Posts by BenWilson
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to chris,
Sent.
that political compass that was doing the rounds a few years back had far more to offer if only our surveys had been less one dimensional.
Well, ironically, when the parties are actually placed on it, they form a reasonably straight line (albeit on a slope), which pretty much means that it's one dimensional. It's almost the main finding of that analysis - that "Authoritarian" and "Right" are strongly correlated, similarly with "Libertarian" and "Left". If you just rotate it 45% clockwise, you've got Left-Right. The compass is just distinguishing "Authoritarian" from "Right" without any clear reason for doing so.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to chris,
The culmination of a Masters and a Doctorate in Political Science is a perpetuation of this traditional visualisation of the political spectrum as a dualistic linear continuum.
Heh! I can tell you the culmination of a few weeks work tossing the NZES data backwards and forwards was that I was actually unable to find a significant second dimension. About 85% of the difference between all of the candidates party vote choice modelled on their political opinions came down to the first principal axis, along which the two main parties lay, and which was divided along unsurprising left-right cliches.
However, I also slowly realized another obvious thing, in hindsight, that the questions themselves were also dominated by that division, so any other outcome was unlikely. Out of 72 odd questions, only 1 pertained to environmentalism, for instance, so the Green voters were naturally barely distinguishable from the Left generally. The NZF party had the most 2nd dimension distinction, particularly since it was almost dead-center in the main axis.
I'd love to find other strong dimensions, but it's going to take more questions, more surveys. As it stands, there is pretty much a left right blobby space aligned almost exactly how you'd think...
If you're interested, I can send you an email of the report I did on this. I'm not really ready to chuck this research online yet. Same comment goes for anyone else interested.
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Hard News: Change for the Better, in reply to Russell Brown,
But part of me said “hey, it’s cyclist day, use the road”.
Yeah. I don't seek to excuse the driver, and I can understand why you did it - I'm luckier in that my hair raising experience at that intersection was in a car. Of course I was not at fault then either. At least no more at fault than you were, in so far as I made a judgment that drivers were not complete shitbags, and I was wrong. But I'm not going that way again to prove any points. Something about it just encourages motorists to act crazy. It's effectively a pinch point on a corner, since in both directions it goes from 2 lanes to 1+parked cars, and drivers (including bus drivers) seem to race each other to merge ahead. It would probably be safest if it was just a no right turn.
It's especially shit that it's literally outside the front door of a shop selling a lot of bikes, probably to tourists.
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It is possible to call *555 to report bad driving. Or the police if it was really bad. For someone pushing me with their car it would be the police.
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Turning right out of Gundry is a pretty game maneuver, even in a car - I don't usually do it, even though it's an obvious shortcut if you're coming up Newton to K Rd. It's got many layers of wrong about it.
Agreed that drivers shouldn't be dicks, though. Some layouts seem to promote dickheadedness and I guess it's part of being a road savvy cyclist to slowly build up a store of knowledge about where those are. It's stink that this store is built through frightening experiences, at great risk.
I think quite a few motorists have no real idea just how much risk they're putting cyclists to, that their memories of cycling are as children, where falling off a bike was an unpleasant but seldom particularly terrible experience, with young light bodies that recovered quickly, and riding less on the road than in parks and on footpaths with berms. They don't realize what happens when an adult on a road even just falls off a bike, let alone collides with a car.
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Tom Semmens,
And wouldn't you, if you were an employer in a competitive industry where everyone else is doing that? In IT, your main cost will be wages. It's what I'll probably do when it comes time to try to upscale my business - no sane stats graduate kiwi kid is going to work for what I'd be able to afford to pay, but some technically competent kid without the best English, who really wants a start probably will. Then I'll be one of these evil exploitative employers, running a barely viable shop and hardly paying myself at all. I probably shouldn't be in business, but unfortunately the alternative for me is unemployment and poverty. Because that's how our system works. With all the best intentions in the world for it to be different, that is my reality.
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Swan,
I'm not sure what you're talking about there Swan. Not being combative, but I just lost the thread. A supply shock in what? Jobs? Money? Property? Oil? Milk? I just don't know what you're talking about, so can't really intelligently respond.
It seems overly confident to state that the full conditions that could lead to high inflation and unemployment simultaneously. I don't even really accept the general framework of the discussion of these figures, for reasons given above - inflation seems high to me because I live in Auckland and my own personal "basket of goods" includes property ownership, which has gone so high it dominates my entire financial life. But sure, the price of milk is pretty stable, and computers are always coming down.
As for unemployment, it's always quite fraught because there are so many ways to just exclude people who don't have a job or money from unemployment statistics, and then just ignore their plight when talking about the grand economic indicators.
