Posts by Rob Salmond
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to Emma Hart,
The Black Ferns win-loss-draw record is 62-8-1.
Wow - that's impressive! For all-time win percentage, they're up there with the US basketball teams, and beating out the All Blacks all time mark (although over their most recent 71 games the All Blacks are 63-6-2.) Hope the Ferns maintain their form as their game history stretches into triple figures.
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to George Darroch,
Yep, sadly anything from pro-cycling (and 90s era baseball) probably has to get a permanent asterisk in this type of conversation.
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@Russell: Certainly you're right the IP chapter deserves close scrutiny. I'd have thought, though, that anything hugely draconian like everyone adopting US patent law or 3-strikes for VPNs would have leached out today. Hard to see all 12 countries wanting to keep that a secret now.
@Andrew: Well, that's stink news to hear! I, of course, bow to your superior expertise on this stuff.
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@Rich: Certainly people with some pre-knowledge do better out of specialist films. That’s always true. But for my 2c I reckon there’s something in here for anyone who cares likes everyman heroes and/or is a sucker for a well-told tragedy. I’d hate it if every movie had to have the “hollywood ending.” Some good stories are sad ones, too.
@James: I agree that it’s not a movie for absolutely everyone. Very few movies are. But that alone doesn’t make it a bad film, as some of the reviewers are appearing to suggest. I don't see them panning arthouse projects or political biopics because they require a bit of pre-knowledge to fully get. I reckon the issue here is movies (not just this one) sometimes get short-shrift when they’re outside the reviewers’ comfort zone. The best reviewers can see past their own personal biases.
@Craig: I don't think the movie ever suggested it didn’t matter whose fault the 1996 disaster was. The screenwriter just didn’t know. Big difference.
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Speaker: The silent minority, in reply to David Hood,
I can justify that with:
2011 voting rate for those with access to the internet 87.45%
2011 voting rate for those with no access to the internet 87.50%And that difference is just margin of error.
I think looking at this in a bivariate way isn't likely to give you good information, both because (1) there are so many other known correlates of voting also correlated with internet use, and also because (2) the theorised effect is time-series / cultural, rather than cross-sectional.
Foe example, income / education / SES is positively correlated with both voting and internet use, while age is negatively correlated with internet use, but positively correlated with voting. But, even if you do a big giant regression accounting fort those, it's still missing the temporal component.
I don't want to just be a naysayer, I'm sure there are a ton of studies testing and retesting Putnam's claims on this. But a bivariate correlation won;t cut it this time.
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These results seem right, and fit with both common sense and much of the existing literature on turnout. (The Pacific MPs thing is the obvious, very NZ-specific, exception.)
Bob Putnam's Bowling Alone makes similar claims about why voter turnout is declining in the US. He says turnout decline just one indicator of a broader movement of social atomisation, which leads people to disengage from civic affairs more generally.
For Putnam, technological change (eg. TV, internet) is a large, long-term driver of that atomisation, and therefore of the decline in turnout. I agree with him.
A difficult challenge for all political parties is how to entice people to vote again without touching the (IMHO) primary driver of the initial turnout decline. From earlier threads ,"being bold" and "being relevant" are two ideas currently floating around the NZ left on that question. I think it's worth noting that, regardless of which strategy gets chosen, all political parties are swimming against a strong cultural and technological tide.
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Polity: BURGERGASM, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Any recommendation that contains the words "jalapeño poppers" is a good recommendation!
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Polity: BURGERGASM, in reply to Russell Brown,
Mmmm … steak tartare.
A well-prepared dish of raw steak is a fine thing.
Fun fact: Last year's Burger Wellington featured a tartare burger, which was 100% delicious.
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Polity: BURGERGASM, in reply to Vivid,
I wouldn't eat raw mince. And you are not going to convince me.
What if I buy a thick steak or roast cut, sear all sides to kill surface pathogens, then grind it at home? At that point, can I sear the patty and have some rare mince in safety?
For me, I'll take the risk if it's a good restaurant. And yes, I've paid the price twice before, so I know what I'm risking.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to william blake,
It seems odd that there isn’t a swingeing centrist party at one third of the actual vote.
See "Median Voter Theorem" for the reasons why.