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Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
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Hi Gavin, maybe a link would suffice next time?
Excessive spamming about the new Ford hatchback, on Radio National at the moment and at a tech website I previously had respect for.
Credibility fail.
http://www.istartedsomething.com/
Cornelius Cardew was discussed on the Music Show this morning, which was a nice surprise, even his Scratch Orchestra got a mention…
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicshow/stories/2011/3322519.htm
…The Scratch Orchestra:
http://www.musicnow.co.uk/scratch.html
Decision time: should I go back to Japan in late October to see the beloved, or should I stay in Brisbane and say hello to Betty?
It’s Metaday!
So, just kicking ideas around for shits ‘n giggles here — ya get me?
I’m going to make a move analagous here to a reverse theodicy, just to see how it plays out:
—-
“Theodicy” A) There exists a website called Lazy Posters, whose members exhibit all the hallmarks of a closed-shop, groupmind-y, hivethink-y, closed ranks-y circle jerk, so much so that any amateur sociologist could pick it in 5-seconds flat —
“Theodicy” B) There exists a population of free-floating interlopers who, possessing all the intersubjective awareness of a cantaloupe, flit from site to site, and instead of discussing the topic at issue on any given thread, can’t refrain from lapsing after one-and-a-half posts into complaints about the behaviour and perceived shortcomings of the hosts. Whereas the hosts themselves put up topics and conversation-starters because they want to have a conversation about those topics; the interlopers routinely decide that the really important topic at issue is the behaviour and perceived shortcomings of the hosts themselves — and comment on such at every opportunity, garnished with extravagant assertions of “theodicy” (A) above. The interlopers consider “theodicy” (A) to be a robust sociological observation about closed-group behaviours, and consider themselves to be above it all, able to make sound judgements without reflection or critical awareness.
—-
As with a reverse theodicy, (B) provides an equally fitting post-hoc explanation of the observed phenomena as explanation (A).
You see, I’ve been here a while, and observed that at semi-frequent intervals, different interlopers with different nyms come along and exhibit all the behaviours described at (B), replete with belligerent posturing, tendentious questioning, haughty denunciations of the LP oeuvre and indignant protest when their behaviour is met with a congruently uncivil response.
Since numerous different adherents of (A) over several years have exhibited all the behaviours encapsulated by (B), I’m going to infer that (B) is an hypothesis that has testable predictive power!
Let’s see which “theodicy” remains standing!
Meh. Mangled penultimate paragraph. The testable hypothesis I propose is that, ceteris paribus, an adherent of “theodicy” A will behave in the manner described by “theodicy” B.
Meta out!
Terangeree @ 5, unaccountably you did get caught in the spam filter. With a bit of luck the beast will learn.
Betty is going to lift our spirits, according to Anna Bligh.
In Dymocks yesterday, it was notable that all books about Julia Gillard were heavily discounted. A sign that she’ll be gone before Xmas?
Terry said:
Well I discount most of what is said of Ms Gillard and by her too, so that is not surprising.
Improbable, regardless of whether that occurs. Some more likely hypotheses come to mind:
1. Lots of books are being discounted because people now buy far more books online
2. People aren’t that interested in politicians generally. Costello’s book was remaindered pretty quickly.
3. People aren’t nearly as interested in Ms Gillard as are the regime-change media.
4. The book was overpriced in the current market.
5. Books require considerable space and space costs money. If some other books than those being heavily discounted look like being more promising stock to put on the limited shelf space available discounting the slow/moving or low margin stock makes sense.
When you think about it, most books are a considerable waste of space and money. Most are only read once. Libraries could perhaps be charged, and collect a small royalty for every time a book is loaned.
Some books are keepers. Some people may even like to keep a Julia Gillard book rather than read it once and store it. I wouldn’t bother to read one, even if it was a gift. There are just so many people in this world worth reading about more than Julia and I will never get to read about them either.
I had a feeling people may want to correct that relationship drawn. Actually, there is one book on an Australian politician that goes against all of the trends discussed above, having gone into an updated second edition and prominently displayed throguhout the store.
Unfortuntely for many on this site, that book is “Lazarus Rising”
AIUI, Howard’s Lazarus Rising sold 4000 fewer than Ben Cousins’ My Life Story. Currently hot on Nielsen Book Scan is one about Darren Lockyer. That may tell us something.
We also need to put an asterisk next to the sales of the Howard book. One suspects that large numbers would have been purchased by LNP-related organisations, much as was the Plimer book, for reasons having little to do with its intrinsic quality.
* CONTAINS FOUL LANGUAGE *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S18gsZ37QXY
Pop Quiz
I this clip, which argument participant, shows more:-
(a) intelligence ?
(b) self-respect ?
(c) debating skill ?
(d) tolerance ?
All respected qualities on LP.
Oops, “In this clip”
And the answers are NOT the bull.
Re the Palestinian move for UN status, perhaps a magnanimous public gesture by Netanyahu is what the world is now waiting for: Obama’s promised veto in the security council is regrettable and diminishes him and the US.
