Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Rob Stowell,
This for instance. A trillion dollars lost in 'cyber-attacks'. Where's it come from, where's it gone?
It's hard to factually disprove this because it's based on no facts, just conjecture from (of course) people with stuff to sell (in this case McAfee, a serial offender).
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what percentage of what is in the major outlets is in this category?
In the case of tech journalism, and going back to the print era, I would put it at over 50%, whether it's driven by lack of understanding, sources with an agenda (selling something, often) or desire to create a good story where none exists. I'd say tech is probably about average.
Financial journalism has been an outlier in terms of actually being accurate - but purely because the professional market pays for accuracy and high end agencies (e.g. Reuters and Bloomberg) competed on that basis, so the 'entertainment' news market had an accurate reference.
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I've known since childhood that there is a substantial dissonance between the information in the media and reality. My father was in the aviation industry, and would explain to us how almost any story in the newspapers on that subject was anything from inaccurate to deliberately misleading.
Similarly, pretty much all tech stories I see in the general media display ignorance and sensationalism (particularly if they contain the prefix cyber- anywhere in the text).
In general, I tend to regard any information not evidenced by my own eyes, by the eyes of somebody I know personally or properly evidenced research as 'for entertainment only'.
Certainly, the best advice with any sort of situation like the recent quakes or killer clowns is to take the batteries out of your radio and disconnect the internet until the hysteria-loop subsides.
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I don't think the locus of their offices has any bearing on the jurisdiction of the Employment Tribunal. If the work's being done by an NZ resident in NZ, then NZ law applies.
IANAL, but you knew that.
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The problem isn't that Trump snorts too much coke and plays russian roulette with The Button. It's more subtle than that:
- Trump gives his bestie, Putin, the idea that invading Ukraine/Estonia/Poland would not spoil their friendship
- Putin goes rolling in, hoping to bolster his position as the new Ivan The Quite Bad
- However, the general view in NATO is that invading Poland *is* going too far, apart from anything else there's a treaty of mutual assistance, so NATO forces intervene and start battling Russians
- As in Afghanistan (etc) Russian troops and tech don't perform as advertised and NATO rolls over them into the motherland
- Rather than lose St Petersburg, Putin tries a few nukes
- Taking out a French division
- The French fire everything they have and take out Moscow
- The Russians blow up the worldThis is how wars happen. Look at Kuwait - the US gave Saddam the impression that his invasion would meet with no more than protestation, he invaded on that basis, and then the US (encouraged by Maggie and the Saudis) felt they had to retaliate.
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Hard News: The Long, Strange Trip, in reply to Bart Janssen,
teach people, in something like a civics course in school,
Yeah, but what about the guys at the back watching pr0n under the desk?
Maybe introduce votes at 16, but make it conditional on passing a short answer and essay paper covering history, constitution and critical thinking.
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Don’t ‘diagnose’ Donald Trump, it’s not helpful.
Obviously. Maybe if there'd been more memes calling Trump a fat ugly nutter, then Bubba T Flubba down in Shitsville, FL wouldn't have voted for him. But you know, Trump won't hurt the rich people or indeed New Zealanders who are most fastidious about these things.
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to Rob Stowell,
One place is Apple: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/02/apple-cash-mountain-grows
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Hard News: Be careful what you wish for, in reply to Aidan,
Aidan: Correct. There is a secondary market for the debt, so it gets sold for whatever price it'll get (and hence the buyer gets a better yield: yield = coupon/price). If secondary market yields rise then sure, the US will need to either pay a higher coupon on new debt, or drive yields down by doing QE (buying and cancelling its own debt).
The idea that the Chinese can just bang on the door and demand their cash back is naive and wrong. (and what's actually happening is that China is draining down their foreign exchange reserves to maintain an artificially high CNY parity).
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You stats geeks, know, don't you, that there are multiple source of errors:
- there's sampling error => I have a bag of fair coins and 60% come up heads -> that depends on the sample size and is known.
- then you've got systematic errors => some of the coins have two heads -> that's the unknown.When people say a poll has a 4% error margin, that's usually sampling error. You add on to that errors because the group of people they polled wasn't representative, the people lied, the adjustments for that (based on previous experience) were wrong, etc. That number is unknown - it could be anything at all.