Posts by BenWilson
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Swan,
We have had low inflation for I think about 6 years, and similarly high unemployment. Therefore, monetary policy has been too tight.
It's a bit hard to make therefore-type conclusions about this stuff. It's possible that we could have high inflation and high unemployment too, which would be even more of a lose for RB, since inflation is their primary responsibility. Or at least they do what they can, whilst ignoring probably the biggest driver of real inflation - the price of property. It's not even counted even though it's the hugest part of our economy. With only the small number of levers they have, it's a lot to expect that they could really control either inflation or unemployment. It's like expecting them to swim using only one arm. They might be able to struggle along for a while but they'll never make decisive headway, and they're helpless against even minor waves and currents. Most of the economy is outside of their control. A pretty significant part of the economy is outside the control of all the governmental powers put together - what the international economic situation is.
They might be the most qualified people to gaze at crystal balls and twiddle settings, but it's still crystal ball gazing and twiddling fairly weak and incomplete controls.
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Rob Salmond,
For what I hope are obvious reasons, I won’t be sharing the specifics of that information publicly.
Well, I can guess what the reasons are anyway. The Colonel doesn't give away his special blend of 11 herbs and spices to just anyone.
There are, of course, people who aren’t unemployed but are underemployed or insecure in their employment.
Of course. For most major combinations of demography and opinion there are some examples of people like that. But I was hoping to get an idea of any particularly significant groupings. Or, if none have been found, to at least know that, in which case the shotgun approach is all that's left. But I find that hard to believe - there are clusters of opinion that go together and segmenting the targeted audience makes a lot of sense, if only because the political messaging budget only goes so far.
An easier question might be: Are there any groups that don't rank jobs as one of their highest concerns? Or is this kind of messaging literally doomed to be something that just has to be hammered out to everyone?
I'm thinking that, for instance, foreign students may not really care that much about jobs here, or more specifically they may not in general care about joblessness. Expats abroad could be in the same boat, unless they're looking to return home, in which case it's the exact opposite.
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Rewarding/pointless is a quadrant.
For sure, I don't really want to slice and dice it. Just giving the cliches of central tendency so far as work goes. I'm currently doing unpaid work that I love - looking after children mixed in with postgrad stats training, and I'm only an attitude change away from being capitalist class, courtesy of tax-free property gains. I'm definitely not the demographic Labour is looking for.
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Polity: Hosking’s right about jobs, in reply to BenWilson,
I’m curious, Robert
That was a question for Rob Salmond, btw. I just realized I have no idea if Rob's a Robert and definitely shouldn't presume to call him that.
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I'm curious, Robert, who it is that Labour sees as the target voter for this kind of push. Is it the unemployed themselves? Do they have some kind of evidence or information about just which voters might think jobs is the number one issue to the point that it changes the way they vote?
It will be most interesting to see what comes from the Future of Work Commission. I'm sorry to say that I don't have high expectations - think tanks typically come up with the answers that they've been told to. I don't think this is a study that can realistically be conducted without ideological bias. What an ideal future of work is depends very much on your political ideology.
Some people see a world with less work as a good thing - others see it as hell on earth. Typically that continuum is organized from people in the shittiest work to people in the best. Then of course a capitalist society is predicated on the whole idea that society is divided into 3 main classes anyway - those with capital, who don't even need to work (but probably do anyway because it's extremely rewarding for them), those with skills and employment but little useful capital (who do most of the rewarding work, and quite a lot of pointless work too), and those who are precariously employed or unemployed, doing poorly paid or unpaid work, and serving to keep those in the class above motivated to keep expending what capital they have to maintain their position.
It's a system in which a lot of work gets done. It could go on forever, because it's a system designed around maintaining a social order, rather than around any actual social need, most of which has long since been transcended in practical terms, and needs to be manufactured by a system that actually creates poverty in a world of plenty. This could be the future of work, certainly if the future resembles the past. Which it usually does, right up until it doesn't.
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Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
It can obviously happen, and it's intrinsic. It's also quite probably tiny and insignificant in the case we're talking about, and not particularly unfair. The whole idea is that the price itself reflects the inside information. Someone even acting on it at all has effectively made it almost public information. At least it's somewhat public that something is going on that might affect the price. It makes for a fascinating study in group dynamic behaviour and information flows, played only by people who are up for it, and affecting nobody but them, for the most part. If there's a mad gambler out there that's been ruined by iPredict, I'd like to hear about it. Or at least some fucking evidence at all that something sinister is afoot with it.
I’d suggest that where possible, laws should offer certainty, not allow workarounds for mates.
If you can provide any evidence that such "workarounds" happened, do so. Perhaps a story of someone who tried to make a similar business/research project here, but was not allowed.
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Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
it strikes me that the FMA wouldn’t have been as helpful to a random bunch of kids with a startup or an overseas betting operation like IG Index.
Maybe not beforehand, but after another one existed, they'd have less of a leg to stand on.
I’m actually surprised that the universities ethics committee approved iPredict, given the scope for insider trading (such as an oil company employee making a few bucks by predicting petrol prices). And they’ve had seven years to gather data.
The incredibly tiny scope, where attempts to do any such thing would be extremely obvious to whoever is watching, something that all the other traders are financially incentivized to do.
I'm not surprised they approved it, it's an extremely interesting experiment.
In pretty much all real futures markets, insider trading is illegal for the above reasons.
You're talking at cross purposes here. When people say insider trading is the point of prediction markets, they're not saying they condone insider trading. They're saying that one of the best ways to deal with it, given how inevitable it is, is to allow a system in which the signal that someone is trading on the inside comes out immediately in the price - in short, the price contains all the information available to all traders, including the insider traders. This is its main strength, why it can be more accurate than models based on only the purest information and most ethical of motives.
Furthermore, the killing of it was not done out of any concerns about its ethics. It was because it could be used for money laundering, so the Associate Justice Minister claims.
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Polity: A hazy, intriguing crystal ball, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
There’s a reasonable argument for allowing small-stakes online gambling
Particularly when no small part of the purpose is for the information that it provides, because the bets aren't about which dice or card will come up, or which horse gets thrashed across the line first, but majorly important issues of the day.
That source has simply been switched off. Goodbye experiment, research possibilities, threads like this one.
one company gets an end-run round the law by being a university / mates with the National Party.
Was there someone else who tried to set something like this up? It was set up in 2008, when Labour was still in power.
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I'm not the world's biggest fan of David Farrar, but he doesn't deserve to have his business killed for basically nothing. Especially since it represents something rather unique.
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I mean seriously "three traders hold portfolios on the website worth in excess of $10,000". Dear God, the world is coming to an end! The gigantic sum of $30,000 could maybe (but most probably not) be used to launder all the dirty drug money of one small time cannabis grower. Or, alternatively, they could just walk into Sky City with ten times that amount and play blackjack, because that is something our government not only allows, it is willing to make big exemptions for.
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