Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to BenWilson,
You can easily have underemployment that is every bit as severe as unemployment, particularly when the wages are awful, and debt levels are high.
I don't disagree. 1 in 8 UK residents is counted as 'poor' (60% of median wage - around £11,000 p/a). Half of them are in paid employment.
But while 1929 happened very suddenly, I personally think we're still sliding towards some sort of tipping point - 2008 started the slide, but at the moment it's still quite a gentle ride. As soon as we jolt over the real tipping point, probably sometime in the next decade......
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to BenWilson,
I think that our democratic system hasn’t stopped working. It’s just working to the natural limit of its current ability, and we have come to expect a lot more. It’s hit some kind of equilibrium, and so we can’t expect continual progress out of it.
There's a very interesting situation in the UK at the moment. Scotland goes to the polls for a referendum later this months, voting 'yes' or 'no' to independence (FREEEEEEEDOOOOOMM!!!!)*.
The turnout is expected to be 80%+, engagement at all levels has been deep and sustained. The consensus is that this is occurring because the population has realised that their vote actually matters this time, and that a 'yes' vote will allow the foundations to be set for a more localised and direct form of governance. Although they're coming from behind, the momentum is with the 'yes' campaign, and the 'no' campaign has been caught more than a bit flat-footed - their natural assuption seems to have been that a paternal 'daddy westminster knows best' attitiude would naturally carry the day, and in campaigning in this manner, they've shown themselves to be considerably out of touch with grass-roots feeling on the ground.
As you've alluded to, it takes a while for these things to happen, inertia and all that, but if they start rolling, they don't tend to stop all that easily either. The trick is how to get them rolling. The Scotland thing started off a a nationalist thing, but has warped a long way away from that - it's more about grasping the opportunity to actually have a say in how things are run, now - as in 'not by an out-of-touch political class in a city hundreds of miles away'.
*Sorry, couldn't help it.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to BenWilson,
We’ve already had that, and it hasn’t worked.
2008? Not even close. Unemployment was 20%+ in the US, for starters. And that's without any sort of government safety net/welfare to rely on.
I suspect there's something coming down the pipe, and 2008 was merely the overture. If the gap between the haves and have-nots keeps widening, and if we keep automating more and more people out of skilled jobs, then we're in for some very interesting times.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Steve Barnes,
In fact l wish he would delete the whole revolting festering sore that it is
Not before some highly deserving cats have been house-trained by having their noses thoroughly shoved into it.
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Hard News: Privacy and the Public Interest, in reply to Emma Hart,
I disagree – there is a very real public interest here. Outing people who hold these vile opinions about half the human race may go some way to showing how unacceptable these opinions are, and perhaps provide a heads-up to the women who have to interact with them IRL.
I have to say I agree, Judi. I think it’s really important for women who may have to interact with Williams in future to know that he holds these views, for their own personal safety.
Wasn't this a factor in Mr Tiso's advertiser's boycott? IIRC a good proportion of the brand and advertising managers were female, and weren't particularly impressed with having the brands they represented assoiated with misogynists.
So yeah, it's public interest for 50% of the pupulation by default, before you even start arguing opinion and legal nicities.
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Hard News: Show some decency, in reply to Chris Waugh,
I suspect chess and similar games were invented precisely to teach kids the kind of strategic thinking they’d need for careers in government and/or the military.
My chess game has improved quite a bit since I started attempting to apply military tactical thinking to it, for what that's worth (I'm still rubbish, however).
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to stephen walker,
Remember how much personal shit Helen Clarke copped?
Different groups of people can look at the same thing and see two different things. From a purely psychological perspective, it is quite fascinating.
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I think people have a lot invested in a certain world view (that John Key is a nice man, that generally people/our leaders are decent and want to do the right thing, etc). It’s difficult to challenge because it effectively means they have to admit they’re wrong, and aren’t as smart, sophisticated, well-informed, etc as they thought. That they had a fast one pulled on them and now they look silly.
Far easier to resort to the time-worn sport of messenger shooting.
