20 Different Triangles

Contemporary playground equipment

2008-11-12T02:32:00.003+11:00

Once playground equipment was fun.

And by "fun", we mean dangerous.

Swings swung high enough that the fall would break legs. Slippery dips were of towering heights and could rocket you into the ground after the sun baked metal had seared your flesh. And nothing could sever fingers like merry-go-rounds.

An unlikely alliance of sense and litigation put paid to this era. Equipment became safe plastic, but blunt and stunted. But it was colourful, and children could use their unthreatened fingers to give each other shocks. It was boring, but a taste of risk remained.

Today we are in a new era. Equipment looks like this.

I don't understand it.

It doesn't look fun at all.

In the same fashion I do not find trees erotic.

Certain playground equipment looks unfun. Certain people are unattractive or repulsive.

But this is in a different world entirely.

A train ghost

2008-11-04T23:56:00.002+11:00

Today I was on the train travelling into the city.

A deshevelled man walked up the carriage holding a crumpled envelope. He went to each passenger in turn, and poked it under their noses.

None looked up. They stayed immersed in their books, in the views out the window, or the gum under the seats in front.

None wished to make contact with the crazy man.

He came to me. I intended to do as everyone else did. Nonetheless, I briefly looked at the envelope.

It was dirty and worn, with several sentences of text. I read only the first line;

"(I am dead)"

He swiftly moved on to others, and then the next carriage, apparently unpeturbed.

A man. A ghost. Wandering and trying to reach the living.

Failing.

But enduring.

A draft comic

2008-10-14T22:27:00.001+11:00

Here.

viewable in Firefox or IE only

One day to be polished.

The freedom of the automobile, by the grace of the state

2008-09-05T19:04:00.002+10:00

In Australia, and elsewhere in the world, a debate about transport has been brought about by an infernal mix of congestion, fuel costs and global warming. Central to this debate is the role the car plays in our transport options, particularly in urban environments. Unfortunately, as with many debates on policy, the discussion often degenerates into bomb throwing between commentators whom would be better placed barracking at football matches, and whom see the car as a symbolic issue on how society
One set of cheerleaders declare that other options are woolly socialist thinking and knee-jerk hatred of the successes of Western Civilisation. Did we not win the cold war? Wasn’t the Trabant the emblem of socialism’s failure before the Mercedes glowing example of enterprise. Isn’t the control of a vehicle and the freedom of movement by an individual the epitome of the sanctity of the person before the whole as opposed to the cattle herding of public transport?
Another set of cheerleaders sees the car and its consequences as encapsulating the failures of neoliberalism. Is there a better way to showcase how selfish individualism aggregates poorly than global warming, or a traffic snarl filled with honking monsters whom would otherwise be people? And aren’t the absurd amounts of money and love spent on the car classic signs of affluenza and conspicuous consumption.
Both these views are reliant on the idea that the car culture is somehow the result of free enterprise, of user pays and of consumer sovereignty. This idea is very hard to justify. The car, if a symbol of anything, is a symbol of government and industry collaboration. The Great Mid 20th Century Handshake that lingers with us still.
It is illustrative to look at the epitome of car culture, the United States, and particularly LA. There was a time when transport was ruled by lassaiz faire, before the depression soured the public and politicians to the idea, and subsequently LA was ruled by street cars, run by a polyglot of firms bursting into life, dying, selling to each other. This echoed the amazing outburst of entrepreneurial zeal which had endowed America with railways in the previous century and which had elsewhere built the London underground and provided Sydney with it’s first passenger railway (now the Inner West line). This street car system was the most extensive in the world, and the mobility it gave the residents of LA was responsible for allowing the city to become the great sprawling mass it is.
It came to an end obviously. It has often been blamed on the insidious plots of General Motors, but this was but a small element in the wave of public, political and commercial sentiment that followed the Great Depression and more importantly, the war economy. This led to a great growth in manufacturing, particularly planes (giving Boeing an ascendency it still holds) and automobiles, and it gave a promise of a new system. The street cars could not survive in this world.
Post war, the Great Handshake was in full swing. The cars rolling off factory line enlarged by war spending drove on Eisenhower’s new Interstate Highway System. This in turn was born of the great 20th century faith in public works and also provided for the greater mobility of the government’s armed forces. These in turn were administered by the former GM president and Defence Secretary Charles Wilson whom captured the sentiment by declaring he “thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa". Just to be fair, a Ford president in Robert McNamara was given the job the next time around. The companies were happy selling their cars, the public was happy to buy them and zoom off to the suburbs (and new “teenagers” to sexual experimentation) and away from urban centres hamstrung by planning laws designed for that very purpose. The government was happy if the first two were happy. Eisenhower may have closed his presidency with a warning about a “military-industrial complex”, but why spoil a good thing?
The oil shock and consequent and subsequent chaos spoiled this faith in the American system, but it did not destroy the handshake, nor its child the motor car. It merely shifted it, first to the growing might of the Zaibatsu manufacturers such as Mitsubishi and Honda, deeply enmeshed with their own government through Japan Inc, and later their brethren in the Korean Chaebol.
Even today the largest car maker, Toyota, is part of this marriage with the state and elsewhere governments fight to keep motor industries alive. Zappa may have declared the need for a beer and an airline, but a motorcar industry seems to be seen as a far more potent sign of national virility. Why else would Malaysia pour so many resources into Proton. Why else is the Australian car industry still shielded by tariffs when the rest of country responds to globalisation, and why else is it such a recipient of government largesse when competition is the watchword?
The car culture hasn’t been the result of free enterprise, but could it have been anyway? Afterall a car is only as good as the roads on which it drives, it only takes you where the roads go and as fast as they let you. And the roads are public goods.
Private companies have (and are) building roads, but these are reliant on the modern manifestation of the Great Handshake called, obviously, the “Private Public Partnership”. Unfortunately, even with this partnership the exercise is producing losses in examples such as the Lane Cove Tunnel and Cross City Tunnel, and these companies may not return. How would they succeed without the assistance of government?
Otherwise roads are provided by government with little regard for user pays or market forces. Whilst there are registration costs, these go but a small way to covering the expenditure on roads and furthermore these costs are the same regardless of whether one drives once a week on an unpaved public road, or everyday on an elaborately engineered freeway. The pricing mechanisms on which most of capitalism rests holds little sway. When a market mechanism is suggested such as congestion pricing, it is howled down and when it exists in some form is it subject to poplist counter measures, such as the M4 cashback.
The free roads are then governed not by the market but by a mix of norms and the law.
Most quieter roads run mainly on the former, a complex and tacitly understood web of what should and should not be done, when one should give way and is entitled to cut in. The law is in theory in force, but the enforcers are unlikely to catch an infringer, and the social enforcement of driving peers is paramount. This honestly works surprisingly well, but is reliant on social values and sharing, and not on the enlightened self interest of capitalism.
When this society breaks down on major roads is when authority comes into play. Speed cameras, traffic cops, more lights and road markers and signs and fines. This may also work to some extent, but isn’t managing a system by force of authority rather than the aggregation of individual actions the antithesis of free enterprise?
So the car is not the result of free enterprise, nor could a car culture emerge or operate under free enterprise. So if cars are not a symbol of free enterprise and capitalism, what then are they a symbol of?
The answer is “nothing”.
We simply need to recognise that in modern society, and form of transport will be reliant on the provisions of government (even walking requires a footpath). No transport system, whether cars, public transport, bicycles or walking are independent of either enterprise, the state or social norms.
Advocacy of any transport system should only be viewed in light of its merits and not in light of an apparent world view.

