Sigh... so much misinformation.

National debt has not doubled over this time. Soverign debt has increased from 120bn (April) to 134bn (end of July). https://www.aap.com.au/nz-nati.... Also, check out the GDP graphs above.

Big Picture: Personally I am a believer in counter-cyclical spending. Research has shown that the best time for governments to spend is during crises, and then to pay back debt during good times. This keeps the economy going and people in jobs. Fiscal conservatives tend to take the opposite approach, which bucks research (but then they often believe in trickle down too, which is thoroughly debunked).

There's been no evidence that the government "continuously lies to the public". What there is evidence of are human mistakes throughout a complex system - people have escaped, people have been given compassionate leave inappropriately, border workers were not tested enough to name a few.

So lets examine escapees:

People arriving are kept in hotels, which were *never* designed to be secure - in fact just the opposite. It might be impossible to stop escapes 100% without switching to jails, which I dont agree with. However from a risk perspective almost everyone is doing the right thing and staying put. We have had no community transmission from arrivals.

What about testing border workers?

There's been no widespread community transmission from either the people in quarantine or the workers around them. Perhaps we've been lucky... personally I think its working pretty well and getting better.

As to your comment about controlling the media - coming from the Key era when not only was messaging strongly controlled, but access to even Official Information was restricted via a set of games... this government is a step forward so far. I'm not going to say they are perfect by a long shot, but their big picture moves so far have been right on the money.

Actually, both Labour and National (two leading parties) have tended to leave the NZ economy in relatively good shape. National have a brand of providing fiscal responsibility, but if you go back over the last few cycles, both have done a good job (when examining purely on economic strength).

Note that in all cases, they are also at the mercy of global economics.

Personally I prefer a more socialised government providing stronger social services(mental health, cheap healthcare, backstops for people losing jobs etc) plus very strong environmental support, so I tend to support Green/Labour. I too am glad that Labour were in control at this time - National would not have been brave enough to shut the country down for fear of upsetting businesses.

Yeah... so while its true that they will repair... I have been told it will take 2+ weeks, likely much more, to get repairs done. Apparently they will disassemble the mac to examine, *then* they will order parts. They will *not* put it together again so I can keep using it. It must now wait, disassembled, until parts arrive.

Sadly, being without my work machine for many weeks just doesn't work. So I carry an external keyboard everywhere.

If my mac exploded, I would walk down the road and get another immediately. Restore from backup and I'm going within hours. With this maddening keyboard crapfest, I just can't afford the time away.

Checked with 3 certified repair shops here. They will perform the warranty repair, but I need to give them the machine for 7-10 working days, minimum. Could be longer. So I'm out my primary work machine for 2+ weeks!

Turns out they will open it and look, and *only then* order parts. I have offered them money if they will close it up again so I can keep working. Nope. I'm guessing they expect to destroy something when looking inside it.

I don't think Etherium and their Smart Contracts may ever be ready for the prime-time, at least not without a major shift in technology.

The problem is the code that gets written to express a contract. Code *always* has bugs, and it requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to debug. Often these bugs are just so subtle that they live for years inside code - and often no-one looks.

How is joe-average supposed to invest in and trust a smart contract - there is no way they can verify that the code is correct. I'm a (hopefully better than average) coder and I didn't spot the issue in the Parity wallet that caused a big loss a few days ago (hint - internal methods accidentally made public). I did look. Ditto for the DAO hack.

Bitcoin has a steady code base that is moving forward in increments, being written/managed by a small number of experienced people (theoretically anyone could check it, but realistically only a few do). Its in a much steadier state. Smart contracts are made by anyone. Very few people understand the tech well enough to verify. Probably even fewer actually look. There will be bugs.

Even worse... Etherium devs just keep forking the blockchain each time one of these hacks occurs. I expect they will do the same again. Ick. I suggest avoiding like the plague until they figure out how to remove the chance of bugs in smart contracts.

"they couldn't secure financing for manufacturing and shipping the first batch of units"

If only we had a way to provide funding for products? We could set up websites that enabled people to post commercially unviable ideas, collect sales in advance, and then bullshit for two years about why they haven't shipped, promised features have been removed, etc.

We'd have problems with fires - which would get massive - before we had problems with crops dying off due to lack of CO2. Also, the ocean's pH would change and that'd be quite bad news indeed.

> As an example, you say that this study from a Canadian university is racist and has been debunked extensively, which is clearly total bullshit.

