Posts by Matthew Poole
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
if anything I think that academic writing style isn't pushed enough.
And thank [deity] for that. Academic writing is bollocks. Other than having to crash-relearn elementary algebra (lost in a fog of traumatic amnesia a decade prior to starting my degree) in order to complete my mandatory stage one economics papers, the biggest challenge I've faced at uni has been academic writing. Not because I can't construct a coherent sentence to explain an idea, because I can, but because it is so far divorced from reality as to be a totally different language. In one job interview, when asked what the biggest challenge at university had been, I actually said "academic english".
If you're fresh out of high school and thoroughly unschooled in writing for "the real world"[tm], then I'm sure it's a piece of cake. But you're in for a hell of a shock once you get out of the rarefied atmosphere of tertiary education and enter the real world. Or if, like me, you've spent some time working, and writing real-world documents, before you go to university, you're in for a hell of a shock as you try and unlearn everything you thought you knew about writing. Forget thinking for yourself. Forget calling on your past experiences. Such things are strengst verboten.
If one has no intention of leaving academia, then I'm sure that academic writing is a wonderful thing to learn and exercise. For the rest of us it's a load of shit. I can say with utter certainty that academic writing will not help me one jot after I graduate. It barely helps me now, and I'm still a student. The only thing it's good for is ensuring that students don't dare exercise their minds. It certainly doesn't help them with their spelling and grammar, as witnessed by other comments on what markers see/do. That shouldn't be a tertiary institution's job, to be sure, but students who lack even rudimentary literacy tools shouldn't be allowed to pass. Until that changes, there's no incentive for the lower levels of education to pick up their game.
-
I'd suggest one improvement to MMP would be abolish dual voting, so one's party vote went to the party of the chosen electorate candidate.
Hell NO! I'll be voting for my National electorate puppet (I think it's Richard Worthless again) this year, because I live in Epsom and it's either swallow that fish or waste my vote, and contribute to Rodders (and by extension Act) possibly getting into Parliament.
However, I have no desire to see National in power. Keeping Act out is one way of trying to ensure that, but it doesn't mean I want them to get my party vote too. Under your plan, I'd lose the ability to try and keep both National and Act out because voting one way on one vote would automatically cast my other vote the same way. -
The cost of smoking-related health care to the New Zealand taxpayer is about $250 million.
What about the economic cost of all the tens-of-thousands of lost hours spent on smoking breaks? Or the lost output of smokers who get seriously sick? I'd love to know what the secondary costs of smoking are, because I bet that the $250m looks decidedly piddling by comparison.
-
And who's to say that butter doesn't kill or disable more people than cigarettes?
That wasn't my point. My point was that smoking does bad things for the body's ability to cope with surgery. Reduced lung function, reduced peripheral blood flow, etc. All those known results of being a smoker mean that surgery is riskier and lead to longer recovery.
If you can point me to a study that says that butter does similar things, then I'll add it to my list of "sins" for which elective surgery (note elective surgery, not medically-indicated surgery) should be deferred/denied. -
On the not treating smokers thing, I see no great issue in refusing elective surgery to smokers. Their recovery takes longer, the risks of post-operative complications are higher. It's a consequence of nicotine's properties as a vaso-constrictor, plus all the other things that smoking does to the body, and I don't accept that a person's choice should then require the health system to pay extra for something that's not medically required.
By all means treat their urgent conditions, just as any non-smoker would be treated, but when there's free help available to assist with quitting there's no compelling reason why smokers should be allowed to consume limited health resources. -
I would like to see better protection of disclosure documents.
In which case you'll need to get a law passed regarding what those who have been charged can do with disclosure documents. After all, the documents are their property, not just in their care. They can do with their property as they see fit.
Once you start down the path of restricting what people can do with their property, where does it end? They may not own the copyright in those documents, but that doesn't mean much. I don't own the copyright in anything released under the Official Information Act, either, but I can still publish it on a website or give it to a newspaper. I could sell it, if I so chose, but only the original not a copy. Discovery documents are very similar to OIA documents, in that they're the work of government employees, in the course of their employment, released under statutory requirement. It's very, very risky to start trying to restrict discovery, because the principles are easily shifted to OIA. It can already be a real struggle to get official information out of departments, and the last thing we need is for that to be legitimised in any way. -
So that would indicate that the 3000 is one degree of separation from the suspects. That's an astoundingly high figure, assuming that it's only those that are facing trial that are 'suspects'.
