Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #1, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Really, if we're going to turn this into a popularity contest why no just go back to high school and be done with it?
OTOH, if it's all about the issues, why don't we just vote directly on the issues? Representative democracy is always going go have elements of a popularity contest, and the credibility and motives of people strongly maintaining policy positions will always be of interest. It actually does undermine ACTs law and order position that their spokesman was hiding a crooked past, however much of an ad hominem that is technically. We don't speak in vacuums, imparting impartial facts for evaluation in a great big logic machine - the framing of debates is highly contextualized to the people doing the debating.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to andin,
It must be getting really tense in CHCH if a logo on a shirt is precipitating anger at the wearer.
Understandably tense, and horrible for the people involved - there's nothing nice about being the tool of bad news delivered from above, and these people mostly live in Christchurch themselves and have suffered too. It would not be a good outcome if being a Tower assessor became such an undesirable job that no-one local wanted to do it, because it can only slow the process down, and ring-ins from out of town would have less to lose, and be chosen (and paid) for their hardness, so the positions would be more likely to polarize to a disastrous stand-off. But sometimes these things have to happen, if the people above really are that callous.
Government can't wash their hands of this. A Muldoonish "sport isn't the government's business, but law and order is" approach could easily lead to riotous confrontations that divide the nation. I don't want to see an emergent "fuck Christchurch" camp in our politics, when it could be resolved by better communal engagement with the question of "what should be done about the disaster?". Silence and backroom discussion just isn't an option.
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-Another obvious one, you could vote for only one person, and let them decide everything. It's not really that far from how we do it now.
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There's no limit to the number of possible systems that could be devised to extract the cloud wisdom of the democratic citizenry and turn it into decisions and/or leadership. There's also no guarantee any of them will come up with something that citizenry will like in the long run, because they can always just make bad choices.
Some more possibilities just off the top of my head:
-Instead of selecting or ranking candidates, you have to "weight" them, by assigning a numeric value from, say 0-100 for each of them. You could weight them all evenly, strictly rank them, give all to one and none to any others, or even give them all none (which would be a much better way of signalling no-confidence than to not-vote). Candidates would then be chosen either on a proportional basis of total weightings, or in a winner-takes-all basis electorate by electorate, or both.
-You could go even deeper and make a matrix that divides the candidate parties or representatives by portfolio (Prime Minister would be only one of these), weighting the extent to which you like their views in some policy dimension or other. Then the choices are allocated exactly where they are most preferred, so National could win Finance, but Labour could take Education, Maori Affairs going to Maori Party and Greens getting Environmental portfolios. Close runs might end up with shared portfolios. This could be a way for people to signal what/who it is that they actually like in party on a national basis, where all the electorate based systems only take account of your opinion about the candidate's influence on local affairs.
-The ballot could be organized by issues, which you weight by how much you care about them, and in which direction your preferences go, and then weight which candidates you prefer to represent you on them. That way not only is the candidate chosen for their views, but the actual mandate itself is clearly represented - you're signalling to them that you voted for them, for instance, because you want them to represent you on drug policy, AND that what you want is for them to push for decriminalization, rather than have an epiphany after the election and decide that the status quo is Te Orsome now that they're in control. -
Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to webweaver,
Assuming that this is common to all the banks, then they're not actually the ones doing the insuring, are they? I think they're just the middle-man.
Pretty sure you're right there. I just found my underwriter in the world's tiniest print at in the footer of my insurance document, with waiver of all responsibilities on the bank to actually do a damned thing. But still, the house does actually belong to the bank, so it's got to be in their interests to get a payout. A lot of people will simply go bankrupt leaving a big bad debt, without it.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #1, in reply to Phil Lyth,
It isn't accurate to say that MMP doesn't / won't maximise Maori representation.
That's one of the things I like about it. It would be awesome if the Maori party really back themselves enough to keep seeing it that way.
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #1, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I would bet that we won't.
I'll take your easy money, Fast Edgy. It may well be that they simply haven't thought it through yet. It would border on remiss of them not to take the option that maximizes Maori representation. If they didn't, my respect would rise considerably (although I'm not discounting that they're one step ahead of me here, I see them, particularly Sharples, as extremely canny politicians).
A bottle of chosen alcohol to the winner of the bet that within the next two months, the Maori party come out publicly in support of one of the alternatives to MMP (I win either way, btw, because I personally favor MMP and hope they do support it)? Bombay Sapphire is my pick.
Edit: You'd need to nominate your choice before I clap hands for the bargain. I'm not forking out for a $20,000 bottle of wine :-)
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Legal Beagle: Referendum Fact Check #1, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I don't particularly care. Their arguments are either good or bad. Their statements are either factual or not.
I do. It's always good to know the motivations behind people who mount major campaigns of any kind. Why do they care so much?
Of course the arguments they make are vital too, but some of the time I want to know whether they're really arguing that because they believe it, or because they have another motive. And any system that gets big backing from private money seems highly likely to be aligned with the interests of that private money. Which is fine, they're allowed their position and say, but I have personally seldom found my interests to be aligned the same way.
"It goes to the credibility and impartiality of the witness, your honor".
Please note, I'd be just as interested in the motives of any concerted effort to promote MMP. It's no surprise that the Green Party has every argument in the book to keep it, because PR is a system that gives their type of party its best chances. Similarly, anyone want to place bets that we'll hear significant support from the Maori Party for whichever system seems likely to allocate the most guaranteed Maori seats?
But yes, evidence and argument about the pros and cons of the systems are going to sway me the most, I'd like to think.*
*Edit: I'd like to think my faith in MMP has withstood the shock of National routing the Left, which I most naturally tend to. I feel that National became a much better party because of MMP.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
If you have a mortgage, that would be a problem.
I'm also thinking that might be the core of the solution too. The banks want their money back too, I expect, and surely have deep enough pockets to go for the insurance companies. They'd only want their piece back, but that's still not something they're going to get with companies like Tower twisting out of obligations.
Also, it's one possibility to "Who else can we insure with"? My insurance is with the bank that holds my mortgage. If they ripped me off, they're also ripping themselves off. I know they're separate entities, technically, but they're part of the same portfolio for any shareholders in my bank.
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Muse: OFF TOPIC: This Is What Your Brain…, in reply to bmk,
Yup, stats is great, but sometimes you aren't actually after that much accuracy in your data. You might just be trying to decide if it's even worth further investigation.
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