Picking parliament proportions precisely

Every election, I wonder how voting could be improved to ensure the parliament we get is a true representation of what we want. One idea I (and many others, I’m sure) have had is to vote on policies, not parties. That would mean doing something like the Vote Compass and then your vote going to the party that most closely aligns with your points of view. There are a number of downsides to that, but one of the biggest is that it is too much effort for a lot of people, and would probably just put people off of voting altogether.

Another idea I had prior to this past election was for voters to vote on the makeup of parliament itself, not just the number one party they wanted in. That means they could give 60% of their vote to Labour, 30% to Greens and maybe 10% to National because they agree with them just a little bit. The obvious issue with that system is the same as the system above, in that it is too much effort for a lot of people. Then I thought of a simplified system that would rely heavily on computer vision, but is nothing current technology can’t handle.

Normalised proportional voting (NPV; because every voting system needs an acronym) would mean people could put as much or as little effort into voting as they’d like. Voters would have a very similar ballot paper to what we have now, but they could put as many ticks against a party as they liked. The ballot paper would then be scanned and the proportion of ticks against each party calculated and normalised to 1. This means each voter still gets one vote, but it is split between parties to represent how they’d like to see parliament. So, for example, 4 ticks for Labour, 2 for Greens and 1 for National would split the vote 0.6 to Labour, 0.3 to Greens and 0.1 to National (rounded to one decimal place, but it wouldn’t need to be). It wouldn't matter how many ticks you gave overall, as it would all get normalised to 1. And if you can’t be bothered with all that ticking, you can just give one tick to your favourite party and they get the whole vote. It doesn’t have to be ticks either, that’s just how the current system works.

The closest voting system I’ve found (and I’ve never studied politics, so I’m relying on Wikipedia here) is Single Transferable Vote (STV). However, that would require voters to rank parties, and the preference between 1st and 2nd is not always the same as between 2nd and 3rd. The NPV system would more accurately reflect the voter party preferences.

As I said, I’m not a politics major or anything, so there are probably huge holes in this system. But I feel like it might have legs in some form or another, and I’d love to hear from those of you more knowledgeable than me as to why it would or would not be a good idea.

To get the ball rolling, here are some thoughts I had on why it may or may not work or be adopted:

1. The computer processing may be untrustworthy, or be viewed as untrustworthy.
2. Splitting your vote may be seen as diluting it, so people would just revert to giving a single vote out of fear of their 'number 1' party not gaining power.
3. Smaller parties might have more of a shot of getting into parliament, as people could throw them a bone if they kind of want them to be there, but not enough to waste a whole vote.
4. There is huge potential for analysis into how people view parties in relation to each other, e.g. 67% of people who gave National 0.6 or above also gave Greens at least 0.1.
5. Smaller parties may form to fill a niche made apparent by the analysis of voting patterns, e.g. if 67% of people who gave National 0.6 or above also gave Greens at least 0.1, then maybe there is room for a Blue-Green party.

How odds

I just finished watching a video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver about state lotteries in the US. He points out how little money actually goes to 'the public good' as claimed by the ads. It turns out, not much. This got me wondering about the equivalent NZ lotteries and other 'beneficial' gambling outfits, most importantly the NZ Lotteries Commission. Not just how likely it is to win, but how much good they actually do.

The NZ Lotteries Commission 2014 annual report says that people spent $988,766,000 on Lotto, Big Wednesday, Instant Kiwi and Keno; nearly a billion dollars. Of that money, people were awarded a total of  $486,411,000 in prizes. That's less than half. If my maths are correct, that means that if everyone who buys a Lotto ticket decided instead to burn half the cost of that ticket and keep the rest, on average people would come away with more money. But that's not the point is it. There's the dream of the big win; becoming an instant millionaire. We all know the odds, but we can beat them. Well, the odds of winning Powerball on a $12 ticket are 1 in 3.8 million. Those are huge odds to overcome, but not impossible. People do it all the time. To put it in some perspective though, the odds of contracting motor neuron disease (MND) are about 1 in 15,000. So you are roughly 250 times more likely to contract MND than win the millions. If winning Lotto is considered achievable, then developing MND must be considered a near certainty. To be perfectly honest, I'm one of the people who buys Lotto tickets thinking they can overcome the odds, so that terrifies me.

