Web 2.0 i
That’s i for imaginary, as with the square root of negative one.
With the real component at the origin, that is, as a big fat zero.
Question: What, would you ask, has inspired such an obtuse comment?
Answer: http://www.KevinPM.com.au
Question: Who is advising our Prime Minister?
Answer: God knows. But if you ask Him, He will probably reply with a mischievous comment.
Over and out, Captain…
…An individual’s dissent can be the price of freedom for the rest of us. The novelist Marilynne Robinson writes: “A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. A democracy relies on its exercise. I think we would be wise to learn to cherish it in one another.”
Individual courage is necessary for democracy because, as Lord Acton famously put it, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Absolute power is power unchecked by a free press (I mean that as shorthand for intellectual freedom), an independent judiciary, the separation of the executive government, the legislature and the law.
It is a cycle: absolute power is power unchecked by individuals who, themselves protected by the free press, the independent judiciary and the ballot box, can find the courage to say: “No - that is going too far.”
Because a society is a changing, living organism, competing interests are always shifting in relation to each other, gaining or losing ground. But they do this in an environment that has laws as firm as Newton’s: just as gravity makes things come down, power sucks more of itself to itself. It centralises control like a magnet pulling iron filings from every direction, like a black hole sucking matter into itself. In order to do this without protest, power must stifle dissent…
Anna Funder is the author of Stasiland: Stories From Behind The Berlin Wall. This is an edited extract from tonight’s Sydney PEN lecture at Sydney Grammar School.
The courage of individuals is the currency of our freedom - Opinion - smh.com.au.
There is nothing particularly new about this idea and it has most likely been tried already. On some airlines now each person can have a small flatscreen display located just in front of them. They could watch the ads or the flight progress or choose the movie they want to see. Nothing new about that.
It would probably not be relevant for cars on the road or for planes as they are today, but if you could use flatscreen displays on the inner walls of a vehicle and show live video from cameras looking out from the side of the vehicle, then you could have thick solid walls for the vehicle and the semblance of windows along the inner walls. The pretend window/screens could be quite large too. You might be able to make it look as if the vehicle had glass walls and a glass roof, even while there were solid walls protecting the inside from whatever was outside of the vessel. With such pretend windows you could also have labels next to relevant objects if you wanted to.
Another thing you could do in a place like space is to give the occupants the semblance that the vessel is stationary with regard to its surrounds, while in fact it may be spinning to create an artificial gravity for the people inside. People could walk around in such a space station or spinning spaceship and look out these pretend windows and see the view as if they were looking at them from a stationary place in space - the constellations would appear to remain stationary. The cameras and screens will also be able to filter the image and show things that a person could not directly look at if they were seeing in analog, such as the sun for example. After being in such an environment for a while, people would get used to it and there would be conventions about how things are presented. You could have spacecraft with strong, thick walls and without windows, much like a submarine I suppose, while for the people inside the view on these pretend windows could be spectacular if they were traveling near some place like the moon’s surface. It isn’t that much of a stretch of the imagination.
***
You could also imagine building a spaceship with a spinning living quarters inside - like a large washing machine in a spin cycle (don’t you love those clumsy hand waving analogies). When the spaceship is traveling (as if weightless) in space the inner tub could be set to spin to provide a semblance of gravity with the rounded walls of the inner tub being like the floor - it might be better to have a number of flat surfaces like a polygon to walk on. It would still be useful to have a fraction of the acceleration due to gravity as experienced on earth in a spacecraft to make life easier - so liquids flow in a downwards direction. You could cook, go the toilet, have a shower, sleep without being strapped into a bunk, walk around and exercise on a treadmill, and so on.
