Dave @ Dave @lemmy.nz

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2 yr. ago

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The party with the highest number of votes proposes laws, they have to pass both houses to become law

This seems like one big parliament with extra steps. Is the benefit of this process that you are specifically getting MPs that represent specific areas to agree to pass it, separately to people whose party was voted in but personally they don't answer to anyone? I guess while I can see some benefit of the two stages I'm not sure I get why it's worth the effort. Is the benefit more in that you select them in a different way and on a separate cycle?

every vote is a conscious vote

I don't get how that works in practice. Wouldn't there be an expectation that MPs vote with their party, even if you claim it's a conscience vote? Is there some law now that says MPs have to vote the way their party says?

Any law that is proposed would be submitted to the advisory panel where the experts would write a report listing the possible benefits and the harms of the law. They don’t get a vote.

I'm assuming the membership can choose whether or not to participate? E.g. the milking industry will want to participate in an advisory panel on water quality in rivers, but they may not care about laws relating to offshore oil drilling. How do you prevent this advisory panel from advising water quality isn't an issue because the one tourism advisor representing the kayaker tour operators gets outnumbered by the dairy, agriculture, and power company representatives?

I just don’t understand the mentality of a business saying “we don’t want to talk to our customers”.

Money. They worked out the customers lost from this add up to less than the cost of having a short wait time.

Seems like this could be done easily, even easier with email.

Realistically it's actually pretty difficult to identify exactly which individual houses are affected and them map that against customer accounts and then send an email to them all within a short time. I don't see any reason why it should be that way, though. If they had their system set up so customers were previously mapped against certain local cables, cabinets, etc then they could identify the problem spot and trigger an email to all the potentially affected people. But again, such efforts would cost money. And I'd argue that money is better spent on reducing the number of outages.

A reminder to vote in the post about which recent NZ song we should submit to Lemmyvision: https://lemmy.nz/post/20776690

Like most call centres, they have busy times and quiet times. The problem is, busy times are defined by the fact that most people are calling then. If 70% of people all try to call at the same time (lunch time, when the internet has gone out, etc) then 70% of people will get long wait times.

But from what I see there is no incentive to reduce wait times even it off peak periods. If you can call and have the phone answered right away then there are many people who will do this to find out their balance or what time they are open or other easily found information. As soon as your wait time is 20 minutes then you'll see a huge drop-off in these calls and so you suddenly don't need all those staff to answer those basic calls.

If you're always seeing wait times of 20m or more, you're most likely only calling at peak times. Calling outside those times will help.

Nothing will help long wait times when there is an unplanned widespread outage, except perhaps a mass text campaign to message everyone affected to tell them you know and are working on it - except you might not know who is affected until you've had time to investigate.

I think the assumption if you'd use you phone on mobile data to access the website if your internet is down. But yes, like you I've only had bad experiences.

Luckily our internet seems pretty stable these days. Occasional overnight brief loss of internet but I would never know if my fancy router didn't tell me.

Realistically? Not really. If you make it too easy to call people stop using the online channels that are cheaper to provide.

However, I'd say someone like Spark may be a good option. I believe they have callbacks so you call and push whatever number and then they call you back when you get to the front of the queue. They are also better resourced to handle the calls, and I'm assuming share their call centre with the subsidiaries (skinny, bigpipe, I think there are others). Spark itself can be a bit expensive but the subsideries are cheaper and might do ok on service. I don't think any major player will have "great" service, though, and many little ones don't have a phone number at all.

Keep in mind that unless it's just you with the issue, any outage covering an area is going to cause a big spike to the call centre and queue times will increase.

I admit I have never understood how bicameral parliaments operate. In this proposal of yours, how does a law get passed? Who proposes it, who votes on it, how do the two level interact?

And for the advisory panel, if each sector of the economy chooses a representative, how does that work? Does Fonterra put in a representative for the dairy industry? That doesn't seem like the way to represent workers, but I'm not sure there are any unions representing dairy farmers since they are almost entirely small family owned companies. Who decides whether potato growers get a seat or if it's just one seat for agriculture? How does this panel interact formerly with the law making process?

I just think that if enough people vote for some party that it would (absent a threshold) amount to 1 MPs worth of votes, that those people deserve representation even if its a conspiracy theorist nutter.

