Posts by tussock
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Brent Jackson,
Are prisoners allowed to write for newspapers?
Well, they're not allowed to vote, so does that make them impartial ?
Speaking of, does anyone have the numbers on how many people are excluded by that, or likely excluded because they'll be put off the roll too close to get back on even when out?
Or how many got turfed in the last couple years and never got back on? Or data on how hard the prisoner population voted against National in the past? Obviously they don't vote Nat, or we wouldn't have the new law.
Be interesting if it turns out a close election, which it's looking like given typical poll shifts in recent cycles.
-
Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Brent Jackson,
Editor wrecked this comment, try next.
-
Interesting that Slater says he did the Ports of Auckland work in the hope they'd be able to claim payment after the fact, and never got it. Thus the stories dying off at a certain point.
I wonder if it works the same for most of his income. Attack the opponents of big companies and hope they pay up when your stories end up in the Herald or on the 6pm news, then stick with the ones that pay and abandon the ones that don't.
Then the only people who do pay are old National party folk, like at the Food and Grocery Council. Interesting business model, shows it always helps to know the right people.
-
I would assume conspiracy laws in NZ are not as stupid as they are in (some small parts of) the USA, with that first step nonsense. I seem to recall a conspiracy to kidnap that was questionable even after finding the prepared room to hold the victim in, despite the near-fitting, underground room essentially being a coffin-in-waiting if anything went wrong.
Here it seems you can try to show a reasonable doubt that the crime would've happened. As Slater and co. talk great volumes of borderline criminal shit on a daily basis, but are actually just sad little internet trolls (takes one to know one), that would provide some doubt.
-
Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Moz,
They have to be thinking "oh, that smart, sensible, rich greenie I know, he's the exception, the rest are barmy".
No. They're trying to win elections. They think calling smart, sensible, rich greenies, and all the other kinds, who they know and like and stuff, call them "barmy" is going to help them win elections. Which is their goal.
There's no doublethink involved. There's the real world where they like you and know green policies are good for people, and there's the fantasy story where they don't know any of that and you're a crazy greenie. Like anyone reading fiction, or watching scary movies, they know the fantasy isn't real, but they also think the story might be good enough to shift a few people into voting for them.
George W. Bush knew Iraq didn't have WMDs, he wouldn't have invaded if they did. That wasn't the point. The point was to have a good story on the way to militarily managing the looming oil crisis. For Farrar and co, it's not wars, it's just serving the local elite. Being at the coal face and letting the real movers and shakers keep their hands clean, and if people get hurt, well, that's just sad for them isn't it.
-
The point of the ACT branch of the National party is to give voice to the things the National party wants to do, but cannot risk saying for alienating the less rabid of their fan base. It's the same when they agree to implement "ACT" policies that happen to precisely match older and less electable National Party policies that they "dropped".
Also, it's half a seat for free. If they could get away with giving ten seats to ACT they would.
So this isn't a strange game of gathering up the racist votes, it's policy in the waiting. Don Brash wasn't an anomaly, the people behind the Nacts know better than you do about facts and things. They know better about buying food than poor people. They know better about educating children than mere teachers. They know more about healthcare than doctors. And they know more about dangerous legal precedents than some Māori. Jamie White's just making the mistake of saying so out loud.
It's because we're all jealous. Envious of their hard-earned success. Can't even think strait, you see. Obviously the best way to raise incomes (of the select few) is to drive down wages (of everyone else). Makes perfect sense, you just don't say the bits that the lesser folk can't bear.People vote for them, really, because "well, yes, but we're doing alright". The harder the Nacts kick the poor, the more their voters perceive themselves as being lucky by comparison. The whole point of even having a middle class is to shield real power from the masses.
-
Hard News: Decidedly Undecided, in reply to Andrew Robertson,
Tussock – it’s not that simple.
What they report now is bullshit. You don't like my simple approach because it doesn't cover some contingencies, but what they report now covers almost no contingencies. Maybe 1 if a party's near 5%.
The results for each party are non-independent, so if the number of seats for one party changes, this changes the number of seats other parties will get (irrepective of what their range is).
Yes, but if you actually care that National (or whoever else) don't really have the range of outcomes you say they have, and think that's important, maybe you should be doing something about it already.
They report the polls as a left vs right thing (and you should probably ask people if they want a left- or right-lead parliament to inform their reports) with some centre parties mostly ignored in the graphics.
So it doesn't actually matter how many votes flip between Labour and Green, only between the left block and right block. Because that's all they're really reporting.
And that's simple enough math. Because the right block is almost entirely the National Party it's variation is the same as the net variation in the left block. Can't be otherwise. Any further variation in Labour and Green is unknown between those two and a bunch of minor parties.
When you chuck another party on National's side, the uncertainty on that side grows, and so does the uncertainty on Labour's side to match. That's really easy to display on the hop. You don't have to cancel out the movement between those graphically joined parties, even though you could try.
Parties with a range crossing the 5% threshold would then add to this complexity and would shift entire ranges altogether. Then to add even more to the complexity, the total number of seats will shift depending on whether parties have ranges that might create an overhang. The number of seat combinations would be ridiculous, and impossible to report.