Wikimafia, and apologies for the buzzwords

2008-04-28T09:00:00.002+10:00

Having recently read Venkatesh's and reading in the early pages of this and account of the Chechen mafia, I have a speculative possibility for the future of organised crime.

The older networks, such as the Cosa Nostra and the Yakuza have worked along rather feudal lines, leadership based on hierachy of seniority and strength and delineated by families.
Yet by the time of the crack boom, the crack gangs worked along corporate line, with local branches, managers and executive directors.

When the Chechen mafia began its rise, it rose as a franchise. Trading on the stereotype of Chechen vicious insanity, the term was for sale to other non-Chechen group that would pay for it, and protect the brand. It had come to a franchise.

Organised crime was following similar phenomena in capitalism.

But where now?

Here's a speculation. Many groups, such as the social groupings of motorcycle gangs or inner city gangs, or political groups such as the Green Gang and other triads, did not begin as organised crime groups. But when crime (often drugs) was adopted to fund them, the crime began to become the sole purpose of the gang.

Now today we have some politically orientated organisations around the world whom may be struggling for funds due to the efforts of several bodies to prevent their former benefactors channeling finance to them. What could happen if Al Qaeda decided to gain more funding from Opium, or some other such source? The main requirement for organised crime is the use of violence, or more importantly, the reputation for it. The training camps are teaching something, and their reputation for bloodshed is strong. It seems quite possible that over a course of years the organisation, like others, could lose its original aim and pursue only the crime.

But there is something else about the Al Qaeda brand. It has no short or medium term goals, only a vague dream of a single caliphate and the destruction of Israel. In the shortterm, merely random acts of violence. Subsequently, the terrorism is now open source. There is no need for a car bomb maker in once country to be attuned to the hierarchy if they now the goal (kill people) and the technology, which is easily disseminated. The founders of Al Qaeda may have no more idea of its extent than anyone else, nor any more control. Terrorism 2.0 to indulge in inane jargon.

If this turned to crime, would it be wikimafia, mafia 2.0, spontaneous organised crime?

