Labor slips back a point in this week’s reading of the Essential Research fortnightly average, from 54-46 to 53-47, although this is to do with a particularly weak result for the Coalition a fortnight ago washing out of the result, rather than a turn in their favour this week. On the primary vote, the Coalition is up a point to 36%, Labor is steady on 37%, One Nation is steady on 10%, and the Greens are down one to 8%. Other findings are that 49% disapprove of Donald Trump’s self-styled Muslim ban, with only 36% in favour. At least some of this would appear to be down to questions of implementation, as the gap is narrower on the question of whether Australia should do something similar, with 41% in support and 46% opposed. Fifty-three per cent agree with the Prime Minister’s position that it is not his job to comment, versus 36% who disagree. Other questions relate to technology use, including a finding that 50% say technological change is making lives better, with 25% opting for worse.
I will apologise to the great HL Mencken for so egregiously slandering him (and you it seems). Its the kind of bullshit he would have railed against no doubt. Not uber-menschen enough.
Climate change et al are complex, true. But you don’t need to communicate that complexity to voters. You need to communicate effectively to voters. People lying is certainly a problem, but people will always lie. And sometimes the liers will win. Communicating inneffectively wont change that. Im not sure if you really believe that effective communication is a problem. Or just that the liers have been more effective at it of late.
Was Mediscare a lie, or was it concise and spoke to a greater truth?
C@t:
Certainly an interesting mix. I just hope it doesn’t turn into the Lambie Hour like the last time she was on Qanda.
el guapo @ #2951 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 10:47 pm
Did the Labor party win government as a result?
c@tmomma @ #2949 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 10:43 pm
c@tmomma @ #2949 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 10:43 pm
The Ghost of Donald Horne claims his revenge, his vindication?
The actual Mencken quote (unparaphrased):
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem neat, plausible and wrong.”
I have a close friend who works in QR.
The CEO who resigned was very hard working and well loved by all the staff. She is sorely missed. Did she not tell the government that they had an impending staff shortage? No one knows for sure, but she was one of the best and most competent CEOs around.
I’m also very surprised that Labor did not make more capital out of this given that this was entirely Newman’s fault.
Charlie Spiering will have the piss taken out of him as long as he remains a White House correspondent
That doesnt answer the question though does it? Was it a lie or effectively speak to a greater truth? And i am not in any way advocating lies. They may have their own costs down the track. I am simply making the point that complex ideas MUST be communicated simply and effectively. And they can be. And the ALP need to be better at it. And the Liberal Party will scream Stop The Boats regardless. Changing the culture of a society so that complex explanations are the order of the day is beyond the remit of contemporary politicians.
VERY IMPORTANT CENTERLINK NOTICE!!!!
Dan Nicholson @dpn78 1m1 minute ago
Dan Nicholson Retweeted Dan Nicholson
The percentage of Centrelink decisions changed on internal review is published annually (last year it was 37.5%). The info exists.
el guapo @ #2958 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:03 pm
We await your detailed concrete examples on how you would do it.
So all those people have been misrepresenting the anti-democratic Herr Mencken all these years?
[The internet is based on the TCP/IP protocol. ]
I have a painful memory early 90’s a until on networks that obsessed over the 7(?) layers of the TCP/IP protocol? The memories are as vague as they are old.
He’s a Breitbart alumni Shellbell so of course.
Dave, way to miss the point.
el guapo @ #2964 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:13 pm
You wrote –
Details please – you are the one missing the point.
Then you need to explain it in a more concise and simple manner.
Forget Mencken, you are looking for Herbert Simon:
“…the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal.”
And in greater depth:
“If we accept values as given and consistent, if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decision maker’s computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need to distinguish between the real world and the decision maker’s perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision maker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision maker’s perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)
“If, on the other hand, we accept the proposition that both the knowledge and the computational power of the decision maker are severely limited, then we must distinguish between the real world and the actor’s perception of it and reasoning about it. That is to say, we must construct a theory (and test it empirically) of the processes of decision. Our theory must include not only the reasoning processes but also the processes that generate the actor’s subjective representation of the decision problem, his or her frame.”
So, you may need a simple explanation to get through to some groups of people, and it may not be the best thing f it is strictly true, as in corresponding to reality, because that truth might conflict in “irrational” ways with a person’s internal model of the world.
Well, I think I made myself clear there.
el guapo @ #2966 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:19 pm
Nope, I’ve asked twice already for you to explain in detail your statement –
So detail what you claim should be said and done.
Little point in asking or discussing further if you don’t detail what should be done and said.
LU, I don’t know if I would advocate that it even not be strictly true (but lets face it, who didn’t enjoy Mediscare) but that it needs to use whatever aspects of its truth that resonates to a particular audience.
That’s ethics. I thought this was a political blog? 😛
[Bemused @8:09 pm
Singapore has roads, highways, freeways, an airport and busses. No trams and not sure about bike tracks. They have a rail link to Malaysia.