You, sir, are making the perfect the enemy of the good. We don't need to see the exact chance of every possible parliament layout, we don't need an exact chance you've found a left-wing majority. It's just when Duncan Garner and co get on and prattle about National having 62 seats on the last poll data and they'll be governing alone on that poll that should fucking well embarrass you.
Because it's not true. Your data doesn't show that. It never shows that. It can't. I understand they can't display everything the data might be showing, but right now they display things the data doesn't show.
And one way to fix that is just to show that National has polled between 58 and 66 seats, and those 8 seats could actually be going to other parties by the same poll data. By candy-striping them or something.
It's not the whole story, the error's going to be too large combining parties, etc, etc, but it's a hell of a lot more of the story than picking the number in the middle for everyone and pretending like that's true.
So no, a little bit of maths won’t do it unfortunately.
A little math would be better. No math would be better if when they put up their graphic of seats in parliament it just showed that some of them were uncertain.
And that includes the uncertainty of a 121st or 122nd seat, the big change if Winston misses or gets in (because his range might be 0 or 6-8 and that drops other parties by 0 or 1-4 by size). But you'll notice the number of seats Winston gets is equal to the total seats everyone else loses and so they're the same damn seats in the graphics.
OK, the graphics at TV3 and TVNZ aren't your problem, and I'm maybe talking to the wrong person entirely. But you'd have a hell of a lot more sway with them than I do, because I've heard them give your excuses there already on TV. You already do influence them. -
Hard News: Decidedly Undecided, in reply to Andrew Robertson,
Actually, we've had people tell us that we shouldn't even report to whole numbers - but provide only ranges. If we did that though, we couldn't convert to seats and it would be hard to tell how close things are under MMP.
Of course you can convert it to a range of seats. National getting between 58 and 66 seats is what your poll data is saying. A little math would tell you the odds they're polling above 60 seats. Taking the median and suggesting they get 62 seats exactly is simply not supported by the data.
You could even point out that National get at least 58 seats, Labour and Green at least 52, minor parties 4, and there's six seats could go to either block is the real story of the poll. The uncertainty of the cross-bench point is the bit that actually matters. Highlight it.
Maybe some more people will GOTV to try to help it one way or the other. The one curse of polling is so many people end up thinking their vote doesn't matter. That it's all decided already, when the uncertainty is always there, right on the cross benches. Well, usually it is.
Even got a house graphic for you: Striped seats in the middle with colours covering the uncertainty range of each party. Labour's got 5 half-seats, Nats 6 Half-seats, Greens 3 half-seats. Look at 'em there, just waiting for your lazy ass to get out and vote.
Edit: Then put up a graphic with how many seats the non-voters could swing. Because it's what, 30 seats? More? -
Hard News: Labour's Fiscal Plan:…, in reply to Swan,
It is double taxation on the same income no matter who is paying it
That's a specious argument. Everything is double or triple or more taxation because money really does circulate. When I spend money in a shop I've been taxed and then they pay GST, and then the wages the shop pays and profits they make are taxed, same for all the other businesses in the chain, and their workers also spend that money and pay GST, and around it goes. Bit and bobs get claimed back along the way.
If someone happens to buy and sell assets during that merry-go-round, and you set the tax rate on that to zero like we do, people will game the system with asset-trades. It's like the government paying people to put ever more money into fixed assets, which with a limited fixed asset supply can only ever distort asset prices upward in the long run, at least until the pyramid comes crashing down.
In the US it got so bad the banks wrecked the entire world's economy gambling on house prices going up year-on-year forever with no significant risk. The market is literally insane around tax gaps.
Joyce is simply being deceitful to say that leaving some private homes out of the system will make people game it when almost everyone in the National caucus is already gaming the system more than they could with this change, including him. The perfect is not a true enemy of the good, especially if a perfect system is unelectable.So yes, asset taxes are totally a double tax. Just like every other tax. And they're important because our asset prices are highly distorted against their realisable value at the moment, because of people gaming the system to chase that 0% tax.
Someone asked how you play the game? The standard was (it changes as the govt/IRD tweak things) to count your rental as a loss maker, and dump 30% of your income into improving it's value (while secretly defrauding the IRD by putting most of the money into your own house instead). This gives you a tax rebate for your regular income equal to your normal tax bill. That's harder to do now than ten years back, especially with WFF giving many folk 0% tax anyway, but not impossible.
The game finishes when you flip properties and realise the untaxed capital gain. You earned 90k, put 30k "into the rental at a loss", paid no tax, sold the rental for +60k when inflation happened, for net income 120k, total tax paid 0k. Times about 50 for rich folk, inside those layers on layers of trusts they "know nothing about" while living in and driving.
-
Legal Beagle: Suicide Reporting; or, The…, in reply to william blake,
just because the gutless arsehole
That's not how that works, by the way. It's always nice to believe that people doing horrific things hold belittling character flaws, but it's not true.
It's a mental health issue. They're not well, or at least they weren't for that last minute. Most suicides are just something lethal being right there at a very bad moment for otherwise normal enough people: gun locks (and medicine and such put out of sight and away from where you spend time) save a lot of lives for that reason.