Women as accessories

2008-04-09T15:19:00.002+10:00

The other day Tomo and I were at the RSL playing snooker. At the table next to us were three people, two young men and a young woman, whom was romantically connected to one of the men.
The two men were playing snooker.
She was not.
She walked around a bit. Then she watched videos on her mobile. Then she played the DS. Then she SMSed a bit, then ate a sausage roll.
And she kept staring at us. Or so I thought.

She was staring at Tomo.

In all this time her apparent boyfriend said all of two sentences to her.

a) To inform her they were going for a smoko (she was left behind)

b) To demand a bite of the aforementioned sausage roll.

I don't know if a girlfriend is more accessory than companion in South China (from whence these uni students came), but I understand if she was feeling a little neglected.
I also understand that this experience of heterosexual relationships may instill some sapphic longing.

But hey, if I was a woman, I'd turn for Tomo.

Casual and paid sex around Central at 6:00 AM

2008-04-07T14:35:00.002+10:00

On Sunday I was walking through Belmore park in front of Central station. A Gentleman was storming through the park screaming into his phone, loud enough to be heard for several hundred metres.

"It's fucking over! I'm going to go fuck someone else right now! Fuck you!".

He then hung up, and stormed towards the station.

I don't think casual sex is common at 6 am (the pickings are usually gone), let alone in a train station, unless a glory hole was sought. Brothels are plentiful nearby, but I believe they were closed at 6 am.

I wonder if he carried out on his promise.

Sectarian theories of consumption

2008-03-31T09:17:00.002+11:00

We were in an Annandale cafe yesterday next to a tiresome trio in who spent their entire time complaining about their relationship troubles. All that was of note was their strangely anachronistic sectarian notions of thrift.

"I'm from a Presbyterian background, and it's not that we're scabby...but we practice self denial. But he's from a catholic background, every week gets his paycheque and wants to spend it all at once...I think catholics like to splurge".

Lucky he wasn't accused of being a drunkard.

Tourist Photos

2008-03-20T21:20:00.002+11:00

The other day I was riding back from Parramatta on the rivercat. We had gone past the dismal industrial shores and vital but visually unimpressive mangroves and entering the harbour proper began to gain glimpses of the bridge. The Bridge.
I was quite swiftly muscled away from my position near the bows by tourists eager to take pictures.
Simmering due to their unapologetic jostling, I began to wonder why they would take a picture at all. Is it

a) Memories? I can understand taking a picture of a restaurant, of people met, an interesting example of local life. But I cannot imagine a tourist flipping through their snaps and, coming across a photo, exclaiming "oh....THAT bridge, I forgot about that"

b) Faith in one's own photographic endeavours? "This may be one of the most relentless photographed landmarks in the world...but MY photo will be unique!"

c) Proof? "You saw the bridge? Bullshit! Such an act is extremely unlikely and dare I say it, without evidence I must adjudge it impossible by mankind!"

Still, it strikes me as more reasonable that those tourists whom walk around with a video camera lodged in their eye socket. I can only presume that seeing the location they're in reduced to two dimensions makes it more akin to television, and therefore superior to reality. That or they hope to catch the moment the landmarks being filmed collapse/start doing the macarena.

Adventures in mysterious oriental stores

2007-01-05T23:23:00.000+11:00

Near my house there is a Chinese restaurants/takeaway, literally on the wrong side of the tracks from a popular eating strip. The glass at the front is frosted and so the insides are veiled to the passerby. It has been there for as long as I can remember and the sign out the front gives a 6 digit phone number. We have been using 8 digit phone numbers in Australia for over a decade.

In all my time, I had never seen a soul enter or leave this establishment. Yet it remained, with an open sign on the door, year in, year out.

Surely it was a front for something. Triads? Yakuza? Heroin? White Slavery? What tentacles of the Mongolian Octopus was it hiding?

Today the missus and I made it our duty to explore the place. The enigma is yet deeper.

As we entered the place, we noted the decor. It would be familiar to anyone who has eaten in the old style Cantonese places which once spotted the Australian landscape, but have been disappearing from her cities. Lots of red cloth and calligraphy, prints on every wall and gratuitous, near circular archways. A new TV dominated one half of the establishment however.A man in a t shirt and shorts emerged from the kitchen and wordlessly demanded our business with a glare. We asked for a table for two. We were given one in the corner by way of a silent pointing finger.

We sat down and read the menu. Incongruously it had a photo (labeled) of a Vietnamese temple on the front. Our table only had one menu, so I surreptitiously removed one from the adjacent table. This table was large, with a lazy susan, and was set for 10 people. In light of such large numbers, it had two menus. No item on the menu was greater than $13.50 (the scallop dishes), and most were under $9, and largely consisted of the staples of Australian Cantonese food; Sweet and Sour, Plum sauce, sizzling, all in a choice of 6 or so meats. Interestingly however, there was also a "miscellaneous" section, replete with names like "Chinaman's Hat".

At this point there were two sets of diners, one eating at a table, and the others waiting for a takeaway. Both sets were elderly, working class and Anglo. Both were also chatty with the waitress (presumably the wife of our taciturn friend) and appeared to be regulars.