We all know the odds are insurmountable, and deep down we all know we're never going to win the big one. But we don't just do it for us, we do it for the community and all the good that the NZ Lottery Grants Board does. There's still $502 million left after awarding prizes; that's got to do plenty of good for the community, right? Well, first we have to consider all the running costs of this government-led numbers racket. Firstly, there's GST, that about $60 million. Then there is the lotteries levy ($54 million) and the problem gambling levy ($1.3 million; that's it?!). Other sales-related costs, such as ticket costs and transaction fees, which equate to a further $74 million. After that there are various costs for marketing, personnel, building, IT etc. What's left for the NZ Lottery Grants Board to hand out to community organisations? $45,485,443. Less than one tenth of the revenue, after prizes have been paid out, goes to the community. Still, $45 million is quite a bit, and the people who receive it wouldn't get that money without Lotto, so it's not all bad. Here's a graph to showing ticket sales, prizes awarded and community giving, mostly for the sake of graphs.

However, remember how burning half the cost of a ticket was more beneficial for everyone? Well if we instead took that money we would otherwise be burning, literally or hypothetically, and sent it directly to the NZ Lotteries Commission, not only would all us 'players' be better off financially, but they would still be getting $494 million dollars in revenue. They still have to pay the personnel, building, and IT costs, and maybe even marketing to get you to donate, but there's no ticket sales or gambling involved. That means no GST, no levies and no sales costs. That's an extra $211 million or so that can go directly to the NZ Lottery Grants Board to be distributed to the community; nearly five times as much as they currently get. The Dargaville Community Cinema Charitable Trust could be getting $94k instead of their current $20k. The citizens of Dargaville might finally be able to see that space battle movie everyone's been talking about.

It's a nice idea, but of course that's not going to happen. People don't want to think about odds and economics when all the ads are telling us we could be flying personal jets with ungrateful dogs (don't get me started on that bloody dog). The charity angle is a nice way of justifying our soft-core gambling addictions, but the real reason we're buying that ticket is because we think that this week we'll beat the odds and contract a degenerative neurological disorder 250 times over, I mean win Powerball.

Dense and Denser

The Auckland Unitary plan was released and our little stem-cell of a community up in Riverhead is concerned that we will be swallowed by urban sprawl thanks to the redefining of the Rural Urban Boundary (RUB).

This post isn't really about that, but it's what sparked my investigation (as well as reading this article a while ago and deciding to delve into the figures myself). I hear people mention Auckland's spread out population and unnecessary urban sprawl all the time. "Auckland is the size of London with one tenth the population", they say. As well as, "Auckland is too spread out, that's why public transport doesn't work". Then there's the age old adage that I've heard since cows outnumbered Albany residents, "in terms of land area, Auckland is the second largest city, behind Los Angeles".

I'm not sure where the latter came from. In fact, it's actually very hard to find metropolitan area statistics, as these are defined differently in each country and mean different things. According to Wikipedia, "the parameters of metropolitan areas, in both official and unofficial usage, are not consistent"; so a comparison is flawed from the beginning. However, like a good scientist I'll proceed anyway. Using the numbers I could get hold of, I found that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area encompasses LA and Orange county and covers 12,520 km², while the Greater Auckland Region (a similar geographical type of area) only covers 4,894 km². I guess that doesn't really say much, because it's only two metropolitan areas. So, I found a couple more metropolitan areas for comparison. The Tokyo Metropolitan Area is 13,400 km². That rules out LA as being the largest. The Sydney Metropolitan Area covers 12,145 km². Not as big as LA, but still bigger than Auckland. It's still hard to find any data on the whole 'volcanic pancake' theory, but it's not looking promising.