The study was published in "Intelligence", which is a journal for the "International Society for Intelligence Research."

A quick google for "International Society for Intelligence Research racist" shows that recipients of it's "lifetime achievement award" and board members are widely criticized as promoting junk science, white supremacy, and furthering nazi concepts on race.

Let's take a look at some examples.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

According to sociocultural anthropologist Francisco Gil-White, in publishing studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, Linda Gottfredson is part of a concerted effort to legitimize racist ideology through pseudo-science, together with an assortment of other people with inadequate or completely missing scientific qualifications for studying human intelligence"

Rushton has been discredited for over thirty years and he's viewed as nothing more than pseudo-science fuel for white supremacists like you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And his co-author on that paper? An idiot who thinks racists like him are "the next galileos." https://www.google.com/search?...

He's so desperate to spread his bullshit that he paid to have a booklet about his work mailed to professors around the country

Rushton is a racist - this is both well known and extensively documented by comments he's made publicly and white supremacy publications he's contributed to. His science is beyond junk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The man has been repeatedly and thoroughly discredited scientifically as ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his prejudices, his testing methods as biased against black people, and using non-equivalent groups.

He was president of an institute classified as a hate group. He speaks routinely at eugenics conferences and has published articles in white supremacy magazines and online websites.

"Most bike accidents happen to inexperienced riders and/or idiots."

There is absolutely no evidence to support this incredibly victim-blaming comment. There is plenty of evidence to refute it, if you simply google the phrase "cyclist driver fault study"

Examples: http://www.executivestyle.com....

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05...

http://www.theguardian.com/lif...

You're a classic victim-blamer. See, it's those other, stupid, slower, more inexperienced cyclists who get hit. Not you. You're experienced. Dressed like a dayglo traffic cone clown. Covered in lights.

"If they spend $1.4M and got the rand() function, then terrorists might be able to exploit it to escape random searches." Like lining up sequentially with 2, maybe 3 people?

I live in New England, haven't owned a car in roughly a decade and have been commuting 20 minutes each way every day for work by bike in addition to whatever other daily transportation i need, and own/use snow tires for said bicycle. I also own a nice road bike which gets ridden on weeknight group rides and weekends. I started out on a $350 hybrid I bought from REI on special, and it lasted me several years and thousands of miles, until I decided I wanted something better.

So yes, I do actually know what I'm talking about. And incidentally, Minnesota has more bike commuters per capita than many much warmer locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There have been dozens of studies over the years showing that riding a bicycle for transportation, even slowly, brings health benefits over people who sit in their cars for transportation: https://www.google.com/search?...

Oh, and which is it? Everyone flying along so fast they'll fatally injure pedestrians they smack into? Or people who "toddle around with their heartrate under 100bpm so slow it doesn't do them any good"? Hmm?

Please, save the "you want to put grandma on an iceberg" crap. I wasn't advocating forcing people onto bicycles. I'm saying driverless cars aren't going to fix problems with congestion and pollution.

"Of course, the obvious question is: Will the bike stop at stop signs?"

And yet 99.9% of pedestrian injuries and deaths are caused by motor vehicle drivers, who also blow through stop signs and run red lights.

Where were the jokes about autonomous cars running red lights, and how cities won't be the same without cars speeding, running red lights, not stopping for pedestrians, double parking, making turns without yielding to oncoming traffic, etc?

When a bicyclist doesn't stop for a pedestrian, they bump and (both, probably) fall down. When a car doesn't stop for a pedestrian, the pedestrian ends up in the hospital, or dead.

A bicycle costs $500, emits no pollution, uses little roadway, doesn't cause wear and tear on infrastructure, generates no noise, and provides health benefits. An autonomous car costs....probably $100,000 minimum, uses a huge amount of energy/emits pollution, causes wear and tear on infrastructure, generates a lot of noise, and results in more sedentary behavior.

Do we really think the future is 200 bicycles for the price of one autonomous car?

With only a PCB-trace antenna and one ethernet port, that is nearly useless.

Which do you think is computationally more expensive? Crawling a website, or serving the website being crawled?

Here's a hint: aside from the fact that one involves repeatedly parsing a scripting language, database calls, logging, etc and the other requires little more than generating URLs and downloading them....one involves random access retrieval and the other involves writing the stored data.

Also: the different in computing power between laptops and servers of similar age is less than an order of magnitude. Server equipment typically runs further from the bleeding edge than retail/consumer equipment, and often is kept in production much longer than consumer equipment.