We ordered (Honey Scallops and Duck with Crab Meat), and received our food rapidly.

I fear that our order may have single handedly doomed the scallop to extinction. There must have been 20 of the damn things, all battered and honeyed up in a golden pyramid on our table, and each large enough to only allow one in our (plastic) rice bowls.

At this point Mr Taciturn turned on the TV and began to watch CCTV. This was subtitled in Chinese. Occasionally he would flip through a large variety of other Chinese language stations. At the same time, Mrs not-so-taciturn decided to turn on some music, which sounded as if it could be the soundtrack to a 1950s Disney nature or adventure film. It gave a aura of vast prairies and mountain rivers to the world of Chinese soap opera.

At this point I went to the bathroom. As I headed through a door indicated by silhouettes of a man and woman in elegant evening wear, Mr Taciturn gruffly asked....something. I asked "is this the bathroom". There was a sound approaching affirmation and I continued, past the intriguing door marked "private" and into the male toilets.

At the urinal, I brought out my goods and then stopped. I am not one for stage fright, but this was an unnerving urinal. It was not filthy, in fact it was quite clean. I would even venture that this urinal had not been urinated on in years. It was as dry as a bone. I went in the cubicle.

Exiting, I was afforded a look at the back courtyard of the property, with external stairs leading to the first floor where presumably Mr Taciturn spends his silent nights. Underneath however was a great contraption. A hulk of machinery, left from some forgotten age of steam. Perhaps it had once powered giant robots that had grappled with Zeppelins, or was a time machine. Alas, I had not to time to examine it, but it was adorned with a single and lonesome wok.

I returned, noticing that on the back of the door there was a Free Tibet sticker. A sentiment common amongst CCTV viewers.

During this time further diners came in. All elderly and Anglo. One came in and gave a silent nod to Mr Taciturn, who went into the kitchen and started cooking immediately. He came out with bags and handed them to the customer, who left wordlessly, and without payment. Another came in clutching a wine bottle, stylishly clad in a silvery plastic cooler, and became chatting breezily with Mrs not-so-taciturn.

When we left (with half the sea bed uneaten in a plastic container) we gave our payment to Mr Taciturn, who took our notes to the kitchen and returned with change. The front door had given notice that they also took Visa and EFTPOS. I can only assume that one went into the kitchen to pay with the latter.
Whilst waiting I read a flyer for Buddhist classes that spruiked themselves on the notion that in no way was Buddhism a religion.

Then we were back on the streets. I have even more questions than before.

Missions at the Urinal

2006-12-04T13:50:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I was at the pub watching the football, and grog doing as grog does, I found myself at the urinal.

Whilst I was relieving myself, a man began to converse with me.

For those unfamiliar with the concept (such as those unfortunate individuals bereft of a Y chromosome), the urinal conversation is a strange phenomenon. Whilst many men flee into the Cubicle of Shame to avoid the spectre of Stage Fright, the trough provides a forum for a certain, limited, form of discourse.

This mainly runs along the lines of ;

"Looks like you've had a few mate!"

"Makin' room for some more eh?"

etc.

This man however, was a different beast. The barman later informed me he was with the "Weekend Detention Christmas Party".

Our conversation went as follows:

"How are ya?"

"alright", I replied. "You?"

"I'm great. Now tell me. What is your mission in life?"

"Uh, I haven't really thought it through"

"Now, do you want to be a drug addict, an alcoholic, or do you want to work?"

"I think I want to work"

"Good!"

I shook, and then departed.

Is This Awesome or Terrible

2006-11-29T12:30:00.000+11:00

In earlier posts I've talked about how people use different mechanisms to discover the quality of goods before they buy them.

At the moment I am in an altogether different bind.

These two albums
Spider-Man : From Beyond the Grave - A Rockomic
Spider-Man - Rock Reflections of a Superhero

Are these the most awful, of the most awesome albums I have ever heard.

The former opens with a wonderful theme, pulsating with bubblegum pseudo-funk pop about the "one lady sex machine" Spider-Man. He is a creature of contrasts.
"Walks like a spider/loves like a man"
"Crawls like a spider/grooves like a man"
"Moves like a spider/tired like a man".

I dare not describe the album any further for fears of collapsing in paroxysms of hatred/joy.

The latter, a collection of every terrible musical cliché of the 70s; funk blaxploitation (Luke Cage us credited with Bass), bad folk (if Donovan was the poor man's Cat Stevens, this is the poor man's Donovan), the embryonic cries of synthesized music and an incongruent doo-wop piece.

Best of all is our treatment of a semi black gospel style song led by that renowned black supervillian....Doctor Octopus. He tells his congregation that he will turn them all into Go-Go dancers.

A fiendish plot preacher.

All in all, is this terrible or awesome. In all honesty, I have no idea.

