Is there anything more annoying than trying to type on your smartphone’s touch screen whilst riding in a Sydney cab?
My current driver is from Kabul (nice bloke I should add) and it’s a fair bet he hasn’t ever driven a car before his current gig. He is vicious on the pedals.
I think I have repetitive strain whip lash. And I am about to throw this phone out the window.
One of my favorite cars is the Nissan El Grand.
It’s an accidental cult car/truck. A slab of Japanese utility gone viral.
When pimped and dropped on their tits they are the bees.
Surry hills is, tonight, very full of twenty somethings running around in Halloween gear, getting very drunk.
Messy. Messy.
It’s a whole generation of kids that are in denial about growing up.
And it’s the first batch of Australian adults who have properly bought into this American festival of sugar.
The top floor of the South Juniors club oughta be on every tourist circuit. It’s old Sydney at its best. A veritable cultural oxbow lake. And a total shambles.
First there was the old blokes playing chess. Then the Asians doing water colour class. Then a dodgy isolated bar. The squash courts on the right (my excuse). And to top it off, a night of boxing.
Those little pamphlets at the bottom of the picture are adverts for a Buddhist retreat amidst a wall of Mexican gangster horror.
There’s a lot of babies and toddlers in Clovelly.
Which means a lot of blokes rooting a lot of wives that they are sick of rooting.
Blondes mostly, wagon driving (Volvo, Subaru, Rangies VWs or BMWs), a nod to a hippy past, holidays in Byron, helicopters at school, the ubiquitous ponytail, and a pretend part time job.
It’s the men I don’t get…what goes on up there?
This pub owner is quite confused…
I said to a friend, an aging beauty, that crying as means to get a bloke to fix up her problems only works while the bloke still wants to root her. She looked confused.
A last word on the gay marriage debate.
The conservatives are mad for thinking they have the moral right to stop gay people getting married.
And the gay people are mad for thinking they need government approval to consider themselves married.
In both cases a root cause analysis screams ‘insecurity’.
You don’t increase you’re own sense of security by increasing the sense of insecurity in others.
Nor is your sense of insecurity abated by adopting the insecurity of others.
I was talking to a bloke the other day about his current settlements with his former de facto wives. Yes, plural.
It appears he had two girlfriends and he spent enough time at both their places for a period longer than two years to be considered in a de facto relationship with both of them.
When the girls discovered the existence of each other they both simultaneously pulled the plug and they both took him to court for his assets.
And there is nothing in the law that says you can only be in one de facto relationship. So he had to settle twice.
In this instance it actually is better to be married since you can only be married to one person at a time.
In other words it is legal to practice de facto polygamy. Isn’t that strange?
One of my pet hates is accidentally consuming a bug whilst riding my bicycle.
I don’t mind the protein but I prefer to presciently approve the domain prior to ingestion.
Fortunately, bugs have a high surface area-to-volume ratio and my stomach pH is around unity; meaning that I don’t get to see bugs crawling out of my arse.
As an aside, when I was about 4 years old I accidentally swallowed a marble (a little round glass ball for those ignorant of such) which I naughtily (i.e. against strict instructions) had in my mouth as my parent’s 1959 VW beetle (i.e a bug) went over a bump. Sometime later and much to my relief I found it at the bottom of the toilet bowl unscathed by the very same medium that dissolves and dissipates my wayward bugs.
I wonder how the Internet will change the power of the state over the individual? It’s too early to tell as yet.
In the the previous era, the one since the start of the enlightenment, a fascinating battle has been won and lost by us all.
We managed to overthrow the hegemony of monarchs and the churches only to be captured by an artefact of the systems that we set up to ensure our own freedoms. That is, the processes that ensure our basic freedoms and rights are now being used against us all, by us all (although by some more than others).
Bentham’s Utilitarian rule of the ‘greater good for the greatest number’ has been used to justify a continuing tightening of what is acceptable behaviour in life. And this has been accompanied by a massive increase in life’s complexity because the controls in place to sheep-dog us into the acceptable windows of behaviours are so complex as to require continuous and universal education for at least the first twenty years of our lives.
So we have gained freedom from continual persecution by oligarchs only to land in the Truman Show.
The Internet will change this. On one hand it offers uncensored information and on the other unparalleled access, by any individual or agency, as to what we are doing and thinking.
My guess is that the Internet will simply accelerate the trend towards 1984 because there is more incentive for the few that profit in this scenario, and also because, with 8 billion people on this planet, we may have no choice.
I am not sure I would call Rupert’s media ‘right wing’. That is a political position and I am not sure his is.
Rupert seems to believe in the separation of wealth (to the few and hence not to the many), the ascendency of the West over the rest, and the control of politicians.
Its just so happens that right wing politicians are easier to control than left wing politicians, and hence people make the assumption that Rupert is right wing.
