There is no doubt that NSW is in a mess. Well, at least the public sector portion of the economy. The private sector trundles on, albeit dragging a larger millstone around its neck, because decisions in the private sector are distributed and driven by market forces. If businesses persist with stupid ideas or bad management, well, they cease to persist once the money runs out. If they sell rotten products or offer lousy service, they cease to be. If they are run by incompetent leadership, the market sorts them out eventually. Businesses don't all go broke on a single day once every four years. Lousy businesses go bust every day. A single failure can bring them unstuck at any time, which means they have to be constantly vigilant, always on the lookout for opportunities and forever seeking to do things in a better way.
I was told yesterday that one of the leading indicators of economic activity is the sale of Volvo trucks. It has been running at something like 15,000 per whatever period they normally look at.
In the current period, it is 45.
Shit.
Anyway, ever since Carr got into power, the only constant in NSW has been bigger and bigger government. I think that lefties are forever growing government because people make stupid decisions, and lefties don't like that. They want people to be protected from their own stupidity, so they force government to intervene in their lives and to make decisions for them.
Take health care for instance. Lefties think that stupid bogan westies are too stupid to make a sensible decision about their health care needs, so we get Medicare. However, those stupid bogan westies make decisions everyday on what ugg boots to wear, what sort of mags to put on their 1987 Commodore and what type of enormous flat screen TV they should steal to put in their lounge room. These people are not stupid. They know which dealer is selling the best heroin this week. They know how to scam oodles of money out of Centrelink. They know how to cheat their way into public housing and how to avoid paying taxes of all sorts. They can make decisions for themselves.
But just because a few wastoids would prefer to spend every last cent on heroin instead of buying health insurance, we need to pay a compulsory levy to give them health insurance. And of course the levy does not cover them, because they are lying on a soiled mattress somewhere with a needle in their arm and their baby screaming in the corner instead of flipping burgers at the nearest McRatfucks.
So government exists to save us from our own stupidity. It gets bigger and bigger in order to make our lives better.
And what do we get after 12 years of this?
We get NSW.
We get a rolled gold, diamond encrusted monkey turd.
How did that happen? Isn't government supposed to make smarter decisions than individuals can make for themselves?
What these lefty idiots forget is that the people who are in government are no different to you and I and every other Joe Blow in the street.
Let us assume that the Premier and Cabinet decided that Mr Kafoops of 91 Thicktwiddle Way is too stupid to decide which school he should send his kids to. So the government takes away his right to decide, and vests it in a new department called "Excellence in school placements", which is usally shortened to sound like "excrement".
And guess who works in that deparment?
Mr Kafoops and his wife, Mrs Kafoops. The same people who are too stupid to make a decision about where to send their kids are now deciding where the rest of us should send our kids. Instead of 5% of the population making stupid decisions, we now have stupid decisions forced upon 100% of us.
I've heard that described as "spreading the misery around".
But the lefties are happy because stupid people are freed from the burden of making stupid decisions, and with the time saved, they can afford to break into and steal from another house this week. That's about the only group who achieve a productivity gain from actions like this.
Lefties are also happy because the new department has added 500 new members to the relevant public sector union, which means more money in their coffers which they can then use to keep the Labor party in power for another term, which should mean yet another wave of new members after each election.
I have to laugh everytime I hear Obama promising that his government will do this, that and something else for everybody. Governments are very effective at extracting taxes from people, and utterly crap at doing just about everything else. I know - I have worked in government, and seen what it is like from the inside. Government agencies have a desperate need to install themselves into important looking buildings so that they give an impression of competence and solidity - just as banks used to put up buildings with enormous marble foyers and granite entrances and Greek columns. They wanted you to think that they would look after your money after you gave it to them. They need you to think that they are not a fly-by-night operation.
Government departments are the same - you'll never find one operating out of a shitty office. They want you to think that they are lean and mean and sleek and operating amazingly efficiently, when out the back is a scene of utter mayhem and catastrophe as one debacle piles up after another. You can only sustain the facade for so long, as the government of NSW has found to its cost. Bob Carr was a master at it, but he was also smart enough to recognise when the veneer was about to wear off and that it was therefor time to go.
Friday, 14 November 2008
Memo to SMH: cut the bollocks
Crikey, just how bad can a newspaper get?
The SMH leads off this morning with an attention grabbing headline of:
Secret plan for return of red rattlers.
The headline itself has almost no connection to the story. The story is all about the proposed re-introduction of single deck trains to the CityRail network (for those of you not from Sydney, we converted to double-deck trains back in the 1960's in order to increase capacity).
The red rattlers were mostly phased out in the early 1990's, with many ending up on farms as a bit of outside accommodation. The rattlers attracted a large following amongst the train-nutter brigade, and many were sorry to see them go. I think the only reason people had an affection for them is that they had been around so long - they were initially introduced in the 1930's when the network was electrified. Whole generations of Sydneysiders had grown up and died during the lifespan of the rattlers. Getting rid of them was as wrenching as demolishing the harbour bridge and replacing it with a rather boring modern looking concrete structure.
The rattlers were still running when I moved to Sydney. I loved them for their freedom. They were sparse, noisy, draughty and yes, they were red (a very dull red, like primer paint). The doors did not close automatically - passengers were supposed to close them when the train moved off. Many opted not to, preferring to travel with the doors open so that you could get a better view, or a bit of breeze in summer. You could hang onto a rail and lean out the door as you went over the Harbour Bridge, which provided a magnificent experience.
The rail corridors were littered with seats from the rattlers, since they simply lifted out, and vandals would open the doors and toss them out by the dozen as the train rattled down the line. The lighting in them was pathetic - you couldn't read a newspaper in them after dark. However, the poor lighting allowed couples to get up to all sorts of funny business, and if you had been out on the turps, the poor lighting and open doors allowed drunks to have a wee out the door. This open door wee policy meant that when the rattlers were finally retired, CityRail discovered that it had an enormous problem with its toilets - it didn't have anywhere near enough on its stations. People were so used to weeing out the door, they'd never needed to use a public toilet, and now suddenly they were forced to.
The rattlers were a bit underpowered, since they featured the original 1930's traction motors still in 1991. The motors were a bit long in the tooth, and overcrowded trains were known to catch fire as they struggled up the steep slope from Wynyard station to the Harbour Bridge with a full load. The motors simply overheated from the strain.
Now, here's the rub. There were two versions of the rattlers - a single deck version and a double deck version, which was introduced a lot later, but it still had the same features - manual doors, the same seats, windows etc, just a double deck. Whilst most people would associate a red rattler with single deck trains, it's not strictly true.
Anyway, the SMH is being disingenious with its headline. We are not seeing the return of museum peices from farmers paddocks. What we might see is the return of single deck rolling stock, built brand new. This is about as sensible as saying, "Obama is getting a black car - so the headline is secret plan for return of Model T Ford".
The idea behind going to single deck trains is that you can cut a lot more doors in the sides to let people on and off - so long as you don't mind getting rid of a lot of seating. "Standing only" type metros can get people on and off really quickly if a carriage has six doors instead of two, but the trade off is a loss of seating. You can't put seats in front of a door. A crammed double deck carriage is a notoriously slow thing to get off - if it is standing room only on both decks, it can take forever to get out of your seat, push past the people standing in the aisle and then get out the door.
However, the other reason why it takes so long to get off a double deck carriage is the sheer number of people it can carry. An 8 car Tangara can carry 2000 people if you really jam them in - that's 250 per carriage. I have no idea what a single deck can carry, but it would have to be less, simply because it would have a lot less floor space - unless you remove all the seats and get most people to stand. But it takes longer to get off a Jumbo jet holding 400 people than a small Airbus holding 80 because five times the number of people have to get off. A single deck train with two doors will take less time to empty than a bigger train with the same number of doors because of the smaller number of passengers.
Hmm, less passenger capacity on a rail network that is currently bursting at the seams. Does this really make sense?
If the per-train capacity is going to fall by say 20-30%, it means they will need to run a lot more trains per hour just to stand still. If you are currently moving 10,000 people per hour from A to B using say 10 trains at 1000 people per train, and you introduce trains that only hold 700 people, then you suddenly need to run 14 trains per hour to carry the equivalent number of people (for those of you that can do maths, I am assuming that 200 people will be carried Indian style on the roof).
Here starts the lesson on train operations from the anorak wearing train spotter.
One of the things that governs the capacity of a length of rail line is the signalling system. Think of a stretch of road through your local CBD - in Sydney, it would be George St. Let's say there are 20 sets of traffic lights between one end of the CBD and the other. Now, imagine that when the lights go green, only one car can go through them into the block ahead. As soon as I drive through the lights, the traffic lights will go red behind me in order to prevent another car from running up my arse. If the road ahead is clear, then the lights will be green ahead of me. If there is a car waiting at the lights two streets ahead, then the next set of lights in front of me will be red - I won't be able to drive into the same city block as a car in front of me (otherwise you get the Glenbrook crash, where one train smacked into the back of another, killing 7).
Now, the capacity of your road through the CBD will be governed by the number of signals. The more signals you have (and thus the closer together they are), the more cars you can jam into that bit of line. Theoretically, you could cut the road up into itty-bitty little sections all about six feet longer than your car, and cram about a thousand cars into that line, but progress might be a bit frustrating during peak hour.
The existing rail network is setup to deal with a certain number of double deck trains. Signals are expensive to build and maintain, and a greater number of them makes the network more complex to manage, and makes life harder for the Train Controllers, so you don't put in more signals than you absolutely need. So if you need to increase the number of trains per hour from 10 to 14, you are going to need more signals.
Don't ask me what a new signal costs, but I am sure you would get stuff all change out of a million dollars. It may in fact cost a lot more. The design process has to be extremely thorough and painstaking - you can't risk having a train with 2000 people on it smacking into another fully loaded train because of poor signal design. There are very few people around the world with that sort of experience, so they are expensive and hard to employ. Signals are tricky to install, since you are installing them close to a working rail line, which has hundred tonne trains rumbling past every few minutes. And it's not just a matter of plopping in a post with coloured lights at the top - the new signal has to interlock with the signals either side of it, and be connected back to a control room which might be 100 kilometres away. The control panel in the control centre needs to be updated with new lights to represent the signal, the Controllers need to be trained and so do the drivers that drive up and down that line.
Training the drivers about a new signal might sound wierd, but trains do not having the braking power of cars, so drivers have to be much more careful about their speed. If they are used to coming around a corner at 80km/h and having a bit of flat, open track in front of them, and suddenly there is a signal at red 200 metres away, they are going to have a problem pulling the train up in time. Especially if there is another train sitting just beyond the red signal. They need to be trained to manage their speed to suit the new track configuration.
All of this is expensive, so it would not surprise me if half the cost of introducing new trains was swallowed by signalling.
The silly buggers will probably forget that they need to increase the electrical capacity of the network, which is what happened when the Milennium trains were introduced. The size of the substations, their spacing and the carrying capacity of the overhead electrical wiring were setup according to the power draw of a certain number of Tangara trains per hour. If you want to run more trains per hour across a certain bit of track, you need to install more substations in order to provide more electricity, and you need to cut the overhead wiring into smaller chunks so that it can handle the current.
My electrical knowledge is crap, but let's assume that a Tangara draws 100 watts of power. If you are running 10 Tangaras down a bit of track, the substations need to be able to provide 1000 watts, and the overhead wiring needs to be able to carry that amount of power without overheating and stretching in summer. If the overhead wiring overheats too much, it stretches too far and sags, and at that point it gets tangled in the pantograph of a train (that's the bit that sticks up and touches the wire, giving the train power). When it gets really hot, trains slow down so that they draw less power, thus reducing the risk of getting tangled up.
The screwup with the Millenium trains is that although they are the same size and have the same carrying capacity, they draw a lot more power - because they have more powerful motors, more bells and whistles etc. If we assume a Millenium train draws 120 watts instead of 100, you can see you've got a problem with running 10 trains per hour if you only have 1000 watts of capacity in the system. It cost CityRail millions to put in more substations etc when they finally woke up and realised that they had to beg Treasury for more money.
Now, we've assumed earlier that you'll require 14 single deck trains to replace 10 double deck trains, and I'd assume that the single deck trains will require only a bit less juice than the double deck trains - let's go with 90 watts instead of 100. Woops, you need 1260 watts of capacity in a network that can only supply 1000.
You get my drift. You can't just dick around with rail systems.
The SMH leads off this morning with an attention grabbing headline of:
Secret plan for return of red rattlers.
The headline itself has almost no connection to the story. The story is all about the proposed re-introduction of single deck trains to the CityRail network (for those of you not from Sydney, we converted to double-deck trains back in the 1960's in order to increase capacity).
The red rattlers were mostly phased out in the early 1990's, with many ending up on farms as a bit of outside accommodation. The rattlers attracted a large following amongst the train-nutter brigade, and many were sorry to see them go. I think the only reason people had an affection for them is that they had been around so long - they were initially introduced in the 1930's when the network was electrified. Whole generations of Sydneysiders had grown up and died during the lifespan of the rattlers. Getting rid of them was as wrenching as demolishing the harbour bridge and replacing it with a rather boring modern looking concrete structure.
The rattlers were still running when I moved to Sydney. I loved them for their freedom. They were sparse, noisy, draughty and yes, they were red (a very dull red, like primer paint). The doors did not close automatically - passengers were supposed to close them when the train moved off. Many opted not to, preferring to travel with the doors open so that you could get a better view, or a bit of breeze in summer. You could hang onto a rail and lean out the door as you went over the Harbour Bridge, which provided a magnificent experience.
The rail corridors were littered with seats from the rattlers, since they simply lifted out, and vandals would open the doors and toss them out by the dozen as the train rattled down the line. The lighting in them was pathetic - you couldn't read a newspaper in them after dark. However, the poor lighting allowed couples to get up to all sorts of funny business, and if you had been out on the turps, the poor lighting and open doors allowed drunks to have a wee out the door. This open door wee policy meant that when the rattlers were finally retired, CityRail discovered that it had an enormous problem with its toilets - it didn't have anywhere near enough on its stations. People were so used to weeing out the door, they'd never needed to use a public toilet, and now suddenly they were forced to.
The rattlers were a bit underpowered, since they featured the original 1930's traction motors still in 1991. The motors were a bit long in the tooth, and overcrowded trains were known to catch fire as they struggled up the steep slope from Wynyard station to the Harbour Bridge with a full load. The motors simply overheated from the strain.
Now, here's the rub. There were two versions of the rattlers - a single deck version and a double deck version, which was introduced a lot later, but it still had the same features - manual doors, the same seats, windows etc, just a double deck. Whilst most people would associate a red rattler with single deck trains, it's not strictly true.
Anyway, the SMH is being disingenious with its headline. We are not seeing the return of museum peices from farmers paddocks. What we might see is the return of single deck rolling stock, built brand new. This is about as sensible as saying, "Obama is getting a black car - so the headline is secret plan for return of Model T Ford".
The idea behind going to single deck trains is that you can cut a lot more doors in the sides to let people on and off - so long as you don't mind getting rid of a lot of seating. "Standing only" type metros can get people on and off really quickly if a carriage has six doors instead of two, but the trade off is a loss of seating. You can't put seats in front of a door. A crammed double deck carriage is a notoriously slow thing to get off - if it is standing room only on both decks, it can take forever to get out of your seat, push past the people standing in the aisle and then get out the door.
However, the other reason why it takes so long to get off a double deck carriage is the sheer number of people it can carry. An 8 car Tangara can carry 2000 people if you really jam them in - that's 250 per carriage. I have no idea what a single deck can carry, but it would have to be less, simply because it would have a lot less floor space - unless you remove all the seats and get most people to stand. But it takes longer to get off a Jumbo jet holding 400 people than a small Airbus holding 80 because five times the number of people have to get off. A single deck train with two doors will take less time to empty than a bigger train with the same number of doors because of the smaller number of passengers.
Hmm, less passenger capacity on a rail network that is currently bursting at the seams. Does this really make sense?
If the per-train capacity is going to fall by say 20-30%, it means they will need to run a lot more trains per hour just to stand still. If you are currently moving 10,000 people per hour from A to B using say 10 trains at 1000 people per train, and you introduce trains that only hold 700 people, then you suddenly need to run 14 trains per hour to carry the equivalent number of people (for those of you that can do maths, I am assuming that 200 people will be carried Indian style on the roof).
Here starts the lesson on train operations from the anorak wearing train spotter.
