Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Phil Lyth,
I’d say it is past time to repeal the bit of the regulation (3A(c)vi) which requires that registration of a birth includes
That one caused a bit of fun in our house. We’re just yesterday at the point of three years of cohabitation, which is one of the milestones to having “a relationship of the nature of marriage” as defined in the Property (Relationships) Act. Another one is to have “a child of the relationship”, which ticked over nine weeks yesterday (he has my surname). So trying to decide if we were in “a relationship of the nature of marriage” or some other form of relationship that wasn’t married required a bit of intellectual contortionism. (ETA: not helped by my pretentions to some degree of legal understanding, and a spot of education on the PRA. I suspect most people would just have gone with the commonly-accepted definitions.)
In the end we decided it was of the nature of marriage and were done with it, but it is definitely something of an archaic question. I can, however, understand its statistical utility – there’s no other point in time where the question is asked, and for demographers it’s a useful insight into society at a point in time.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Richard Grevers,
I have heard of Plummer + Butt -> Plummer-Butt (!)
At least it was Butt rather than Crack.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
almost never do you hear of a couple creating a new surname of their own (which I kind of think would be cool).
A couple of my acquaintance went from being Burch (his) and Hall (hers) to being Burchall. You're right, it is cool. They were fortunate that their names worked so well together and could be blended so seamlessly.
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On the topic of surnames, a colleague got married a month ago. She's kept her own surname, but now goes by Mrs. As an American, she didn't get the humour associated with being Mrs Slocum.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Jason Kemp,
The other stat not mentioned is the divorce rate among those who do get married.
Nobody knows what it is. Not a single person. Figuring it out would require a complete database of marriages and divorces all the way back to the year dot for whichever jurisdiction was trying to do the figuring-out.
I get heartily pissed off when people say "x couples got married last year, y couples got divorced last year, ergo the divorce rate is y/x." Doesn't work that way, and that much ought to be blatantly obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. -
Hard News: A GCSB Roundup, in reply to "chris",
Oh, the stupid. "It's really bad, and you have to trust me because I know how bad it is."
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OnPoint: Government Portfolios for Dummies, in reply to B Jones,
what government departments know is very different to what they can convey to government Ministers
Particularly when said ministers are of the reputed ilk of Pull-ya Benefit, who apparently demanded that briefing documents be no more than two sides of A4.
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OnPoint: Government Portfolios for Dummies, in reply to Stephen R,
I don’t really blame the staff for choosing to do that.
No, but I do blame the executives (and the penny-pinching ministers) for not investing in a proper electronic document release management system that handles redaction appropriately. Such things exist, and are of sufficient reliability that they're used for releasing partially-declassified top secret documents. It's really not good enough that the default behaviour in NZ is to cheap out and use the lowest-tech, lowest-convenience course of action; not something that is in the least bit confined to the public sector.
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Keeping better government data better than the government.
Because why not.Because security through obscurity. It's much easier not to fuck up redaction and erasure of document data fields if you scan than if you do a "Save as PDF" from Office.
Also, old documents don't give shit away to the proletariat, who, as we know, are best treated as mushrooms when it comes to knowing that the government is up to and how it pretends to function.
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Hard News: Media3: Watching the Fourth Estate, in reply to Russell Brown,
What a mess.
Snowden’s only real hope at this point if he’s to continue blowing the whistle (ETA: given Russia's ultimatum) is military transport by a sympathetic country, which would be immune under diplomatic convention (ie: not starting a war) from interference by any country that was over-flown or landed in en route to his final destination. If the Russians won’t grant him a temporary visa he’s not going to be allowed to enter Russia or board a scheduled flight that requires travel documents to pass through other countries, which leaves his options as boarding an unscheduled flight.