Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #6:…, in reply to Geoff Pritchard,
Isn't there also some (entrenched?) rule about the South Island having to have a certain number of seats. Because they're special, you know, and if we upset them, they'll go off and form an independent federal state with Tasmania.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #6:…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
So the National Party says that National Radio doesn't have a right wing bias, and we must believe them.
A core aim of the right-wing discourse is to cast conservative opinions as "apolitical". Having journalists from domestic magazines is not balancing the right-wingers, it's reinforcing them.
And you'll notice that Farrar's analysis doesn't look at the time people got, just the fact that they appeared..
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Hey guys, 200 words! Didn't they teach you that at university :-)
if you just want to be a programmer, your best bet is a polytech industry-based course
Except that won't give you the status to be seen as one of the cool kids and work on interesting stuff. You'll be on the "industry" side of the geek/industry divide, and you'll be very much lined up to be replaced by a $20 an hour outsource resource from Hyderabad, Almaty or wherever they're finding cheap brains this year.
Best plan is to get Daddy to finance you while you build up a track record contributing on open-source. Daddy hasn't the dollars? - hard luck, welcome to the world...
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I reckon that electorate voting for the candidate of your choice is reasonable unless you live in Epsom or Ohariu. Or you feel the Labour person is one of the better ones and deserves more of a chance of geting in than their list position indicates. Or conversely, the National candidate is a bigger dick that the norm.
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I'd prefer to use talent as the selection criteria
What's wrong with using the ability to do the course? That seems to be the fairest system - you need to know and have done X,Y and Z in order to enter a course with an expectation of completing it - which is what NCEA is designed to measure.
Otherwise, it's just a sifting system - and every such system, although they may purport to be meritocratic in fact discriminates in favour of those whose parents have been able to buy expensive, exam-focused tuition.
Also, and this may not have occurred to the academics who advocate for UK-style competitive entrance, it creates an artificial league table of universities based on the undergraduates they can attract. For NZ, this would mean that although Lincoln or Massey (for instance) might be objectively the best places for particular research, they'd be seen as intrinsically inferior to e.g. Auckland, just because one demands AAA and the other CDD (or whatever equivalent was cooked up).
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OnPoint: 3 News Exclusive Investigation…, in reply to George Darroch,
My friend got well funded to do a PhD at Cambridge, despite being American. The SSRC looks at the research, not the person doing it. (This has probably changed as part of the UK’s policy of becoming a developing nation within 20 years through applied xenophobia).
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Our goal is to be 90% renewable by 2025
Of course, by privatising power generators they are getting rid of the levers they could use to achieve that (rather unambitious) goal.
We should actually be aiming for 100% renewable by 2020 and to go well beyond that in replacing transport and static fossil fuel usage by renewables after that date. This is actually very achievable (we have identified renewable generation projects that take us over 100%, but isn’t going to happen with a “market” that prices fuel according to current costs of extraction.
It’s also something that can genuinely transform our economy by giving us a huge energy cost advantage over fossil-fuel dependent states. Something government should do (as opposed to much touted industrial policy fads – turning Waikekemukau into a ‘high-tech geomorphic innovation cluster’ is something that just isn’t in government’s gift. Or ‘transforming our economy through sport-based inbound tourism…’).
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[qualifications framework] theoretically goes up to 10
10 is a Nobel Prize?
11 would be discovering the Higgs Boson, or something impossible like general AI.
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Auckland mayoral <strike> "elections" </strike> beauty contests are FPP.
This election is MMP. It's fairly unlikely that the Greens will drop below 5%, or that Winston will get any seats. So a vote for the Greens vs a vote for Labour makes no difference in the overall left/right outcome.
That's the good thing about MMP, you can vote for whoever you want (unless it's a party with no hope of getting seats) and not worry about tactics.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #5:…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Yes, the UK parties (including the Liberals. in fact, especially the Liberals) are very broad coalitions. We in NZ also don't have the dividing issues that UK politics has around the EU.