Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I spent much of the 2nd and 3rd quarters yelling at the screen to take Donald off, move Nonu back in, and put Toeava on. I claim credit for their first try therefore. He's not a line breaker, his kicking was less than average, he's only there because we don't have anyone good to play in the spot.
It's increasingly bizarre that the All Blacks have one of the best playmakers in world rugby in Carter (he didn't have a great playmaking game, but still), and they choose to put him outside of the play so often in the second-five spot. I don't think it's rocket science - you've got a playmaker, you want the ball in his hands as often as possible, in rugby that's first-five. Rugby league teams have got it well figured out, how come the All Blacks struggle with this simple concept?
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Yeah that's the one. Given that she's taken 16 seconds off her PB in a year, that last two seconds to the world record probably isn't too unlikely in the next five years.
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I ask again - if Semenya has this huge and insurmountable advantage that means she is ineligible to compete with women, how come her times are squarely in the middle of the range of the top female times for the past thirty years? She's very good; she's not breaking world records.
I can't find the graph that I saw a while ago (Hadyn might have linked to it?), but it showed how her results have improved drastically over the past year. Which isn't a surprise, given she's so young.
As a middle-distance runner, she'd peak at about 30 or so? So there's plenty of time ahead for people to fret over it, and for her to become a record-breaker.
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From that story:
Since SoonerCare is the only insurance that will accept Sophie, we have to meet their financial criteria, which means living at or below the poverty level. I have had to quit wonderful jobs because I made too much money to qualify for SoonerCare.
There's a perverse outcome that I'm sure congress never intended.
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Ben, I don't think the threshold is there to keep minorities or weirdos out. A bunch of them get in anyway. As David pointed out, it's a stability question.
The experience of some European countries with low thresholds (Italy comes to mind, though Giovanni would know 10 times as much as I do - I think we discussed this some months ago and he said that it was stable in terms of not having frequent elections, but the makeup of the government frequently shifted as parties ended up in or out of governance agreements, I studied it a little in 1993 but not since) is that government arrangements tend to chop and change a lot because they might be holding together ten different parties. The more you reduce the threshold the more attractive it becomes for parties to fracture and we end up with more parties contesting the vote and sitting in parliament.
That's not an unworkable situation, but there has to be a balance somewhere on the continuum of 1. threshold is one MP, ie no threshold, to 2. threshold is some high number like 10 MPs, which would shut just about all the minor parties out.
I think 5% is too high, I'd be happy for it to drop, but not below 2.5%. That would give three MPs, maybe four. Dropping the threshold would give rise to less anomalies like ACT MPs getting in on the back of an electorate win. They'd get in on their list vote and I think campaigning for elections would be better if there was less focus on winning 1/60th of the country rather than working all of it.
I think the reason it's a percentage and not an absolute number is that would result in creep down. If our voting population doubles then you'd only need half as much support proportionately than you did previously.
The reason it's not a number of MPs is that the number of MPs you get isn't figured out by the total votes. X% of list votes don't determine the makeup in parliament because the party that they voted for didn't make the threshold. That will always be the case even if we remove the threshold, because a bunch of parties will never get to the minimum of 1MP threshold which will always be there.
eg, for a party to get 50% of the house they need to only get about 47% of the total list vote. 100% of the votes are received, but then 6% are taken out of consideration because those parties don't qualify for MPs (eg, NZ First).
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At first read that sounded quite good. Second read, I don't really see how it counts as MMP at all. It's effectively a variation on FPP system - & would weight parliament in favour of the two biggest parties.
I think it means that parliament would end up with the same proportion of MPs from each party as we do currently.
But instead of them looking down the list and picking out the top X number of people who didn't win an electorate, they'd look down the people who lost electorates and pick the ones that got closest to winning.
Same proportions, different method for filling what are currently the list slots.
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I like how when James comes on and makes his standard post, Russell always comes in with some helpful links and facts to point out how he's talking out his butt.
I don't need to look anything up myself, I can just go "what Russell said about that." I can even do it pre-emptively with confidence. "What Russell will no doubt say once he gets the chance to post it. Smacked down!"
The private cost of procedure X in NZ is often lower than the out-of-pocket cost of X for an insured American.
I think I've mentioned this previously, but my ex was living with me in NZ for a while and had to go to hospital for a few hours for fluids and observation. The A & E staff were very apologetic that as an international visitor she'd have to pay $100 to be admitted.
She was quite happy, it would have cost her several times that amount, even with insurance back in LA.
It's quite impressive to design a health care system that just costs so much in total, however it's funded.
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The stuff story seemed to indicate that she couldn't be banned, because it's not drug cheating, it's a medical issue.
And that it might be possible that 2nd place getter would also get gold. It sounded like they were guessing and making it up.
I would have thought international sporting bodies would have had policies on hermaphroditism. Is this the first time it's come up in the modern sporting world?
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<nerd_confession>
Woah. Make room. Scary post coming through.
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Candyman candyman...
I think Sam F and Leopold can share the blame for the arrival.