The world welcomed East Timor into the UN in 2002 after that country had lived under four hundred years of colonisation, occupation and oppression, surely it’s time for the international community to extend some good grace to the Palestinians.
@6
that’s exactly sort of tendentious theorising I would expect from one of you people.
{the sort}
As you were (hivemind)
Fran, if the point is that bogans are buying “Lazarus Rising” alongside their Ben Cousins’ autobiography and books about Darren Lickyer, then I can’t think of any more damning indictment of Julia Gillard’s Prime Ministerial tenure.
Far more than her predecessor, Julia Gillard absolutely craves a sense of oneness with suburban Australia. That was what her initial appointment was about (Rudd apparently failing the “Lindsay test”), what the “Real Julia” interlude was about, and why she is pursuing, and continuing to pursue – against all sensible advice – the Malaysia Solution, in a desperate attempt to appear more anti-refugee than Tony Abbott. Anohter collapse in her polling is surely immanent.
FWIW, the additional chapters of “Lazarus Rising” see Howard arguing that Rudd would easily have won the 2010 Federal election over Abbott, since he would have had a simple campaign message “our economic policies kept Australia out of recession”. As it was, Julia Gillard had to trash her predecessor’s record, and as such had little to campaign on. A good government has lost its way, and all that …
I’m still wondering when someone is going to find the problem with the faster-than-light neutrino experiment, now that the results from OPERA have been out for half a week on arXiv.
My (completely non-expert) money’s on something wrong with the GPS.
@ Fran
“Howard’s Lazarus Rising sold 4000 fewer than Ben Cousins’ My Life Story.”
Which means at the time of writing that means the previous best-seller political autobiography sold 6000 fewer than Ben Cousins’ book.
Your silly comparison aside, Howard has already beaten the previous best-selling autobiography of Hawke. The paperback sales will most likely see Howards book pass the 100,000 mark.
Compare political books with political books, not sport stars.
Apples and oranges.
“We also need to put an asterisk next to the sales of the Howard book.”
No we do not.
“One suspects…”
Uhuh, assumption and making stuff up time coming.
“large numbers would have been purchased by LNP-related organisations”
There it is, the bullshit factor.
Do you have any proof of this or are you just making this up as you go along?
“Darren Lickyer”! May well be a book about something other than a career in Rugby League.
My local Bilo Supermarket has just installed 6 self serve checkout machines. There’s another dozen entry level jobs gone. WTF are we doing. I’m all for boycotting the bastards!
@14 Wantook
Rather curious reportage of Palestine’s request for status at the U.N. by the Victorian ABC news this morning. The 7.45a.m & I think the following Tony Eastely A.M. report gave soundbites of the reception at the U.N. to President Abbas’ speech with a short version of the Israeli response Netanyahou. The Abbas speech was received very well and was interrupted several times by clapping.
It was curious to me that the 8.30 a.m. version of the news completely omitted the references to Abbas’ speech or its reception and played only a soundbite from Netanyahou saying he would hold out his hand to Palestine (with strings attached). Perhaps the differences in emphases given in both news services depended on the News Editor of the day but it was very puzzling that there was such a difference.
Terry
Karmichael Hunt is not mentioned at Spoonerists Anonymous (SA) either.
Marisan.
With ya.
@17, right Roger — I’ll chalk one up for the (B) team, then
I’m rooting for something wrong with the GTR, Jess. I’ve always been a lousy punter.
It’s always dangerous to bet against Einstein su. That man had a direct line to the architect.
Ironically, most of the folks who voted for John Howard over the last decade probably don’t like the guy enough (or indeed politicians generally enough) to buy and read a weighty tome about him. That’s probably why we see so many somewhat successful left and centre-left political bios and hardly any from the other side of the fence.
@Guy
“Ironically, most of the folks who voted for John Howard over the last decade probably don’t like the guy enough (or indeed politicians generally enough) to buy and read a weighty tome about him.”
Well as more people have bought Howards book than other politicians such as Hawke, your logic would suggest Labor folk like their politicians even less.
Would that be a fair assesment of your thinking?
Can anyone think of a reason why I shouldn’t buy a Kindle 3G with my tax return money?
‘Cos your question sounds like you’re from a get-paid-to-post-product-sales-related-questions-on-blogs marketing campaign?
Google ‘tax return’ and ‘buy a kindle’ and you’ll see what I mean.
Personally, I think Kindles are great. But I couldn’t care less what you, or anybody else, does with their tax return money. Sorry.
But, since you asked, why not buy a pig? Or an exercise bike? Mebbe a Royal Doulton figurine? You could even donate it to your local school, or just hand it to the fifth person you walk past on the street tomorrow morning. Just to mention a few possibilities.
“Libraries could perhaps be charged, and collect a small royalty for every time a book is loaned.”
SG – not sure if this is what you mean, but Australia has a public lending right scheme whereby the government pays authors according to how many copies of their books are held in libraries. Another taxpayer funded source of retirement income for JWH – few libraries would not have bought it, probably a lot more than bought the Ben Cousins book.