As an aside, right wing politicians are easier to control because they inherently are driven by conservative social views which are usually illogical. Finance and politics serve their social agenda. But their social agenda usually does not stand up to logical purview and hence they themselves don’t bother with complete thinking. This makes them more susceptible to practising lying and deceit in order to achieve their goals, which in turn makes them more corruptible by media (& other) interests.
A by-product of all this is that Rupert’s media interests tend to adopt a conservative view on social issues despite the fact that I don’t think Rupert himself cares about these issues. Its just part of the pact he has with his right wing political flunkies. A quid pro quo you might say.
Which is a shame because today the Australian is full of rubbish about gay marriage. I simply do not understand why these people get so worried about this issue. Marriage, by law, is some artificial and relatively recent-day artefact of legislation – just another part of the modern movement towards control and measurement of us all by bureaucracy. Legal marriage is a piece of paper and a few entries in an electronic database, whereas true marriage is a daily event.
Firstly, shame on the idiots on both sides of this debate for taking it so seriously. But it’s not surprising, very few people have the strength of mind required to remove themselves from the vanity fair of the vox populi.
And, secondly, for those opposing gay marriage so vehemently, they really need to get out of other people’s lives. That battle has been lost. Wherefore comes the desire to tell other people what they can and can’t do? I think it’s driven by fear and insecurity on the conservative’s part which can only be assuaged if they have the control to tell people explicitly what acts are permitted and which are not.
Clive Palmer variably has said;
“Wendy Deng has been spying on Rupert for years giving money back to Chinese intelligence.”
“It is just a beat-up by old Rupert because he is upset that I said Wendy Deng, his wife, is a Chinese spy, and he doesn’t like that”.
“How much did you pay your wife to get her to marry you?”
“And rather than Rupert come out and say anything or make a statement, he doesn’t do that, he just gets his flunkeys to come along, or he sends Skype messages to (The Australian Editor in Chief) Chris Mitchell at The Australian, Chris says ‘go down there, give Palmer a hard time.’ That is all it is about.”
“You know the best barometer of my wealth, if you like, is the Murdoch press”
Two rich, vain, insecure and stupid men – there isn’t going to be any conciliatory moment here until one of them is dead.
But it’s very odd how democracy works though. Clive, under some circumstance is likely to have control of the senate, and a personal dispute between him and Rupert will be to the detriment of Tony Abbott and his coalition, Rupert’s boy in the Lodge.
In any case it’s not much use Rupert’s media going after Clive the way they are. The more they push this the more the 700,000 Bogans that voted for Clive will love him. They can sense a witch hunt and they love his funny and upfront approach to dealing with it. He isn’t stupid enough to a do a ‘Gillard’ and deal with it with a straight bat – he just uses humour to fling the mud straight back from whence it came.
I just got rung up by a head hunter on Collins Street. He wanted to know if I was interested in a dodgy CEO role for a listed Australian company.
I told him politely, no, I am not looking for jobs any more and haven’t for over a decade.
For some this reason this was an affront, and he started lecturing me about my career prospects.
I tried to explain to him that I liked working but had no interest in a career as such. No luck – it was like I was talking Martian.
I explained that a career implies an upwards trajectory within a pyramid, either within an organization or within a whole work discipline, and that I had essentially left pyramids behind in 2000.
It worked in one sense – I am pretty sure he thought I was mad and put put a mark, very blackly, on the lid of my box.
So the Labor party is not going to oppose the Coalition’s removal of the Carbon Tax but it will oppose its Direct Action plans.
It is what I feared; all they have learnt from their electoral loss is that Abbott’s very cynical negative approach to opposition actually seems to work. This is going to be a spiral, downwards.
The political thinking behind this move is this.
One, Labor won’t oppose the removal of their Carbon Tax despite the fact that they know, of all the options, it makes the most sense.They will say Abbott has a mandate to remove to it due to his election win and they don’t want to get in the way of the people. This will remove the grounds for a double dissolution on this issue.
Two, they will oppose Direct Action on the ground that it is ineffective and inefficient, and then they can say Abbott isn’t doing anything about climate change. Calling a double dissolution election because they can’t get Direct Action plan through would be a very unpopular move for the Libs (on one hand you can’t claim there is no climate change but then think its important enough to call an election on the issue!). In fact, Abbott, if he doesn’t get these plans through, will likely do nothing and then be exposed to this at the next election.
Despite Rupert’s media coverage it looks highly likely that Abbott is going to get hung by all the stupid things he said and did in order to get to the Lodge.
Simplot is in the news. This foreign-owned food-processing group is starting to look like the local car industry, bleating to the government to grant fund them (with our money!) so that they can compete against imports.
How does that work? They claim that their costs are higher because of our high labour costs and somehow that is the government’s fault. And they want a grant not a loan. Madness.
Clearly they need to get much bigger and invest in automation and supply chain management etc. But that investment should come from the private sector.
