I love Apple, to the point that people frequently assume I’m a “Fanboi”. But that doesn’t let them get away with crazy shit – like some weird DNS bug that’s been in the OS now for ages that just drives me wild. Close as I can tell, it only affects machines that have multiple locations in network preferences. I’ve never yet had the problem on any fixed-location system.
Seriously, Apple, this DNS shit just drives me crazy:
Following the floods that brought devastation to a wide stretch of Queensland, the Federal government has declared its intention to enact a levy starting with the new financial year, to run for a year, to help fund the estimated $5 billion rebuild cost.
The levy is relatively minor, has exemptions for those who are in flood affected regions, and does not apply at all to people who earn less than $50,000 per annum. To quote the prime minister’s official information page:
1. Low-income earners will not pay the levy. The levy only applies to income above $50,000.
2. The levy will not apply to victims of the floods. People in flood affected areas who have received the Australian Government Disaster Recovery Payment this financial year will be exempt from the levy.
3. The levy will only apply for the 2011-2012 financial year and will raise $1.8 billion.
4. A teacher earning $65,000 will pay $1.44 per week for the levy. You can calculate how the levy will affect you here.
5. A lawyer earning $95,000 will pay $4.33 per week for the levy.
All in all, it’s a relatively minor sort of impact being proposed, and only for a year. By raising an additional 1.8 billion dollars through this, the government can keep on track for returning the country’s budget into surplus within just a few years.
Yet there’s already a vocal group insisting this levy is utterly and completely wrong.
Why?
What’s wrong about temporary, small tax increases to assist rebuilding efforts for part of the country and fellow citizens affected by a major disaster? Comments I’m seeing about this include:
This is absolute crap. I chose to live in an area that does not get effected by floods, so my family NOW has to pay 1% of our family income. I am sorry if I offend anyone and I feel really bad for the families that have been devastated by the floods, however I do not see why my family has to suffer for the choices of others.
(From Facebook.)
Comments such as the above are being made everywhere, and might be considered to represent a descent into narcissism reminiscent of the debate that happened in the United States about their attempt at Universal Healthcare. A common complaint ran along the lines of “what do I have to do with my someone else getting sick? Why should I pay for their bills?”
Here’s 5 good reasons:
Honestly, what is so wrong with everyone contributing to help people in need? Have we descended that far into narcissism that we resent losing a dollar or two a week?
Not only that, the person in the example who was claiming to lose 1% of their income is completely wrong. If the levy doesn’t kick in until an income of $50,000, then 1% of the income would be $500, which would mean $9.62 per week. Yet using the flood levy calculator spreadsheet supplied by the government, it takes someone to be on $125,000 will to pay $9.62 per week. 1% of that person’s salary would be $1,250 vs the actual $500.24 extracted by the levy. Even someone on $60,000 per annum would only be contributing $0.96 per week. Oh, the horror!
The bogan media and cheap shot tacking liberals want to insist this is a terrible thing. Forget the fact that the previous coalition government, with Tony Abbott as a senior minister, brought in several levies. Tony even proposed levies while campaigning last year – ones that were going to last at least 3 years.
So what it comes down to is a hypocritical opposition insisting levies are bad (unless they, in government, impose them), and a bunch of narcissists jumping on the band wagon with incorrect facts and figures insisting they shouldn’t be required to help their fellow citizens.
What’s more terrible? A few dollars a week, or the continued descent of this country into narcissism?
Call it a comfort zone, call it a rut, or call it walking in circles.
The end result is still the same. I spent years walking in circles not really looking up to see that I wasn’t going anywhere.
Some choose to see me trying to get out of the rut somehow as an attack on them – that by wanting to change my life I’m actually criticising theirs. I don’t care how people live their lives so long as they don’t try to interfere with the way I live mine.
And if they see me trying to improve my life as an attack on theirs, then perhaps that speaks to their own insecurities in the matter. This move is about Darren and I – no-one else. Real friends will understand.
So another year has rolled on, and I find myself reflecting on what I wrote last year, “Why I’m not proud to be an Australian today“.
In reality, the same holds true for this year as did for last year. Sure, there’s lots of things to love about being Australian. The recent floods in Queensland for instance yet again demonstrated the great Australian notion of cooperation and helping out others who have fell upon hard times. It’s a pity our governments (both state and federal) haven’t adopted that as … maybe, a policy, and do something about the vast mental health problems being ignored in the country.
