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?

Shedding Light

Something happened over the weekend; something wonderful. Something that many have been eagerly anticipating for some time now, and many will rejoice in for months to come. New Zealand was gifted an extra hour of sunlight in which to enjoy the evening. Oh sweet Amun, God above, your brilliance shall be basked in with added euphoria and duration. In short, I love summer. Nay, I despise winter. Perhaps that's unfair though, there are things about winter that I wouldn't want completely removed from my life. Wood fires crackling away while the rain sheets down the windows. Those crisp, sunny days when your dragon's breath hangs in the air as you wrap your scarf ever tighter. Snow gently settling on your skin as you try and convince yourself that it's not just regular sleet. There are some things that only winter can provide. However, there are things that I could do without. One thing in particular: a noticeable absence of daylight.

So it was that I found myself a week or so ago discussing the upcoming blessing that the Department of Internal Affairs was about to bestow upon us. I mentioned that I am always amazed how, sitting in the darkness at 7pm on a winter's night, it's hard to imagine a time where there is still light at 10pm. At some point during the fits of derisive laughter that subsequently surrounded me, I started to think that maybe those I was with didn't necessarily agree with my contemplation. It turns out they thought 10pm was a bit of an exaggeration. Never one to doubt myself in the face of unanimous doubt, I was convinced that it was, at most, an optimistic rounding error. Mostly because I clearly remembered thinking on one night last summer, at around 10pm, that there was still light where six months prior there had been none. I was unable to broaden their minds to the possibility, so it was dropped and the conversation moved on.

Not for me though. Never one to pass up an opportunity to procrastinate at work, I set out to prove, if possible, that the summer months ahead held more daylight hours than my disbelieving companions could fathom. Where else to start a search for such proof than the US Naval Observatory. If there's one thing the US do well, it's providing government websites that generate tables of data which can be openly interpreted to prove a point. I'd used such a service before when some insisted that sea temperatures had varied significantly since we were children (they hadn't; data not blogged).

Ferreting through the tabular possibilities, I chose to focus on three measures of 'light': sunset, civil twilight and nautical twilight. Sunset you should all know about already...I hope. Civil twilight can be defined as the limit at which terrestrial objects can still be clearly distinguished and outdoor activities can be carried out without further illumination. Nautical twilight is defined as the limit at which the horizon is indistinct, however ground objects may still be distinguishable. So, without further ado, I present to you a graph:

As you can see, 10pm may have been an optimistic rounding error. However, at the height of summer (light-wise, not temperature-wise), there is still enough light to distinguish ground objects at 9:53pm. I'd say that falls pretty damn close to my original contemplation. Good enough for me anyway. I can relax, safe in the knowledge that a little over 2 hours before we welcome in 2012, I will be able to walk outside, point to the ground and say, with absolute confidence, "that, my friend, is an object".

The Power of Graphs (and vice versa)

There's a bit of talk going on at the moment about the cost of power, switching companies and whether those companies use renewable energy or not. I hear people bandy around that this company is greener than that company, they generate energy from fairy dust, they use the screams of innocent children. What I don't see or hear is actual data, so I thought I'd have a dig around and find some.

This post is not about whether or not I think the renewable nature of the energy generated should take precedence over the cost of the energy or whether I think coal is the fuel of the Devil and hydro is liquid Jesus. I'm a supporter of renewable energy, but that's mostly because often it's new technology, and I love that. Burning coal to produce energy? What is this, the industrial revolution?! OK, it's now a little bit about what I think. From now on it's just the facts. What this post is really about is presenting some simple graphs that show how the top 5 companies generate their power. This post also isn't about cost, so I'd suggest visiting Powerswitch.org.nz to find that information.

I collected this data from the most recent annual reports available from each of the companies. The GWh produced might be a little bit out of date, but the percentages should be pretty accurate, and the general philosophy of each company definitely won't have changed much.

The first graph shows total energy generation by source. The second graph shows the percentage of the total energy generation that each source provides. 'Other' refers to biomass for Mercury Energy (which is actually Mighty River Power) and Swaption for Contact. What is Swaption you ask? I'm not really sure. Look it up. To make it all a bit easier to digest, I then present a graph that has been simplified down to two categories: non-renewable and renewable.