Obsolete Jobs

2006-11-25T09:48:00.000+11:00

We're all familiar with jobs that disappear because of technological advance, where mechanisation on farms replaces labour, or now where the internet may make many real estate agents and travel agents redundant.
And, subsequently, the world changes and workers move from agriculture to industry to services.

But I'm wondering about the jobs that have disappeared without any apparent technological change. Once all lifts had operators, yet I have never seen an operator in my life. There is no mechanical button pusher though. Through films and novels written before my time I know of petrol pump operators, who would refuel your car for you, but I have only see this once (in the affluent suburb of Rose Bay).

I'm sure there are many other examples. In these two cases, we merely do ourselves, as the customer, what the worker previously did. It seems reasonable that as wages have risen across the board, the cost benefits of employing workers like this changed enough to entice employers not to hire them anymore.
But it's difficult for me to think of a time where the relative benefits would ever outweigh the costs of wages. Maybe in the very early days people would have been scared of the technology, and this was the only way it could be utilised, but I can only imagine this fear lasting a matter of a year or two. Why did it take so long to realise that people were perfectly capable of putting a nozzle in a tank, or even more simply, pressing a button on their own. The minor inconvenience this represents would be costed less than the higher prices required by paying these workers by most people, even with 1950s wages.

So really, the question may not be why they disappeared, but why they lasted any time at all.

A Tragedy of Riches

2006-11-24T09:38:00.000+11:00

If I was a developing country, and this is a plausible entity to be as an individual, there is a steadfast rule that I would live by.

Avoid having natural resources.

At the beginning of the century, there were many poor countries in the world, but by the end, a large number had living standards on par with the trailblazers of Europe and North America.

Some of these countries include Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Ireland and Iceland.

They share something in common. They're all islands (South Korea's only land border is closed), but more importantly, they have next to no mineral wealth.

By contrast, Papua New Guinea, Iraq, the best part of South America, the Congo and many more have an embarrassment of oil, diamonds, bauxite and other raw materials.

This is not counterintuitive.

To look at another case of two societies, both English speaking and only partially free. The South of the US and early colonial NSW. In both cases, the economies were reliant on institutions of forced labour. Forced labour is inefficient in aggregate (although profitable for those on top), and as argued by early Republicans, retards the development of the economy at large. A minority can retain a privileged position at the expense of the many.

In the southern US, the institutions were slavery, plantations and, most importantly, cotton. Cotton was a resource in need by the industrial heartlands in Manchester and Leeds, and there was always a buyer. The society could survive despite being suboptimal.

In NSW, there was a different prospect. The institutions were free settlers and convicts, but it was still agrarianism based on forced labour. Here, however, the land was dry, their crops were unsuitable, and exports would perish on the way back to the mother country.
Moreover, it could not support itself and was costing the crown a considerable amount. Macquarie was sent to the colony with a task to make it self sufficient. This required optimal, efficient institutions. Efficiency or death.
This required the exploitation of the human resources available, and as he famously discovered, some of the most able men in the colony were convicts. Thus began the emancipations of men like Greenaway, an architect, and others who took up positions in the public service. Commerce rather than slavery took hold and the colony began to prosper. The Exclusionist free settlers eventually rid themselves of Macquarie, but by that time it was too late. The barrier of the blue mountains was breached and the colony's first genuine export, wool, was exploited by free men. Transportation was diminished in importance and eventually ground to a halt as its status as punishment came under doubt.

Nearly two centuries later, NSW remains prosperous. Alabama, by contrast, conjures up notions of first world poverty. The rolling plains of dixie proved her downfall, the sunburnt country of NSW proved her blessing.

In a country with oil, or diamond mines, life on top is easy. The powers that be, drip fed by oil revenues and mining royalties, have no reason to attempt any other action. The Emir, the oligarch, they have their pudding and proceed to eat it. The rest of the society can remain in squalor.

But what are those powers in resource poor countries, like Japan or Singapore to do? The only resource is labour, and activities like manufacturing (and later services) take hold. When labour is utilized, in a post slavery world, it must be paid. Paid workers not only work better, which profits those on top, they spend what they are paid, on goods that are made by their peers in businesses by the powers that be.

The powers have lost relative position, but the society is better for the lack of natural resources.

Institutional Failure....and just plain stupidity

2006-11-21T18:17:00.000+11:00

The other day I posted about Sony, especially as a reason to talk about institutional failure.

There, the material was essentially about organisations failing as a result of individuals within them targeting different aims. The individuals might be doing what's best for them in the short term, and it is only the aggregate that seems stupid.

Which brings me to the events of NSW parliament, and more specifically the actions of Peter Debnam.

I can't explain this.

It defies explanation.

It is simply stupidity writ large. It can make sense on no possible level. When one only has to sit still to win, he has found a way to fail.

Previous stupidity on the parts of oppositions, both at state and federally, do make sense as individual factions chase their own goals. It is unfortunate, but explicable failure. The assassination of John Brogden is a previous example from the NSW opposition.

