Politics 🗳️ NZ Politics

[miket12]

Who then get an understanding of the issues and explain them clearly to the public.

They don’t need create their own LLM, but they should probably be able to communicate the plan around the rollout and maybe even use the tech themselves to demonstrate the wonderful advantages to be gained.

You do realise that government depts have IT staff who could inform them things so the Ministers can then explain it? You do realise that most "experts" in AI, and pretty much anything, have had to learn about it? Even people who have "self taught" themselves about AI have spent time learning it.

 

[Tokyo Warrior]

You do realise that government depts have IT staff who could inform them things so the Ministers can then explain it? You do realise that most "experts" in AI, and pretty much anything, have had to learn about it? Even people who have "self taught" themselves about AI have spent time learning it.

Great! Then why couldn’t the ministers explain it? Or demonstrate its effectiveness?

 

[miket12]

Great! Then why couldn’t the ministers explain it? Or demonstrate its effectiveness?

Have you stopped to think that they may not have had the time to yet since it was announced in a pre-budget speech? They don't set the budget or its agenda and most of the time, aren't aware of it's contents... Willis does.

 

[juju]

That might be your take but it’s not mine and largely not the countries. Hipkins is polling higher than Luxon and Peters is only 3% of equalling him for preferred pm. His leadership is dismal and things like this mineral deal for America alone is going to harm him when there are apparently military implications. He needn’t sign any NZer for anything he’s not prepared to send his son to

The current government will be known as an all talk no delivery regime with a big undercurrent of shitting on the citizens most needing their help.

 

[Tokyo Warrior]

Have you stopped to think that they may not have had the time to yet since it was announced in a pre-budget speech? They don't set the budget or its agenda and most of the time, aren't aware of it's contents... Willis does.

Funny time to roll it out then. Almost like they need some layoffs to create a pre-election fund to bribe the electorate with after a miserable three years in power.

"Minister, have you rolled out this game-changing technology fully in your own office?"
*sad right-wing noises*
"If not, why not?"
"If so, how many of your mates on staff have you managed to lay off as a result?"

 

[Tokyo Warrior]

As Frank showed us upthread, a famously lean country like Singapore has 1.4% of its working population in core civil work, even though its similar population is much more concentrated in a single urban area. NZ is aiming for 1% in an apples for apples comparison. It is going to achieve this using game-changing technology (which Singapore obviously hasn't heard about) with the potential to change society at every level.....which the ministers don't use and can't talk intelligibly about.

I'm glad you lot are big on immigration, because thousands more skilled Kiwis are on their way out of this country, probably to be replaced in a few years by third worlders when reality bites.

 

[snake77]

Have you stopped to think that they may not have had the time to yet since it was announced in a pre-budget speech? They don't set the budget or its agenda and most of the time, aren't aware of it's contents... Willis does.

Whatever budget they set I highly doubt this will come in under budget. Why?

History of government IT projects.

A.I is like the Cloud the industry has gone made over A.I. Have they learnt the lessons from failed Cloud projects. What are they planning to use it for?

The main reason. The current state of the IT industry. I mentioned this in this thread earlier in the year. There is an extreme shortage of specific parts affecting the industry. At the moment, it isn't uncommon for companies to get a quote (let's say $1 million). Sit on it for a month and find the quote is no longer valid. The parts are no longer available. The cost is now $3 million.

The lead time for hardware is often 6 months out. I am currently sitting on projects, updating customers that we are waiting on hardware. Delivery times can't be guaranteed.

Heard a story yesterday of a company not being able to buy memory. They had to buy a cheaper server, pull out the memory and install it into the server they needed to upgrade.


What is causing this? The large Hyperscalers buying up all of the key components. At the moment it is the computing power required for A.I.
This happens occasionally, but this current situation is expected to last a while. I heard into the following year.

This will be a lot worse waiting for the equipment required for A.I.

 

[snake77]

You do realise that government depts have IT staff who could inform them things so the Ministers can then explain it? You do realise that most "experts" in AI, and pretty much anything, have had to learn about it? Even people who have "self taught" themselves about AI have spent time learning it.