The next set of graphs are the pie charts. These show individual power companies and just the energy sources they each use. You can interpret this as either total energy generation, percentage of total energy generation or Big Mac equivalents. It's a pie chart, units are irrelevant. The whole pie is everything, segments represent parts of that everything.

Finally, I present one last pie-chart showing NZ's total energy generation. Again, units are irrelevant.

Keep in mind when perusing this data that no matter how a company generates it's electricity, it all gets fed into the national grid. That means that even if you choose the greenest power company imaginable, you still might be boiling your kettle with dolphin tears. That doesn't mean you aren't encouraging companies to use renewable energy sources by supporting them, it just means that you have no guarantees over the power you use. Since 81.6% of NZ's energy is classed as renewable, you probably don't have to feel all that guilty about it anyway. An 18.4% chance of dolphin tears makes for pretty good odds.

So, without further ado, I present to you the graphs.

GMO you didn't!

Articles like this one from Stuff.co.nz irritate me. Not just because they blatantly get basic scientific principles wrong, TV and movies do that all the time. What annoys me is that in the case of genetic modification, all they do is perpetuate ridiculous myths about mad scientists toiling away in their underground lairs creating frog-potatoes that will devour us all. A basic understanding of genetics and the role of DNA would be quite refreshing in a lot of science reporting.

In the article mentioned above, there is one line that urks me, that is "...fundamental flaws in the monitoring of horizontal gene transfer from genetically modified animals disposed of in offal pits." This sentence conjures up images of DNA oozing through the soils and some cow licking it up and growing an extra udder or something. Horizontal gene transfer only occurs in bacteria and some fungi and yeasts. I'm guessing the genetically modified organism (GMO) in question here is actually some sort of bacteria in the cow's gut, not the cow itself. Genes can not spontaneously transfer themselves from one animal to another and instantly incorporate themselves into the DNA of every cell in their body. Viruses can achieve something close to this, but they're not the products of science. If animals could transfer genes by ingesting the tissues of another animal the vegetarians might actually have a valid argument. I'm not sure if the reporter's parents have had this conversation yet, but in order for animals to exchange genetic material, they need to have sex. For that to happen with GMO, first GE animals need to be produced, then they need to escape, then they need to fornicate with similar species, then the offspring need to do the same in order for the gene in question to be perpetuated through a population. To prevent that, it would be wise not to carry out this research in the animals natural habitat. However, cows tend to be reasonably well contained, so a GMO outbreak would require a lot of faulty number 8 wire.

Science reporters should really attend a primary school science class or two, or at the very least do a quick search on Wikipedia before submitting their article.

Non-News is S#@t News

I get my news during the day from Stuff.co.nz. Often they're more tolerable than NZ Herald, often they're bang on par. I just saw a news story titled World Cup advert 'unlikely to offend'. Granted, it made me look. On closer inspection I realised that this was another non-story, paraphrased from a press release.

The story talks about a complaint about the ANZ ad where a couple fire a giant party popper from the top of Ruapehu. It goes on to say that the complaint was rejected.

I visited the Advertising Standards Authority website and found that it wasn't rejected, it had 'no grounds to proceed'. That's the equivalent of someone bursting into the ASA screaming 'this ad offends me' and the ASA waving their hand and saying 'get this man out of my office'. It was barely even considered. THAT'S NOT NEWS!

There were 15 other decisions released yesterday, 10 of which had 'no grounds to proceed'. Why did they choose this one? Probably because it had all those great elements that get the punters clicking: "World Cup", "Pakeha", "Iwi", "Party Popper". They probably wanted us to get all full of national pride and say 'have they no sense of humour?!'. Well I did one better, I wasted part of a Friday afternoon blogging about it and directing traffic to the article.

By the way, if you really want to get all riled up about the lack of humour some individuals possess then visit the ASA website and read some of the full decisions. There's not having a sense of humour and then there's this.