The minute any business resorts to getting money from a dumb source like the government it is doomed to fail in the near future because it is a clear sign that management simply has no idea or strategy, and therefore they have no plan that they can sell to private sector sources of investment.
Don’t believe me? Just think how much the former Labor government threw at Ford Australia – it has been hundreds of millions all based on the premise that Ford would keep manufacturing Falcons in Australia. Personally I would have made those loans, not grants, repayable with interest and immediately repayable in full if Ford pulled out, as they did. Governments really are financially quite silly when it comes to these things. In the worse case scenario the loans could always have converted to equity in the parent company at the government’s call.
[Observation, Horatio; there was a remnant of skidmarks on the white undies after the wash]
She says “people who ride bikes shouldn’t wear white undies”
He says “well they only come in Neapolitan packs. You can’t not have the odd white one”
She says “try another brand”
He says “I like these ones. It has taken me years to find undies I actually like wearing”
She says “well its not fair since I do most of the washing”
He says “that is simply untrue. It’s just that my turn at the washing goes via the Chinese laundry where, I might add, skidmarks aren’t a problem to remove”
She says “have it your own way. You always do”
He says “You can have the last word if you want”
Long evil stare…
Interesting. Today the Australian it’s starting a campaign to undermine Clive Palmer, fearful of his control of the Senate.
Since they need Clive’s consent to manage the senate and get their legislation through, this attack on him and his party can only imply that they are committed to pushing the repeal of the carbon tax through in order to force a double dissolution election. The purpose of this it to take control of the senate, subject to the will of the people.
An unwise move me thinks because if it backfires Clive will not hold back in being a prick. And it is likely to backfire because Abbott hasn’t appreciated that he was elected despite the fact that he is not very popular. There is no way Australians will give this government control of both houses; people simply aren’t that stupid.
In fact I would predict Clive and his PUP party to get even more seats under a double dissolution election, especially since minor parties are favored by such an event due to the smaller cutoff quota for seats.
I have just been sailing with old friends. I was noted as “quiet”.
Truth is, I didn’t have much to say.
I didn’t even take a photo…Jesus!
The truth is, I hardly ever wear a sunscreen.
I am pretty sure the chemical absorption is worse for you than the photon absorption.
I suspect that we are just one marketing campaign away from disappearing up our own arses.
Very few of us, almost none in fact, ever tell anyone everything about ourselves. For a start it would take 20 years to explain 20 years worth of experience. No, what I mean is actually the important stuff, the weird stuff, the scary stuff and the condensed version of what we ourselves find important in our lives.
I believe that keeping certain important details to ourselves is simply a habit that we get into while we are young and its use is based on the quite reasonable assertion that we don’t know how other people will react to certain information. But then, as we get to know them we might in fact be very much be able to predict how they will react, and we know that this would be negative in some cases.
None of us want to be isolated or to be cut off from people we care about, and with such a desire we create an ‘edited’ version of ourselves designed to fit our perception of what they want us to be. Of course the perception itself is subjective, as is the edited information from them that we use to construct it. It’s a very circular problem – at its root is the very complex and illogical bio-computer called the brain, which is always one little disaster away from full or partial derailment. We are not inherently logical; we are functional at best.
By way of example of info withheld, sometime back I was hit by a car whilst riding my bike but the reason for why this happened is subjective. For example, my explanation is that the guy who hit me was a careless and useless driver plus I was on the outside of a round-a-bout (a habit that I have fixed now). Or, in my imagination, Joannes’ version is that I was riding my bike on a busy road which is inherently dangerous and stupid. Not wishing to upset Joanne or have endless debates about whether I should ride a bike, I withheld details on the event because I know I will continue to ride and this will cause strife between us if she knew I have been hit by a car.
In this clear-cut example my desire to keep riding my bike and not to be hassled by Joanne trumped my desire to share the story with her. And it was a good outcome, for me. And it’s good for her so long as I stay safe.
If she was more aligned with my views on ‘a life worth living’ (i.e. nothing ventured, nothing gained – we can’t live a good life if we risk nothing) then I could have shared this with her.
So my story leads me to the conclusion that the withholding of truth is very much about creating a ‘glue’ that holds people together, where we know or suspect that we are different to the other.
The closer that two people are in their life-views, then the more they can share without fear of loss or fear of dispute. Note that the ‘loss’ can be simply a loss of self if you have to make too many compromises to fit in with the other. I suspect that each of us trades-off these compromises for other benefits of being close to other people – and each of us can stomach more or less of this.
Of course, on the odd occasion two people may have similar and fearless life-views, and then they can practice total openness. But I am guessing that, over time, everyone will discover little recesses of the mind that render fractious dissent to or from a loved one.
Possibly, true openness can only be achieved with a stranger because there is so little to lose.
I am pretty sure that passive consumption of broadcast video media, no matter how well intentioned you are, pollutes the brain.