I don't show up on any unemployment statistics, because the support I can get for it is basically nothing - I can't get a benefit, therefore I'm not even an official statistic. No one officially knows if I have a job. I don't even know - I just know I don't get paid for the work I do. Doesn't mean it's not substantial - I was recently doing 60 hour weeks to get coursework and exams behind me. That's on top of childcare (one of the children being disabled) and housekeeping. Now, I'm working full time on my small business. Which is a "job", but it's still not paid until I get a sale. I'm not "precariously employed" - no one can fire me from the company in which I'm the sole shareholder and only employee. I'm not idle. Nor am I unusual in any of this among my peers. This isn't some whack unusual situation which can safely be considered noise.
Essentially, it seems to me that the very way people work is changing. If that is the case, then time series about unemployment figures and inflation rates aren't going to be any more enlightening than time series about any other phenomenon that is undergoing a fundamental change. It's entirely possible that inflation and unemployment could decouple - there's no strong obvious casual connection, just a long period of weak correlation. It's also entirely possible that this could be a good thing. A world in which less work is done is not an axiomatically bad world to me. For me, it's almost the entire point of work - so that you can stop doing it at some point, and move on to activities aren't work, which you like to do. You work now so you can work less later. We've been working really, really hard for a really long time now. We could...just...stop doing it so much. We could take all of the insane amounts of energy and development that have gone into keeping us busy and just direct it into making ourselves happier. That's the only kind of economic plan that makes any sense to me, and this world of neverending work maintained by keeping a poverty line there and devaluing money via inflation to kill off what investment actually means for the bulk of humans - that shit is whack. That's the Vale of Tears I was talking about, the cycle of endless Dhukka that we have literally put ourselves in through a lack of imagination and self awareness. I'm not even a Buddhist, but I get that this Christian suffering shit that we suck down wholesale from both sides of our political spectrum is just bilgewater.
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I guess the police just hate amateur detectives
This is an episode of Columbo. We already know who did it, that's always the first scene. It's not meant to be a mystery, but about how no-one can withstand endless questioning from an idiot. First proved 2400 years ago in Athens.
Of course we're all going to look silly when it turns out to have been an elaborate ruse and the two journalists really used the gun to top Mike Hoskings and replace him with a remote controlled muppet, throwing all suspicions off themselves by going public that they bought a gun without a licence. No one will ever notice, until the day that Hoskings says something actually intelligent and the police give him a probing search to get him back for being a smartarse. During the rubber glove check for his journalistic integrity, they find that they can control his mouth. They quietly put him back, seizing the remote control as "evidence".
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Hard News: The Police Ten 7 State, in reply to Hilary Stace,
It's really hard to get my head around quite how stupid the person had to be that launched the investigation. There's a sort of bureaucratic daftness that could only result from complete immunity to self-reflection. The sad part is that probably the very cops doing it would have just been shaking their heads at the stupid waste of time that had been inflicted on them from some lofty management level above. That's really why they joined the force - so they could prove a gun had been purchased illegally, by a person who bloody well said they did that, and then gave the cops the gun, before they ever even knew it had happened, and as a direct consequence, it's now much harder to get guns that way, so the police are safer from guns. They literally joined the force so that they could make the world slightly less safe for police, by making journalists just that little bit more uninclined to help them in their work.
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I don’t believe there is a major skills shortage in the IT sector.
I find it quite hard to square with being unable to find a job despite huge experience and skills in the sector, and not even having high salary expectations. To me it's just one of those things people complain about - on both sides. People hiring always complain that they can't find people and on the other side that they can't get a job. What they always leave out is the caveat of price. The employer can't find the person with the exact right skills at the price they're prepared to pay, or someone close whom they will have to train for a bit. It's as much a statement about their stingyness as it is about the availability of the people with appropriate skills. On the flipside for me it's as much a statement about what kind of work I'm prepared to do, under what conditions, and at what remuneration, as it is about whether there is any work I can do around.
<digression>
If it doesn’t end in the bootstrapping of an AI that can perform any programming task – which in turn depends to some degree on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem
</q>
:-) Heh. Well no AI is going to solve the Halting Problem, But the question it all most depends on is whether every mental task currently performed by humans is ultimately computable. After that, the Church-Turing thesis pretty much guarantees us that a computer could do it.
</digression>
Automation of every kind already does massively reduce the "genuine" need for human labour. It's been doing that for centuries. We manufacture the demand for human labour at the same time, though. Because, as described in the first sentence of this post, demand is not a fixed thing anyway, just a statement about how much we're prepared to pay for what. We can keep ourselves this way forever. We could even make things worse quite easily. Until we can conceive our way out of this dilemma, we're pretty much stuck here in the Vale of Tears, vacillating over how much punishment we deserve (and the others around us).
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