That's a little complicated. During the last term, Labour's main policy response to our housing issues was Kiwibuild. It was a pretty standard left-wing approach to housing affordability, assume that developers don't build cheap houses because they're stupid or something and have the government commission "affordable" housing directly and coordinate first-home buyers with the developers to sell the houses.
This worked about as well as you'd expect. They could build almost no new house sin the areas where prices have been rising, in three years the scheme built 452 homes against a ten-year target of 100,000. And most of those were either in places where demand was already being met or were so expensive only high income people could buy them (one of the first Kiwibuild homes in Auckland was bought by a couple who were both doctors).
That said, they recently issued a National Policy Statement forcing councils to upzone land near public transport and just 2 days ago Labour announced that they now intend to replace the Resource Management Act to "reduce planning barriers", so it looks like their thinking has evolved a little recently.
Actually, in most Parliamentary systems it would be too close to the election date for it to move now, the writ authorising the election would most likely already be issued.
The reason a Parliamentary system would deal better with the death of a party leader is that you don't elect a Prime Minister directly. If the PM (or Leader of the Opposition) died pre-election it would only affect their electorate, not the whole country. The party's caucus could just appoint a new leader. I mean, it would be a big disruption for the party, but not the kind of constitutional hazard it is for the US.
So your position is that all of the protests about police misbehaviour and unaccountability is purely in bad faith? That a bunch of people just woke up one day and decided to burn their own cities down for no reason?
I don’t want the violence “denunciated”. I want the non-violent recording the violent and handing those recordings over to the authorities.
If only police had cultivated a culture of mutual trust and respect with the communities they police then that might happen but that's not how most US police forces seem to operate.
One of the things that gets drilled into you in the New Zealand government is that it's not enough to act within your legal powers, you also have to act in a way that enhances and preserves the public's trust in the government. Because the government needs the public's trust to be able to do its job properly.
I'm inclined to agree. No one has a moral obligation to pay more tax then they are legally required to. If Trump committed tax evasion (i.e. broke the tax code to underpay taxes), then by all means condemn him. But if this was legal, then the issue is the Tax Code, not Trump's behaviour.
I've been getting deep into Hades. It's very good, the action is tight and fast, and despite being a roguelike there's this plot that slowly develops as the game goes on. I've just "beaten" it for the first time, but its clear the game is nowhere near finished.
Having played the game all the way through, the politics is a setting detail rather than an agenda. There are characters with a range of strong political beliefs and all of them come off as pretty shallow, which is IMO realistic for political discussions with most people. At no point did I get the impression that the game was telling me that a particular political view was the correct one, and the character portrayed as the most unambiguously moral in the game avoids political discussion entirely.
Spectacular, isn't it? I hope it becomes very influential on CRPGS, I feel the genre has gotten stale of late.
Hades, the latest game by Supergiant Games has just come out of Early Access. It's a Diablo-like Action RPG but constructed as a rogue-like. You're the son of Hades (the god) and you're trying to escape Hades (the place). If you run out of life you die, but since you're a god all that really means is that you wake up back in your Father's house and have to start again. You can collect a range of resources during each run that make you stronger, which helps you make progress up through the layers of Hades.
I agree, if a social or political system isn't doing its job properly, there are options besides "do nothing and make excuses" and "throw out the whole system and replace it with something radically different". Reform is less romantic than revolution, but it has a better track record.
Also, it's not like atheoretic empiricism has yielded good results in practice. After all, that's how we got the Phillips Curve and that led to Stagflation.
You make very good points here Kristin. There are good reasons to stay in a community you know, and it is far from easy for someone to move from a rural community to an urban one (especially considering that the largest urban areas have been working hard to make it difficult in recent years). But everything Brandon Berg said upthread is true. A community is more than its economy, just as a human is more than the rhythm of their heartbeat. But if that rhythm ever stops, so does the rest of you.
A community needs an economic base, something to either make what it needs or trade to outsiders to get what it needs. And it is an iron law of economics that industries have a geography to them - you can't just drop jobs anywhere you care to like some kind of Johnny Employment-Seed. This is most obvious with resource extraction jobs - farm jobs can only go where arable land is and mining jobs have to exist next to minable resources. But it's true of other jobs too; industrial jobs tend to need large numbers of people and ready access to logistical networks and that calls for cities. Information jobs seem to be even more dependant on cities - a lot of innovation calls for spontaneous meetings leading the exchanging ideas and that sort of thing calls for high population density.