When the spaceship is somewhere where gravity is experienced, close to a planet or moon for instance, the spinning of the inner tub would be stopped and one of the flat WALLs in the tub while it was spinning would become the FLOOR and the erstwhile curved (or polygon) FLOOR while it was spinning becomes the WALL - the axis for up and down shifts by 90 degrees, if you know what I mean… Anyway, the people traveling in a spaceship with a spinning inner living quarters would need to be fastened to their seats as the inner tub (for want of a better term) is accelerated or decelerated. One challenge would be to dynamically adjust the moment of inertia for the inner tub as a whole for slight changes in the centre of mass as people move around while it is spinning. The angular velocity would have to be constant while people are walking around in the spinning living quarters. You wonder what radius and speed would be naturally comfortable for people to live in. Camera and screen systems as mentioned above could be used to give the people traveling in a spinning living quarters the feeling that they are moving linearly through space. A disc or saucer shaped spacecraft does make sense (but not when they are propelled by rockets).
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12 November 2008
You might be able to have a spacestation with a number of these rotating living quarters connected at leaf nodes off central branches. You could then have all the possibilities of modular design and for adding extensions with tree, lattice or ring-like structures that connect the branches in a particular spacestation. For large extended branches you could imagine something like rails on either side of the walls so that very small vehicles using those rails could convey people too and fro along a branch, given that it is in zero gravity. The branches and spacecraft docking facilities would all be stationary with regard to the space around the station and these places would be weightless. Large spacestations would definitely not be suitable for low earth orbits where the ISS currently is.
There would need to be an equivalent of a lift in a building on earth for each of these living quarters such that a person would walk into one of these -rotation or frame changing- lifts in a rotating living quarter and that ‘lift’ would move from the edge of the rotating hub to the axis of rotation for that hub in such a way that when it did arrive at the axis of rotation for the hub it wouldn’t be rotating at all.
… the lift door would close, the person would experience acceleration to one side of the lift until it was stationary again, the door on the opposite side of the lift would open and the person could float out into the weightless branch section of the spacestation. Perhaps the ‘rotational lift’ could simply be an interface between a weightless branch section of a spacestation and a rotating living quarter which would have the semblance of gravity. The radius wouldn’t have to change as the rotational lift’s angular velocity accelerates and decelerates. One door for the lift would open up to the branch section when it is not rotating and the door on the opposite side of the lift could open on to the living quarters when the lift’s rotation matches that of the living quarters and the rotational lift is locked to the lift door point in that living quarter. Instead of the experience we feel in a linear lift of being slightly lighter or heavier as a lift goes up or down, on these rotational lifts the acceleration is to the side so we would naturally lean or sit against the relevant wall as the rotational lift is accelerated or decelerated - it would feel like being in a car that is turning through a corner and just keeps on turning until it eventually straightens out again [13 November 2008] …
The person in the ‘lift’ could then leave the lift and move weightlessly through the spacestation branch, perhaps to another rotating living quarter or to a dock for spacecraft, or where ever. A ‘lift’ for these rotating living quarters would similarly take a person from the weightless branch area of the station to the floor of a rotating living quarter where the person would experience the artificial gravity due to rotation.
For a spacecraft built around only the one rotating living quarters the direction of movement in space would best be in the same direction as the angular momentum vector L for the spinning living quarters (or tub as expressed above). Even while the living quarters for such a spaceship is spinning, the direction of the spacecraft as a whole would appear to be parallel to the line of sight for people standing in the spaceship with one ‘wall’ while spinning being behind and one ‘wall’ while spinning being in front or ahead. Maybe nautical terms could be adapted for use in these novel frames of reference. When the spinning is stopped and the spacecraft moves near a large object like a planet or moon, it would move relative to the planet or moon flat like a frisbee and what was the behind ‘wall’ while spinning would now be the floor. People who have studied basic physics should be able to understand these ideas, even if I am not expressing them very well. A few diagrams would probably go a long way in descibing these ideas.
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14 November 2008
Back to the more mundane: large space stations as described above could earn their keep in space as industrial manufacturing and processing centres. The range of environments available for processing metals, crystals or glasses is much more varied than what is available on earth. There is the range from zero gravity to custom and manifold fields to grow crystals or set glass in. There are temperature ranges from the ambient temperature in space to very high temperatures available by focusing solar energy through reflective solar collectors onto a point. That energy is clean and constant in space. The pressures available range from the vacuum of space through to as high a pressure that machinery with an endless supply of solar energy could produce. It could be a place to process mineral ores. You could also grow plants in large rotational living quarters. You might be able to create water and oxygen from minerals that could be sourced in space. Soil, however, can not be manufactured. There’d be plenty to do out there beyond the clouds!
