Posts by izogi
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to andin,
But then I read he compares himself to D Trump
That was unexpected. I caught the live stream from outside parliament, via rnz. At first I thought various journos were trying to goad him into a Trump comparison (just another distraction to make it more about him than about what he was doing). When I heard bits again later it sounded as if he proposed it himself.
Morgan's far more sophisticated than Donald Trump and I don't understand why he'd want to associate himself at all. His manner obviously irritates, though.
Morgan said he would like to see cats managed in a similar way to the way we manage dogs. I don’t think he ever said he hates cats.
Neither. Not that what he's actually said really makes a difference.
I also joined the Crofton Downs Halo project, which he's been subsidising, and have recently started walking trap lines around here. I don't agree with the guy about everything, but I've developed some respect for how he likes to do stuff. It's not traditional by many people's standards, however.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Also, maybe they could compromise with ACT and encourage farming cats (and kiwis)* for their meat.
I'm struggling to find any discussion of this party anywhere today which hasn't resulted in a conversation that's mostly about Gareth Morgan and cats. People love to scream about how much they hate him because of something about cats.
It's a shame because I think he mostly gets misrepresented on that and it's a total distraction from the actual party and everything else Gareth Morgan and his Foundation does and talks about, but I guess that's politics. TOP's going to have to get past it in the same way (for example) the Green Party has to get past everyone who dismisses it simply because it has the word 'green' in its name.
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Legal Beagle: Just get the App, already, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Yes of course. But when people use the app, they have the app and so they have a boarding pass, don't they? (Maybe they haven't gone through the motions of telling it to officially issue the boarding pass?) People not using the app have to print a boarding pass before arriving, or visit a kiosk, or visit a check-in desk. In whichever case, as far as I'm aware, they get it before they go through security.
So what logical scenario could there have been for Gerry Brownlee to approach the security zone without already having a boarding pass? Do Ministers get special treatment? Was someone else holding it for him?
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Ping. (Since it hasn't been mentioned yet.)
Housing New Zealand has ignored repeated warnings from senior government officials that it is misusing methamphetamine contamination guidelines to evict its tenants.
The Ministry of Health has repeatedly told Housing New Zealand that its methamphetamine guidelines were to be applied only for the clean up of former meth labs, and were not intended to monitor homes where the drug has been smoked.
Yet hundreds of tenants have been evicted from their state homes, after Housing New Zealand detected tiny traces of methamphetamine in them, and are often made to pay tens of thousands of dollars in clean up fees.
The ministry has just published new guidelines saying meth can be found at three to four times higher than the level being used as a reason to evict tenants.
Director of protection, regulation and assurance, Dr Stewart Jessamine, said the ministry had repeatedly made it clear to Housing New Zealand it was misusing the guidelines.
"The guidelines are very clear - that they are only for use in houses where methamphetamine has been manufactured. We have pointed out (to Housing New Zealand) and communicated that these guidelines are clearly for use in houses where meth has been manufactured," Dr Jessamine said.
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Thanks, Graeme.
And Gerry Brownlee didn’t have a boarding pass.
Isn't it standard in most/all New Zealand airports for boarding passes to be issued before security? Whether it's at a check-in desk or printing it. Must he have forgotten, or do Ministers typically get special treatment with this sort of thing?
And maybe, if anything good is to come from Gerry Brownlee’s escapade, we could fix that?
It seems strange that there haven't been obvious efforts to fix it already, especially if it apparently embarrassed the CAA enough to unlawfully redact its explanation.
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Is it necessary to validate Slater's trashy ramblings by linking to them?
The lesson? Likely voter screens are hugely important in lower turnout elections.
What measurable metrics are used to determine likely voters?
Can it be narrowed down to determine likely swing voters, so that everyone else doesn't have to be bothered by annoying phone calls? Maybe not so far as to completely avoid the election. :P
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
The sad fact of the matter is, izogi, “media” workers have only ever had a very basic understanding of how STV works. That is very clear from the hopelessly incomplete and inaccurate descriptions of STV we see in our local papers, particularly around local election time.
Also, assuming it's true, this is really depressing.
On the surface politics often seems to be the last major topical area which local media spends any resources on. Maybe that's just because it's cheap to pay for never-ending opinion and sniggering as if the whole thing's just an entertaining tactical game. I suppose understanding the actual rules requires more investment than just making stuff up.I’m sure that newspaper editors, in this democracy of ours, adhere to the principle of ‘free speech’, which (simplistically), I take to mean we are free to communicate with each other, even when what we espouse is actually quite wrong. Follow-up letters from readers (often unpublished – I have personal experience of this) will give (hopefully) correct information.
I haven't interacted with letters to the editor for ages, but I had cautiously positive experiences when I did (back in Evening Post days). Editors would often add a note to correct obviously wrong things that were published from people, if necessary, and I routinely found that if I actually followed the stated rules (length limits, etc), a letter I wrote would normally be published. By comparison, comment threads from the same newspapers are rubbish. They're controlled by anonymous moderators who seem to let random, frequently personally abusive and incorrect, comments through on a whim... and block others for no obvious reason. A couple of times now I've avoided interacting with journalists because I don't want to be subjected to the utter crap in comment and facebook threads that'll most likely flow underneath any article that's published.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Paul Campbell,
unless of course all the people you choose are eliminated, then all of your vote is still in play and is thrown away ..... as I mentioned it's stupidly difficult to rank so many different people ...
Given most people out there seem to compare this with FPP, claiming that FPP is more simple (and therefore better), I think it needs to be pointed out that FPP also results in votes being thrown away, except that it happens immediately for everyone whose first choice doesn't get elected. STV also doesn't require anyone to rank more than their first choice, so you can quite easily make your vote about as meaningful as any FPP vote ever was. I guess the main difference in that respect is that under STV, everyone else might not be voting so simplistically.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
The writer warned voters not to rank-order too many candidates, because “If you choose to number your preferences then your one vote can be split, supporting all of your numbered preferences depending on how the vote counting proceeds, including those that you don’t want.” (He said this had happened in Kapiti Coast – 2007?)
As agents for informing the public I find it disconcerting enough that major media outlets frequently don't bother to fact check stuff presented as if it's objective fact, and which should be easily determined as right or wrong, before it's published in online comment threads.
I'm not sure if I should feel any better to be reminded that it doesn't always even happen in the more controlled printed letters to the editor, let alone in an age when newspapers probably had staff who really should have been able to understand how a vote count actually works.
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
My explanation: for younger generations (the media market) perception now equates with reality. Often a story about popular perceptions will seem better than one that merely reports facts.
And/or maybe the standard journalism degree doesn't necessarily impart the wide and mixed range of skills that many of us expect from a journalist. I'm sure there are always exceptions and exceptional circumstances, but perhaps it's also a consequence of very few journalists out there who actually understand how to locate, read and interpret something like a court document? Maybe it's mostly coming from hearsay, lobby group press releases, reports from others and enraged feedback from random members of the public via social media? Or not.
After a quick google there's something which doesn't sit quite right with me when I see that Massey, for example, combines Journalism with Communication and Marketing into the same school. Wasn't there a time when news media businesses sourced their staff from places where they already had actual experience in things, and then trained them up? I guess times change.