Posts by Matthew Poole
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Stephen Dickson,
No mention of the fact two of the final four are in fact copyrighted.
They're all copyrighted! They have been expressed on paper, ergo copyrighted. The number of people who don't understand this is staggering.
-
Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Katharine Moody,
All the more so since we don’t actually record spoiled ballots as anything other than “informal”.
But surely media will report it for what it is – a protest vote.
"Informal" includes people who bugger it up, and since it's an STV vote buggering-up is entirely possible. With there being no actual recording of spoiled ballots as spoiled, the media cannot report anything except the percentage of votes that have been declared "informal" and how that compares to the percentages in other elections; probably local-body since we have no postal voting or STV at the national level.
Speaking of STV, I hope the papers will have randomised ordering.
-
Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to James Butler,
The alternative is the RSA’s “old man yells at cloud” plan to influence the process, which seems somewhat self-defeating.
All the more so since we don’t actually record spoiled ballots as anything other than “informal”. It’s a useless protest because it demonstrates nothing when reported as part of the final count.
I really wanted Wā kāinga
I've not actually paid very much attention to the various designs proposed, but that one is seriously classy. I like the explained symbolism, too.
-
One of the fern designs will win the first round of the public voting
I bloody hope not. Insipid, the lot. I'm a big fan of the "Vote hypnoflag!" plan, and fully intend to promote it at every opportunity.
-
However long ago it was that the private operator deal was announced, I said (and now cannot find) on Facebook that the only way a private operator can make money by doing the state's job on the basis of costing less is by doing it cheaper. Which means fewer staff, less training and rehabilitation of prisoners, and all the other stereotypical exercises in cost-cutting that we see in Dilbert and elsewhere. Lo, it has come to pass, so freakily close to what I predicted that more than one of my friends recalled my prophesy as though it was something that could never have been foreseen by a mere mortal.
A good friend's OH is a prison officer a MECF, and the comments she passed on about the working conditions are scary. Officers routinely working double shifts, spending 12-14 hours a day on the floor six days a week, so tired that they are seriously impaired cognitively. That's what happens when staff are your biggest OpCost and you have to find a way to make money out of the same budget as the state operator that is doing the same job. There's no fat in the food budget - which is already too lean, really - and that doesn't leave too many other places to trim.
-
Speaker: A minor change to existing provisions!, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I’m afraid she can claim for cleaning costs when she’s done the cleaning herself, and there’s a set rate/hr the TT allows – but if she wants to do so, she needs to demonstrate that the property needed cleaning, so she’ll have to produce photographs showing it hadn’t been left “reasonably clean and … tidy”.
Ah, bother.
Given that she said she's spent the thick end of three weeks cleaning the place, I don't think there'll be enough bond to cover her claimed costs.
Of course, if it's taken three weeks to clean after we spent 18 hours on it, I'm surprised that she let us stay there for five years! -
Speaker: A minor change to existing provisions!, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
I'd really like to see adjudicators able to rule that so long as a party to a hearing is mostly innocent in the matter, their names be left off the public Tenancy Tribunal (TT) documents. That won't help with the reference of course, but would help when landlords do TT searches on prospective tenants.
I hadn't considered that.
We've just moved house, and the former landlady has announced that she wants to make deductions from our bond to compensate her for the time she's spent cleaning a house that she deemed generally fine at the time of final inspection (we didn't deal with the bond at that point because there was some gardening required and a missing key). Aside from being pretty sure she's not allowed to deduct for costs not directly incurred, it's the principle of having spent about 18 hours of person-time cleaning and then being told that, actually, that wasn't sufficient; and no, we did not live in a hazard to health.Since there's no assurance that our next move will be a purchase, the fact that we challenged her in the Tenancy Tribunal is a publicly-available negative for future landlords is a huge disincentive to stand up to her.
-
Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to BenWilson,
I think you wanted * 0.00004. It was a percentage…so *0.004*0.01
That'll be it. Mid-afternoon brain-fade.
No race was that close.
Occasionally one is. But in that case, they go through the votes carefully anyway.
Going back to 1996 (earliest complete data set) we have had precisely three instances where the winning margin was < 97:
- Tauranga in 1999, with a margin of 63 to Winnie
- Christchurch Central in 2011, with a margin of 47 to Nicky Wagner
- Waitakere in 2011, with a margin of 9 to Pull-ya BenefitSo very, very occasionally indeed.
-
Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to Rob Salmond,
0.004% of the votes cast in 2014 (2,416,479) is 9,666.
Actually, it is 96.66. Which makes your “no impact” argument about 100 times stronger.
I have no idea how I managed to bugger that up (probably did *00.4 instead of *.004), but yes, that really wouldn't have affected anything. No race was that close.
-
Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to izogi,
I guess in these days when a small number of Party votes might tip a threshold, or result in MPs having been allocated differently between parties, maybe fraud could be identified as having made a significant difference
0.004% of the votes cast in 2014 (2,416,479) is 9,666. Had they all been cast for a single party (the anecdotal claims about massive fraud by the YounGnats, for example) it would not have affected the outcome except if it was all in a small number of seats and in favour of a single MP; 43 seats were won with a majority of 9,664 votes (Northcote) or fewer. And that wouldn’t have changed the overall result because MMP.
No party’s vote was so close to tipping over into a higher threshold, as far as I can tell, as to have been changed by so few votes. It wouldn’t have got CCCP over the 5% line, and they were the only party within cooee of getting there.