Posts by tussock
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To summarise, you target the big two. Threaten an arbitrary swing against the due winner and hope to get both of them to commit before the election so you don't even have to deliver. There's benefit for them in it by weakening the smaller parties, giving them more options after our usual tight elections.
Wouldn't be any of this urgency nonsense though, so I guess the ascendant fascist trend in National may not bite. They still dream of 51% after all.
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Legal Beagle: On Consensus, in reply to Steven Peters,
If my take on this is correct, what is your solution?
I'm not sure. Let's see if I can essay one up.
The low turnout we're getting should scare the crap out them, but they trust their PR spending to keep any populist upstart from grabbing all the stay-homes and taking over. I wouldn't put it past an extremely rich person to out-PR them still, but at the moment they all get a better ROI buying policy from National.
NZF and Greens benefit as the third and fourth parties (with a Christian group to replace NZF eventually, maybe). They'd be weakened by more small parties existing, have to be. Four parties is what 5% gives us, and with 3 or 4% we should stabilise at five parties with a swinger in the center. At least, that's the international trend long term.
If we do fall back to four parties permanently, two left and two right, it's much the same as the old FPP deal. You either get Nats+1 or Labs+1.
Where was I? Right. How do you get the politicians who think they're sneaking unpopular policies through via the old 2-party system in drag to vote for a system that would deliver a more representative government and may fragment their old power blocks?I guess you try to start a movement which can get the non-voters off their ass. Not for yourself, but for one of the big two. Deliver an extra 100k(?) votes to the first party who'll fix the system and let everyone get representation, and none to either if they refuse. A carrot for the one who'd lose otherwise. Get the no-seat minor parties onboard, that should give you a few tens of thousands to start with, not that they'd all agree.
You'd need some real money though, because the PR battle would be legend, and it's hard to fight for giving small minorities a voice, because they are small minorities and thus have no voice.
And realistically, it won't get much better for them even with a seat or three in parliament. Small groups have less choice of people to front, and are never going to look as good on anything they talk about as a result (imagine one random Labour MP having to front everything), and they'd be highly unlikely to get much policy through (unless it's widely popular stuff the big two or four can't sponsor for fear of their extreme wings, like not hitting your kids).
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Legal Beagle: On Consensus, in reply to Steven Peters,
Why do you support ‘no party vote threshold’
Hi, I'm not Graeme, but I do support the very low party vote threshold (of about 0.8 seats, or a 1.4 first divisor, as you will). Anyhoo, to me it's a pretty damned simple case now of the majority stealing votes from the minority to give themselves more power to push through legislation without popular support. Like selling state assets or sea-floor drilling and mining.
The current system also gives more power to the small parties who do happen to get into power. It's much easier to run a minority government when there's more of them to choose between to find each majority, play them off against each other, and minority government is what kiwis keep voting for (and have done basically forever).
More parties would leaves the little ones free to vote for their own policies, rather than get tied up in coalition compulsions.
When a party grabs 3% of the vote now, those seats instead go two to National and one each to Labour and Green. That's not right. At all. What happens is that people who want to vote for those parties (Alliance, ALCP, Christian flavour of the month, Hunting and Fishing, whatever) end up mostly staying home because the polls say it's hopeless, giving us these low turnouts. We had 10% of the electorate not turn up specifically because they thought their vote wouldn't count. That's 12 seats. That should count, even if they're split between five or six parties. Even if half of them still vote for Labour and National.
You can't just ignore those people's will because you disagree with them or are worried it'll be harder for the majority to bulldoze policy through anyway. Or obviously you can, because you're the majority and that's what happens now. You shouldn't ignore them though. It's rude and presumptuous.
Bla, bla, bla.
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Shorts, loose, big pockets, and covers the knees for warmth. Polyprop longs under in very cold weather. Bike top, often with a loose long-sleeve open-front shirt over for sun/wind protection and because it's brighter than my bike tops. Flouro overjacket in dim light or night rides. Cheap-ass shoes.
Gloves, fingerless. Silly pretend-helmet, legal. Light, awesome. Drinks, up to three. Bike, hardtail trail, goes anywhere but the big drops. Off for a week on the trails at Naseby tomorrow. Really must get to bed.
Seems a lot safer to put more visible parked cars between cyclists and motorists.
It's not. They're getting rid of them in various countries already, the turning vehicles don't see you at all. Safest solution is shared space, no road markings at all, lines just make the drivers act like they own the place.
