Posts by Richard Aston
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That would have made him one of those foreign students then, squeezing out the locals?
Zinger!
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Myles Thomas,
Please refer to the research by Jack Vowles mentioned earlier about voters not bothering if they think the election is a foregone conclusion. And keep your pessimism to yourselves.
Last time EVERYONE said National would romp home, there was a massively low voter turnout and lo behold, National squeaked in. Don’t trust the polls, they are proven to over estimate Nat numbers.
Thanks Myles. Polls are not a neutral observer they are part of the process, especially in how the media headline them.
In fact if I was a spin doctor for the Nats ( I am not) I'd be commissioning regular polls showing the Nats ahead , Labour behind and the rest in disarray. -
Hard News: The Web, in reply to Russell Brown,
I actually walked into their old bunker on Newton Road a couple of days after they’d announced it as the Tuanz conference, found Nick Wood surrounded by modem banks and signed up.
I did exactly the same thing in, 1995 I think, modem banks sounds flash what I remember was a long bench piled a meter high with modems , cables everywhere, it looked chaotic, I nearly didn't sign up but it was a good deal.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to BenWilson,
Of course it would help even more if they can give us insight as to what points they actually agree on. If they actually had mature policy that they’d already largely OKed with the other group, it might sound like a team with a plan.
+1
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Russell Brown,
Maybe Grant Robertson will have a role to play there too. He seems capable of collegiality in this area.
Agreed, but what influence do you think Matt McCarten will have on the Labour/Green relationship.
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Phil Lyth,
To kick things off: overwhelmingly younger people do not participate and so their concerns are addressed less than those of the older generation who do
I am really interested in non voters and why they don't vote but there is not a lot of survey work out there on this. The Electoral Commission did a survey post 2011 election that doesn't seem to shovel much of a glimpse into the reasons.
This survey by Stats NZ is a bit better with the following non voting reasons;
1 More non-voters in younger age group. 18–24 years 42%
2 People with marginal incomes , 28 % said they did not vote,
3 Unemployed people less likely to vote 35 % of unemployed people did not vote.But a very interesting take is a paper by Jack Vowles (Victoria University), on the steady decrease in voting since 1945. He developed a model that predicts the level of non voters. Its complex but he says the key reasons for not voting are;
close elections at which the two major parties posed clear policy alternatives enhance turnout, while elections where the outcome is not in doubt and where party policies closely converge produce low turnout
He goes on to say much of this comes down to public perceptions of how close the election might be
The public may tend to under-estimate the closeness of elections because of a focus on the two main parties and consequently less attention to coalition options because of the campaign’s focus on the two major parties, particularly since the 2005 election
I can kinda understand that, "Why bother voting for party Y if it looks like party X will get in anyway"
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Its funny but when I think back to my early experiences with the net in 1995 I don't feel much nostalgia, yet I do with music etc .
It got better so fast that the past was so slow in comparison why would I feel anything but relief it had moved on. Netscape on a 14.4 kilobits/sec modem was a dog.Instant email communications with people around the word was still magic as was email attachments, they revolutionized the business I was in .
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Hard News: The Web, in reply to Russell Brown,
Lame! Not really a search engine and certainly not as good as Alta Vista, which was already in wide use at the time.
Agreed, webcrawler was ok too , Yahoo for a while until it couldn't keep up with new sites. But when google came along it was a seismic shift in searching.
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Great info on coffee Matt thanks.
How about green tea , I have moved over from coffee, 4 cups a day , double bags in each, steeped for 5 mins. Feeling the need for a triple bag cup . -
Hard News: Friday Music: Both sides of…, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Taste Records, owned by the late Dave Perkins, bless his soul. It had a listening booth with extractor fans so you could get in the right state of mind to *understand* the music.
Thanks Simon , yes those listening booths were good and they didn't seem to mind you listening to whole LPs .