Posts by Rich of Observationz
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an ecstasy-related death by expediting a terrible bill.... that cracked down on drug utensils
Ban ecstacy utensils! Er.. fingers?
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Polity: BURGERGASM, in reply to RBentley,
I would recommend reading a chapter in one of Anthony Bourdain's books attacking that idea - burger meat, like any other meat* shouldn't have to be cooked to destruction to destroy pathogens.
* With the exception of chicken and to some degree pork.
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Can we not be more data driven here?
Assign a percentage value to 9 or 10 qualities: meatiness, bun crispness, cheesiness, choice of ingredients. Then weight this with a factor derived from the name of the restaurant’s position within a canonical set of Wellington restaurant names, aligned to traditional thematic factors: South American revolutionaries, primitive built structures, food components, etc.
Then put all the raw data into R and produce a cluster diagram and hence calculate the Minkowski distance between each burger and the basic Maccas.
Might tell you something. Or not.
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Are you sure you aren't overthinking this, or that you've trolled by somebody with time on their hands and the rand() function?
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her Masterton origins
I went to Masterton once. Sample conversation:
You're from *outside*? I've always wanted to go somewhere outside Masterton once, like maybe Carterton or Martinborough, but I've never been able to find the way.
Is it true about oceans? And cities? -
several National voters who intended voting for Annette as a great electorate MP
I'm a bit cynical about the "great electorate MP thing". You can come across as wonderful if you listen to what people say, agree with them vehemently and then do stuff all about it. As practised by the UK Liberals, most local councillors, etc, etc.
Another top tip for Rongotai Labour is that if you're going to do the "fake local paper" thing, at least do it more than once every three years.
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This is fixable:
- ban on foreign media ownership
- ban on cross media ownership of a radio station, TV station or newspaper in the same market
- levy on monopoly newspapers to fund alternative media
- end to public subsidy (through license fee holidays, fake bankruptcies and the like) of commercial media
- requirement that no individual is the beneficial owner of more than 10% of a media company
- funding through NZ On Air (etc) for alternative online and broadcast journalism
- BBC-style impartiality requirement for commercial and state news and current affairsThat'd probably do a job. The right would scream hard, but if enacted in the first six months of a left-wing government, it'd be forgotten by the next election, and all their mouthpieces would be long gone.
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Sure, no company or manager is going to employ somebody to do a bullshit job if it is not going to improve the bottom line of the company
It might improve the bottom line of the company, in isolation, but not add anything useful in totality.
My first job, we had one secretary with a typewriter to a factory of a hundred people. Sales and marketing material was generally plain old typescript – anything flash would have to go out to specialist printers. Now, sales collateral involves websites, full colour proposals (in one case I saw, perfect bound on glossy paper, like a book) and presentations. That might add value for the business, because they get the deal over a slightly less shiny competitor, but it does nothing for the customer, who is ultimately paying for this.
Or look at the electricity industry. Dozens of companies competing intensively to supply the same commodity which costs them all roughly the same to acquire. It’s an entirely artificial market – and to a large extent, it *is* by design that government made it work that way. When the fourth National Government set it up that way, did the thought of creating lots of middle class jobs not enter their head?
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we STILL haven’t confronted the disparity of ‘safe’ Labour seats like Mt Albert or Island Bay where Labour lost the party vote.
Island Bay isn't an electorate?
A lot of that is because Green (and maybe NZF) voters support the Labour candidate rather than their party candidate (NZF didn't contest Mt Albert). The rest I guess is voters hedging their bets: who either support National and don't care about the electorate vote, or support Labour and wrongly don't care about the party vote, or support National but want David Shearer to do well in the Labour party.
Personally, I voted for Chris Finlayson rather than Annette King in Rongotai, because Finlayson is one of the better National MPs and King is one of the worse Labour ones.
(I may have said elsewhere that the split vote is a dumb indulgence. Elections should be about making a clear choice, not avoiding one)
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I'm not sure how
learning more about every voter before we make contact
is going to play out in NZ.
The US is both legally and culturally a less private environment than NZ. There's no effective data protection law, for instance, and a the primary system means a large number of voters are registered supporters of a party.
In NZ, all a party has to go on to start with is name, address and age from the electoral roll - I'm not sure what can be learnt from that. All other data is limited by privacy legislation which requires the person to have given consent - do the terms of use of Airpoints or Baycorp data extend to allowing political parties to buy and use that data?
And I'm not convinced that cold calling people with a file on them in front of your rep is going to go down well. You might be better pretending to be the other lot whilst doing that.