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AusPoliGaf |Early 2016 Election| - the government's term has been... Shortened

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darkace

Banned
The point is that wages aren't paid to a household, they're paid to an individual. This quote of yours:



When the topic of discussion is "wage stagnation" which you have claimed as a myth, you cannot use the metric of household disposable income to prove that. It is a completely different thing. If you're going to make the argument that "wage stagnation" doesn't matter because of other factors such as smaller household sizes, you can, but you appear to be conflating the two and then calling someone wilfully obtuse for pointing that out.

I'm really not sure how this is confusing. If median household size across the entire country shrinks and household wages remain the same then ipso facto individual wages have increased.
 

Fredescu

Member
I'm really not sure how this is confusing. If median household size across the entire country shrinks and household wages remain the same then ipso facto individual wages have increased.

Correct, it's not confusing at all. Your wage is the amount of money your employer pays you. Household size is completely independent of this.
 

darkace

Banned
Correct, it's not confusing at all. Your wage is the amount of money your employer pays you. Household size is completely independent of this.

???

I'm talking about individual wages. Household sizes and household income are a way of looking at individual wages by proxy. Individual income is just household income divided by household size.

If household income has flatlined while household sizes decrease then individual income has increased.
 
???

I'm talking about individual wages. Household sizes and household income are a way of looking at individual wages by proxy. Individual income is just household income divided by household size.

If household income has flatlined while household sizes decrease then individual income has increased.

He specifically says that it's fallen for single male s though (ie the group that traditionally commanded the highest wage). You're getting higher averages because of dual income households and single female houses where the earnings have increased.
 

Fredescu

Member
Household sizes and household income are a way of looking at individual wages by proxy.

It's a way of looking at the usefulness of those wages, but lies outside the discussion of "have wages stagnated"? Like I said before, if you want to make the argument that "yes, wages have stagnated, but we're still better off because xyz" then do that.


Individual income is just household income divided by household size.

What is the usefulness of this metric? I don't understand the situation where you don't know what an individuals income is, but you *do* know what the household income is, so you do some division to arrive at a number that has no bearing on the actual wages of the people living in a given house. I get how individual income is useful, provided you're using the number of their payslip. And I get how household income is useful, as it implies certain shared overheads. But it's bizarre to assume all households pool their income and distribute it evenly among all members, and then use that figure and call it individual income, when you probably already knew what the real individual income was anyway.
 

darkace

Banned
It's a way of looking at the usefulness of those wages, but lies outside the discussion of "have wages stagnated"? Like I said before, if you want to make the argument that "yes, wages have stagnated, but we're still better off because xyz" then do that.

The answer is yes only if you you exclude other forms of employee compensation such as healthcare benefits and pensions. And then only in the US. Australia has seen continued strong wage growth for decades.

What is the usefulness of this metric? I don't understand the situation where you don't know what an individuals income is, but you *do* know what the household income is, so you do some division to arrive at a number that has no bearing on the actual wages of the people living in a given house. I get how individual income is useful, provided you're using the number of their payslip. And I get how household income is useful, as it implies certain shared overheads. But it's bizarre to assume all households pool their income and distribute it evenly among all members, and then use that figure and call it individual income, when you probably already knew what the real individual income was anyway.

This is how averages work.
 

darkace

Banned

It's been low recently, but we've seen strong growth since the late 80's recession outside of the last few years. And the last few years have been as a result of the end of the mining boom.

The question is, when you want to know what the average wage is, why would you include people who do not earn a wage in that average? It makes the end result misleading to put it mildly.

It skews it downwards, but predictably and easily adjustably so. It's still very useful for showing trends.
 
Trending on my FB this morning: Andrew Bolt has been forced to move his family out of their home following death threats from people claiming to support ISIS.

Andrew Bolt is now a refugee. Will that stop him demonizing brown people? Probably not.
 
There are now 7 votes in it for Flynn after preferences, 78.74% counted. Labor's candidate is 37,287, vs the Liberal National's 37,280.
 
There are now 7 votes in it for Flynn after preferences, 78.74% counted. Labor's candidate is 37,287, vs the Liberal National's 37,280.

It's going to come down to absents and interstates for some of these, which means we could be waiting until next Friday night for a definitive seat count. Also a margin of less than 100 triggers an automatic recount. And there's probably disputed informal / provisional ballot arguments too (which is why the ballots they lost in Qld may turn out to be important).
 