One of the things that governs the capacity of a length of rail line is the signalling system. Think of a stretch of road through your local CBD - in Sydney, it would be George St. Let's say there are 20 sets of traffic lights between one end of the CBD and the other. Now, imagine that when the lights go green, only one car can go through them into the block ahead. As soon as I drive through the lights, the traffic lights will go red behind me in order to prevent another car from running up my arse. If the road ahead is clear, then the lights will be green ahead of me. If there is a car waiting at the lights two streets ahead, then the next set of lights in front of me will be red - I won't be able to drive into the same city block as a car in front of me (otherwise you get the Glenbrook crash, where one train smacked into the back of another, killing 7).
Now, the capacity of your road through the CBD will be governed by the number of signals. The more signals you have (and thus the closer together they are), the more cars you can jam into that bit of line. Theoretically, you could cut the road up into itty-bitty little sections all about six feet longer than your car, and cram about a thousand cars into that line, but progress might be a bit frustrating during peak hour.
The existing rail network is setup to deal with a certain number of double deck trains. Signals are expensive to build and maintain, and a greater number of them makes the network more complex to manage, and makes life harder for the Train Controllers, so you don't put in more signals than you absolutely need. So if you need to increase the number of trains per hour from 10 to 14, you are going to need more signals.
Don't ask me what a new signal costs, but I am sure you would get stuff all change out of a million dollars. It may in fact cost a lot more. The design process has to be extremely thorough and painstaking - you can't risk having a train with 2000 people on it smacking into another fully loaded train because of poor signal design. There are very few people around the world with that sort of experience, so they are expensive and hard to employ. Signals are tricky to install, since you are installing them close to a working rail line, which has hundred tonne trains rumbling past every few minutes. And it's not just a matter of plopping in a post with coloured lights at the top - the new signal has to interlock with the signals either side of it, and be connected back to a control room which might be 100 kilometres away. The control panel in the control centre needs to be updated with new lights to represent the signal, the Controllers need to be trained and so do the drivers that drive up and down that line.
Training the drivers about a new signal might sound wierd, but trains do not having the braking power of cars, so drivers have to be much more careful about their speed. If they are used to coming around a corner at 80km/h and having a bit of flat, open track in front of them, and suddenly there is a signal at red 200 metres away, they are going to have a problem pulling the train up in time. Especially if there is another train sitting just beyond the red signal. They need to be trained to manage their speed to suit the new track configuration.
All of this is expensive, so it would not surprise me if half the cost of introducing new trains was swallowed by signalling.
The silly buggers will probably forget that they need to increase the electrical capacity of the network, which is what happened when the Milennium trains were introduced. The size of the substations, their spacing and the carrying capacity of the overhead electrical wiring were setup according to the power draw of a certain number of Tangara trains per hour. If you want to run more trains per hour across a certain bit of track, you need to install more substations in order to provide more electricity, and you need to cut the overhead wiring into smaller chunks so that it can handle the current.
My electrical knowledge is crap, but let's assume that a Tangara draws 100 watts of power. If you are running 10 Tangaras down a bit of track, the substations need to be able to provide 1000 watts, and the overhead wiring needs to be able to carry that amount of power without overheating and stretching in summer. If the overhead wiring overheats too much, it stretches too far and sags, and at that point it gets tangled in the pantograph of a train (that's the bit that sticks up and touches the wire, giving the train power). When it gets really hot, trains slow down so that they draw less power, thus reducing the risk of getting tangled up.
The screwup with the Millenium trains is that although they are the same size and have the same carrying capacity, they draw a lot more power - because they have more powerful motors, more bells and whistles etc. If we assume a Millenium train draws 120 watts instead of 100, you can see you've got a problem with running 10 trains per hour if you only have 1000 watts of capacity in the system. It cost CityRail millions to put in more substations etc when they finally woke up and realised that they had to beg Treasury for more money.
Now, we've assumed earlier that you'll require 14 single deck trains to replace 10 double deck trains, and I'd assume that the single deck trains will require only a bit less juice than the double deck trains - let's go with 90 watts instead of 100. Woops, you need 1260 watts of capacity in a network that can only supply 1000.
You get my drift. You can't just dick around with rail systems.
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Planning a better bike route
Since this blog is supposed to have something to do with cycling, I will write a post that has some small connection to zipping around on two wheels.
Sydney City Council had a "community consultation" meeting last night in regard to upgrading the bike route through Pyrmont - the bit that links the ANZAC Bridge to the Pyrmont Bridge. Since you probably have no idea about the area that I am talking about, I will avoid saying much about the route itself. Instead, I will try to describe the rather interesting characters that turned up at the meeting, and what they had to say.
I do not attend a lot of public meetings. In fact, I can't remember the last one I went to. I probably don't go to many as I am not old enough - I reckon I was close to the youngest person there. The average age was in the mid 50's. Judging by the overflowing bike rack out the front, a reasonable number of those attending were cyclists, although the majority of the talking was done by NIMBY residents who were lukewarm or hostile to the idea.
Next time someone tells you that today's youth are interested in politics and involved in their communities, just laugh at them and tell them to fuck off. The youth were all at home, watching some very important soap opera on TV, or too involved in a computer game to get off the couch. Political activism starts at 40. People are too self absorbed up until that age to get involved in "community" stuff.
I didn't do a head count, but I reckon 50 people turned up. Council had planned on maybe 75 turning up, which meant I got to eat an extra slice of cake. It also meant that the tea bags had not run out, which is a perennial problem at these sorts of events. All the good tea varieties always go first.
(The slices of cake were minute by the way, and all the cake on offer could be classed as 'healthy'. There was not a single, fat slice of chocolate mudcake to be seen. Obviously, the Fun Police had been sent to the cake shop with orders to buy nothing tasty or interesting).
Given the Green theme of the meeting, the room was not air-conditioned. As it was a humid Sydney night, we all sweltered in the thick fug enveloping the community centre. No one even thought to turn on the overhead fans - possibly because they were solar powered, and the sun had gone down an hour before the meeting commenced. I'm glad I drove my climate controlled 4WD to the meeting instead of riding - I would have been sitting in a pool of sweat if I had taken the bike.
Clover Moore, the self-promoting Lord Mayor, attended the meeting. She wasn't wearing one of her trademark dog collars, possibly because of the heat. I doubt she rode either. There were two Council Prius's parked out the front (what is the plural of Prius? Priapis? Priii?), and I presume she came in one of them. Clover is great at spending ratepayers money on promoting her name, and last night was no different. Council staff had setup a lectern and a table for Moore and two staffers, and behind the table was a large green sign with a Green slogan on it, with the slogan or quote being attributed to Clover Moore. I know that because it had her name in big, fat letters under the slogan.
The meeting was well organised and well run, and although a few speakers rambled on a bit once given the microphone, it was thankfully bereft of nutters using the occasion as a soapbox for their tinfoil hat-wearing views. There was one bloke who looked like he might be part of that brigade - he looked about 60, had a big beard and a long ponytail of grey hair. I couldn't work out whether he was homeless or a Nimbin hippy who was lost. It turned out that he was a well spoken local resident who wanted to make sure that the Council abides by their own design rules for building kerbs and so on. Apparently the whole area is covered by some sort of template that dictates the material that you can use for paths, roads, kerbs, guttering and that sort of thing, and the mob that follows it the least is the Council! Typical.
Whilst most of the discussion was on how to separate bikes from pedestrians and bikes from cars, a few people brought up the topic of separating cyclists from drunks. The Pyrmont Bridge Hotel is one of those pubs that is open all hours, and it is quite common to ride past their at 7am and to see a horde of drunks staggering out after pulling an all-nighter. Two people talked about sitting at a red light outside the pub on their bike and having a drunk try and get on the bike with them! I've never experienced that, but I've had to put up with plenty of drunks yelling abuse at cyclists as they go past (this is drunks who are sitting inside at the bar, not drunks who are staggering around outside on the path, or trying to cross the road). The range of human behaviour that you can experience whilst on a bike is generally quite a bit more widespread than what you get in the sterile, enclosed habitat of a car.
There was only one business owner there, and he was concerned about the length of time that construction would take, and whether that would send him broke or not. Energy Australia tore up the street earlier this year for a long period (and did an awful job of relaying the asphalt afterwards) and apparently four shops in that section went bust. He was the only one to survive the disruption. I half caught the name of his place "fine foods" something or other. I think I know the place. I wanted to tell him that I am always on the lookout for a good place to have breakfast when I ride to work, and that I'd stop at his shop if it was appealing to cyclists. He could do quite well out of the passing bike traffic if he put his mind to it, but I think cyclists are the last people he wants to deal with. If he wants to go bust by not serving a certain market, that's his problem.
After the meeting, I went over to talk to the bloke from Bike Sydney, who turned out to be an arrogant bugger wanting nothing to do with a fellow cyclist. Cyclists are generally a cheery mob who wave and say hello as they ride past each other, but I bet this guy just scowls.
I had a look at the diagrams and designs and found that they'd forgotten about one thing, so I hung around and had a chat with some of the council staff, their consultants and the designers. They had one consultant there who just took care of the traffic light phasing. He's probably the kind of bloke that has an enormous train set at home in the double car garage.
I suspect that for the most part, the works won't really do much for the serious commuter cyclist - the sort of person who is comfortable mixing it up on the road with the traffic. However, it will do a huge amount for beginners, or the occasional rider. It should give a big boost to people using their bike for odd trips, which makes it a Very Good Thing.
The only disappointment for me was that Shayne Mallard, a Liberal councillor, was not there. Apart from being a fellow conservative, he's a blogger and cyclist, and I wanted to say g'day. But I guess that as far as Clover is concerned, there can only be one queen at these events. Shayne is the enemy, and he has to be kept well away from the people. Only Clover can be seen to be discharging largesse to the electorate.
Sydney City Council had a "community consultation" meeting last night in regard to upgrading the bike route through Pyrmont - the bit that links the ANZAC Bridge to the Pyrmont Bridge. Since you probably have no idea about the area that I am talking about, I will avoid saying much about the route itself. Instead, I will try to describe the rather interesting characters that turned up at the meeting, and what they had to say.
I do not attend a lot of public meetings. In fact, I can't remember the last one I went to. I probably don't go to many as I am not old enough - I reckon I was close to the youngest person there. The average age was in the mid 50's. Judging by the overflowing bike rack out the front, a reasonable number of those attending were cyclists, although the majority of the talking was done by NIMBY residents who were lukewarm or hostile to the idea.
Next time someone tells you that today's youth are interested in politics and involved in their communities, just laugh at them and tell them to fuck off. The youth were all at home, watching some very important soap opera on TV, or too involved in a computer game to get off the couch. Political activism starts at 40. People are too self absorbed up until that age to get involved in "community" stuff.
I didn't do a head count, but I reckon 50 people turned up. Council had planned on maybe 75 turning up, which meant I got to eat an extra slice of cake. It also meant that the tea bags had not run out, which is a perennial problem at these sorts of events. All the good tea varieties always go first.
(The slices of cake were minute by the way, and all the cake on offer could be classed as 'healthy'. There was not a single, fat slice of chocolate mudcake to be seen. Obviously, the Fun Police had been sent to the cake shop with orders to buy nothing tasty or interesting).
Given the Green theme of the meeting, the room was not air-conditioned. As it was a humid Sydney night, we all sweltered in the thick fug enveloping the community centre. No one even thought to turn on the overhead fans - possibly because they were solar powered, and the sun had gone down an hour before the meeting commenced. I'm glad I drove my climate controlled 4WD to the meeting instead of riding - I would have been sitting in a pool of sweat if I had taken the bike.
Clover Moore, the self-promoting Lord Mayor, attended the meeting. She wasn't wearing one of her trademark dog collars, possibly because of the heat. I doubt she rode either. There were two Council Prius's parked out the front (what is the plural of Prius? Priapis? Priii?), and I presume she came in one of them. Clover is great at spending ratepayers money on promoting her name, and last night was no different. Council staff had setup a lectern and a table for Moore and two staffers, and behind the table was a large green sign with a Green slogan on it, with the slogan or quote being attributed to Clover Moore. I know that because it had her name in big, fat letters under the slogan.
The meeting was well organised and well run, and although a few speakers rambled on a bit once given the microphone, it was thankfully bereft of nutters using the occasion as a soapbox for their tinfoil hat-wearing views. There was one bloke who looked like he might be part of that brigade - he looked about 60, had a big beard and a long ponytail of grey hair. I couldn't work out whether he was homeless or a Nimbin hippy who was lost. It turned out that he was a well spoken local resident who wanted to make sure that the Council abides by their own design rules for building kerbs and so on. Apparently the whole area is covered by some sort of template that dictates the material that you can use for paths, roads, kerbs, guttering and that sort of thing, and the mob that follows it the least is the Council! Typical.
Whilst most of the discussion was on how to separate bikes from pedestrians and bikes from cars, a few people brought up the topic of separating cyclists from drunks. The Pyrmont Bridge Hotel is one of those pubs that is open all hours, and it is quite common to ride past their at 7am and to see a horde of drunks staggering out after pulling an all-nighter. Two people talked about sitting at a red light outside the pub on their bike and having a drunk try and get on the bike with them! I've never experienced that, but I've had to put up with plenty of drunks yelling abuse at cyclists as they go past (this is drunks who are sitting inside at the bar, not drunks who are staggering around outside on the path, or trying to cross the road). The range of human behaviour that you can experience whilst on a bike is generally quite a bit more widespread than what you get in the sterile, enclosed habitat of a car.
There was only one business owner there, and he was concerned about the length of time that construction would take, and whether that would send him broke or not. Energy Australia tore up the street earlier this year for a long period (and did an awful job of relaying the asphalt afterwards) and apparently four shops in that section went bust. He was the only one to survive the disruption. I half caught the name of his place "fine foods" something or other. I think I know the place. I wanted to tell him that I am always on the lookout for a good place to have breakfast when I ride to work, and that I'd stop at his shop if it was appealing to cyclists. He could do quite well out of the passing bike traffic if he put his mind to it, but I think cyclists are the last people he wants to deal with. If he wants to go bust by not serving a certain market, that's his problem.
After the meeting, I went over to talk to the bloke from Bike Sydney, who turned out to be an arrogant bugger wanting nothing to do with a fellow cyclist. Cyclists are generally a cheery mob who wave and say hello as they ride past each other, but I bet this guy just scowls.
I had a look at the diagrams and designs and found that they'd forgotten about one thing, so I hung around and had a chat with some of the council staff, their consultants and the designers. They had one consultant there who just took care of the traffic light phasing. He's probably the kind of bloke that has an enormous train set at home in the double car garage.
I suspect that for the most part, the works won't really do much for the serious commuter cyclist - the sort of person who is comfortable mixing it up on the road with the traffic. However, it will do a huge amount for beginners, or the occasional rider. It should give a big boost to people using their bike for odd trips, which makes it a Very Good Thing.
The only disappointment for me was that Shayne Mallard, a Liberal councillor, was not there. Apart from being a fellow conservative, he's a blogger and cyclist, and I wanted to say g'day. But I guess that as far as Clover is concerned, there can only be one queen at these events. Shayne is the enemy, and he has to be kept well away from the people. Only Clover can be seen to be discharging largesse to the electorate.
Perverse incentives and the housing market
Housing in Australia is very expensive at the moment - I think there is no question of that. Compared to incomes, it is amongst the highest in the world.
Why is that?
Most people would assume that it is a byproduct of an economic boom. If the economy is doing well, then house prices must go up as people get wealthier.
Have a listen to this podcast at Counterpoint and then see what you think.
In my opinion, one of the drivers of the increase in house prices has been a wall of money that has been unleashed by the banks and the non-banks. When a growing amount of money is chasing a fairly static number of assets, the price of those assets will go up. If houses are thought of like any other asset - gold, shares, bonds, silver, collectible art, racehorses, tulips etc - then it becomes clear that we're at the top end of an asset price bubble. If you want to read a lot more about this, go to the UK Bubble blog - it makes for excellent, if slightly depressing reading. I read it every day before going to work - it stimulates me to go and make money, because we're going to need as much of it as possible to survive the efforts of "fumble fingers" Woin Swan to "save" the economy. Watching Woin trying to do that is like watching a headless chicken with its arse on fire running around inside a gunpowder mill.
The podcast made some interesting points which I will elaborate on.
The first was the incentives that town planners face in different countries. The second is that in the US, those regions that had the strictest land use regulations also generated the highest number of sub-prime loans.
Think about how councils are financed in Australia. They get some money from rates on land, and the rest in grants from the state and federal governments. Some money also comes in from processing fees and the like.
The incentive for all councils is to increase the value of the land within their boundary, which will feed through into higher rates and thus a fatter council budget. They are not interested in stable land values, and are terrified of declining values. It is therefor in the best interests of councils for them to do all that they can to pump up land values. An asset bubble is good for them.