They are best compared with a city rather than one of our states.
Our sprawling cities are not really a good idea and our focus on cars is unfortunate.
We can do better. We should do better.]
I go out to dinner (sadly not with along lost friend and his lovely Singapore lady). and come back to an avalanche of posts, many about Singapore. If I read through all of them before replying, It’d be long after midnight. So a quick comment!
Someone pointed out that we don’t have a coherent infrastructure approach, but chop and change every three years.
IMO the chief difference between Singapore and us is that we are not a one party state, like Singapore! I myself would prefer our chaos to Singapore’s uniformity.
Never the less, it would be nice if big investments such as Defence could be made without reference to short term political advatage. This is probably pipe dream, and I blame the Libs’ persistent attempts to divide , rather than unite us!
Bemused, I think we’re not far apart in thinking that at least part of the $5oG could have been better spent.
Back to catching up with others’ opinions.
Dave, you apparently believe politicians should communicate in a complex and detailed manner that fails to resonate with great swaths of the voter. Genius. The point isnt whether i can or cant do it, the point is turning complex ideas into simple phrases that allow good policy to be implemented.
The LNP-ON shuffle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smE3dD0fbE8
Libertarian Unionist
Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:20 pm
Forget Mencken….
There is also the matter of uncertainty, which is another way to think of time and its correlates – expectation and memory.
We have to sort the past, the present and the future more or less simultaneously and with a highly incomplete knowledge of any them.
don Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 3:17 pm
The answer is: it varies.
Say you have an Ethernet connection to your router. Each Ethernet frame will have a 7 octet (byte) preamble and 1 octet start of frame delimiter. These are part of layer 1 and so not considered to be part of the frame itself. Let’s ignore them.
The Ethernet Frame itself will have a 14 octet header, a payload which can be from 46 to 1500 octets and a 4 octet checksum. So, in an Ethernet frame, and excluding the layer 1 stuff, there’s an overhead of 18 bytes, regardless of whether your sending one character or 1000. Let’s now forget about that because the Ethernet header and footer will be stipped off by your router (although new ones may be subsequently added on and removed depending on the types of links between you and the destination). Ethernet is a layer 2 protocol, it’s only used within a network. **
As this is the Internet, you will be using IP, most probably IPv4. An IPv4 packet, which will be the payload in the Ethernet frame, has a header of between 20 and 60 octets (20 fixed, the rest optional).
Crikey is on a web site so within the IP payload will be a TCP segment. A TCP segment can have a header of between 20 bytes and 60 bytes.
Note, a TCP segment can be fragmented across multiple IP packets.
So, your TCP/IP packet will contain a minimum of 40 bytes of headers, whether you’re sending 1 byte, or 1000 bytes.
As a rule of thumb, when converting between bits and bytes for networking purposes, I just multiply or divide by 10 rather than 8 to account for the overhead.
** The astute reader might have noticed that the minimum payload in an Ethernet packet is 46 bytes, while the TCP/IP headers total a minimum of 40 bytes. If the TCP segment contains no data (e.g. a SYN) then the remaining 6 bytes will be filled with padding.
Any word from Trump? If not then I’m taking that as a good sign!
Gippslander
Kindly ask this question to your Singaporean Lady friend who was so ‘kind’ to opine about Australian being a ‘third world country’ –
Is Singapore a ‘third world country’ having felt the need to make laws to criminalise its people who piss in the lifts of buildings ?
And does she agree that Singapore should only ever be ruled by the Lew Dynasty or their toadies ?
At least in what she referred to as a ‘third world country’ – Australia – for all our faults we haven’t yet perverted the courts to sue political opponents for expressing their opinion. RC’s excepted!
The Lib/ON union is yet another example of Liberal arrogance. It supposes that voters are stupid and will be told what to do.
They have underestimated the voters of WA.
el guapo @ #2972 Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:40 pm
I simply asked you to demonstrate what you demanded of others,
Fail. A miserable fail.
Dave
Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 9:56 pm
Who is it to the left of Joyce?
Ghengis Khan?
More seriously, El Guapo, take what you said and look at the converse.
No one who Labor is trying to convince to vote for it will care if the Libs say something untruthful if it resonates with them. So the way to address untruths is not to point out how your opponents’ statement violates the laws of physics, but to either make a stronger appeal to the resonating part of an engaged voter’s internal model, or to find something that has even greater resonance.
For example, I have plenty of friends (and a wife) who go on about Abbott and Trump and Pyne and Morrison and Turnbull and Hunt sayng incorrect things and ranting and raving about how wrong they are, but it does noting but make them feel better (I guess). Moreover, it would never convince anyone who comes to the table with a different set of basic beliefs to change their minds.
And to diverge slightly, that is one reason why I’m loving the repetition of “Mr harbour-side mansion” from Shorten. It means so much to so many different people, and almost all of it negative. The statement it truthful; the inferences, perhaps not – but that is the power of it.
