who knows? it's a state of affairs that seems to come about eventually in any nation which does not either undergo a revolution which actually changes the system in search of a better way of doing things or find itself embroiled in a war of survival where the enemy's ideology promotes such things, thus making opposing them imperative to the nation's continued ability to fight. either of these things seem to reset the count.
need to be a bit careful there. 'experts' often have more interest in maintaing that status than they do in ensuring that what they're experts IN is correct. economics has, in the last few decades, been one of the worst offenders for that. (they keep insisting that a system which functions like weather or earthquakes, and which includes non-rational actors which change their behaviour based on any analysis of it, can be explained as if it were so simple, mathematically, as gravity, for one thing. )
i strongly recomend reading 'the economy of cities' and 'cities and the wealth of nations' by Jane Jacobs when it comes to planing economic stuff. (hint: you can have free trade OR a national currency without eventually gutting most of your economy. not both. and things like the Euro are pretty much economic suicide for all but the city-region with the highest contribution to exports to areas which use other currencies.)
Re: Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
the lemming like behavior of the average voter, the USA's shear size, the entrenched and uncontrolled bureaucracy, and the 'two party system' trap mean it's unlikely to get you anywhere without a revolution.
some of that is not actually a tech issue. probably most of it, actually. mostly, probably, a matter of accuracy, standards, and local conditions/factors.
Re: Twitter and Facebook fall within the legal definition of media
'course, if you use the Actual meaning of the word, CDs, flash drives, water, air, the ground, and various other things, as long as you have more than one of them and something can travel through them, are also media...
one could make a (literalist and non-legal) case that you inherently qualify on the basis that the bone structure between your mouth and ear can carry sound... (that's why your voice sounds different to you from how it sounds to everyone else, btw. you get that as well as the sound traveling through the air. everyone else only gets the latter.)
... if by 'accurate' you mean 'people are idiots so change their votes based on nonsense data' ... aka: self fulfilling prophecy.
it is my opinion that the only way you will ever get a fair, meaningful, unbiased election result is if no voter has ANY information about how any other voters will vote.
where do you live that such oppinion polls are accurate?
here abouts they're blatant propaganda that are just 'fact-y' enough to not trip campaign rules ... the Polls are horribly bias and corrupt, but they're data gathering, not Campaigning... and the Reporting on them is not Campaigning at all, just statement of 'fact'.
this is used Deliberately to discourage supporters of those parties opposing the group the media company in question supports...
to devistating effect in the last election where it was a major contributing factor to 1/4th of all registered electors Not Voting, resulting in an Exact 50%+1 seat win by the party (and it's one or two (my memory is vague on if the second was needed or simply bandwagon jumping)'irrelevant as a separate entity' smaller buddies) that was being supported by said obviously corrupt poll.
they had been making the claim that National would get a minimum of 50% for Months, during the course of which you could not find anyone with anything positive to say about national Anywhere but the dedicated 'national is awesome and everyone sucks and no i did not engage my Brain before writing this, rar shill troll rar' type blogs
should also be noted that electorate boundries got redrawn (as they need to do periodically due to population changes), in many cases (as is far from uncommon) in favour of the current ruling party...
In Spite of all this, there were so many electorates that were so close as to need repeated recounts ... and court cases over some of them... it was nuts. the one i Live in was a Perfect Tie between two candidates for the local electorate seat (we use an MMP system) until days after the election when the last of the special votes (people out of the country or otherwise unable to vote in their electorate on election day) came in. those special votes only add up to a few hundred voters per electorate, generally. enough to make a difference to the national level party vote, but usually completely irrelevant in terms of who wins an electorate...
i don't know why people believed these polls though... we've had years of elections where 3news kept trying to do the same thing and it didn't pan out... one of which had national reduced from alternating between largest and second largest depending on if it won or not, to 'actually smaller than some of the 'minor' parties' ... there was much hope it would just Die after that, but sadly it came back.
of course, This time National was the incumbent at the same time and Labour is falling into the trap National did of changing leaders every election and picking people no one's ever heard of... (and, the media kept slaming their last pick as having no presense and being evasive and God knows what else despite people easily remembering who he was and him being honest and straight forward and actualy answering questions when asked rather than ranting on about unrelated subjects as everyone else does... bizzarely, their current leader? most people can't remember his damn NAME most of the time, or face, or anything he's actually done. ... compaired to the previous one, he's something of a non-entity so far._
try every voter ever to have that information, near enough.