Sitting on a plane, I have just absorbed the entirety of the Australian and the AFR.
I like to do this every now and again in order to calibrate my awareness of mainstream Australia.
All I can say is that, politically speaking, the current group of rent seeking managers are having a nice time, primarily because the papers are owned by their major donors.
There are hints of major cuts to government social spending, increases to GST, and further reductions in the power of unions so that the minimum wage can drop.
The business lobby appears very focused on growth in profits and not revenues. This can be easily achieved by a reduction of labour input costs.
Strange that they aren’t lobbying for massive cuts to the very costly red tape that we live with. This would go hand in hand with a smaller public service. But it looks like the public service is going to be out-sourced, and it is these contracts that the business community is really after.
The reserve bank gets a few billion so it can respond to the upcoming US default. This will cause the Australian dollar to spike and they need to be able to devalue the currency as well as provided liquidity to the economy when the lending market freezes.
Most importantly, it is very clear that Alex Ferguson is an arsehole. Probably a required characteristic for his former role.
Headline – “A coffee a day can help in keeping non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). The study to be published in international journal Hepatology has concluded that caffeine helps in reducing the fat (lipid) content on the liver.”
Firstly, it’s not even published yet. And nowhere in their results is ‘non-alcoholic’ referred to. That is just the do-gooders intervening in the media and they can get away with this because the researchers didn’t bother to get their mice pissed.
In any case I just we know alcohol is a major contributor to fatty liver disease, so if you drink lots of grog then you also need to down lots of coffee (despite the implication of the headline). This has always been my strategy.
And then you need Valium to overcome the effects of the coffee so you can sleep. And then maybe some uppers in the morning to get moving and overcome the grogginess.
And you may as well supplement the whole shebang with multi-vitamins and some electrolytes.
Ah, but beware – this result is from a university and so far all we have is “Using cell culture and mouse models, the study authors observed that caffeine stimulates the metabolization of lipids stored in liver cells and decreased the fatty liver of mice that were fed a high-fat diet”.
Notice there is no mention no mention of the quantitative changes – it was probably a 1% change (with and without coffee) and within the error of the measurements. In any case it was in a Petri dish using mouse cells for fucks sake. I smell a rat.
This didn’t stop these academics going media-viral with this conclusion: “These findings suggest that consuming the equivalent caffeine intake of four cups of coffee or tea a day may be beneficial in preventing and protecting against the progression of NAFLD in humans”.
Fuckwits.
People in glass houses should not throw stones and people with iPhones who have scant understanding of IT should not post videos.
I suspect I might get stoned.
Blink. It categorically illustrates that there is a book in every blog entry.
Personally I prefer the two thousand word essay version. Anything more than that has ample filler.
I wrote “Once a week a motorist within striking range will do something very stupid, but thankfully these acts are very predictable also (for those of us that ride often). The major culprits are taxis, mothers in SUV’s, people on phones, buses, Asians, truck drivers, …”
Reading that, I could be accused of being bigoted, racist, sexist, you name it.
However, in times where split second decisions are needed I think categorizing people is a survival trait. It allows much quicker decision making. For example, be very, very wary of anybody driving a Toyota Camry – they are sure to try and kill you without ever even being aware of your presence.
In any case I would rather categorise people and be wrong, as compared to not categorising them and being wrong.
I have been riding to work for ten years now and here are the stats:
1. I have had a major incident once every 5 years, e.g. knocked off by a car
2. Once a year I manage to do something silly, usually when drunk but not always, which results in either me or my bike getting minor scuffs
3. Once every two months I have a road rage incident, normally with a tradie (they often seem to be very angry about something)
4. Once a week a motorist within striking range will do something very stupid, but thankfully these acts are very predictable also (for those of us that ride often). The major culprits are taxis, mothers in SUV’s, people on phones, buses, Asians, truck drivers, …
5. Once a year another cyclist will get all high and mighty with me for my scant regard of the road rules
6. I get to chat to a law enforcement officer about once a year. It always results in a friendly wave goodbye
It’s far easier to offend people you know than it is to get them to accept a compliment.
Arbitrage, in financial terms, should be risk-free but it is never.
In fact in the finance markets it is a reward for understanding and modelling risk better than others.
However in the venture capital world it is a reward for know-how and experience, which is the ability to assess risk itself. This can’t be reduced to a spreadsheet; it is built on qualitative factors alone.
Here’s a headline for the ages “The partial US federal government shutdown has cost the Pentagon at least 600 million dollars worth of productivity”.
But they don’t day how much they would have had to spend to get that ‘600 million dollars worth of Productivity’. Maybe it was $500m, or even $800m, but more likely $600m.
That is, they spent $600m and they probably have no idea what economic benefit it brings but its almost certainly less than than the amount they spent, i.e. they have negative productivity.
The evidence is simply that the US government is getting further into debt, so either their spending has negative productivity or, if positive, the benefits are ending up in private pockets.
