Some of those people affected must have had a horrible time in the coldest parts of the past month or so.

That’s interesting — so you can only give your vote (and any you’ve been given) to someone you know personally? Sounds like a fun thought experiment.

First, would you compel people to vote for someone else? How would you prevent people from holding onto votes they’ve been given in the hope that they will get into power based on that?

Second, if you do compel people to transfer their votes to someone, wouldn’t that end up with just one person being given power in the end? How would you set up, say, a 120-seat parliament?

The ones I’m most annoyed by are the pay equity cuts, the ferries, and the Lake Onslow battery. The general attitude towards environmental concerns also sucks, as does their attitude towards Maori.

Stuns me that people actually think that all the parties are the same because actually no, not all parties do this sort of thing.

Edit: forgot to mention completely f***ing up the health system.

Yes. I am disheartened by the financial support the far right has. I’m surprised Labour hasn’t tried to fight this battle, personally. They can’t think they’d ever attract that funding from those particular funders themselves, so why hold back?

That’s an interesting perspective given that some parties have held their seats for decades. Do you really think the parties have earned trust or that some people just vote for them out of habit?

I take a ‘build it and they will come’ approach: I think that if it is possible to actually get in, the minor parties will be able to consistently find better candidates who are willing to invest the time. Right now there is often no point, except for the top of the party list.

If you really think that minor parties place the country at risk I guess you’d be in favour of electoral systems that reduce their chances of getting in.

I hadn’t considered that the rising population might be an issue that people would like to address here. I know it’s been a concern in the US in the House. For me I’m comfortable with having 120 MPs as I don’t want to pay more MP salaries. I can understand why other people might think otherwise.

I’m also reluctant to dump the party vote system. I’m in the regions and my politics are out of step with pretty much everyone around me. With the party vote system I can vote for the party of my choice and know that my vote counts towards their final total. If it were done with an electorate only, my voice would be gerrymandered into not being heard at all, even with smaller electorates.

That’s hearty National territory there. Be interesting to see if the electorate has slipped further right-wing though; NZ First and ACT might appeal more to any new true believers.

Fair enough. Hence why I’ve been arguing to retain the party vote system under my proposed tinkering rather than moving to electorates only.

Kind of. I’m not suggesting a move from MMP.

That’s true.

I agree that Goldsmith now has too many portfolios and you’re right about how this imperils good governance. It seems to me though that National already has options within its existing caucus and doesn’t need more MPs if the goal is simply to distribute the workload. This is more of a choice from the prime minister about how he delegates work and voters can decide what they think about it, I guess.

Labour was similar, as I recall — there were a few ‘super ministers’ in charge of a lot.

I take your point regarding gerrymandering. It’s not quite the right word. Replace it with a word that means ‘made to vote in elections where my vote will not materially affect the outcome whereas under the current system it can’, if you like.

At this rate, I’m grateful for anything that isn’t burning fossil fuels.

I’d rather see solar and wind power though.

Yeah, that’s where I was going with that. I kind of get it as I’m in the regions and our population is low enough that our roads suck and are expected to suck in perpetuity. Seems the Govt. is mostly fascinated by trying to grow the infrastructure of Hamilton and Auckland.

My son was in NICU. I thought of his time in hospital as soon as the news about the Palestinian hospital broke. This is terrible.

Embarrassing for BMW.

I can’t be the only one who actively tries to reduce the number of subscriptions I have. It’s terrible for the monthly budget. Gamepass lasted only a few months for me before I decided that I didn’t get sufficient value out of it. Something about paying monthly to retain access to a game that I can otherwise buy rubbed me the wrong way.

I haven’t posted on Reddit since they killed third-party apps. Funny thing is, I was a paid subscriber for years before they did that.

Here to be the change I want to see in the world. Go Lemmy.

The gold standard would be to make each student do an oral defense of their work. Hand-written exams are good too. Both of these approaches are time-consuming to mark, though.

Assessment design can require students to perform analysis of rare and obscure source material, so that there are no published materials for AI to draw on (which can make it struggle). Similarly, asking for a good bibliography that lists the sources used in the text and formats it correctly would show up the hallucinatory tendencies of AI, I think — though I haven’t tried the latest models.

At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.

Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.

All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.

Great to see. This lad is going places.