in New Zealand it has become bloody obvious that this happens all the time. to the point where some of the news companies Deliberately Publish the results of dodgy polls which have obviously been skewed to support their favoured party. week after week after week... and because they're reporting 'fact' it's not even restricted campaign related stuff during the election period.
this lead Directly to about 1/4th of the registered electors Not Voting in the last election, leading to National just Barely eaking out a 50%+1 majority after forming a coalition with what would have to be the single most hated party that actually manages to get in reliably. (other than themselves).
this was after MONTHS of the government controlled news services very carefully walking the fine line they do of not critisizing Any of the parties in power unless A: they could hit all the parties with any hope of getting in at once, or B: the events were so blatantly disasterous that the party would take more damage from it being found out Later after being hushed up than it coming to light then (or so it appeared, at least) while 3 News, owned by american interests (established fact: National acts more on US interests than NZ interests, when not acting directly in the interests of getting re-elected or lining their pockets) dedicated pretty much every article on the elections to either how Labour was going to lose or blatantly bias and corrupt polls in support of National... and did everything they possibly could to ignore the rest of the parties in parliament or write them off as loonies... none of the media EVER mentions ANY party that's not already in parliament, no matter how much support it has. (the closest 3News came to saying anything against national was when they had a go at the state owned OneNews for how they handled the debates... and even then general consensis from all sides was that none of the parties really 'won' the debate, and the big loosers were the audience.)
National's name is also ironic... it's either the first or second most 'globalist' (for want of a better term) party in the country.
(all (or almost all) of the left wing parties of any significance have taken up nationalist policies and attitudes of late, as have the saner center/center-right parties, largely in response to the massive public backlash against National's blatantly pro-foreign interests/Anti-New Zealand Citizen polices. people like to ignore that Labour did a lot (possibly more) of the same stuff when it was in power, just without stepping on anyone's toes in the process.)
but yeah, this is the same issue as with exit polls,and under a proportional system. people see the party they like least is (supposedly) going to win, and so rather than voting for the ones they like anyway to reduce the damage, Don't Vote, making each vote in favour of the one they dislike More Valuable and give them More Power.
had that remaining 1/4th voted, there is no way in hell National could have assembled a majority... we were at the point where essentually Every Other Party (except Act, which is basically 'National with even less sanity' and which i personally write off as 'part of National's bloc') was (apparantly) willing to form a single coalition, despite having major disagreements with each other, just to shut them out. this would have, bizzarely, been in line with public sentiment and probably given them the most solid mandate to govern (though not do any specific thing) any government has had in a long time... (had it been possible to form a coalition Without doing that, of course, the various points of contention would have become an issue again... and a smaller national party persence might have lead to some of them being willing to go with National anyway if it offered them a better deal, which, in a weaker position, it might have done. still, )
Re: Re: Life, Liberty, And The Inalienable Second Amendment
... it doesn't really say 'socialism' either. among other things, an Actually socialist system (modern usage/(there's another name for this but it escapes me)) would regulate their anti-citizen ambitions into the ground, more so the closer they got to a monopoly.
a socialist (communist/Stalinist) system wouldn't let them have monopolies/IP in the first place. the government would run it all instead.
Government monopolies aren't free market, no, but they're certainly capitalist and more right wing than left (also more authoritarian than liberal, really.)
current setup with our ISP here is that they e-mail us when we hit 80% of our cap.
when this happens at all it's in the last week of the month, unless someone's done something unusual.
(like this month, when we got that notice within the first week or so. quite baffling. they're usually quite reasonable about doing what they can to help you figure out what happened there if you don't know, though, and sort out any problems. but the data they store, and, more importantly, that the customer service people have access to, is quite limited due to privacy laws etc.
that said, there's actual Competition in the ISP space here :) )
again, all this nonsense should kill ANY hope of extraditing Kim Dotcom.
unfortunately, under the current government in New Zealand, that's not as guaranteed as one would like.
(techincally the courts are independant of the legislature and the executive, beyond the fact that they all officially answer to the monarch... 'bout a decade or so back, however, parliament Somehow managed to replace the privy council (technically the monarch themselves, but the privy council filed in like the GG does as head of state) as the highest court of appeal with a High Court of some sort within NZ. It's generally acknowledged that this was entirely because they LOST cases when tried before the privy council, and they would have greater influence on a court actually within the country. it's quite noticeable that Parliament (or at least the 'government' part of it) can have quite a bit of influence over the courts, one way or another, when it comes to things like this.
oddly, if you bring a case Against the government, the courts suddenly become rather immune to such influence... and the government desperately tries to disclaim responsibility and promptly writes laws meaning that their actions are legal... from then on, at least.