Perhaps people are buying Lazarus Rising to count the bulldust. I read the other day he had to delete from the second edition a reference to inviting Bob Menzies decendents to the lodge after he became Prime Minister. It didn’t happen. He made it up. The liberals didn’t nick name him Honest John for nothing.
Russell @ 33, the concept is known as Public Lending Right. Australia passed a PLR Act in 1985.
There’s a related concept of Educational Lending Right. I think you’ll find that it is based on an actual survey of schools.
Here’s more on the schemes.
Just went to see the new movie ‘Red Dog’. Thought there were Aboriginal people in north west Western Australia? Funny how the movie didn’t show any!
Jess @ 20: Thanks for the pointer to the arXiv, under hep and search term ‘opera’:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897
(the local mirror was offline); I became fairly familiar with arXiv chasing up physics aspects of some of the more esoteric of 9/11.
su @ 27: Actually the neutrino terminal velocity is no big deal; if the momentum of the neutrino is less than the momentum of the photon. It will make a difference to the GTR, but no more than Einstein made to Newton. By the way Newton was more hard headed than Einstein, but inventions and discoveries lead to deeper insights.
@Tom: Yep – I think there were 30k people watching the release of that paper so it’s not surprising that the server is down. They’ve been remarkably thorough in trying to find sources of error, and when they’re stumped they’ve opened it up for comment – that’s an excellent way to do science.
I’m not sure that it’s as simple as checking the momentum of the neutrinos though, because neutrinos have mass (which we can check because they have state oscillations – so it’s small but it’s there). So if a neutrino and a photon were travelling at c, the neutrino would have more momentum (in fact an infinite amount more). That’s a pretty big problem for Einstein if this measurement is verified.
I think the insertion of a ‘reply’ button might be of some assistance here. (With all due respect to the site architect.) (Of course.)
(That bloke on the Music Show, towards the end, yesterday. He said “of course” a least four times in the first minute I heard him.
Neurotic speech pattern noted and I lost interest in whatever it was he was banging on about. Of course, life for him was of course a done deal, of course.
)
Marisan @ 23 – all the supermarkets seem to be slowly rolling out self checkouts. I do love them though. Now I can avoid talking to another person when doing my shopping! And I don’t get stuck behind talkative people in the queues too
@39
Clearly…
Chris @ 41
So all those people that filled that reasonably unskilled position as their first step into the workforce are to be thrown to the tender mercies of CentreLink just so you can avoid talking to them.
I have to say, my love of a good chat notwithstanding, I’ve come to like the self-serve checkouts.
Well I, for one, absolutely REFUSE to use them.
I’d rather see someone with a job than a machine that only serves to increase the bottom line.
Marisan – with the growth of the service industries there’s quite a demand for low skill workers still – look at the number of people who have cleaners these days. Besides, no one is forced to use the self checkouts. A great alternative for those who like them though.
Chris @ 46
“look at the number of people who have cleaners these days”
You don’t mean (Gasp) Servants do you?
Self-serve checkouts afford an excellent opportunity to accidentally press the adjacent ‘celery’ button when weighing up your cherries.
Not that I’d ever do such a thing.
In the end though Marisan, someone has to install and maintain the machines, so jobs are still there, albeit they may require more and different skills.
Hi Fran,
Installation is a one off.
Maintenance: probably 1 hour per machine every six months.
So I agree, jobs are still there but a hell of a lot less jobs and with a higher skill base therefore locking out those that used to be Checkout Chicks.
(I am not denigrating Checkout Chicks/ Guys in any way)
There is, of course, the security person to stop FDB from pressing the Celery button.
I doubt your figures Marisan, but even if I accepted them the question of equity no more turns on make work schemes than it did on workhouses in the 19th century.
What is needed is to ensure that the burdens and benefits of work are shared about rationally and equitably. If the amount of work required declines, then that should mean an increase in discretionary time for all without loss of material benefit.
Having people wait in queues to get goods is not productive if it is avoidable.
FDB
That tactic ( to be frowned upon, of course) could be employed to fight of the horrendous effect of bananas( serial culprit ) on the inflation rate.
But I for 1 prefer to encourage a young person to get of the Xbox and learn the value of an “earned dollar”
Hi Fran,
“What is needed is to ensure that the burdens and benefits of work are shared about rationally and equitably. If the amount of work required declines, then that should mean an increase in discretionary time for all without loss of material benefit.”
Now that is something I heartily agree with.
Remember when Computers first came into the workplace?
They were supposed to give us more leisure time.
How has that worked out?
Marisan asked:
Modestly well. We can now avoid standing in the RTA to re-register our cars. We can call each other despite being away from landlines and avoid time wasting. We can do at least some shopping online, avoid having to hand-write things out, have shopping lists on spreadsheets, find detailed information on the weather or movies in near real time, watch TV when we want to and avoid the ads. Most goods cost less when measured against the work time needed to earn the money to buy them. Most of us have an official work week shorter than in 1980.
Fran @ 53, (Yes I know, right above)
I didn’t explain myself properly.
