Posts by linger
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Access: Help needed! Deciphering the…, in reply to Angela Hart,
Re: core staff costs -- my best guess is that the intended calculation is, roughly, (number of assessed support hours) x (number of people required simultaneously), possibly also with some fudge factor for (specialised-skill-dependent payscale required). Which, at least dimensionally, makes some sort of sense.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to mark taslov,
The bigger point here is that, if any "meritocratic" limits are to be set on who can qualify to vote in a democracy, then it is essential that those limits be designed so as not to unfairly disadvantage or exclude any group whose lives will be affected by the outcome. In a national election, that's essentially any full-time resident. Such an unbiassed set of limits is near-impossible to achieve, even if those designing and administering those limits have that as their primary goal. (Which was clearly not the case in the Louisiana example above!)
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Rich Lock,
Dear Sir,
I must protest in the strongest possible terms the fake statistics used in the above comment: the estimate of "one trillion" is demonstrably out by at least 3 orders of magnitude.(Tongue firmly buried in the next person's cheek, lest there be any confusion...)
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I’ve commented before on this, but in the late 1980s Allan Bell did a series of studies into accuracy of news reporting in New Zealand, looking at (i) international news stories and (ii) science reporting on topics such as ozone depletion and global warming. The results were not encouraging. Only about 1/3 of the science stories were rated, by the individuals cited as expert sources, as fully accurate. Meanwhile, stories from regions with which journalists were less familiar (South America or Africa in particular) had on average one serious factual error per story.
And this was back when there was subediting.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Nah, it's perfectly sensible on her part: too much risk that the headlines wouldn’t be the only thing grabbed.
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Hard News: #eqnz: Okay?, in reply to krothville,
Yep, that was exactly my point.
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Hard News: #eqnz: Okay?, in reply to Paul Campbell,
One month after the Tohoku quake (and two months after the second big Chch quake, which had had no small amount of media coverage because of the number of Japanese victims) one of my colleagues actually asked me, with some surprise,
“Oh, do you have earthquakes in New Zealand!?” -
N.B. luck out is one of those phrases that is its own antonym (meaning either 'ran out of luck' or 'came out lucky').
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Thinking they were supposed to vote someone off ?
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Hard News: From Zero: New Zealand and drugs, in reply to nzlemming,
Were the users called smeckheads ? Red Dwarf fans need to know.