Your dilemma is rather similar to the early days of the vaccine rollout here in the US. I'm the beginning, supplies were limited, and even with phased eligibility, competition to get in to get one was fierce. There were people who volunteered their time working the various websites to help others get an appointment. There was a group called "Vaccine Angels" dedicated to this cause.
By now, you can actually just walk in to any pharmacy or one of the state facilities to get vaccinated without an appointment. The problem I hear more about these days is not enough people coming out to get their shot. Quite the turnabout. So who knows, maybe in the coming months your MIQ problem will resolve itself!
Also I suspect that you have some kind of internal kitty radar because you somehow *always* find the cats around you.
Is there really any point in even having a time window where people can sign up?
Wouldn't it be best to simply just allow each person with a passport sign up for dates they want a slot for (it can be a singular day, or it can be Sept 1 to Dec 31). Then have it be a lottery from there? You could weigh the lottery too to increase ones odds the longer they've been in this queue system waiting for a date.
After all, even finding that singular time slot that lasted 10 seconds took you hours of refreshing. Even if it was a lottery for single spots, it still requires you to be constantly hunting for single slots, each of which you'd have a 1/10,000 chance to get.
It all just seems rather silly for them to think that system was ever going to work, and that they haven't remedied this situation by now.
I'm writing this from Day 13 of MIQ. We secured our spot several months ago. I had used a monitoring service to alert me of new dates, but I didn't entirely trust it and so I'd been playing the game, too. But it did alert me and I jumped on. Back then, the game also involved server timeouts and error pages. We were lucky.
I had considered writing a script similar to the one you shared, and rejected it partially on ethical grounds and partially on work-equivalence grounds (I judged it would have taken as long/longer to write the program as to just play the game).
On the ethics, the government says 'as they still require some manual input, they fit within the rules'. I think a lot of people will read that and (rightfully?) conclude that playing by the rules is ethical. However, there are services which provide a programming interface to solve CAPTCHAs. You just write a program to pipe the CAPTCHA to the service, it shows up to a waiting human, they solve it, and the program continues. Other services use speech recognition to solve the audio-only CAPTCHA (which is provided for accessibility purposes).
I think the government saying 'our rules don't prevent it' is a face-saving dodge. A better response would be "We've put together a system of immense complexity (MIQ and all that) on short notice. It is a system which evolves and improves every single day. We agree that the current system must be improved to enable fairness and equitable access, even as we must accept that demand outstrips supply. We're evaluating a number of options, we value all of the feedback we've heard, and we'll provide an update on what we are doing to improve in two weeks time."
I’ve only dealt with this in regards to concert tickets being grabbed up by bots in seconds and that was frustrating enough. Higher stakes must be awful.
kittens! I recently acquired a scratching post in the shape of a cactus and it’s now my cat’s god. Very monolith in 2001 vibes.
I used this website when I raised kittens that were three weeks old, and when I found LAX Stewart (who is thriving, btw). Last year when I took in the three week old kittens, I had no idea what to do and had absolutely no kitten experience and this website was a massive help.
What I would hope for is a completely random system that puts everyone on an equal footing. The five minute opening idea sounds like the best option. I really don''t like the idea of more tech savvy people having a better chance, it feels so unfair.
AAAARRRGHHH!! those kittens kill me, they are sooo cute!!! Looks like you are having some lovely bonding time with them, David. :-) Cats are so awesome. Yeah, hopefully, as you say, as the vax programme rolls out the MIQ changes will also roll in. Home q makes sense for Kiwi's who have been vaxed coming home, if staying with someone here that is vaxed for the first few days. And vax passports that are verifiable by customs will help streamline things. Booking the MIQ is a total nightmare and just broken - farked up - a bad process. My sister, stuck in Germany and now fully vaccinated and desperate to get back to see our Dad who has dementia and may not even remember her if she doesn't return soon, has discovered just what a nightmare it is also. But she is definitely not keen to go the unethical route of using the bot/app/search engine thingy that does it for you. I like your idea of the random pick - but it would be better if the MIQ timeframe was shortened to a week maybe, for vaccinated kiwi's. Of a tracer app that means they can be tracked for the first few days and must stay put at the place of choice for a few days. I do know that ALL of the options are currently being closely investigated and with a bit of luck solutions will appear. Magically. Like cute kittens. *sigh*
Come via Melbourne, do hotel quarantine here, then fly home to NZ once the bubble opens... Melbourne will be out of lockdown in 3 days, what could go wrong??? On a serious note, I'm a kiwi who has lived overseas since 2017 in the UK and Aus. It's an extremely hard decision to just uproot your life and move home - even in a pandemic. It's just not always that easy. In Melbourne last year we reached some real lows and during those lows I saw plently of comments online from kiwis how we 'should have just come home when they first told us to', 'shutting the borders' and worse. It was like a kick in the guts when you're down. I visited home when the bubble opened, so I feel extremely lucky. My heart goes out to every one of those kiwis trying to get home right now, we have no idea what point of desperation they are at but this kind of challenge is probably the last thing they need right now
Kittens are adorable, not sure who is happier in that photo. Lucky kitties to be rescued and loved. As for your ethical dilemma. It's a nightmare. When trying to get tickets to some shows I log on knowing I'm probably not going to get them. Applying that to getting home...I'd be really distressed I think. I can't say what I would do. I would hope I'd take the higher road but you don't know until it happens.
