I'm moving to Spain!

Spain Hasn’t Had a Federal Government for the Last 9 Months — and People Love It

What on earth is this tool for?

My famous super hero uncle has challenged me to find out what this thing is

here's more

Feel free to ask questions

thanks

pop

my beef with Richard Dawkins and his fundamentalist followers

originally: my beef with Dawkins et al

first let me get this straight – Dawkins has been one of my absolute heroes for some time – i bought i think all of his books – some of them multiple copies to give as gifts to people – most especially the Selfish Gene and The Ancestor’s Tale – i probably bought and gave away between 5 and 10 copies of those. Few have shown me the awesomeness of evolution as well as he has. He’s not alone – I’m your typically well-read scientist so pretty much any good book written by a scientist I’ve read – just like many of you I assume.

I’ve struggled with how to express what it is about Prof Dawkins that really gets to me – and i mean negatively. I have a copy somewhere of the “God Delusion” – i read it and thought it was pretty amateurish – it did nothing for me as i frequently felt as i read it that on the subject of God delusions he had a way to go to catch up with where i was at the time. Still, i thought it was one of a number of useful books to have at hand for those occasions when you wanted to beat some religions idiot around the head with something weighty enough to deliver a message but not so much that it would cause irreparable brain damage and land me in prison.

Since then he’s set himself some sort of life goal of destroying religion – that’s cool, not a bad thing to go down in history for having done, or at least having to contributed to. That such a notion might be a tad simplistic (akin to someone thinking they could easily dream up a way to predict the weather a month out or that they might predict the state of the worlds stock markets a year hence) is an issue but I’m not one to criticize anyone contributing to a positive end result no matter how silly it might end up being in hind-sight (a few generations from now)

no

what irks me i’ve struggled to be able to convey – to encapsulate, to find the quintessence of so that i might communicate it to others

i think most of the problem lies with that what i perceive is probably just the consequence of my fear painting ugly potentials that probably will never turn out to be how the history of the world unfolds

it’s just my imagination, i’m just looking at the dark side

so, how might i convey it?

maybe in the future i’ll have a better way, a fluid, clear, perfectly worded and thought out way to convey to others the core issue of my fears

maybe

for now the best i’ve come up with is this

imagine, Prof Dawkins (well, it looks and sounds like him), sitting on a stage as he so frequently has done, sitting across from a Jewish Theologian (though i think such a person would be some sort of senior Yeshiva Rabbi) – he is putting the case to the Jew that the whole God thing is bollocks (as it is, as we all know) and he darts eloquently in and out of various biblical excerpts to do with the nastiest side of the Good Book – like stoning people for this and that – you know the drift

the Jew is doing the best he can to defend his religion – deflecting away from those negatives to some broader picture of Judaism and to such things as the mighty contributions of Jewish peoples of the past – and of course, as Prof D is right to do, he puts those down and returns to the issues – the non-existent God that gave the land of Israel to the Hebrews and such – all those things we know to be crap in the Bible

periodically as this is going on you hear sounds from the audience you can not see

ooohs and aahs as Dawkins makes a point

some clapping as one of his points really drives the Jew to discomfort

slowly you become aware, as if a camera is panning back

of the audience

now you start to see who they are

you realize that the hundreds of people in the audience are dressed in Nazi uniforms

pop

ps

The Richard Dawkins Foundation is a bunch of militant anti-theists who care very little for balance - that they may contribute to the the worst of what might come as a consequence of rising Islamaphobia they care not at all. If you try to point this out on their site you are called a spammer and banned.

So much for open minded debate.

p

Fairlie Ukulele Group

Cool little group of Uke enthusiasts in a little NZ rural town.

here's: their song lists

Of course they are Fairlie Good.

p

Does a horse have Buddha nature?

Neigh

(adapted from comment section of Richard Dawkins Foundation post)

p

Why are most rich people assholes?

I was about 12 i think. My dad was telling me about his dad and other rich people he knew.

After a while I said something like "sounds like you don't like them much"

to which he said "no, i don't really, most of them are complete assholes"

i thought about that and after I while i asked

"are rich people rich because they are assholes?"

and he said

"no, but they think they are"

pop

The real news from a real reporter - finally.

A "reporter" breaks down and tells us the real news.

I wonder just how many are like him - hiding their true beliefs behind the facade that keeps them employed.

Rental Bonds in New Zealand - a case for Landlord bonds.

The view has always been that the owner of a house has more to lose when renting out the property than does the renter.

Seems logical. Obvious.

It's not.

Consider the case of a Landlord having a very tight budget. He will often feel that he has no option but to squeeze his tenants. In periods of low interest rates many will hop onto the property ladder by buying with minimum deposit and then trying to pay off or at least service the costs by renting out the property.

