Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: MMP Review #1: The Party…, in reply to Steven Peters,
However, its removal should be concomitant with a meaningful reduction in the party vote threshold.
Absolutely. Divorcing the two, and then dropping coat-tailing without dropping the thresholds would be a leap backwards, IMHO.
This is my reason for thinking it should be retained. Making it "fairer" by eliminating coat-tailing ignores that it makes it unfairer to people whose representation would then be excluded. It's a dirty hack of a system, but I don't see that it improves matters to "rationalize" the system by making it represent less people all over again. That's like saying we're helping the poor by taking away some of the benefits they were getting, because other people were excluded from those. Net effect is that the poor lose. Net effect from removing coat-tailing without reducing the party vote threshold substantially is that we are moving backwards, away from representation of minority interests. And I don't even LIKE the interests they have generally represented over the years, but I think they should be retained, because I believe in democracy more strongly than I believe in my own personal political views.
Dropping the party vote threshold would make coat tailing redundant anyway. Perhaps that is the main reason why it is resisted so strongly. Coat-tailing is a convenient whipping boy in our MMP implementation.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Sacha,
Classic. Superman is like the ultimate under-acheiver. Gifted with the most ridiculous superpowers out of all the super heroes, he manages to get a tedious day job. I think Tarantino was right - Clark Kent is Superman's commentary on the entire human race.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Corp PR,
But if we accept that quality journalism takes time and resource, and time and resource takes money, the 'user' must surely be one of the 'payers'.
I think that's sound. The "If" in there is an important caveat. Time and resource might not take money, in a different model. People can and do work for free, and that is what the quality paid journalism is competing with. Which is why I said earlier that it's the very conception of the value of work, and the inextricable link from that to money, that creates the trouble for this industry, and many others.
Thanks for your comment, btw. I'm really liking how many new contributors this saga has brought to PAS.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Joe Wylie,
So what would be the IT equivalent of confusing Greymouth with Greytown?
Trusting autocomplete to choose your variable name.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Russell Clarke,
Too easy to scare the horses otherwise.
Classic. It's kind of become a badge of pride, though. In my last job there was a guy who was deliberately scrofulous to an extreme degree that I was sure was 90% affectation. I think he felt that his credibility as a computer nerd was in doubt if he didn't look the part. His business partner (who was also my business partner, just in a different business) had the guy to stay over at his house (the fellow lived in California), and had to reprimand him one day for leaving his dirty underpants in my partners hallway (my partner had a wife and two children, in an immaculate house). I found it hard to actually believe someone would be so careless about things as to somehow drop their underpants in the hallway of someone else's house, and to not notice them when walking past, several times. It just had to be a put on. Didn't it? Surely?
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Knowledge Bro,
It's Knowledge Bro.
I just remember it was what the kid on Whiz Kids called himself. He also talked to his computer and gave it a name. I remember at the time thinking that there was almost nothing realistic about the show (most particularly the geek love-triangle), having seen up very close just how low-tech successful hacking could be, and what the personality type and motivation involved was.
Years later, studying computer science, a lecturer gave one of the most out-of-place lectures I can ever remember having, in which he ran down hackers with a bitterness that could only have been personal. They had to discipline a number of the kids who got it into their heads to crack the university systems, and he made some generalizations that have stuck with me ever since. "poor social graces and no sexual partners" leaped off the pages of a dry manual on operating system design. "Apart from trying to damage our systems, he sought thrills in other dangerous activities, nearly killing himself on a motorbike, and eventually blowing off one of his hands with home made fireworks". "They were not the talented students, which is why getting a cheap advantage through doing something tediously repetitive liking entering passwords endlessly struck them as a better idea than just getting a high paying job like most of our graduates <with a bitter verbal aside about the pay of university lecturers>".
I'm paraphrasing, having not kept the textbook. I thought it was a bit mean, probably 90% true, and quite funny. But still a damned boring subject.
On a personal note - when customs ask me for my profession - I don't put hacker - I put computer programmer.
Wise choice. I notice that even the most alert and attentive passport controller gets a glazed look in their eye when they ask about that job. It's probably the fastest way to look boring and square imaginable. Act like you really want to tell them about it, and you'll be angrily waved through. Make sure you always put a line through any zeros and sevens on the forms. If they ask, then you can explain ASCII! Instant wave-through.
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Knowledge Bro,
Classic, 3 times faster than the Candyman. Or Candy woman in this case, whom I notice was thankfully never triggered. That would not have been good sport, sir.
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The location and nature of value is shifting, just like it did when scribes were no longer the only ones who could write.
I don't think I'd say the challenge faced by journalists is quite as stark as justifying handwriting after the printing press was invented. That's like the most important invention of an entire millennium, whereas citizen journalism could actually rise and then fall. Journalists could come back into fashion. There was never going to be a fall after moveable type printing was conceived. "So what if you can make 3600 pages a day and the scribe could only do 2. His were quality pages".
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OnPoint: H4x0rs and You, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Excellent comment Lew.
The strategic fix is to make journalism a high-status, high-value career and attract better-qualified, or more specialised people.
I can't think how to do that, though. Indeed, being unable to think of how that could work, makes me think that can't be the solution, or perhaps not the right formulation of the problem.
Left to the market, traditional journalism is dying, being superseded by the kind of thing Keith has just done. But I'd be mighty surprised if Keith can make a living doing just that - you break a story like this only a few times in your entire life. Even if he makes ten grand out of donations, that's a month's salary for "high qualified, specialized people". And he risked losing a whole lot of it to legal costs, which as an individual rather than an institution, is pretty bloody significant.
Perhaps an alternative model will work, like Hickey's initiative. But I can't see it. An industry can't survive on donations to itself from itself. It's righteous work to try to make it happen, to be applauded at every turn, but I hate having to be the guy who thinks like a capitalist and knows he wouldn't risk his wad on it.
I don't know the solution. I only have an opinion, which is that our very conceptions of work and value, and the connection between them, have to change. Or, more likely, economic equality is going to continue to slide backward, hidden behind the fact that formal social equality is improving. This is the extremely clever (whilst at the same time incredibly stupid) thing about neoliberalism, that it gives as it takes, so we don't notice what we lost until its gone. Everyone can be a journalist now, it's an equal opportunity employer, just so long as it doesn't matter that you can't make a living out of it.
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OnPoint: MSD's Leaky Servers, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Probably each and every WINZ office really needs to be razed and the ground sown with salt.
Even nuking from space doesn't work - the damn taint will cling to the underside as you lift off. You have to actually become the taint, and then kill yourself.
ETA: Oops, correct quote put in.
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