Posts by BenWilson
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Legal Beagle: Cameron Slater: computer hacker?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
There is a theory that because a computer program is a perfect embodiment of its owner’s instructions, most categories of computer misuse cannot be deception, as the computer evaluated those instructions and decided to grant permission.
That's deep. So when HAL tried to kill Dave, he was right, it was actually all down to human error. Also, there's only ever one truly correct document about the program specification - the machine code that is created. Why comment the code? It's either obvious, or wrong.
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Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to Rob Salmond,
Particularly in light of them probably being randomly distributed around the nation, so we're talking about roughly 1.5 votes per electorate. The limit case of them all trying to swing one outcome together is interesting, since even then it could hardly have achieved anything. But the likely actual case of them being independent shows just how much of a fraud problem we don't have. Once in all of NZ history an electorate was won by a single vote. In that case, and every close count, for that matter, they then pick through the voters with a fine tooth comb looking for ineligible voters. We've already got a system in place for this shit.
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Legal Beagle: Cameron Slater: computer hacker?, in reply to Russell Brown,
You’re saying Hooton is organising bank jobs now?
Someone tell him that when the police come they can easily be repelled by yelling "I've got a gun".
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Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to Dean Wallis,
Republican politics being what they are, one could posit that reducing electoral fraud could actually benefit the left?
It could, if there was any significant fraud to remove. If not, then it's hard not to see the point of it being two particularly right wing tendencies. Firstly, increasing barriers to voting that are very much skewed towards their own demographic, at a time when their majority is extremely tight. Secondly, it's collecting information on people unnecessarily, in a process that we generally like to think should be entirely free from the fear of coercion. I find the second the more pernicious of the two reasons, personally. It's probably not all going into a database so that random data spooks can fish for troublemakers. Probably. Not yet. But if they don't collect it in the first place, then "probably" becomes "certainly". I prefer certainly, in this case.
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Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to Keir Leslie,
it wouldn’t be at all practical, considering the scale of modern electorates. It’s a polite fiction from the days of limited franchises and much smaller electorates.
I don't know about that. The bit that's old fashioned to me is thinking that a large database is a difficult thing to collate and search.
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Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Also, I don’t need any chilling reasons to think this is a dumb idea. It’s enough that it’s a completely unwarranted waste of time and money. That it’s chilling is just icing on the fuck-off cake.
Give us a real reason to do this, or don’t do it.
ETA: Not at Keir. The link was accidental, and unfortunately not editable.
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Polity: Buying a fight with democracy, in reply to Rob Salmond,
It's fair to compare to the Republicans and their drive to exclude voters. There's pretty much no other good reason to do any of this in a system that isn't broken.
Well, none that I can think of. If anyone else can think of a good reason to fix our unbroken system with a new administrative overhead likely to have a disproportionate effect on the young, recent immigrants, the poor, the elderly, women, etc, I'd like to hear it. All the people for whom cranking out a driver's license isn't just an automatic expectation.
It might be a long bow to suggest that immigrants are more likely to vote National, though. They might, however, be more likely not to vote at all, in which case their vote becomes irrelevant. If looking for a sinister motive, I'd be thinking this one hits young people more, and also women (less likely to drive?). Both are more likely to vote Labour than National.
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Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to Glenn Pearce,
IMHO low interest rates are the single biggest cause of the increase in property values.
Could be. But other factors could be nearly as big as low interest rates. To think we can fix things only with interest rates because they are strongest is akin to saying you can fix my swimming by just working on my right arm because it’s stronger than my left one. Actually, you want to work on the left, and also the legs (despite a far smaller contribution each), and also look at other refinements, like abdominal tension, breath control, shaving your chest, etc.
I say all that without even accepting the dominance of interest rates. If we somehow proved that foreign investment were the biggest lever, that wouldn’t mean that we should stop worrying about interest rates either.
The way I see it, any time there’s any control we could use to tweak the economy, we should consciously aim to have it in the arsenal for use, even if we don’t always use it. That makes our system less fragile. It takes pressure off the other controls. We design vehicles to go backwards and forwards, even though they could get to most of the same places by just going forwards and steering. It’s just way less easy, and can get completely stuck. Let’s not design our economy like a car with only one gear and a wheel that can only be turned in one direction, because it’s conceptually purer. Let’s design it with maximum functionality, much of it completely redundant (until the day we need it – like our ABS on that one wet day some idiot crosses the centerline at us).
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Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to B Jones,
I was wondering whether changes in the amount of deposit required might influence things. If all of a sudden people need a 25% deposit rather than a 5% deposit (or whatever you could get away with in 2007), that might show up as lower levels of debt vs housing value? Or is that small potatoes?
That already happened, didn't it? LVRs were changed. David, did you notice it affecting debt/value ratios?
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Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to Bart Janssen,
What bemuses me is that people seem weirdly resistant to that idea.
Word. There's two main hypotheses here:
1. Unusual foreign demand is driving up prices in Auckland
2. Collective local lunacy has gripped AucklandI don't see 2 as any kind of null hypothesis. Both hypotheses say "there's something going on". The null hypothesis is that there's nothing going on. That one is already clearly rejected in the way, way out of normal growth in Auckland prices.
You have to actually have the strange ideological view that some economists seem to have that money does not exist, and everything works as a perfectly balanced bartering system to think that 2 would be a case of business as usual.
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