Posts by tussock
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Check that, off-by-one error.
1996: ALCP 2, Christian 5.
Otherwise, spot on, until further notice. 8]
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We've had an unstable government in NZ ever since MMP, despite the 5% threshold, it's simply not represented that way by the media. Labour's been a minority government for nine years now.
Everything gets passed by negotiation and hard work with the votes of recalcitrant MPs, some of whom have crossed the floor, or split the party. We've have our race-baiting fucktard in parliament all that time (and another stopping in as leader of the opposition, and nearly winning them an election), and plenty of religious nutters getting in by various means.
The 5% was put in there to cut the number of parties to four or five like happens in all countries with 4-5% margins (rather than the 10-12 you get with a near-zero margin). To make passing legislation easier on the government. Oddly enough, the problems with easy passing of legislation (Muldoonism to Rogernomics, yay) was exactly why we got MMP in the first place.
1996: ALCP 1, Christians 2. (Nat/NZF 68)
1999: ALCP 1, Christians 3+1, OutdoorRec 2. (Lab/All/NZF 62)
2002: ALCP 1, Christians 2, OutdoorRec 2, Alliance 2. (Lab/Jim/NZF 64)
2005: Christians 1. (121 seat parliament, 58 v 56 minority, 6 abstain).Wow. What a complete bunch of Nazis. All it did was kill the Alliance, ban the Christians, and fold most of the others into parties they never agreed with in the first place, forcing voters to choose from parties who fail to represent them.
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Labour and National collude to pass anything interesting that the minor parties don't want anyway. <sigh>
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Huh. I'm not the only one who's noticed Duncan Garner, then. It's like he's taking lessons from Fox in how to present an opinion piece as an unbiased review.
I mean, I like opinion pieces, that's why I'm here for instance, I just expect to see them presented as such.
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A 0.625% margin (3/4 seat, to be mostly sainte-league compatible without overly favoring the tiny groups, and mostly matching how many voters you need to get an electorate seat) would be a great change to our current system.
We'd get some Christian splitters, Outdoor Recreation, Alliance (which would probably weaken the emerging new union movement, and hurt low-wage workers), maybe Legalise Cannibus again, possibly Mana Motohake or similar, and we wouldn't get the endless babble from the pundits about who is and who isn't going to make the 5%.
We'd get to keep ACT, NZF, Progressive, and United without worrying about their electorate vote. We'd have a more democratic outcome, a great many less lost votes, and possibly a much higher turnout. No idea if it would shift left, right, conservative, liberal, rich, poor, or anything, it's just obviously the right thing to do(tm).At the first MMP election, much more of the vote went to guys like that, but wasted voters don't vote again.
It would have been an insane headache for Labour over the last nine years though, and the Nats don't want the current problems, so it's impossible to pass. But hey, who knows.
They could also do with more MPs or less South Island seats too, the proportionality could easily go balls up at the current ratios.
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Left hand script, right hand ball and bat, right hand mouse, left hand eating utensils, left foot kicking, right foot jumping. I have to swap sides between digging and lifting with a shovel. The melody is totally on the wrong end of the piano, but the violin was made for me (in that it also got me out of English class, heh).
So left handed, but right armed, mostly. Fortunately, ambidextrous enough with most tools that I don't have to struggle with a right-handed grip, but the wallet lives it's life upside down, as it never occurred to me they could do otherwise until Susanna mentioned it there (and mine's far too tight for anything to fall out of it. b-dum-tish).
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Please, people pricing bandwidth, regarding the data "caps", make the payments a proper small amount of 0.xx cents/MB or whatever. I know tricking people into using more than they'd expected and then paying more for what they don't use is your revenue model, what with you all being phone companies and all, but it's kinda Evil.
If you, say, had no variation in cost by bandwidth (other than installation of course), and didn't artificially cap it at all (always burst to the limits of the hardware and network), you'd be stuck competing on data charges, and would earn customers by offering superior connection speeds in each area.
Now wouldn't that be an nice buyer's market.Hmm, I was thinking 50c/GB might be reasonable and http://www.wic.co.nz/ourplans.php suggests that's possible right now in city for the hardcore Dunedin user. Are those cable things just a really bad idea in the first place? Will they ever do that sort of price? What do the telcos pay for international data anyway?
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Re: female models. Humans view other adults as competition, and sexually attractive ones don't sell well to people of the competing demographic. Fortunately for the sellers, our brains are hardwired to accept certain body features as being childish. Skinny-ass models with diminutive facial features appear immature, and thus non-competitive.
Female models that are supposed to sell to men are instead rather comically sexualised.
People with low self-esteem can get into trouble facing either style all the time, or with no help at all, as it's not generally a healthy thing.
Male models fall into several categories too, the "bloke" as a non-threatening potential friend for the heterosexual male audience (often with a signature unattractive feature), the hairless six-packed Fabio for the ladies (speaking of comically sexualised), and the father-figure who's supposed to look the age our own father was when we where impressionable youths (old fashioned hairdo, wrinkles, and all).
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BKJ? No way is a 12 year responsible for doing what he's told by a bunch of much older kids when he is effectively in their care. He should never have faced more than an extensive CYFS case and counseling. Crappy lawyer no doubt, being a young Maori boy not helping his chances with the typical judge and jury.
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Good grief this spawned a fscked thread.
Boo hoo, rich folk suffering away and only getting the freedom and power of money to show for it. Protesters inconveniencing the people they're protesting against. It's all Cats and Dogs, isn't it.
Don't like local poverty? Bump the bloody benefits, and bump the minimum wage. It's not at all complicated. Universal benefit FTW.
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Rich, mate, no one could have imagined what 800 baud modems would do for business, like how newspaper reporters could suddenly deliver photos and stories complete from on site to the editors, allowing more time in the field for the same outlay.
No one could imagine the wonders that 14.8, 28.8, or 33.6 would do either. The explosion of the web, online booking for services, online help for products, replacement manuals, and societal participation such that literally every topic imaginable was soon available as text + gif, all indexed by near-instant search engines of ever-increasing quality.
Like a library, only like every library ever, only with a librarian who has the book you want in hand as you walk in and wants to talk with you for hours about the fine details of the topic.
Businesses track inventory, make purchases, contact customers, advertise, seek interested partners, take reservations and make sales, and more, all for a fraction of the cost it used to take.
Faster speeds, early 64k, later 56k, 128k, 256k, 512k, 1M, 2M, ... every step spawns entire new industries, makes old tasks so cheap that those who used to sell those services disappear (or legislate and sue), allows most business to do more for less.
Not to mention the ever-increasing difficulty that repressive governments have in hiding inconvenient facts from the public.
What we'd all end up doing with 10M is like asking what we'll do with the findings of the Large Hadron Collider once it's up and running. Until it's there, we can't really imagine. Thousands of imaginative people will try things (because starting small on the net is amazingly cheap), and a handful will take off, and change everyone's life in the ways that they will find a new desire for. -
Pfft, 100 fold increases in floods are nothing, we get well over that in the Shag valley. Of course, having a near-zero base helps there.
Anyhoo, according to media tidbits, kids dead because an adventure company with a proper safety certificate wasn't subscribed to the weather warning system correctly, but thought they were, so ignored the oncoming rain, and ended up with nowhere to go when it hit.
String of errors and such. Poor bloody guide. What a hell of a thing to live with.
The Christian sect is in it's element as a result, a shining beacon of love and forgiveness leading others to Christ and all that. Remarkably well rounded people, really, could teach the SST bunch a thing or two about being a victim, if only they didn't insist on wrapping up all their good sense in fairy stories.