Posts by James Green
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
It reminds me of the early days of Twizel (but with trees). Rows of uniform houses, no footpaths ... perhaps it was cooked up by some hangover of the Ministry of Works. I was going to suggest that what Christchurch needs is not CERA, but MW, with their army of yellow trucks and diggers, and whatever faceless bureaucrat looked to Scandinavia for urban planning and insulation.
Sort of relatedly, there seem to be a lot of ads for Pegasus at the moment. Some shots make it seem nice, but mostly it just seems creepy.
-
This is great news. Covenants are one of the key diagnostic signs of the pathogen Wisteria stepfordii, an invasive infection found all too prevalently in Canterbury.
My understanding is that they can be very difficult to enforce, and at times can be hilariously circumvented because the people that write them lack imagination. My parents built a house in a subdivision that required that the front fence could not be further forward than the front of the house - very Wisteria Lane-ish, so everyone was supposed to have a big open lawn between the house and the street. I think the covenant may also have precluded hedges. Unfortunately for the covenant writers, it did not preclude a self-made bund covered in a rabid array of natives*...
*in some weird cosmic irony, twenty years later, invasions of wisteria stepfordii are now often separated from healthy tissue by very large bunds also covered in (much more organised) natives.
-
I think the Greens may have done amazingly in the post but it was more muted in 2008. They got 8.5% in specials (I think) versus 6.6% on election night. It's a bit hard to find provisional counts for old elections. That was enough to get Kennedy Graham as an extra from election night.
-
It depends on how many special votes are valid, and how other things change relatively speaking. Maybe more useful to think that of the 220000 special votes, the Greens would expect to get a bit over 20000 of those, buy somewhere like 25000 might get them an MP. Not currently near a spreadsheet but that’s my sense of it. Whereas NZ First need maybe only 16000 not 15000 to get an extra. But it does depends who suffers for these losses to occur.
I think the Green swing last time was less than expected. It was a pretty similar scenario IIRC.
-
As a geek, I just revised and improved my Saint Lague calculator, and note that national have seat 121 at the moment, and that NZ First are closest to pinching this. It would take a modest swing in the specials of half a percent from National for this to occur. Luckily for Key & National, specials historically don't favour NZ First. The Greens are quite far back. They'd need an extra 3.5% or so, plus a half percent loss from National.
(All these percentages are of special votes only, which would be a very small nudge of the overall percentages)
-
Nice analysis Graeme. I'd never really thought of ALC as getting enough votes for a seat before. Also, just to slightly continue a conversation we were engaged in elsewhere last week, you know Daniel Kahneman is pretty instrumental in the modern understanding of counterfactual?
-
Not to disagree with the argument for the need for this project, but part of the reason for the "big train" stations in London, Paris etc., was the way the cities long preceded the existence of the railway. They are more rail incursions into the existing centre.
-
Don't know if it extends into the suburbs, but the proposed cycle lanes for the central city look good!!
-
Hard News: Vanilla Buffalo Yoghurt, in reply to Russell Brown,
For really serious over-the-counter pain relief -- Nurofen Plus + Panadeine Plus. Just don't tell the chemist that's what you're doing ;-)
I'm pretty sure that this is actually the best analgesia you can do over the counter. It's still likely less codeine than your doctor would give you if you got it on a script.
-
Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Lilith __,
Perhaps we're unharmed, but the environment is damaged by monoculture, highly-mechanised farming, and use of strong pesticides.
And yet all of this is true of some organic farming. In particular, I'm not sure that the organic pesticides are less nasty than some of the mainstream ones. (And I'm obviously not looking at the guy I buy my hogget off)