Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Utter nonsense. We are selling our house and moving in a few months taking our 4 year old with us. Our neighbours have just done the same and have a pre schooler. None of this will be on the last census records.
Which is why the census gets done every 5 years. Imperfect but better than not having census data.
See also electoral rolls which are also only accurate-ish on the day that they get closed.
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Doubly ironic given this from Wikipedia:
In 1902, agents of Thomas Edison bribed a theater owner in London for a copy of A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès. Edison then made hundreds of copies and showed them in New York City. Méliès received no compensation. He was counting on taking the film to the US and recapture its huge cost by showing it throughout the country when he realized it had already been shown there by Edison. This effectively bankrupted Méliès.
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But. There are people who are unhappy because they are not legally allowed to marry, and I don't think "oh come on, marriage sucks anyway" is an adequate response to that.
I believe Giovanni's wish is for marriage to cease to exist as a legal institution. So everyone would have to get civil unions.
Then marriage would only exist as a social institution. So your church can marry you, but only as a facade on top of an actual civil union, which is what does all the legal stuff. Everyone would be legally equal, but churches would retain the right to be able to choose who they conduct civil unions (and marriages) for, the state will civil union anyone.
There could likewise be same sex marriage ceremonies conducted by some celebrants, which would be similarly legally null, but no doubt very nice.
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Even better: say "this is one of my lovers".
I sometimes introduce my partner as "a drunk woman I found outside". We're friendly like that.
I haven't given thought to getting CU-ed rather than married. But I guess I like using 'husband' and 'wife' in a CU as it opens up possibilities for same sex couples doing that and I'm sure that would annoy the right people who are out defending marriage as "ours but not yours". Just for that look of confusion followed by horrified realisation when a man says "my husband".
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I presume kindergartens next to primary schools also provide a further indication in case the primary school hasn't noticed who lives in the neighbourhood already.
Lots of children don't go to kindergarten. And lots of children go to a kindergarten which may or may not be near where they go to school. My daughter's childcare is near my work but her school will be near her home.
There isn't any complete way that this data is gathered apart from the census.
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I would like to suggest that knowing my religion is not that useful for the "public good".
Largely I agree with you. Except I work with historians who use census data to try and make sense of our past.
The more people subvert the intent of the questions (basically, knowing what religions everyone in NZ follows) the less we will know about ourselves, now and in the future.
I know someone whose fulltime job is researching and teaching about NZ's religious history. He uses census data as part of that picture. If there's half a million Jedi and two thirds of respondents have put their ethnicity as "New Zealander" what can he say with any certainty about what that says about the changing nature of Pakeha and their religious beliefs and practices? We'd know less about ourselves and I don't see any counterweighing positives.
I guess I just don't see any harm in filling out your survey form conscientiously, as the designers would like you to. There is actually small good that comes from doing so, even if you can't see it.
Consider the census to be like the Domesday Book. How would our world be richer if everyone had subverted that process? And that was largely done to be able to collect taxes, the census data can't get you into any trouble at all.
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I have a feeling that analysing such a poll would be a statistical can of worms. There are N! outcomes of a poll with N candidates, without even considering those voting for less than N.
Yes, but if people gave you accurate answers, and you picked all the candidates with a chance (in Dunedin it would be generous to say three) you'd end up with the right answer. Which is presumably the point of polling - indicating who would win if the election was held that day.
We have an incumbent and two anti-candidates. One of the anti-candidates came out ahead in the poll.
But if the incumbent came out ahead by a small margin, that would only be an accurate result if he picked up a decent amount of 2nd, 3rd etc votes. That's not likely here, as people who put the third candidate first (and others) are much more likely to put the other anti-candidate 2nd.
A simple STV poll would certainly have a better margin of error than a FPP poll which... can't even have a margin of error. It's illogical. Your polling system doesn't relate to your voting system.
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Neither does telling them you identify as 'a' when you also have equal amounts of 'b', 'c', and 'd' ancestry when it comes to health stats.
That depends entirely on what 'a' is. But mostly, yes it does prove useful.
Schools ask students what ethnic group they are from when they enrol so each school has it's own records of their ethnic breakdown to run their own programs as a response, so the census matters for diddly squat there. The government gets this info fed back to it and it's a lot more 'live' than a census every several years.
OK. Tell me how many 5 year olds are going to be rocking up to start school at the beginning of next year, what their genders and ethnicities are, their likely locations, and family incomes, so that the Ministry can prepare to provide funding for each school and a total budget, without looking at census data.
It isn't perfect (particularly the longer out from the census date), but it is useful.
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And there's the problem: Since we still have this tiresome thing called a secret ballot (and the so-called "exit polls" being waved around have their own methodological credibility issues), we're inevitably making a lot of assumptions.
The ODT did a poll of voters a couple of weeks ago and gave it major front page coverage.
As a poll of FPP votes in an STV vote for mayor, I took it with about three cups of salt. A useful poll would have got respondants to "put these two/three people in voting order".
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Well, and also the "NZ exposure to the world" tourism angle.
I do think that the actors have a bit of limited liability here. They can bear some flak if the movie doesn't get made here and colleagues in the film industry lose work.
But the upsurge in interest in tours around a Matamata farm? You can draw that link, I'm just not sure it's a link of "you are responsible for this". If that was the case, the reverse would be true and the actors and crew should have got a small cut from every NZ tourism operator over the past decade.