I'm here to write about things that matter to people though, like housing density and public transport. For that we have to concern ourselves with the urban area. This is the more populated part of a city. In Auckland, of the 1.5 million people that live in the greater metropolitan area, approximately 1.4 million live within the urban area. Demographia defines an urban area as, "the lighted area that can be observed from an airplane (or satellite) on a clear night". When you look at a city on Google Maps, it's reasonably obvious what would be called the urban area. It's the large grey mass nestled amongst green fields.  Here's a very rough diagram I made showing the Auckland urban area overlayed on London, Sydney and Los Angeles.

You can see that Auckland (the one that looks like a depressed seahorse) is considerably smaller than the other cities. It's one third the size of London, so there's another comparison that's inaccurate. Overall, the Auckland urban area ranks 229th in urban area size; equal with Kiev, Nanchang, Warsaw and Huntsville, Alabama.  "But the population is much smaller", you say. This is true, however next we look at population density within those urban areas; those statistics are much easier to come by and tell a different story.

Ignoring the developing world and their over-crowded cities (not altogether or course, just for the purpose of this post), here is a table of Auckland's population density compared with other major cities (hand selected by me for maximum dramatic effect).

According to this, Auckland is on par with Los Angeles, a little less dense than Amsterdam and denser than Sydney. Denser than Sydney? But their public transport is amazing?! That's right, so there goes another argument. Our public transport sucks just because it does, not through any fault of the city's layout. Since we're always trying to live up to our big brother, let's look a little closer at Australasia.

Auckland is actually the most densely populated city in Australasia. Even Hamilton and Christchurch are more densely populated than Sydney (although I'm sure these figures are pre-earthquake) and Wellington is equally dense. This is just the urban area, remember, not all the rural parts and satellite towns. But even in regards to this part of Auckland, people complain about public transport and the fact that we're building "out not up". I won't go into the fact that when the council dares to suggest people build up, there is opposition to that as well.

The fact is, Auckland isn't as sprawling as people seem to think. It's urban area is considerably smaller than most other major cities and it's population density is higher than many. Does that mean I want Auckland to keep expanding and Riverhead to be swallowed up? Of course not. But it will. I just hope that the low density excuse gets phased out and we can focus on improving infrastructure like public transport alongside the expansion. Most important of all, I hope people consider the actual population density of Auckland when complaining about urban sprawl instead of assuming we're more spread out than LA just because they can see a tree from their bedroom window.

PS: I spent a while putting together a full spreadsheet of all the urban land areas and populations in the world (taken from Demographia.com), so if you want it you can download it here.

No Impinging on the Bingeing

I was quite surprised that parliament voted against raising the drinking age in any shape or form. Not because I think it should be raised, but because I thought the general consensus among adults not affected in any way by the change in drinking age was that it should be raised. As I said, I don't think it should be raised. The first, and possibly most important and final, point is that if you're old enough to be trusted to vote and determine the future of the country, why shouldn't you be able to buy yourself a pint? As it stands the gambling age is still 20, which makes even less sense. That's a different story though. Secondly, I'm not convinced binge drinking, let alone binge drinking among 18 and 19 year olds, is as big a problem for society as the media makes it out to be. Anyone can go out with a camera and find a representative from any age group behaving poorly as a result of alcohol. If you go into town no less, you're bound to find the binge-drinking youth because people over 25 find town on a Friday and Saturday night hellish, expensive and above all, too filled with young people who make us feel old and out of place. Us older kids largely choose to stay at home and binge drink. And remember, just because that wine you're knocking back cost $40 a bottle, doesn't mean you're not binge drinking. I've been binge drinking for 15 years. For the first 3 I was under age and for the last 9 I've been above the proposed drinking age of 20.

