Posts by mpledger
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard-working New Zealanders are not an ATM for Saudi sheep farmers, Sky City, Orivida...
the aluminium smelter, movie industry or the water industry ...
Feel free to add more.... -
Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to linger,
>> for smaller parties the polls are less accurate
> Only in terms of relative error, not in terms of the absolute error
Only in terms of the sampling error. The non-sampling error for small parties is probably quite large.
National's margin of error is quite close to the survey's margin of error at 3% (giving a sampling error of roughly 1.5%). I could easily believe the non-sampling error for small parties is at least 1.5% even if the sampling error is minuscule ...
... especially for the Maori Party and Act - the former because of phone line & demographic issues and the latter because of geographic concentration.
-
Thomas Lumley wrote a great article about quantifying the actual margin of error compared to the theoretical margin of error. It's a bit statsy though.
http://www.statschat.org.nz/2014/07/02/whats-the-actual-margin-of-error/ -
Sample sizes for national polling in NZ are 750-1000 (Colmar Brunton is usually slightly over 1000). The typical sample size for US national polls is 1000.
~~
Very basically - for polls the margin of error of a survey depends on the number of people sampled not the size of the population being sampled.But that just highlights that not all the potential error is reflected in the margin of error of a survey.
~~~~
I think NZ polls have been quite good because the people who are under-represented in phone surveys are also under-represented in voting. -
Back when I was a university student, I seem to recall that the hostel students could vote for their "home" electorate even though they were living in Wellington.
-
There was a "Would I lie to you" - "This is my" segment that was quite interesting.
-
The last Indian restaurant I went to (about 6 weeks ago) had two Pakeha uni students as waiting staff - the waitress said that she had been eating there since she was a child and loved it so it seemed like a natural fit.
I suspect non-Indians find working in an Indian restaurant intimidating because the food is exotic. And Indians tend to want to work in their own business rather than someone elses.
-
Hard News: Every option has costs, every…, in reply to Peter Davis,
Peter Davis said:
(2) Working holidays visas. There are a lot of these, but I cannot see how these are anything more than tourist visas for young people who are allowed to work part of the time. These are not serious migrants in the sense of being "new settlers", although some may become so. This should not be part of the debate.
~~~~~~~~
I was in Picton and Kaikoura 18 months ago and young people with foreign accents were working everywhere. I was so struck by it that when I did meet a young NZer working in a shop I started talking to her about how she got the work - her aunty ran the shop and she worked in it part-time and she had another part-time job.Working holiday visas are a big deal because employers prefer mid-twenties tourists rather than kids just out of high school who would have got those jobs previously. The problem is that the young NZers have to leave those places to find decent work and opportunities or scrabble at the bottom of the employment heap. The working holiday visas are depriving young NZers of job opportunities, experience and income.
-
Big businesses that do govt social work tend to take the easy cases, fix the easy stuff and then the govt is left still having to deal with the hard cases and hard stuff that didn't get fixed. For people with little problems, who might have fallen off the government waiting list, it all seem good but for everyone else it just turns into double handling with high stress.
-
The thing about the Dunedin Longitudinal study was that the participants were all in their mid twenties (IIRC) when the research was done. You can't generalise that to all ages and stages.