So, I still live in a country where I’m treated as a second class citizen and the bogan media is still taking over. Too little has been done to correct our track record with the Aboriginal community, our Federal government has a policy of treating asylum seekers like shit and the mentally ill get mostly ignored. On a lesser note, if you can call it that, the country is still obsessed with sport at the expense of research and development. We need to stop caring so much about swimming records and gold medals, and more about solutions to energy issues, dealing with climate change, and cures for diseases. Oh, and to top it all off, the internet-censorship spectre still haunts the edges of government policy, but the alternative is a league of morons who think the internet is a passing fad and we don’t need to access it any more efficiently than we currently do, thank you very much.
Sure, I love being an Australian, and what good Australians are capable of doing. But I still can’t be proud about Australia. The bogan response is “if you don’t like it here, move!” Well, I’m better than a bogan – I’m a patriot. Bogans think that patriotism comes from buying lots of cheap nasty little flags to stick up on their cars to replace the reindeer antlers they had for christmas. Real patriotism though comes from being able to say that you still love your country, while admitting its flaws and hoping it can do better.
C’mon Aussie C’mon; make me proud for Australia Day 2012.
Darren and I both got our iPads on May 28, and I’ve been asked by a friend to give a review of what I think of the iPad now. In the past I’ve said that it’s effectively a new computing platform paradigm – neither desktop nor smartphone, but somewhere inbetween. And it’s a paradigm that’s going to have a big impact on business.
I’ve just scrubbed out a lengthy commentary – I pretty much stand by everything I’ve previously said, and was just repeating myself anyway. So instead I’ll cite just a few tidbits with the caveat I’d still get one today if they were only just coming out, even knowing what I’m about to say.
A few things that do annoy me though:
There you have it. Sure, the iPad has a few niggles – I’m not a fanboy – but it offers a portable, immersive app experience you just won’t find in a desktop or laptop system.
There’s a memorable quote in “Burn after Reading”, where John Malkovich’s character, Osborne, says to another, “You’re part of a league of morons.”
I think this, with some exasperation, every time I hear Tony Abbott finding another reason to demand the immediate cessation of the Australian National Broadband Network (NBN) programme.
I’m starting to gather the impression that it’s a conspiracy theory; not one formed from malice, but from … well, let’s be honest: stark raving stupidity.
The anti-NBN approach espoused by the coalition is fundamentally wrapped up in their overall inability to consider that climate change is:
John Howard started this trend, I think, by refusing to have Australia ratify the Kyoto accord all those years ago. But what did it matter? He was already counting down the years in life rather than counting up, so it wasn’t as if he was going to have to live in the world he was helping to create.
What, might you be asking, does climate change have to do with a national broadband network infrastructure roll-out? Well, oddly enough, there’s a big relevant comparison: telecommuting.
I’ve worked from home now since 2006, and I can honestly say that existing ADSL and ADSL2 infrastructure run over copper just doesn’t cut it. You can get by on the performance it gives, but unless you’re damn close to an exchange and have a really good incoming copper connection (neither of which I have), you have to structure your work around four fundamental considerations:
None of those are insurmountable, but they do require you to have different work processes to everyone else in the office.
Here’s where I think there’s a triumvirate of stupid ideas, creating a perfect storm in the heads of certain politicians (well, nature abhors a vacuum, after all):
The traditional, 19th century business approach is that employees should be at their desks from 9am to 5pm, possibly with overtime, and if they’re not at their desks they’re not working. (That approach is still followed today in some companies – e.g., where people are required to clock in and out when they go to the toilet, and make up time.)
Now I could play “studies at 40 paces” … there’s a multitude of studies out there that say that working from home is evil, and there’s an equal multitude that says that it’s fantastic. Instead it’s probably best to read this wikipedia article about telecommuting, as it mentions the positives and negatives. The reality is that working from home is a sliding scale where:
Obviously here I’m talking about office jobs. (There’s not much point sullying the argument with interjections about say, whether brickies labourers can work from home.)
However, I would like to see the federal government set a goal of encouraging office-based businesses to get a percentage of staff telecommuting as a result of the NBN. Maybe 25% of the traditional-offie workforce telecommuting at all times within 5 years of NBN being completed? Imagine the difference this would make to the roads and public transport infrastructure.
One of the inevitable consequences of accepting that climate change is a real issue – or as a side line, accepting that the decline of fossil fuels is a real issue – is that we can’t afford to continue the ancient business practice of everyone sitting within line-of-sight of their manager. Not only that, as cities continue to grow, we’re not really seeing any improvements any longer in commute times. A vast number of workers will regularly travel at least an hour each way each day to get to work. Those who use public transport can make some use of that time, but those who have to drive are stuck doing exactly that.
