Posts by Rich of Observationz
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How does a 42 year-old woman who’s had a part-time job at a newspaper and a PR company with no clients afford lately to buy a “big” house in Ponsonby and invest in a new media joint venture?
Same way everyone does - use the flexi mortgage to meet the payments on the fixed mortgage and recapitalize often? Plus a bit of help from mummy and daddy, you'd think? Who are mummy and daddy in this case?
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Hard News: Sorting out our thinking on drugs, in reply to Josh Helpful,
There's still a big hypocritical gap, even amongst educated professionals. It's ok to have paracetamol (quite risky, high incidence of accident and suicide deaths, limited treatment, low therapeutic index) sold in supermarkets to deal with a hangover, but not MDMA, which is of at least comparable risk, because it's just there to make life more amusing. (One solution to this is to medicalise human mood and personality such that a 'medicine' is needed to 'cure' them).
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to BenWilson,
All my coding bandwidth outside my job is taken up with making arduino controlled blinkies. Maybe after Burning Seed.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
But it's only really big in Victoria. NSfW and Queensland, it's all about the league (and the cane toad racing).
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I'd actually like to get the answers for more meta-questions, like:
- have you always voted for the same party?
- how do your parents vote?
- when do you make up your mind on how to vote?Also, maybe a longitudinal study on how attitudes shift during elections?
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Ryan Postlethwaite,
Yeah, but the Brits are as bad with soccer.
It must be a source of disappointment to Crosby Textor that Aussie hasn't got a consensus code of football to get behind.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Rob Stowell,
So should we lose (which is possible, given that we have a soft group, NZ haven't played any northern hemisphere teams all year and they'll be straight in against France or Ireland in the quarter finals) will that mean that we'll be spun the story that they'd have won under a better flag?
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
No.
http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2015/0066/latest/DLM6405391.html
The actual counting is done in secret, presumably so that how individuals vote remains secret (although as always, a postal ballot can never be properly secret as you can’t tell if anyone has seen, or even filled out on behalf, a voter’s ballot paper).
The results aren’t disclosed before the end of voting, which is the usual case with extended voting periods, to avoid a bandwagon effect.
The actual result totals for each choice will be published after the count is complete.
The process will be supervised by JPs and District Court judges* (but with no partisan observers, unlike a general election). Apart from that, it all seems reasonable. Would the government really try and rig the vote, with all the chances of being caught, over something as trivial?
* probably all reptilians. I’m sure there are enough reptilian illuminati JPs they can call on.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to BenWilson,
“Reducing taxes in general would help solve our economic problems”.
If you feed that sentence through a reading grader, it comes out at a (US) grade 12 (as in 6th/7th form - 17/18).
That's a higher level of literacy than most people can manage, so it'd quite possible that the anomalous results are caused by a failure to understand the question.
It's also a loaded question, because it implies its own correctness.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to BenWilson,
By principle you mean principal as in "the principal component" rather than principle as in "the principles of the party"?