Posts by linger
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Hard News: Friday Music: Sweet Inspiration, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
Musically, for sure -- but those lyrics go beyond cheese into some other animal product entirely. Rhyming "today" with "see"!? *shudder*
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Legal Beagle: The law to make it easier…, in reply to FletcherB,
To give print media its due, Vernon Small ( Dominion Post Thu 18 Aug), giving hat tips to A. Geddis and G. Edgeler, also noted this bill as a symptom of National stuffing the member’s bill ballot.
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Legal Beagle: The law to make it easier…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
embarking on a political career and then turn it into being a bit of a general joke
Not that odd, cf. Jo(hn)Key The Clown Minister.
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Up Front: Dear Dudebros, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Obvious boring answer:
a quite literal “some of my best friends are…” statement. -
Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
it would be absurd not to elect ABCD in the example I gave.
Again, this depends on the system’s starting assumptions. I am not convinced that it is automatically absurd not to exclude E; candidate E has by far the widest support among the voter population, even though this is expressed as 2nd-preference rather than 1st-preference votes. By contrast, each of ABCD appears relatively unacceptable to at least 70% of voters (receiving neither 1st nor 2nd rankings). As noted above, if you measure overall support by weighting the n th-rank support by (0.5)^ n (which entails that each complete set of ranks counts as 1 vote, and that the total of n th-rank votes are worth as much as all lower-ranked votes combined), the candidates are ranked in overall support as E,A,B,C,D on the (incomplete) preference information given.
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“Correct winner” is a circular term here; it’s “whoever wins under the stipulated rules of vote-counting”, those rules being the present subject of discussion.
One could imagine an alternative vote-counting system that considered all rankings simultaneously as weighted votes – e.g. as a first approximation, with a weighting of 1/(2^rank), whereby all ranked votes sum to approximately 1 for a large number of candidates (for 5 ranked candidates, the total is .97 vote; it would be a minor tweak to normalise the vote total to the number of ranks actually expressed, so that each voter actually counts as exercising a total of 1 vote). In the example given, with
101 AE.. 100 BE.. 99 CE.. 98 DE.. 10 E..
the sums of 1st & 2nd-ranked votes are A=50.5; B=50; C=49.5; D=49; E=104.5
and however 3rd-ranked votes are distributed, none of the other candidates can overtake E (a maximum of 10*1/4=2.5 2nd-rank votes are still in play; the maximum 3rd-ranked votes available = 408/8=51 but none of A,B,C,D can capture more than 311/8=38.8 of those).(This is still a single-vote system, allowing the expression of ranked preferences, but the vote is no longer “transferrable” in exactly the same sense.)
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somehow think
Not the verb I'd use; but considering others as persons isn't likely once you're comfortable reducing another person to "meat".
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
What the Farm?
producing more than 600 heads, but the experience proved these sheep cannot live in the atmosphere of New Zealand.
I’m trying to picture a 600 headed sheep….
…dangling from a hot-air balloon, with tragic consequences!?
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
It's possible a govt keen to seem "tough on crime" might react that way, but it would be entirely the wrong move, because it's not the ease of compliance that is the issue, so much as the misdirected (by which I mean, targeting individual drivers rather than the inciting companies), and (therefore) weak and inefficient, enforcement of the existing regulations.
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Speaker: Are we seeing the end of MSM,…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
The most charitable interpretation is that somebody decided it'd be premature involving any undertakers before the police investigation was complete :-/
Or are they saying the police were in some way responsible for the body being there? (NB there are at least two senses in which that last sentence can be read without breaking any libel laws.)