Random raves

Stupid Socialist Alliance assertion du jour (at least according to a banner I saw of theirs today): apparently capitalism is responsible for all the nasty ills of the world, such as wars, racism, pollution and something else I've forgotten now. Now, I'm not pretending that capitalism is not a very effective way of delivering various kinds of oppression, including the economic kind, but wow, I totally had no idea of the utopia embodied in absolute monarchy, feudalism, dictatorships (of the right and left kind) or even the good old days of tribes and their chieftains fighting over neighbouring hills.

There's nothing wrong with pointing plenty of fingers at capitalism, but correlation does not equal causation.

In other news, the new Connie Willis book, Blackout, has arrived in Oz, and what a disappointment. This review on Amazon summarises exactly how irritating it is. Such a shame. Anyway, I'm not bothering to go back for Part 2 - the whole "miscommunication" trope was wearing on me a bit in To Say Nothing of the Dog, but this book tipped it way over. It's also EXTREMELY irksome that there is no mention of the fact that the book - nearly 500 pages - is part one of two, until you get to the end and find a very subtle (not) advertising blurb to buy the next. No thanks.

And cocktail invention of the month:

In a cocktail shaker lid, lightly crush two cloves. At 1-2 Tbl of overproof rum and heat over a tealight until bubbles start to form. Flame the rum, allow to burn for a few seconds and extinguish by covering the lid (with the bottom of the shaker, a glass, whatever). Strain the rum over ice in a short glass. Pour over a shot of light rum (decent quality, plz), 1/2 a shot Grand Marnier and a shot of orange juice. Top up with pineappe juice and stir. To be classy, make a twist of orange peel, flame it and use it to garnish the drink.

Nom nom!

This cracked my shit up on the weekend; it's on the wall of the Lyneham post office-cum-laundrette. It was particularly apposite given the fact I'd seen it (the uncommented emblem only) tattoo'd on the back of a young woman's neck, in size LARGE, the day before.

Apropos of an article in the SMH today on Julia Gillard, the deputy PM:


Thank you, Mr Peter Hartcher, for assuring us that the inequity of women's representation in politics (67 out of 226 in the Australian Parliament), is nothing to do with their gender. That's wonderful, and I'm glad it's all just warm fuzzies all round.

Although at least he's saying nice things about Ms Gillard. She is pretty groovy.

(Women are slowly catching up in the public service too, in a similar proportion to parliamentary representation - 35% of the Senior Executive Service in 2007, although only three Commonwealth department heads I can track down. But forget about business: 12% in exec roles in the top 200 ASX companies)

Meh, I've done very little of the work I intended to this weekend. I did some reading, set up a couple of wikis, and helped one of my fellow students with a piece of software. I have to write an essay outline, which is assessable, and I'm having very little inspiration at the moment. The topic I've chosen relates to power in organisations, and can also encompass "empowerment". While I'm very tempted to go on a rant about how empowerment is very often used as a cheap "stroking" technique used to make workers feel engaged in their work, or, equally bad, ends up throwing a bunch of additional requirements onto people without their having the skills and resources to adequately discharge them, unfortunately, the essay question doesn't have quite that latitude (although I'll allude to some of that).

When it comes to power in the workplace, I'm all in favour of workers owning as much of it as they can (and by "workers", I include such non-typical categories as non-executive management). There are two issues with it, though, in terms of the areas where more self-management is devolved to workers. One is that many people are not enculturated to want it (or, they're psychologically averse to it, for whatever reasons), unless they specifically want to get into management. "Too much responsibility." "Why should I do my manager's job?" "It makes me feel insecure." "Who gets the blame when something goes wrong?" "Why should I do more work that I'm not paid for?" The second, and much more pertinent issue, is that not much real power (including resourcing, strategy, etc) is devolved to workers, even in incremental ways. Heh, this is even true for middle management in our organisation (and I really wonder what their function is sometimes). This is hardly a surprising issue, given the setup of most enterprises, and, in a more general sense, our being accustomed to hierarchy and top-down management.

While it might be easy to assume that nothing much will fundamentally change in that area, think of the changes our societies have gone through in the last few hundred years. We no longer believe that the monarch is directly anointed by God, nor do we believe our rulers have absolute rights over our lives. We believe in the notion of individual rights (which is a pretty recent innovation). Companies have also dramatically changed in the last couple of hundred years. You are not supposed to run businesses on slave labour. People must be paid in money and not kind, have reasonable time off, and so on. These kinds of things are enshrined in law, but the law was made because people's attitudes to exploitative and even paternalistic company cultures changed.