While I'm here I have finally got around to listening to Armchaired and Dangerous. (Listening to podcasts when I'm out to mitigate panic attacks) Really enjoying them and find them thoroughly distracting. I really look forward to the 'We are supported by...' bit because US ads are bonkers and 7/10 are for mad products. Who buys this stuff? :D
Given Managed Isolation's shelf life is until borders are opened more broadly (per you theory on departure from NZ), I don't know investment in improving the process will be made. In which case is it not a can't beat them, join them situation?
Funny to see you quote Sean there. I used to work for him, good and smart guy!
While a lack of vaccinations in NZ isn’t affecting daily life there too substantially, it continues to make it painful for kiwis overseas who want to visit family. At least if there were a hint of a reopening plan one could have a sense of when it’s reasonable to think about visiting again.
This is a common problem with these kinds of systems and I think we really need to get with the times in terms of building them. There’s some really basic things we can do to stop bots - for example checking how quickly the request happened or how frequently a page is being requested. Equally, why can’t people apply to be on a waiting list and then have a space allocated to them? It’s just stressful and a waste of everyone’s time to have to keep refreshing the page looking for a spot.
On another note, it feels really awful knowing that you are basically barred from entering your country. I am going through a breakup and knowing I can’t go home and see my friends and family is tough. At what point are we infringing on the rights of individuals to enter their own country? I know we don’t have a constitution but it feels anticonstitutional
Your dilemma is rather similar to the early days of the vaccine rollout here in the US. I'm the beginning, supplies were limited, and even with phased eligibility, competition to get in to get one was fierce. There were people who volunteered their time working the various websites to help others get an appointment. There was a group called "Vaccine Angels" dedicated to this cause.
By now, you can actually just walk in to any pharmacy or one of the state facilities to get vaccinated without an appointment. The problem I hear more about these days is not enough people coming out to get their shot. Quite the turnabout. So who knows, maybe in the coming months your MIQ problem will resolve itself!
Also I suspect that you have some kind of internal kitty radar because you somehow *always* find the cats around you.
Is there really any point in even having a time window where people can sign up?
Wouldn't it be best to simply just allow each person with a passport sign up for dates they want a slot for (it can be a singular day, or it can be Sept 1 to Dec 31). Then have it be a lottery from there? You could weigh the lottery too to increase ones odds the longer they've been in this queue system waiting for a date.
After all, even finding that singular time slot that lasted 10 seconds took you hours of refreshing. Even if it was a lottery for single spots, it still requires you to be constantly hunting for single slots, each of which you'd have a 1/10,000 chance to get.
It all just seems rather silly for them to think that system was ever going to work, and that they haven't remedied this situation by now.
I'm writing this from Day 13 of MIQ. We secured our spot several months ago. I had used a monitoring service to alert me of new dates, but I didn't entirely trust it and so I'd been playing the game, too. But it did alert me and I jumped on. Back then, the game also involved server timeouts and error pages. We were lucky.
I had considered writing a script similar to the one you shared, and rejected it partially on ethical grounds and partially on work-equivalence grounds (I judged it would have taken as long/longer to write the program as to just play the game).
On the ethics, the government says 'as they still require some manual input, they fit within the rules'. I think a lot of people will read that and (rightfully?) conclude that playing by the rules is ethical. However, there are services which provide a programming interface to solve CAPTCHAs. You just write a program to pipe the CAPTCHA to the service, it shows up to a waiting human, they solve it, and the program continues. Other services use speech recognition to solve the audio-only CAPTCHA (which is provided for accessibility purposes).
I think the government saying 'our rules don't prevent it' is a face-saving dodge. A better response would be "We've put together a system of immense complexity (MIQ and all that) on short notice. It is a system which evolves and improves every single day. We agree that the current system must be improved to enable fairness and equitable access, even as we must accept that demand outstrips supply. We're evaluating a number of options, we value all of the feedback we've heard, and we'll provide an update on what we are doing to improve in two weeks time."
I’ve only dealt with this in regards to concert tickets being grabbed up by bots in seconds and that was frustrating enough. Higher stakes must be awful.
kittens! I recently acquired a scratching post in the shape of a cactus and it’s now my cat’s god. Very monolith in 2001 vibes.