I meant Leisure time from YOUR Workplace.
If computers have doubled productivity since 1980 (The figure is far greater but for the purpose of the discussion let it stand) why are we still working a 38 hour week instead of a 19 hour week?
FDB @ 48 – quite a few people doing that. Apparently because they pay something many don’t consider it stealing.
Marisan @ 47 – well I avoid having servants count and bag my groceries where I can when I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself
@55 Chris
“well I avoid having servants count and bag my groceries where I can when I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself”
Following your logic i must assume that you never eat at restaurants as you can cook and serve your own food unless you are NOT perfectly capable of doing it yourself of course.
Chris,
“Marisan @ 47 – well I avoid having servants count and bag my groceries where I can when I’m perfectly capable of doing it myself”
But what about the income those servants (Actually employees) generate and place back into the economy?
I used the term ” servants” to mean the old job description ” Menials”
ie: those that do the jobs that are below me.
“Most of us have an official work week shorter than in 1980.”
No, no no.
Ignoring the (possibly) weasel word ‘official’, the truth is that most people work longer hours than they did in the 80s, particularly if their job involves time saving technology.
Also you may recall the paperless office.
@ Adrian
“Ignoring the (possibly) weasel word ‘official’, the truth is that most people work longer hours than they did in the 80s, particularly if their job involves time saving technology.”
I agree. here is an article you may find interesting. I know it is American and from 2005 but it does support your point nicely.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_40/b3953601.htm
Get with the program Marisan. ‘Servants’ aren’t ‘menials’ OR ‘employees’ any more. They ‘team members’.
Jess @ 38
Photons have zero rest mass, but they do have relativistic mass. Their momentum is proportional to their relativistic mass.
Adrian
“Ignoring the (possibly) weasel word ‘official’, the truth is that most people work longer hours than they did in the 80s, particularly if their job involves time saving technology.”
We have a winner!
If everyone refused unpaid overtime we would solve the unemployment and underemployment problems worldwide.
The need to do paid overtime merely underscores how inadequate the wages on offer are.
This begs the question ” Why are we allowing this to be done to us?”
Marisan – I don’t consider cleaning below me. But it does buy me time with my daughter I wouldn’t otherwise have. And self checkouts are normally pretty time efficient too.
Apparently there was an incident at Dubbo Woolies ( I know, aren’t I well-connected), whereby someone stuffed up the programming for “buy two items get the second one free” so that the price of every second scanned item was deducted from the running total. Within a couple of nanoseconds the population far and wide got wind of this and were queueing at the self-serve checkouts so they could scan a more expensive item every second item, buy hundreds of dollars worth of groceries and be given hundreds of dollars cash change, without paying a cent.
Hi Chris,
But how many cleaners do you need?
What happens to your cleaning job when the GFC Mk 2 appears.
I’m not denigrating anyone but destroying viable jobs with technology seems a retrograde step just to increase your convenience.
And, if we worked a 19 hour week, due to doubled productivity, you’d have plenty of time for your daughter
Self service checkouts have made me appreciate manned checkouts all the more. I don’t mind them, but always seem to have items which either don’t scan or cause some sort of grief and require human intervention.
Far easier to hive off these problems to a checkout chick/bloke, who also packs the groceries in the bags far more efficiently than I.
As a grumpy old woman, I can’t say I’ve had a problem with talkative checkout staff. Having done this sort of work myself, having a brief chat with about the first 10 customers is bearable; after that please shut up, I don’t wish to talk to you.
Cmmc at 3: yes, I noticed the shameless Ford Fiesta product placement piece on ABC Radio National too. 20 minutes of it. Warrants a complaint – not just on that basis, but also because the interviewer was highly rude and unprofessional, she interrupted and rode over the designer’s answers to her questions no fewer than 8 times!
Jess @38 and Tom,
The difference is measured in (many) nano-seconds; this is huge.
If it was femto-seconds I would look for experimental error.
Huggy
dear anyone
i go to coles in the city 2 or 3 times a week. half way from work to bus – that’s my convenience. i pay cash everywhere whenever i can – the less “they” know about me & my “shopping habits” the better, as far as i’m concerned. so, i always go to the check-out people. heck, there’s even one woman at the city store who remembers me from week to week, even after i was on leave. i don’t know how she does it, but talk about service with a smile after a hard day at the office. and as for the convenience of self-serve check-out, the line up is plenty fast fro me & besides i won’t be doing what i consider their work for them, even if it didn’t cost jobs at the check-out.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
p.s. – my first job in australia was as an office cleaner & now i’m privileged to be a middle manager no one in earshot gets away with idly slagging off the cleaners. -a.v.
