Posts by Moz
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Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to Alec Morgan,
“if you make it to the top floor, don’t forget to send the elevator back down…” and hope it applies this election to 90s alumni voters that are doing better now
Isn't the famous former solo mother who got a degree while on the benefit and eventually made it into parliament still there? Since she's (in)famous for not just pulling up the ladder of opportunity but smashing and burning it, I can only think that a change would require a Green majority in parliament, not just a few tweaks to the composition.
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In Australia some wonk did the numbers and came up with a very detailed explanation, but in short: if every single person getting a non-pension benefit was actually entitled to nothing at all, the level of fraud involved would still be less than the amount of tax fraud detected.
That's something to keep in mind, and ideally in the headlines, whenever the topic of benefit fraud comes up. Doesn't stop fraud being committed against beneficiaries by the government, as the ongoing "Centrelink Debt recovery" scam/scandal here shows.
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Hard News: On benefit fraud, in reply to nzlemming,
As a victim of the system, I have no doubt that MSD have a formula ready at hand. Bastids.
Oh, they have a formula all right "your money. Hand it over. Fuck you".
I'm not sure I have the order of phrases exactly right, though.
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Access: Hearing privilege and Deaf disempowerment, in reply to Emma Hart,
We had to choose all NZSL or all oral English.
Whatever happened to the fad for teaching pre-verbal infants sign language? I remember that being a thing a few years ago, on the basis that speaking is beyond the fine motor control skills of infants for a long time after they start to understand words, but they can sign. And giving them a way to express themselves makes life a lot less frustrating...
But that fad is in direct contradiction to the "one or the other" nonsense, and its existance counts as evidence that at worst it's not always true that a kid that learns sign is never going to speak..
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Hard News: Meth Perception, in reply to Russell Brown,
MethSolutions
Great name, I presume they make a vape-able form of the drug?
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to Neil Graham,
I read about a RAM intensive hashing algorithm which uses far less CPU but requires lots of memory.
Yes, and there's also even less wasteful options like connection time (which favours IOT devices... oh the malware we'd see, if all that counted was the number of devices). It's not a field I'm competent to even express opinions on the technical details, but from outside what matters is resource consumption.
I wonder if a tamagotchi-style thing would work, where your contribution was solving a simple captcha once an hour. Or even just "press button on device A in response to request on device B" (viz, they get your email, push and SMS details, you get a message via one of those and have to press the requested button. But the cheaters have to deal with a lot of possible requests, from an SMS saying "what's eight + ||" to an emailed picture of a newspaper-letter note saying "hit the (8) ball" to a push saying "Pleas count the e's").
The issue there is the "proof of identity", where you don't want to simply up the frequency to prevent multiple enrolment, but it's very hard to both reliably detect a person at all, then to accurately identify that person. I wonder if there's a network-oriented solution instead - your contribution is periodically convincing another network member that you're human? Not a hierarchy, but a random association. Gamed via "always agree" perhaps?
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to BenWilson,
forming a marker of our relative power to simply burn down something of value to show our own value.
Somewhat amusingly there are "primitive tribes" who do much the same thing, sometimes literally - The Pyramids and St Paul's Cathedral, for example, but also the various "burn the giant straw man" things where my bonfire is bigger than yours.
A better system is a "gifting economy", as seen in many parts of Polynesia. The best person is the one who is the most generous. Sure, it has downsides, but looking at that from metastising capitalism those don't look so bad.
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Hard News: Blockchain, what is it?, in reply to David Hood,
{cries}
Money quote:
Cryptocurrencies are inefficient by design. Their decentralized nature demands a way to establish trust between strangers on the internet, and for technical reasons the best answer we seem to have developed so far is to back blockchains up with enormous amounts of electricity and computing power.
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Have any of the crypto-currency/blockchain people solved the fundamental problem of power consumption? My understanding is that to a large extent the "51% hack" is measured in megawatts, and just operating a blockchain requires a considerable amount of both hardware and power. Or alternatively, guarding against a hostile takeover requires that the defenders spend more megawatts than the attackers can afford to.
If you think that climate change is a problem, or that the planet is finite, this is something of a problem. But if not, it's merely a business opportunity.
FWIW I think the Etherium rewriting of history proves that the people doing it are not serious and don't intend to carry out their claims. The very first time they made a mistake they changed their story from "irrevocable programmatic contract" to "the rules are what we say they are on the day". In other words, if you as a small player find a way to win, they will change the rules to screw you. Small players need to use those systems with that in mind.
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Hard News: Barclay and arrogance, in reply to Rob Stowell,
‘Radical’ and ‘hard-left’ are not so much ways of describing the policies; they are meant, I think, to exclude them from the conversation.
You can perhaps see this most clearly with The Greens. They're described as "far left" ridiculously often even though their policies vary from (European) centre-right to vaguely left-ish if you ignore the world before 1970 or 1980. I tend to think it's because they don't consider the left-right axis useful, they operate on a green-brown one. Or a human-survival/human-extinction one, if you want to be blunt about it. Think about *that* viewpoint when politicians stand up and say they oppose The Greens. And you thought the Voluntary Human Extinction movement was dead...
Yet on key issues like rates of tax, student fees, and public ownership of assets, the policies would have been considered mainstream
The flippant part of me wants to say:
yeah, you're right, they're hard left. When they get elected, they're going to bring in genuine hard left policies. Starting with Trumpian unilateral withdrawal from treaties and following up with nationalisation, inevitably ending up with death camps. Or is that the facists, I forget. Death camps... death camps... no, that's a British innovation now mostly used by the right
Or possibly not?