Posts by Idiot Savant
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And, not least, why is Wikileaks still declining to publish the secrets it has obtained from within governments who do not happen to be the United States of America?
This is one of the things that bugs me. WikiLeaks was doing sterling work publishing secrets from around the world. And now all of that has stopped because of their vendetta with the US.
I like seeing the US's dirty laundry. But I like seeing information about corrupt european banks, dodgy australian censorship, and filthy multinational oil-traders as well.
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Unfortunately the Guardian doesn't have any cables from NZ.
There's a zip archive of the Guardian's header spreadsheet here (4MB, extracts to 26MB csv). From my initial searches, NZ traffic seems to be mostly about Afghanistan, Iran, and trade controls (selling the skyhawks). But without the cables themselves, we don't know how interesting they might be.
BTW, I'm currently trying to relearn enough perl to extract the NZ records. It would be nice if someone beat me to it.
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I'm once again glad that I get all my TV over the internet, and will thus be able to avoid this bullshit.
Now to see if I can set AdBlock to recognise any mention of royalty as an ad and block it.
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If the international travel perk was instituted in lieu of a pay increase in 1972, then there is exactly one sitting MP who has any sort of moral right to it: Roger Douglas. As for the rest of them, who weren't around at the time, and whose salaries have increased at double the rate on everyone elses' since 1987 (which is as far back as I can find a Determination without resorting to hardcopy), sorry, but they can piss off.
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Would there be much of a political market for a Lib-Dems type party? In other words, the social policy of Labour or the Greens, and the economic policy of Peter Dunne or Winston Peters.
Oh, that's what they promise - but when they go into coalition, it turns into the social policy of Thatcher, and the economic policy of Thatcher.
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First they came for the journalists...
And then they came for the yoof drinkers...
To steal Lyndon hood's line, this government can't even design a liquor control regime without trying to turn us into a police state.
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But sensibly, we would implement the non-waiver of electorate seats by including these parties in the calculation, but not grant them any MPs beyond their electorate wins.
Thanks; that's at least a sensible way of doing it (though still IMHO the wrong solution).
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I believe the right I/S is talking about is the right to have your vote count equally with everyone else. If National gets 20,000 more votes, they get an extra seat. If Bill and Ben get 20,000 more votes they don't.
Yes. But note that I care about party votes, and I'm quite willing to subordinate inter-electorate values of electorate votes to this.
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Graeme: another problem with abolishing the electorate lifeboat: it makes overhangs worse. Much worse. In the present parliament, we have a 2-seat overhang, which I think we can all agree sucks. But simply abolishing the electorate lifeboat would mean that balooned to 8 seats: 1 for ACT, 1 for UF, 1 for Jim, and 5 for the Maori Party.
And this problem applies even if the threshold is lowered to 1 or 2% - we end up with every electorate won by a party which doesn't make it being an overhang.
Of course, one could always treat them the same as independents, and take it out of everyone else's representation so as to fix parliament at 120 seats. But this is more disproportionate than the current arrangements, and so not a positive move.
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Is this a feature of of sainte-lague, that smaller parties can get in at about 0.5% of the vote? Should take more like 0.8 shouldn't it?
Think of it this way: that 0.4% of the vote is (on straight division) 0.5 of a seat in a 120 seat Parliament. Which gets rounded up to 1.
That's what Sainte-Laguë and the various other systems do: allocate the rounding errors.