Dead Man

Member
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BowieZ

Banned
So Hindmarsh is going up but the others all going backwards. And it appears there's still 15-20% of the vote to count. Dammit. Sounds like when the dust settles, a Majority will actually be probable.
 
Is it actually going take a whole extra week to get a result?

It's an automatic recount if there's less than 100 votes difference. So most of these really close seats are going to need recounting. If the difference is less than the number of outstanding Absent / Postal votes they have to wait for those to come in (which I believe is 13 days, so next Friday) as well. The reason you get fast results on election night is that the AEC cheats like blazes , they guess the two most likely contenders for a seat , and then attribute preferences to whoever's higher up on the ticket for all other votes.
 
Is it actually going take a whole extra week to get a result?

Very possibly, postals can come in as late as next friday and still be valid. With the margins involved it'll be a long wait.

Let's face it Malcolm has 76 minimum so majority government however slim but oh boy does he have trouble. I'll bet the likes of Christensen are already preparing their wishlists.
 

darkace

Banned
Electronic voting has terrible, terrible issues. Yes paper voting is wasteful but it's a hell of a lot better than our election results being subject to tampering.
 

cheezcake

Member
You fundamentally can't guarantee a totally secure electronic system, especially not while keeping your vote both private and voting accessible.

I trust an electronic system more than a paper ballot which I was forced to fill in with pencil. Also you can guarantee a 100% mathematically secure communications system with the BB84 protocol (yay quantum communications), I believe Sweden did it for their election.

Of course the end point systems are still vulnerable, but still far more secure than paper ballots if done competently.
 
There has to some happy transitional medium.

Say an electronic system where you input you vote on the screen. The machine prints off you HoR ballot paper that looks just like the standard pencil filled in one with a unique barcode that electronically describes your vote alongside it with some non-identifiable tracking info. Then you have 3 auditable systems, the electronic count, an optical machine count of the barcodes and a third hand count. Once you have confidence in the system you can do away with the hand count unless requested in close results.

People would obviously have to check their ballot before placing them in the box or committing them to the count electronically.

The senate and their 100+ candidates would probably need another method!
 

dity

Member
There has to some happy transitional medium.

Say an electronic system where you input you vote on the screen. The machine prints off you HoR ballot paper that looks just like the standard pencil filled in one with a unique barcode that electronically describes your vote alongside it with some non-identifiable tracking info. Then you have 3 auditable systems, the electronic count, an optical machine count of the barcodes and a third hand count. Once you have confidence in the system you can do away with the hand count unless requested in close results.

People would obviously have to check their ballot before placing them in the box or committing them to the count electronically.

The senate and their 100+ candidates would probably need another method!

Press on screen, print on paper, sign box on lower right, throw into ballot box.

Sounds way better than filling out a piece of paper in pencil. Pencil!
 

seanoff

Member
The liberal party got ahead of themselves.

Pass laws to rig the senate to the 2 major parties, trigger a DD election on an issue that most people in the electorate don't know or care about.

And then barely get back in with the senate changing from a bear pit to a pit of vipers.

Lol.

So now nothing constructive will get done and what does get done will rely on the racist and odious Pauline Hansen and her band of xenophobes.
 
The liberal party got ahead of themselves.

Pass laws to rig the senate to the 2 major parties, trigger a DD election on an issue that most people in the electorate don't know or care about.

And then barely get back in with the senate changing from a bear pit to a pit of vipers.

Lol.

So now nothing constructive will get done and what does get done will rely on the racist and odious Pauline Hansen and her band of xenophobes.

Turnbull can go the other way and appeal to Labor. The business community (aka the fuck everything else lower our taxes brigade) are already making noises in that direction. As expected Morrison is already flubbing it by ruling out any potential compromises.
 

darkace

Banned
I trust an electronic system more than a paper ballot which I was forced to fill in with pencil. Also you can guarantee a 100% mathematically secure communications system with the BB84 protocol (yay quantum communications), I believe Sweden did it for their election.

Of course the end point systems are still vulnerable, but still far more secure than paper ballots if done competently.

The experts that I've heard have suggested that it's impossible to guarantee a system in which the outcomes are secure.

I'd much rather a system that is slow over a system susceptible to fraud.
 
The experts that I've heard have suggested that it's impossible to guarantee a system in which the outcomes are secure.

I'd much rather a system that is slow over a system susceptible to fraud.

Its impossible to absolutely guarantee the security of the physical system too (at least as we do it). People tend to hold electronic voting to a higher standard for some reason.

