Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Hard News: The Crazy Gang Nation, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Then again, Germans do seem to have a fairly high expectation that their politicians behave like functional adults.
But Germany doesn't use FPP for all their elections, they use MMP, so the tipping gets washed out at those levels. If the republicans got 40% of the vote and got 40% of the house as a result, they'd have to start behaving like someone that a coalition partner could join up with.
And also, there's a bit more adult behaviour and less money involved in most other electoral systems. All relative of course.
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That would be no bad thing
Sounds great. Does anyone know how to stuff their kiwisaver account under their mattress?
One faction of one party of one branch of government holds the world to ransom.
It really does show the failings of multiple layers of FPP. Tea Party are influential enough for their candidates to win a heap of primaries (or more moderate candidates have to sway to the bat-crazy right to do so). Then because they've got republican beside their name, they beat a bunch of democrats. Enough of them do that in the caucus, and they rule the caucus so control leaders and priorities. Enough republicans are elected, they rule the house. Rule the house, shut down the government. Economy starts to falter, and we're all a bit screwed.
It's like 10-15% of the politically active population in the US (figure pulled out of my butt) just winning each tipping point and then sucking up most of the people that they just beat and heading on to the next tipping point. Eventually a couple of million people at the crazy end of the political spectrum are screwing with all of us.
I hope they get smashed at mid-terms. Something needs to change over there.
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I'm surprised that so many people use the signal to the tower rather than the signal to the satelitte. Is that through choice because it offers more, or avoiding the cost of installing a dish on the house?
We had a sky dish on the roof when we brought our house, so just brought a freeview box to run off it when we moved in.
Within a couple of months we'd been sucked in by mysky and haven't looked back since, so it's in the spare room with the spare TV now if the kids want to watch something right now.
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The answer is again, "maybe". If Dunne was bringing in two or three other MPs, then the answer is "definitely", but only if you can rely on Dunne falling your way come coalition talks, which probably isn't likely given he's in the middle of things.
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Thats pretty querky. If National had won Epsom in 2011, it would have cost it a list MP, and therefore its desirable for a different but friendly party to win it. Do you know how many electorates this scenario could apply to?
The same applies to Peter Dunne's seat, and it's the reason that John Key held his nose and had that cup of tea with John Banks.
The alternative is to assume that if you killed Act, most Act voters would shift to National as the next best thing (some would go elsewhere for sure), so it's a tradeoff between how many seats Act gets, wanting multiple coalition partners so you're not tied to one party to pass things, a total guess as to whether that next list seat will be yours or not (there's about a 40% chance of it being yours anyway), and how much of the Act vote you'd pick up if you don't have the cup of tea, call them dead in the water, and urge their voters to vote for you as the alternative.
You're much more likely to do it if that party was bringing in 3 or 4 MPs, one is really starting to be marginal, particularly when they're outside of you on the political spectrum (there's probably a fair chance if you knew they were only going to get one MP, and you killed them, you'd pick up that MP as a result, whereas if they have three or four you know you'll lose at least one from your coalition).
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But we pay our cops to police, not to write, and occasional infelicitous phrasing aside, it's a pretty informative story.
Police officers have some pretty variable literacy skills - it's been getting better as they tend to employ people with higher education levels now, but it used to be a job that you could get after dropping out of school. I've read some interesting English during my time working for the police.
A shift spent in a police car on a Saturday night anywhere in NZ is a real informative experience. Damn difficult job, particularly where the expectation is that you get it right every time. Wouldn't catch me doing it.
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Is this factually correct? If National had taken Epsom in 2011, would not the result have been exactly the same for the Nats in terms of having the numbers to form a govt.?
Act wasn't an overhang MP (1.07% of party vote) so didn't increase the size of parliament.
So if Act didn't win the electorate but National won it, National would get one less list MP. By my calculations, Labour would have picked up this list MP as the next party due to have one under the formula.
That would have left National with 59 MPs, and Maori Party with 3, 62 being enough to form a govt in a 121 seat parliament. It would have made the Maori party a lot stronger though, as currently National + Act + United Future can pass legislation. Without Act, National's only option is the Maori Party.
What price for their support? I guess it depends how likely the alternative of Maori-Greens-NZ First-Mana was.
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In front of them hoping it will help? what?
I think that's fairly obvious.
Yeah I saw that and I guess I’m so jaded that I read it as “we’ll pay a consultant to write a report and carry on as before” rather than as a commitment to make certain they aren’t doing harm.
Maybe, but given it's a charity, I hope we'd give them the benefit of the doubt unless they have history.
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It wasn’t clear to me from the response of the campaign spokesperson who posted here that they would be doing that.
They did say:
As we move into next year we will undertake to consult with organisations that understand eating disorders to get their advice on how we might further ensure that we are both aware and active in minimising the possibility of harm.
Without stopping what they are currently in the middle of doing on the basis that it may be doing some unintended harm to some participants... what more should they be doing?
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Speaker: The act of not eating doesn't…, in reply to andin,
It seems we would rather bury ourselves in idiot campaigns to win pieces of silver in which money will always win.
Maybe it's not a great solution, but no need to be a dick about people committing to what's in front of them hoping it will help.