Posts by Euan Mason
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"Censored research" is an oxymoron.
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Well said, Claudia.
John Key will have consulted his pollster and his spin advisors and he will have been told that his gross, appalling outburst in parliament would win him votes. He doesn't give a fuck about who he hurts so long as he wins votes.
David Carter's reputation has plummeted over this fiasco.
JK's outburst and the Speaker's response are sickening, but ripostes like yours help to restore our faith in humanity.
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Field Theory: Our greatest fear, in reply to David Hood,
Intercept=2.222e-15 and P=1 looks pretty convincing :).
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Field Theory: Our greatest fear, in reply to David Hood,
Thanks. I have 3.0. I downloaded the file manually and adjusted the line numbers in your code. The residuals looked a bit larger around sdiff=0, and I thought there might be some heteroscedasticity for a model of absolute values, but Breusch-Pagan says "no":
bptest(I(abs(sdiff)) ~ I(abs(rdiff)),data=scores)
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David,
Interesting analysis and code. I tried it but got:
> u <- “https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Rugby_Rankings”
> if(!(file.exists(“rugby.html”))){
+ download.file(u, destfile="rugby.html”, method = “libcurl”)
+ }
Error in match.arg(method, c(“auto”, “internal”, “wget”, “curl”, “lynx”)) :
‘arg’ should be one of “auto”, “internal”, “wget”, “curl”, “lynx”
>What's "libcurl"?
Am I missing a library? -
Wonderful graduation balls in the UCSA building, with different types of music in each room - you could choose your style and volume. Vastly better than recent balls at the Horncastle arena with a single large cavern vibrating to a deafening band of dubious quality.
Taking the family to evening meals at the UCSA when I was a postgrad. Cheap, but reasonable quality - a grand night out for a family impoverished by both parents studying.
Great plays at the Ngaio Marsh theatre from Dramasoc.
Rock concerts at Bentleys with the stage over the river during orientations.
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Access: Just think of the children, in reply to chris,
Apparently things are not going so well in Scandanavia (note: selective cherry picking throughout).
I agree about the cherry picking. Sweden has a very high proportion of GDP delivered by government agencies, and salaries tend to be more equitable than we see in NZ. There is a small, privileged aristocracy that has inherited vast wealth, but for the most part those at the bottom have considerably more buying power than our poor do in NZ, along with more respect and vastly better government services. Sweden offers fully tax-funded education right through university, as well as health services, counseling, unemployment benefits and pensions. Sweden has one of the highest effective prices on GHG emissions in the world and can now claim to generate more than 50% of total energy from renewables, versus NZ’s 35%. The economic performance of Sweden suggests that those who claim that increasing taxation and state services will necessarily bankrupt our economy are purely propagandists.
There are strong pressures within Sweden to turn neoliberal, and nobody would claim that Sweden is a perfect society. There are also issues with integrating immigrants, as the article says, but those I spoke with in Sweden took a very caring attitude to the problem, and although that statement is excessively anecdotal, I didn’t encounter the venemous xenophobia that pervades our social media here. The problems perhaps arise from a deep social conservatism in Sweden that is a strength when it comes to working in state services and a weakness when immigrants arrive with radically different world views. BTW, the word “state” is rarely used in Sweden, conferring a Stalinist overtone which Swedes instinctively dislike. It’s OK to talk about “government” services.
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Hilary, this is a great post, and the questions you pose are very difficult to answer in today's New Zealand. I would prefer we paid higher rates of taxation and provided better government services. I do not believe this would be bad for our economy, in fact the opposite is likely; more equitable distribution of wealth and services would lead to a happier, more productive nation. Scandinavia offers several examples of high tax/high government service economies that remain prosperous. I have lived in Sweden, and their focus on children is wonderful to behold.
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Great post, Russell.
"Isn’t that what you’d want for your family? And with all the talk about national values amid the flag debate, wouldn’t you want offering that chance to our share of those in need to stand as a marker of New Zealand values?"
Yes, and yes.
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Next: A $26 million panel, comprising neither poets nor musicians, to select a short list for a new national anthem.
The National Party has managed to stuff up even this diversion from their other stuff ups.