What is the best way to increase land values?
Apart from initiating a wall of money via cheap and easy credit, the other way is to restrict the supply of land. This is where planners come in.
One thing that was mentioned was that in Switzerland, local government levies income taxes. This means that councils have an incentive to attract more people (at least more people that earn enough money to pay an income tax), so planners plan in such a way to entice them in.
It's interesting to contrast that with the recent view of Michael Costa, who said that Bob Carr essentially wanted to stop Sydney from growing at all for green reasons. When you combine state government pressure to stop land releases with local government incentives to boost land prices, you get the sort of stupidity that Sydney has been going through for a decade. Many people think that they are very smart because they have made money out of the housing boom (or house price asset bubble as I prefer to call it). They're not smart - they're just fortunate to have bought at a time when a convergence of forces relentlessly drove up prices.
The other bit that was interesting was that about the relationship between land use regulation in the US and sub-prime lending. In Australia, we get the impression that "sub-prime" meant lending to poor people with no money. That's part of it, but there were also a lot of very large loans (in the millions of dollars) to quite wealthy people who were either speculating in the market, or buying not just a big home, but a grandiose home that would normally have been beyond their buying power.
Land use restrictions clearly acted to drive up prices. When housing starts to become unaffordable with a normal, prudent loan, some people will do the obvious thing and take out a bigger loan than prudence would dictate in order to buy something. The old rule of thumb is that your mortgage should not exceed 3 times your gross income. If you earn $100,000 pre-tax, you limit yourself to a $300,000 mortgage.
But let's say you are earning $100,000, but a house in your area now costs $700,000, and you only have a $100,000 deposit. You go sub-prime, and borrow $600,000 (well, more than that, since you also need to pay stamp duty and conveyancing etc). Not many poor people were borrowing that sort of money - you need to be fairly well off to be doing that; but that's what a lot of people did, in the expectation that either their incomes would go up (due to a booming economy) and/or that house prices would go up, thus giving them a gain if they were forced to sell.
Gee, aren't those people fucked now.
One thing that is clear to me is that if we want to stamp out all these NIMBYs and do-nothing councils, we need to change the structure of incentives that councils operate under. That probably means overhauling how they raise money, and unfortunately I can't see that happening in my lifetime.
In other words, we can look forward to a few more booms and busts in my remaining lifespan.
Why is that?
Most people would assume that it is a byproduct of an economic boom. If the economy is doing well, then house prices must go up as people get wealthier.
Have a listen to this podcast at Counterpoint and then see what you think.
In my opinion, one of the drivers of the increase in house prices has been a wall of money that has been unleashed by the banks and the non-banks. When a growing amount of money is chasing a fairly static number of assets, the price of those assets will go up. If houses are thought of like any other asset - gold, shares, bonds, silver, collectible art, racehorses, tulips etc - then it becomes clear that we're at the top end of an asset price bubble. If you want to read a lot more about this, go to the UK Bubble blog - it makes for excellent, if slightly depressing reading. I read it every day before going to work - it stimulates me to go and make money, because we're going to need as much of it as possible to survive the efforts of "fumble fingers" Woin Swan to "save" the economy. Watching Woin trying to do that is like watching a headless chicken with its arse on fire running around inside a gunpowder mill.
The podcast made some interesting points which I will elaborate on.
The first was the incentives that town planners face in different countries. The second is that in the US, those regions that had the strictest land use regulations also generated the highest number of sub-prime loans.
Think about how councils are financed in Australia. They get some money from rates on land, and the rest in grants from the state and federal governments. Some money also comes in from processing fees and the like.
The incentive for all councils is to increase the value of the land within their boundary, which will feed through into higher rates and thus a fatter council budget. They are not interested in stable land values, and are terrified of declining values. It is therefor in the best interests of councils for them to do all that they can to pump up land values. An asset bubble is good for them.
What is the best way to increase land values?
Apart from initiating a wall of money via cheap and easy credit, the other way is to restrict the supply of land. This is where planners come in.
One thing that was mentioned was that in Switzerland, local government levies income taxes. This means that councils have an incentive to attract more people (at least more people that earn enough money to pay an income tax), so planners plan in such a way to entice them in.
It's interesting to contrast that with the recent view of Michael Costa, who said that Bob Carr essentially wanted to stop Sydney from growing at all for green reasons. When you combine state government pressure to stop land releases with local government incentives to boost land prices, you get the sort of stupidity that Sydney has been going through for a decade. Many people think that they are very smart because they have made money out of the housing boom (or house price asset bubble as I prefer to call it). They're not smart - they're just fortunate to have bought at a time when a convergence of forces relentlessly drove up prices.
The other bit that was interesting was that about the relationship between land use regulation in the US and sub-prime lending. In Australia, we get the impression that "sub-prime" meant lending to poor people with no money. That's part of it, but there were also a lot of very large loans (in the millions of dollars) to quite wealthy people who were either speculating in the market, or buying not just a big home, but a grandiose home that would normally have been beyond their buying power.
Land use restrictions clearly acted to drive up prices. When housing starts to become unaffordable with a normal, prudent loan, some people will do the obvious thing and take out a bigger loan than prudence would dictate in order to buy something. The old rule of thumb is that your mortgage should not exceed 3 times your gross income. If you earn $100,000 pre-tax, you limit yourself to a $300,000 mortgage.
But let's say you are earning $100,000, but a house in your area now costs $700,000, and you only have a $100,000 deposit. You go sub-prime, and borrow $600,000 (well, more than that, since you also need to pay stamp duty and conveyancing etc). Not many poor people were borrowing that sort of money - you need to be fairly well off to be doing that; but that's what a lot of people did, in the expectation that either their incomes would go up (due to a booming economy) and/or that house prices would go up, thus giving them a gain if they were forced to sell.
Gee, aren't those people fucked now.
One thing that is clear to me is that if we want to stamp out all these NIMBYs and do-nothing councils, we need to change the structure of incentives that councils operate under. That probably means overhauling how they raise money, and unfortunately I can't see that happening in my lifetime.
In other words, we can look forward to a few more booms and busts in my remaining lifespan.
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
Microsoft up to their old tricks?
I have been having terrible trouble with my PC for the last week or so - Outlook would open one message, then lock up. iTunes simply refused to open at all. It wouldn't shut down properly, leaving me no option but to yank the power cable out.
I bit the bullet today and uninstalled the last update, which was installed on 3 Nov. Suddenly, iTunes opens straight away.
Are they gearing up for another war with Apple?
I bit the bullet today and uninstalled the last update, which was installed on 3 Nov. Suddenly, iTunes opens straight away.
Are they gearing up for another war with Apple?
Do lefties still think the US is stupid?
In my short lifetime, whenever the yanks have had a Republican President, the lefties here spend 4 or 8 years (or 12 years) calling Americans the stupidest people on earth, or the fattest, stupidest people on earth.
If you don't believe me, read a few Philip Adams columns from the Reagan or Bush years. Whenever a Republican is in charge, American culture is repugnant and must be kept at bay. The American people are too thick to tie their own shoelaces. Their system of government is corrupt and greedy and driven by the interests of "big business".
I haven't been able to get through an entire column of Adam's since Bush Snr took over from Reagan, and I'm not about to start reading the fat, smug, fat-head again now. But I will be interested to know if he is whistling a different tune now that the Osmuga will be taking over in January.
Adams must work on the principle that at election time, giant alien invisible space lizards descend on America and perform 300 million brain transplants, removing stupid brains with repugnant personalities and replacing them with smart brains with likeable, UN loving personalities. An entire country can't go from being stupid to smart in one day without one or more of the following things happening:
On point one, I think we'd notice if 30 million people suddenly disappeared. Unless you believe that Hurricane Katrina was a trial run organised by Halliburton, with the inclement weather being organised by giant alien space lizards. As for the brain swap-out thingy, I have been listening to podcasts of talk radio from the US both pre- and post-election, and the leftie callers have not been noticeably smarter after the election. They've been as smug as a smug-filled smuggle-buggle, but still dumb as a box of hammers. As for lots of low-IQ people leaving the country, lefties always threaten to go to Canada when the Republicans win, but I don't remember Canada reporting a sudden dumbing-down of their population after the last two elections.
On point two, I know that the US gets a few million newcomers each year, but most of them are illegal, and if they were all geniuses, they'd be working in Silicon Valley designing software, not picking lettuce.
I guess I am back to the theory that Phat Phil and his ilk are just pin-heads with a love of unrealistic, overblown rhetoric, and I'd be better off listening to my own farts than any of them.
If you don't believe me, read a few Philip Adams columns from the Reagan or Bush years. Whenever a Republican is in charge, American culture is repugnant and must be kept at bay. The American people are too thick to tie their own shoelaces. Their system of government is corrupt and greedy and driven by the interests of "big business".
I haven't been able to get through an entire column of Adam's since Bush Snr took over from Reagan, and I'm not about to start reading the fat, smug, fat-head again now. But I will be interested to know if he is whistling a different tune now that the Osmuga will be taking over in January.
Adams must work on the principle that at election time, giant alien invisible space lizards descend on America and perform 300 million brain transplants, removing stupid brains with repugnant personalities and replacing them with smart brains with likeable, UN loving personalities. An entire country can't go from being stupid to smart in one day without one or more of the following things happening:
- everyone with a low IQ dying, leaving the country, or having their low-IQ brain swapped out by a giant alien space lizard
- tens of millions of people with a genius level IQ moving into the country, or again, another giant alien space lizard brain swap
On point one, I think we'd notice if 30 million people suddenly disappeared. Unless you believe that Hurricane Katrina was a trial run organised by Halliburton, with the inclement weather being organised by giant alien space lizards. As for the brain swap-out thingy, I have been listening to podcasts of talk radio from the US both pre- and post-election, and the leftie callers have not been noticeably smarter after the election. They've been as smug as a smug-filled smuggle-buggle, but still dumb as a box of hammers. As for lots of low-IQ people leaving the country, lefties always threaten to go to Canada when the Republicans win, but I don't remember Canada reporting a sudden dumbing-down of their population after the last two elections.
On point two, I know that the US gets a few million newcomers each year, but most of them are illegal, and if they were all geniuses, they'd be working in Silicon Valley designing software, not picking lettuce.
I guess I am back to the theory that Phat Phil and his ilk are just pin-heads with a love of unrealistic, overblown rhetoric, and I'd be better off listening to my own farts than any of them.
Tuesday, 11 November 2008
Non-observance
I once calculated that over a 15 year period, I worked in 20 different buildings in the Sydney CBD or North Sydney. I have no idea how many different buildings I have spent Remberance Day in, but I guess it would be 10. In some cases, I was working for private enterprise; in others, for government.
Today was spent in a private building out in the sticks. It was the first time in 15 years that I can think of where the building did not stop at 11:11hrs for a minutes silence. I doubt anyone even knew it was Rememberance Day.
In previous years, we'd usually get an email in the morning to remind us of the importance of the day, along with a request that all work cease at 11:11, and that silence be observed. At the appointed minute, the building manager would get on the PA system, and a formal announcement would be made to every nook and cranny of the building.
Some idiots would of course ignore the announcement - they'd continue prattling away on the telephone until something large and heavy would sail through the air in their direction. Wherever I was at that time, you'd hear the whole building come to a stop. The only sound would be that of the air conditioning thrumming away, or the occasional "ping" of an email arriving. On the whole, everyone respected it, regardless of their personal feelings.
Today was a bit of a shock, because I was in a meeting, and was expecting an announcement to be made blah-blah-blah, and when I looked up, it was 11:30am. We'd sailed right through without a pause.
I'm not going to make the mistake of assuming anything in the future.
Today was spent in a private building out in the sticks. It was the first time in 15 years that I can think of where the building did not stop at 11:11hrs for a minutes silence. I doubt anyone even knew it was Rememberance Day.
In previous years, we'd usually get an email in the morning to remind us of the importance of the day, along with a request that all work cease at 11:11, and that silence be observed. At the appointed minute, the building manager would get on the PA system, and a formal announcement would be made to every nook and cranny of the building.
Some idiots would of course ignore the announcement - they'd continue prattling away on the telephone until something large and heavy would sail through the air in their direction. Wherever I was at that time, you'd hear the whole building come to a stop. The only sound would be that of the air conditioning thrumming away, or the occasional "ping" of an email arriving. On the whole, everyone respected it, regardless of their personal feelings.
Today was a bit of a shock, because I was in a meeting, and was expecting an announcement to be made blah-blah-blah, and when I looked up, it was 11:30am. We'd sailed right through without a pause.
I'm not going to make the mistake of assuming anything in the future.
Monday, 10 November 2008
Obama and the youth vote
I know that some political junkies will have a go at me for bringing up the "youth vote" in the recent US election - because there isn't one really, given that most youth are too lazy to get out of bed and vote come election day. Apparantely youth turnout was no greater for this "landmark" election than previous ones.
There goes another myth that was so carefully nurtured during the campaign.
I have listened to a few speeches that Odrama has made, and read a few more online, and not once have I read anything of substance, anything of meaning or anything that really said something.
I guess that's the prejudice of my personality type showing through - I hate all wafflers and dissemblers. I like being told things directly and succinctly. I like facts and analysis, not high-minded waffle and vacuous vapidity.
Will anyone remember a single word that the Odroner has uttered in 50 years time? Will any of his speeches resonate down the years, like those of Churchill or Kennedy or Martin Luther King?
I doubt it.
Puffery and fluff leave no impact, they leave no trace, they leave not even a shadow of their passing.
This all came to me in a blinding flash on Sunday. Junior had gone for a bike ride with 3 buddies, all aged around 12, and they dropped in for a drink after an hour or so. I listened to their conversation for about a minute, and could take no more. Boys of that age say nothing meaningful - they throw words at each other in an attempt to big note themselves. It is not something that will lead to the betterment of the universe. It is as shallow as the cap on a beer bottle.
It struck me then that the things that irritated me about listening to four juveniles were the same things that I find irritating with Ofluffer. "Hope and change" is not meaningful like "E=MC2". Hope and change is a lyric which has simply been repeated endlessly, like "all you need is love".
Spare me whilst I vomit.
All the Beatles gave us was a lot of screaming women, a nasty outbreak of VD and after a few years, the worst facial hair to grace the faces of Europeans since Erik the Viking and his pals were raping and pillaging everything within sailing distance of Oooslavgovblard.
Oprompter isn't likely to be any better.
There goes another myth that was so carefully nurtured during the campaign.
I have listened to a few speeches that Odrama has made, and read a few more online, and not once have I read anything of substance, anything of meaning or anything that really said something.
I guess that's the prejudice of my personality type showing through - I hate all wafflers and dissemblers. I like being told things directly and succinctly. I like facts and analysis, not high-minded waffle and vacuous vapidity.
Will anyone remember a single word that the Odroner has uttered in 50 years time? Will any of his speeches resonate down the years, like those of Churchill or Kennedy or Martin Luther King?
I doubt it.
Puffery and fluff leave no impact, they leave no trace, they leave not even a shadow of their passing.
This all came to me in a blinding flash on Sunday. Junior had gone for a bike ride with 3 buddies, all aged around 12, and they dropped in for a drink after an hour or so. I listened to their conversation for about a minute, and could take no more. Boys of that age say nothing meaningful - they throw words at each other in an attempt to big note themselves. It is not something that will lead to the betterment of the universe. It is as shallow as the cap on a beer bottle.
It struck me then that the things that irritated me about listening to four juveniles were the same things that I find irritating with Ofluffer. "Hope and change" is not meaningful like "E=MC2". Hope and change is a lyric which has simply been repeated endlessly, like "all you need is love".
Spare me whilst I vomit.
All the Beatles gave us was a lot of screaming women, a nasty outbreak of VD and after a few years, the worst facial hair to grace the faces of Europeans since Erik the Viking and his pals were raping and pillaging everything within sailing distance of Oooslavgovblard.
Oprompter isn't likely to be any better.
17 year old "boy"?
Is a 17 year old a boy or a man?
I think that if you are old enough to have held and then lost a drivers licence, old enough to get drunk and be out at 3am, old enough to steal licence plates, then you are old enough to be charged as an adult.
Enough of this "boy" nonsense. At that age, they are a "young man", or "young gentleman" as my elders and betters used to call me, in an attempt to get me to behave like one.
I think that if you are old enough to have held and then lost a drivers licence, old enough to get drunk and be out at 3am, old enough to steal licence plates, then you are old enough to be charged as an adult.
Enough of this "boy" nonsense. At that age, they are a "young man", or "young gentleman" as my elders and betters used to call me, in an attempt to get me to behave like one.