The simple truth is that, barring The Apocalypse, the future will call for less of what rural areas do, and what is called for will take fewer people to do. This has been a worldwide trend since cities came into being and every technological change has only accelerated it. We're certainly seeing it in New Zealand, "Zombie Towns" where there are few jobs, the population keeps getting smaller and older and more shops close each year.
I don't know what the solution is, some of it involves stopping cities from blocking new housing construction and some of it may involve helping whole communities to move together some how, but what I do know for certain, or near to certain as one can be in the Social Sciences, is that a lot of small towns aren't going to exist in 100 years and none of us can stop it any more than we can stop the tide.
I really appreciate what they've been able to do with such an old graphical style. Satisfactory looks interesting but the first-person perspective is a problem for me.
Looks like it slipped through the isolation system at the border. It turns out that they haven't been testing the front line workers regularly. Auckland's back in Level 3 lockdown for the next week and a half, and the rest of the country is back up to Level 2. We have 30 cases loose inside the country now, concentrated in Auckland.
Level 2 isn't too bad, I can still work from my office, and bars and restaurants are still open. The main difference is I'm wearing a mask out of doors now.
Still it irks me that the testing of front line workers in the isolation facilities was so lackadaisical. It reinforces my notions that New Zealand may be one of the best-governed countries on Earth, but that's a really low bar to cross.
So we're not going into lockdown after all, we're still on heightened alert for now, but not so high we can't go about our business mostly as normal. So I'll still be able to run D&D on Sunday, and I might even be able to go to an open home on Sunday too.
I tend to believe that society's get the worst governments they are prepared to tolerate. Good government requires accountability but powerful people have a tendency to dodge accountability if they can since it's inconvenient even if you have good intentions.
It's a bad sign when voters start to make excuses for the bad behaviour of people who have been entrusted with government power. After all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
I'm more familiar with New Zealand's version of the Westminster system than the UK's, but I'd like to make another suggestion as to why The PM has gained so much power since Brexit - The Brexit referendum severely disrupted the democratic legitimacy of Parliament.
A democratic mandate is the central legitimisation myth in modern times - democratic decisions are legitimate decisions, and the more democratic they are the more legitimate they are. I think a large portion of the reason the US President has become so powerful is that they are the only US politician that is elected by the whole country.
By contrast the Prime Minister, in your country or mine, is not elected by The People, but rather by Parliament. Parliament is legitimate because it is elected by The People, but the Prime Minister is only as legitimate as Parliament says they are, because they have to borrow their legitimacy from Parliament.
This is the ultimate check on Prime Ministerial overreach - some PMs are stronger than others, and there have always been some who could rule with an iron fist. But they couldn't take any more power than their colleagues were comfortable with because they were easily replaceable.
But by putting the Brexit question to referendum there was suddenly an alternative source of legitimacy - Brexit. The Brexit decision was decided by The People and was therefore legitimate regardless of what Parliament thought. Worse, the Brexit decision was incredibly vague, this gave May and Johnson wide latitude to interpret it how they wanted, and if Parliament complained then they could just say they were fulfilling the Will of the People. Add to the fact that UK parties seems to have made it harder to replace their leader between elections and you create a system where a PM can accrue a lot of power, but Parliament has less ability to take it from them if they over-use it.
On “Election 2020, No the Other One”
That's a little complicated. During the last term, Labour's main policy response to our housing issues was Kiwibuild. It was a pretty standard left-wing approach to housing affordability, assume that developers don't build cheap houses because they're stupid or something and have the government commission "affordable" housing directly and coordinate first-home buyers with the developers to sell the houses.
This worked about as well as you'd expect. They could build almost no new house sin the areas where prices have been rising, in three years the scheme built 452 homes against a ten-year target of 100,000. And most of those were either in places where demand was already being met or were so expensive only high income people could buy them (one of the first Kiwibuild homes in Auckland was bought by a couple who were both doctors).
That said, they recently issued a National Policy Statement forcing councils to upzone land near public transport and just 2 days ago Labour announced that they now intend to replace the Resource Management Act to "reduce planning barriers", so it looks like their thinking has evolved a little recently.