Well, my official work week in 1980 consisted of finger-painting on Mondays, macaroni-gluing on Tuesdays, and something ghastly involving melodicas on Wednesdays, I think…
My hours since than have gone up enormously! But productivity about the same, I reckon
dear su
what a nice story about the dubbo wollies & its wayward self-serve check-out. it brings to memory occasions from the era before mobile phones when the telstra phone booths would stuff up & allow unlimited overseas calls for the price of a local call, around forty cents then. i remember one time when the “problem” remained “unfixed” for an entire weekend. people came out in the evening and into the wee hours to use it. they even queued up along the street & around a corner for a while, chatting & waiting a turn. it was summer & warm and everyone was in good spirits, civil & considerate – people wanting to talk longer just re-joined the queue for half an hour & had another go. the police drove by a couple of times but didn’t stop.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
More on the Ford Focus product placement on ABC’s “By Design” – interviewer Janne Ryan appears to have a bit of form writing on the car industry, including in business intelligence mags dating back to 2008, and is also very acting in commercial branding professional circles. I hope she herself isn’t a strategic placement with the ABC on behalf of the car industry.
I may be being a bit gloomy here, but my take on self checkouts is that at present they are more convenient than staffed checkouts – just so that people will move to them. However, as more people move over to them, they will get more clogged and queues will form to the point that you will wait just as long at these new machines as you once did at the checkout.
At which point, the Wu Li shareholders get the benefits, and we will be in the far queues.
dear Marks
too right! there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
the reason consumers are offered this “convenience” is because the company will make more profit from each transaction, through eliminating staff & getting the “customer” to check out & pack their own groceries, after proffering their credit cards to the store computer, for stock-take & other record-keeping (for in order to offer better targeted service, of course, scout’s honour) and payment from their bank, &c. repeatedly. every penny the company saves by laying off staff & getting “customers”, under the guise of convenience, to do work for free, that paid staff used to do, is a penny more profit to the company. repeatedly.
counter-factual consideration: do they offer staff to take customers bags to their cars for them, or load ‘em into the trunk/boot for them? obviously very convenient, especially if you’re old or infirm, and shop. but considered an unacceptable impost on the owners profit, & the almighty shareholders dividend, when they can lay off staff & get “customers” to do work for free.
in the name of convenience, they get to lay off staff, increase their profit, and get you to do free stuff for them. and then the equipment gets old & begins to break down. and, later on down the road, if there’s a financial crash & poor people try to scam the scanners, well, the company’s got their credit card details & lawyers, and, after all, the scanners are there for customer “convenience” & not to be “misused”, &c., &c., &c.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Stop picking on Janne Ryan – that part of the program is called Trends and Products, of course they’ll be talking about products! As someone who generally hates new technology I found it interesting to find out about ‘self-parking’ cars.
Background Briefing this morning was talking about new products too – the Google wallet thing etc. I’ve always hoped I would die before having to buy a mobile phone, but it looks like they will soon be indispensable.
On radio announcers voices: I reckon you can actually hear intelligence in Janne Ryan’s voice, which makes a nice change. Many of the female radio announces have unpleasant voices – a rough, rasping edge to every word. I never listened to Fran Kelly because of her voice. Compare with Geraldine Doogue or Margaret Throsby.
As for talking over guests – that’s just standard and often makes me turn off the radio. I can’t listen to Philip Adams’ program because of it, even though he has good guests. Just as bad is the mouth-breathing impatient sounds announcers make when you know they want the guest to shut up. Alan Saunders gave a classic example on By Design the week before when interviewing Clover Moore – didn’t she know she was meant to respond to every question in three very short sentences?
You could tell he had a list of questions he had planned to ask, so he wouldn’t actually listen to what she said and respond, actually have a civilised conversation, no, as soon as she was hurried to end one answer, he would go on to the next topic. Very annoying radio.
I thought I might translate an article from the NZZ, which will hopefully help to improve my German and might interest some of you, at the same time.
Destructive dynamic in trading room
The timing of the study’s publication is perfect: in an MBA paper from the university of St.Gallen by Thomas Noll and Pascal Scherrer, the authors investigated the behaviour of 27 professional traders, mostly employed in Swiss banks, but also in Swiss commodities trading companies and hedge funds.
The study was conducted using a method which enabled a direct comparison with an existing study of 24 Psychopaths in German high-security clinics and a control group of 24 “normal” people. The starting hypothesis was that the financial professionals, in a computer simulation based on the Prisoner’s dilemma, would behave in a similar manner to the psychopaths– ruthlessly, selfishly and unco-operatively, but would however achieve markedly better performance outcomes.
This assumption was disproved, albeit unfavourably for the traders: The traders behaved in a way, which was significantly less cooperative than both the psychopaths and the control group. Out of 40 game turns, on average more than 12 [game turns] were uncooperative. The psychopaths — whose character one can simplify by describing it as being without empathy or feelings of responsibility, in comparison, chose [on average] uncooperative tactics 4.4 times. The result in the control group was 0.2.
In the performance criteria the end result for the professional traders, who trade in stocks, derivatives and currency trading, was actually worse than the psychopaths. Indeed the traders maximised their relative Profit at the cost of their simulated competition, but in the important performance category — total profits, they achieved a slightly worse result than the psychopaths. “If one seeks only to maximise one’s relative profit by reducing the total profit of the competition, that is actually very destructive,” said co-author Thomas Noll. Noll is a psychiatrist and head of the youth detention centre Poeschweis. “It is like destroying the neighbour’s expensive car with a baseball bat, to make one’s own car the best in the neighbourhood.”