I wouldn't make that assumption. Evidence gathered by warrant can rule a person out from being charged. Also remember that 17 were initially arrested, and a great many more were mentioned in the affidavit.
I decided to do a very quick, distinctly unscientific survey of some of the categories on TradeMe that were mentioned as having been "of interest" to the cops during their investigation - scopes/mounts, ammunition, and balaclavas. For the first two, I went to the relevant section under hunting, sorted by lowest-price-first. For the third I first went to the headgear section in menswear and selected any vaguely military- or balaclava-related listing. Failing to get my 10 entries I then searched all of clothing for "balaclava" and "ski mask" and added an extra three entries.
In all cases I used the number of feedbacks from unique sellers, until I had 10 (or 9 for the third category), and averaged them. The category averages were 5328, 292, and 787. The overall average is 2136. That means that over those categories, each seller has completed an average 2136 transactions. Even if there's 50% repeat business, that's still over 1000 unique purchasers.
Suddenly 3000 people doesn't look like very many. Yes, my numbers are skewed, particularly in scopes/mounts, by some very high-volume traders (one in that category has > 22k feedbacks), but I never said it was scientific. Outliers, standard deviations, etc, I really can't be arsed. It's indicative. And it indicates that 3,000 people is easily within the realms of possibility for associations with 17 (or more) people.Correct me if I'm wrong but if documents or WHY are deemed not relevant to evidence they do not have to be revealed for discovery and are therefore deemed inadmissible?
Oh, more than likely. But when you're talking about something as nebulous as TardMe trading records, and many, many thousands of them, it's going to be a challenge to actually narrow down what's "relevant" and what's not. After all, what makes any of it relevant once you get beyond the purchases "of interest" by persons under investigation?
-
we should be discouraging the police from embarking on such wide-ranging fishing trips in the first place.
It's a tough balance to strike. How far is too far when seeking trading records? Two degrees doesn't sound unreasonable, and clearly a judge thought it was acceptable, but when you're talking about a web of interconnected people it adds up bloody fast.
If each of the seven had traded with 20 others, that's 140 new people dragged in. If each of those 140 had traded with 20 others, it's suddenly 2800 people. Even if there's 10% overlap in trades within the group it's still in the vicinity of 2500 accounts to investigate. Suddenly a blanket two degrees of investigation looks overly broad, but until the information has been gathered it's impossible to tell.I suspect that the police had never done record gathering on that scale before, so had no idea that it was going to result in such a volume of information. Once they've got it they can hardly give it back, too, so being in possession of it they had to hand it over during discovery. Hopefully it's a lesson learned and in future they'll be a bit more discerning, but if they got useful information from a reasonable percentage of the secondary trade records it could become another tool to be utilised on a regular basis.
-
I'm all for preventative medicine and better habits leading to longer, healthier lives, but let's not kid ourselves that it's going to save us money - we've never spent more in health services and yet we're the healthiest we've ever been.
Why do you think I've avoided talking about heart attacks and strokes and other seriously-life-threatening eventualities? Joint replacements and fractures are quality-of-life issues, rather than terminal ones (though death is not unheard of in patients who suffer hip fractures as the result of falls), so the costs associated with them are all about health rather than longevity.
As the population ages, and the size of the aged population increases, these non-terminal events become a greater drain on resources. Every joint replacement is tens-of-thousands of dollars in operative and post-operative care. Fractures can require months of treatment, as old bones don't heal as well as young ones. That's often in a hospital bed, requiring nursing care, catering, etc.Also, you talk about "retirement". It seems to be becoming an accepted position that for many people retirement won't be a complete cessation of employment. They'll work fewer hours, or play TradeMe as a way of generating income, but they won't be out of the productive sector. It's already happening, and the change will accelerate over coming years. If we can keep people capable of doing such things, the economic benefits are enormous. Keeping them fit and healthy and in a position to keep working is a saving, in that they're contributing economically instead of just consuming.
-
I'd love to know why TM "had to" release so much information to the Police. Surely the people charged haven't traded with tens-of-thousands of other users. I could understand "the records of these accounts, and the trading records of those with whom they have traded", but I find it extremely hard to believe that this would be a net that casts so wide as to be five figures in size. Maybe I'm just underestimating the complexity of such a web?
I understand compulsion under warrant, but that sounds more like a fishing expedition.