Posts by Peter Ashby
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Sheesh, what a load of insencere and innacurate tosh. For a start councils have been told they are not allowed to use anti terror powers to snoop on people so scratch that one. On the side of the council if people cooperated on recycling and sorting waste the councils would not have to resort to fining them. The alternative is being charged even more for refuse removal.
If you don't want FTL to track your movements then don't register your Oyster card, simple. As for the woman fined for parking on the motorway, well it is illegal to do so. The DVLA sells such things since private companies are zealous in collecting them or they don't make any profit. It's efficient innit? Or maybe you think people should be able to break the law with impunity?
The collection of all electronic communication has been shelved and may well die a death as the govt has been told it is unworkable technically.
Still if your paranoia gets too much for you move up here North of the Border. We have far fewer cameras and our police are still at heel.
Oh and Mr Litterick the police here in Scotland must destroy the sample and the record if you are not found guilty. It is not the collection of dna that is the problem, it is what is done with it that matters. If you disagree with the collection of dna you must disagree with the police holding fingerprints.
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@Andrew
I have just finished William Ruddiman's book Plows, Plagues and Petroleum. He is a paleoclimate researcher: what was the climate like in the past.He has amassed a large amount of data, peer reviewed and published, showing that us humans have been modifying the climate since the first hunter gatherers gave up being nomads and started to cut the forests for agriculture. The evidence is from the ice core data etc. That is the Plows part.
The Plagues part is that the data show dips in CO2/methane in the early middle ages etc and these correlate with things like the Black Death in Europe where contemporaneous accounts say the forests grew back over abandoned farms.
The Petroleum part is pretty obvious. In addition he presents good evidence that if our ancestors had not taken up agriculture on a global scale the world would now be in another ice age.
You will like his last chapter though as he takes on both extreme climate deniers and the Green lobby for ignoring the data. The former deny the obvious evidence while the latter scaremonger.
It is well written and easy to read. I thoroughly recommend it to you if you are truly of an open mind. Hard to be sceptic about warming since the industrial revolution when you see what we already did.
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My concern with this approach is that it potentially fundamentally changes the system of criminal law. The basics require an act and a motivation, taking DNA alters this equation to include all previous acts.
So does the taking of fingerprints and they do that if you are arrested even if you are not charged. These days they are digitised and will be automatically checked against the database. I do not see dna collection being fundamentally different in the respect you raise.
There are other problems as we have been discussing, but I don't think this one flies.
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Consider, for example, the possibility that having been arrested, but not charged, for receiving stolen goods, you have a DNA sample taken. Is it a stretch to imagine that the next time the Police discover a pawn shop in your neighbourhood has not kept a proper register, you get a knock on your door?
Well firstly if they have dna evidence that you have handled some of the goods then fair enough, they have detected prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. However in practice the cost of dna testing means it will never come up in such cases, the police will rely on the old standbys of informants and fingerprints.
The problem with large scale population dna collection is that the idea of exactly how firm the testing is has not actually been tested other than mathematically on those scales (which relies on various assumptions). At the very least they will need to increase the number of loci they use in fingerprinting. The more sites they use the firmer the evidence that it was you, but that costs more further reducing the use of it for all but the most serious crimes.
I'm not aware of the history and practice in NZ (having been away for too long) but here in the UK there have been a number of cases of people arrested for relatively minor offenses and been found to be responsible or wanted for rapes, murders, assaults etc.
However as has been mentioned, the NZ police have a good record of catching serious crims, partly because NZ is a village compared to the UK. It is hard to hide in NZ and not easy to leave without detection. In the UK as a result of the poll tax there are huge numbers not registered with the authorities, add in that identity theft is rife and fairly easy and disappearing is possible. Especially if you can hop a ferry to Ireland or the Continent with such ease.
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Craig, National propose to introduce legislation enabling the Police to take DNA from people arrested for an imprisonable crime; merely arrested... I don't know that they even limit it to charged. That's as close to a Police State as I think NZ's come. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Except that there are quite solid criminology based reasons why it is a good thing from the p.o.v. of catching crims. The people who get arrested a lot but not necessarily charged or let off with a caution are often those who did stuff in the past and got away with it. Taking DNA means you can close old cases.