When people travel to work, they do it on their own time. If it’s a five minute walk, that’s fine. If it’s a ten minute drive – OK, that’s not too bad. When it’s an hour drive? A two hour public transport trip? A three hour public transport trip?
When I worked in Sydney, I commuted from Gosford, and didn’t drive to work. So I caught the train, which was a 5 minute drive to the station, a 5-10 minute wait for the train, a 1 hour 20 minute trip, then a 5 minute walk to the office. So on the best of days office work would cost me 2 hours 10 minutes of my personal time. Not so bad. But public transport frequently doesn’t run on time (well, in countries like Australia, anyway). So it was not unusual for that to become a 2 hour trip each way. Maybe 3 hours sometimes. I was lucky: the worst trip I had was a 6 hour trip in one direction. At least 4-5 times a year though I’d have a 4 hour trip. Overtime would then come into play, since public transport outside of business hours runs less frequently.
Traditional business doesn’t give a flying fuck about how long their employees take to get to work: it’s not as if they’re having to pay them for it. What they don’t realise though is they do. Australia has one of the highest rates of unpaid overtime in in the world for a modern democracy/economy. Unremarkably, it also has a strong tradition of the “sickie” … or as I like to call them, mental health days. Ultimately, businesses that don’t care how much personal time a staff member sacrifices to get to and from work reap their rewards through staff burn out.
Quite frankly, the conventional business practice of requiring all personnel to work in the office is:
Many companies at least have started to realise this and offered telecommuting options for staff.
The coalition of morons in Australia, by demanding so frequently the end of NBN, are showing a complete lack of understanding for or appreciation of:
In fact, not only are Tony Abbot and his accomplices wrong on the NBN, the environment and workers rights, they’re working their damnedest to drag Australian business practices back to the 19th century. Unless they’ve got a secret plan for instantaneous teleportation and zero point energy up their sleeves, they’re suffering a reality dysfunction.
As an alternate to NBN, the coalition continues to offer a mentally deficient IT strategy based on wireless networking in most places and a peak speed of about 1.2MB/s. Apparently though, if you don’t pirate movies, that’s more than enough for you for the next 10+ years. The coalition see the internet as some great big play pen for games, multimedia downloads and pornography.
Productivity? You can only do that in a bricks and mortar office!
Well, if you’re part of a league of morons, that is.
This could almost be nominally a follow-up to a post I made ages ago, “The walled garden vs the overrun garden“. You’ll probably want to read that first.
Now that Android has been out for a while, I wanted to reflect on how fragmented the Android platform has become, and how the consumers have not reaped the benefit of an “open” platform. Indeed, despite arguments to the contrary, Android has proven itself to be a remarkably closed platform that is actively used to deny user freedom.
Don’t believe me? Let’s have a quick run through the catalogue of failures, or to be more honest, the catalogue of “consumers being shafted”:
The list just goes on and on, and frankly gets a bit boring and repetitive. The message remains the same though: Android is “open” for values of “open = closed”. A consumer using Android is at the mercy of both the carrier and the hardware manufacturer, unless of course they want to “root” the device, but that’s not something that Aunty Betty is going to be interested in doing.
OK, so Apple has a “closed wall” garden, but at least it’s a well maintained garden. Devices get OS updates for at least 2 years. Carriers can’t install consumer-borking user experiences on the devices, and … oh, the upgrade process is simple.
A very common story is devices that are less than a year old are being denied updates. Hello? What the fuck? That’s why I dropped Palm all those years ago. “What’s that? You want to upgrade from X.2 to X.3 of the OS? OK, pay $1000 for a new phone and you’ll have the new OS!”
Android is increasingly becoming the platform for people who want to be screwed without bothering to have sex.
When I finished high school, I went to University in “the big smoke”, Newcastle. When I finished Uni, I got a job with BHP-IT and spent 4 years working there before moving on to working in Sydney and living on the central coast.
I’ve always had an odd regret of never going back to work in Newcastle after all of these years. I think part of that comes from the simple consideration that when we left Newcastle, I’d had some idea that in time we’d eventually move back to it. It was probably the first place I ever had any real affinity to.
Today though I learnt that sometimes you need to look at where you’ve been in order to know where you’re going. I started a couple of weeks consulting in Newcastle, and while I still love the city and have great memories of it, I realised that it’s no longer the sort of place I can live. It’s got nothing to do with what I’m currently doing in Newcastle or who I’m working with, etc. Sometimes the cliche, “it’s not you, it’s me” holds true.
It’s like I cut another string holding me onto my “old life”, and got another step closer to Melbourne – ironically by travelling in the opposite direction.
Dear Newcastle, it’s not you – it’s me.