A large space station could sustain itself and include the industrial infrastructure to build and extend its own structures. Spacestations might start out as small villages in space, grow to the size of towns and eventually become as large as cities if they are suitably located. It is important that they are organised as civil and public spaces with elected democratic representatives to take responsibility for public decisions. It is also important that what happens in space is transparent and open to public scrutiny. There is a sense that space is international and demilitarised.
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16 Nov 08
On a large space station, eventually, you could imagine large cylinders built like apartment blocks with the angular velocity being such that the centrifugal acceleration for the living quarters on the outer edge of the cylinder comes close to the acceleration due to gravity on earth or that would be felt to be a comfortable fraction of g. There could be a few radial floors closer to the axis of rotation of the cylinder, and these places would have a centrifugal acceleration less than those below them with a larger radius. You could perhaps use the innermost radial floors of a large cylinder for growing plants. That way the cylinder could be filled and used productively. I would assume that there are some plants (or algae) that would do alright in such an environment and that could adapt to space but that is something that would need to be researched. I do not support genetic engineering.
A lift for such a cylinder might accelerate and decelerate at the outermost radius and once the lift is spinning at the same speed as the cylinder perhaps the lift could move closer to the axis of rotation for the cylinder by reducing the radius for the lift, obviously. A lift for these large cylinders would need to have a balancing counterweight. Most of these things have been thought of before and these ideas aren’t new.
Yay for democracy and a great new President for the United States. The victory speech was impressive.
A lot has been written on the web about this historic win, and already we can feel a change in policy and mood especially with regard to a Greener economy. Something like an “Apollo Program” for renewable energy sounds exciting: the term chosen was “Apollo Program” not “New Deal”. Some of the ideas on my blog may become reality over the next decade. I think it will be an exciting time. We’ll have to see.
I suppose they will still have to shuffle hapless old W. out to a podium every so often until the inauguration early next year. The neocons will be left with plenty of time to ruminate on the meaning of regime change…
According to Albert Einstein, imagination is more important than knowledge. We never know what world we’re educating our kids for. But we do know the times ahead will be full of massive change and huge challenges. The only solution is to encourage kids to use imagination, teach them to solve problems creatively and equip them to adapt to change.
According to British education expert Sir Ken Robinson: “Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
He argues that we quash creativity in schools and that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities — capacities we need to mine and nurture for our future now more than ever. He says we’re frightened of being wrong and if we’re not prepared to be wrong we’ll never come up with anything original.
Due to the universal hierarchy of subjects in education — maths and languages at the top, arts at the bottom — talented, brilliant and creative people are slipping by the wayside because what they’re good at isn’t valued and is often stigmatised…
It’s time to encourage imagination. Don’t just be prepared to stuff up, expect it. Encourage it. Experiment. As Zorba the Greek says: “Life is trouble. Only death is not. To live is to undo your belt and look for trouble.”
Catherine DevenyWe won’t survive unless we get a bit crazy | theage.com.au.
LIBERAL Senate leader Nick Minchin has some advice for Rupert Murdoch: don’t bother with the idea of an Australian republic.
Senator Minchin accused the media magnate — who advocated Australia move to a republic in the Queen’s lifetime in his first Boyer Lecture on Sunday — of failing to understand the benefits of Australia’s present constitutional arrangements. Mr Murdoch’s renewed push for a republic was a disappointing feature of his otherwise excellent lecture, he said.
Again - Copernican Models for a republic maintain the benefits of Australia’s present constitutional arrangements.
It’s interesting watching the Libs getting stuck into Mr Murdoch, especially since in the first Boyer Lecture Mr Murdoch was careful NOT to criticise the Howard Government directly for its massive increase in government handouts to business and the wealthy over the past 12 years. Obviously the boomtime taxes that should have gone into education and health, and to address dire disadvantage in sections of our community, have been funneled into middle class welfare during the years of the Howard Government. The bludger ethic of the Howard times extended as far as a $200,000,000 handout to Saddam Hussein and no one here seemed to be too bothered about it. At least in the United States they have exorcised the demons of the Bush years and they seem to be ready and enthusiastic for a change in direction.
