Posts by Moz
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
IMO widespread electronic voting could only reasonably produce a caretaker government just because it's so grossly insecure that even a landslide win wouldn't be convincing evidence of the intention of the voters. You might as well use a telephone poll of 100 voters per electorate and save the theatrics.
-
Legal Beagle: Pandemic Preparedness and…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Trump tries postponing this year’s elections
That would require a bill passed by both houses and signed by the president (and almost definitely also requiring the assent of their supreme court just because someone is bound to sue).
The US Constitution says the terms of the President and Vice President end at noon on the 20th day of January. Without a president or vice president the order of succession falls through to the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. So either they hold the election, delay it via both houses, or they let the role fall through to Pelosi. One of those things seems like something Trump would do almost anything to avoid.
-
Recent events suggest we also need a SLAPP law, so that rich racists can't punish people by dragging them through the courts. Or at least if the cost of doing that and losing was having to pay not just the defence costs, but damages as well, a large part of the point of those actions would go away. But those laws are pretty hard to balance, IMO, especially since they're some of the few civil laws explicitly designed to be used by the poor and powerless.
-
Hard News: "OK Boomer" wins Public…, in reply to tussock,
the bushfires in Oz
There are a lot of angry people. Only now it's the green and some of the left displaying the sort of anger more commonly seen from right wing outrage media types. Also the welcome surge in attention to the opinions and thoughts of young women (rather than just their appearance - who would have thought the most famous young woman in the world in 2019 would be so for wanting world peace or some such thing)
-
Did I miss the change when "they both win" referred to each person individually winning a separate thing? In my day that referred to team efforts towards a single prize. #grumpyoldman
-
Speaker: What almost everyone is missing…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Note that those are systematic problems and you're only seeing one headline. In Victoria there's a weird situation where architects can't get professional liability insurance because of the huge liability from all the shitty buildings, so the government has removed that requirement. While also talking about imposing stricter requirements on building professionals...
There are so many dodgy aspects to the industry here that it's hard to know where to start the list (and that affects NZ because we share regulations and many products/companies cross the Tasman. Oh, and the banks...) Even my boss who is a property developer thinks the systems we have are unsatisfactory (but he uses stronger language). What shocks me is that banks here will still lend to people buying, especially apartments. We *know* that the vast majority are not fit for purpose but the banks will still lend against them.
-
How would you label the spectrum that's not obviously biased, other than green-brown?
survival-suicide is the obvious alternative, but the hard browns have already defined those terms as referring only to economics. Most of the rest have similar definitional issues and I'm struggling to come up with other anyonyms for green, or synonyms for that matter. "anti climate change - pro climate change"is just clumsy and also confuses people who think "pro climate change" means wanting to minimise the scale of the catastrophe..
-
Speaker: Extinction Rebellion is not a…, in reply to linger,
we’re using blue-red and green-brown political spectra now?
IMO the green-brown one is the only relevant one to use. (More) mass deaths or not, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to take arms against a sea of trouble and all that.
Observation suggests that the black logo signifies scorched-earth or perhaps merely nihilism.
-
My take is more: this is an emergency, we need to do everything that might work. So my criteria for actions that I support is “will this be catastrophic? Has it been proven so?” and if not then I think it’s better than the current path. Because the current path will be catastrophic, that has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.
Mere inconvenience pales into insignificance next to the high probability of dying as a climate refugee.
-
Speaker: Extinction Rebellion is not a…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Stopping public transport is unbelievably stupid
Really? Political leaders all over the world are publicly commiting to wipe out 9-10 billion people and delaying a train is the thing that strikes you as stupid?
Admittedly I disagree with XR about the idea that simply telling the truth will make a difference, that’s an idea that has been thoroughly discredited. Again, we have people like Jacinda Ardern taking to the world stage to declare that climate change is a huge problem and she intends to make it worse. Sure, there are people who deny that it’s a problem (or that it exists at all), but they are only incidental targets for XR as I understand it. The primary target is people like the kiwi PM who say “I accept the reality of climate change, and the need for urgent action, but I absolutely refuse to take meaningful action or even be specific about what that action might be”.
It might be more obvious where I am in Australia, where 90% of the voters are resolutely commited to business as usual and the government is busy criminalising dissent. But in Aotearoa the number is only slightly better, Labour has a significant core of deny, delay and deflect members and voters (as well as all the voters to the brown of Labour). *they* are the target.
It’s all those commuters on said trains going “oh, maybe we should avoid catastrophe later, but not if it’s inconvenient now”, all the media commentators saying “30 years of going through the proper channels and asking nicely has got us into this mess, but we’re sure that if you keep doing that we’ll get out if it again”, all the other people saying “I accept the science but I have other things to do than worry about my future, or my children’s future”.