I suspect they have negative productivity AND the benefits are ending up in private pockets.
Many people I know construct castles of truths around themselves.
These are things that allow them to react and respond to almost any situation, virtually without having to dig into the grey matter at all.
The benefit is that, sometimes, very difficult life becomes relatively facile to deal with, with less anxiety to boot.
On the negative flip, learning slows and as time marches, one becomes trapped in a former paradigm.
October is the new February.
From Narelle; ” Oi!!! Worst cousin in the world!! I’m off to Thailand tomorrow … Just saying x”
Reply; ” Drugs…men…bad tattoos….call me with your one call eh?”
Dear god, you are great (suck suck).
We are going to try and copy your great example.
(although we have no fucking idea what you get up to. Let’s hope you leave those alter boys alone)
So long as you keep us fed and in bread.
If you ignore our shit behaviour we may try and ignore that of others.
If we do fuck up its your fault anyway.
So it’s your problem to fix.
(final meaningless grovel).
Your sincerely,
This ad at the airport fascinates me. It’s aimed at the Chinese with some weird looking Italian dude flogging high tech beds. Odd.
The binge is over twelve hours later…
There is hope for the Y’s after all.
The irony is that she was born after the futuristic date of Orwell ‘s book. It never happened!
Orwell was just a century eager me-thinks.
Joanne has announced she is going on a non-drinking binge. Yeah that’s wrong.
One of the personality traits that I have had to unlearn, for my sanity’s sake, is the natural tendency to feel very responsible for how other people are feeling.
People who don’t have this problem can’t imagine how risky it is get succour from one who does.
On paper its sounds like a nice to have, but … it does nobody a favour. If someone else’s emotional state can’t be fixed, but feeling so responsible for them, one tends to construct castles of make believe for them.
In many cases the long term prognosis is not good. So this is one trait I have had to work hard to remove.
The ability to communicate with anybody, anywhere, at any time is sheer madness.
The ancients would have called us gods. The gods would call us crazy.
And then the cops pull over a motor cyclist right in front of me. Over the same coffee.
First question the cop asks the guy “how are you doing today.”
Constabulary irony?
Having a quiet coffee, I just had a guy (with a silent companion) come up to me and say:
“Hi. I am just completing a stuttering recovery course and part of our training is to approach strangers and say this. Thank you for listening.”
Still a slight stutter but not bad.
Very brave I thought.
I said “Great, and good luck with it mate.” And I meant it.
Surry Hills just keeps giving.
A very small fraction of the people I have met in the workforce have a very unusual characteristic; they plan their future, both work and home, based on the most optimistic forward looking scenarios.
This approach has absolutely no contingency built in for the almost inevitable disappointments that will follow.
These people bounce from one disaster to another, using their enthusiasm and energy to keep going forward and to put the ‘failures’ behind them.
They stress out everyone else around them because they try and transfer their issues and make them someone else’s problem to solve; sort of like a very sophisticated series of simultaneous blackmailing, but all at a low level.
As they age the past catches up with them, a reputation is forged and their options shrink.
The Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher said to the Economic Club of New York “Kicking the can down the road for a few months will not solve the pathology of fiscal misfeasance that undermines our economy and threatens our future.”
The truth is that one lot won’t consider raising taxes, because it takes money out of their pockets and they argue that money is needed to promote business investment; mostly untrue.
The other lot can’t think of any cuts to spending that they would even consider, and just about everyone agrees they have to spend all that useless money on military even though its a non-investment.
The only option they have is to trash their economy so badly that the currency becomes worthless and US exports then take off as they become the new China. Since their debt is to be repaid in their own currency that would work. However, the US won’t be a very nice place to be by the time this is over.
I just had to explain to Joanne that patrons are, by their very nature, patronising.
Four lovely palms in a row and all dead. The cause?
They attract ibises (ibi?) which, trust me, are bloody awful birds to have nesting near your house. They nest in groups of ten to twenty. They are loud and they shit like crazy. The smell is awful.
Across the road from these trees are some of the biggest, most ostentatious, Italianate mansions that you will ever see.
The Oxford University study on kissing was published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour. Also known as Penthouse.
What a career choice eh? Good for dinner parties I guess.
Forget the TAFE’s. Even Oxford Uni is getting in on the act.
In a recent study researchers found that generally women place more importance on kissing and the frequency with which people in long-term relationships kissed related to relationship satisfaction, more so than sex.
This is simply a statistical observation (and one wonders how strong the correlation was and what were the error bars?), but this didn’t stop them going on to hypothesize that “The idea is that through taste, scent and the exchange of hormones, we may be able to determine whether someone’s genetic code will complement our own and create healthy offspring.”
Of course in the papers that hypothesis is presented as fact!
If that is so then why, once they land the bloke, do they need to keep sampling him with kisses eh? Is it a signal-to-noise issue, where the number of samples increases the specificity of the analysis. Maybe our brain is running a Fourier transfer over the kissing results…fuckwits.