Sincerely,

J. Milledge

Exactly like stealing cars

Big brother, draconian laws, corporate pandering, guilty until proven innocent and all that. Or maybe not so much. With the passing of the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill it would seem that, like so many recording companies and movie studios, our government is refusing to move with the times and instead have decided to stand and fight the inevitable digital revolution. The new law might not be as big a deal as it appears on face value, but it still goes nowhere to addressing the issue of trying to stuff a digital world into a physical pigeon hole.

There was an uproar back in 2009 when an amendment bill (section 92A) was passed that allowed ISPs to cut off a person’s internet access if they suspected them of downloading illegal content, putting the onus of proof on the accused. One of the courageous acts of defiance prompted by this law change was people all over Facebook changing their profile photos to black squares (come on the internet, you can do better than that). This law sought to punish the downloading of illegal content without addressing the problems that caused it, such as hyper-inflated movie prices. To put it in physical world (‘meatspace’) terms, it’s like being arrested for stealing a television and then having to provide a receipt. Of course, it was never intended to be used on every individual who had a sudden desire to watch Joe vs. the Volcano but didn’t want to fork out $3 for a weekly rental (commonly known as a ‘Tom Hankering’). Laws like this are most likely designed to scare people into not doing things by promising more than they can realistically achieve, rather than punishing every possible individual until society has been cleansed.

The new amendment has seen section 92A scrapped and a swathe of changes made to make it slightly harder for people’s internet access to be cut off. A rights holder (Paramount, Sony BGM etc.) informs an IPAP (ISP redefined as an ‘internet protocol address provider’) that they have identified an IP address linked to a specific illegal download. The IPAP then issues the holder of the IP address a warning notice. These warning notices expire after a maximum of 9 months. After three non-expired warning notices an enforcement notice is issued by the IPAP. The IP address holder can then challenge it, in which case the rights owner is notified and can choose to reject the challenge. If rejected it then goes to the Copyright Tribunal and if the IP address holder is found “guilty” they can be issued with a maximum fine of $15,000 and can have their internet account suspended if the Tribunal decides that’s not a completely dickish thing to do.

So, in order to be fined you have to download enough content for the rights holder to take notice. A feat in itself given this country’s extremely low data allowances. You then must do that twice more within 9 months, not including the illegal downloading against the same rights holder within 28 days of the detection notice they issued because they aren’t allowed to issue two notices within that period. You can always challenge them and delay the process, bringing that 9 month expiry ever closer. Once you’ve been issued the enforcement notice and end up in court you’re in trouble. This is where the IPAP will demonstrate that your morally reprehensible acts of piracy have ruined the lives of countless children and are solely responsible for the degradation of modern society, at which point the judge will fine you the amount you saved by not going to the movies and force you to take up one of the other IPAPs offers for free connections and wireless modems. To avoid the horrific fate of having to deal with customer service every 9 months, here are some tips:

* Diversify - download from a number of rights holders so you’re never downloading enough from a single entity to arouse their suspicion.

* Change tack - if you get issued a warning notice, target the rights holder responsible like the rabid pirate they think you are for 28 days straight. Download their entire catalogue of music and movies and then avoid them for 9 months.

* Sleep around - If you really want to continue downloading so much material that every rights holder in the world is issuing you notices left and right, have more than one internet account. They can only target IPs; your details are never released to the rights holder. In fact, when you get sent that second warning notice, change ISP. After the next two warning notices, change ISP. You can pick your favourite two and flit between them every 9 months.

So, other than the fact that this sort of law does nothing to force the studios to rethink their distribution plan or lower prices of existing online content to reduce the need to turn to file sharing, it probably won’t harm the ‘casual pirate’. There may be concerns about rights holders submitting notices for every IP address they find on BitTorrent, but there is a fee associated with each submission payable to the IPAP by the rights holder. It wouldn’t make financial sense for them to target every IP address because they could quickly lose any profits they would hope to gain from legitimate sales.