Car imports crater
Unfortunately, as I have not been riding into town over the Anzac Bridge for some months, I have been unable to guage the impact of the current financial situation on car imports by the most reliable known indicator - the number of vehicles backed up on the docks at White Bay. When I was last regularly doing that ride, the docks were completely covered in cars. They were overflowing into every nook and cranny, even onto docks on the other side of the harbour.
I had a good look yesterday.
The yard looked about 40% full.
Not a good sign. Where once the wharfies used to have trouble tying up two car carriers back to back, and then finding a spot on the dock for a car; and where truck drivers coming to collect the cars had an interesting time navigating the traffic jams of car carriers, now we have enough space for a few games of 20/20 cricket to be played on the docks. Along with about 10,000 spectators.
I will try and do a ride out to the car yards on Paramatta Rd sometime this weekend - in order to see how many are going into liquidation. Personally, I'd like to see them all go bust, so the state government could buy up the vacant lots and widen the road as it should be.
I had a good look yesterday.
The yard looked about 40% full.
Not a good sign. Where once the wharfies used to have trouble tying up two car carriers back to back, and then finding a spot on the dock for a car; and where truck drivers coming to collect the cars had an interesting time navigating the traffic jams of car carriers, now we have enough space for a few games of 20/20 cricket to be played on the docks. Along with about 10,000 spectators.
I will try and do a ride out to the car yards on Paramatta Rd sometime this weekend - in order to see how many are going into liquidation. Personally, I'd like to see them all go bust, so the state government could buy up the vacant lots and widen the road as it should be.
Sunday, 9 November 2008
Foster kids and a rotten ideology
I will start this post by stating that I have not been fostered as a kid, nor have I been a foster parent; and I don't think I know any foster parents.
However, I do know a destructive ideology when I see it.
Andrew Bolt really has it in for people that mistreat kids. He blogged about it again today.
My understanding is that in the "old" days (ie, back before when I was born about 40 years ago), we were comfortable with the idea that if you couldn't find a good, safe foster home for a kid, then it was alright to stick them in an institution (like a boarding school), and keep them there until they were an adult if need be - and that could be done without anyone feeling guilty or depressed about the whole arrangement.
But then we had the whole 1960's and 1970's thing, and man, it suddenly became such a bummer to have, like, institutions man. Because institutions were bad. Institutions crushed people. It broke their souls.
They had to go.
I think what the 1960's crowd hated is that they were orderly. They were spartan. They were disciplined. They were managed according to strict policies and procedures, and the consequences for disregarding those policies were not happy ones.
They occasionally employed complete whackos, who enjoyed beating or mollesting their young charges instead of educating them and nurturing them.
So it had to go. Only the family unit could provide the sort of nurturing that young kiddies need.
So we now have an army of foster parents, and like anything that grows from a cottage enterprise to an industry, quality gets sacrificed along the way. In the old days, I'm sure a strong argument was made for foster parents based on some very good outcomes being achieved by some exceptional parents. But not everyone can be exceptional, and basing an argument on the results of a group that may represent only the top 10% of a chosen field is bound to lead to disaster.
In any group, there are always going to be a small number of oustanding people, a largish mass of competent performers and a tail of useless, boneheaded drongos bringing up the rear. And here's the thing - attention will always be drawn to the outstanding performers. If you hear about someone talking about the excellent work that a group of people are doing, you can be sure that they have only really looked at the very best work on offer, and have not bothered to inspect the mass of dreck that the rest have produced. Our eye is always drawn to the best on offer.
Just look at the NSW government today. When Carr was first elected, he had a handful of bright ministers, a mass of windowlickers and some truly awful people bringing up the tail. Carr's government was carried by the 3 or 4 really good ministers, and once they left, the place turned to poo. I'm sure that there were some within the mass of windowlickers who thought that once they got their baton, they would turn out to be Napoleon in a good suit.
No, sorry about that. They turned out to be a windowlicker in a taxpayer funded, chauffer driven limousine. Once the cream left, there was no more cream left to rise to the top. Iemma had a tough time forming a cabinet out of the 1 or 2 good people that were left, but when he left, so did they. As Rees has discovered, there is no talent in his talent pool.
So it is with fostering. Let's say that in 1960, there were 50 foster parents in NSW, and that there are 1,000 today (I am making up the numbers here). Back in 1960, 5 of those foster parents might have been excellent, 30 so-so and the remaining 15....well, let's say I wouldn't leave my kids with them. The policy makers would have looked at the results being achieved by the institutions (and only the worst results, if they were biased against them), and then compared them to the results being achieved by the top 5% of foster parents. And guess which ideology would have won?
The assumption any public servant would make though is that if we grow the number of foster parents from 50 to 1000, then the number of excellent foster parents will grow equally from 5 to 100.
Ah, I beg to differ. I would contend that the good people have already put their hands up. You might grow the number to 10, but you'll never grow it to 100.
What you do get though is that the number of so-so parents might grow from 30 to 500 - not quite a 20-fold increase, because there just aren't that many good people out there. Look at what happens when you take a footy competition and grow it from 12 teams to 20. There just isn't that much talent out there at the top grades to fill up 20 teams.
The one thing you are absolutely certain to get is that the number of awful, awful foster parents has grown from 15 to 490. They have gone from being 30% of your pool to nearly 50%, and instead of 15 kids growing up in shit homes, you have 490 growing up in shit homes.
What a way to breed the next generation of over-achievers.
Societies have used institutions of various types for centuries to deliver services, because they are efficient and effective (to a degree). Where do you think an abusive foster worker is more likely to be uncovered - in an institution where they work with 30 other co-workers and are working under direct management oversight, or in a foster home which gets inspected once every few years?
I find it odd that the same people that love one type of institution to death (the state school) are so averse to other types, such as mental institutions, boarding schools for feral kids and fostering institutions for kids with terrible parents. I do agree that mamoth institutions (like our state school system and our state hospital system) tend to generate terrible results, and they should be broken up and removed from the state sector as far as possible.
If an institution for foster kids is so terrible and inhuman, why do we force kids to attend a school of one sort or another?
I am not against fostering. What I am for is limiting the scope of fostering so that only quality parents are chosen, and sticking the remaining kids in an institution on the assumption that they will be there for a long time, so the institution had better be up to scratch. I think the field has tilted so much now that the departments charged with overseeing kiddie-care want 100% of their kids in foster homes, so they shovel the kids out to anyone that will take them, and they put no effort into providing quality institutions.
That has to change. There should be no stigma attached to running a quality institution.
I am a graduate of several institutions - an outstanding boarding school and the Australian Army. I lived in another form of institution whilst at uni - a university college. I doubt many Marines would feel down about being members of that great institution known as the Marine Corps.
But then again, the sort of people who are down about institutions for kids are the same sort of people that don't like the Marine Corps very much either. Which says a lot really.
However, I do know a destructive ideology when I see it.
Andrew Bolt really has it in for people that mistreat kids. He blogged about it again today.
My understanding is that in the "old" days (ie, back before when I was born about 40 years ago), we were comfortable with the idea that if you couldn't find a good, safe foster home for a kid, then it was alright to stick them in an institution (like a boarding school), and keep them there until they were an adult if need be - and that could be done without anyone feeling guilty or depressed about the whole arrangement.
But then we had the whole 1960's and 1970's thing, and man, it suddenly became such a bummer to have, like, institutions man. Because institutions were bad. Institutions crushed people. It broke their souls.
They had to go.
I think what the 1960's crowd hated is that they were orderly. They were spartan. They were disciplined. They were managed according to strict policies and procedures, and the consequences for disregarding those policies were not happy ones.
They occasionally employed complete whackos, who enjoyed beating or mollesting their young charges instead of educating them and nurturing them.
So it had to go. Only the family unit could provide the sort of nurturing that young kiddies need.
So we now have an army of foster parents, and like anything that grows from a cottage enterprise to an industry, quality gets sacrificed along the way. In the old days, I'm sure a strong argument was made for foster parents based on some very good outcomes being achieved by some exceptional parents. But not everyone can be exceptional, and basing an argument on the results of a group that may represent only the top 10% of a chosen field is bound to lead to disaster.
In any group, there are always going to be a small number of oustanding people, a largish mass of competent performers and a tail of useless, boneheaded drongos bringing up the rear. And here's the thing - attention will always be drawn to the outstanding performers. If you hear about someone talking about the excellent work that a group of people are doing, you can be sure that they have only really looked at the very best work on offer, and have not bothered to inspect the mass of dreck that the rest have produced. Our eye is always drawn to the best on offer.
Just look at the NSW government today. When Carr was first elected, he had a handful of bright ministers, a mass of windowlickers and some truly awful people bringing up the tail. Carr's government was carried by the 3 or 4 really good ministers, and once they left, the place turned to poo. I'm sure that there were some within the mass of windowlickers who thought that once they got their baton, they would turn out to be Napoleon in a good suit.
No, sorry about that. They turned out to be a windowlicker in a taxpayer funded, chauffer driven limousine. Once the cream left, there was no more cream left to rise to the top. Iemma had a tough time forming a cabinet out of the 1 or 2 good people that were left, but when he left, so did they. As Rees has discovered, there is no talent in his talent pool.
So it is with fostering. Let's say that in 1960, there were 50 foster parents in NSW, and that there are 1,000 today (I am making up the numbers here). Back in 1960, 5 of those foster parents might have been excellent, 30 so-so and the remaining 15....well, let's say I wouldn't leave my kids with them. The policy makers would have looked at the results being achieved by the institutions (and only the worst results, if they were biased against them), and then compared them to the results being achieved by the top 5% of foster parents. And guess which ideology would have won?
The assumption any public servant would make though is that if we grow the number of foster parents from 50 to 1000, then the number of excellent foster parents will grow equally from 5 to 100.
Ah, I beg to differ. I would contend that the good people have already put their hands up. You might grow the number to 10, but you'll never grow it to 100.
What you do get though is that the number of so-so parents might grow from 30 to 500 - not quite a 20-fold increase, because there just aren't that many good people out there. Look at what happens when you take a footy competition and grow it from 12 teams to 20. There just isn't that much talent out there at the top grades to fill up 20 teams.
The one thing you are absolutely certain to get is that the number of awful, awful foster parents has grown from 15 to 490. They have gone from being 30% of your pool to nearly 50%, and instead of 15 kids growing up in shit homes, you have 490 growing up in shit homes.
What a way to breed the next generation of over-achievers.
Societies have used institutions of various types for centuries to deliver services, because they are efficient and effective (to a degree). Where do you think an abusive foster worker is more likely to be uncovered - in an institution where they work with 30 other co-workers and are working under direct management oversight, or in a foster home which gets inspected once every few years?
I find it odd that the same people that love one type of institution to death (the state school) are so averse to other types, such as mental institutions, boarding schools for feral kids and fostering institutions for kids with terrible parents. I do agree that mamoth institutions (like our state school system and our state hospital system) tend to generate terrible results, and they should be broken up and removed from the state sector as far as possible.
If an institution for foster kids is so terrible and inhuman, why do we force kids to attend a school of one sort or another?
I am not against fostering. What I am for is limiting the scope of fostering so that only quality parents are chosen, and sticking the remaining kids in an institution on the assumption that they will be there for a long time, so the institution had better be up to scratch. I think the field has tilted so much now that the departments charged with overseeing kiddie-care want 100% of their kids in foster homes, so they shovel the kids out to anyone that will take them, and they put no effort into providing quality institutions.
That has to change. There should be no stigma attached to running a quality institution.
I am a graduate of several institutions - an outstanding boarding school and the Australian Army. I lived in another form of institution whilst at uni - a university college. I doubt many Marines would feel down about being members of that great institution known as the Marine Corps.
But then again, the sort of people who are down about institutions for kids are the same sort of people that don't like the Marine Corps very much either. Which says a lot really.
Do you ever backup your photos?
I think we now have around 11,000 digital pics on our home network - a result of having owned a multitude of digital cameras over the last 10 years. People like to sit in the armchair that sits behind my office chair just to watch the screensaver when it kicks in, as I have it set to display our photo library in a rapid, random sequence. The multitude of photos from all sorts of places and events captivates all who've seen it.
It would therefor be an utter disaster for us if my hard drive went up in smoke. We've had a NAS for a few years now (Network Attached Storage, for the less technically inclined amongst us) - it's a device about the size of a toaster that holds two hard drives, cost me about $350, and has more than enough storage to backup all 4 computers in our household (although I will probably upgrade to larger hard drives sooner rather than later).
Although the NAS is a nifty, if annoying bit of kit, I have been slack when it comes to backing up my stuff to it.
Then I found a Microsoft utility called SyncToy.
If you have something like an external storage device, and you find your current backup software to be a complete pain, try SyncToy. It's a free utility, and it's great. It doesn't have any scheduling ability, so it has to be run manually, but I only need to run it once every week or two to keep things up to date.
SyncToy. A good piece of kit. Don't be a lazy-arsed bastard and wait for your hard drive to crash before installing it.
It would therefor be an utter disaster for us if my hard drive went up in smoke. We've had a NAS for a few years now (Network Attached Storage, for the less technically inclined amongst us) - it's a device about the size of a toaster that holds two hard drives, cost me about $350, and has more than enough storage to backup all 4 computers in our household (although I will probably upgrade to larger hard drives sooner rather than later).
Although the NAS is a nifty, if annoying bit of kit, I have been slack when it comes to backing up my stuff to it.
Then I found a Microsoft utility called SyncToy.
If you have something like an external storage device, and you find your current backup software to be a complete pain, try SyncToy. It's a free utility, and it's great. It doesn't have any scheduling ability, so it has to be run manually, but I only need to run it once every week or two to keep things up to date.
SyncToy. A good piece of kit. Don't be a lazy-arsed bastard and wait for your hard drive to crash before installing it.
I know what Junior wants for Christmas
This would keep him busy.
But he'll have to wait a few years before he gets it.
But he'll have to wait a few years before he gets it.
Car chases
Many years ago, just before I departed Perth for warmer economic climes on the east coast, the media was having a field day abusing the Police over a number of chases that had gone badly wrong. The last straw was when a VW was cleaned up and a mother and child killed. From that point on, police chases pretty much ended for some time. Perth seems to the ideal place to steal a car for an adrenaline fueled joyride.
I don't know if much has changed, but before I left, kids (mostly of the indigenous variety) would sniff some glue, steal a car and then drive around until they found a Police car. At that point, they'd drive into the back of it, giving it a nudge, and then the chase would be on. Perth is a great city for driving fast at night - traffic (back then) was minimal, the roads wide and straight and flat, and it was easy to get up to 200km/h. Try doing that on Parramatta Road!
I experience something of this first hand one night when I went to a party in the hills with a mate. He drove an RX-3, a beast of a thing, and we both got completely hammered. I knew at about midnight that the party was over for me, so I crawled into the backseat of his car and went to sleep.
I woke up around 3am to find that we were going through a red light. I looked at the speedo to find that we were doing 180km/h. When I asked Dave what he was doing, he said, "I'm slowing down for the red lights". He had that thing going at warp speed. I was drunk beyond caring, so I simply lay down and went back to sleep. It took us an hour to get to the party and about 20 minutes to get home.
I never cadged a lift to a party with Dave ever again.
Although we did ride a motorbike, naked, down Stirling Hwy at around 1am one morning as we left a nude pool party that was out of booze, went home, collected some grog and returned. If you have to ask why, you've never been 19 years old and in the shower with a couple of chicks.
Crashes in Perth in those circumstances were terrible because of the speeds the nongs were doing - a mate of mine, who was a copper at the time, was chasing a car that went through a red light into the side of a Range Rover. The driver was a well known local businessman, and he was killed outright in the collision.
The Police of course copped all the abuse for crashes like that - no one wanted to blame the 15 year old kids, high on glue or drunk, who were stealing cars and deliberately initiating chases for the thrill of it - knowing that if they were caught, the consequences would be minimal.
The upshot is that we went through a decade where police chases were bad, bad things.
The attitude of the media seems to have shifted 180 degrees in the last few years. They've woken up and realised that people get killed by these idiots even when the Police aren't chasing them. They do dumb things like race each other from the lights, and smack into other cars unfortunate enough to get in the way. They speed recklessly and smash into power poles. They get drunk and speed recklessly and smash into houses. And all the while, the Police are sitting in their stations, drinking skinny lattes and filling out paperwork. Unless they are in Five Wog - in that case, they are eating fish and chips (the fish and chips around here must be good - the Riot Squad sent a Landcruiser out this way a few weeks back for a large order of shark and spud).
Anyway, the result is that the media are now firmly on the side of Plod. Plod can crash and bang and tip their cars upside down as many times as they like, and not a peep will be heard from the media.
