Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Riding shirtless on a horse with his buddy Vlad, perhaps.
-
Hard News: DNC 2016: Beyond weird, most…, in reply to nzlemming,
Solid speech.
-
Interesting stuff, David. Wish I had the time to go through my own findings on the last survey to compare and contrast. Are the questions mostly similar?
It was an interesting process last time. I think I found out a lot more about statistics than I did about NZ voters' opinions, though. I'd been hoping to find more interesting dimensions than left vs right, but of course the first PC axis accounted for most of variance that could be accounted for in the data (which it's designed to do), and that seemed to divide the issues along fairly predictable left-right lines. The second axis accounted for very little and didn't have much by way of recognizable pattern.
But then I realized that this was probably mostly because of the design of the questionnaire, which was massively full of left-right type questions, and had very few questions about, for example, environmentalism. Those that did exist were strongly correlated to votes for Greens, so I was left realizing that so much of what I was looking for was down to what questions get asked.
I'll be very interested to see what else you find in this survey. The finding that there is a left-right ordering of our parties seems to be unchanged. National is still at the far right of the parties with meaningful numbers. What else are you thinking of looking at?
-
Hard News: The Unitary Plan and grown-up…, in reply to nzlemming,
Yes, the population is actually the only point of similarity between the nations. Radically different geography, demographics, history, culture, economy. Also politics: NZ has been a democracy for over a hundred years, with leadership changing every 2-3 elections. Singapore has continually "elected" the People's Action Party (PAP) since 1965. You judge for yourself how democratic any country could be that has not had power change hands for 50 years. On a backdrop like that, abolishing local government would be a matter of the PM deciding to do it one day. In NZ, it's a process that would take a hell of a lot more than that.
Then, since NZ is actually a much larger country, the government would have to create something that basically took the place of the local government, to administer all the things currently done by it all around NZ. Maybe a ministry for every city. So they wouldn't really be abolishing local government. They would just be seizing it.
But we digress. Back to the adult discussion about things that actually might happen.
-
Hard News: The Unitary Plan and grown-up…, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
Maybe we should follow Singapore and just abolish local government altogether.
I thought this was to be an adult conversation. That's not going to happen in a country that has not yet reverted to fascism. Hopefully that doesn't happen.
-
It's a worrying turn, I have to say. Not at all unexpected, though. I expect nothing less from a market solution to worker exploitation than a double down, because that is how it works everywhere, and always has. In other news of doubling down, it turns out that the other rival emerging recently promising salvation from Uber is turns out to be funded by a particularly controversial and disreputable church, and leads in to the market at exactly the same rates as Uber, with an almost boilerplate copy of their outrageous contract, and an app clone that can only be distinguished from Ubers by the unresolved bugs, total lack of documentation, and the requirement that drivers accept that the app will track their locations even when it's not on. The difference, of course, being that they haven't figured on just how touchable they are as an NZ registered company.
-
My brother lived a full and wonderful life for 35 years.
Nowhere long enough. Thank you for giving us this, Amberleigh.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
I've not heard, but with these guys, who knows. It's that low in Brisbane now.
If it went that low, than means Uber drivers would have had their rates halved in one year. From a position of already being the cheapest taxis on the road by far.
-
Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
There is a chance that those regs don't go through, though. They are being written by NZTA after all, and if there was once an understanding between then and Uber, it's possible that the big stink finger that Uber gave them had soured that. But who knows what's going on at the top level when the Minister says that the regulations will have "the lightest touch possible". Currently that's exactly what they're already getting, with open violation of existing law, almost no tax paid. Quite literally no law or regulation appears to touch Uber and that seems to be how the Minister likes it. Why bother to formalize anything, that could only bring Uber into a legal framework that they would then have to find new ways violate. Because the current violation literally made no economic sense in the first place, and it would seem the law breaking is an end in itself to establish dominance over a shockingly weak system with an even weaker government overseeing it.
-
Oh btw, thanks to the collective incompetence of Chorus and Compass, the fibre in my house still has not been switched on (despite all the hardware already being in place), 50 days after my first request, so I've written practically everything you've seen in the last 2 months using nothing more than a cheap Huawei phone. I'm getting really fast at it.