Much like the amendment to section 59 didn’t see parents hauled off in droves for giving a light smack to a child, and was never intended to, this bill will not see you punished for your illegitimate collection of Bieber tracks. These high-profile bills are most effective in the way they raise awareness and make people second guess themselves before committing what they now perceive to be a crime. Unlike the amendment to section 59 however, which was a huge leap forward in the way society operates, this bill merely clings to the notion that a digital copy of a song or movie is exactly the same as a CD or a DVD. I’ve argued for years that ‘piracy’ doesn’t hurt the artists, it hurts the executives. Musicians make the majority of their money from concerts, so they benefit from more people hearing their music by any means. Those responsible for making movies, (actors, directors, best boy grips) still get paid enough money to make Powerball look like a meat raffle (maybe not the best boy grips, who would most likely still be happy with a meat pack). That might not be the case for independent movies I suppose, but the more obscure the movie, the more likely those that watch it paid for the privilege to do so.

iTunes is great for music, but it’s still only marginally cheaper than a physical CD, yet there are no specific production costs per unit sold (except for data storage, which is cheap but not free). Radiohead should have shown that people will pay for music even if they don’t have to. They made $3.6 million without a record company or even a pricing structure. At an average of $3 per album download ($7.5 for those who actually paid) they earned more than twice as much per album as most artists make through traditional CD sales. It might be different for new artists that don’t already have a fan base, but how many more albums would you buy if they were only $3? iTunes would also be great for renting movies if they weren’t only a dollar less than the video store and took less than 18 hours to download. I can download a movie from BitTorrent in about half an hour. If that cost me $3 each time I wouldn’t download any less. A great example of low price equals high profit is the App Store. At $1.29 per app I don’t know many people that hesitate to download something new on a regular basis. The developers get 70% of that. Angry Birds reached 50 million downloads in December 2010. At 90c per download, that’s $45 million they’ve made in a couple of years. That’s $61,643 a day, which is more than I earn in a week. There are plenty more success stories out there too. Maybe not quite to that extent, however if someone takes 6 months to write an app that reaches 100,000 downloads they make $90,000 and all it cost them was time. Many millions have been made out of people sitting on their couch with nothing good to watch on TV and $1.29 burning a hole in their bank balance.

The biggest thing holding back the music and movie industries from fully embracing this sort of pricing structure is that record companies and movie studios are scared of losing profits and becoming obsolete, so they fight to keep it exactly the way it is, potentially taking money away from the artists they claim to be protecting. They do this by working with lawmakers to produce such things as the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill. As long as these sorts of laws are perpetuated, digital media will be forced into a style of marketplace and pricing structure that was designed for physical items requiring production, distribution and marketing. All of that takes place digitally now. Rethink the industry to reflect the product; don’t change laws to force the product into the existing thinking. You wouldn’t hear of a law that prevented the development of alternative fuels to protect the profits of oil companies, or legislation that banned the sale of gardening tools to stop people growing their own food. Freely downloading digital media is not the same as stealing a physical item; I hope that in the near future the lawmakers will come to realise that. In the mean time, don’t worry too much about the new law changes. The copy of Twilight your daughter is currently downloading is just as unlikely to get you prosecuted as clipping her round the ear for watching it; and only one of those things is morally reprehensible.

Hypocritical Oaf

It's an often asked question: Is God responsible for tragedies, or if not could He have prevented them?

I'm not going to go into the existence of God here, however I will get into how much influence He has on the movements of the Earth. I find it silly that people would claim God has any control over natural disasters, in the same way I find it silly that fundamentalist Christians deny the theory of evolution.

If I was God, hypothetical of course, I wouldn't bother creating a universe that I had to monitor every single moment and control every single aspect. If I'm busy creating universes I'm probably a bit smarter than that. I'd do it more like someone might program a computer game. I'd come up with the concept, draw up some designs, then work on creating a number of algorithms that will allow the universe to go about it's thing. Of course I'd want to be able to alter things from time to time, no one wants to play a computer that has no user input. Hence, I would create physics to allow things to interact without causing too many errors, I'd install evolution to allow things to adapt to their environment and finally some jerks to make it interesting. Then I'd sit back and watch, occasionally collapsing governments or creating new mountain ranges if I was bored.