Which is a good thing.
If you ask me, Police chases should last only so long as it takes to do the following:
I don't know if much has changed, but before I left, kids (mostly of the indigenous variety) would sniff some glue, steal a car and then drive around until they found a Police car. At that point, they'd drive into the back of it, giving it a nudge, and then the chase would be on. Perth is a great city for driving fast at night - traffic (back then) was minimal, the roads wide and straight and flat, and it was easy to get up to 200km/h. Try doing that on Parramatta Road!
I experience something of this first hand one night when I went to a party in the hills with a mate. He drove an RX-3, a beast of a thing, and we both got completely hammered. I knew at about midnight that the party was over for me, so I crawled into the backseat of his car and went to sleep.
I woke up around 3am to find that we were going through a red light. I looked at the speedo to find that we were doing 180km/h. When I asked Dave what he was doing, he said, "I'm slowing down for the red lights". He had that thing going at warp speed. I was drunk beyond caring, so I simply lay down and went back to sleep. It took us an hour to get to the party and about 20 minutes to get home.
I never cadged a lift to a party with Dave ever again.
Although we did ride a motorbike, naked, down Stirling Hwy at around 1am one morning as we left a nude pool party that was out of booze, went home, collected some grog and returned. If you have to ask why, you've never been 19 years old and in the shower with a couple of chicks.
Crashes in Perth in those circumstances were terrible because of the speeds the nongs were doing - a mate of mine, who was a copper at the time, was chasing a car that went through a red light into the side of a Range Rover. The driver was a well known local businessman, and he was killed outright in the collision.
The Police of course copped all the abuse for crashes like that - no one wanted to blame the 15 year old kids, high on glue or drunk, who were stealing cars and deliberately initiating chases for the thrill of it - knowing that if they were caught, the consequences would be minimal.
The upshot is that we went through a decade where police chases were bad, bad things.
The attitude of the media seems to have shifted 180 degrees in the last few years. They've woken up and realised that people get killed by these idiots even when the Police aren't chasing them. They do dumb things like race each other from the lights, and smack into other cars unfortunate enough to get in the way. They speed recklessly and smash into power poles. They get drunk and speed recklessly and smash into houses. And all the while, the Police are sitting in their stations, drinking skinny lattes and filling out paperwork. Unless they are in Five Wog - in that case, they are eating fish and chips (the fish and chips around here must be good - the Riot Squad sent a Landcruiser out this way a few weeks back for a large order of shark and spud).
Anyway, the result is that the media are now firmly on the side of Plod. Plod can crash and bang and tip their cars upside down as many times as they like, and not a peep will be heard from the media.
Which is a good thing.
If you ask me, Police chases should last only so long as it takes to do the following:
- put a shotgun round into a tyre
- put a shotgun round into the engine
- put a shotgun round into the driver
The Kiwis are coming
Helen Clarke resoundingly defeated in NZ. Leftists over there must be in the slough of despair. A nasty, right wing government will be taking over. What should they do? What should they do?
I know! They'll all flee to Australia!
Oh wait, they're already here......
I know! They'll all flee to Australia!
Oh wait, they're already here......
Saturday, 8 November 2008
This is the best time in history to have the death penalty
What?
I say again, this is the best time in history to have the death penalty.
Why?
Because death penalty decisions have never been subject to so much scrutiny and debate. Look at Indonesia - under Soharto, Amrozi and his pals would have been arrested, tried in about 1 day and shot the next. These days, the country has moved on to the point where they have trial layers galore, appeal followed by appeal, tremendous media scrutiny and possibly even a small group of human rights groupies calling for clemency. Every aspect of the case has been picked at, reviewed, pulled apart and analysed. Every decision has been reviewed, argued and reviewed again. The forensic evidence has been looked at by forensic scientist after forensic scientist.
If there was one hint that just one of the bombers was innocent, then the media, Amnesty, the legal fraternity and Sweden would be all over the case like a rash. Cases have to be absolutely and utterly watertight these days in order for someone to go from being a suspect to fronting a firing squad. There is no room for error. None!
Today, we have DNA evidence.
We have CCTV.
We have oodles of other forensic techniques. Juries have watched months and months of cop and CSI drama shows, and are thus familiar with these techniques.
We have a media that is intensely sceptical about the death penalty, if not downright against it. We have human rights groups coming out of our ears. We have battalions of lawyers that oppose the penalty, and will work death cases for free.
So if we were to re-instate the penalty today, we would be more certain than ever before that if a person is tried and convicted, then they are guilty. Many of the errors that were committed in the past could not be committed today. I am not saying that the system is fault free, but it provides enough certainty for me to feel comfortable with pulling the lever on someone found guilty of murder.
Many, many arguments have been made for why we should not put people to death for heinous crimes. I will not repeat all of them here. But one that is always made is, "what if we hang the wrong man?" It was fair enough to say that in 1950, but I don't see that argument being very powerful today.
I say again, this is the best time in history to have the death penalty.
Why?
Because death penalty decisions have never been subject to so much scrutiny and debate. Look at Indonesia - under Soharto, Amrozi and his pals would have been arrested, tried in about 1 day and shot the next. These days, the country has moved on to the point where they have trial layers galore, appeal followed by appeal, tremendous media scrutiny and possibly even a small group of human rights groupies calling for clemency. Every aspect of the case has been picked at, reviewed, pulled apart and analysed. Every decision has been reviewed, argued and reviewed again. The forensic evidence has been looked at by forensic scientist after forensic scientist.
If there was one hint that just one of the bombers was innocent, then the media, Amnesty, the legal fraternity and Sweden would be all over the case like a rash. Cases have to be absolutely and utterly watertight these days in order for someone to go from being a suspect to fronting a firing squad. There is no room for error. None!
Today, we have DNA evidence.
We have CCTV.
We have oodles of other forensic techniques. Juries have watched months and months of cop and CSI drama shows, and are thus familiar with these techniques.
We have a media that is intensely sceptical about the death penalty, if not downright against it. We have human rights groups coming out of our ears. We have battalions of lawyers that oppose the penalty, and will work death cases for free.
So if we were to re-instate the penalty today, we would be more certain than ever before that if a person is tried and convicted, then they are guilty. Many of the errors that were committed in the past could not be committed today. I am not saying that the system is fault free, but it provides enough certainty for me to feel comfortable with pulling the lever on someone found guilty of murder.
Many, many arguments have been made for why we should not put people to death for heinous crimes. I will not repeat all of them here. But one that is always made is, "what if we hang the wrong man?" It was fair enough to say that in 1950, but I don't see that argument being very powerful today.
Friday, 7 November 2008
Who will be the first in the new administration to blame the VRWC for their problems?
Anyone want to place a bet?
I reckon it will be Mrs Obomber.
The moonbats will claim that Bush has spent 8 years secretly funding the VRWC from black military programs, creating a.... well, an even vaster vast right wing conspiracy. Funds that were allocated for Iraq went "missing" and ended up in the hands of the VRWC, where it will be used to destabilise the Obomber regime.
For instance, it will be used to ensure that disreputable former terrorists are put into plum positions in the new administration, that racist, Jew-hating preachers are promoted as spiritual consultants, and that crooked and corrupt front-organisations are used as conduits to convey his message to "the streets".
All that will cost approximately 15 cents to setup.
The remaining $100 billion will be spent on beer, cigars and lap dancing to rouse the flagging spirits of the VRWC committee, as they sit out the next 4 years in their secret underground bunker, in an undisclosed location.
I reckon it will be Mrs Obomber.
The moonbats will claim that Bush has spent 8 years secretly funding the VRWC from black military programs, creating a.... well, an even vaster vast right wing conspiracy. Funds that were allocated for Iraq went "missing" and ended up in the hands of the VRWC, where it will be used to destabilise the Obomber regime.
For instance, it will be used to ensure that disreputable former terrorists are put into plum positions in the new administration, that racist, Jew-hating preachers are promoted as spiritual consultants, and that crooked and corrupt front-organisations are used as conduits to convey his message to "the streets".
All that will cost approximately 15 cents to setup.
The remaining $100 billion will be spent on beer, cigars and lap dancing to rouse the flagging spirits of the VRWC committee, as they sit out the next 4 years in their secret underground bunker, in an undisclosed location.
So long, Economist
I blogged a few weeks ago about how those sneaky swine at The Economist decided to renew my annual subscription without my say-so. I even did an on-line questionairre for them not long ago where I told them that I would not be renewing.
But they still went ahead and gouged $380 from my credit card. I got a refund about a week after I complained - of $379.99. I am thinking about demanding the return of that last cent, which will surely cost them a packet in processing fees. It's almost worth doing, just to cause them some heartache and pain.
I wonder whether they are doing this to other subscribers. The Economist has been very succesful in building its subscription base, and I'd imagine they'd be under a lot of pressure to at least hold onto those subscription numbers, or even build them further. Given how most dead tree newspapers are suffering from a decline in circulation, The Economist has done well to get the numbers up - but have they increased their numbers in an ethical, or even lawful manner? How on Earth did my sub get renewed without me approving it? Was this a one-off glitch, or a routine occurence?
Anyway, the reason for my cancellation was made clear to me this morning when I counted my pile of unread copies. I have 26 unopened Economists sitting on my desk - 6 months worth. I used to get through them every week when I caught the bus to work, but they've been piling up ever since I ditched that God-awful conveyance. Now I wonder if I'll ever manage to read them, or whether they'll go into the recycling untouched.
But they still went ahead and gouged $380 from my credit card. I got a refund about a week after I complained - of $379.99. I am thinking about demanding the return of that last cent, which will surely cost them a packet in processing fees. It's almost worth doing, just to cause them some heartache and pain.
I wonder whether they are doing this to other subscribers. The Economist has been very succesful in building its subscription base, and I'd imagine they'd be under a lot of pressure to at least hold onto those subscription numbers, or even build them further. Given how most dead tree newspapers are suffering from a decline in circulation, The Economist has done well to get the numbers up - but have they increased their numbers in an ethical, or even lawful manner? How on Earth did my sub get renewed without me approving it? Was this a one-off glitch, or a routine occurence?
Anyway, the reason for my cancellation was made clear to me this morning when I counted my pile of unread copies. I have 26 unopened Economists sitting on my desk - 6 months worth. I used to get through them every week when I caught the bus to work, but they've been piling up ever since I ditched that God-awful conveyance. Now I wonder if I'll ever manage to read them, or whether they'll go into the recycling untouched.
Palin tests her intelligence against a journalist
Moderator: "Welcome ladies and gentlemen to this test of Sarah Palin's intelligence. We will ask each candidate 5 questions, and the candidate that gets the most correct answers will be declared the most intelligent"
"Now, I will start with an esteemed print journalist, David Marr"
"David, spell cat"
Marr: "C-A-T. That's a four letter word."
"Well done. Now, what is the name of your favourite cat?"
Marr: "Fluffy".
"What is your favourite colour?"
Marr: "Blue".
"Is H2O the same as water?"
Marr: "Bottled water or tap water?"
"Either will do, David"
Marr: "I'd have to say yes. But what about sea water?"
"That's enough David, I'll ask the questions. Now, what newspaper do you regularly write for?
Marr: "The Sydney Morning Herald"
"Thankyou, you got all those answers correct. Now, Governor Palin..."
"Name the four best known species of the family Felidae"
Palin: "Lion, Tiger, Jaguar and Leopard"
"Thank you, but the proper terms are Panthera leo, Panthera tigris, Panthera Onca and Panthera pardus"
"Now, what is the term for an exagerated fear of cats, and please spell it"
Palin: "Ailurophobia. Spelt a-i-l-u-r-o-p-h-o-b-i-a"
"I'm afraid that we only accept the French way of spelling it, which is elurophobia"
"Moving on, what is the wavelength of the colour blue?"
Palin: "I believe it is around 450 nanometres"
"The correct answer is between 440nm and 490nm, so I'm afraid we can't accept your gross and misleading approximation. Next you'll be telling us that you can see blue from your house"
audience laughs
"Now, have you heard of the city of Mbandaka in the Democratic Republic of Congo?"
Palin: "Yes"
"Can you please name the father-in-law of the editor of the Mbandaka Herald?"
Palin: "That would be Lawrence Bemba".
"I'm afraid your information is way out of date and that you are living in the past. The editor divorced last week and was remarried this morning at 9am, and his new father-in-law is therefore Jean-Pierre Okongo".
"Our last question - please provide the molecular mass of 7-chloro-1-methyl-5-phenyl-1,3-dihydro-2H-1,4-benzodiazepin-2-one"
Palin: "I believe that would be 285 g/mol"
"I'm sorry, the correct answer is 284.7 g/mol. We don't allow round numbers."
Palin: "You could have told me you wanted it calculated to the first decimal point"
Marr: "The first deciminal what?"
Moderator: "Don't worry about it David, you are the clear winner with 5 correct answers. Ladies and gentlemen, I have to ask you, why would anyone want to elect someone so stupid that they couldn't even get one general knowledge question correct?"
"Now, I will start with an esteemed print journalist, David Marr"
"David, spell cat"
Marr: "C-A-T. That's a four letter word."
"Well done. Now, what is the name of your favourite cat?"
Marr: "Fluffy".
"What is your favourite colour?"
Marr: "Blue".
"Is H2O the same as water?"
Marr: "Bottled water or tap water?"
"Either will do, David"
Marr: "I'd have to say yes. But what about sea water?"
"That's enough David, I'll ask the questions. Now, what newspaper do you regularly write for?
Marr: "The Sydney Morning Herald"
"Thankyou, you got all those answers correct. Now, Governor Palin..."
"Name the four best known species of the family Felidae"
Palin: "Lion, Tiger, Jaguar and Leopard"
"Thank you, but the proper terms are Panthera leo, Panthera tigris, Panthera Onca and Panthera pardus"
"Now, what is the term for an exagerated fear of cats, and please spell it"
Palin: "Ailurophobia. Spelt a-i-l-u-r-o-p-h-o-b-i-a"
"I'm afraid that we only accept the French way of spelling it, which is elurophobia"
"Moving on, what is the wavelength of the colour blue?"
Palin: "I believe it is around 450 nanometres"
"The correct answer is between 440nm and 490nm, so I'm afraid we can't accept your gross and misleading approximation. Next you'll be telling us that you can see blue from your house"
audience laughs
"Now, have you heard of the city of Mbandaka in the Democratic Republic of Congo?"
Palin: "Yes"
"Can you please name the father-in-law of the editor of the Mbandaka Herald?"
Palin: "That would be Lawrence Bemba".
"I'm afraid your information is way out of date and that you are living in the past. The editor divorced last week and was remarried this morning at 9am, and his new father-in-law is therefore Jean-Pierre Okongo".
"Our last question - please provide the molecular mass of 7-chloro-1-methyl-5-phenyl-1,3-dihydro-2H-1,4-benzodiazepin-2-one"
Palin: "I believe that would be 285 g/mol"
"I'm sorry, the correct answer is 284.7 g/mol. We don't allow round numbers."
Palin: "You could have told me you wanted it calculated to the first decimal point"
Marr: "The first deciminal what?"
Moderator: "Don't worry about it David, you are the clear winner with 5 correct answers. Ladies and gentlemen, I have to ask you, why would anyone want to elect someone so stupid that they couldn't even get one general knowledge question correct?"
You'd have to by psycho to smoke dope
I'm afraid Miranda Devine half misses the point in her opinion column this week. I accept her main points; that admitting that you smoked dope is no longer political suicide, that smoking it often can send you nuts, and that kids are puffing less of it these days.
I guess I am part of the last generation to find dope cool. When I was growing up and going to parties as a teenager, having a toke on some completely crap weed was the ultimate thing to do - apart from getting laid, that is. Getting stoned and getting laid - now that was something that would forever enshrine a party as completely legendary.
It was cool because it was so rare. Buying beer was easy - I celebrated my 15th birthday with a pub crawl around the Perth CBD with another 15 year old mate, and although we got a few odd looks, no one ever refused us a drink. Getting on the turps was easy and relatively cheap. Booze could be bought anywhere, including just down the hill from school.
Dope on the other hand was hard to procure, expensive and risky. You could get away with drinking at school, but drugs would have you thrown out before you could say "boo". Well, you couldn't exactly get away with drinking - I got busted once, copped six of the best across the arse (yes, welts do bleed if they overlap) and learned to always sober up before setting foot on school grounds.
Dope was also reasonably rare at uni - it appeared at most parties, but not in any great quantity, and there was certainly never enough to get everyone off their face. Booze was still the drug of choice. We knew the odd person that smoked it all the time, and more than a few attempted to grow a few plants of their own (usually ending in failure). But until I was about 25, it was the only drug that I bumped into at parties.
