Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Alfie,
You don't seem particularly interested in reading any of the objections raised. For example, Emma wrote:
On Saturday, I had a guy moved away from standing over his wife while she voted.
If we had online voting, that all would've happened at home and nobody would've been able to stop that guy standing over his wife and doing whatever it was he intended to do. Which could've been purely innocent, but quite likely wasn't.
And maybe you're right about the inevitablity of online voting, but it's something I will fight and I will not give up fighting it because I can only see it as a major step backwards for our democracy and our society.
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If internet voting is supposed to increase turnout by making voting more accessible, then let's review Sofie's comment here. Something tells me that telling people in the situation she describes they can now conveniently cast their vote online won't go down terribly well.
Also: What Gary Young says about the dominant male of the household and Emma says about abuse.
Those are also reasons to can postal voting and go back to good old fashioned ballot boxes for local polls.
And I still think no matter how secure you make it, online voting is too vulnerable to being hacked. NSA/GCSB or China or whoever or all of the above. The system we have works and is pretty damn secure, so stop trying to fix it.
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Hard News: Five further thoughts, in reply to Kumara Republic,
I’m voting National. The prospect of a self-centred German gamer hijacking New Zealand’s election just pisses me off. Go home, you prick.
And some people try to say there was no, or not really very much at all, xenophobia in the opposition to Internet Mana?
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Farmer Green,
I understand that , in this election, ex-pats were able to do exactly that from the comfort of their beds.
Only those of us who'd been back to NZ in the last three years.
I strongly dislike any suggestion of any kind of electronic voting, be it machines in the booths or online. Seems to me the more technology is involved the more ways there are to game the system. Online, especially. Good old fashioned pen and paper works.
And talking about how some fancy-arse new technology is magically going to increase voter turnout is massively missing the point re: disengagement. My classrooms have computers, screens and projectors as well as blackboard and chalk, but using the fancy newfangled stuff instead of blackboard and chalk makes not one blind bit of difference to how many or which students pay attention, and talking to other teachers suggests it's not just me that notices this. Technology is just tools. It should be used where appropriate, and the right technologies used for the right jobs, but it ain't going to get those non-voters voting.
The current pen-and-paper system of voting works. The system can be gamed, yes, all systems can, but the opportunities to game the system are limited. Putting voting online where anybody can hack at it? No way.
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What's this I see in the Port of Tauranga? Raw logs? Awaiting export? I'm hardly the first person to ask why we aren't adding a bit more value first.
Also, it would seem to me that there's a lot more to the NZ economy than primary production, tourism and export education. Oh, and the occasional Hollywood blockbuster. New Zealand builds planes, don't you know, and I seem to remember them doing a deal with a Beijing company earlier this year, but my Google fu is deserting me, can't find a relevant link. Anyway, the point is there's plenty more going on in NZ than churning out milk powder, raw logs, graduates to fill international plane seats, and Hollywood films. Yes, there is a bit of media coverage of the rest of NZ's industries, especially the few who make it big, but there doesn't seem to be anywhere near the same level of support that those big few get.
It also seems to me [takes a deep breath before shooting in the direction of his own economic foot] that NZ has failed to learn from history and is still a bit too good at relying on only one market.
Diversify, people! And let's try and persuade the government to join in. After all, we're stuck with them for the next three years (most likely).
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to mark taslov,
Tourism, yes, but... If Beijing is the example, then I would suggest it's culture and historic sites that draws the big crowds. Happy Valley is just around the corner from me, and I can see it from my classrooms. I walked past it a lot over the summer (less time now that classes have started) and although I did see a lot of people, including some clearly (tour coach licence plates, accents, etc) from out of town, I've never seen anything like the crowds attracted by the Forbidden City, Badaling, etc. Even Jingshan seems to easily match Happy Valley, even if it is only for the tree the last Ming emperor hung himself from and the view over the old city from the top of the hill.
Air NZ, Whalewatch Kaikoura and others are active on Weibo and elsewhere, Air NZ in old media, too, pushing clean, green NZ. But we do need to keep the environment reasonably clean to keep those tourists coming. Feng Xiaogang recently published an autobiography in which he had nice things to say about a trip to NZ, Yao Chen's Queenstown wedding was popular on Weibo, but you can imagine what would happen if somebody of their stature and influence returned to China talking on Weibo about NZ's lurid green cowshit sodden rivers.
I have zero faith in the current government to understand any of this.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Farmer Green,
NZ was lucky that the Chinese suddenly wanted a whole lot of milk powder. That’s all over now.
Yup. The sheen has been coming off imported milk powder for some time now, with a bit of assistance from Fonterra, Sutton Group, and others in NZ. It's fortunate that NZ has so incredibly dominated the imported dairy sector in China and that China is so bloody huge - and that the local dairy companies still haven't persuaded anybody to trust them. Yet.
But a big economic question NZ has been facing for a while now, although the government hasn't been facing up to, is which economic baskets to redistribute our eggs into? I see no reason to trust National to even notice this question, let alone do anything about it.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to BenWilson,
Internet/Mana [.......]. Labour just killed them stone dead.
Bit early to be making that call, perhaps? Internet seemed to have some good ideas and some talent, but perhaps need to reorganise without Dotcom. Mana seems a bit more solid, and I couldn't shake the feeling that what happened in Te Tai Tokerau was the Establishment ganging up to get rid of the upstart Little People. But perhaps if Mana could go underground and rebuild for the next 3 years, they might have a base from which to stage a comeback next time?
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Alfie,
But if you’re an All Black, try to keep your public image clean and non-political, for God’s sake.
Why? They may be paid to undertake the fundamentally stupid activity of colliding with each other at high velocity for our entertainment, but they're still citizens with all the same rights, responsibilities and privileges as the rest of us.
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One for the very unfortunate name (or spelling of the name, at least) file:
Electoral Commission spokeswoman Stasi Turnbull said a number of complaints had been lodged over breaches.