Excessive drinking has been part of culture since a damp bag of grain first got left in an overheated storehouse too long. What piece of writing or film set in ye olden days doesn't depict people getting their booze on. Perhaps it's largely a British influence on our own culture, but they're not the only culprits (although they may be one of the worst). Other European cultures have managed it better, such as Spain and France. This is possibly a result of a lower drinking age, making alcohol more accessible and less desirable. Regardless of where binge drinking is occurring though, it is not the exclusive domain of the irresponsible youth. I think one of the problems is that young people still know how to enjoy themselves. There's a scene in 'We Bought a Zoo' where the daughter can't sleep because there's a party next door. When the father comes in and asked what's wrong she says, 'their happy is too loud'. I think that pretty much sums up a lot of people's arguments against this sort of thing.

Well, not entirely. Obviously there are other factors, like destruction of property and clogging up the A&E. Destruction of property? I know first hand that that's not the exclusive domain of youth either; they're just fitter and able to outrun the consequences. Clogging up the A&E? Sure, it takes beds away from people who otherwise need them, but so does falling off your ladder because you didn't secure it well enough, or running over your toes with a lawnmower. Most accidents are the result of stupidity or carelessness, and it can be argued that they are largely self-inflicted one way or another. The fact that the careless self-infliction relates to an overdose of alcohol isn't all that different from a severed toe. If they don't want accidents in the A&E, they should just call it the E.

Then we come to the next big one. Drink driving. I hear people say all the time that the careless youth are responsible for a large percentage of drink driving accidents. I had no reason to doubt that, after all, they haven't been driving or drinking as long. Why would we expect them to be good at either? Anyway, I looked up the stats on the Ministry of Transport website and present to you the flashy graph you're been hanging out for (this is mean data from 2008-2010):

This clearly shows that 15-19 year olds cause a high number of alcohol and drug related fatalities (the stats I gathered didn't differentiate). They also cause a high number of non-alcohol related accidents. Like I said earlier, I would expect nothing less from people who have only been driving for a couple of years. It would be better if there were no fatalities, but sadly it's something we have to accept for the time being. Raising the drinking age might reduce alcohol-related fatalities, but 15-19 year old inflicted road toll would still be higher than many other age groups. 20-24 year olds are the biggest offenders in terms of both alcohol related and total fatalities. There's no reason to think that would change if the drinking age was raised. Interestingly, 30-34 year olds have the highest percentage of alcohol-related fatalities. So, there's an age group that has clearly learned to be more careful on the road, but after a few drinks that all goes out the window. Maybe they (or should I say 'we'?) should be more heavily targeted by the anti-drink driving campaigns.

Most interesting of all is that of all the fatalities on the road, only 34% had alcohol or drugs as a contributing factor. That means that in 66% of fatal road accidents, the person responsible was stone sober. I find that a much more terrifying prospect. It also makes me wonder, how can drink driving be considered a major contributing factor when twice as many accidents occur without it being involved? If I was to plot a graph of jeans being a contributing factor, would the statistics look the same? I dare say jeans are involved in more accidents than alcohol. OK, I'm getting into dangerous territory here; I'm on the edge of defending drink driving. That is absolutely not my stance. I loathe it and am glad that it is not as prevalent today as it was a generation ago. Actually, I don't have the stats to back that up, but I'm sure I've read that somewhere.