But this?

There is no game theoretic basis for sheer, bloody stupidity.

How do you keep an Irishman sober

2006-11-19T08:50:00.000+11:00

Have a look at this graph I took from the BBC article here.
I absolutely adore how the excise rate is directly correlated to their reputation for drunkenness. Whether these reputations are justified or not, it's always fun to have stereotypes supported by data.
The question is, of course, are the governments of these countries taxing vices they wish their countrymen to cut down on, or are they merely exploiting the price inelasticities?

The past as now.

2006-11-17T19:59:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I was thinking about Arthurian legends, chivalric tales and various other knightly stories. Arthur was a soldier of the dark ages, yet his later chroniclers, in Morte d'Arthur and others, and subsequently in later Romantic and modern works, have always portrayed him in armour, with a stone castle and other relics of the 15th or so century.

And why shouldn't they? In Malory's time technical (and social) change was slower, so it may have seemed reasonable to assume that the past was much the same as the present, except in regard to specific kings or the distant glory of the Roman empire.

But following the industrial revolution, knowledge of such processes has given us both science fiction for the future and a pretense of historical accuracy for the past.

Which brings me to a point. I wonder what our historical tales would be like if we had just assumed the past was much like the present. We are adept of doing this in a post modern way, or by way of recontextualisation, but I would like to see it done through pure naivety and ignorance of change. To an extent this happens in our portrayal of Cinderella, with high heels and a Prince in modern imperial garb, but I can only imagine a Raj with cars, pirates with steel hulls and the Bastille being stormed with Molotov cocktails.

Is it wrong to wish death just to see the autopsy?

2006-11-16T08:33:00.000+11:00

I want to see Sony collapse.

Not just go broke, or fade away. I mean collapse dramatically. Go Enron, OneTel, crash and burn, create corporate catastrophe.

I bear no grudge against Sony. I have no emotional attachments to any electronics company, and I am not a zealot of a rival, although I do note the hate that some people seem to hold towards the company.

It's just that a collapse of dramatic proportions would give both the motive and the means for journalists, regulators and authors to peer over its corpse and work out what was happening within it.

Because, truth be told, I want to know how Sony can be so damn dumb.

It's interesting to study historic actions of stupidity. Invasions are a great place to start. There are millions of words written on why actions like Pearl Harbour or Operation Barbarossa were undertaken. In the coming decades millions of words will be written asking how it was thought the Iraq war was a good idea.
Why was the Watergate break in undertaken, and why was the more damaging coverup undertaken so stupidly?
Who thought New Coke would work? Who kept giving money to Battlefield Earth, to Waterworld, to Heaven's Gate? Why did dot com shell companies attract so much venture capital?

All these actions of stupidity weren't undertaken by individuals, but by organisations. Each one was beholden to a vile stew of competing incentives, from internal politics, to the personal self interest of constituent individuals and random miscommunication.
And whilst each functional organisation is alike, all disfunctional ones are different, a new tragic operetta and dance of destruction.
Foolish military actions are often attributed to the pressures of military industrial complexes or political weakness at home (a good example being the Argentine junta and the Falklands). In a bubble you have to go along with the crowd even if they're obviously wrong lest you be fired, just ask Jeffrey Vinik. If you're a CEO, you have to look proactive and paradigm shifting, and miscellaneous other buzzwords, to justify your salary and ensure reelection. If that comes at the expense of your real job description, like running the company properly, who's to complain....I mean, besides everyone else.

So what kind of internal politics has led Sony to release exploding batteries, or better yet a hideously late, overpriced, under manufactured, faulty and loss inducing console?
I understand the concept of loss leading on a product to profit on the complimentary goods, but this looks faulty when your competition is underselling you considerably, and you still make a loss. Additionally, when the loss you lead with won't be covered for four years (ready for you to lose on a whole new generation), it looks a tad shaky.
Of course, they're getting Bluray players into homes, and Sony has a track record of getting it's own standards to be the market standards. Look at the success of BetaMax, and MiniDisc, and their DVD encoding, and UMD and...oh dear...

I can only assume there is some kind of zaibatsu pride going on. A company that values its achievements (internally that is, shareholders might feel different) by dominance rather that traditional business ideals like making money. This would certainly explain trophy buys like Columbia studios, which still aren't making any money (the occasional Spider-Man film merely offsets losses).
And part of this is a desperate need to control a medium. But in electronics (with the exception of MS Windows and perhaps Google) there are few examples of a company holding control for long. In fact, the most popular standards, whether it be email, html or the world wide web, are explicitly out of the hands of commercial control. Yet Sony still wants the prestige, as if they are like a railway track, one that can be built and then milked for profits and prestige indefinitely.
Microsoft also seems have the same need for dominance, Internet Explorer was made free and scored a Pyhrric victory over Netscape, and the Xbox and the Zune are further examples that may yet succeed, but these actions, no matter how loss inducing, don't seem as befuddled and incompetent as Sony's.

