Posts by tussock
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The biggest question is how would people's vote change if there was no threshold. We can see how it's changed with one, less votes for Christian parties, the hunter/fisher party, no stable socialist party, and it's very hard on centrist groups.
I'd suggest we'd end up with a radical socialist party, some sort of Christian conservative group (or two), a proper libertarian party, and a nationalist centre, to go with Green, Labour, and National. Also probably some single issue MPs like animal rights, drug law reform, copyright reform, and so on, for the young folk to vote for. Broader representation like that could easily pull in more voters to the polls, meaning you really need 14k or more votes.
Hopefully it'd pull the libertarians out of National, the marxists out of Labour, the nutters out of the Greens, and do away with all that shady electorate gifting.
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You know, Russell, it's not the defendants in this case that are the danger to New Zealand, it's the police (and many other government department) powers for arbitrary search, surveillance, and detention based on little better than rumour and innuendo.
We've just witnessed the trial of four political activists for associating with people who said things that weren't even illegal to say, because some other guy who wasn't even charged bought weapons that were not illegal to buy or own. Also, someone put petrol in the wrong kind of container once, which is almost like making truck bombs if you're a sufficiently credulous moron, or a policeman.
The police leaked illegal evidence entirely out of context to poison the well, and the government retroactively allowed them to use such illegal evidence in other cases. They raided left-wing political activist groups throughout the country, including truly dangerous types like organic farmers and pacifists. They took all those people's computers and copied out all their contacts so they could spy on everyone they'd ever communicated with, just in case, and the government is still busy giving them more surveillance powers, less oversight, and more bullshit laws to charge harmless people with.
This isn't about quelling the local terrorist threat, because there aren't any local terrorists. Not at Parihaka, not at Bastian Point, not in the Ureweras. This is about threatening and intimidating the entire political activist movement in New Zealand, again.
That and finally getting Tame Iti on firearms charges after he dodged the last ones. Never underestimate the pettiness of the NZ justice system.
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Hard News: European Horror Stories, in reply to Russell Brown,
some of those banks have been obliged to write off 50-75% of the Greek debt they own,
Sorta. Those banks have been running 100% or higher interest rates for over a year, so when they write off 50% what it is now, the Greeks still owe more than what they did before the Germans put their economy in the toilet, only the interest rates are still too high, the ECB still isn't allowed to be a lender of last resort, and their economy is spiralling into oblivion because neo-liberalism über alles.
Interestingly, the Greek government is a profitable enterprise. If they just dumped the Euro, and defaulted on the interest, they'd be immediately able to run a healthy stimulus budget without borrowing anything more, and they'd have rocking growth in no time.
All they'd have to do is figure out what to do with their money. Digging holes works to pay off debt, but if you can make something productive it works even better. Shame is, massive and growing overproduction, no one wants anything, unless someone can figure out how to get the idle rich in Germany and Japan to loan all their money to some other poor country to buy it all with. 8]
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If Key's giving his time to a commercial body during an election campaign, isn't that treating? Surely an illegal gift by a politician can't undo an illegal gift to a politician?
Otherwise you could give them free advertising as long as they pimped your business for free during question time. That can't be right.
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Ooh, I've got one. It's really like I saw a show on TV about how to make a nice cheese sandwich, so I made one, and it was nice. Now Mediaworks is gone and all their employees are in prison because it turns out some dude in the US made that same sort of sandwich years ago and got a recepieright, and he wasn't the only one, and one of the cleaners totally knew!.
Only people realised how fucking crazy it would be to stop people sharing the food they liked, so didn't, and it only happens when I make myself a copy of a book, a song, a movie, or a whole boatload of pictures. Or if I sing "happy birthday" to someone at a public restaurant, because that's not "public" either.
NZ just arrested a man for running a near-unlimited public server at a profit. We should all be so fucking proud. -
Hard News: Nobody wanted #EQNZ for Christmas, in reply to Islander,
They should publish something to that effect, though I'd imagine it's outside their niche. They could update wikipedia, but it would suggest they find something published with numbers like that too, eh.
Continental transform faults don't make 9s. Can't make 9s, as far as I can find. Might create an extremely powerful tsunami if they slip the side of a mountain into the sea, or Lake Dunstan, as the case may be.
@linger, cool. Redefining "aftershock" could be interesting work.
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The reports should all say the same thing. Aftershocks follow a logarithmic decay curve on the standard scales, it's just a matter of fitting that curve to what's happened in Christchurch.
Basically though, -15% in the last 15 months means -15% in the next 15 months, so down to about 5.1 maximum by March 2013, and then 4.3 by June 2014 (which everyone can sleep through). It's a shallow fault system, so they'll stay shallow, but this should be the last liquefaction event, or last-but-one.
More interesting is what these tiddlers all do to the alpine fault (which isn't going to be a 9 or anything silly, around 8.3, quite deep, big rolling waves for 2-4 minutes, feel about like a local 5.5 in Dunedin or Christchurch, IIRC). Probably very little, it's somewhere around 1% per annum anyway.
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Cocytus: Sainte-Laguë just ensures the (root mean square) difference between the % of seats and % of vote is as small as possible for any given number of seats. Any other calculation makes parliament less proportional on average, including things like thresholds, which is how National gets too many seats (their higher share of the votes mean more of the binned vote transfers to them).
One thing that might help it is letting parties share their excess vote around as they please, so that the 3-4 left wing parties don't all round down while the 2-3 right wing parties all round up. Might alienate voters, of course, unless done up front.
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Shonkey. 'Cause they fell down, innit.
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Serendipitous association to topic at hand is found in today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2454#comic
Charlie Brown is such a “nice guy”. Let the evolution of our common language take fast with this grand idea. Bravo Emma Hart, bravo. Encore.