Posts by Bart Janssen
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the people with real money to lose ... are taking account of those changes
I don't think it's that straightforward. There is a huge amount of change involved in dealing with climate change and most of that change occurs in the business world. It is a fact that implementing a sensible response to climate change will cause significant financial loss to many businesses. For those in those businesses delaying that loss by even a short period of time can mean millions in profit.
There are also huge opportunities for gain, but those gains will be made by somebody else.
Our problem in NZ is that interests that stand to lose seem to hold great sway with the National Party. The other problem is that we only focus on possible losses eg limiting dairying. That leaves possible gains ignored.
In short, technology will dramatically change worldwide as a result of climate change, that creates huge opportunities for new ways of doing things and selling those methods around the world. By denying climate change we stifle that opportunity. We are so focused on minimising loss that we are ignoring the opportunity to shift from a primary produce economy to a technologically advanced economy.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to George Darroch,
There are a number of ways to explain this discrepancy.
Most New Zealanders want Labour to form a coalition government
But most New Zealanders expect Labour to do something so utterly compellingly stupid before the election that they will fail to win
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Feed: Saints Preserve, in reply to Richard Aston,
The only decent crop it has had was in 2011 when the sewerage failures meant three males were peeing around it for months.
That’s how I restored a failing lemon tree , lemon trees it seems just loved to be pissed on. Same for orchids.
Urea is basically nitrogen fertiliser.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to David Hood,
you kind of need two, side by side
But TV is not a static medium, you aren't limited to a graph that is fixed. You could have some seats fixed red blue green or purple and some that flick between colours slowly or rapidly depending on uncertainty or something much cleverer with a 3D component.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Russell Brown,
Honestly is there any reason why they couldn’t report actual intervals instead of just simplistic percentages.
I have some sympathy here. Explaining confidence intervals in a three-minute news item is not something I’d like to try and do.
But yes, as you and Pete both note, treating the simple number as gospel is actually misleading.
I've been thinking about this a bit and I think it comes back to something I get told in my profession a lot. First we have to make it simple enough for the [stupid] public and second we have to avoid talking down to the [stupid] public.
The big problem I have with that is that in my experience the public is NOT stupid. Sometime they are disinterested, which is fine, a lot of the time they don't remember or never learned the necessary background, but very rarely are they unable to understand.
However it can take time to explain which gets back to your 3 minute problem.
But I still think the MSM could take a punt and start representing the poll data in a manner more closely linked to reality. They love flashy graphics and surely this is an occasion where a really nice graphical representation could convey the uncertainty of the outcomes. I suspect the public would respond quite positively to a graph that showed just how important their vote might really be come election day.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Sacha,
Thinking about it you need another bar or another colour on each bar to describe the don't know vote.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Sacha,
I'd argue that such a graph is a clearer version of the data than any of the numbers given in the news.
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Hard News: Gower Speaks, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Yep. That’s a story they’ll want to run.
And yet that is exactly the story New Zealand needs to hear to understand that MMP is actually working as intended and not just being steamrolled by National.
It IS a balanced situation where your vote counts - NOT what is being reported.
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Honestly is there any reason why they couldn't report actual intervals instead of just simplistic percentages.
What he is doing by presenting the simplistic numbers is actually misinformation
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Feed: Saints Preserve, in reply to Lilith __,
Meant as a compliment. ;-)
Taken as one :)