The majority of the government IT processes have been outsourced for quite a while and have gone through a number of vendors. They have had managers for budgets and may have some consultants directing strategy etc. Most of the skills are with external companies.

Your statement about having to learn A.I is accurate. Not just IT but also the companies intending to use it.

In I.T we are quite mature in sizing and scoping computing power for storage. These workloads require x IOPS and latency. We need to connect via these protocols etc.

For A.I we are still figuring out the requirements required to get this information to size what is required. The size of the GPU cards etc.

Companies also aren't very far along the A.I journey when they decide to go down that path. So they can't provide the relevant information.

Some of the key requirements are acceptable accuracy and wait times.

The wait times are interesting as companies may scale back and decide a minute is acceptable for staff to wait. Years ago waiting for machines to start up or for processes to complete could take minutes. Now if things aren't done with in a few seconds people feel they aren't working. We are turning into goldfish.

 

[MrFrankWhite]

As Frank showed us upthread, a famously lean country like Singapore has 1.4% of its working population in core civil work, even though its similar population is much more concentrated in a single urban area. NZ is aiming for 1% in an apples for apples comparison. It is going to achieve this using game-changing technology (which Singapore obviously hasn't heard about) with the potential to change society at every level.....which the ministers don't use and can't talk intelligibly about.

I'm glad you lot are big on immigration, because thousands more skilled Kiwis are on their way out of this country, probably to be replaced in a few years by third worlders when reality bites.

I agree on premise and I of course agree on the threat posed by immigration. But I don’t think those public servants are as skilled as you think they are.

They won’t be better off in Australia much longer. We have a higher rate of public sector employment than any one. When the bubble pops here, it will be extreme.

 

[wizard of Tauranga]

Are we talking about decreasing from 1.2% to 1.0%?

It’s 0.2% of the workforce. Irrelevant in the big picture.

 

[MaybeTop8]

Are we talking about decreasing from 1.2% to 1.0%?

It’s 0.2% of the workforce. Irrelevant in the big picture.

Spoken like a callous far right neoliberal capitalist

 

[miket12]

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There's one huge difference however between the numbers of public servants in Singapore and New Zealand.... they include local body employees as public servants for the stats while NZ treats LB employees as a separate category.

So how does this effect the numbers? 60,000 people out of the 158,000 mentioned above work for local councils (so wouldn't be used in the public service number for NZ) meaning a proper comparison would be that 1.6% of the population of Singapore are consisted public servants as NZ measures them compared to 1.2% of the population of NZ.

Or if you want to adjust the figures to include local council workers like they do in Singapore, they have 2.6% compared to NZ's 2.3%.... (63,000 PS + 58,000 LB) / NZ population x 100.

Since 2017, the public service has increased by 32%, the proposed change would decrease it by 12%, meaning it would still have increased 20% over the 2017 figure. By comparison, the NZ population rose by 10%.

And while we're comparing Singapore to NZ, if we were to drop the number of people in the NZ public health system to match the number in Singapore's public health sector, it would go down from 100,500 people currently employed in that sector to 58,000.

And in education, there is just under 80,000 people employed in the public education sector in Singapore compared to 150,000, so we would have to lose nearly half the sector.

Put it another way, including local body employees as they do in Singapore). 1 in 26 (6.1m / 235K state employees) people in Singapore works for the state sector of the country. In NZ, 1 in 12 (5.3m / 440K state employees) people works for the state sector (not including contractors). That means, if we want to match Singapore, half of all government employees would have to go. Maybe, getting rid of 8,700 instead of over 200,000 isn't to bad after all.

So maybe it's best not to think we should be following Singapore's example!!!

 

[Rick O’Shay]

Here's a few rich pricks that need culling.

 

[MrFrankWhite]

Here's a few rich pricks that need culling.

Managers, reporting to managers, reporting to Chiefs. My personal favorite is needing both a Manager Building Compliance and Consents AND a Manager Consenting and Compliance. Because why not? Both of who I assume report to the Chief Planning Officer?

 

[Tokyo Warrior]

It is one thing we can all agree on. Middle managers and their equivalents need the guillotine.

 

[defensivebomb]

Here's a few rich pricks that need culling.

That’s a decent wedge in Wellington

300k in Wellington converts to about 500k Auckland pesos