Right then, what's the answer. People under 20 cause a lot of accidents. Alcohol is a factor in 33% of these. Would raising the age help? I believe there is a developmental age that restricts when kids start drinking. Lowering the age to 16 wouldn't mean 12 year olds would be getting wasted every weekend. They don't need alcohol to have fun, they still have an imagination. Raising ethanol taxes might help. That would encourage low-alcohol products like good old beer over that have built-in regulators to prevent too much alcohol being consumed at once. Granted, you can still drink a lot of beer, but even if you drink 2 litres, that 2 litres is still only 5% alcohol. Drink spirits and you can polish off half a bottle before your body starts protesting, and by then it is way, way too late. People say ban RTDs. I don't agree with that either (although if you banned Woodstock & Cola, I'd wager domestic violence would plummet). 'But the marketing is targeting young girls'. Maybe that's because teenage girls are the number one consumers of all things and so any company will jump at the chance to target them. But young people aren't necessarily going to change their drinking habits based on advertising, they'll just change their brand choice, or worse, drink $10 bottles of fortified water labelled as vodka. At least alco-pop has the same built-in alcohol intake regulator as beer. Lowering the cost of alcohol in town might be another solution. If one wishes to spend hours in town but doesn't wish to spend hundreds of dollars, they preload. This is because town is a living hell and the only way to survive it is to be mildly unconscious. To preload for the next few hours requires a lot of alcohol, otherwise you might sober up in the middle and realise who you're dancing with. The problem here is that all that alcohol one consumed before heading to town hits one all at once. Suddenly the bars don't want you and the cold concrete of the concrete behind a dumpster is your only friend. If drinks were more reasonably priced in town, maybe people wouldn't preload so much and their drinking would be more evenly spaced. More time patronising the bars and less time patronising the stormwater drains.

This is a difficult problem to tackle. Largely because when it comes to alcohol, you can't do many things to youth that don't affect the more responsible, grown-up binge drinkers. One of the only things you can do is raise the drinking age. So, like I said at the beginning, I'm surprised parliament voted against the changes. I dare say tonight the happiness of 18 and 19 year olds will be doubly loud.

All Summer in a Day

If you hadn't heard, Ray Bradbury passed away recently at the age of 92. Since his not wholly unexpected demise, I learned that he only ever acknowledged Fahrenheit 451 as being science fiction, since it was the only story that could come true. All others he considered fantasy, despite being quoted as saying, "The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance; the idea that anything is possible."

One of my favourite short stories I've ever read was written by Ray Bradbury and shared its title with this post, or rather the title of this post was posthumously plagiarised from his short story. If you haven't read it, do. You can download a PDF here. If that doesn't work, try Google, or whatever replacement exists in the dystopian future you currently live in where anarchy rules and Dropbox links no longer work. Don't come back to this post until you've read it; it won't make sense and I might ruin the ending.

So, for those who have read it, which should be anyone reading this far down the post, you will remember that it is a very sad story about a poor girl who, through an unintentional consequence of school bullying, misses a very, very rare event. That event is, of course, a break in the clouds and a brief glimpse of sunshine. Well, I wish to present to you evidence that Ray Bradbury was wrong about his stories being fantasy. For you see, we live in a city that over the past year has begun to resemble a certain Venusian settlement in more ways than a rising bully population.

In the past 12 months, Auckland has been subjected to 41.3 days of constant rain. Not 'constant' constant, but if you add up every rainy hour, that's what you get. That means it's been raining 11.3% of the past 12 months. So what, you say, that's 324.6 days of glorious sunshine. Au contraire, my arithmeticulous friend, the sun doth not shine at night. But you're right, 11.3% might not be that bad. Rain a bit at night, concentrate it over winter and voila; nice, long dry periods for all those outdoor activities. Unfortunately, the rain wasn't concentrated. It's been spread so thinly that we have actually had more rainy days than dry ones. A depressing 51.7% of the last 366 days have had at least 0.2 mm of rain (the minimum rainfall measurement at Auckland Airport). As you can see here, March and April have been the only months recently to buck this average, with January barely scraping above the bar.

In fact, as you can see from the graph to follow, the longest stretch of consecutive dry days we've had is 12 days. That's not even a fortnight without a bit of rain. And that stretch was in April, when all us working schmucks were safely tucked up in our office chairs. In the summer months preceding that the longest dry spell was a mere week.

