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Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 3:11 pm, January 19th, 2010
"The problem is, no-one can present any serious evidence of this, only a few neoliberal papers that inevitably have a piece of mathematical circular logic hidden in their depths that mean the conclusions always magically match the economists' pre-concieved ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 9:50 am, January 19th, 2010
@Marty: Yeah, I can buy that. Actually, you might be able to help: I'm looking for a decent data series on the NZ minimum wage (and other wage regulation), but I can't find one after half an hour or so of Googling. Ideally, I'd be able to go back as far as ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 9:17 am, January 19th, 2010
DPF noted the poll is shonky, and I tend to agree in this case. It gave respondents only three options: reduce the minimum wage; hold minimum wage steady at $12.50/hour; increase minimum wage to $15/hour. I'm perfectly willing to believe 60% of kiwis want ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 9:10 am, January 19th, 2010
I'm pretty much agnostic on the minimum wage at this stage, so I won't comment on that here, but I will offer a correction: "That would lift the minimum wage nearly back above 60% of the average wage, where it traditionally was before the neoliberal ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 12:07 am, January 7th, 2010
My bad. Apologies.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 2:19 pm, January 6th, 2010
Agree totally on the abysmal standard of the AP piece. There's a much better short summary at Popular Science: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/nasa-finds-hotter-weirder-bodies-ever-sky?page= I'm not sure where the AP got 14000 degrees Celsius ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 3:29 pm, November 23rd, 2009
Hi Marty: thanks for the graceful response. I'm a little pressed for time this afternoon, so I won't be able to reply in full until a bit later; suffice to say there are a couple of quibbles, and a couple of points I'll be conceding to you as well. Just ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 11:18 am, November 13th, 2009
Yeah, because National is the party of the Wall amendment. When it comes to gay rights stuff, my position is pretty simple: a pox on all their houses. And how the hell am I equating being gay with waving the pink flag? I'm pointing out that different gay ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 10:05 am, November 13th, 2009
I can't speak for Rocky, but I imagine she brought the example up to demonstrate that in politics, taking offence is weapon used opportunistically, and often hypocritically. An example: I take opportunistic offence at you calling Chris Finlayson "an Uncle ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 7:19 am, November 12th, 2009
I've gotta say, even though I'm not historically your biggest fan: this post is awesome. It's amazing how the towering stupidity of TVNZ can unite everyone from all along the political spectrum.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 10:54 am, September 11th, 2009
Toad: If the 5% threshold were abolished, the Kiwi Party would have had 1 MP in 2008. It's the magic of Sainte-Laguë.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 7:25 am, August 24th, 2009
We didn't. The "gap" increased a little both in absolute and relative terms. Check the source cited under the graph if you don't believe me. (For the record: I happen not to believe economics-by-league-table is very interesting to start with, but if we're ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 7:54 pm, August 5th, 2009
Hear hear. If the decision-maker's Wellington-based, coffee's on me.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:33 pm, August 5th, 2009
Apologies QtR. My comment wasn't really directed at you. I'm a terrible communicator, and I'm not quite sure why I put that particular comment there. If I were English, I would be complaining to TVNZ and 3News. This would open me up to accusations of ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:23 pm, August 5th, 2009
Just because something's been published, it doesn't follow that it's cool to publicize it.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:20 pm, August 5th, 2009
Toad, I'm not trying to divert attention away from the English controversy: I'm pointing out that publishing a politician's home address is seriously uncool. I'm doing that in the forum I regard as most appropriate: viz the comment thread to the blog post ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 4:58 pm, August 5th, 2009
I'm sorry, but I've gotta ask: how precisely does this round out the picture? Does knowing the precise address where the DPM's family live make any difference—any difference at all—to the debate. Wasn't it sufficient to know that the house is in Karori ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 4:18 pm, July 28th, 2009
This is really interesting, if it can be confirmed for certain (this generally takes a decade or so, until the Presidential Library is opened). The last President to write his own speeches was Reagan. Certainly his stump speech and inauguration were ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 11:55 pm, July 21st, 2009
I can buy all that quite happily. Maybe it's just a case of me being in too close; I'm within earshot of the grievance-airing, so I take that to be "normal". In that case, I'm really not the best person to comment.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:09 pm, July 21st, 2009
@PB: I'm happy to stand corrected here, and I don't have the time right now to dig through all the old archives. From memory, it was this part of the notes that was contentious, and further reports attributed the statement to Smith. (I once won a prize at ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:03 pm, July 21st, 2009
Ag, it's remarkably tacky to imagine you've looked into my soul and divined my opinion about a piece of scientific research you assume I haven't read. I'm very familiar with the study, and I had no problem with it (with the exception of John J Ray and his ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 1:39 pm, July 21st, 2009
@PB: What is long-forgotten, of course, is that Don Brash never said "gone by lunchtime". Lockwood Smith did. Yet it was repeated mindlessly, ad nauseum, and uncritically by Labour supporters for years. I'll have to think about your broader point a bit, ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:52 am, July 21st, 2009
From this, I must conclude that you've never been in the same pubs as me, and that you've definitely never been in the same National Party meetings and conferences as me. I've long lost count of the number of people who tried a "gone by lunchtime" taunt at ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 5:27 am, July 21st, 2009
I sincerely hope it is a sense of irony, and not supreme arrogance, Ag, that leads you to invoke "scientific fact" and then proceed to burden it with a proviso—Of course the fact that conservatives will tend to deny such studies outright only confirms ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 11:27 am, July 10th, 2009
Richard: spot on in general. (Though I'm rather too loyal to National to see the Nats in quite the terms you do, you do identify a real danger for them.) In Farrar's defence, well, he is a pollster by profession, so it's kinda inevitable that he'll see ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 10:57 am, July 10th, 2009
1: Here's a newspaper contemporary to the trade deal that suggests pretty clearly the deal was not "signed under the National coalition government". 2: Nobody's arguing that "the First Labour Government was tight with Hitler." Not Watson, not Crawford, not ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 4:28 pm, July 8th, 2009
Sounds plausible. I don't buy it personally, but it's a legitimate reading. I withdraw my criticism.Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 12:19 pm, July 8th, 2009
I think you've taken O'Sullivan out of context when you say: "According to Fran, Bill English is opposed to Brash's leadership out of personal bitterness:" O'Sullivan's very next sentence is: "Frankly, both English and Brash are better than that."Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 12:06 pm, June 23rd, 2009
The scaling if the bottom axes is fine: the ticks are nine months apart. I have quibbles with this post; the scaling on the charts isn't one of them. (The y-axis of the last chart might more usefully start at zero, as this would clarify that the values all ...Written By: BK Drinkwater - Date published: 9:31 pm, June 13th, 2009
Lee is at Labour campaign HQ congratulating David Shearer as I type.
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