Then there are cool trends like the "recovered factories" in Argentina (after the early 2000s peso crash) and elsewhere. These businesses are run by the workers themselves as co-operatives. I find those kinds of enterprises fascinating.

My god, this is the most thinking I've done all day. I discovered dubstep.fm's online stream today (the "iTunes/Winamp" aka .pls stream plays in VLC -192kbps works for me), and I've been listening to that while staring at VLC's "goom" visualisation. No drugs involved either, except Neurofen.

...OMG, I just found out that one of my favourite groups evah, Red Snapper, has a new album out, A Pale Blue Dot. I've been listening online, and while it's not as compelling as some of their earlier music, it's still decent. They've always been in the trip-hop/acid jazz area, but this album is definitely more into the downtempo acid jazz area (but not as anodyne as some of that stuff can be). ETA: I'll revise that last comment, because I said that before I listened to the third-to-last and final tracks. ICK. God, it looks like I won't be buying this one. I'll have to do a post on their greatest hits shortly.

If you were truly devoted to making the Freedom of Information laws truly about freedom of information, you wouldn't charge one red cent for processing an FOI request. Yes, I know they can be vexatious and time-wasting. So what? You build that cost into what it takes to run open and transparent government (although getting the higher-ups to fork out extra budget for those kinds of things could be challenging). That's nice that journalists and non-profits get to have 5 hours free time, while normal punters (and businesses) have to fork out after the first hour. At least querying information held about yourself will be free. But 20-30 years for releasing non-classified Cabinet documents and notebooks? Give me a break. I think that's disgusting, actually (although nearly half the current ridiculous span).

Still, they're appointing an Information Commissioner, and FOI commissioner, who will be aligned with the Privacy Commissioner in a new department. That makes sense. And the new rules will be much better than the current set, including the concept that disclosure should be assumed unless there are sufficient grounds for information to not be disclosed (which would not include such "grounds" as potentially causing embarrassment to the government).

In sum, B-minus, could do better. But it's a start.

ETA: I was also intending to mention a really good economics blog series by John Quiggan, which is about debunking various doctrines:

#1 The efficient markets hypothesis

#2 The case for privatisation

#3 The Great Moderation

#4 Individual retirement accounts

#5 Trickle down

Here's a bit discussing the "efficient markets hypothesis":

More important than asset markets themselves is their role in the allocation of investment. As Keynes said in his General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, this job is unlikely to be well done when it is a by-product of the activities of a casino. So, if the superficial resemblance of asset markets to gigantic casinos reflects reality, we would expect to see distortions in patterns of savings and investment. ...

The dotcom bubble was just one component of a massive asset price bubble that began in the early 1990s and is only now coming to an end. Throughout this period, patterns of savings and investment made little sense. Household savings plunged to zero and below in a number of developed countries (including nearly all English-speaking countries) and the resulting current account deficits were met by borrowing from rapidly growing poor countries like China (standard economics would suggest that capital flows should go in the other direction). The massive growth of the financial sector itself, which accounted for nearly half of all corporate profits by the end of the bubble, diverted physical and particularly human capital from the production of goods and services.

How not to get phished

If you ever get an email purporting to be from your bank, or credit card company, or tax office, or Great Aunt Bessie who wants to know your credit card number or bank account details for some arcane reason, for god's sake, do not, even if it has all the logos and your name or anything, click on any links.

Simple. Here endeth the lesson.

But what if you're worried that your bank/credit card issuer/tax office/great aunt is genuinely trying to contact you about an urgent matter? Ok, open your browser, and type in your bank website address. If you don't know your bank website address, then you obviously haven't used online banking, so don't bother. Once you're on your bank website address, look for the account logon link, which should take you to a page with https: at the start of the address and a cute little golden lock icon on the bottom right of the browser window, or perhaps in the address bar. Somewhere. Then you can logon and see if your bank has actually been trying to get hold of you.

If it's Great Aunt Bessie, for chrissakes, give the old dear a ring. The phone is still a mighty handy instrument for banks/credit card companies/all of the above as well. Don't click the links!

That goes pretty much for any email message that contains links where the content is not obvious or trusted - you can hover over the link to see where it is intending to take you. If you're still unsure, you can type in the address from the "http://" up to the next "/" to check if the top level site is anything recognisable. Even that could be slightly risky, though.