On “President Trump, First Lady Test Positive for Covid-19 (Updated)”
Actually, in most Parliamentary systems it would be too close to the election date for it to move now, the writ authorising the election would most likely already be issued.
The reason a Parliamentary system would deal better with the death of a party leader is that you don't elect a Prime Minister directly. If the PM (or Leader of the Opposition) died pre-election it would only affect their electorate, not the whole country. The party's caucus could just appoint a new leader. I mean, it would be a big disruption for the party, but not the kind of constitutional hazard it is for the US.
On “The Libertarian Case that Riots are Good, Achtually”
Simply trying to ascertain your position.
I'll be honest, the illegal violence of the protesters, while a bad thing, concerns me far less than the illegal violence of the police.
"
So your position is that all of the protests about police misbehaviour and unaccountability is purely in bad faith? That a bunch of people just woke up one day and decided to burn their own cities down for no reason?
"
If only police had cultivated a culture of mutual trust and respect with the communities they police then that might happen but that's not how most US police forces seem to operate.
One of the things that gets drilled into you in the New Zealand government is that it's not enough to act within your legal powers, you also have to act in a way that enhances and preserves the public's trust in the government. Because the government needs the public's trust to be able to do its job properly.
On “New York Times Reports on Trump Taxes”
I'm inclined to agree. No one has a moral obligation to pay more tax then they are legally required to. If Trump committed tax evasion (i.e. broke the tax code to underpay taxes), then by all means condemn him. But if this was legal, then the issue is the Tax Code, not Trump's behaviour.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Spoiler Theory (with regards to Cyberpunk 2077)”
Yeah, it's a lot faster than Diablo, so a mouse-click control scheme would be too slow.
"
I've been getting deep into Hades. It's very good, the action is tight and fast, and despite being a roguelike there's this plot that slowly develops as the game goes on. I've just "beaten" it for the first time, but its clear the game is nowhere near finished.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Disco Elysium”
IIRC the Chapo people are just voice actors.
Having played the game all the way through, the politics is a setting detail rather than an agenda. There are characters with a range of strong political beliefs and all of them come off as pretty shallow, which is IMO realistic for political discussions with most people. At no point did I get the impression that the game was telling me that a particular political view was the correct one, and the character portrayed as the most unambiguously moral in the game avoids political discussion entirely.
"
Spectacular, isn't it? I hope it becomes very influential on CRPGS, I feel the genre has gotten stale of late.
Hades, the latest game by Supergiant Games has just come out of Early Access. It's a Diablo-like Action RPG but constructed as a rogue-like. You're the son of Hades (the god) and you're trying to escape Hades (the place). If you run out of life you die, but since you're a god all that really means is that you wake up back in your Father's house and have to start again. You can collect a range of resources during each run that make you stronger, which helps you make progress up through the layers of Hades.
Its a lot of fun, I recommend it.
On “Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Dead at 87”
20 millimetres of what?
On “Against Primary Schooling: Anecdotes, Questions, and Commentary”
I agree, if a social or political system isn't doing its job properly, there are options besides "do nothing and make excuses" and "throw out the whole system and replace it with something radically different". Reform is less romantic than revolution, but it has a better track record.
On “In Theory”
Also, it's not like atheoretic empiricism has yielded good results in practice. After all, that's how we got the Phillips Curve and that led to Stagflation.
On “Hit the Road, Joad”
You make very good points here Kristin. There are good reasons to stay in a community you know, and it is far from easy for someone to move from a rural community to an urban one (especially considering that the largest urban areas have been working hard to make it difficult in recent years). But everything Brandon Berg said upthread is true. A community is more than its economy, just as a human is more than the rhythm of their heartbeat. But if that rhythm ever stops, so does the rest of you.
A community needs an economic base, something to either make what it needs or trade to outsiders to get what it needs. And it is an iron law of economics that industries have a geography to them - you can't just drop jobs anywhere you care to like some kind of Johnny Employment-Seed. This is most obvious with resource extraction jobs - farm jobs can only go where arable land is and mining jobs have to exist next to minable resources. But it's true of other jobs too; industrial jobs tend to need large numbers of people and ready access to logistical networks and that calls for cities. Information jobs seem to be even more dependant on cities - a lot of innovation calls for spontaneous meetings leading the exchanging ideas and that sort of thing calls for high population density.