I imagine in such a world we would see that person thrown out of parliament on a regular basis, and using question time to ask pointless questions that don't help anyone. I am not sure of the proper procedures but on thinking about it I think if we aligned procedures with the change it may work. E.g. you get proportional time in question time based on your party's share of parliament or something. Changing the threshold to be a bit lower does sound more achievable though.

Agree re the dark money in the TU, NZ Initiative etc. But even if we found an effective way to nullify that the same interests still own most of the media and would spread their messaging and campaigns through influence on those outlets instead

Yeah, a tale as old as time. I hope humanity one day works out a solution.

I don't think the threshold should be removed completely. The electoral review from way back that no government ever did anything with recommended 4%. I think 3% would be OK too, but any lower and parliament wouldn't get any work done because it would be full of conspiracy theorists.

Using a ranked voting system may let us keep the 5%, my goal would be to get more parties into government so the small parties didn't get crazy amounts of power.

I would love political party funding to be state funded, but for this to be effective we need to do something about political organisations that are separate from the party. That Act/National supporters can just donate to the Taxpayers Union then the TU goes and does a bunch of political campaigning, that's a serious flaw in the donation reporting requirements.

Holy hell, Napster is a (legal) subscription music streaming service! Crazy times we live in.

We need to somehow disincentivise the current polarising where it becomes an us and them think. The left vs right. Boomers vs Millennials. The woke vs the... asleep?

At the moment, the divisive politics drives people to anger at the "others" and this gets people voting for their party of choice. It's also a cornerstone of social media engagement, which I think is not unrelated.This divisiveness and means parties increasingly need to slide away from the centre to find more votes instead of having a big pool of people in the centre with many choices to vote for and parties actively trying to get votes from this pool.

I like the idea of parties that can pick and choose good policies without worrying about how it looks - e.g. Labour not adopting a good policy because it was proposed by National and so it would make Labour look like it was pandering to National voters. Our MMP system actually allows for a solution to this, where smaller parties can cherry pick good policies and campaign on them. I would argue that the Radical Centre is a representation of this.

I think shortening terms to 12-18 months would be bad. National came in, ran parliament under urgency for 100 days to pass a bunch of laws and rip out a bunch of laws the previous government brought in. Is this going to be the new standard, where successive governments just rip out the laws of the previous government? In my view reducing the term in government will just lead to faster turn around on repealing the previous government's laws unless we fix the system that got us here.

I think we need to reduce the threshold to get parties into government. Avoid situations where Winnie gets to tell the big parties what to do under threat of leaving the coalition. Every election should have multiple possible coalitions.

I'd also accept a ranked choice voting system where people who want to vote for smaller parties can do so without worrying about wasting their vote.

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation. I still think Watercare did a bad job of conveying this. They are trying to say there is plenty of capacity, we didn't plan poorly, but also we won't let anyone else on the network.

It's also super shit that they gave 24 hours notice and seem to think this was reasonable. I doubt any developments in planning could have suddenly got resource consent within that time.

Thanks! I have set ours up like that now too.

It seems Cloudflare should support range requests from the cache, but it might be a bit tricky to set up and perhaps not possible on a free plan. I read a bit about it but have given up for now.

Thanks for that site for testing configuration for streaming video! Lemmy.NZ was failing but is fixed now.

In our case it was Cloudflare, I configured it to bypass the cache and it's resolved. Kinda defeats half the purpose of Cloudflare though haha so I will probably adjust it to do images but not video or something like that.

I cooked two more just to even it out 😅

Docker wants you to use volumes. That data is persistent too. They say volumes are much easier to backup. I disagree, I much prefer the bind mounts, especially when it comes to selective backups.

Haha me too, but you had some great suggestions too!

I think deleting communities is a bad idea. We lose the history then, so I'm not sure what action we would take. Out of the communities that get used, I feel like they are all justified:

C/newzealand is our main community.

NZ Politics is deliberately split off because some people want to avoid politics. It also seems active enough to support being it's own community.

C/rocketlab is topic specific and of interest to those outside NZ, it has a different audience than our other communities, so at the time we held a poll and there was support for adding this as it's own community.

The others don't get used very much. People tend to use c/nz so I feel like your suggestion to keep things together is already being done because people don't tend to use the regional communities.

I'm keen to hear from others if there is support for doing something (I'm still not sure what the action would be).

Yes that's what I do too!

Overnight cron to stop containers, run borgmatic, then start the containers again.

I occasionally have had permissions issues but I tend to be able to fix them. Normally it's just a matter of deleting the files on the host and letting the container create them, though it doesn't always work it usually does.