place to another within a country, is that they all go through a stage remembering how well used to life back there they were and how they're struggling with things here, and so everything back there is all rosy. The big trouble is an awful lot of them (particularly here in China) never get over that. I have about as much patience for them as you do, but unfortunately my line of work means I constantly have to deal with them without telling them to fuck off back home. It can get trying. I do, however, fully approve of people in more convenient occupations reminding whingeing migrants they are free to bugger off back to where everything is apparently perfect any time they wish.