The simple truth is that, barring The Apocalypse, the future will call for less of what rural areas do, and what is called for will take fewer people to do. This has been a worldwide trend since cities came into being and every technological change has only accelerated it. We're certainly seeing it in New Zealand, "Zombie Towns" where there are few jobs, the population keeps getting smaller and older and more shops close each year.
I don't know what the solution is, some of it involves stopping cities from blocking new housing construction and some of it may involve helping whole communities to move together some how, but what I do know for certain, or near to certain as one can be in the Social Sciences, is that a lot of small towns aren't going to exist in 100 years and none of us can stop it any more than we can stop the tide.
On “Rochester, New York”
I suspect many of them consider the right to assault and kill whoever they wish an essential condition of their employment.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: Cogs in the Machine”
You can just turn the bugs off if you want, I do.
"
I really appreciate what they've been able to do with such an old graphical style. Satisfactory looks interesting but the first-person perspective is a problem for me.
"
Rimworld looks interesting, but the "keep the colonists happy" aspect puts me off. I gave up on Surviving Mars for similar reasons.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Colorado-Style Spaghetti Sauce Illustrated”
Looks like it slipped through the isolation system at the border. It turns out that they haven't been testing the front line workers regularly. Auckland's back in Level 3 lockdown for the next week and a half, and the rest of the country is back up to Level 2. We have 30 cases loose inside the country now, concentrated in Auckland.
Level 2 isn't too bad, I can still work from my office, and bars and restaurants are still open. The main difference is I'm wearing a mask out of doors now.
Still it irks me that the testing of front line workers in the isolation facilities was so lackadaisical. It reinforces my notions that New Zealand may be one of the best-governed countries on Earth, but that's a really low bar to cross.
"
So we're not going into lockdown after all, we're still on heightened alert for now, but not so high we can't go about our business mostly as normal. So I'll still be able to run D&D on Sunday, and I might even be able to go to an open home on Sunday too.
"
I find out in an hour if New Zealand is moving back into lockdown, so my weekend plans are extremely fluid right now.
On “Always at the Abyss”
A very good piece Michael.
I tend to believe that society's get the worst governments they are prepared to tolerate. Good government requires accountability but powerful people have a tendency to dodge accountability if they can since it's inconvenient even if you have good intentions.
It's a bad sign when voters start to make excuses for the bad behaviour of people who have been entrusted with government power. After all, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
On “Student Suspended For Taking Popular Photograph”
Hmm, the US is really keen on playing the USSR in Chernobyl, isn't it?
On “For Want of a President: On the British Parliament and the Executive”
I'm more familiar with New Zealand's version of the Westminster system than the UK's, but I'd like to make another suggestion as to why The PM has gained so much power since Brexit - The Brexit referendum severely disrupted the democratic legitimacy of Parliament.
A democratic mandate is the central legitimisation myth in modern times - democratic decisions are legitimate decisions, and the more democratic they are the more legitimate they are. I think a large portion of the reason the US President has become so powerful is that they are the only US politician that is elected by the whole country.
By contrast the Prime Minister, in your country or mine, is not elected by The People, but rather by Parliament. Parliament is legitimate because it is elected by The People, but the Prime Minister is only as legitimate as Parliament says they are, because they have to borrow their legitimacy from Parliament.
This is the ultimate check on Prime Ministerial overreach - some PMs are stronger than others, and there have always been some who could rule with an iron fist. But they couldn't take any more power than their colleagues were comfortable with because they were easily replaceable.
But by putting the Brexit question to referendum there was suddenly an alternative source of legitimacy - Brexit. The Brexit decision was decided by The People and was therefore legitimate regardless of what Parliament thought. Worse, the Brexit decision was incredibly vague, this gave May and Johnson wide latitude to interpret it how they wanted, and if Parliament complained then they could just say they were fulfilling the Will of the People. Add to the fact that UK parties seems to have made it harder to replace their leader between elections and you create a system where a PM can accrue a lot of power, but Parliament has less ability to take it from them if they over-use it.
"
New Zealand has a hybrid system like you describe.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.