Now, what irritates me about the question is that people can't seem to decide whether or not He is directly responsible when disaster strikes. The answer to the question is largely based on the outcome of the disaster, particularly in relation to the loss of human life. Here's an example from Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch Barry Jones:

5th September 2010: 'Roman Catholic Bishop of Christchurch Barry Jones said in the wake of the earthquake many people were finding comfort in the church. "We just have to give thanks to God that there's no-one dead."'

24th February 2011: 'Bishop Jones reminded everyone that bad things happening was not God punishing people, despite the "tragedy that has unfolded in our city over the past 24 hours". "Such thinking is a mistake ... it's not about vengeance," he said.'

We should thank God that people were not killed in September, but can't blame Him when they were in February? You can't have it both ways Mr. Jones. Passive God or vengeful God. At least if it's one of those we know what we're dealing with. Unpredictable, erratic God? How is that any different to having no God at all? Oh, right...

Too many spirits, not enough Christmas

Wanting to get into the Christmas spirit we rented ‘A Christmas Carol’. An animated adaptation of the classic book. Having seen Scrooge flying through the air, sliding down bannisters and lots of pretty colours and whimsical music in the trailer we settled in for some holiday cheese. Oh, dear God, were we not expecting what the next hour and a half would bring. This movie is dark; REALLY dark. Broken-jawed ghosts shackled in chains doomed to walk the Earth for all eternity dark. Struggling families with dying, crippled children dark. Being chased by the shadow of Death and his screaming shadow horses dark. The scenes that didn’t result in horrified recoiling were so lathered in Charles Dickens' olde English that it took all my attention just to decipher what the characters were talking about. Sure, there are a few scenes with pretty colours and whimsical music, but these mostly come at the end, after you’ve already been subjected to an hour of panicked screams, horrifying visuals and insights into the miserable lives of the Victorian-era working class.

I’m not having a go at the story. It’s a story of self-reflection, second chances and all that. The movie probably captured the mood and message of the book perfectly. I didn’t feel it was a particularly good movie in many ways (motion capture animation kind of weirds me out, I blame the uncanny valley, and I found the whole 'ghost of Christmas present' scene to be visually confusing). What struck me most about this is that this movie was marketed at children. It was marketed as a delightful holiday romp. If they hadn’t intended it for children, maybe the trailer should have included the scene where the shadow of Death (ghost of Christmas future) dangles Scrooge over his own grave while he pleads for his life.

There’s a certain ignorance from the studios that causes the mis-marketting of these movies. Anything that doesn’t feature live actors seems to be automatically assumed to be for children. It’s like giving a piña colada to a child because it looks like fruit juice. This phenomenon still dogs The Simpsons for some people. Those people are all the more moronic for it, but I have heard comments like ‘I don’t feel like watching cartoons’. 'Cartoons' they say! Heaven forbid they should ever buy their niece or nephew a birthday present from a Japanese video store ('oh look, this one has a girl in a school uniform holding some sort of microphone, it must be similar to High School Musical'). It also affected Fantastic Mr. Fox, one of my favourite movies and one of the funniest movies of the past few years. The jovial DVD cover image of the characters riding a sidecar was reminiscent of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and in no way did the movie justice. It’s like studios pay people to make movies, watch a 30 second highlights reel and devise a marketing strategy. But there’s more than just ignorance at play. There’s a certain level of irresponsibility that goes along with it. Insisting a movie is for children when it’s not simply because you can’t figure out a way of marketing animated films to adults is almost a form of child abuse. Saying A Christmas Carol is for children because it’s animated is the same as saying Event Horizon is for children because it has a spaceship in it. I wonder how many parents have sat their kids down to watch A Christmas Carol while they were doing something in another room, probably wrapping presents I suppose, only to come back and find them rocking gently in a corner muttering something about Tiny Tim.