On the subject of obesity I often wonder how people get fat and out of condition.
And then I remember, it’s based on addictions to sugar, carbs, alcohol, eating and laziness.
I don’t have any of these addictions, I have others altogether. Hence I am not fat or out of condition.
In fact I would go as far as to say that I have an addiction to being fit. I feel horrible if I am not.
I wonder if we all feel better about our own addictions as we learn to live with them and their outcomes? I bet we do.
Smugness is an addiction, Horatio.
Before currency there was simply trade and barter. And since then there have been three generations of currency.
The first currencies were shells, metals, coins and finally promissory notes – all based on the trade of physical goods.
As our modern economies have become more productive and our wealth more tied to services, we have tried to morph promissory notes into something related to the value of services. We have done this by letting go of gold standards, making the things simple float and sort of controlling how many we print or put into virtual accounts in the reserve banks of the world. This is like sticking a very square peg into a very round hole – it simply isn’t working very well and will get worse.
What we need now is a currency system specifically constructed and pegged to the value of first world services. Bitcoin, strangely, is a first attempt at this although this wasn’t the intent of the authors – their intent was to move away from central government controls.
By the time we have this it will undoubtedly be obsolete as we are already seeing the beginnings of virtual money which is tied to units of trade (goods and services) that are entirely virtual, e.g. in massive online gaming. As we continue our slide into a Matrix-like existence, with more and more of our time spent looking at displays, this online virtual currencies will become the most important.
There was a time once, before I was born, when the media reporting of an academic study could be relied on to be of significance and probably quite useful. A media report would never have happened until well after the study had been published in a high quality peer reviewed journal.
These days academics often by-pass the journal step and go straight to the media with quasi-complete results. They justify this because they say the higher profile helps them get grants; it does not. The real reason they do it is for their own egos.
The problem is that most of the work thus published is rubbish put together by second or third rate academics at dodgy universities that used to be TAFEs. Even the Sandstone universities have dropped their academic standards considerably and they participate in this rubbish process.
Not one of the participating academics seems to have any concerns that the reporters they talk to, and their editors, end up sensationalising and exaggerating the significance of the results. Its all good they say!
Corruption is:
1. A distortion of the story told to many
2. An attempt by a minority to get more than their fair share
So basically it’s common to human nature, and its more effective if its hidden.
Whether its legal or not just changes the impacts of getting caught. It doesn’t alter the morality one whit.
All politics is corrupt and the difference between various countries is twofold;
1. Whether the corruption is institutionalized like it is Australia or sub-legal as it is in China.
2. Whether the goal is rent-seeking as it in Australia, or focused on new economic growth as it is in China.
As far as I know there is no country that has institutionalized corruption that is also focused on growing the economic pie – this is a real opportunity.
Let’s see, I need to summarize this thinking and move on….
The problem with our representative democracy is that it entrenches two useless parties of rent-seekers that are only responsive to lobby groups and marginal seats. The role of media technology and the control of the media by certain lobby groups doesn’t help one little bit.
There isn’t a single MP that genuinely represents the people that elect him or her. They represent the party line, which is a conglomerate of wishes of the lobby groups that pay the party, media-owners interests and what the self-interested fuckers want in the swinging seats.
There are simply no incentives for people who genuinely want to achieve real goals to get into politics. When I say achieve real goals I mean, say, save the planet, grow the economy or introduce massive new social rights.
If people have the intelligence and skills that could make a difference then they are also smart enough to know that they can’t under our current system.
So we are stuck with the system and the idiots that we have and it will take one massive fucking disaster for anything to change.
The SMH do online polls, as per the picture below.
I would love to explain to them that there are no ‘scientific’ polls, except those on the subject of science.
What they mean is that the results have virtually no ‘statistical significance’. That is they are almost certainly distorted since they are sampling people that (a) could be bothered reading the SMH online, and (b) could be bothered answering an online poll question.
The results would be so distorted that there is no use looking at the results. Hence there is no point having the poll either.
Charlotte, at ten years old, was telling me that her mum dumped her boyfriend and she is now on the internet, shopping for a new one at the RSPCA website.
If we can’t trust the USD or any other currency as the reserve currency because governments keep devaluing them, then are we stuck with gold?
The trouble is that they can dig as much of that stuff out of the ground as they want.
Maybe we should use postal stamps as the default currency. They have the benefit that their value is related to a fixed service provision and not a metal nor just imaginary numbers in a computer, and there is already international transfer pricing agreement.
That is, instead of buying a stamp for 60 cents, you would buy 60 cents for a stamp.
The general idea of a currency fixed to a service provision has merit since our modern economies are so service driven these days. And it would float naturally with economy.
The trick is to only let the number of stamp promissory notes be printed as a fixed proportion to the number of postal services that are going to be provided. But how to stop them becoming assets in their own right???