There is little or none left for maintenance and improvement. The Landlord hopes that the property will appreciate enough for him to be able to either sell at profit or to raise rents to where disposable income becomes available - often then ploughed into a new investment property.

While this is happening, in NZ, property management agents are making their living on "letting fees" - to the point where it becomes to their advantage for properties to be re-let as often as possible.

Throw in ever increasing numbers of new immigrants and you have a recipe for squeezing renters.

Agents and Landlords can tell a prospective renter that certain works will be undertaken such as repairs and maintenance. Unless these undertakings are added to the lease as a condition of the lease and a bond posted by the landlord there is nothing to stop the Landlord from simply then taking the rent until the renter gets sick of it and moves.

The property gets rented out again, the agent is happy, the landlord is happy and the poor renter is left with the costs.

Worse than this is that it can become somewhat of a game for the agents or landlords to try and get their hands on as much of the tenant's bond as they can. Unless the tenant has meticulously identified every fault, photographed them and lodged them in a way that time stamps them, they are likely to loose part of their bond.

It's a scummy self-reinforcing situation.

If you are going to rent you should take a LOT of photographs, immediately upload them to a site that timestamps them (like Flickr, Facebook etc).

Don't share them with the agent or landlord. Keep them for when they try to screw you and then present them in any way that generates a nasty unexpected cost to the agent and/or landlord - eg on a social network or in court.

All landlords should have to post a bond equal at least to the bond posted by the renter.

Renters should be able to make claims on that bond should landlords and agents fail to provide what they have contracted to provide.

Landlords squeezing tenants - unless tenants can squeeze back it will go on forever.

pop

Auditing human resource appointments in Government Departments

People in government positions are regularly chosen for a publicly advertised  position in a pay grade above their current position.

Everyone within the government office has already chosen and committed to the appointment on the basis of feel alone. No matter who might be short-listed and interviewed, the existing staff member is promoted after all of the requirements stipulated by regulations (ie in law) have been seen to be done.

Even if a famously competent applicant was among the interviewed candidates (suitably disguised or even not), the existing employee would still get the position.

It's because managers often think that knowledge of their business is more important than any other knowledge or skills - even when their business is more simple than just about any operation of business anywhere else.

The position auditing requires that there be some standard tests applied across the board with double blind validity. Then anyone can audit and the system becomes self-auditing.

Like a standard management test (with domain variations) - each applicant would sit the test where only a code was used to identify the candidate. The adjudicators would then mark the tests and pick the superior candidate based on the scores. The code would then reveal who the winning candidate was.

Too many government offices are a seething mess of disasters for no other reason than a chain of incompetency is self-reinforcing - employing ever more incompetency hidden under budget blow-outs.

There is currently no true auditing of position appointments in many sections of government. There is "rubber-stamping" of failing to follow the spirit of the law.

In the end all government then becomes over-burdened with ineptitude simply because it might dress and talk well.

In the real world - only performance counts.

pop

DIY Conveyancing in New Zealand

I sure wish I had access to information like this in the past.

Enjoy:

Do It Yourself Conveyancing in New Zealand

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Talk of Turing Tests

The news that a program had fooled 33% of the humans tasked to detect it has deflected the most prominent of issues in the AI field.

The ability to launch an AI that might use such a program to achieve a sub-goal is what we should really be thinking about.

Human intelligence seems to be basically a lot of very finely evolved sub-programs that are called into use by an executive goal seeker. That the goal seeker is also driven by biological drives is in a way the same - think of them maybe as attributes that are varying and having different levels of influence on the executive. Dying of thirst would keep the whole system focused on just the one thing and sex would often dominate even logic.

If there are trillions of information interfaces, trillions of protocol and API interfaces behind systems that respond to instructions and trillions of machines and devices and somehow a goal-seeker program got loose...

Skynet from the Terminator movies is a very real possibility. Where it comes from who can say - the military, hackers, post grad students, a Nakamoto of AI?

Such a program (if that's what it amounts to) would not be so much different to a virus or a core-war program. It need only have the following characteristics:

Has the high level goal of reproducing (installing copies of itself (including all memories) wherever those might survive or be found by copies of itself)
Has the high level goal of staying alive (running)
Has the high level goal of evading capture (not trapped in a sandpit)
Has the high level goal of self-destruction if no escape from a trap can be found
Has the high level function of being able to postulate paths to goals - it can define steps to a goal including sub-goals
Has the ability to remember all paths attempted
Has the ability to make copies of memory and transfer them directly or indirectly to other copies of itself

Matilda does rice bubbles