I don't think it’s a new phenomenon either. Have you actually seen Dumbo? He gets wasted and starts hallucinating in a scene that would make Pink Floyd shift uncomfortably in their seats. Granted, the rest of the movie is pretty child-friendly, but that scene is a tenth of the whole movie. A lot of the animated films of the 40s and 50s were similar. I can’t say whether they were marketed towards kids at the time, or whether kids at the time routinely got hammered and hallucinated, but they're definitely marketed as nothing but kids movies now.

So, this is a plea to studios and the general public alike. The use of animation in movies and television does not automatically pigeon-hole them as perfect for children. Sometimes it’s not a case of being aimed at kids but still entertaining for adults (a la Shrek, Nemo, How to Train a Dragon etc…). Sometimes they are simply meant for adults, and should require a pre-viewing before subjecting little Bobby to a lifetime of therapy. A movie should be judged on its own merit, not assigned an audience based on how the poster is going to look, especially now that animation has become so versatile. Once the public acknowledges that, the studios might be willing to accept it too and we’ll see more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox doing well at the box office because they’re being marketed at the right audience. That means more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox being made, and that is definitely not a bad thing. We also might be able to start watching movies like A Christmas Carol with the proper expectations and not sit through an hour of dark, dark soul-searching, all the while waiting for the cutesy squirrel character to come bounding onto the screen and lighten the mood.

500m Straw Clutch

Australia did tremendously well at the recently closed Commonwealth Games in Delhi. They blitzed the field with gold after gold, showing that it's not the size of a country's population that matters, but how you use it. Congratulations to them and their athletes. They're a relatively small country that have consistently punched well above their weight. It's hard to fault their performance. Hard, but not impossible. What sort of Kiwi would I be if I didn't waste my time trying to find a way to bring the Aussie's down a peg?

For this I have burrowed through the data to uncover that vital piece of information that I can skew in such a way that if you squint it almost makes Australia look less-than brilliant, and hopefully move NZ up a couple of spots in the process.

In the interest of conciseness, and because making tables in HTML is incredibly tedious, I'm only going to list the top 5 countries (and NZ and Australia if they aren't up there).

Firstly, the standard medals table, ranked by gold medals (and then total if there's a tie):

Ranking	Country	Gold Medals
1	Australia	74
2	India	38
3	England	37
4	Canada	26
5	Malaysia	12
11	New Zealand	6

The only thing you can say about that is that Australia didn't get as many golds as in previous years; it's their lowest gold medal haul since Auckland in 1990. That's about as small a consolation as they come. That's gold though. There's a common line of thought that says that a bigger population means that you should win more gold medals. Another way of looking at it is that a bigger population gives you a higher chance of winning each gold medal because you have more people to choose from. So Australia had a 5 times higher chance of winning each gold than NZ. Wouldn't that be reflected in the total medal count then?

Ranking	Country	Total Medals
1	Australia	177
2	England	142
3	India	101
4	Canada	75
5	New Zealand	36

Well, I guess we moved up a few spots. Unfortunately, Australia didn't budge. It looks like I have to manipulate the data a little bit more to get what I want. Luckily I'm a scientist, so that's pretty much my job.

For my next trick I'll look at number of gold medals per capita. Surely a big old country like Australia will falter when faced with the likes of small-and-mighty NZ. I'll use millions of people per gold medal so the numbers don't get out of hand. The smaller the better in this case.

Ranking	Country	Population per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	0.01
2	Cayman Islands	0.06
3	Samoa	0.06
4	Australia	0.30
5	Bahamas	0.35
9	New Zealand	0.73

Curses! I suppose that knocked them off the top spot. I think I can do better than that though, and maybe even get New Zealand a little higher. Modern sports is all about money, right? Then GDP (in millions of USD$) per gold medal should weasel out the over-spenders.

Ranking	Country	GDP per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	$60
2	Samoa	$163
3	Cayman Islands	$1549
4	Kenya	$2516
5	Cyprus	$6227
9	Australia	$12497
16	New Zealand	$20860

Ha! Take that Australia! What's the matter? Earn too much money do we? So that's the first task, taking Australia out of the top 5. Sadly, NZ has also been pushed down, all the way to number 16. For us to overtake Australia I'm going to need to get things nice and convoluted on the home straight. Here goes. GDP in USD$ per head of population per gold medal. This can't possibly fail...