I was never a big fan of dope. It seemed like a lot of effort to procure some from a dodgy vendor, roll a joint or pack a cone etc etc when it was so much easier to buy a keg, spear it, apply some ice and then have cold beer on tap all night. And the things it did to ones lungs.... ugh. I lived with a complete conehead for a while - although it might be more accurate to say that he gatecrashed a party and never left. He essentially dossed on our loungeroom floor for about 3 months until we booted him out. He woke up, coned up and generally stayed in that state all day. And although he offered us cones every day, I never smoked one with him in all that time, because I really didn't like the way he looked and smelled at 9 o'clock in the morning. There is something deeply offputting about trying to eat your weeties and to do the morning crossword whilst you can hear the slurping, bubbling, hacking sounds of a wastoid doing his first cone of the day in the loungeroom behind you.
This is what breakfast with the Big T would sound like:
"Scottish lake, 4 letters"
"Loch"
"Serve from bottle, 4 letters"
"Pour"
"Hack, cough, sluuuuuuurp, huuuuuuuuuuuugggggrh"
"Is the coffee ready yet?"
"Plunge it yourself"
"Tap leak, 4 letters"
"Drip"
"Hey man, you got a lighter? Mine's had the dick"
"There's a bottle of lighter refill in one of the kitchen cupboards"
"Hey, cool man. Yeah. Hey, what you doing?"
"The crossword. Same as we were doing yesterday. And the day before"
"Yeah. Hey, yeah! I remember!"
"Wooden sheds, 4 letters"
"Huts"
"Hey man, I can't find the lighter stuff"
"I said to look in the kitchen cupboards - you're in the laundry"
"Winter garment, 4 letters"
"Coat. Your turn to pour the coffee"
"Hey man, you've got bread. Do you think I could have some toast?"
"Yes, go ahead. Just remember to eat it this time. Don't leave it in the toaster for 3 days"
"Hack, cough, sluuuuuuurp, huuuuuuuuuuuugggggrh"
"Look, could you not do that in here? The smell really doesn't go with weeties"
"Sorry man. Hey, look, you filled in some boxes!"
"Sluuuuuuurp, huuuuuuuuuuuugggggrh"
It says a lot about how generally tolerant and easy going me and my friends are, because we put up with this for a few months before offloading him into a more "culturally suitable" habitat - ie, one where everyone coned up at breakfast, and no one seemed to pay any rent.
If you think drugs are cool and interesting, living with a hippy will disabuse you of that idea for life.
Many years later, I shared a house with a Canadian bloke who had a taste for listening to the Grateful Dead and another band called Fish. This was in the days before the internet, and their music was not readily obtainable in Australia. He's brought a big pack of CD's with him from north america, and they were his most prized possessions. I was intrigued, and asked if I could listen to some one day.
It was truly, truly awful. The worst music I had ever heard.
This bloke had an interesting job. He was an environmental engineer, and he split his time between cleaning up the nuclear fallout at Maralinga (in his opinion, only about 10 acres needed cleaning up) and cleaning up the Homebush toxic waste dump so that an Olympics venue could be built on top of it. He smoked a lot of dope too. He'd be straight whilst he was at work, but as soon as he got home, out came the bong. Thankfully, he was never behind on the rent, helped with the cleaning, was a reasonable cook and was also utterly hilarious - an absolute riot to live with. I only smoked with him twice in the year or so we lived together.
On the first occasion, we decided to deal with our cockroach problem. Living in Bondi Junction, we had a lot of cockroaches. Didn't matter how many baits we put down, or how many we sprayed at night with Mortein, there were always more.
We decided that they had to die by fire.
We got suitably bent, then popped across the road to buy two bottles of metho. Not to drink. We put squirty tops on them, grabbed a lighter each, and proceeded to use the metho bottles as flame throwers on every cockroach that we could see. And we saw a lot of them. I discovered that the brick wall in our backyard had many nook and crannies, each holding a nest of cockroaches, and that we could flush them out by squirting metho in each hole, standing back and then squirting fire into the pool of metho.
Why the Fire Brigade never came is something that I can't explain. We'd firebomb the wall, have another cone, and then bomb it again.
I gave up when I started seeing penguins.
That was a happy, happy night. We also listed to the Grateful Dead, and I thought they were the best band that ever toured the Earth.
Some months later, my girlfriend of the time came round, and the three of us got stuck in again (my girlfriend was much more partial to having a smoke than I was). I got so whacked, I essentially slumped down in my chair at the dining table; awake but completely paralysed. My flatmate and girlfriend retired to the loungeroom, and although I was paralysed and apparently unconcious, I could hear everything they were saying. They thought I was asleep, so they let it all hang out.
She told him she wanted to break up with me as it wasn't working out.
Ouch. And I couldn't say a word. I couldn't move a muscle. I was bent off my head, with my brain completely detached from my body.
That wasn't the bad bit.
It was not long afterwards that the 50 foot crystal glass ants turned up and started chasing me through tunnels of molten fire that turned out to be my veins.... you get the picture. I was having a really, really bad nightmare whilst awake; I couldn't move or talk; and I couldn't stop the nightmare. Through all of this, my now ex-girlfriend was telling my flatmate all the reasons why our relationship wasn't working, as I ran from the 50 foot crystal ants with 20 foot long crystal jaws that just wanted to bite me in half....
Remember the dead baby scene in Train Spotting? That had nothing on what I was going through. It was horrific beyond horrific. There was lots of other creepy stuff in there, and it went on for hours; but the ants is what I really remember. Running from those enormous ants through my own veins.
I think you can appreciate why I've never wanted to touch a bong again. I can also completely understand why people who smoke the stuff all the time might go nuts. It can be nasty, nasty stuff.
Anyway, this was supposed to be about Miranda's story, not mine. Miranda notes that youngsters these days aren't very interested in dope. That doesn't mean they are not interested in drugs - they've just moved onto ecstacy and other pills like that.
Which is another story.
I guess I am part of the last generation to find dope cool. When I was growing up and going to parties as a teenager, having a toke on some completely crap weed was the ultimate thing to do - apart from getting laid, that is. Getting stoned and getting laid - now that was something that would forever enshrine a party as completely legendary.
It was cool because it was so rare. Buying beer was easy - I celebrated my 15th birthday with a pub crawl around the Perth CBD with another 15 year old mate, and although we got a few odd looks, no one ever refused us a drink. Getting on the turps was easy and relatively cheap. Booze could be bought anywhere, including just down the hill from school.
Dope on the other hand was hard to procure, expensive and risky. You could get away with drinking at school, but drugs would have you thrown out before you could say "boo". Well, you couldn't exactly get away with drinking - I got busted once, copped six of the best across the arse (yes, welts do bleed if they overlap) and learned to always sober up before setting foot on school grounds.
Dope was also reasonably rare at uni - it appeared at most parties, but not in any great quantity, and there was certainly never enough to get everyone off their face. Booze was still the drug of choice. We knew the odd person that smoked it all the time, and more than a few attempted to grow a few plants of their own (usually ending in failure). But until I was about 25, it was the only drug that I bumped into at parties.
I was never a big fan of dope. It seemed like a lot of effort to procure some from a dodgy vendor, roll a joint or pack a cone etc etc when it was so much easier to buy a keg, spear it, apply some ice and then have cold beer on tap all night. And the things it did to ones lungs.... ugh. I lived with a complete conehead for a while - although it might be more accurate to say that he gatecrashed a party and never left. He essentially dossed on our loungeroom floor for about 3 months until we booted him out. He woke up, coned up and generally stayed in that state all day. And although he offered us cones every day, I never smoked one with him in all that time, because I really didn't like the way he looked and smelled at 9 o'clock in the morning. There is something deeply offputting about trying to eat your weeties and to do the morning crossword whilst you can hear the slurping, bubbling, hacking sounds of a wastoid doing his first cone of the day in the loungeroom behind you.
This is what breakfast with the Big T would sound like:
"Scottish lake, 4 letters"
"Loch"
"Serve from bottle, 4 letters"
"Pour"
"Hack, cough, sluuuuuuurp, huuuuuuuuuuuugggggrh"
"Is the coffee ready yet?"
"Plunge it yourself"
"Tap leak, 4 letters"
"Drip"
"Hey man, you got a lighter? Mine's had the dick"
"There's a bottle of lighter refill in one of the kitchen cupboards"
"Hey, cool man. Yeah. Hey, what you doing?"
"The crossword. Same as we were doing yesterday. And the day before"
"Yeah. Hey, yeah! I remember!"
"Wooden sheds, 4 letters"
"Huts"
"Hey man, I can't find the lighter stuff"
"I said to look in the kitchen cupboards - you're in the laundry"
"Winter garment, 4 letters"
"Coat. Your turn to pour the coffee"
"Hey man, you've got bread. Do you think I could have some toast?"
"Yes, go ahead. Just remember to eat it this time. Don't leave it in the toaster for 3 days"
"Hack, cough, sluuuuuuurp, huuuuuuuuuuuugggggrh"
"Look, could you not do that in here? The smell really doesn't go with weeties"
"Sorry man. Hey, look, you filled in some boxes!"
"Sluuuuuuurp, huuuuuuuuuuuugggggrh"
It says a lot about how generally tolerant and easy going me and my friends are, because we put up with this for a few months before offloading him into a more "culturally suitable" habitat - ie, one where everyone coned up at breakfast, and no one seemed to pay any rent.
If you think drugs are cool and interesting, living with a hippy will disabuse you of that idea for life.
Many years later, I shared a house with a Canadian bloke who had a taste for listening to the Grateful Dead and another band called Fish. This was in the days before the internet, and their music was not readily obtainable in Australia. He's brought a big pack of CD's with him from north america, and they were his most prized possessions. I was intrigued, and asked if I could listen to some one day.
It was truly, truly awful. The worst music I had ever heard.
This bloke had an interesting job. He was an environmental engineer, and he split his time between cleaning up the nuclear fallout at Maralinga (in his opinion, only about 10 acres needed cleaning up) and cleaning up the Homebush toxic waste dump so that an Olympics venue could be built on top of it. He smoked a lot of dope too. He'd be straight whilst he was at work, but as soon as he got home, out came the bong. Thankfully, he was never behind on the rent, helped with the cleaning, was a reasonable cook and was also utterly hilarious - an absolute riot to live with. I only smoked with him twice in the year or so we lived together.
On the first occasion, we decided to deal with our cockroach problem. Living in Bondi Junction, we had a lot of cockroaches. Didn't matter how many baits we put down, or how many we sprayed at night with Mortein, there were always more.
We decided that they had to die by fire.
We got suitably bent, then popped across the road to buy two bottles of metho. Not to drink. We put squirty tops on them, grabbed a lighter each, and proceeded to use the metho bottles as flame throwers on every cockroach that we could see. And we saw a lot of them. I discovered that the brick wall in our backyard had many nook and crannies, each holding a nest of cockroaches, and that we could flush them out by squirting metho in each hole, standing back and then squirting fire into the pool of metho.
Why the Fire Brigade never came is something that I can't explain. We'd firebomb the wall, have another cone, and then bomb it again.
I gave up when I started seeing penguins.
That was a happy, happy night. We also listed to the Grateful Dead, and I thought they were the best band that ever toured the Earth.
Some months later, my girlfriend of the time came round, and the three of us got stuck in again (my girlfriend was much more partial to having a smoke than I was). I got so whacked, I essentially slumped down in my chair at the dining table; awake but completely paralysed. My flatmate and girlfriend retired to the loungeroom, and although I was paralysed and apparently unconcious, I could hear everything they were saying. They thought I was asleep, so they let it all hang out.
She told him she wanted to break up with me as it wasn't working out.
Ouch. And I couldn't say a word. I couldn't move a muscle. I was bent off my head, with my brain completely detached from my body.
That wasn't the bad bit.
It was not long afterwards that the 50 foot crystal glass ants turned up and started chasing me through tunnels of molten fire that turned out to be my veins.... you get the picture. I was having a really, really bad nightmare whilst awake; I couldn't move or talk; and I couldn't stop the nightmare. Through all of this, my now ex-girlfriend was telling my flatmate all the reasons why our relationship wasn't working, as I ran from the 50 foot crystal ants with 20 foot long crystal jaws that just wanted to bite me in half....
Remember the dead baby scene in Train Spotting? That had nothing on what I was going through. It was horrific beyond horrific. There was lots of other creepy stuff in there, and it went on for hours; but the ants is what I really remember. Running from those enormous ants through my own veins.
I think you can appreciate why I've never wanted to touch a bong again. I can also completely understand why people who smoke the stuff all the time might go nuts. It can be nasty, nasty stuff.
Anyway, this was supposed to be about Miranda's story, not mine. Miranda notes that youngsters these days aren't very interested in dope. That doesn't mean they are not interested in drugs - they've just moved onto ecstacy and other pills like that.
Which is another story.
Thursday, 6 November 2008
Interesting use of statistics
I was listening to a podcast from the US tonight and it brought together some interesting statistics on immigration and poverty. It appears that what you might call the "underlying" poverty rate has been declining since 2000, but the constant arrival of new (and poor) illegal immigrants keeps topping up the number of people living in poverty.
I will use some dummy numbers to illustrate the point.
Let's say you have 10 million people living in poverty in 2000. By 2008, 5 million of them have worked their way up the income scale (the US is the land of opportunity after all), so you'd expect the poverty rate to have halved.
But it hasn't - it has stubornly remained at around 10 million.
Now your initial thought might be that just as 5 million people got a bit wealthier, maybe the evil capitalist system dumped 5 million more below the poverty line. Some greedy bastards closed some factories etc etc and put people out of work and so on, which is why we still have 10 million people living in poverty.
That's how a lefty would explain it, since it fits their world view regarding the evils of capitalism and the need for governments to provide all manner of safety nets.
Back in the real world, what's actually happened is that 5 million poor people have arrived from south of the border.
Like I said, I made up the figures to make my point, because I couldn't remember the exact numbers - but the real numbers tell the same story. The US economy has been creating enough wealth each year to drag millions out of poverty, but just as quickly as it does so, more poor people move in to fill the vaccuum.
Australia runs a very different kind of immigration program, and we have nothing like the illegal immigration problem that the US faces, but I'd be interested to see whether we have something similar going on here. Of those refugees and asylum seekers that we let in, how many quickly end up as a statistic "below the poverty line?"
One interesting factoid about the way the US calculates poverty is that it does not include any government welfare programs. Let's say the poverty line is $10,000, and you earn $8,000 from various non-government sources. Officially, you are poor. But if the government gives you another $5,000 in benefits, thus taking your total earnings to $13,000, you are still officially classed as being below the poverty line. That's what I would refer to as an interesting use of statistics.
The reason these numbers were brought up is poverty statistics are always used by people with soft heads (like ACOSS in Australia) to justify calls for ever increasing buckets of cash being thrown at "the poor", whilst also generating howls of confected outrage any time any form of tax cut is proposed.
I can now see why conservatives in the US get so angry when illegal immigration is raised as a topic. If it wasn't for illegal immigration, poverty would decline rapidly in the US. That would allow welfare programs to be cut back, and that would flow through to tax reductions. However, what's happening is that illegal immigration is ensuring that the absolute number in poverty stays the same, thus justifying the continuation of welfare programs, and allows the left to screech loudly (and build papier mache heads) every time a tax cut is floated.
The other fascinating number is that out of 47 million people in the US without health care plans, 9 million are illegal immigrants. Obama has of course promised to give all 47 million health cover, whether they are legal or not. Not even Medicare does that in Australia.
I will use some dummy numbers to illustrate the point.
Let's say you have 10 million people living in poverty in 2000. By 2008, 5 million of them have worked their way up the income scale (the US is the land of opportunity after all), so you'd expect the poverty rate to have halved.
But it hasn't - it has stubornly remained at around 10 million.
Now your initial thought might be that just as 5 million people got a bit wealthier, maybe the evil capitalist system dumped 5 million more below the poverty line. Some greedy bastards closed some factories etc etc and put people out of work and so on, which is why we still have 10 million people living in poverty.
That's how a lefty would explain it, since it fits their world view regarding the evils of capitalism and the need for governments to provide all manner of safety nets.
Back in the real world, what's actually happened is that 5 million poor people have arrived from south of the border.
Like I said, I made up the figures to make my point, because I couldn't remember the exact numbers - but the real numbers tell the same story. The US economy has been creating enough wealth each year to drag millions out of poverty, but just as quickly as it does so, more poor people move in to fill the vaccuum.