Setting things up so people could vote on a smartphone , print their ticket, verify and box it would be a huge improvement though. Especially with the new Senate voting system. It'd make the OCR / Scanning much more efficient too.
 

darkace

Banned
Its impossible to absolutely guarantee the security of the physical system too (at least as we do it). People tend to hold electronic voting to a higher standard for some reason.

Setting things up so people could vote on a smartphone , print their ticket, verify and box it would be a huge improvement though. Especially with the new Senate voting system. It'd make the OCR / Scanning much more efficient too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

Here's a video that says it better than I ever could. I'm not well versed in this area so I try to keep my statements to a minimum.

I like the efficiency idea, but I remain totally unsold on privacy and security concerns.
 

Fredescu

Member
Its impossible to absolutely guarantee the security of the physical system too (at least as we do it). People tend to hold electronic voting to a higher standard for some reason.

It needs to be held to a higher standard because there is no physical record of the vote. It's not impossible to lose that, but it's much harder. It's much easier to secure and passes through far fewer hands. Data is lost and databases are corrupted every day of the week.

But what problem are we actually solving with evoting? Slow counting? A week or two without new legislation, big deal.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

Here's a video that says it better than I ever could. I'm not well versed in this area so I try to keep my statements to a minimum.

I like the efficiency idea, but I remain totally unsold on privacy and security concerns.

A lot of that was arguments that could have been made against physical voting were it introduced now (humans can be incompetent , my malevolent or compromised).

I guess the big thing is that defense against electronic attacks introduces the inefficies electronic voting is supposed to avoid (the expensive pencil problem) which is true. The best defense is air gaps but those are equivalent to Human involvement to move data. That and the expense, it's possible to do things like smart hardware based handshakes with USB to verify its a good untampered USB (to the machine) and vice versa but it suddenly vastly increases the cost.

Also voting software that you can't audit and isn't air gapped during the audit is a terrible idea.
 
It needs to be held to a higher standard because there is no physical record of the vote. It's not impossible to lose that, but it's much harder. It's much easier to secure and passes through far fewer hands. Data is lost and databases are corrupted every day of the week.

But what problem are we actually solving with evoting? Slow counting? A week or two without new legislation, big deal.

You could do physical records (or pseudo physical records). The problem is verifying them while maintaining anonymity.

Its probably going to be a month to get the Senate done. That may or may not be a big deal depending on when Senate elections happen and how often (A half - Senate every 3 years is a bit of a bump unless elections are timed to avoid sitting periods).
 

darkace

Banned
A lot of that was arguments that could have been made against physical voting were it introduced now (humans can be incompetent , my malevolent or compromised).

They're all things that have been largely solved at any scale large enough to influence results. The same can't be said for electronic voting. It's infinitely easier to influence results on a scale large enough to change how things swung.
 

Fredescu

Member
You could do physical records (or pseudo physical records). The problem is verifying them while maintaining anonymity.

A physical record of the electronic vote? Why not just have a physical record of the actual vote and count that? Electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem.
 
There has to some happy transitional medium.

Say an electronic system where you input you vote on the screen. The machine prints off you HoR ballot paper that looks just like the standard pencil filled in one with a unique barcode that electronically describes your vote alongside it with some non-identifiable tracking info. Then you have 3 auditable systems, the electronic count, an optical machine count of the barcodes and a third hand count. Once you have confidence in the system you can do away with the hand count unless requested in close results.

People would obviously have to check their ballot before placing them in the box or committing them to the count electronically.

The senate and their 100+ candidates would probably need another method!

Quite frankly, this is probably the best middle ground. Having a printed paper record that can be verified by the voter before being deposited in a voting box that can then be inserted in a verification machine later during counting would basically ensure that the data cannot be forged any more easily than regular paper voting and can be counted manually if required. And I imagine machines can be made to print senate papers as well, it's just a matter of keeping the machines stocked with paper and ink.

It's a lot more secure than full electronic voting but also a lot more convenient than traditional paper voting, I think.
 
They're all things that have been largely solved at any scale large enough to influence results. The same can't be said for electronic voting. It's infinitely easier to influence results on a scale large enough to change how things swung.


Yes, and if we'd had electronic voting for a couple of hundred years , we'd have worked the issues out too (given that the social structure otherwise mirrored that before rather that the modern one). But we didn't.

The best way to switch is hugely inefficient: use it as a hugely expensive pencil, until repeated field tests, audits and cross validation have worked out the errors. Then gradually remove the physical aspect (by only using it when something is contested). And no one has the appetite for that.