Fighting with the hawks. An odd way to spend a night in Hong Kong.
I was talking to my friend Chan about incidents that happened a decade ago, like when we were kidnapped by gangsters in Shenzhen. His recall of the details is amazing and I realised that my long term memory for details is shit. I get the overall vibe right, but my anecdotal retelling of the events slowly morphs. It appears I have more original thoughts than many people but that my memory for details is crap. Unless the details are technical in which case I remember everything.
Relaxing at the Shek O beach back bar with Zeeks in the most unlikely hidden gem of a spot in the world, around the back end of Hong Kong island. Life is tough.
It’s true, the Chinese have virtually no resistance to brands and couldn’t spot a cliche at ten feet.
If representative democracy was proposed today for the first time, the innovator would be labeled a conspiracy theorist and be reduced to languishing, mostly unnoticed, with the rest of them on You Tube.
My friend in Taiwan insists that China is slowly and carefully stockpiling gold in preparation for a transfer to a gold standard for their currency.
He claims they are doing it slowly so as not to push the price up.
They want to wean themselves off the essentially valueless US dollar so as to be independent of the US and it’s troubles.
Their timing will coincide to when their economy is 70% domestic so they aren’t too exposed to US consumption.
That’s the hypothesis anyway.
The Chinese do have a tendency to slice and dice their food.
This means more work for the cooks and less the diners.
And it’s easier to include food types that wouldn’t look too good undiced. For this function we use sausage rolls whereas they can use just about anything.
Also the difference between breakfast and dinner, or food from provence x and y is a job for the train spotters.
Had Karl Marx been a true scientist and not a social scientist his experiment would have been first run with animals. Pigs, one imagines.
Today he wouldn’t get it past the local ethics committee in any case.
One of the all-time great inventions.
My Chinese friend explained rugby to a colleague thus; “it’s like soccer without rules except you can’t pass the ball in front of you. And it’s rough like NFL and they don’t even wear helmets. You see them emerging from a cloud of dust all covered in mud and then they go and drink beer together. They look happy”.
Two extreme definitions of love according to the Chinese.
I love you so whatever you want to do I will help you.
I love you so you have to listen to me because I know what’s good for you.
It’s possible that if I lance the singularity and let the cats out of the bag that I would be functionally multi dyslexic and pretty much useless to myself and all the colored girls.
I lose at least half of my potential blog thoughts to business. They just slip away and I can’t get them back.
The only thing worse than a bad internet connection is a bad internet connection with intent, China!
It’s official; one of my greatest pleasures is having a yarn over a new and a dart.
I have a bottle of conditioner that is just down right amazing.
As it ages the contents get thicker and thicker. After a while I am forced to fill it with water and shake, otherwise nothing will come out.
I have filled it about five time so far over a year and it shows no sign of giving up. I have my very own magic pudding.
Seven Wonders Moroccan Argan oil conditioner.
You would have to think that Taiwan would be best placed to do a deal with China now while they are in a position of relative strength.
Eventually the US protection will go away when the yanks can’t afford it.
If Taiwan did a deal now they could be very autonomous within greater China.
Of course they would have to hand back the crown jewels to Beijing.
Growth in an economy is due to an increase in all three of productivity, labour and capital inputs. Its not just the scale of the last two that matter, but also the mobility.
A recession is usually the result of increased input costs (e.g. energy costs) or reduced capital mobility (e.g. the GFC).
The last few decades in the US (and to a lesser degree elsewhere in the West) has seen a sharp rise in wealth disparities across the population, often looked at in terms of, for example, the percentage of wealth that the top 1% of American’s control (it happens to be 40%).
This wealth disparity in the US is a result of two historical factors.
First, general wealth had by the 1970’s risen to a level well above subsistence and it was ‘viable’ (i.e. did not necessarily lead to social unrest) to construct a system where the bottom half (or more) of society did not continue to share in a society’s wealth gains.
Second, by the 1970’s political science had developed to a point whereby new media and IT technologies could be usefully used to systematically control political processes in representative democracies. This led to a myriad of laws being enacted and enforced, all with the aim of controlling rises in labour costs, and removing barriers to both labour mobility and capital mobility. Productivity gains were mostly left to market forces.
The actual means by which wealth is accumulated by the ‘controlling’ classes is two-fold. Firstly, there is a wealth transfer from the public purse to private enterprise through expenditure on health, education, defence and other sectors. Second, private-sector capital mobility was unleashed by new technology and the removal of government controls, and only those in the privileged position to participate could benefit – this effect was auto-catalytic.
The US, it seems, has gorged itself on this situation for too long without the necessary checks and balances. Public debt, which has enriched many private citizens, has risen to the extent that the Fed is the primary buyers of US government bonds, using freshly ‘printed’ money. It looks like a Ponzi scheme and the only thing propping it up is the fear that many have as to the outcomes if the US economy is allowed to naturally go through the nasty depression it needs to have.