[And then there's some discussion about the transferability of the study/ simulation to actual trading, etc.]
Gruezzi!!
Russell
Re: Philip Adams — indeed. It’s most annoying, precisely because he often has interesting guests and all you hear is him, trolling his own interview.
I don’t mind a chat with the checkout chick/chap at all, if both of us are in the mood. In my 3 local supers, one is a friend of my daughter saving to go overseas. Another is a fellow student in the course I’m doing, and another I met turned out to be a retired doctor of all things – she was busily promoting a scheme where you donated to the childrens hospital in return for your name on a flower on the wall. I was feeling a bit under the weather and she started asking me questions, next thing I knew she volunteered that she had actually been a medico. Stress got too much. I’ve got to know a few of the older ladies on the checkouts over the years – sometimes they tell you things. Is that so very bad? They are mostly decent people. What kind of world where people prefer to deal with a machine. I heard some radio commentator on ABC once saying she couldn’t stand it when checkout people ask ‘how are you’ or ‘are you having a good day’. The woman displayed arrogant attitude I thought – just because they are told to say it doesn’t mean you should be contemptuous of them – at least it’s a chance at real human interaction. The world is becoming too robot for my liking. I won’t use the ‘self check outs’. But then, I left school just around the time of the early 80s recession. I remember the ‘fun’ of applying for job after job. Don’t be too complacent about technology taking over. Anyway, our supermarket went under in the Bris floods, and only reopened some months later – I returned there to find that people working there were just over the top helpful. I suppose they’d been told to, but they seemed to be enjoying it.
I can see the old prison “wheel” will soon be reinstated Joe, but the repetitive and ultimately futile exercise will this time involve the psychopaths being issued with laptops and phone headsets.
Some discussion of employment has started now that the issue of capitalist economic crisis has thrust itself onto the worlds stage. So all the old notions over employment and how to keep people working is bound to get dragged up. The discussion is already very lively in Europe. It’s gone beyond talk to massive demonstrations and even riots in Greece. Unemployment is big but just how big is hidden by massive underemployment in the US with widespread (relative) poverty noted by Brian in another thread. The issue is huge in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine and so on around the world. In this era when capitalism is ‘global’ it is perhaps the most common of all problems humanity confronts. So before people start on this very important discussion, at this left of center blogg, a discussion that will see all the old ‘solutions’ restated, it would be a good idea to get some left theory on the issue stated up front so that we have at least some common language to talk. The issue seems so normal to modern people that we need to recall that for many thousands of years there was never even a concept of unemployment. Employment is the very basic reason for unemployment.
Anyway this 30 year old document is IMV a great place to start the discussion from http://www.lastsuperpower.net/docs/unemploy-rev If people really want to think about this issue and not just throw out thoughts about preserving petrol pump jobs or the night cart mans employment perhaps the mods would put up a special thread? I hope so.
dear Shingle
when they ask me “how are you?” i take the opportunity to say “fine & how are you?” when they ask “flybys?”, i say “no, thank-you”. when i go, i say something like “i hope your bus is dry & on time”. it costs nothing to be nice to people who do stuff for you. nothing.
yours sincerely
alfred vension
dear alfred venison
I always chat with checkout staff and try not to use self serve check outs. Most of the time I get my fuel at a service station, and even tho I often do my own petrol pumping I know the crew there and always chat to them. As some of you may know I just became a dad, and the people at my preferred petrol station were asking how things were going. They obviously knew enough to take the time to comment. The other day I was in a hurry to get out of a big chain store, one that has one checkout person and several self service sections, because I had to pick up my wife and new bub from the hospital, and the line on the real check out was just too long. I still feel a bit bad about that.
I never use reward cards either. Something in a Robert Rankin novel years ago put me off them, just before the became a big deal.
And cash – always cash.
What is it with that stupid ad for a debit card where everyone is swiping their cards like a robot and some guy comes along with cash to pay and it upsets the consumer production line the checkout crew have going? Everyone looks at the person using cash like they have committed some terrible social faux pas. Cos they used cash.
As long as you have cash you have control of your own spending. How long till a particular bank has a deal with a particular supermarket to give free transactions to every customer and said supermarket ups the fees on their use of non compliant bank accounts? While we pay in cash that can’t happen. While we pay in cash we can’t get charged service fees for using our own money.
What really cracks me up is that I know a guy who runs a hydro shop. He has EFTPOS!!!! Thats unbelievable, most of his customers would be growing something unlegal and yet they might conceivably use an electronic payment system.
Jules – so how do solve the problem of coins?
I mentioned Background Briefing earlier, unaware, until I read Eureka Street this morning, that it is destined for the chop. I think it’s the only serious investigative reporting program left on the ABC. Ah well, must get rid of those specialists. Remember when RN got rid of its environment program? – of course environmental issues have been of no interest these past few years.
alfred @ 75 – there was one supermarket I used to go to that no matter what time of day (and it was a 24 hour one) you went it always had the same long queues. During the quiet times they just put on less staff. Someone must have done a study into how long they could make people wait without getting so frustrated they’d shop somewhere else.