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Thank you. I’m sorry, I chickened out. Also, I need help.
Awesome, now I'm an adult.
/blink.
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to Damian Christie,
But at the same time I/S you seem to be claiming that you have a right to experience and interact the content, which you yourself refer to as product.
You mean like radio, and tv, and libraries, which also contain newspapers and magazines, and the internet (you might have heard of it, it also duplicates all of the above)? Yes, people do have a great many rights to experience and interact with content.
For the most part, people are dead keen to get you to experience their content. They actually pay people to deliver more users to get that experience, with ads. Radio is mad-keen to get you to hear songs for free, and Russel would love a million extra kiwis to read his blog every day.
The one thing the law explicitly forbids those content providers from doing is running programs on my computer without my consent. That's the illegal thing here. Trying to get around my "ad blockers".
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Hard News: MegaBox: From f**k-all to zero, in reply to Russell Brown,
And so my right to decide what’s displayed on my site, next to my work, is unimportant? Good to know.
I can see the pictures, for .gif and .jpg and .png and even .bmp, which lets you track traffic and everything just fine at the server level, as does a simple count of page views by IP. What people block with so-called "ad blockers" is programs that try and run on users' computers.
You, Russel, have no right whatsoever to run programs on my computer. None. Zero. Ziltch. Things want to run on my computer, they need to ask my permission, and the default answer is "hell, no". If your business model demands otherwise, you need to rethink it.
Yes, Dotcom's getting people to install a parasite, but at least he's offering people a choice and some clear incentive. You get a stealth one through an ad network and you get nothing.
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That's just the police. There's also the courts, the prisons, parole, monitoring and record-keeping. Also, it may be wrong, the police budget is only $1.4 billion per annum, so they'd be using over 7% of their budget on pot.
If that is right, it's pretty clear who's hooked on the marijuana, eh.
http://www.corrections.govt.nz/about-us/facts_and_statistics/prisons/ps-July-2013.html
11.4% of prisoners are in for drugs or "antisocial", excluding people also charged with "more serious" traffic or violence offences.
51.4% for being "Māori". Well, no, you'd expect some, so only ~40%.
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So, a couple things.
1: I think the angle of violence in the media totally has things going for it here. Not a lot, but real anyway. Dude's Mum was a bit of a collapse cultist, which totally feeds on the news cycles of sensational violence, popular crime dramas, and religious-radio culture-war types. For isolated people like them, there's a lot of grim they can get lost in. Fiscal Cliffs are 24/7 in the states right now, if that's what you're into.
http://thedevilspanties.com/archives/8086
My own family has noted that just not watching shit like CSI makes the world seem a nicer place each day; anecdotal but don't know of anything that contradicts. At least the local docu-cop stuff lets you pity the victims (of the asinine laws).
2: The news this time has been damned kind to we few with Aspergers. They are never so kind to the Psychopaths. Privilege in it's own little way.But Aspergers people can become deeply obsessed with just one topic in life, and near-oblivious to anything else. If his Mum made his preparing for the imminent collapse of society and killing everyone who came for their tinned food, that's just not something I can see an isolated Aspie handling well. Perhaps he was saving them all from the impending doom?
3: It's not the guns. Statistically, the gun deaths are exactly what you'd expect given the number of homicides and suicides, and the number of houses which have guns. They just have a lot of homicides.Speaking as an Aspie (you know, I'm not going to get sad when the Americans drop bombs on Pakistani children, and I'm not going to get sad when Americans shoot bullets at American children: it's all sad, but there's way too much of that shit in the world to let it in).
Anyway, there's totally better ways to up your score of 6-year olds (I can think of three or four he'd have easy access to), especially if you weren't fussed about injuring a few, rather than being so careful to quickly kill each one.
@Russell: it's not that people aren't special, it's that they are. I can't take things like this too seriously because it would cripple me. Sometimes you just have to work the numbers, the distant facts and figures, as a way to engage with it at all. -
And we’re not going to learn much from [Drug Bust] at all.
I don't know about that. Most of my more conservative relatives have been surprised to see that a lot of pot growers look just like poor single mums with a lot of mouths to feed, and aren't exactly living it up while doing so.
Puts a new light on us having thousands of people in prison for growing pot, many of whom have property subsequently seized with other dodgy laws.
At some point we will certainly shift to legalise and tax and regulate marijuana and probably other drugs.
With all the kickbacks the parties get from the booze? Not f*kin likely. It's not about what it costs society, eh, it's about what it earns the political machine.