There are quite a few things about Mr Murdoch’s impressions of Australia as expressed in the first Boyer Lecture that indicate that he is out of touch with Australia. Australia is now a much crueler place after 11 years of Howard. The idea that Australians are egalitarian is a myth and civil society has been badly damaged. In a boom it doesn’t show that much, but in a bust this society could easily become driven by populism and turn nasty. News Corp had a major role in that change to Australia. There is more to Australia than a feature length glossy ad. The tone of Mr Murdoch’s approach to reconciliation betrays a superficial understanding of the real disadvantages that people face. It will take much more than shaking hands, making up and then getting on with middle class living as if nothing had happened in the past. Frontier society?
Finally, there is an even more fundamental constitutional question about our identity. Should Australia be a republic? There has been more maturity to this debate over the past couple of years, and there is now no need to rush to the exit. But the moment is not far away when the country will decide its fate. And if I were in a position to vote, it would be for a republic. The establishment of a republic of Australia will not slight the Queen, nor will it deny the British traditions, values and structures that have served us so well. But we are no longer a dependency, and we should be independent.
Boyer Lectures - 2November2008 - Lecture 1: Aussie rules: bring back the pioneer. [My Emphasis]
Don’t tell me: Rupert is actually a closet Copernican Republican?
The lion on the road to the republic is chasing his tail…
Guy Fawkes Night (also known as Bonfire Night, Cracker Night, Fireworks Night) is an annual celebration on the evening of the 5th of November. It celebrates the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of the 5 November 1605 in which a number of Catholic conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London, England…
Bonfire Night/Guy Fawkes Night (and the weekend closest to it) is the main night for both amateur and official fireworks displays in the UK and New Zealand.
In Australia, Guy Fawkes Night is mostly known simply as Bonfire Night and bears little connection to its original purpose.[citation needed] Celebration of Bonfire Night has died down due to the banning of fireworks in most states and territories to prevent their misuse and personal injuries. Prior to this ban, Guy Fawkes Night in Australia was widely celebrated with many private, backyard fireworks lightings and larger communal bonfires and fireworks displays in public spaces. It is also referred to as Cracker Night (mainly before the ban was enacted) by some Australians and celebrated in a song of the same name by Australian singer, John Williamson.
Although one of the reasons for the ban on fireworks was the danger of bushfires during hot Novembers, since the ban, private (and therefore illegal) fireworks have become increasingly popular on New Years Eve, an even more dangerous time for bushfires.
The other lessons from this brief and potted history of Australian climate change modelling are, of course, that the problem has only got worse during all the decades we have spent modelling it, and that it would have ended up being much cheaper if the world had started taking decisive action back in 1996.
Another thing about modelling is that you can only make a model about what you know. The problem of global warming is a consequence of energy systems that burn fuels. The modelling can only assume that things will stay much the same as they have in the past. The whole issue will shift once energy systems that rely more on storing electrical energy for later use are designed and built. These new energy systems may still require similar amounts of energy but by being able to store electrical energy you would be able to use more renewable sources and move the energy around for greater energy efficiency. It won’t take much time before models based on 20th century energy systems will look dated and overly pessimistic.
News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch has warned that Barack Obama could worsen the world financial crisis if he is elected US president next week and implements protectionist policies.
In an interview with The Weekend Australian, Mr Murdoch said the Democrats’ policies would result in “a real setback for globalisation” if implemented.
Mr Murdoch said he did not know whether Senator Obama would implement all of the protectionist measures espoused by the party.
“Presidents don’t often behave exactly as the campaign might have suggested because they become prisoners of all sort of things - mainly circumstances and events,” Mr Murdoch said.
I guess Mr Murdoch is offended by the possibility that a world leader might not be captive as if a prisoner to the ideology espoused by News Corp. Heaven forbid a new US President who works for the best interests of Americans and the liberal democratic world. Didn’t Mr Murdoch support the invasion of Iraq on the delusional premise that it would reduce the price of oil - to something like $20 a barrel if I remember correctly?