Australia runs a very different kind of immigration program, and we have nothing like the illegal immigration problem that the US faces, but I'd be interested to see whether we have something similar going on here. Of those refugees and asylum seekers that we let in, how many quickly end up as a statistic "below the poverty line?"
One interesting factoid about the way the US calculates poverty is that it does not include any government welfare programs. Let's say the poverty line is $10,000, and you earn $8,000 from various non-government sources. Officially, you are poor. But if the government gives you another $5,000 in benefits, thus taking your total earnings to $13,000, you are still officially classed as being below the poverty line. That's what I would refer to as an interesting use of statistics.
The reason these numbers were brought up is poverty statistics are always used by people with soft heads (like ACOSS in Australia) to justify calls for ever increasing buckets of cash being thrown at "the poor", whilst also generating howls of confected outrage any time any form of tax cut is proposed.
I can now see why conservatives in the US get so angry when illegal immigration is raised as a topic. If it wasn't for illegal immigration, poverty would decline rapidly in the US. That would allow welfare programs to be cut back, and that would flow through to tax reductions. However, what's happening is that illegal immigration is ensuring that the absolute number in poverty stays the same, thus justifying the continuation of welfare programs, and allows the left to screech loudly (and build papier mache heads) every time a tax cut is floated.
The other fascinating number is that out of 47 million people in the US without health care plans, 9 million are illegal immigrants. Obama has of course promised to give all 47 million health cover, whether they are legal or not. Not even Medicare does that in Australia.
More on Callan Park
If I ruled the world, I'd levy a special super-tax on ignorant bastards like the owner of this house near Callan Park. Not that I am generally in favour of higher taxes, but there are times when I feel that stupid people should be made to pay the price for their stupid ideas.
The aim of my super tax would be to grab all the additional capital value created by not developing Callan Park. Here's my maths.
Let's say this dump was worth $1 million a few weeks ago. Then the decision was made to not give the land to Sydney Uni, and let's say this house suddenly shot up in value to $1.2 million because of that. My super-tax would take that additional $200k, because the increase in value has nothing to do with a rising property market or improvements to this house - it's due to a policy decision by government. If people can be compensated when government decisions reduce the value of their property, then they can be un-compensated when government decisions deliver windfall capital gains to them.
I wonder if these people would be so pushy in regard to sites like Callan Park if they realised up front that they weren't going to make a cent out of it, regardless of the outcome.
In short, that would fuck 'em.
By the way, such a tax would raise a lot of money, for there are a lot of signs like this scattered around Callan Park.
The aim of my super tax would be to grab all the additional capital value created by not developing Callan Park. Here's my maths.
Let's say this dump was worth $1 million a few weeks ago. Then the decision was made to not give the land to Sydney Uni, and let's say this house suddenly shot up in value to $1.2 million because of that. My super-tax would take that additional $200k, because the increase in value has nothing to do with a rising property market or improvements to this house - it's due to a policy decision by government. If people can be compensated when government decisions reduce the value of their property, then they can be un-compensated when government decisions deliver windfall capital gains to them.
I wonder if these people would be so pushy in regard to sites like Callan Park if they realised up front that they weren't going to make a cent out of it, regardless of the outcome.
In short, that would fuck 'em.
By the way, such a tax would raise a lot of money, for there are a lot of signs like this scattered around Callan Park.
Wednesday, 5 November 2008
Pain
No riding for the rest of this week. I came back from a weekend in the country with what I thought was a dose of hayever, went for a ride on Monday and discovered that it was the start of the flu. Have spent the last 24 hours in bed, coughing up green slime and alternatively shivering and sweating. Every joint hurts. Every muscle aches. Typing this is really hard. Even my skin hurts, and when I breathe, it burns right down to my diaphram. I'm now also siezing up from loafing in bed for an extended period.
So when people say, "What do you think about the election?", my response is, "What election?" The most important thing to me over the last day has been the distance from my nose to the closest tissue box.
And somehow, in a wierd way, that makes the pain of the free world being ruled by a dusky Hugo Chavez fade away.
So when people say, "What do you think about the election?", my response is, "What election?" The most important thing to me over the last day has been the distance from my nose to the closest tissue box.
And somehow, in a wierd way, that makes the pain of the free world being ruled by a dusky Hugo Chavez fade away.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
The Greens are mad
Two articles from the SMH today really help to reinforce the point that many Greens are completely mad. Bonkers. Stark raving crackers.
The first is to do with Callan Park, which ironically used to be a loonie bin. I go through or around Callan Park every week or so as part of one of my bike rides, and the only changes that I see each time are the new signs erected by "groups of concerned locals" who are attempting to extort money from either the state or federal government for their pet project. The whole place is running down - the site is covered in old buildings that range from quite attractive to "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" hideous, and it won't be long before most of them are reduced to a shell surrounded by broken glass from having every window smashed. If anyone ever wants to do a remake of Full Metal Jacket, they'll be able to use this site as a set for the second act - the Battle for Hue.
The state government is currently strapped for cash. It's in such dire straits, it's slashing school subsidies - something that only the desperate would contemplate. It's laughable that in this fiscal environment, the Greens dominated local council would demand tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to "greenie-ise" the site. The state government had agreed to give the site to Sydney Uni, which had the money to pay for a cleanup, but the locals didn't want an "evil" institution of learning taking over the site and filling it with people. In their minds, it was more important to fill the site with trees instead of students. So the uni pulled out, away went the money, and now the Greens are demanding that someone else pay for their vision.
The council is now estimating that maintaining the park could eat up 20% of their annual revenue. To that, I say, "so what?" You have a few choices to make. You can use part or all of the park to generate some income and make it self funding (but that would involve evil capitalist processes). They could jack up their rates by 20% (assuming the state government let them), but that would "hurt the poor".
Welcome to the world of making difficult choices, my lunatic Green compadres. Resources are limited. Choices have to be made. Making choices will make some people unhappy. You can't promise everything to everyone and make everyone happy 100% of the time. Get used to it. These idiots don't seem to realise that they money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is our pockets. It doesn't matter how the money is raised - whether it comes via the GST, stamp duty on house sales, land tax, car registration fees, petrol excise, payroll taxes or council rates - in the end, it all comes down to extracting money from my wallet. The Greens seem to think that if the state government pays for it rather than local government, somehow "they" don't have to pay for it. And we all know that whilst local government finances are fixed and limited, state and federal governments can create money out of thin air (ha ha ha).
The other story relates to "affordable housing". Under this madcap scheme, councils could force developers to hand over a portion of the units in any new development. To the Greens, this must seem like free money. Everyone knows that every developer is an evil Jewish billionaire who drives a Rolls Royce, so taking a few units from them won't send them broke.
The argument advanced by the Greens is that the people that perform valuable public jobs can't afford to live near the inner city, so social housing is required for nurses, police officers, ambo's and teachers.
How nice. Think of the nurses.
However, I doubt reality will bear any resemblance to the rhetoric. Once the Greens get their hands on the sort of patronage that social housing represents, they'll stuff it with their clients - who will of course vote for them in perpetuity out of gratitude. I bet that not a single copper or ambo or fireman will get a look-in at this social housing, because those people have jobs. They work for a living. They do something useful. Instead, social housing will be full of social workers, student activitists, counsellors, artists, single mothers, drug addicts and other assorted rif-raf.
In country areas, it is quite normal for government departments to provide housing for their staff. Stationmasters used to get a house near the railway station. Police lived in police housing next to the Police station. Teachers are also provided with housing. The departments do this because staff are usually not assigned to a place for more than a few years, so it isn't worth it for the staff to buy a house and settle into an area. The housing market in many country areas is also highly illiquid, so if they did buy, they might not be able to sell. It's also an inducement, since they can't pay higher salaries - the free rent doesn't show up in the final salary calculation, but saving a few hundred bucks a week on rent can add up over a posting of a few years.
If these same agencies are having trouble finding staff in the inner city areas, why not do the same and build or buy housing for their staff? They can go into the open market and pick up the sort of housing that they think is appropriate - and there is absolutely no need to steal any from a developer.
The first is to do with Callan Park, which ironically used to be a loonie bin. I go through or around Callan Park every week or so as part of one of my bike rides, and the only changes that I see each time are the new signs erected by "groups of concerned locals" who are attempting to extort money from either the state or federal government for their pet project. The whole place is running down - the site is covered in old buildings that range from quite attractive to "One flew over the cuckoo's nest" hideous, and it won't be long before most of them are reduced to a shell surrounded by broken glass from having every window smashed. If anyone ever wants to do a remake of Full Metal Jacket, they'll be able to use this site as a set for the second act - the Battle for Hue.
The state government is currently strapped for cash. It's in such dire straits, it's slashing school subsidies - something that only the desperate would contemplate. It's laughable that in this fiscal environment, the Greens dominated local council would demand tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to "greenie-ise" the site. The state government had agreed to give the site to Sydney Uni, which had the money to pay for a cleanup, but the locals didn't want an "evil" institution of learning taking over the site and filling it with people. In their minds, it was more important to fill the site with trees instead of students. So the uni pulled out, away went the money, and now the Greens are demanding that someone else pay for their vision.
The council is now estimating that maintaining the park could eat up 20% of their annual revenue. To that, I say, "so what?" You have a few choices to make. You can use part or all of the park to generate some income and make it self funding (but that would involve evil capitalist processes). They could jack up their rates by 20% (assuming the state government let them), but that would "hurt the poor".
Welcome to the world of making difficult choices, my lunatic Green compadres. Resources are limited. Choices have to be made. Making choices will make some people unhappy. You can't promise everything to everyone and make everyone happy 100% of the time. Get used to it. These idiots don't seem to realise that they money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is our pockets. It doesn't matter how the money is raised - whether it comes via the GST, stamp duty on house sales, land tax, car registration fees, petrol excise, payroll taxes or council rates - in the end, it all comes down to extracting money from my wallet. The Greens seem to think that if the state government pays for it rather than local government, somehow "they" don't have to pay for it. And we all know that whilst local government finances are fixed and limited, state and federal governments can create money out of thin air (ha ha ha).
The other story relates to "affordable housing". Under this madcap scheme, councils could force developers to hand over a portion of the units in any new development. To the Greens, this must seem like free money. Everyone knows that every developer is an evil Jewish billionaire who drives a Rolls Royce, so taking a few units from them won't send them broke.
The argument advanced by the Greens is that the people that perform valuable public jobs can't afford to live near the inner city, so social housing is required for nurses, police officers, ambo's and teachers.
How nice. Think of the nurses.
However, I doubt reality will bear any resemblance to the rhetoric. Once the Greens get their hands on the sort of patronage that social housing represents, they'll stuff it with their clients - who will of course vote for them in perpetuity out of gratitude. I bet that not a single copper or ambo or fireman will get a look-in at this social housing, because those people have jobs. They work for a living. They do something useful. Instead, social housing will be full of social workers, student activitists, counsellors, artists, single mothers, drug addicts and other assorted rif-raf.
In country areas, it is quite normal for government departments to provide housing for their staff. Stationmasters used to get a house near the railway station. Police lived in police housing next to the Police station. Teachers are also provided with housing. The departments do this because staff are usually not assigned to a place for more than a few years, so it isn't worth it for the staff to buy a house and settle into an area. The housing market in many country areas is also highly illiquid, so if they did buy, they might not be able to sell. It's also an inducement, since they can't pay higher salaries - the free rent doesn't show up in the final salary calculation, but saving a few hundred bucks a week on rent can add up over a posting of a few years.
If these same agencies are having trouble finding staff in the inner city areas, why not do the same and build or buy housing for their staff? They can go into the open market and pick up the sort of housing that they think is appropriate - and there is absolutely no need to steal any from a developer.
The profitability of moral panic
The first episode of The Hollowmen was an absolute cracker, based on a childhood obesity scare - war had to be declared on this new menace to our society. In the end, combating fat kids came down to a marketing campaign, which is always great news for local media. I am starting to believe that the only thing underpinning the share price of our local media companies is the market for moral panic.
I spent a few months working for the marketing manager of a government agency. This bloke was quite despondent, because his job largely involved approving designs for posters, and at that time, not many posters were being produced. His budget was minimal. His creative juices were not being taxed. He used to walk into management meetings with the latest copy of some marketing magazine or another and point to a league table of advertising expenditure, and lament the fact that our agency was not up there in the top 10 big spenders on advertising.
He was miserable because he was not being given a chance to blow our money on TV advertising. He got to place the odd ad in the print media, but for marketing people, you aren't anybody until you've had some ads on TV. When these marketing types do the cocktail circuit, the big swinging dicks are those that have the grooviest, most repeated and most expensive ad campaigns on TV. No, scratch that. The ads don't even have to be groovy. The whole campaign just has to cost a lot, regardless of how good or useful it is. Government marketing managers are insanely jealous of other marketing managers that get to buy a lot of airtime, and they lust after the day when they can ring up an advertising agency and announce that they have $10 million to spend on a campaign. It's what they live for.
I remember this clown so well because I was working on a project that also required posters, and we had our own budget for producing them, and we had our own ideas about how they should look and where they should go. As far as we were concerned, they were nothing to do with him, but so desperate was he for some more money to spend, he tried to commandeer our project. You know things have reached a low ebb in the public sector when managers in grey cardigans are fighting over scraps of money like dogs over a bone. We won, but it so poisoned the atmosphere that when the project finished, I had to move on because this guy was absolutely out to destroy my career, and that of those I had worked with. The other guys all split as well, knowing full well he was out for revenge.
Some years down the track, he got his wish and went on to spend millions on TV ads. They were quite controversial, and it was not long before the whole campaign was scrapped, and that agency has hardly run a TV campaign since. I think they were so traumatised by the whole affair that they decided never to stick their heads above the parapet ever again.
But that is not the case with lots of other agencies, especially those in the field of health and public safety. They can spend like drunken sailors without anyone ever saying a harsh word, because they are doing it "for the children". How can you object to a TV commercial that is designed to save lives?
Well, I can certainly object to it. What would you prefer - that the RTA spent $10 million on a TV campaign, or $10 million on asphalt and concrete that improved our roads and made them safer? I'd rather see the money spent on filling in pot holes, rather than filling in time slots around the 6pm news.
The problem with these marketing types is that if you go to them with an issue, their solution is an advertising campaign. If you told them that our biggest problem was spending too much money on TV commercials, they'd commission a commercial that warned government marketing managers about spending more money on commercials! They're mad.
They have it in their heads that it is more important to shape our perceptions than to try to alter our reality. For instance, if our hospital emergency departments are having trouble coping, they'd come up with a warm and fluffy ad showing nurses and doctors in soft focus trying desperately to save kids that have drowned in a swimming pool or been hit by a car, rather than spending more on actually enlarging the departments or providing more beds or doctors or machines that go "ping".
I form my opinions of government agencies from direct contact with them. I have never had contact with ASIO for instance, so my opinion of them is neutral. I don't think about them as being good or useless, because I've never dealt with them. They're like a restaurant - a critic might write a good or bad review about a place, but in the end, the thing that counts is what the experience was like for you. A good review of a bad restaurant is unlikely to encourage you to tell your friends that the place is great. If they ask what it was like, you won't read a review to them from the newspaper - you'll tell them how you were treated.
Which is why I personally think most public hospitals are crap 90% of the time, and that our state schools are in dire straights. I've had direct experience of both as a customer. The Teacher's union wants us to believe that state schools are great. I don't know what planet the teachers are on, but it's not Earth. Putting up warm and fuzzy signs on the fences of state schools with statements like "Public education - growing our community" does nothing to counter the many bad experiences that I have had dealing with teachers as a parent. Do they really think that a slick marketing campaign will change my mind about their useless behaviour?
But I should stick to the topic, which is moral panic.
Moral panic is good for business - if you happen to work in the area of selling advertising. The media is very good at manufacturing moral panic, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that it is now a major topic at editorial conferences each week. If advertising sales are flagging, the best way to boost them is to scare the government into throwing money at a problem.
Next time you see any sort of government sponsored ad on a billboard or on radio or on TV, just consider this - it's only there because a Minister crapped their pants, and the campaign is only designed to cover up the smell of poo in their undies.
I spent a few months working for the marketing manager of a government agency. This bloke was quite despondent, because his job largely involved approving designs for posters, and at that time, not many posters were being produced. His budget was minimal. His creative juices were not being taxed. He used to walk into management meetings with the latest copy of some marketing magazine or another and point to a league table of advertising expenditure, and lament the fact that our agency was not up there in the top 10 big spenders on advertising.
