Posts by tussock
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Ah, rorting MMP. Be interesting if they split the Mana-Maori for that end, but not good for the system at a time when everyone else gets a chance to throw it away.
Still, great thing to see the left rise once more, and here's hoping they get rid of that bloody 5% threshold in few years. Enough with all this hanging your party on one electorate; Winston, Jim, Peter, Rodney, Hone, or anyone else. 0.625% all the way, half of two seats for one.
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Lyndon, that article seems to go a long way to say nothing. People on short jail sentences are those who didn't meet the requirements for community service and such. Not only are they given less support in prison, they're fundamentally a different group to those on longer sentences who aren't divided into community service vs custodial.
"[...] the data could not be used to reliably establish the impact of probation supervision and offender management programmes."
All it might be showing is sentencing judges are about 8-10% accurate at picking the problem offenders when they have the option. It may as well be random.
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I don't think that doing your sums thing works anyway, it's just a lie the Right tells it's supporters. The dole was set 20% below subsistence levels in Shipley's time and has never grown beyond inflation since (aside from the rent subsidies, which rent rises ate up in no time, driving the housing boom). You're supposed to get poorer on the benefits, that's the idea, incentive to work and such, typical misunderstanding of Hayek.
Yes, you can pay for power, rent, food, and have a tiny bit left to let you get to and from where the food's sold, but if the fridge coughs you're completely fscked. All the real incentives are to not own anything, pay more in rents to avoid possible repair bills, buy $10 shoes that fall apart if you walk in them, eat cheap fatty meals to make up for the ones you miss, do less so you don't get as hungry, and take stupid gambles because there is no other way out once your good clothes are no longer fit for a job interview, not that there's enough money to travel for job interviews anyway.
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I can’t find any means to describe ObL as anything but evil, but that doesn’t mean then that any action against him was purely one or the other – if it was a good act, then he was evil and therefore killing him was a purely good act, or if killing him was a bad act, then he must have been good, or at least not so bad and America is therefore definitely bad… those sort of arguments baffle me and seem self-deluding.
That's the team-jersey view of alignment, very Gygaxian (derived from his religious upbringing). 3e's much more sensible: harming the innocent is Evil, stopping that is Good, if killing is necessary to stop Evil then it is not in itself Evil. Killing Evil people at random is Evil, because you can be Evil and still innocent, and lots of people are Evil.
John Key for instance, quite happy to cut from the poor to give to the rich, because he honestly thinks people choose to be poor (as he chose to be rich and is, begging the question being a common human failing). So he thinks hurting the poor just gives them more incentive to choose wealth. Evil, and innocent.
Furthermore, Good can kill Good, because Good isn't always innocent. You can totally harm the innocent while trying to stop great Evil, ruining your own innocence, making you a valid target for Good people.
UbL's failing is typical of fundies there, he thinks because the US does great Evil, that it's citizens are not innocent, but that's just an excuse for collective punishment, which is grossly Evil.
... 8]
The presumption of innocence was nice while it lasted, but we in the modern empires can't put up with those old revolutionary ideals of the primacy of law and equality of man. Don't you know. Pip pip. etc.
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Duncan's a smart guy, he knows all this already, he's just going to "get" Hone because he's like that with people who end up on his naughty list.
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Been dead 10 years already, didn't y'all hear?
Yes, seriously. Nice to see them give up part of the grand charade, now that the Gitmo files are being released, showing the Americans have been fighting a rather illusive enemy for quite some time now. Who knows, maybe they'll declare victory and fuck off home again.
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I'm quite surprised that a UN resolution for no-fly actually got through the security council.
OK kids, here it is. Libya has a lot the magic stuff which makes all the machines go, and they're our friends because they give it to us for our machines.
A little while back, the people in Libya had a disagreement over which one of them would be the one to give us the magic stuff. The guy who lost that argument blowed up some of the pipes that put the magic stuff in our big boats, so he's done now. We're just fixing things up, with some bombs. -
So, yeh, now you'll get fined a hundred thousand dollars for reading the wrong pdf on your iphone, so that various foreign companies can better extract monopoly rents on their "incompatible" electronic products, and we can start getting those rentals six months after everyone else in the world again.
Bonus material: healthcare costs will rise, all the names on the cheeses will change to confuse all the tourists, and I won't be on the internet for very long.
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Ooh, the poo debate. You know, when you go on a Great Walk, they advise you take five steps off the track, scrape aside a little flora, do your business, wipe with the flora, cover the lot in a little dirt and carry on down the track. It's all composted itself in a couple of weeks, no one the wiser.
Also, all those dairy cows? Totally just shitting everywhere out in the open like a bunch of animals. If the farmers didn't concentrate it in ponds that flood into local streams now and then it wouldn't hurt either.
Poo is quite a useful natural product. It fertilises the ground, and has natural odours that warn of it's disease carrying properties in the most minute traces. What's strange is that when you don't provide people with a toilet you then get angry about them defecating in a paddock.
I get that the local hoteliers want that banned, because there's money in the alternatives for them. Only there isn't, because the freedom campers will not come any more if we make them pay to sleep. The funny thing is a lot of the "mess" comes from locals chucking baby's nappy out wrapped up tight in plastic bags to rid themselves of the smell mid-journey, and have a pee while they're stopped, of course.
But we can't have public toilets out in the tourist spots, because local kids get drunk and vandalise them in the winter. No one wants to pay for that either, especially not the people selling the booze.
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Surely the roads are simple political corruption. The contractors involved do pay rather large sums in political donations, and that is a rather ancient issue with the funding of politicians and their parties.
Though we do have a party in office that refuses to take bids from local carriage makers, on the grounds they couldn't possibly be competitive, and then the foreign company they do give the contracts to promptly subcontracts it back to those same locals after taking a margin for doing so.
sigh
Perhaps the ideological blindness doesn't need so much special funding; it's just that old boys club groupthink that pats itself on the back too often to notice what the real world's up to in the meantime. Liars or idiots, you tell me.
"Got stuck in traffic again over the long weekend, eh what. Surely there'd be huge benefits to a bigger road up there, it's always terribly slow when I'm on it.""Quite right, old chap. Why, if you compare it with the cost of the helicopter flights I use to bypass it, ...."