Stand alone solar systems usually consist a few different components. The solar cells are only one part of the system. There is usually also a bank of batteries to store the energy that the solar cells generate during the daylight. There are also controllers to efficiently charge up the batteries and change the electricity to forms that are useful. Many stand alone systems need a backup generator that fires up when the load is too much for the cells or batteries to handle.
My question refers to the use of batteries with the electricity grid. Our energy use varies over the day. Before and after work residential energy use may peak, while at night and during the middle of the day the residential energy use may be minimal. For the majority of people our power comes from the grid, and I suppose the energy load at any time is generated in real time. So I suppose that there are daily peaks and troughs in energy demand during the day for a large number of households and/or workplaces.
If households contained a bank of batteries, that were charged up in offpeak times and controlled through computers connected via internet to the power utilities, that may have an effect of flattening the power needs over the space of a day. The load on the whole system could become more constant, rather than responding in real time to the energy needs as they arise throughout the day. In peak times during the day energy is taken from the batteries, rather than all from the grid.
The arguments for nuclear power stations usually mention base-load electricity generation. The arguments are that we need a higher base-load generation capacity (mostly to handle peak demands that airconditioners demand on hot days apparently). My question is whether, in practice, base-load power generation is set to meet the peaks in power uses during a day, rather than the average that the use of local batteries would require. The widespread use of batteries may, in practice, substantially reduce the base-load requirements by charging up the batteries in offpeak times, so that the battereis can be used at the peak times - all within the same day. This is a question about the practice of energy generation, how it works in reality, rather than in theory.
Solar panels are not the only components in the solar energy option. The use of batteries may also have significant effects on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of coal power stations by averaging the power requirements over a day.
In terms of research and development, and creating jobs and export technologies; the solar energy option has more potential. Laptop computers and mobile phones are driving research and development into batteries. The solar option would have industry spinoffs beyond just solar cells. Compare that to the potentials that R&D in nuclear waste would generate. Solar wins hands down.
One problem with solar is the cost. That is no longer the case. Thanks to the need to ‘debate’ nuclear power as an option, we can now realistically assess the implementation of solar technology. Capital costs for a nuclear power station are in the billions of dollars, and that does not include costs of processing fuel or dealing with the wastes. If the nuclear option is worthy of ‘debate’ then certainly the solar option, even if it is more expensive than coal power stations, is a realistic contender. If the solar option costs less that the billions needed for nuclear power stations, then it is in the running. If nuclear power stations are decades away, then a long term strategy to incrementally introduce solar cells, batteries and compter networks to manage the system efficiently is feasible.
It all depends on the political will of our population: coal, solar or nuclear.
This is a more conventional view of the energy problem.
The use of Renewables means looking at the energy problem differently.The problems, like having to have base-load capacity that can cover all cases, disappear from the perspective that Renewables bring to the problem. There may still be a need for coal power stations but not at the scale where Global Warming becomes an environmental danger (we can reasonably hope).
This is a post from the Pharoz blog written more than three years ago. The date for the post is the 21st of June 2005. It is also one of the first posts that I wrote expressing a novel approach to renewable energy systems. There are many more ideas that followed in the years since then - some ideas are admittabely more worthwhile that others. There is much more that could be done, but still for a FIRST this start wasn’t that bad. And you know what…
With higher education and specialisation in the workplace these days people are encouraged to stay within their discipline and burrow ever deeper into their specialty. Interdisciplinary studies might have been added as an afterthought and even then the coverage would be quite shallow. Perhaps that is changing a bit these days. In some fields of study, such as in medical and health sciences and in biology, you could not avoid having a systems understanding, or you’d think so.