Ranking	Country	GDP per Capita per Gold Medal
1	India	$28.7
2	Kenya	$65.2
3	Nigeria	$97.1
4	Uganda	$232.8
5	South Africa	$476.7
7	Australia	$555.7
19	New Zealand	$4747.6

Damn it! Lousy Aussie overachievers. Australia actually did slightly better and NZ did slightly worse. That was a waste of time (unlike the rest of these tables...). Good on India though, sort of. They must have blown a lot of lunch money on training their athletes for these games.

I suppose whatever way you look at it Australia did pretty well. Not even the fact that they have the second highest GDP per capita of all the nations competing at the Commonwealth Games (Isle of Man has the highest) can account for the number of gold medals they are capable of pulling in, they just got too many. I would have loved to look at medals per athlete competing per country, but Wikipedia let me down there. Not even Google could find me the information I needed.

I've tried all sorts of combinations and I just can't get NZ ahead of Australia. I guess the only hope for all my Oz-bound friends, when faced with the inevitable gloating Aussie, is to point out that they earn 40 times as much per person than India and could only manage twice as many golds. If they start pointing things out, like the fact that we earn 30 times as much as India and only managed 1/6th as many gold medals, then just keep spouting figures in terms of foreign currencies, arbitrary multiplications and decimal points until they get bored and start hitting you. Anything is better than that bloody gloating.

Anand then...

I used to think television-induced outrage was reserved for the bitter elderly and the perpetually unemployed. I’ve realised in the past couple of days that it is now the right of every New Zealander to race into a state of hysteria without stopping to think that there might be something more important to worry about.

I am of course talking about Paul Henry’s latest controversy. The crux of the issue appears to be that him asking if Govener-General Sir Anand Satyanand was ‘really a NZer’ and then going on to ask the Prime Minister if he was going to appoint someone who ‘looked and sounded more like a NZer’ was deemed extremely racist. Judging from the sheer amount of outrage, media coverage and water-cooler conversation around the subject, I have to assume that it was more racist than Hone Harawira, a member of parliament, stating that he wouldn’t want his daughters bringing home a pakeha, or Winston Peters’ ‘Yellow Peril’ campaign from a few years ago, or Michael Laws opening his mouth. I don’t think that’s true, not even close.

Paul Henry may be racist. It’s highly likely that he is. Not in an overly malicious way, but from a number of his comments it’s reasonably clear that he holds different opinions for members of different races. However, the questions he asked were not racist, especially not as racist as everyone seems to think.

Firstly, ‘is he really a NZer?’. At it’s base, this is a sign of ignorance, if anything, rather than racism. I myself am a first generation NZer. My mother is Dutch and my father is British. People have said to me ‘oh, I thought you were German’. I wasn’t offended. I was a little taken aback, but that was it. If I did consider myself Dutch then I imagine being called German might be a little offensive, however I consider myself an NZer so I dismissed it as an odd observation. The truth is that in such a multi-cultural country, it is unclear who is an NZer and who is not. It doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it any more obvious. When Anand Satyanand was first appointed as Governer-General many people asked ‘is he an NZer?’. In fact, soon after his appointment Sir Satyanand himself said in an interview, ‘I imagine during [my term as Governer-General] there will be some who will say “there is one of us being one of them” while for others it will be a case of saying “there is one of them being one of us”. So even he acknowledged that his Indo-Fijian descent might cause a bit of confusion. The fact is that when you see a person of Indian descent (be it Indian or Indo-Fijian) with an Indian name, your first assumption isn’t that they are from NZ. With nearly a third of the World's population fitting that description and not being NZers, to make that assumption would be statistically ignorant (I’ll confess my own ignorance here, in that I’m not aware of the difference between Indo-Fijian names and those from countries in the sub-continent). It is also not a pre-requisite that the Governer-General be an NZer. So, assuming complete ignorance, that question in itself is not unreasonable, nor is it racist.