Economically speaking though, the problem in the US is that a lot of that 40% of wealth controlled by the top 1% is not being effectively used for investment in growth. There are so many derivative layers of finance structures that a good fraction of that wealth is stagnating in electronic databases, or worse still, in tax havens. As the US becomes a riskier proposition one would expect more wealth to surreptitiously ‘leave’ the country.
I see two sources of troubles ahead. One, the US Fed can’t manage the tapering of their addiction to government bonds because this is also a great wealth transfer mechanism, and, two, resource limitations act as a gating factor to growth to such an extent that there is an effective default in the US system. At most risk is social welfare and pension funds which effectively hold much of the US debt.
When this happens there will be serious troubles and give the US perchance for violence and history of civil war, it will be bloody.
The opinions of others, your own anger, objections, and hypotheses masquerading as theories. Just keep smiling.
America’s social inequalities will one day lead to civil war. It will be sparked by something innocuous and will spread like wild fire. The army will be called out but at least half of them will defect. Chaos followed by I know not what.
No, just my head.
There is no relationship between public transport and Buddhism, so please don’t discuss them in the same sentence.
Work is a trade off between interest, money and time.
Most of us, the smart ones, are trying to maximize the first two and minimize the latter.
Is it anxiety related the whole trip or is it just the flying?
It’s a mystery, but what I do know is that I get antsy before a trip and I generally sleep for the first half hour after taking off, after which I awake totally de-stressed.
Our brains are odd places.
I wonder how many times you’ve had sex and I wonder if you know who’ll be next? However, asking the questions isn’t anywhere near as interesting as providing the answers. But therapists believe that the only answers that stick are ones that you arrive at yourself. Either that, or this takes more time and they get more money.
I just got knocked off my bike by an harassed working eastern suburbs mother in a brand new Volvo station wagon.
A cliche by a cliche in a cliche.
I was unharmed and was very polite given the circumstances.
In this city, I wonder how many real blondes there are over twenty years old?
No bottles, no chemicals, no assistance, nothing.
The philosophical questions that most puzzles the millennials; if it isn’t photographed, posted, commented on, or liked in Facebook, then did it really happen?
Is there a bucket called ‘sex’, where all your emotions can be tossed?
To be loved, liked and needed; all to be compressed into, and proxied by, sex.
On one hand this short-cut does proffer efficiency.
And yet, on the other, it may lack complexity and richness of experience, and also add guilt.
As in all things ’emotional’, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
For every selfish action there are natural and undeniable consequences.
For example, if you ride a pushie to work every day you will have to live with skid-marks in your undies.
A few years ago Napster was the biggest thing in peer to peer file sharing.
Then it was brought down; and this was possible because it used central servers.
Similarly Bitcoin has just been brought to heel by an attack on its central servers by the US feds, who are shit-scared of a monetary system outside the control of a central government that they can bomb the fuck out of, if necessary.
The next step, as night follows day, is the development of non-government, electronically trade-able money system that uses a distributed peer to peer system with no central servers.
The US has just set the Aspergers kids a nice challenge.
The alarm system at my office is constantly going off at odd hours, or malfunctioning.
Even the cleaners managed to fuck it up this weekend.
Combined with the dodgy doors on the place, which interact with the alarm, I can’t imagine why I have put up with the vibe of the thing for so long.
It’s like having a very annoying external conscience. Whadya?
My body had finally told me to stop partying for a while. I am listening.
A club for lost and lusty people.
Skulking and scrumping around Surry Hills, picking mulberries, I overheard two twenty-something girls, dressed up to the nines, and upon seeing me, an “ooo yuk”.
There will be a “de rekoning” one of these days me thinks.
Some futurologist recently made the claim that modern society will splinter into two groups; the techies, who will represent the wealthiest top fifteen percent, and the rest who will be on subsistence earnings.
Farewell middle classes.
It’s probably bullshit but it does make me wonder if, at some stage, information technology will get so invasive and obscure that we might face a second Luddite movement?
According to the newspaper it’s not cockroaches that thrive during a nuclear winter, but pigs.
The evidence is that wild pigs have taken over the exclusion zone around Fukushima and are multiplying.
Japan is short of hunters and in any case they wouldn’t want to go into the exclusion zone. But the pigs are pretty keen to come out.
Only in Japan. Note to self…eat not pork on the next trip to Japan.
The word “party” arrived around the thirteenth century from an old French word that meant “that which is divided”. Think “partition” or “party wall”.
The political sense of “side in a contest or dispute” evolved by 1300.
Later, a party as a “gathering for social pleasure” was first used in 1716, originally for some specific purpose,
e.g. dinner party, hunting party.
So we went from a group of politicians, divided from their opposition, to a group just having fun and getting pissed.
It’s a shame we didn’t come up with a new word for the latter.
offshore westerly 