I wonder whether that emphasis on narrow specialisation has has a cultural effect in a way so that people are less likely to perceive how systems operate. It might be something like colour blindness. A person may know how to use all the jargon of their narrow specialty but not really understand how it all fits together. I would suspect that such a person would focus on the nitty gritty details of their job and try to micro manage, even if they are in a position that requires as a vital prerequisite the ability to perceive and understand systems so that they can intervene at an executive level to maintain the systems under their control. Without being able to perceive and understand systems an executive would be leading as if with a tunnel vision, shortsightedness or with colour blindness. They would simply not see and understand the nature of the systems they are working with.
There are tests for detecting colour blindness. The Ishihara colour test are the gestalt-like images with coloured dots where numbers and letters become discernible depending on the colours your eyes can perceive. I wonder whether you could devise tests to identify whether someone has an adequate understanding of the systems they are working with as systems in their own right, not just as a collection of disembodied reductionist facts and details related to their job in a seemingly ad-hoc way.
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26 Oct
Its quite easy to manipulate someone who doesn’t understand or recognise systems. All you need to do is feed them with a large volume of material that matches the message you want them to take on, and the shear volume of material - nonsense or not - is likely to sway their views on the matter involved. In the field of media you could call it propaganda, with regard to an individual it comes down to managing that person’s access to information and other people. To make a goldrush analogy, a miner without an understanding of systems might measure their success at the end of a day’s work by the pile of dirt they happened to have shifted or dug up, while a group of people with a systems view would measure their success at the end of a day by the pile of gold they had extracted using ingenious engineering and clever mining techniques that they had worked out and put in place. Obviously the group with a systemic approach will be more successfull and you could also expect the people plodding away on their little individual claims to become resentful - they were doing hard work and while some people stuck it lucky the systemic mob who were working smarter seemed to be doing better. It didn’t seem to fit with the work ethic ideology.
Senator Brandis says Mr Howard showed “a conscious preference for social order above personal freedom, for the attitudes of ‘the mainstream’ above the concerns of the marginalised.”
“Given that the philosophy of the Liberal Party - in particular as articulated by Menzies in the 1940s - is ultimately built upon a belief in the primacy of the rights of the individual, this was a profound shift in emphasis.
“The principal descriptor of the relationship between the individual and the community became ‘responsibilities’, not ‘rights’. “This was a long way from Menzies’ The Forgotten People (essays), which suggested that society’s obligation to the vulnerable was unconditional.” Senator Brandis says: “An apostle of social cohesion, he staked his leadership of the Liberal Party, and arguably lost the prime ministership, by pioneering fundamental industrial relations reforms that, on a few occasions such as the waterfront dispute, provoked acute social conflict. The leader of a party that he held to be the custodian of the tradition of John Stuart Mill, as much as that of Edmund Burke, he all too often subordinated the individual to the mainstream.
“As a social conservative, he too often lost sight of a core value of Menzian liberalism: a philosophy that makes paramount the rights of the individual demands that those rights be defended in the case of every individual, not merely weighed in the balance.”
Liberal senator George Brandis lashes former PM John Howard | The Australian
The Howard Liberal Government wasn’t liberal, as most people know. In Australia we usually refer to a true liberal as a small-l liberal to differentiate liberalism as a political philosophy from someone who happened to be in the Liberal Party and whatever it is they believe in. You could also argue whether neo-liberal economic policy was liberal or not, as it seemed to privilege an elite minority over the vast bulk of the population and seeing that the current financial crisis is a direct result of neo-liberal policies. Describing neo-liberalism as being liberal would be akin to describing a feudal monarchy as being democratic. Deregulation and lower taxes so the wealthy can do much as they like - that’s not liberal.
The Mini E is based on the regular Mini three-door hatch but swaps its conventional internal-combustion engines for an electric motor.
The electric motor is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack and produces 150kW and 220Nm – sufficient to make the Mini E 1.9 seconds (8.5sec) quicker in the 0-100km/h sprint than the 360kg-lighter Mini Cooper auto.
BMW has limited the E’s top speed to 152km/h, with the car focused on city driving.
However, the large, 260kg battery and electric transmission (located by the rear axle) take the place of the Mini’s rear seats, making the front-drive Mini E a two-seater only. (Some would suggest the limited rear legroom in the regular Mini effectively makes it a two-seater, too.)