Over the weekend, the United States saw an attempted assassination attempt – an act of terrorism – committed. A democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, was attacked and gunned down; multiple people including a judge and a young girl were killed in the attack, and the prospects of a full recovery for Giffords is yet to be determined.
I recently read quite a simple yet powerful quote:
The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins. – Oliver Wendell Holmes. (US Supreme Court Justice.)
Over the last decade or so I’ve seen a trend coming out of the United States which I find highly disturbing. Violence. Violence in speech. Violence in music. Violence in TV. Violence in movies. Violence in computer games. Violence in console games. Violence, violence, everywhere.
But heaven forbid if a breast, or bum crack be shown on television. Heaven forbid if someone says “fuck”. Or “shit”. Or “cunt”.
It’s terribly immoral after all to swear, or to reveal even a fraction too much of the human body.
But making a movie where someone has to mutilate themselves in order to be saved from a torturous imprisonment, that’s OK.
Making a TV show about a serial killer is OK.
Making a movie about alien creatures bursting from the chests of children is OK.
Making a computer game where the player gets points for say, running over and killing prostitutes, that’s OK too.
And so, apparently, is it OK for people in the public eye to drag politics into the realm of violent rhetoric:
To the teams that desire making it this far next year: Gear up! In the battle, set your sights on next season’s targets! From the shot across the bow – the first second’s tip-off – your leaders will be in the enemy’s crosshairs, so you must execute strong defensive tactics. You won’t win only playing defense, so get on offense! The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons – your Big Guns – to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win.
That’s from a note on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, dated 29 March 2010. That’s also her italics, not mine.
Enemy? Is she talking about the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda? Apparently the United States has a far more deadly enemy – democrats!
The politics of the United States has become the compromised by the politics of hate. There’s evidence that both sides of politics engage in it, but it’s appears to be a trait more vociferously carried out by extreme right wing thinking. Maybe that’s just what gets reported in the media – but hell, violence in the media is part of the problem, so it remains a valid observation.
Post-event, there’s all sorts of crazy cover-up stories. Sarah Palin’s aides insist that the “targets” used in her campaign targeting democrat seats were “surveyor’s marks”, yet Palin’s tweet from before the shooting directly contradicts this:
Remember months ago “bullseye” icon used 2 target the 20 Obamacare-lovin’ incumbent seats? We won 18 out of 20 (90% success rate;T’aint bad)
Note the word: bullseye. Not “surveyor’s mark”. Note the sinister rhetoric in the other versions of the map (seemingly being removed out of shame):
We’ve diagnosed the problem…
Help us prescribe the solution…
Oh sure, Sarah’s just talking about voting people out … via a “battle”, with “sights” on “targets”, where there’s a “shot across the bow”, then people are in “crosshairs”, and you must go on the “offense” and “penetrate through enemy territory” and “bombing through the press” and using “your strong weapons”.
Oh no, that’s not violent at all!
In the craziness that followed, there was a strong voice of reason:
“When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous. And, unfortunately, Arizona I think has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry… It’s not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. And that’s the sad thing of what’s going on in America. Pretty soon, we’re not going to be able to find reasonable, decent people who are willing to subject themselves to serve in public office… Let me just say one thing, because people tend to poo-poo this business about all the vitriol that we hear inflaming the American public by people who make a living off of doing that. That may be free speech. But it’s not without consequences.”
That was said by the local sheriff in Arizona, Clarence Dupnik. (Quote sourced from Deus Ex Malcontent.) Already of course, some right-ring figures are calling for his resignation for daring to politicise this issue. Only he didn’t start the politicisation of it; someone with a gun who apparently attempted to assassinate a politician had already politicised it. The issue already is politicised, but like Oz screaming “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”, some would scream that any attempt at any logical correlation should just be ignored.
I am in my own politics a very left-leaning individual. I vote green for the most part these days, seeing in Australia that the new third power in Australian politics is about the only one with a suitable social conscience for my ideals. But my condemnation of the violent rhetoric and violence in the media doesn’t come from a condemnation of the right – it’s a condemnation of all hate.
I said in an article some time ago, “I’m tired of all the hate“:
Have we learned nothing in all these centuries of supposed “civilisation”? Some will argue “there are things worth fighting for”, but that ultimately leads to “things worth dying for”, and that ultimately leads to “things worth making other people die for”; ultimately none of these are either productive or moral.
