Posts by David Hood
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Speaker: A simple strategy for Trump to…, in reply to linger,
Colour me embarrassed at the misspelling, though since the poll favoured Trump, it should probably be a strange shade of orange result.
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There was that Reuters/Ipsos poll just released where Trump was in a dead heat with Clinton, but that is (at the moment) assumed to be the occasional rouge poll that just happens.
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There is also the percentage of murk- where a company or trust is the immediate owner, that falls into the "doesn't count towards the 3% because we don't know the ultimate owners".
That would greatly affect the results, but in this case this you can get a ballpark of the size of the problem,. Possibly naively I would suggest you could:
1) take an old snapshot of the property titles database.
I assume political parties researchers have been doing this. If I can, people who get paid to do so should be able to.
2) take a current snapshot.
3) find all the titles that have changed ownership
4) find what percentage are companies or trusts.
This could be done through data matching, but does lead to the potential problem of "inhuman sounding names" where Mr Transpacific Megacorp Holdings Limited is confused with a similarly named company,. Rather than get into a fight over the classification of a tiny number of properties owned by the Trust family (rather than a family Trust) , I would just classify those as "couldn't tell if owned by a human"
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In terms of Icelandic politics, with the Panama Papers, the Pirate party is now on 43% support (up from 34% at the start of the year). If the Panama papers fallout triggers an election, they will be the governing block. They are a very, very anti-corporatist party.
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Do people remember Barry Marshall?
http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/07-dr-drank-broth-gave-ulcer-solved-medical-mystery
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People might want to watch Rob Knight's (still a few kiwi vowels) Ted talk.
https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_knight_how_our_microbes_make_us_who_we_are/transcript?language=en
Though I think he would agree that it is a really complicated micro-ecology of interactions in there, so you can't really just swap-out microfauna on the grounds of "this one seems good in isolation" at present. -
Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I presume “men” refers to me
I presume “men” refers to me
I was the only other person who discussed closing the thread, so I might be one third of the at least 2+ males that must exist to be men. I try generally assuming the best and posting to add to the surrounding knowledge, and I was regretting the nett outcome of my actions in this thread. If I was one of those being ascribed as feeling oppressed (and statistical the odds were pretty good I was one), then I note that those feelings were being misattributed to me.
While the sugar tax was introduced by surprise by a right wing president, it was recently weakened (generally regarded as due to lobbying by corporates). Left wing parties opposed weakening the sugar tax.
However, the lower house of Congress voted in October to halve the tax on soft drinks containing less than 5 grams of added sugar per 100ml, arguing this would encourage drinks companies to change.
That move, backed by the ruling PRI party that proposed the initial tax, caused a storm of protest among leftwing opposition parties and was speedily overturned in the final approval of the 2016 budget.
One deputy said reducing the tax was a “death sentence” and the Alliance for Food Health, a campaign group that supports it, said the tax needed to be doubled, not halved and that soft drinks killed more Mexicans than organised crime."http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5593d870-97fe-11e5-9228-87e603d47bdc.html#axzz47lvX5Pu2
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'd be happy not to have the option of adding to things to this thread- I was just composing posts while helping out on other sites, so I was lagging in the conversation, and I don't think I can add much light to it.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Well, I was thinking in terms of it having been a standing policy of England Labour as part of a package of policies considered more progressive than the Tories. Regarding Finland, and my reading of Finnish politics is by no means expert, it was part of the basket of policies of the leftist green coalition of the time which one would describe as leftish by scandanavian standards. In other parts of Scandanavia sugar taxes seem to have been established as part of the general post war social democrat Scandinavian social safety net of social support.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I’m sure hidden in this interesting catalogue is something that contradicts my claim that conservative politicians like the tax, and it’s just me who can’t find it.
That it not what I was trying to do, because some conservative politicians like it (and some dislike it) and it is not clear if there should be a "some" or "all" in your claim. I'm not getting sucked into that argument.
I was responding to your earlier statement, in good faith, that "Or you could give me examples of places where the sugar tax is being advocated for as part of a balanced package of measures, along with others aimed at reducing the chief cause of the problem – namely, poverty. I’d be all ears."
Since you said you would be keen to know, I responded.