BMW says the Mini E has a range of 240km, which can be extended by up to 290km through regenerative braking.
No Internet Censorship for Australia
The Government is refusing to release concrete details on the plan. However, we know that ISP-level filtering has been ALP policy for some time and is being zealously pursued by the Minister. What we do know is this:
- The feed will be mandatory in all homes and schools across the country.1
- The filter will censor material that is “harmful and inappropriate” for children.2
- The filter will require a massive expansion of the ACMA’s blacklist of prohibited content.3
- The filter will target legal as well as illegal material.4
Free Speech in AustraliaAlthough the initiative is intended and marketed as a tool to help protect children from the dangers of the Internet, this paternalistic scheme raises some troubling issues that affect all Australians. As a source of daily information, the Internet increases in importance every day. Do we really want the Government of the day deciding what Australian adults can and can’t see? Do we want Australia to join a censorship club in which Burma, China and North Korea are the founding members?
- The list of prohibited sites will probably be secret, so it will be hard to know what content the Government has effectively banned.
- The feed will be compulsory in all homes, even where there are no children.
- It is unknown whether there will be any way to have content removed from the prohibited list.
- How far will the list go, now and in future? Will it filter out material on sexual health, drug use, terrorism.. even breastfeeding?
…
More relevant posts:
Mandatory Australian Internet Censors: Conroys’ Bait and Switch at Hoyden About Town
Australia embraces web censorship by Antony Loewenstein
…
I think there is much more to this financial crisis than just personised greed. Blaming this all on the excessively greedy is like trying to solve a problem by finding a suitable scapegoat. The financial sector, stock markets and banks are just the latest areas to suffer an erosion of - false - confidence. Look back only a few years to the arguments and opposition put up against the invasion of Iraq and you can discern a more engaged and optimistic society. I think many people just narrowed in on friends and family, living an enjoyable life, trying to make money and sitting tight while house values and stock prices kept rising. Most people were content to remain silent.
I think that the $10 billion spending package is an attempt to try to keep that way of life going on indefinitely. That approach could be seen as a lack of imagination. But if it lines the pockets of many people, many people will remain silent, and that’s the point. It might make a downturn all the harder though for not building up alternative forms of industry and employment that could be started with public money but possibly not private money, even if they would prove to be profitable in the long run. I know pensioners are doing it really tough and they need not only this one off payment, but a systemic increase in their benefits and services available to them.
It would be difficult for people in steady, well paid employment over a long time to understand how important basic public services are for the poor. One off payments even to a large number of people does not build up public services in a community. I always thought the idea of government paid vouchers for outside school tuition as incredibly short-sighted policy. Paying a team of specialist and responsible teachers a steady salary would be a much more effective way to improve the teaching for school kids. Taxation is pooled money. It is a waste of tax revenue to throw it away as individual handouts. You can provide better services with pooled resources - and some public services can never be profitable.
Perhaps one of the problems for the neoliberal times is an Australia Incorporated mentality. Tax cuts during the boom years were seen to be similar to dividends being paid to company stock holders. There are strong market forces in play, but metaphorically at least you could see the rise to near USD parity then sudden drop in the value of the Australian Dollar as being related to that nation as corporation mentality. Whatever happened to the Commonwealth?
A few other gripes that I want to mention: one of the arguments you sometimes see in The more august newspaper chains is that Economic Rationalism™ is rational economics and anyone who disagrees is being irrational. That isn’t much of an argument, more a tautology.
The great neo-confidence swindle. Neologisms with loaded terms used as if they were trademarks. Ideas and academia turned into a sub-branch of marketing. Remember, you all have to be popular, so be nice while we take off with the valuable public assets and privatise them. And if there are any problems, well heck, you’ll just have to foot the bill won’t you! See ya…
An Age investigation can also reveal:
■ At the request of police, the State Government quietly amended the Freedom of Information Act in 2006 to prevent any document created by the police covert and intelligence unit from being released. This means people may not be able to access their personal files created by this branch of police…
■ Sydney Olympics intelligence director Neil Fergus said a small number of state police intelligence officers who worked for him in 2000 had collected and distributed intelligence in an improper fashion.