So I want to see Sony die, so I can peer through its ribcage to the twisted systems within. Maybe there is a perpetual need to pay back Nintendo for a slight nearly two decades old? Maybe market penetration is a substitute for other forms of penetration? If it crashed, Sony's corpse could be the most fascinating since that of the Third Reich, with hyperbole of course.

Language With Balls.

2006-11-14T08:35:00.000+11:00

Last night in bed (and that is the best way to start a post) I was thinking about standards.

Which I often do...in bed.

In any case I was thinking about how standards, standard measurements, standard protocols etc. came about, and how they spread.
In some cases it can be seemingly obvious. The government enforces a standard, which they may have created (such as the metric system) and the people follow. Right?
Well, sure a government can adopt a standard, but its ability to enforce it is another matter. If uncommon norms (such as prohibition) cannot take root, why should an uncommon standard do so. After all, the French revolutionary government may have had success with the metric system and civil law, but the revolutionary calendar and metric time are intriguing footnotes to the guillotine (itself a government mandated standard).
Moreover, some of the most important standards I can think of aren't enforced as such by government. I'm sure there aren't laws in most countries that require internet traffic to be run through email, the worldwide web or other familiar protocols. They are simply dominant because its in people's interests to use a single standard. That's why MS Office's alternative OpenOffice.Org necessarily has to include Office file formats. Likewise, there is no law that favoured VHS over Betamax, or will differentiate between HD-DVD and BluRay.
Now many of these standards have survived because of inherent benefits, metric measurements are more practical than the unwieldy imperial measurements, and VHS got a foot in the door with longer play times and more content.
But of course, there are always those that claim the standard reached suboptimal, such as DVORAK zealots, and more importantly many different standards have no apparent differences in quality between them. I'm not an electrician, but are any of these myriad electrical sockets inherently superior to any of the others?
There is one standard that every society must form, and most societies have formed seperately, and that is the most fundamental of all standards.
Language.
Most linguists hold that no language is inherently superior to another. Yet languages have coalesced into less forms as human movement and communication have increased.
Yet once upon a time one village could be considered unintelligible to another, and people considered themselves to speak simply as their locality spoke, rather than speaking a larger entity in the way I understand that I speak the same language as those in London.
Languages were initially natural standards amongst people in spoken language. But when these standards came to government, we gain standardised (especially in written form) languages, from Latin to Received Enunciation to New Norwegian. It is also why what we call Malay and Indonesian are mutually intelligible despite different names and different official forms, because "A language is a dialect with a navy".

But this language reminds me of another set of standards, that arose naturally from village to village before they became official.
Football.
And other sport of course.
Once upon a time, rules varied from town to town and from game to game as two teams would have to agree on the rules to play, a negotiation that continues in schoolyards to this day. But as leagues were formed and play expanded and increased, codification became necessary, and a variety of official standards bloomed, which is why many football codes are named for the organisation which codified them, Association Football (the name is also the basis of the term "soccer"), Rugby Union and Rugby League. Others of course are named solely for their place of origin. Many other variants died, with the exception of some living dinosaurs such as Harrow Football.
But there is not necessarily innate superiority to any one of these codes, despite jingoistic affection such as that which would make one claim their language was also superior. Yet some are flourishing multinational codes, some flourish within a single country (such as American and Australian football), and others have died or linger in a tiny corner of the globe.
Like....language. The same historical forces that propelled English to global status and Cornish to extinction are the same variety that have sent Association Football around the world, and kept Gaelic Football within Ireland.
Maybe cricket was the language of the British empire, and perhaps football will be the first global language of humanity

You don't look.

2006-11-13T12:15:00.000+11:00

I'm going to segue off a bit just to record something for prosperity, insofar that a blog gives such a blessing

A few weeks ago the missus and I were at an A-League encounter between the Newcastle Jets and Adelaide United.
For many years at football matches I had the pleasure of sitting in front of a knowledgeable Yorkshireman who gave good commentary in possibly the greatest accent ever bequeathed upon man. To this day I habitually cheer in my ersatz version of said accent.
Unfortunately this time that was not the case. The people behind us were stupid. Moronic. Inane. Idiotic. I could exhaust the thesaurus and not do them justice, and I shall not subject you to much of their conversation (which in accordance with the laws of the universe was as loud as it was brainless), just the best bit.

At one point, their conversation somehow turned to the sexualisation of preteens. An issue of obvious concern to many people throughout society, including, it seems, men of such dubious intellectual prowess as those behind us.
One snippet went:

"I think it's fucking disgusting the way you see tits on 10 year olds now"
"You know I have a 10 year old don't you mate?"
"well....yeah....but you know, you take a look..."
"no you don't"
"no.... I mean, you look...."
"No mate....you don't look. You don't look".

It may lose something in the transcription, particularly the grim, humourless sincerity of the second speaker, but I found it hilarious.

You. Don't. Look.

