Posts by mpledger
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Hard News: Art with a job to do, in reply to Steve Todd,
The vote count really makes the whole process look like a sham. When one flag only generates 1/10 of the votes of the another flag, it shows the flag committee did a really bad job of choosing with flags to make it to the final four.
Ideally, what should have happened was that the five flags should have gotten near equal numbers of first preference votes but from the other preference votes one flag should have run away with it.
I didn't vote - I dithered around trying to decide if I liked any of the flags enough to vote on them that I ran myself out of time to get it posted or go to a post office. This is the craziest time of year to have a vote anyway - there are so many end-of-year things going on at schools, clubs, work etc and then Christmas. It will be interesting to see the sex/age distribution of voters.
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Idiot Savant,
While the explicit blacklisting clause is unusual, the rest of the research contract (including the veto on publication) sounds like standard commercial research boilerplate.
I do stuff with Ministry of Health data - they like to see the research before it's in the news (so they don't get blind sided) but they don't put any restrictions on what I want to investigate or report. Mainly, they just want people to be qualified to interpret it since it's survey data collected in a highly complex way. From what I see, both StatsNZ and MoH are quite happy to get as much use out of their data as they can. I've also had happy dealings with MoE when I was using some of their data some years ago.
The police stuff is not usual - especially as the work is being done for a government organisation.
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When there were three fern flags and one non-fern flag there were low probability cases where the voting method could give some odd results about what flag wins – although there was some disagreement about that.
http://www.statschat.org.nz/2015/09/10/do-preferential-voting-and-similar-flags-interact-badly/Now that there are two non-fern flags against three fern flags it’s not so bad. And also because there are two black and white flags against three non-“black and white”. So there won’t be so much clustering of voting.
It will be interesting to see how they report the outcomes of the vote. It’s quite easy to report an FPP or MMP vote so that people can immediately see the result. People might not be too happy if it’s not intuitively clear from the results posted for STV. If 40% first preference votes go to the hypnoflag but a fern flag wins at the fourth round people might go “huh! How did that work out?”.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in the Flag Referendum, in reply to Steve Barnes,
At the top under your name and address you will see a bar code, this generates an eleven digit number. If you look at the tear off voting form you will see a qCode, this generates the exact same number as the barcode under your address.
Fishy or what?.If both numbers are only on the forms that you hold and/or send back then it's ok because only you have the link. If they are on information that the govt holds then that is fishy. Purposefully obscuring them as to hide the match is definitely fishy.
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But is it a good idea to rank everyone?
Yes.
You only need rank 4 flags - the 5th rank never comes into play.
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The order on my voting form is
Left most) blue/black silver fern
left) red peak
middle) apple eating elephant (aka hypnoflag)
right) black and white fern
right most) blue/red silver fern -
It does worry me that some foreign corporation can buy land here, totally destroy it, declare bankruptcy and never have to fix up (if they could) what they have destroyed.
It's a way for foreign countries to destroy us from within - destroy our ability to feed ourselves and ruin our ability to use that land economically. We have given away too much control.
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David Hood, in reply to mpledger, A day ago
<q>
Unfortunately, that’s not really falsifiable.
It should show up in reported crime, if nothing else (unless you are positing the crimes are so crafty no one notices them, which is not likely in the case of strike offences).
</q>But reported crime can't be disaggregated into second strike or not second strike if they don't know who did the crime.
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I would look at “time served” in both periods. In the first period jails were full so things like early release happened, in the second period parole rules changed. If people are still in jail they can’t (or are less able to) commit a second strike offense.
The other thing is that first strikers may have become craftier – they are still committing crime but are doing so in such a way as to not get convicted either by not getting arrested, not getting charged or leaving less evidence to convict on. Unfortunately, that’s not really falsifiable.
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Hard News: The positive option of Red Peak, in reply to Bart Janssen,
<q>
What about the law of nature that change is the only constant?
Are you suggesting a flag that evolves over time, printed on some kind of intelligent fabric that alters colour and shape with seasons …
</q>I still think we should have a flag made by Lenticular printing
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing )
that changes as it moves in the wind.Super cool for the 21rst century.