High fives to your friends who rescued the kittens. If they, or anyone else, needs a resource on how to take care of such little wee ones:
http://www.kittenlady.org/
I used this website when I raised kittens that were three weeks old, and when I found LAX Stewart (who is thriving, btw). Last year when I took in the three week old kittens, I had no idea what to do and had absolutely no kitten experience and this website was a massive help.
What I would hope for is a completely random system that puts everyone on an equal footing. The five minute opening idea sounds like the best option. I really don''t like the idea of more tech savvy people having a better chance, it feels so unfair.
How does the bot get past the captcha?
AAAARRRGHHH!! those kittens kill me, they are sooo cute!!! Looks like you are having some lovely bonding time with them, David. :-) Cats are so awesome. Yeah, hopefully, as you say, as the vax programme rolls out the MIQ changes will also roll in. Home q makes sense for Kiwi's who have been vaxed coming home, if staying with someone here that is vaxed for the first few days. And vax passports that are verifiable by customs will help streamline things. Booking the MIQ is a total nightmare and just broken - farked up - a bad process. My sister, stuck in Germany and now fully vaccinated and desperate to get back to see our Dad who has dementia and may not even remember her if she doesn't return soon, has discovered just what a nightmare it is also. But she is definitely not keen to go the unethical route of using the bot/app/search engine thingy that does it for you. I like your idea of the random pick - but it would be better if the MIQ timeframe was shortened to a week maybe, for vaccinated kiwi's. Of a tracer app that means they can be tracked for the first few days and must stay put at the place of choice for a few days. I do know that ALL of the options are currently being closely investigated and with a bit of luck solutions will appear. Magically. Like cute kittens. *sigh*
Come via Melbourne, do hotel quarantine here, then fly home to NZ once the bubble opens... Melbourne will be out of lockdown in 3 days, what could go wrong??? On a serious note, I'm a kiwi who has lived overseas since 2017 in the UK and Aus. It's an extremely hard decision to just uproot your life and move home - even in a pandemic. It's just not always that easy. In Melbourne last year we reached some real lows and during those lows I saw plently of comments online from kiwis how we 'should have just come home when they first told us to', 'shutting the borders' and worse. It was like a kick in the guts when you're down. I visited home when the bubble opened, so I feel extremely lucky. My heart goes out to every one of those kiwis trying to get home right now, we have no idea what point of desperation they are at but this kind of challenge is probably the last thing they need right now
Use the script - show the government that a script actually works. Continue to share the script with everyone. The system is broken. Every kiwi citizen and resident who wants to come home should be able to, I think this country is due some bad press. Vaccinated airline crew are walking among us already. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300336892/covid19-all-vaccinated-air-nz-crew-now-exempt-from-isolation
Kittens are adorable, not sure who is happier in that photo. Lucky kitties to be rescued and loved. As for your ethical dilemma. It's a nightmare. When trying to get tickets to some shows I log on knowing I'm probably not going to get them. Applying that to getting home...I'd be really distressed I think. I can't say what I would do. I would hope I'd take the higher road but you don't know until it happens.
While I'm here I have finally got around to listening to Armchaired and Dangerous. (Listening to podcasts when I'm out to mitigate panic attacks) Really enjoying them and find them thoroughly distracting. I really look forward to the 'We are supported by...' bit because US ads are bonkers and 7/10 are for mad products. Who buys this stuff? :D
FYI- new MIQ booking system opens 8am Monday NZ time, so that is 1pm Sunday Sep 19th LA time. You might have a chance to reserve a room!
Given Managed Isolation's shelf life is until borders are opened more broadly (per you theory on departure from NZ), I don't know investment in improving the process will be made. In which case is it not a can't beat them, join them situation?
Kittens 🐈⬛! Hope you get home soon.
Funny to see you quote Sean there. I used to work for him, good and smart guy!
While a lack of vaccinations in NZ isn’t affecting daily life there too substantially, it continues to make it painful for kiwis overseas who want to visit family. At least if there were a hint of a reopening plan one could have a sense of when it’s reasonable to think about visiting again.
This is a common problem with these kinds of systems and I think we really need to get with the times in terms of building them. There’s some really basic things we can do to stop bots - for example checking how quickly the request happened or how frequently a page is being requested. Equally, why can’t people apply to be on a waiting list and then have a space allocated to them? It’s just stressful and a waste of everyone’s time to have to keep refreshing the page looking for a spot.
On another note, it feels really awful knowing that you are basically barred from entering your country. I am going through a breakup and knowing I can’t go home and see my friends and family is tough. At what point are we infringing on the rights of individuals to enter their own country? I know we don’t have a constitution but it feels anticonstitutional