Liberty Victoria president Julian Burnside, QC, said police infiltration breached privacy and might require greater oversight by an external body.
“I wonder how many people would feel comfortable that they were referred to in a police document, however innocuous. I don’t think the police have asked: to what extent are we invading people’s privacy? And what are we gaining from doing so?” Mr Burnside said.
An officer who served in Victoria Police’s covert unit in the late 1990s told The Age that intelligence reports on the groups under surveillance were sometimes manipulated by senior police figures to exaggerate the threat they posed.
“Sometimes you would wonder if those up the chain were speaking the same language as you. You would often find the information you had provided on a certain group or individual had been twisted or moulded to reflect something different by the time it reached the top,” the former officer said.
I don’t know how often this kind of thing is done on the web, but this website above has slated today as a Blog Action Day to discuss the issue of poverty in the world. It would be interesting to see if this kind of collective blogging could work. Perhaps with enough notice and some way to let the most interesting posts float to the top of the list this could be a good way to communicate, share stories and maybe see things differently.
For my part, perhaps when energy systems use renewable energy such as solar energy and energy systems on earth are at least balanced and with the real potential to generate more energy than we need, perhaps then a surplus economy might take shape. Perhaps supply would then flow back to fill demand. Up till now we have had economic channels that funnel a limited and scarce supply of resources to satisfy a demand that has the power to maintain those economic channels. The use of those economic channels in an environment of scarcity maintains that differential between scarce supply and demand, which maintains those economic channels through people’s actions and politics, and so on in a loop.
With a balanced renewable energy supply perhaps economics can switch from a scarcity driven system that produces even more scarcity by hoarding supplies for a powerful minority that has the power to do so, to an economy of abundance. It would be like flooding the channels that maintain that dynamic in an economy based around scarcity. Such a change would take generations in any case. There has never been an environment of energy security in history and perhaps the closest we have been to such a time, a sample, was during the post WWII boom when oil was extremely cheap. Economists would no doubt think that I am just dreaming…
COLES is to slash the number of products shoppers have to choose from by almost a third.
The supermarket group has launched a high-risk trial to cut its lines by 30 per cent, marking a drastic shift away from offering shoppers a wide variety of choice to limited ranges.
It is also likely to cut the number of weekly discounts and catalogue promotions it offers shoppers and to increase the number of private or own-label products it sells by up to 20 per cent.
For what its worth, I think the home brand marketing at Coles is appalling and I deliberately avoid buying any of it even if it is cheaper and better quality - because of the cheesy pictures and marshmellowy image it presents. I think they need to do some solid and honest market research on the presentation of their own-label brands. In every Coles I go to, the own-label milk lines, for example, are nearly always full. It wasn’t like that before the current cheesy theme in their own-brand products was released. Perhaps they should take a more market tested approach to refitting their stores, not a centralised management - hit and miss - approach. In Australia people don’t usually comment or complain about things that annoy them like that, they silently go somewhere else.
The article continues:
Mr McLeod said the “early results are encouraging … it shows just how over-ranged we are in certain segments”. If it is successful, the smaller-range strategy will be expanded to all new stores.
Mr McLeod said the company was conducting a trial to ensure we “don’t make national mistakes” that could trigger a mass defection by shoppers to rival stores.
How would they know if they had made mistakes?
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Sorry, mate, you just don’t synergise with our core values - opinion|theage.com.au
Australian history will not be downgraded. It will be taught systematically and effectively to all students. We fail students — both those who have arrived recently and those who can trace their Australian ancestry across generations — if we deny them a familiarity with the national story, so that they can appreciate its values and binding traditions.
We fail them also if we do not foster the skills of historical thinking that equip them, by the end of their studies, to take an active part in the debates over the legacy of the past, to understand and make use of new sources of information, to sift the wheat from the chaff, to find truth and meaning in history and contribute to democratic discussions of national issues.
Factual knowledge is essential to historical thinking. Without knowledge of chronology, geography, institutional arrangements, material circumstances and belief systems, no student project on a past period — however well intended — will afford understanding.