He was miserable because he was not being given a chance to blow our money on TV advertising. He got to place the odd ad in the print media, but for marketing people, you aren't anybody until you've had some ads on TV. When these marketing types do the cocktail circuit, the big swinging dicks are those that have the grooviest, most repeated and most expensive ad campaigns on TV. No, scratch that. The ads don't even have to be groovy. The whole campaign just has to cost a lot, regardless of how good or useful it is. Government marketing managers are insanely jealous of other marketing managers that get to buy a lot of airtime, and they lust after the day when they can ring up an advertising agency and announce that they have $10 million to spend on a campaign. It's what they live for.
I remember this clown so well because I was working on a project that also required posters, and we had our own budget for producing them, and we had our own ideas about how they should look and where they should go. As far as we were concerned, they were nothing to do with him, but so desperate was he for some more money to spend, he tried to commandeer our project. You know things have reached a low ebb in the public sector when managers in grey cardigans are fighting over scraps of money like dogs over a bone. We won, but it so poisoned the atmosphere that when the project finished, I had to move on because this guy was absolutely out to destroy my career, and that of those I had worked with. The other guys all split as well, knowing full well he was out for revenge.
Some years down the track, he got his wish and went on to spend millions on TV ads. They were quite controversial, and it was not long before the whole campaign was scrapped, and that agency has hardly run a TV campaign since. I think they were so traumatised by the whole affair that they decided never to stick their heads above the parapet ever again.
But that is not the case with lots of other agencies, especially those in the field of health and public safety. They can spend like drunken sailors without anyone ever saying a harsh word, because they are doing it "for the children". How can you object to a TV commercial that is designed to save lives?
Well, I can certainly object to it. What would you prefer - that the RTA spent $10 million on a TV campaign, or $10 million on asphalt and concrete that improved our roads and made them safer? I'd rather see the money spent on filling in pot holes, rather than filling in time slots around the 6pm news.
The problem with these marketing types is that if you go to them with an issue, their solution is an advertising campaign. If you told them that our biggest problem was spending too much money on TV commercials, they'd commission a commercial that warned government marketing managers about spending more money on commercials! They're mad.
They have it in their heads that it is more important to shape our perceptions than to try to alter our reality. For instance, if our hospital emergency departments are having trouble coping, they'd come up with a warm and fluffy ad showing nurses and doctors in soft focus trying desperately to save kids that have drowned in a swimming pool or been hit by a car, rather than spending more on actually enlarging the departments or providing more beds or doctors or machines that go "ping".
I form my opinions of government agencies from direct contact with them. I have never had contact with ASIO for instance, so my opinion of them is neutral. I don't think about them as being good or useless, because I've never dealt with them. They're like a restaurant - a critic might write a good or bad review about a place, but in the end, the thing that counts is what the experience was like for you. A good review of a bad restaurant is unlikely to encourage you to tell your friends that the place is great. If they ask what it was like, you won't read a review to them from the newspaper - you'll tell them how you were treated.
Which is why I personally think most public hospitals are crap 90% of the time, and that our state schools are in dire straights. I've had direct experience of both as a customer. The Teacher's union wants us to believe that state schools are great. I don't know what planet the teachers are on, but it's not Earth. Putting up warm and fuzzy signs on the fences of state schools with statements like "Public education - growing our community" does nothing to counter the many bad experiences that I have had dealing with teachers as a parent. Do they really think that a slick marketing campaign will change my mind about their useless behaviour?
But I should stick to the topic, which is moral panic.
Moral panic is good for business - if you happen to work in the area of selling advertising. The media is very good at manufacturing moral panic, and it wouldn't surprise me to find that it is now a major topic at editorial conferences each week. If advertising sales are flagging, the best way to boost them is to scare the government into throwing money at a problem.
Next time you see any sort of government sponsored ad on a billboard or on radio or on TV, just consider this - it's only there because a Minister crapped their pants, and the campaign is only designed to cover up the smell of poo in their undies.
And I thought I had lived with some grubs
I love reading police blogs. No matter how bad the things I have done in the past, I am a tame pussy compared to the scum of the earth.
Monday, 3 November 2008
A fraudulent iced coffee
One thing us expatriate sand gropers will never get used to is the god-awful muck served up as "iced coffee" east of Eucla. I have travelled far and wide in this wide brown land, and many of my travels have been sustained by the magic of the coffee bean - but I prefer to ingest it in chilled form, for this is indeed a hot, wide brown land, and whilst a piping hot coffee might make sense to someone driving a rig across an ice road in Alaska, it's a silly flipping thing to be drinking when the sun is hot enough to fry turtles before they can cross from one side of the road to the other.
I have found that this is a position also sympathetic to Territorians and those that stuff murder victims into oil drums. When it's hot, the sickly sweetness of Coke just doesn't do it for you after the second or third mouthful - but an icy cold, strong iced coffee is as refreshing and palate cleaning as it gets.
When at home, I am a creature of habit, preferring to dine at the same place day after day, eating the same meal if need be for weeks on end. But when I hit the road, I put on my adventuresome head, and poke my nose into all sorts of weird establishments in search of perfection - or at least something edible and drinkable. I am yet to find a place that serves the magical combination of a perfect iced coffee together with the perfect vanilla slice, but I will not stop looking for it until my final breath.
Last weekend's jaunt took me far from Sydney - I think we ended up spending around 15 hours on the road - and a trip like that usually provides several opportunities to sample the local produce. I normally do my own ordering, simply because I have found that given the chance between doing something right and fucking it up, most people will choose the second option. I like to place my order, repeat it and then ask for it to be read back. That doesn't eliminate the second option entirely, but it does have a material impact on how often the second option is selected.
In this instance, I had to forego ordering and delegated the task to J. I had my hands full with a Monkey smearing a chocolate covered donut all over his face, so J shouldered the burden of facing the fuckup factory on my behalf.
I think we were lulled into a false sense of security by the curly chairs, the hand-lettered menu, the funky decor and the air of quite industry that the place had about it. You see, last time we were in this particular town, they hadn't heard of coffee. I don't think they'd heard of electricity either, and some of the locals certainly hadn't made an acquaintance with a dentist or a shower in a long, long time. The appearance of this cafe, with its purple lettering and the staff with rings through their noses showed that civilisation had at last reached this corner of our wide, brown land, and with it, perhaps an appreciation of the art of making an iced coffee.
Boy, was I deluded. That veneer of civilisation was no more real than the set of a ghost town in your average 1950's Hollywood cowboy movie. I was so taken aback at what we were served, I had to take a photo of it. Instead of putting a shot of freshly extracted espresso into a glass, and the topping it with cold milk and ice cubes, they poured some horrible coffee syrup into a glass and topped it with cold milk. No ice. No coffee. About 90 teaspoons of sugar.
SO HOW WAS THAT A FUCKING ICED COFFEE????!!!!!!!
I was so entranced by the coffee syrup that sat in the bottom of the glass that I photographed it as I drew a straw through it - it wasn't even mixed in properly. There was at least half an inch of pale, unmixed syrup sitting in the bottom of the glass. It had the consistency of warm snot.
The only upside of this little debacle is that we discovered that the Monkey liked it. Don't ask how a three year old managed to get his hands on a tall glass of "iced coffee". The thought of a caffeine-crazed 3 year old in the back of a car for 5 hours would send most parents around the bend, but we were safe, because the coffee syrup appeared to not contain any actual coffee, or caffeine. It was just sweet, brown, cool milk. With thick pale snot in the bottom. Utterly disgusting to me, but completely fascinating to the Monkey. Other parents might recognise a phrase like, "I drinking ice coffee", followed by a large dribble of brown milk down the chin as he tried to talk and drink through a straw at the same time.
When I went inside to pay the bill, I noticed two signs.
One stated that they were desperate for a barista.
The other stated that they needed a cook.
Given how utterly crap the coffee was, I'm just glad we didn't eat there.
I have found that this is a position also sympathetic to Territorians and those that stuff murder victims into oil drums. When it's hot, the sickly sweetness of Coke just doesn't do it for you after the second or third mouthful - but an icy cold, strong iced coffee is as refreshing and palate cleaning as it gets.
When at home, I am a creature of habit, preferring to dine at the same place day after day, eating the same meal if need be for weeks on end. But when I hit the road, I put on my adventuresome head, and poke my nose into all sorts of weird establishments in search of perfection - or at least something edible and drinkable. I am yet to find a place that serves the magical combination of a perfect iced coffee together with the perfect vanilla slice, but I will not stop looking for it until my final breath.
Last weekend's jaunt took me far from Sydney - I think we ended up spending around 15 hours on the road - and a trip like that usually provides several opportunities to sample the local produce. I normally do my own ordering, simply because I have found that given the chance between doing something right and fucking it up, most people will choose the second option. I like to place my order, repeat it and then ask for it to be read back. That doesn't eliminate the second option entirely, but it does have a material impact on how often the second option is selected.
In this instance, I had to forego ordering and delegated the task to J. I had my hands full with a Monkey smearing a chocolate covered donut all over his face, so J shouldered the burden of facing the fuckup factory on my behalf.
I think we were lulled into a false sense of security by the curly chairs, the hand-lettered menu, the funky decor and the air of quite industry that the place had about it. You see, last time we were in this particular town, they hadn't heard of coffee. I don't think they'd heard of electricity either, and some of the locals certainly hadn't made an acquaintance with a dentist or a shower in a long, long time. The appearance of this cafe, with its purple lettering and the staff with rings through their noses showed that civilisation had at last reached this corner of our wide, brown land, and with it, perhaps an appreciation of the art of making an iced coffee.
Boy, was I deluded. That veneer of civilisation was no more real than the set of a ghost town in your average 1950's Hollywood cowboy movie. I was so taken aback at what we were served, I had to take a photo of it. Instead of putting a shot of freshly extracted espresso into a glass, and the topping it with cold milk and ice cubes, they poured some horrible coffee syrup into a glass and topped it with cold milk. No ice. No coffee. About 90 teaspoons of sugar.
SO HOW WAS THAT A FUCKING ICED COFFEE????!!!!!!!
I was so entranced by the coffee syrup that sat in the bottom of the glass that I photographed it as I drew a straw through it - it wasn't even mixed in properly. There was at least half an inch of pale, unmixed syrup sitting in the bottom of the glass. It had the consistency of warm snot.
The only upside of this little debacle is that we discovered that the Monkey liked it. Don't ask how a three year old managed to get his hands on a tall glass of "iced coffee". The thought of a caffeine-crazed 3 year old in the back of a car for 5 hours would send most parents around the bend, but we were safe, because the coffee syrup appeared to not contain any actual coffee, or caffeine. It was just sweet, brown, cool milk. With thick pale snot in the bottom. Utterly disgusting to me, but completely fascinating to the Monkey. Other parents might recognise a phrase like, "I drinking ice coffee", followed by a large dribble of brown milk down the chin as he tried to talk and drink through a straw at the same time.
When I went inside to pay the bill, I noticed two signs.
One stated that they were desperate for a barista.
The other stated that they needed a cook.
Given how utterly crap the coffee was, I'm just glad we didn't eat there.
Why the media are deaf to Rudd's blabbing
Andrew Bolt has been jumping up and down recently about Rudd leaking like a sieve after his chats with foreign leaders - particularly GWB. The question that keeps getting asked is this: "Why is the media not all over this like a rash?"
One commenter even made mention of the "cone of silence" that seems to have descended onto this issue.
It's not a cone of silence - it's a cone of ignorance.
I spoke to my own version of "Jack the Insider" - a man who spent 20 years in the guts of the federal government; a man who had daily contact with the press corps (a few of you will know who I am talking about). His view was simple - the press gallery might spend most of their life in Canberra reporting on politics, but they actually have no idea of how our parliament and government and public sector actually function. None. No idea whatsover. Someone like Laurie Oakes can spend 20 or 30 years dining with federal MPs and still be utterly ignorant of what an MP does.
They think they know, simply because they've been hanging around the place for so long, but that's like the hospital janitor who thinks he knows how to conduct brain surgery because he's been mopping the corridors outside the operating theatres for 20 years. The janitor might have a superficial view of what is going on, and they might have picked up some of the lingo, but they are still stunningly ignorant. Even the theatre nurses that work beside the surgeons might understand a lot of what is going on, but I still wouldn't trust one of them to pick up a scalpel to finish an operation if the surgeon got the shakes.
Watching what is going on - or to be more accurate, watching a small part of what is going on - does not in itself impart knowledge, wisdom or experience. Remember what it was like the first time you got to drive a car? You'd been watching mum and dad do it for years, seen lots of driving in movies and so on - but how many people still ended that first drive soaked in sweat, having bunny hopped up and down the street every time the clutch was released?
According to my insider, journalists actually get to see only a very small part of what really goes on - but they think they are privy to it all. That's the kicker - they really don't understand how small a fraction of government that they get to see.
So when this Rudd blabbing scandal blows up, it fails to blow up because the great majority of the media just don't get how serious it is. Their limited understanding of government and politics and convention fails to equip them with the knowledge to see this story for what it is.
Let me give you a military example. Let's say I walked onto a base with a reporter and saw troops walking past a certain officer and failing to salute, whilst saluting every other officer in sight. That would set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, but a reporter with no military experience would fail to pick it up. They might have been to lots of Defence Department briefings and a few photo-ops with the Minister, and thus think that they have a complete understanding of how the military operates, but in reality, they are more ignorant of things military than the deepest backwoods country bumpkin is of opera.
So the Rudd blab-fest fails to raise the hackles of most Canberra hacks because they really have no understanding of the theatrical production in front of them. To go back to the analogy of going to the opera - I have been to the occasional opera. The sets look nice, the costumes are fancy, the singing is great and the music can be moving - but they are singing in a foreign language, and if I have not bothered to read the synopsis, or if the sur-titles are not working, then I really don't have a fucking clue as to what is going on. I might enjoy the spectacle, but the deeper meaning of the whole thing is completely lost on me.
That, unfortunately, is how most of our press gallery operates. They don't get a copy of the script, they're not trained as opera singers, they've never performed on stage themselves and the whole thing is undertaken in a language they don't understand.
One commenter even made mention of the "cone of silence" that seems to have descended onto this issue.
It's not a cone of silence - it's a cone of ignorance.
I spoke to my own version of "Jack the Insider" - a man who spent 20 years in the guts of the federal government; a man who had daily contact with the press corps (a few of you will know who I am talking about). His view was simple - the press gallery might spend most of their life in Canberra reporting on politics, but they actually have no idea of how our parliament and government and public sector actually function. None. No idea whatsover. Someone like Laurie Oakes can spend 20 or 30 years dining with federal MPs and still be utterly ignorant of what an MP does.
They think they know, simply because they've been hanging around the place for so long, but that's like the hospital janitor who thinks he knows how to conduct brain surgery because he's been mopping the corridors outside the operating theatres for 20 years. The janitor might have a superficial view of what is going on, and they might have picked up some of the lingo, but they are still stunningly ignorant. Even the theatre nurses that work beside the surgeons might understand a lot of what is going on, but I still wouldn't trust one of them to pick up a scalpel to finish an operation if the surgeon got the shakes.
Watching what is going on - or to be more accurate, watching a small part of what is going on - does not in itself impart knowledge, wisdom or experience. Remember what it was like the first time you got to drive a car? You'd been watching mum and dad do it for years, seen lots of driving in movies and so on - but how many people still ended that first drive soaked in sweat, having bunny hopped up and down the street every time the clutch was released?
According to my insider, journalists actually get to see only a very small part of what really goes on - but they think they are privy to it all. That's the kicker - they really don't understand how small a fraction of government that they get to see.
So when this Rudd blabbing scandal blows up, it fails to blow up because the great majority of the media just don't get how serious it is. Their limited understanding of government and politics and convention fails to equip them with the knowledge to see this story for what it is.
Let me give you a military example. Let's say I walked onto a base with a reporter and saw troops walking past a certain officer and failing to salute, whilst saluting every other officer in sight. That would set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, but a reporter with no military experience would fail to pick it up. They might have been to lots of Defence Department briefings and a few photo-ops with the Minister, and thus think that they have a complete understanding of how the military operates, but in reality, they are more ignorant of things military than the deepest backwoods country bumpkin is of opera.
So the Rudd blab-fest fails to raise the hackles of most Canberra hacks because they really have no understanding of the theatrical production in front of them. To go back to the analogy of going to the opera - I have been to the occasional opera. The sets look nice, the costumes are fancy, the singing is great and the music can be moving - but they are singing in a foreign language, and if I have not bothered to read the synopsis, or if the sur-titles are not working, then I really don't have a fucking clue as to what is going on. I might enjoy the spectacle, but the deeper meaning of the whole thing is completely lost on me.
That, unfortunately, is how most of our press gallery operates. They don't get a copy of the script, they're not trained as opera singers, they've never performed on stage themselves and the whole thing is undertaken in a language they don't understand.
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