Descent into a cultural ghetto.

2006-11-12T11:49:00.000+11:00

The other day I was thinking about comic book stores and the absence of comics in newsagents. A medium which once thrived in the English speaking world from being a pulpy, an easily accessed and an inexpensive art form, is now restricted to a small, devoted clique which was both shrinking and off putting to outsiders.
Then I thought about the price. If anything, surely it was exorbitant prices that were creating a huge barrier to entry for prospective new readers. Further research produced this SHOCKING GRAPH.
I created a rough index of the price of a normal 22 page comic book (tracking price changes from the cover price of The Amazing Spider-Man and earlier timely comics productions, excluding specials and hologram covers etc.) and graphed it against the US Consumer Price index, from 1948 to 1997. For thirty years or so, until the early 80s, the trends were roughly equal, which is to be expected. But then the price of a comic book began to shoot above inflation, getting genuinely more expensive, and completely took off in the early 90s.
Of course, direct sales (comic book stores) began to expand in the 1980s, and the early 90s saw the comic book boom. Both events helped sideline comics into a niche market, and took comics from a popular, mass medium, to a small powerless elite.
From 1948 to 1997 prices increased 7 fold, but comic books increased by 3 times that. If I had continued to data to the current day (I only had CPI data til 1997) they would have shown a 30 fold increase.
If a kid was to get into comics today, he would have to enter a dispiriting den called a comic book store (whose denizens may deserve the disrepute they entertain amongst outsiders) where they're not allowed to touch anything. They'd then need to fork over their parent's mortgage repayment for the month to get a single issue of a 6 part story which requires wikipedia character histories to understand anyway. The price means the 30 million colours in high resolution printing on the splash pages is there, and the continuity affirms the elitism of the traditional readers, but this doesn't matter to the kid.
Moreover he or she will get confronted with this:
....so they don't start reading.
I cannot think of another medium that has (in English speaking culture) drawn itself into such a cultural ghetto. However, Science Fiction in all forms as a genre was once the same, and to some extent it has extricated itself. Perhaps comics as a medium can do the same.

Compulsory voting fights global warming.

2006-11-08T08:52:00.000+11:00

The Freakonomics blog today speaks about voter turnout, and refers to this Slate article, which brings up many of the questions I have about compulsory voting here in Australia.

Presumably, compulsory voting works on the principle that people would rather vote than pay a fine, so that the cost of not voting is greater than the costs involved with taking 10 minutes to go to the local primary school on a Saturday.

But the fine is negligible, and I have a friend who has not voted in 20 years, yet has never been fined (He may go to live in China, where there are no such expectations). I am very sure that most people know the chance of getting caught is negligible, particularly as the truly apathetic won't even register to vote.

So it's hard to say that the fine is a true incentive on voter's behavior.

Meanwhile, there are media reports that people are prepared to pay carbon taxes. If they have a preference for being environmentally friendly, they could simply not drive as much, but it seems people want enforcement to keep their behavior in check, particularly when it impacts on others. This could also lead to fat taxes, and may be behind pushes to ban vice on the fear that one may use it. I am sure we all know "social smokers", who will blame the presence of other smokers for their own relapses.

Obviously community enforcement matters, and the law is apparently a codified version of community values. Afterall, the unquestioned laws (murder, theft) are values that predate government, and those without public support (prohibition, denial of women's suffrage) fade away, albeit with a lag.

The case of compulsory voting seems to imply the mere symbolism of a popular, yet unenforced law, is enough to change voter behavior. Does this mean symbolic laws can fight other externalities? A symbolic law against short car journeys? Against leaving the air conditioner on when you leave the house? I don't know the extent of enforcement of Sydney's recent water restrictions, but I know they are widely obeyed when they must be easy to evade, and they are if not "popular" laws, laws whose necessity is widely recognised.

The costs of giving up some car journeys may be higher than the costs of 15 minutes on a Saturday once or so a year, but it's an interesting question to ask, "just how much can popular symbolic laws fight externalities".

An inauspicious beginning

2006-11-07T11:39:00.000+11:00

I want to write a world history of pants.

That is to say, trousers.

Trousers to the Romans were the dress of the barbarians, the attire of Celts or Germanic Hordes. To China they seem to have come from Mongols, or other northern types. To Japan they may well have first come upon the black ships of the unwashed Perry.

And just look what those barbarians did. Pants are the Galactus of ancient civilizations, great white cities of togas quailed before them.

Or do they simply sweep away decadence? They came to prominence in Europe in the middle of the last Millenium, a spark for the reformation, the Enlightenment, and for a Western Europe that conquered the world. Japan emerged from the stagnation of the Edo period and rapidly rose on the world stage, casting off the kimono of a feudal backwater for the pants of a bright young power.

Then, in the 20th century, societies began to realise the potential of their populations by allowing the female half to take their place in work, science and art, a right taken by millions of women, women in pants.

Pants, the most powerful garment in human existence.