I don't have time to go into long-term means, or rabble on about how this most likely has nothing to do with climate change. It'll probably all get better, we're due for a good run, blah, blah etc... There's nothing anyone can do about it, I just think of poor Margot every time I look up from my computer and see a break in the clouds and a glimpse of sunshine

I guess then, my point is this: the weather is miserable, you have every right to bitch and moan and if you have any school-aged children locked in your cupboard, there's no hurry to let them out just yet.

Prolonged Delivery

My Kindle arrived today. I'm very excited, but thought I'd share its painstaking journey across the World with you before I allow myself to enjoy it. The journey didn't actually take that long, 3 days less than expected in fact. What was painstaking was that for half the trip my Kindle was knocking about in the back of a CourierPost van while it ambled around Auckland.

I now present a graph to help convey my frustration to you, after which I will forget about the journey and focus on the destination.

Chpr Phn Plns Pls

We get ripped off in NZ. From All Blacks jerseys to dSLRs, we pay more than we should and it's hard to figure out why. Are we too far away, nestled down here in our island paradise? No. I recently bought a camera from a shop in USA, who made a profit out of the sale, had it shipped all the way down here and it still cost me $500 less than if I had gone to a store and bought it. I can't imagine how electronics suppliers, who buy things in bulk and get them shipped in bulk, can charge so much more than their foreign counterparts. I'm sure there are some complex economics behind it, but it doesn't make sense to me. 

However, one thing that we can't buy on eBay is a monthly mobile phone account. Sure, we can buy the phone's cheaper, but it's very hard to ship an ongoing service via USPS. So we come to the crux of this rant. The cost of mobile phone usage in NZ. Since I'm hell bent on finally getting an iPhone (in memoriam to Mr. Jobs, of course), I decided to do a comparison of the prices here in Aotearoa versus those in lands far away. Below is a table of the most comparable plans I could find for NZ, Australia, UK, USA, Canada and Germany. Why Germany? Because they always seem to be in the iPhone business, and I thought I'd branch out from the English-speaking elite. I've gone with the soon-to-be defunct iPhone 16GB on a 24-month contract, because that's what most company's websites, including Vodafone NZ's, still have up for sale. All prices are converted to $NZD (rates as @ 07/10/2011).

As you can see, we are light years behind Australia and the UK. In some cases the costs of the iPhone and the plans themselves are, literally, infinitely better than what we have on offer. Surprisingly, USA, Canada and Germany are relatively expensive. Still mildly better than us in terms of the cost of the iPhone and what you get for your monthly fee, but their plans cost more per month (except Canada) and they're way behind Australia and the UK. Sprint in the US offer a US$99.99 per month plan which gives you infinite everything. Reasonably expensive, but Vodafone NZ doesn't give us an option even close to that sort of potential usage. You wouldn't need a home broadband connection with a contract like that, you could just tether your iPhone to your home computer. The prices aren't directly comparable either, they're just a direct currency conversion. That doesn't take into account the average income, cost of living, chief exports or rising sea levels.

There is something that I should add though. NZ is quite rare in that nearly anywhere you go in this country, you can get reception. Other countries struggle to get coverage to rural areas, so we can consider ourselves lucky there. Still, we are clearly paying for the privilege. Compared with Australia and the UK we are very clearly getting the bum wrap. Compared with the USA, Canada and Germany we are still getting a raw deal, but not as much as I would have thought.

Of course, none of this is going to stop me getting an iPhone is the coming months (I have agonised over whether to switch to Android plenty; it wasn't a matter of blind loyalty, I promise you that). Therein lies the problem. If I want an iPhone, I have to go through Vodafone. Sure, I could spend $1100 and buy an iPhone outright from Apple, then get it hooked up to Telecom or 2Degrees. Believe me, I'd love to do that. It's just that I don't want to spend that sort of money up front. So I have to take what I can get and there's nothing I can do about it, short of bitching about it on the internet. At least soon I'll be able to bitch about it right from the phone itself.

Edit: I thought I'd add some pretty graphs. Everyone loves graphs, right?