Posts by Keir Leslie
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Merckx was definitely doping, but probably just speed or variants of, which are unlikely to have made any real difference to his performance. Certainly he wasn't doping in the way Armstrong was, and it was part of the peloton culture at the time.
But it's difficult to compare Merckx's dominance with the All Blacks given the sports are just so different. Merckx dominated across a range of formats - time trials, hilly classics, cobbled classics, sprinters' classics, stage races, grand tours, the Hour Record. And he rode in a culture where even as someone notorious for winning everything he was still socially obliged to give away victories to his underlings - he never won Paris-Tours because he sat up in the sprint to let a teammate win in '68, for instance.
Professional cyclists race far more frequently than international rugby teams play, and many races are just not that important - same is true of most domestic teams in any sport, and many international teams in sports with global international reach.
(There is, of course, substantial reason to think that many rugby internationals were played under the influence of various things we'd now see as performance enhancing.)
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It may well be be that Mulcair's decision to go hawkish the deficit was bad, but it's also possible that if he'd stayed dovish we'd now be talking about how he was always going to lose because Canadians couldn't trust him on government finances.
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I think the analogies with real property are a bit misleading because there's very different taxation and policy considerations involved there. (Although cf the prohibition on perpetuities, and death duties.)
It's better - I think - to analogise copyrights to a weird bond with a variable term and variable interest. And we are quite ok with bonds having a finite term, and that doesn't seem strange to us.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to Katharine Moody,
The Hundertwasser was proposed (https://www.govt.nz/browse/engaging-with-government/the-nz-flag-your-chance-to-decide/gallery/design/6175) it just wasn't chosen for the Long List.
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Hard News: Not yet standing upright, in reply to James Littlewood*,
It wasn't a facsimile! It was an altered version that took out at least one of the major components -- the black bar -- and smoothed out the hand-drawn irregularity of the koru in favour of what the alterer thought was a better design. It was an astoundingly arrogant gesture to "improve" on an artist's work and expect the Estate just to pat him on the head and say "oh yes you are better at this than Hundertwasser was, why didn't he leave that ugly unnecessary black bar out?"
The problem for the Foundation wasn't that they didn't approve of the Hundertwasser Flag being considered, it's that -- quite rightly -- they didn't approve of a knock-off using his name.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to David Hood,
Electorates with lower turnout do tend to elect more Labour MPs. But rich states in America tend to elect more Democrats -- doesn't mean rich voters are more likely to be Democrats!
I'm not saying that the non-vote is identical to the voting population. Apart from anything else, they don't vote! But I don't think there's significant evidence that it differs from the voting population in ideological terms, particularly not at the kind of 40,000 ft level we're talking about here, and not in simple left/right breakdowns.
In terms of winning-a-marginal-constituency, of course motivating the (left!) non-vote is crucial, and sometimes that means base-mobilisation strategies. But, importantly, many of the key tools for turning out voters are non-ideological - they are social and, frankly, pestering. But in terms of "where should Labour position" I think it's easy to use the non-vote as a sort of reservoir that will supply the numbers, and I am quite wary of it.
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Polity: Meet the middle, in reply to David Hood,
Yes, age and ethnicity are factors. But New Zealand is a reasonably homogenous population - New Zealand Europeans make up what, 75%+ of the population? And more in the voting age bands (a third of Pasifika are under 15, for instance.)
People of Māori descent make up ~15% of the population. The difference between Māori and non-Māori voting rates is ~10%age points. Therefore you'd expect Māori to make up ~15% of the voting population. In practice, Māori probably make up ~13% of the voting population.
(Repeat similarly for Pasfika and Asian New Zealanders, and you get a difference for all those groups taken together of maybe, what 5% fewer than expected, no? And remember that Asian New Zealanders vote in different patterns than Pasifika who vote differently from Māori, and in ways that may well cancel each other out.)
In terms of age, yes, old people vote. (But don't tell political parties that, they're already obsessed with old people.)
So, look, yeah, I think that in terms of winning tight races, this kind of analysis of the people who turn up to vote is a really important tool. Also for local government elections, where turnout is very low, it's really important. But in terms of big fuzzy picture, looking at the ideological centre of gravity of the nation? I don't think it's a huge distortion, certainly not compared to some of the other simplifications going on!
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I don't know if there's much reliable grounds for thinking that non-voters differ ideologically that much from voters though --- certainly in NZ left-wing parties can win on low turnouts and high turnouts, and ditto right wing parties.
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I am not aware of any political party (anyone that's not the EC, in fact) actually scrutinizing the rolls to check for false details prior to an election - 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.
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to Katharine Moody,
Presentation of the CGT policy by Phil Goff (Christchurch Town Hall) was likely a major factor in swinging the swing voters away from Labour in the election last year.
Er, I could be wrong, of course, but wasn't David Cunliffe as the then the leader of the Labour Party the one on stage at that debate?