Take a crumb of comfort from the Nixon analogies: his approval rating was 60% around the time of Watergate, and it took a long time to make a dent in that, but history has not exactly judged him kindly.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to BenWilson,
For instance, my distance from Winston Peters is not really a function of the two dimensions we see there. He’s miles away from me in some racist homophobic dimension you can’t see there. Similarly Peter Dunne is a long way from me on account of his main contribution to politics, drug policy, on which I despise his stance, even though his position is quite moderate on the plotted dimensions. And Colin Craig might look close to National on that graph, but if you emphasized aspects of his religiousity and belief in science, I think the gap would be a lot bigger.
The trouble with all of those examples you’ve given is that they are effectively one-man bands, so if you’re including them in your potential personal list of candidates, you have to consider the whole person – there’s nothing to temper any elements you may not like. They don’t need to compromise or find consensus within a group.
Once your party gets to a certain size, then it effectively becomes more of a consensus-oriented vehicle. I have a considerable antipathy to the Greens more ‘woo’ elements, for example, but they’ve managed to minimise and distance the centre of the party from that faction to a considerable degree over the last decade or so. Similarly, I’m fairly strongly opposed to the more centre-right elements of the current Labour party – it’s enough for me to be able to see they they’re there, and that they have a lot more say in things than I’d prefer.
In a pragmatic sense, it's good enough (well, probably - see below).
Of course, using a 3-D plot, you’d be able to see the individuals in a group as clusters. You could even add in a spectral analysis over time – red shift/blue shift :)
Of course, this only really works when you have a multiple-party system and a voting system where the votes aren’t skewed and gameable by local demographics (i.e. not Westminster FPP). We are currently living 50 metres the wrong side of an electorate boundary line. 90% of the goods/services etc that I use are on the other side, but in voting terms I have zero influence on the MP or local councillors.
You’re right about the questions and analysis though. I was mildly surprised by the fact that 20-30 questions were considered sufficient, and also by the lack of a ‘neither agree nor disagree’ option. Their methodology is also somewhat opaque. Rather like polling companies, the spin, weight and emphasis you give to various facotrs is going to skew your output, and it isn’t clear how they compensate for that.
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Hard News: Why we thought what we thought, in reply to BenWilson,
Are those two axes really important to you?
Well, if you could make sure you plot all the current election and polling data onto the surface of a four-dimensional hypercube in time for all of us to clarify our relative positions and make a properly informed voting decision before the election, we'd be grateful. Ta.
Important isn't the word I'd use. I personally find the two-axis model more useful, and it's sufficient for my purposes. It effectively divides one's political views into micro and macro: what is of benefit to one personally (plus a small circle of family/friends who you want to see benefit), and what you consider to be of benefit to society as a larger single entity (the economy, basically)*. I'm fairly extreme in my views when it comes to what I should/shouldn't be able to do with my own body: what I put in it, what I like to put it into, and whether I should be able to put it in harm's way for a personal thrill. This tends to align me with Libertarians. However, I'm diametrically opposed to them on any sort of economics issue, which always used to puzzle me. Similarly, I was always puzzled by those of 'the left' who were aligned with, or leaning towards, authoritarianism - I was more in line with their economics thinking, but didn't like being told what I could/couldn't do.
A two axis model helped explain a lot of that. And I think who you end up voting for depends quite a bit on the relaitve personal balance one takes between the micro and macro portions.
Yeah, it's not perfect, but it's good enough for me.
Also, thinking of politics in a single-axis model tends to benefit a two-party FPP system more than a dual-axis MPP system. Various factions wthin each of the parties have to subsume to a large degree in order to stay in the tent (for example, the republican party has two seemingly diametrically opposed wings: fundy religious nutjobs who like telling people what they can and can't do, and libertarians). Two axes are pretty simple to grasp and helps to move away from that sort of unhelpful mindset, even if, as you've pointed out, it's still a hugely crude oversimplification.
*obviously these aren't mutuallly exclusive, there's considerable shading between the two.