such is what it looks like to the average NZ citizen, anyway.)
and having enough money to dump into the black hole that is the courts and the necessary counter-bribes to not end up with all your assets frozen and your business destroyed while you're 'investigated' (and probably in solitary confinement if you're not lucky enough to be out of the country at the time...)
i prefer New Zealand's attitude towards guns, to be honest. it runs thusly: there are a few legitimate reasons to own guns. none of them are the sorts of things there is any legitimate reason to hide. guns are dangerous. therefore, all guns must be licensed, all guns not used for those purposes are forbidden. miss use on the part of those who have such lisences are the fault of the person who owns the gun and/or the person holding it at the time and/or in certain circumstances, the person who managed to get themselves shot. (depending on exactly what happened, and the last requires the person to have known what was going on and to have done something incredibly stupid.)
also: to keep the peace in occupied areas, it is far more effective to REMOVE weapons which are not under the control of your forces from the area entirely, than to try to arm 'your side'. Police can do their jobs just fine with armour and melee weapons. anything they Can't handle is why you have soldiers there.
makes much more sense than the stupidity i hear out of americans who actually care much on either side of the issue (rabid morons who think everything is the gun manufacturer's fault verse those of dubious sanity who can't see there might be good reason to keep track of who owns what, armaments wise.)
they don't generally care much about the health of the economy either, only their own bank account... they seem to have missed how worthless that becomes when the economy crashes...
this sort of nonsense is why the right to keep and bear arms is in the US constitution, btw.
at what point does it become viable, or even Necessary, to take advantage of that?
because frankly i don't see this nonsense ending without the entire corrupt system being torn down and rebuilt on a different model, with the old elite dead (whether by violence or age, it matters little, but there must be a Break between the old way and the new, and simply having new people of a younger generation take up the roles of the old is the slowest way to change such things, if it works at all... and is perhaps too slow all togeather at this point.)
On the post: ACTA Rapporteur's Recommendations: Reject Treaty, But Ask European Commission To Come Up With Replacement
Re: Re: Start by...
On the post: CISPA Sponsor Mike Rogers Says Protests Are Mere 'Turbulence' On Landing
Re: Re:
On the post: Cargo Cult Reverse Activism: Maximalists Think That If They Use Social Media They Can Counteract Public Concerns
Re:
On the post: Obama Administration Told It Should Return The Crystal-Covered Michael Jackson Glove It Illegally Seized
Re: When did it happen?
On the post: Pirate Parties Continue To Grow In Europe As People Get Sick Of Politics As Usual
Re: Re:
i strongly recomend reading 'the economy of cities' and 'cities and the wealth of nations' by Jane Jacobs when it comes to planing economic stuff. (hint: you can have free trade OR a national currency without eventually gutting most of your economy. not both. and things like the Euro are pretty much economic suicide for all but the city-region with the highest contribution to exports to areas which use other currencies.)
On the post: Pirate Parties Continue To Grow In Europe As People Get Sick Of Politics As Usual
Re: Re: Yes, but they have done much by increasing the truth and dialog.
not impossible, just unlikely.
On the post: French Voters Warned To Stay Off Social Media Lest They 'Crash The Election'
Re:
On the post: French Voters Warned To Stay Off Social Media Lest They 'Crash The Election'
Re: Twitter and Facebook fall within the legal definition of media
one could make a (literalist and non-legal) case that you inherently qualify on the basis that the bone structure between your mouth and ear can carry sound... (that's why your voice sounds different to you from how it sounds to everyone else, btw. you get that as well as the sound traveling through the air. everyone else only gets the latter.)
On the post: French Voters Warned To Stay Off Social Media Lest They 'Crash The Election'
Re:
it is my opinion that the only way you will ever get a fair, meaningful, unbiased election result is if no voter has ANY information about how any other voters will vote.
which is pretty much impossible.
On the post: French Voters Warned To Stay Off Social Media Lest They 'Crash The Election'
Re: Re: Re: seriously
here abouts they're blatant propaganda that are just 'fact-y' enough to not trip campaign rules ... the Polls are horribly bias and corrupt, but they're data gathering, not Campaigning... and the Reporting on them is not Campaigning at all, just statement of 'fact'.
this is used Deliberately to discourage supporters of those parties opposing the group the media company in question supports...
to devistating effect in the last election where it was a major contributing factor to 1/4th of all registered electors Not Voting, resulting in an Exact 50%+1 seat win by the party (and it's one or two (my memory is vague on if the second was needed or simply bandwagon jumping)'irrelevant as a separate entity' smaller buddies) that was being supported by said obviously corrupt poll.
they had been making the claim that National would get a minimum of 50% for Months, during the course of which you could not find anyone with anything positive to say about national Anywhere but the dedicated 'national is awesome and everyone sucks and no i did not engage my Brain before writing this, rar shill troll rar' type blogs
should also be noted that electorate boundries got redrawn (as they need to do periodically due to population changes), in many cases (as is far from uncommon) in favour of the current ruling party...