To me the holy grail of supermarket shopping is when pretty much everything is rfid tagged, or some equivalent, and you can just push your whole trolley next to a scanner which adds it all up for you automatically. Then just swipe your card or give the machine the cash.
In addition to home delivery some supermarkets are already experimenting with being able to order online and then just drive up to your local branch to pick up the items already packed for you. I guess they could do drive throughs eventually! So there’s a growing number of alternatives for those who can’t scan/bag their own groceries.
If you like chatting to random people then I’ve no problem with that. Just nice to have an alternative for those like me that don’t.
When I was in NZ a few years ago I was stunned to see two people at every checkout counter. One person to scan the items and one person to pack them in the bags!
jules @ 82 – I have much better control of my spending using a debit or credit card than compared with cash and I avoid cash wherever possible. There’s a clear record where I spend my money which I keep track of in an accounting program. Much easier to work out where I’m spending my money and therefore work out where I can spend less. With cash its so easy to lose track of where it goes.
Does he have a reward card system yet Jules : ) Many congratulations on the birth of your child.
“some supermarkets are already experimenting with being able to order online and then just drive up to your local branch to pick up the items already packed for you”
Worse and worse. Just further proof supermarkets are evil and should be shunned by progressive thinkers. They mostly sell junk and they treat customers as if they were junk. As if they don’t already separate people from food enough already, in the future people won’t even bother to go to a supermarket to see what the best, freshest produce is there (and it’s never the best and rarely fresh) to choose from, no, they’ll click on icons from their computer screen and just collect the stuff later. Supermarkets are an all-round disaster.
Supermarkets experimenting with online ordering and subsequent pickup is almost a return to the way my grandmother used to shop. She’d phone the local grocer with an order (or maybe walk over and order stuff personally), then the grocer would box it up and deliver it later that day. I think he had a horse and cart, but it may have been an elderly Morris van.
“I think he had a horse and cart ..”
So you might have got free manure for the roses too, you won’t get that these days!
My local Coles used to have a few 1-tonne trucks for home deliveries. I guess orders are phoned in and done online. In the last year, the ranks have swollen to maybe 8-10, each with a driver’s-name decal on the bodywork.
I reckon it’s cute.
Russell @ 86 – people who really care about the fresh produce don’t go to supermarkets to get their fresh food. Besides there are specialist fruit and veg home delivery companies now, and those that I’ve tried deliver excellent quality produce.
Chris, not everyone who “really cares” about something will have the time, money and privilege to express that caring in retail terms.
Helen – true – if you’re short on both time and money. If you have lots of time then you can get generally get better quality things cheaper, assuming you’re not stuck in the middle of nowhere. If you have lots of money you pay someone else to get you the quality produce.
But even in supermarket terms you can still choose to shop at the supermarket rather than online. No one is forcing people to use these pick up or home delivery supermarket services. In fact they’re often more expensive. But they do save people time, and for many thats a net benefit for them, and their choice to do so.
“not everyone who “really cares” about something will have the time, money and privilege to express that caring in retail terms”
Can I add in ‘knowledge’? You would think people knew that basic, fresh foods were likely to be better than processed stuff, but given the amount of advertising, and the saturation availability, that knowledge is likely to be swamped by misinformation and convenience. The local farmers markets that are springing up give some hope.
Supermarkets are of course the slippery slope to this.
Sometimes an article can just make you heartsick for what should have been.
link
Last try
Iv’e never understood the “lefty/righty” thing.
Where would Vladimir Putin fit in?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/09/vladimir-putin-action-man/100147/
Historically, the “left” “right” political division derives from
how the brand new French Republic of 1789 chose to seat the various elected people’show various representatives in France’s Legislative Assembly chose to seat themselves just before the revolution in 1789 – those who supported the king’s regime to the right of the president, and those who advocated revolution to the president’s left.I’m sure you can see how such a classification is no longer necessarily especially relevant/useful more than two centuries later in entirely different countries addressing rather different social structures other than in the very broadest terms. The Political Compass attempts to address some of the most simplistic flaws in the left-right model with its addition of an Authoritarian/Libertarian axis, but that only adds a little more sophistication really.
