Posts by linger
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Polity: Let the big lies flow, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
You can’t really accuse people of lying about the likely cost of a policy when you refuse to put any numbers around it yourself.
There is as yet no detailed policy to cost, which means that any numbers you pull out at this stage against it act only to shut down discussion of the whole concept.
I find it rather telling that National's reflex, presented with a topic for discussion, is to act as an opposition, not as a government. -
the Taxpayers’ Union [...] accepts financial members
but it’s not clear if they ever expireOMG it’s an association of the undead!
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Polity: The Taxpayers' Union rides again!, in reply to despud,
why UBI might add value
One way of looking at it is that a UBI is a grant to pursue projects that otherwise people wouldn’t have enough time to complete because of the need to work a paying job to live (or, for the existing unemployment benefit, the need to keep on the job application and administrative hoop-jumping treadmill). So the UBI frees up productive time that is currently unavailable. Obviously this applies to arts and crafts; but less obviously it also applies to research, to ongoing education and upskilling, to business startups, to caring, and to community involvement and improvement.
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To be clear, I support the introduction of a UBI.
However, I'm a little confused as to how the social justice notion "that everybody is getting the same" is compatible with incremental testing or rollout. By definition, surely if it's only applied to some groups, or in some communities, it's not a UBI?
(India has applied it from the bottom up, taking the caste system as a framework; naturally, castes just above the cutoff are protesting.) -
Polity: Let the big lies flow, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
end up like that other great Labour policy, “flag change”
i.e. appropriated by National, who then attempt to impose it in an unrealistic timeframe without sufficient public discussion or expert input?
Labour have called for a UBI to be discussed, not for one to be introduced tomorrow. Given that a UBI would need to operate stably over the long term, there needs to be cross-party agreement on the details. Some “wait and see” is already built in here.
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to David Hood,
Nice. Completely agree re: interpretation of the South Auckland cluster too.
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Legal Beagle: Future Leaders for…, in reply to David Haywood,
It seems simpler to change the voting age from 18 to 15 to accomplish exactly the same result; but what I like about your tweak is that the principle also could be (re)applied to the group of prisoners whose right to vote was removed in 2010 (i.e. those serving a prison sentence with less than three years remaining at the time of the election).
The same underlying principles apply in both cases: these are people we want to get involved in the process, and who will be directly affected by the actions of the incoming government, at a time when they will be eligible to vote. -
Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to David Hood,
If you look directly at flag referendum turnout it is the Māori electorates & a few others in one cluster
as noted above (with scatter plot attached)
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to David Hood,
Certainly National party vote is the single strongest direct predictor out of the data available (it gives the single highest correlation coefficient, with a nicely linear graph, and as you show, other party votes don’t account for the residual variation), and there may even be a direct causal connection; but there is probably also an indirect (causal) connection buried within that, in that
(i) National party vote is correlated with 2014 voter turnout (on the grounds that many people didn’t support National but couldn’t see anything positive to vote for among the other parties);
(ii) 2014 voter turnout is correlated with referendum voter turnout (on the grounds that people who are more likely to vote are more likely to vote); and
(iii) flag referendum voter turnout is correlated with desire to change the flag.
Teasing that out of the data would be challenging, though!There’s also a question of whether to include the Māori electorates within this analysis: they seem to constitute an internally-consistent set of outliers on all of these scales, with possibly different causal motivations (e.g. more systematic opposition to the Lockwood design in particular because it fails to reflect any element of Māori culture or design).
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Legal Beagle: The flag referendum:…, in reply to David Hood,
The graph for Lockwood support against 2014 National party vote.