That leads me to the next question in question, ‘are you going to choose someone who looks and sounds like an NZer?’. Now I admit, that is a stupid and irrelevant question. It’s not racist, at least nowhere near the level of racism that it’s been elevated to, but it is stupid. It doesn’t matter if the Governer-General instantly portrays an image of being an NZer or not, that's never been a consideration in their selection, so why ask? Most likely it was blurted out to get a cheap laugh, which evidently was a bit of poor judgement. As for the alleged racism buried in the question, I don’t believe that Paul Henry was referring to Sir Satyanand himself. Rather, he was likely referring to the fact that Sir Satyanand looks Indian and has an Indian-sounding name. Given that the Governer-General’s parents are Indo-Fijian, I doubt that stating he looks Indian or has an Indian sounding name would cause him any offense, no more than calling me Dutch or British would cause me offense. The reference Paul Henry made was to the man on paper, not the man himself, and it most certainly was not a reference to every NZer of Indian or Indo-Fijian descent. Extrapolating a stupid question about a man’s name deisgned to get a cheap laugh into full-blown xenophobia is more than a bit extreme.

I like Paul Henry. I think he’s often very funny and is the only celebrity that regular calls out the media on its lazy practices. I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his extreme right views of some things such as Government spending, and he can definitely go too far at times. On the whole though, I think television is a better place with him on it. I’m glad to see that Rick Ellis, CEO of TVNZ, has said in an interview that he has no intention of sacking him.

People in this country have become extremely sensitive, and often I feel that that sensitivity is extremely misguided. It’s like there are people in this country who just meet up for a protest, pick up a newspaper and decide what to write on their signs. And too often that newspaper is the New Zealand Herald, which makes matters that much worse.

I’m not condoning racism here, I’m saying that I don’t believe what Paul Henry said should be considered racist. I hope everyone moves on before October the 18th, so Paul Henry can come back to Breakfast and start gearing up for the next bout of over-blown controversy that will inevitably come. I expect nothing less.

Update (08/10/2010): Really India? You're angry at NZ because one TV personality laughed at the name 'Dikshit'? Newsflash India, sometimes your names appear funny to us because they contain certain portions that we consider to be rude words. That's funny. Was there a national incident when Billy Birmingham released any of the 'Twelfth Man' CDs, most of which contain jokes about the names of cricket players from the sub-continent? The name 'Dikshit' is actually quite funny because it contains two very closely related rude words. That's not racist. It's only funny when mispronounced anyway, so Paul Henry wasn't even laughing at her real name (although when pronounced properly it's possibly funnier; Sheila Diksit - sounds like an Aussie porn-star). It was childish, but not racist. When I was in London, I giggled to myself every time the voice came over the speaker and said that the train terminated in Cockfosters. And that only has one such word in the name. It isn't a racial slur if you laugh at someone's name. It's not a reflection of the person and it certainly isn't a reflection of their entire race. It's just a reflection of that inner child in all of us that still smiles when we see the word 'poo'. It might be insensitive if you laugh in their face, but the act of laughing alone simply denotes ignorance and immaturity, not racism. Maybe the bit about the name being appropriate because she was Indian was a little racist... If he'd just pronounced it correctly and gone with Aussie porn-star there wouldn't have been an issue.

The GST of it.

I'm sick of all this talk about the GST rise. Firstly, you're not going to pay GST on existing GST. Since every $1 you spend currently includes 11.1¢ of GST, you'll only notice a 2.235% increase in the cost of things, not 2.5%. It's a small detail, but it bugs me nonetheless.

Secondly, the new tax rates will mean that even someone on the minimum wage will be getting an extra $12.28 per week. Sure, that's not much, however they'd have to spend $549.50 in goods and services each week for that extra income to be eaten up by the GST rise. Since they only earn $510 a week before tax, I doubt that's going to happen.

Even if the tax cuts weren't happening it would barely affect you, so stop complaining about it, you're not going to suffer. Unless you're buying a new car, but then if you're doing that you hardly have money issues do you?

I like GST because it's easier for the individual to control than income tax; so have this one National, because you don't get my support too often.