Check out where various famous composers sit on the Political Compass – quite interesting.
dear tigtog
that dead classical composers political compass was great fun & of course its just a divertissement, but i studied music & nationalism extensively at uni & throughout life, so i beg leave to making small observation.
no quibbles with wagner, the granddaddy proto-fascist of them all – after all its was his daughter winifred, franz liszt’s grand-daughter, who gifted hitler the paper he wrote mein kampf on in the munich prison.
but i’m surprised they bothered with complex stravinsky as a fascist while leaving off the relatively more straight forward carl orf. stravinsky is a difficult figure to penetrate through the deliberately created persona to the actual man, but i reckon he was not at heart a fascist, rather an occasionally loud mouthed cosmopolitan apolitical conservative tending towards authoritarian, more like t. s. eliot.
haydn in the right authoritarian quadrant is probably due to his employment by duke esterhazy, but, by personality, he was exceedingly generous his musicians, friends & family; his music is always well balanced, formally & emotionally and satisfyingly challenging to the orchestra, particularly the horns. he should be at least in the left authoritarian quadrant or somewhere reserved for the middle manager from heaven.
mahler should be in the left authoritarian quadrant, not left libertarian – ask his wife what he thought about her composing songs. but he did get up cosima wagner’s nose, which is, of course, a good left quadrant thing to have done, even if epiphenomenally.
bach, not plotted on the graph, was always getting into trouble with his municipal & ecclesiastical employers, usually over conditions, pay & repertoire. he loved god & martin luther.
prokofiev is more left than shostakovitch? interesting.
and they left out verdi altogether. too bad, maybe too hard to place the risorgimento.
another chart could be made for dead classical performers, too: pablo casals, arturo toscanini, henryk szeryng, leonard bernstein on the left & von karajan, for starts, on the right.
yours sincerely
alfred venison
Dear Alfred Venison, thanks for your response re super (market) people. Dear Chris, agree it is hard when supermarkets are chronically understaffed to interact in a human way, but ‘chatting to random people’? Truth is, no one is random. That’s an illusion. And I think the design of supermarkets perpetuates that illusion by making us all anonymous. But I am reminded of Mr Darcy in Pride and Predjudice who confessed “I do not have that talent, which some possess, of conversing easily with strangers”. Sometimes I too prefer to keep to myself. But somehow, it’s quite enjoyable to have these small interactions on the net! Sincerely, Shingle.
Cut away the ‘can-do’ crap, and what you have is this: Campbell Newman’s family immediately sought to profit from the QLD flood disaster. Is there any other wya to look at this story? I’d have thought that rules him out as Premier.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/campbell-newman-wifes-family-company-sought-30m-for-flood-contract/story-e6frgczx-1226148561904
Yes, I’m fine on the internet or even on the phone. But face to face interactions I often find really quite stressful (its me not them, so I like to have alternatives).
And in other New, Bolt found guilty of breaching the Racial discrimination Act.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-09-28/bolt-found-guilty-of-breaching-discrimination-act/3025918
Abbott immediately flies to his defence. Yes, Tony free speech does mean people having the right to say things we don’t like. It doesn’t mean people get to write porkies with impunity.
@ Fine
At least Bolt puts his name to his opinions and writings.
What do we think of this situation?
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/indigenous/coconut-slur-the-last-straw-for-mp/story-fn9hm1pm-1226148561767
Of course Bolt puts his name to his friggin’ outpourings – he’s a brand after all.
Are we to be grateful that misleading bile has a name?
As for your link, your point is?
“As for your link, your point is?”
Oh just noticeing the Selective outrage around here.
@savvy, the defamers responsible for the slurs in your link remain unidentified. I confess that not knowing who said it makes it harder for me to be outraged at anybody. I definitely feel sympathy for the woman who was subject to the slurs though.
I think the now infamous interview of the trader is really interesting.
I have a theory, that for a few decades now– and some people seem to have chosen the 1970s as being some kind of turning point, which would make the few decades, almost a half a century, ( in Australia, we can probably choose a period post-Whitlam, it doesn’t really matter for non-historians ) almost any ideology, which could fragment the centre of society, has received far more attention, than it rightly deserves. In particular, I mean the identity of the core of society. And by far more attention, I mean, that threats and fear are by their very nature, ( or by our very nature, ) commanding of our attention and interest and ideological threats and fears are no different but due to certain aspects of the way modern society is organised, these threats and fears have been exaggerated and amplified.
This has had the effect of destroying politics in general and ( for example ) national politics in particular, as politics is unable to resolve certain issues like border protection. Politics is also unable to solve other issues related to gender equality, global warming, the welfare state, etc. So why is this?
I believe that the main reason and this is not at all new, is that politics in the current environment, is no longer able to speak to a majority of people. The centre of the society has been decimated. The statistical average which remains does not exist in reality as groups of people who may have some political commonality do not identify with each other, or the political commonalities are so disjunct that it is impossible in a democracy to get a political majority and a political mandate for action.
This also has left the middle of society exposed as it’s political will was not only an aspect of it’s identity, not only a destructive force in the face of minorities, but also the source of it’s ability to defend itself. It is, obvious today, especially, when you see a finance professional talking like the man in the video above, that the middle of society no longer knows what’s best for itself. Or you can say, the middle of society no longer exists– what remains is a network of individuals in disperse groups, with fluid and plural identities.
This is the model for many academics, as well. And it’s been, in the way that issues, which have been introduced to the Australian society, which have attempted to make it more multi-cultural– and I mean this literally, not strictly in terms of ethnicity, more often than not a top-down change.
So, the theory, before I have to run off: the only bottom up political ideology which has gained traction in recent history, is the desire of people to consume.