The problems come with what happens next. Down south of the border here in England and Wales the police get to keep your dna pretty much forever and put it on the database. It is theoretically possible to get it removed if you are not charged or found innocent but it is very, very hard.
Now up here in Scotland they must destroy the record AND the sample if you are not charged. I don't recall if they do that if you are not found guilty as well but it is easier up here to apply for that when the jury find in your favour.
So the devil will be in the details. DNA is just too damn useful for the police to ignore it and people arrested constitute a particular proportion of the population. I have never been arrested for eg. and neither can I think offhand of anyone I know who has been.
Oh yes, the other problem with England and Wales is that you can get arrested for, well, just because. The anti-terror legislation is so wide and the ability of the police to decide your demo is 'illegal' so seemingly spontaneous that doing anything other than keeping your head down and being a good consumer is grounds for arrest. People stood watching demos have been arrested, which means their data is on the database.
DNA is not dangerous, it is what you do with it that is. Be interesting to see which countries the Nats take their model from.
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Anything to say about Key actually talking to the Maori Party? I thought that was never, ever going to happen -- and not as if it's strictly necessary.
Sensible from where I am, difficult to say your are running a centre-right government with only Act on board. If you have the Maori Party as well then gives your claim some street cred. I credit John Key and his people with that much smarts at least.
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He's a fourth generation brethren, whom would say "praise the lord brother" every time we hit the road and at each completed stage of the journey.
Death cult, keep the peeps focussed on the possibility of dying at every oportunity then add the fear of ending up in the hot place with pitchforks. Tried and tested methodology that one. Not good for the psyche but.
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An interesting idea. It does point up that much of the way government and the parliament are run has not adapted to MMP yet. Rather than look at how FPP legislatures like Westminster do it, does anyone know how countries with proportional mulitparty government do it? Germany for instance.
The coalitions that were built up around for eg, the Civil Unions bill show that sense and good ideas are not concentrated in any one party. I am relaxed about parties not in the formal governing coalition being able to advance legislation. After all they are only advancing it, they still have to build the coalition to get it passed which would tend to prevent ridiculous stuff being proposed as it would waste everybody's time.
If opposition parties have to consider how to be constructive as well as simply negative then I fail to see how that will be a bad thing. Perhaps we will need to wait until more of the politicians who cut their teeth under FPP leave parliament to be replaced by new blood for such changes.
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We wear our ponytails on the inside ...
I hear you brother. My external one went west when I had the op on the right hand. One thing you cannot do with one hand, and I tried hard, is tie up your hair. The nice girls in the hairdressers (outer NW London) nearly cried. They thought my hair was really nice.
I first wore the 'tail to a wedding. It was a conservative fundie xian do... We only knew the bride and I got lots of funny looks of the: there's a dangerous hippy in the room variety. I might have started dancing or summat.
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Best foreign comedian comment was Billy Connolly's about Invergiggle. He said the place was so quiet he felt like runnng naked through the streets yelling 'bring out your dead, bring out your dead'.
The world is not entirely ignorant of NZ though. The missus and I were once driving around the Pas de Callais looking for breakfast on a Sunday morning and we find a bar/cafe in a small village. We walk in and in my best French I ask for an organge juice for said spouse. This was met with a stony silence and was repeated several times until one of the patrons intervened on our behalf to get the scene over with. The sense of Froideur was palpable.
We were then asked if we were Anglettere to which we replied: non, nous sommes Nouvelle Zealandais, which, after being corrected resulted in the Froideur being lost completely. 'Ah, le rugby!', 'oui, le rugby' big smiles. 'Ah, l'Affair Rainbow', 'oui' lots of Gallic shrugs on both sides indicating that they thought it Grande Mal too. Then ensued a stilted conversation about various rugby players. It was agreed that Didier Canberroberro was indeed good but his Papa was apparently better etc, etc.
Only the fact that I had to drive to Callais and we had a ferry booking stopped us being plied with endless shots of the local firewater and being invited to meet the wife, kids and grannies.
Ah, le rugby