Friday, March 29, 2024

YEAH RIGHT: You can’t count on the numbers

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When I was at school my teachers were staunchly stuck in their trenches fighting off the relentless advance of technology.
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There wasn’t much in those days of what might now be known as new technology.

Calculators did fit the bill which shows how long ago it was that they were at the cutting edge. However, we weren’t allowed to use them.

There was one teacher who had seen the light and heard of computers. He reckoned they might prove useful in the future and wanted to teach kids something about them.

The school did relent and allowed him to do so, but not in school hours. So some of us went along to his classroom after school once a week and he told us what he knew and we did some rudimentary things like learning about instructions and how binary systems worked. The actual computer stuff wasn’t done there. The school didn’t possess a computer. What we did involved punch cards – bits of cardboard with holes in them – and reams of printouts. Everything had to be sent away somewhere to be processed.

But being caught in possession of a calculator remained a serious crime akin to eating babies. We were allowed slide rules which did the job, eventually, but they were sods of things to use and the possibilities for getting it wrong were numerous.

So we did a lot of playing around with numbers, spending ages on tasks that could have been done in a flash on a calculator.

Fortunately I was quite good at maths so when I got into the upper forms also took advanced maths that involved things like statistics and mechanics.

I enjoyed this stuff. It was fun playing round with numbers. You could use them, especially in the form of statistics, to prove anything you wanted.

I learned that you could take one set of numbers and use them to prove different things – often things that we opposites.

Take bumble bees. It is possible to use mathematics to prove that a bumble bee can’t fly. It’s physically impossible for it to get airborne. Yet I’ve seen bumble bees fly.

Incidentally, it is possible to use maths to prove a bullet can never reach its target. You see, between the firing point and the target there are an infinite number of points. The bullet must touch each point along the way and to do that it must stop on each point. Therefore, with a infinite number of points to stop on the bullet can never get where it’s going. This works equally as well for anything involving movement so if the cops charge you with shooting some-one or bludgeoning or stabling them to death you can quote me. I’m sure you’ll get off.

It also works for speeding. How can you have been doing 51kmh? Impossible. Just tell the cop you were stationary at the time and he’ll immediately stop writing that ticket.

People who want to make themselves look good often send out press releases with numbers as proof of how well they are doing.

The Primary Industries Ministry sent one out saying it surveyed mail coming into the country and found only five non-compliant risk goods.

However, the survey covered just a fortnight and only 4367 items of the 1.6 million that came in were inspected.

MPI claimed that meant 99.93% of goods were free of biosecurity threats in the form of pests and diseases.

But using MAF’s own figures there are getting on for 2500 biosecurity threats a month coming into the country in the mail – and that’s just the ones they know about. Again using MPI’s figures there must be about 200 or so arriving every month in the mail they don’t know about.

And as we have seen from the likes of fruit flies, Psa, blackgrass, velvetleaf, horehound and pea weevils it takes just one incursion to cause huge domestic cost and disruption and threats to our markets.

Biosecurity really is a case where just one failure out of trillions could spell disaster. And to give credit where its due MPI does say it strives for 100% so there is still room for improvement.

Talking of trillions, Winston Peters of NZ First fame has been doing some sums to discredit the Government’s claim New Zealand can be predator-free by 2050 for what he described as the bargain basement price of $28 million.

It does sound good, just $28m to get rid of all possums, stoats, weasels and ferrets and thus the spread of bovine tuberculosis. We’ll all have some of that.

But Peters, unsurprisingly, isn’t having any of it.

His sums, based on the$17m cost to set up the Zealandia sanctuary in Wellington and the $867,000 a year to run it tell a different story.

He reckons it would cost an initial outlay of $1.67 trillion then $91 billion a year to maintain because NZ is 98,000 times larger than Zealandia. The annual running cost alone would be 40% more than NZ earns.

I’ll leave you to ponder the slight difference between the two sets of figures while I ponder the telling off we all got from Peters for not being positive enough about our athletes at the Olympics.

He used the medals per head of population table, rather than the official medals table, to tell us how we our athletes were doing and berate us for questioning the funding for people who were trying really hard. We were being unfair.

First it’s nonsense to use made-up tables to justify our performance. We came first on the table for countries with a prime minister called John Key.

And why shouldn’t I or anyone else ask questions about how much we spend on these people?

It’s our money.

They might train really hard and try really hard in competition but I believe I have a right to ask if I’m getting value for money.

It’s not as if these people are working. They are earning heaps of money for doing something they enjoy – something you and I would call a hobby – and seeing the world at the same time.

Half of them speak with American accents and many of them hardly ever visit NZ. That latter is probably why they never offer to come round and do my lawns as reward for all the money I am forced to give them.

High Performance Sport spends getting on for $70m a year of my money on this privileged lot and its parent body Sport NZ spends another $60m on top of that. The Government also puts money at whim into things like big yachts for rich people and major sporting events.

So if we reckon the Government might put in about $200m a year to sports it’s only fair to ask if I’m getting value for money.

How much wool, meat, dairy produce, honey, wine, fruit and vegetables are sold because of our athletes’ success.

How much marketing and science could we get for that $200m a year?

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