In Spite of all this, there were so many electorates that were so close as to need repeated recounts ... and court cases over some of them... it was nuts. the one i Live in was a Perfect Tie between two candidates for the local electorate seat (we use an MMP system) until days after the election when the last of the special votes (people out of the country or otherwise unable to vote in their electorate on election day) came in. those special votes only add up to a few hundred voters per electorate, generally. enough to make a difference to the national level party vote, but usually completely irrelevant in terms of who wins an electorate...
i don't know why people believed these polls though... we've had years of elections where 3news kept trying to do the same thing and it didn't pan out... one of which had national reduced from alternating between largest and second largest depending on if it won or not, to 'actually smaller than some of the 'minor' parties' ... there was much hope it would just Die after that, but sadly it came back.
of course, This time National was the incumbent at the same time and Labour is falling into the trap National did of changing leaders every election and picking people no one's ever heard of... (and, the media kept slaming their last pick as having no presense and being evasive and God knows what else despite people easily remembering who he was and him being honest and straight forward and actualy answering questions when asked rather than ranting on about unrelated subjects as everyone else does... bizzarely, their current leader? most people can't remember his damn NAME most of the time, or face, or anything he's actually done. ... compaired to the previous one, he's something of a non-entity so far._
On the post: French Voters Warned To Stay Off Social Media Lest They 'Crash The Election'
Re: Re: seriously
in New Zealand it has become bloody obvious that this happens all the time. to the point where some of the news companies Deliberately Publish the results of dodgy polls which have obviously been skewed to support their favoured party. week after week after week... and because they're reporting 'fact' it's not even restricted campaign related stuff during the election period.
this lead Directly to about 1/4th of the registered electors Not Voting in the last election, leading to National just Barely eaking out a 50%+1 majority after forming a coalition with what would have to be the single most hated party that actually manages to get in reliably. (other than themselves).
this was after MONTHS of the government controlled news services very carefully walking the fine line they do of not critisizing Any of the parties in power unless A: they could hit all the parties with any hope of getting in at once, or B: the events were so blatantly disasterous that the party would take more damage from it being found out Later after being hushed up than it coming to light then (or so it appeared, at least) while 3 News, owned by american interests (established fact: National acts more on US interests than NZ interests, when not acting directly in the interests of getting re-elected or lining their pockets) dedicated pretty much every article on the elections to either how Labour was going to lose or blatantly bias and corrupt polls in support of National... and did everything they possibly could to ignore the rest of the parties in parliament or write them off as loonies... none of the media EVER mentions ANY party that's not already in parliament, no matter how much support it has. (the closest 3News came to saying anything against national was when they had a go at the state owned OneNews for how they handled the debates... and even then general consensis from all sides was that none of the parties really 'won' the debate, and the big loosers were the audience.)
National's name is also ironic... it's either the first or second most 'globalist' (for want of a better term) party in the country.
(all (or almost all) of the left wing parties of any significance have taken up nationalist policies and attitudes of late, as have the saner center/center-right parties, largely in response to the massive public backlash against National's blatantly pro-foreign interests/Anti-New Zealand Citizen polices. people like to ignore that Labour did a lot (possibly more) of the same stuff when it was in power, just without stepping on anyone's toes in the process.)
but yeah, this is the same issue as with exit polls,and under a proportional system. people see the party they like least is (supposedly) going to win, and so rather than voting for the ones they like anyway to reduce the damage, Don't Vote, making each vote in favour of the one they dislike More Valuable and give them More Power.
had that remaining 1/4th voted, there is no way in hell National could have assembled a majority... we were at the point where essentually Every Other Party (except Act, which is basically 'National with even less sanity' and which i personally write off as 'part of National's bloc') was (apparantly) willing to form a single coalition, despite having major disagreements with each other, just to shut them out. this would have, bizzarely, been in line with public sentiment and probably given them the most solid mandate to govern (though not do any specific thing) any government has had in a long time... (had it been possible to form a coalition Without doing that, of course, the various points of contention would have become an issue again... and a smaller national party persence might have lead to some of them being willing to go with National anyway if it offered them a better deal, which, in a weaker position, it might have done. still, )
On the post: The Mantra Of The Digital Generation: Life, Liberty And Blazing Broadband
Re: Re: Life, Liberty, And The Inalienable Second Amendment
a socialist (communist/Stalinist) system wouldn't let them have monopolies/IP in the first place. the government would run it all instead.