A physical record of the electronic vote? Why not just have a physical record of the actual vote and count that? Electronic voting is a solution in search of a problem.

The enormous rise in early voting says there's a problem. The huge queues from the new Senate system despite that says there's a problem too. Electronic voting potentially solves both.
 

Quasar

Member
You fundamentally can't guarantee a totally secure electronic system, especially not while keeping your vote both private and voting accessible.

Yeah. I do wonder about keeping the ballots secret, whilst also having it auditable. And course building a system that survive that amount of traffic would be interesting.
 

choodi

Banned
So this gave me a chuckle...

How a Chinese-language social media campaign hurt Labor's election chances

The Labor candidate for Chisholm, Stefanie Perri, says the WeChat campaign hurt her chances.

“There clearly was a campaign that ran through WeChat, appealing to people’s fears and spreading untruths specifically designed to turn the Chinese community against [Labor],” she says. “It was lowest-common-denominator politics. It played on their greatest fears.”

She saw posts claiming Labor would increase the refugee quota at the expense of Chinese migrants. “There was clearly no factual basis but it was very opportunistic,” she says.

The New South Wales Labor Senate candidate Paul Han says the campaign also ran in Chinese-heavy seats in Sydney. He criticised the tactics in a Chinese-language press release a week out from the election.

“It is definitely systematic, organised and pushed by a team of political activists,” he says. “It spreads so fast and took everyone by surprise. The purpose is very obvious. But it is a very dirty tactic.”

After the disgraceful Mediscare campaign which pretty much ventured over the line into illegal territory, any Labor people claiming dirty tactics need to pull their heads in.

One volunteer-led campaign aimed at one cultural group in one electorate versus a party-financed and approved, country-wide campaign translated into multiple languages. I know which is the more "lowest common denominator politics".
 

cheezcake

Member
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

Here's a video that says it better than I ever could. I'm not well versed in this area so I try to keep my statements to a minimum.

I like the efficiency idea, but I remain totally unsold on privacy and security concerns.

Pretty good video, here are the problems he summarises.

1: Auditing the software and hardware
2: Transit of voting data
3: Central count program with little to no accountability

I'll try and approach this from a standpoint that electronic voting has to just be better than paper voting, not impeccably perfect.

Problem 3 is easily solvable, who said the implementation needs a single central count program? Distribute the data from all machines to multiple (could be hundreds to thousands if necessary this is totally trivial) systems held by mix of the stakeholders of the election. Data has to obviously match between all counters to be considered valid. This is actually a really dumb solution and could be done with much more complex security measures but with the same underlying principle, it ensures against corruption of a central count program.

Problem 2 is mathematically solvable thanks to quantum key distribution technologies, transit of data is not an issue. Also note QKD systems are not quantum computing systems, they can be implemented with commercially available technology right now. But there are some vulnerabilities with modern systems due to hardware imperfections, these will be solved in time. QKD systems are also vulnerable to man in the middle attacks to the same extent and classical communication protocol is. But it is possible to authenticate using unconditionally secure schemes designed for QKD.

Problem 1 is hard to solve. At least to my knowledge. I'm sure smart people can think of a way to at least make it as secure as the paper counterpart.

Also paper voting is very vulnerable to MITM attacks. Like every step of it. Vote transit, vulnerable. Calling in results to a central count, extremely vulnerable. Pencils? cmon man.

The best argument in favor of paper voting IMO is that it's very easy to commit small scale fraud, but complexity raises immensely as you try and increase the scale of the fraud. With electronic voting it would be extremely difficult to commit small scale fraud, but if you can change one vote then you can probably change much more than one.

Also as a note. I don't support electronic voting because it's faster, but because I genuinely think it can be much more secure than paper voting.
 

Yagharek

Member
So this gave me a chuckle...

How a Chinese-language social media campaign hurt Labor's election chances



After the disgraceful Mediscare campaign which pretty much ventured over the line into illegal territory, any Labor people claiming dirty tactics need to pull their heads in.

One volunteer-led campaign aimed at one cultural group in one electorate versus a party-financed and approved, country-wide campaign translated into multiple languages. I know which is the more "lowest common denominator politics".

Dont the LNP still have ICAC hearings to come against one of their senators?

In any case both parties are absolutely corrupt. Parakeelia, IPA, medicare texts etc whatever.

The more non-extreme right micro parties/independents in parliament the better.
 
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