Posts by Peter Ashby
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Well as an expat I can tell you that it varies. It helps to have Stuff's listings of who's on when to target our viewing via the Beeb's multiscreen wonder. It is also fine in something like the rowing where they have to talk about Mahe Drysdale because he is leading, but also the Beeb does get a bit Commonwealth friendly at times too. However in something like for eg, the women's cycling roadrace it consists of staring at the screen and excitingly saying to each other: I saw a flash of white top with black down the arms for a moment in the peloton.
Oh and we are lucky if we get coverage of team sports games like the hockey or the basketball. Such teams will have to make it to quarters and semis for us to watch them I suspect. But them's the breaks.
'Twoud be nice if we could view TVNZ's online feed but. Couldn't we put our passport numbers in or something?
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Rodgerd, selectively editing my words to make them look like I didn't say what you did is dishonest in the extreme.
Besides you completely missed the point, while it is true that under FPP you could get into power on 35% ish of the vote, the 35% who did vote for the govt got the govt they voted for. Whereas under MMP you vote for a party and they may be in govt but constrained/pushed by coalition partners you didn't vote for. I'm sure Labour voters didn't vote in favour of Winston Peters as Minister for External Affairs.
Have you got it yet or are you going to just rant some more?
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Matthew the reason why academic writing is different from what you define as 'real world' writing is that in academia being completely open about the subject and your sources is the whole bleeding point. Whereas in commercial life often the point is the exact opposite, you want to emphasise the positive and downplay the negative or vice versa.
In writing an academic paper you are required to spend time picking apart your own arguments and pointing out their weaknesses. Failure to do so will cause the referees to send it back until you do.
This is also why people in the 'real world' often complain that academic's minds are so open, their brains have fallen out. It is a failure of cultures to appreciate the other's needs.
To put it bluntly acadmics care about the truth whereas wider human society is all about controlling what information you show to others while trying to find out all you can about them.
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the unfortunate result was that I found myself having to assume that a student unable to string three sentences together might in fact be making a coherent argument, whereas those who wrote well enough to let it transpire that they had in fact no idea what they were on about didn't get such benefit of the doubt.
Exactly! very well put. My viewpoint when marking essays was that I cannot read the candidate's intentions, only what is on the page. Once you start trying to figure out what they 'might' mean you are on a slippery slope trying to read people's minds. Either that or you may as well just go and read Derrida.
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I'd suggest one improvement to MMP would be abolish dual voting, so one's party vote went to the party of the chosen electorate candidate.
No, no and again, no. It would for one thing kill the independent candidate stone dead for all time. All the minor parties would also disappear overnight. It would effectively disenfranchise a lot of people. Under MMP if you think the candidate for your chosen party is a dickhead you can vote for someone else yet still support 'your' party and vice versa.
Here in Scotland, despite vowing never to vote Labour again (Iraq), I gave a personal vote to a Labour chappie in our Scottish Parliament electorate because of his principled stand against and voted for another party in the party vote. Your system removes that flexibility entirely and would in effect turn electorate candidates into list members.
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Um that should have been a special vote, not a postal one.
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I don't disagree with you Paul, I was simply pointing out that a lot of people don't see it that way. FWIW I voted physically in Dunedin North in '84 but being a first year Scarfie mine was a postal vote in Waitakere, and if memory serves, mine counted ;-)
I strongly suspect that if NZ went back to FPP after a couple of elections there would be another referendum and it would be back to MMP or something similar. Better not to flip flop think.
Here in the UK the vote for the Westminster parliament is now the only FPP vote in the country. Devolved administrations are MMP, European Parliament is PR as, in the last round, are council elections now. Here in Scotland PR has been a lifesaver for the Tory Party, not that at national level they are appreciative of the benefits of PR. It's a funny old world.
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I suspect that the hankering for FPP is that under it most people occasionally got to vote in a government they wanted. Wasn't that what we did in '84? or thought we were doing anyway. Well unless they were Social Credit voters and there were few enough of them.
People also see compromise as weakness instead of the strength it is. I think that the weakening of the party whips in parliament allowing the putting together of coalitions of the willing is a good thing.
Another may be people looking at the lists and forgetting people get elected to constituencies too. Perhaps what happens here in Scotland might help. We have an SNP MSP at the moment but Labour still have a constituency office staffed by an MSP, only he is a list MSP. So if holding my nose and going to the SNP woman is anathema I can go see the Labour chappie. IOW give some of those list bods a constituency to help look after.
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Conversely, if a student makes up a reference in a paper to something like:
Smyth et al, Journal of Applied Chronology, May 1973
does the lecturer get sacked for not making a trip to the library to validate if the paper really exists?Go to the library to look up a paper? Where HAVE you been? Such things went web based years ago, just before you could get the actual papers as .pdf files without shifting your tush. Remember Universities are connected to the world and each other via big fat optical pipes and were when the hoi polloi thought dialup was the latest thing.
Then there is the fact that if the lecturer is setting assignments on stuff they are competent in (radical idea I know) then a paper they don't know will ring automatic alarm bells (what have I missed?).
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The experience of PPP here in the UK is that the private sector will only invest if the state takes on the vast majority of the risk inherent in the projects. This means the state gets left holding the baby and paying interest on it. How this benefits the state is beyond me.
PPP is driven primarily by national accounting rules. Under said rules if the private sector borrows money to build a school or a hospital then that borrowing does not impact on the nation's books. Whereas if the state borrowed the money (at vastly lower interest rates) to build the school or the hospital that debt is on its books.
So because of an accounting rule that could be changed, a slight of hand is effected. This slight of hand extracts much more money from the public purse than would have been the case. And this is a good thing?
That is all before we get into shoddy building, buildings under specc and since the private sector usually gets to run these things after they are built, slow and inadequate maintenance. The for eg hospital management can do nothing about this as they are not party to the contract. They just have to pay the cost of it.
Of course they could buy out the contract, but to do so they would have to compensate the holder for all those years of printing money they would have had....
Don't go there.