Government monopolies aren't free market, no, but they're certainly capitalist and more right wing than left (also more authoritarian than liberal, really.)
On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is
Re: Nobody Needs To Know
when this happens at all it's in the last week of the month, unless someone's done something unusual.
(like this month, when we got that notice within the first week or so. quite baffling. they're usually quite reasonable about doing what they can to help you figure out what happened there if you don't know, though, and sort out any problems. but the data they store, and, more importantly, that the customer service people have access to, is quite limited due to privacy laws etc.
that said, there's actual Competition in the ISP space here :) )
On the post: Judge Preserves Megaupload Evidence For Now, While Gov't Tries To Pin Blame On Hosting Company
Re:
unfortunately, under the current government in New Zealand, that's not as guaranteed as one would like.
(techincally the courts are independant of the legislature and the executive, beyond the fact that they all officially answer to the monarch... 'bout a decade or so back, however, parliament Somehow managed to replace the privy council (technically the monarch themselves, but the privy council filed in like the GG does as head of state) as the highest court of appeal with a High Court of some sort within NZ. It's generally acknowledged that this was entirely because they LOST cases when tried before the privy council, and they would have greater influence on a court actually within the country. it's quite noticeable that Parliament (or at least the 'government' part of it) can have quite a bit of influence over the courts, one way or another, when it comes to things like this.
oddly, if you bring a case Against the government, the courts suddenly become rather immune to such influence... and the government desperately tries to disclaim responsibility and promptly writes laws meaning that their actions are legal... from then on, at least.
such is what it looks like to the average NZ citizen, anyway.)
On the post: Judge Preserves Megaupload Evidence For Now, While Gov't Tries To Pin Blame On Hosting Company
Re:
2) fighting it would require actual Effort by the average citizen.
On the post: Judge Preserves Megaupload Evidence For Now, While Gov't Tries To Pin Blame On Hosting Company
Re:
On the post: Judge Preserves Megaupload Evidence For Now, While Gov't Tries To Pin Blame On Hosting Company
Re: Re: Re:
i prefer New Zealand's attitude towards guns, to be honest. it runs thusly: there are a few legitimate reasons to own guns. none of them are the sorts of things there is any legitimate reason to hide. guns are dangerous. therefore, all guns must be licensed, all guns not used for those purposes are forbidden. miss use on the part of those who have such lisences are the fault of the person who owns the gun and/or the person holding it at the time and/or in certain circumstances, the person who managed to get themselves shot. (depending on exactly what happened, and the last requires the person to have known what was going on and to have done something incredibly stupid.)
also: to keep the peace in occupied areas, it is far more effective to REMOVE weapons which are not under the control of your forces from the area entirely, than to try to arm 'your side'. Police can do their jobs just fine with armour and melee weapons. anything they Can't handle is why you have soldiers there.
makes much more sense than the stupidity i hear out of americans who actually care much on either side of the issue (rabid morons who think everything is the gun manufacturer's fault verse those of dubious sanity who can't see there might be good reason to keep track of who owns what, armaments wise.)
On the post: As ACTA 1.0 Lies Dying, Are G8 Countries Already Working On ACTA 2.0?
Re: Fear, corp Money
past refers to the period of time before the present, or is used as (prepositon? adverb? i'm not sure. but 'we walked/went/drove past them')
the verb is Passed. (past tense of pass) 'he passed me' 'they passed the bill'
you see?
i happen to agree with your point bout the problems, mind you.
On the post: As ACTA 1.0 Lies Dying, Are G8 Countries Already Working On ACTA 2.0?
Re:
On the post: As ACTA 1.0 Lies Dying, Are G8 Countries Already Working On ACTA 2.0?
Re:
at what point does it become viable, or even Necessary, to take advantage of that?
because frankly i don't see this nonsense ending without the entire corrupt system being torn down and rebuilt on a different model, with the old elite dead (whether by violence or age, it matters little, but there must be a Break between the old way and the new, and simply having new people of a younger generation take up the roles of the old is the slowest way to change such things, if it works at all... and is perhaps too slow all togeather at this point.)
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