Confessions
Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:52 pm
Sky News Australia
1 hr ·
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has condemned North Korea following missile launch off its east coast.
Any word from Trump? If not then I’m taking that as a good sign!
Abe goes to Washington. There is a press conference. Trump makes a gesture. He declares the US will stand with Japan against NK missile and nuclear threats. NK fires a ballistic missile. Trump is confused.
Which is why we rely on heuristics, habits, abstractions and gross approximations. These all have biases. Learn the biases and you are in business.
Marketing people know this very well.
Anyway, off to bed for me.
I dunno as much as I would like about truth. But I sure know more than I want about lies and their authors, the LNP and their supervisors at the IPA and News Corp.
Dave, whatever. Simple enough.
Libertarian Unionist
Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:00 am
Heuristics…being another way to spell supposition.
Pinot is very agreeable, taken with lamb and bitter greens.
briefly @ #2984 Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:01 am
Yep – and FOX and the impact that has had dividing and getting Americans at each others throats since 1996.
“Great” legacy.
LU, im a fan of Shortens zingers. Mr Harbourside Mansion works alright. Trunbull certainly doesnt like it.
I understand what El Guapo means. It’s also why seemingly inconsequential moments or surface imagery can swing big moments in political history – a handshake, a birthday cake, a commonly held view that this or that pollie is “a man or a woman of the people”. It’s those things that sum up a zeitgeist and move whole populations as one, where the nation as a whole seems to have suddenly make it’s mind up. I don’t have an example of what must be said or done either and anyone that did would be wasting it on a blog comment. But I have a feeling that if the community spirit can be invoked, those moments when people come together to help those in need, those instincts can be fatal to the project of greed, fear and selfishness inherent in the current government’s DNA.
The converse point that Lib U points out also ring true
Politicians and marketing have much in common.
We no longer really know who’s who when it comes to the Liberals, ON and the Nationals in WA. They are all in disguise these days.
What we do know is that Labor are concerned about the issues that matter to voters – about stopping the sale of Western Power. Labor is concerned about jobs, family incomes, education and health, about transport and congestion.
If voters want to express how they feel about Barnett – if they want a change from politics as usual in WA – there is one sure way to do it. Vote Labor on March 11.
shiftaling @ #2990 Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:10 am
Please post details when its more than a ‘feeling’…
Briefly, one issue of concern is that Lib or ON prefs will see them jump ahead of Labor on 2PP. I don’t know how likely this is in WA, but must be a strong chance in Qld.
Dave
{Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 11:53 pm
Gippslander
Kindly ask this question to your Singaporean Lady friend who was so ‘kind’ to opine about Australian being a ‘third world country’ –} etc, etc
“kindly ” read my post at 11;39. and calm down
Also “kindly” note that the extremely intelligent lady has chosen to live in Australia!! even though it’s imperfect.
So in a nutshell Dave you have nothing of substance to say.
briefly @ #2992 Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:13 am
I’m probably wrong but Jackols post above @10.06 # 2934 looks on the money to me as I said @ 10:29 #2944.
Its what abbott did and what trump has done/ is doing.
In a nutshell, from Jackol –
gippslander @ #2995 Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:17 am
I am calm, and my questions are reasonable.
Why did Singapore need to introduce criminal laws to prevent its people pissing in lifts?
And why are the political opponents of the Singaporean Government sued when the express politician opinions?
In a nutshell, from Jackol –
This works when there are commonly agreed principles underlying the simple, effective communication.
“What we have seen is a concerted attack to question the fundamental facts of, eg, climate change – when you have a section of the public that doesn’t even agree on the fundamentals, then you can’t make a ‘simple, effective’ communication strategy.”
Except the Liberal Party did exactly that.
“FUD works and runs interference on anything except the most basic, primal messaging, which is why the reactionaries love using it. ”
No doubt. But if anything this heightens the need for simple and effective communication. It doesnt mean lying and engaging in the same processes, however complex explanatiins have quite clearly shown to have failed in this environment.
El Guapo
Monday, February 13, 2017 at 12:17 am
Briefly, one issue of concern is that Lib or ON prefs will see them jump ahead of Labor on 2PP. I don’t know how likely this is in WA, but must be a strong chance in Qld.
The Libs and ON are hoping they can work a swap. This relies on voters being willing to follow HTVs. In my opinion, this misunderstands the ON vote. This vote is a rejector/anti-incumbent expression. It is intended to oppose “politics-as-usual”. The Lib/ON deal is pure politics as usual. It treats voters as if they are stupid or ignorant or both. It will also result in brand confusion, inviting the questions “Who is a Lib? Who are ON? Are they just the same?” This will be fatal for both the Libs and ON. Voters want to express resentment of the Barnett Government. There is now just one unmistakeable way to do that – Vote Labor.
ON has attracted support because they have stood apart from the Liberals. They have become tools of the Liberals…and the Liberals have become tools of ON.
They have inadvertently begin to campaign for Labor.