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On a slight change of topic, well, it's no wonder the govt in NZ doesn't give a shit about women's wages. Incriminating pictures from a "Job Summit" held by the govt to discuss employment during the current recession tell the story. Yep, white middle-aged men. Apparently 15% of the participants were actually women. 20 Maori, 2 PI men and one Asian guy. 60% from business, a big swodge from government (central and local), and a whole 3 people from community organisations. Ok, most employers are going to be men (gah!), but you can't tell me that 85% of civil servants and pollies are male. So much for quaint notions of representation.

Cabernet Voltaire are shortly to release a new album... which is entirely remixes of one of my favourite kiwi dub outfits, Kora. How bloody cool is that! You can check out some of the tracks on the MyFace page - all the stuff in the media player with Kora in the name.

Talking about creative endeavours and their dissemination, I'm putting up a black icon in support of the protest against the new copyright legislation in NZ, which "would require ISPs to disconnect customers accused of downloading copyright material." Anyone could issue the equivalent of a DCMA takedown notice against a individual who is said to be hosting copyrighted material, and that individual/organisation would have to be kicked off the internet by their ISP. According to NZ's Consumer Institute (a very august body):

I'm a New Zealander, living in Australia. Most of the people I know are Aussies, Kiwis and Poms (the English). So why does what the leader of another country does on the other side of the Pacific have such an impact?

Firstly, thank god for his first couple of days in power. Formulating the orders and making the statements to get rid of Guantanamo Bay (and the secret CIA facilities), to ban lobbyists from being appointed to agencies they have lobbied about for 2 years, to strongly affirm a pro-choice stance, to affirm a policy of openness in government, to cap the wages of senior government figures, to instantly appoint a Middle-East envoy who was instrumental in brokering the terms which led to settlement in Northern Ireland, to ban fucking torture, to include the "non-believers" in his inauguration speech, and on and on.

Since I'm not an American, why is this so great? Because like it or not, America is a model for Western democracies. How the US handles its foreign relations and its economy affects us signficantly. (And we've certainly learned that pretty directly in the economic sense). Regarding the US's internal affairs, they are again a model. The erosion of social welfare, the casualisation of the workforce, the increasing stratification of society, free-marketeerism and so on, have all come about due to models that the US has provided and that various other countries have emulated to a greater or lesser degree. Basically, if the US rolls over, we have to move as well.

Naturally, compared to the US, most of our countries still seem pretty socialist by comparison, and the religious right has not really gained a political foothold (although they have slightly in Australia). But it seems it will increasingly become the fact that neo-right-wing politicians will not be able to point to the US to justify their plans to erode our rights and working conditions, or to promulgate pointless wars, or to engage in actions of dubious legality in the name of "security". For that, I am grateful. Long may it continue, and I'm sure that those of you who voted for him are thrilled to the core.

This article in Business Week (of all places) is a good discussion of how the Maddow Ponzi/pyramid scheme can be an exemplar of how the US was able to get cheap credit for their less-than-robust financial dealings.



Also, did we all see what Bush said a few days ago?



Um, hello, common factor with all those crises? You don't approve of how the economy is behaving right now, you don't put the conditions in place that make it happen! As for being a "wartime president", who caused those wars. Jesus, if you don't like it, then don't do it.



Erm, so, you have to use "non-free-market" measures to "preserve" the free market system? I know there's a name for that kind of logical fallacy, but since I can't bring it to mind, I'll just stick with moronity. And how did the "excesses of the past" come about, huh?

Actually, I don't think Bush's policies are solely to blame for the current situation. I blame every president since Reagan, including Clinton, who did bugger-all in terms of winding back financial "excesses".

Because now that NZ is going to be run by stick-in-the-mud wankers, fundamentalists, and free-market arseholes, I don't want to be there anyway. Helen Clark won't be able to horse-trade herself out of that debacle (by doing creative coalition negotiation).

Here's hoping the Nats cock up the next 3 years so badly, the lefties will get in by a landslide next time (having learned their lessons about complacency). I'm glad the Greens polled more than ACT (free-market arseholes who like selling off national infrastructure) and United Future (fundamentalists, although they don't say they are too overtly) put together. In an interesting development, the Māori Party only got just over 2% of the votes (Māori are around 13% of the population). I hope that Tariana Turia uses this as a time of reflection. Because if she thinks National and their cronies will give her what she wanted, she's SoL (she encouraged Māori party voters to consider National, because she has such an animus against the Labour Party).

Oh, and fucking Roger Douglas in Cabinet? How utterly wonderful. NZ just bought back the bloody railways (after the PM-to-be's company of the time snaffled them up at the firesale put on by their National Party mates). Definitely buh-bye to national infrastructure, then. And as much of the super and the best accident compensation scheme in the world as they can get their hands on.