If any one good thing comes out of the shooting in the United States, I would hope that real people there, the decent people, will demand an end to the politics of hate, and an end to the egregiously violent rhetoric. The United States places too much emphasis on “freedom of speech”; it’s time for recognition that the freedom of speech stops at which point it becomes the freedom to incite violence, just the same way that a US Judge declared that his right to swing a fist stopped at the other person’s nose. Gary Hart, writing for the Huffington Post, summarised it best in “Words have Consequences“:
Those with a megaphone, whether provided by public office or a media outlet, have responsibilities. They cannot avoid the consequences of their blatant efforts to inflame, anger, and outrage. We all know that there are unstable and potentially dangerous people among us. To repeatedly appeal to their basest instincts is to invite and welcome their predictable violence.
So long as we all tolerate this kind of irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric or, in the case of some commentators, treat it with delight, reward it, and consider it cute, so long will we place all those in public life, whom the provocateurs dislike, in the crosshairs of danger.
The United States does not need revolution; it had that centuries ago. It however is in desperate need of some evolution. An evolution of moral attitudes towards violence.
When MP3 was becoming a popular file format, I started ripping and converting my CDs. Over time I actually built up quite a large CD collection before iTunes came about, and I ended up with a huge pile of the little blighters.
Eventually, about 8 years ago, I got sick and tired of the sheer physical space occupied by CDs, and pulled all the discs out, storing them in compact folders instead. The disk cases are now long gone. There was no regrets; we’ve long since stopped buying CDs as a regular event. I get the majority of my music these days via iTunes, and buy probably one or two CDs a year – just the stuff I can’t source as an iTunes download.
Then, about 6 years ago, I started converting my DVDs to file format, and within a short period of time I started throwing out the cases, keeping the DVDs just in a disk storage box, and the sleeves in a folder.
Fast forward to now, and it’s time to complete the process. You see, all the “special” packs that we’d bought over the years – TV series and special box editions, etc., are now going through the same fate. Even before we’d decided for sure we were moving, we’d stopped buying DVDs except for the most special of items, and then only when they are on sale. “Special box edition of X” no longer appeals. Stupid Alien eggs occupying copious amounts of space and containing just a few disks are space wasters – as are all the other “special” packs.
And so on a Saturday afternoon the deconstruction of falling stars kicks in:
Once the DVDs are sorted, the limited collection of BluRays will go the same way.
On reflection, DVD cases only partially exist for protection of the disks. If that’s all they existed for, they’d be at most the same size as CD cases. Instead, they’re big, bulky things, and often people will pay considerably more for the same movie or TV show if it comes in a “special” case. I know, I’ve been there.
Their primary purpose, I believe, is to fulfil a bogan need to proclaim “look at my possessions!” But as the old saying goes, you can’t take it with you when you’re gone – life isn’t a race to having the most possessions, or at least it certainly shouldn’t be, and so having physical reminders that you own something should be entirely irrelevant.
Choosing to move a reasonably large distance provides considerable opportunity for introspection. What am I keeping this for? Why did I buy it originally? Does it fulfil me? Is it worth the cost of moving it? Will I miss it if I get rid of it?
Everyone clings onto certain things because they’re personally important or useful. I’m not above keeping something for emotional attachments without any sense of logic. I still have the first toy I ever remember getting – a nut-shell stuffed raccoon that my family called “Squirrel” when they gave him to me. The story goes that we were in a toy shop and Squirrel fell from a shelf into my stroller. I’m now 37, and by all accounts I’ve had him for most of those years. I’ll never have kids, and I’ll never give him away.
But other times we cling onto things for entirely the wrong reasons: perceived status symbols, notions of not wasting money, and peer pressure. Yet, when you have to bundle up all your possessions to move, you have to make realistic decisions. For instance, I have a bed frame I bought from Ikea for $150. I’ll be ditching it when we move – for the simple reason that the cost of moving the bed frame will equal (if not exceed) the cost of buying the same frame again in Melbourne from an Ikea down there. Holding onto it makes no sense.
As a consumerist society, we hold onto too many things that make no sense, and frequently desire to acquire more things to hold onto, also without much sense to it. I’m not coming over all hippy and preaching that we should drop all possessions, but it’s time we consider where that culture has got us. It’s practically killed the United States. The US has become so consumption driven that it’s outsourced almost all manufacturing to other countries. Just as we all want the right to consume, we should all share the creation of that being consumed.
I refuse to be defined by, or buried in a pile of my possessions. Life is to short, and too precious, to be weighed down by a portfolio of possessions that would make any previous generation jealous. I’d prefer instead to have the freedom to make a contribution that will better the next generation.
-End-
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[Edit] Of course, the title of this blog post comes from the final episode of Season 4 of Babylon 5, in which the highly advanced humans come back and examine Terran history. It seemed apropos.