Club Troppo

I remember being at a wedding reception talking to someone who was 70 odd.  I asked them whether in their day it was normal for the bride and groom to put the tip of the knife in the cake and then beam at the cameras for two or three minutes – celebrities on their special day. Sure enough, back in the day, the camera was at the service of life life or was most of the time, not vice versa.

Today I’ve noticed a similar, subtle but profound difference in the zeitgeist. Listening to the Australian Open commentary it’s extraordinary how much psychologising goes on. Now filling in all those hours with chat is probably quite difficult, but the current formula (or perhaps it’s just a formula built around Jim Courier’s style) is endless speculation on what the players are thinking/feeling.

“Take us inside Novak’s mind Leyton” says Jim, and sure enough Leyton does his best in the role play. Roger Rasheed is on hand in hushed tones in the stands telling us what it’s like. He’s right there you see. Well so are Jim and Leyton, but he’s so close he has to speak quietly – and of course that means he can get even further inside the players minds. (Quiet – Roger is trying to hear the players thinking.)

And it turns out that whoever is asked to take us inside a player’s mind really can!  They just say what they reckon the player is thinking – though it seems pretty likely they have no more idea than anyone else. Bruce McAvaney is into this schtick like a rat up a drainpipe of course and is endlessly asking Jim “So what would he be thinking as they change ends”.  (Continued)

Katie’s Australia Day – Brazilian style! Food blogger Katie Quinn Davies’ Australia Day recipes.

Australia Day from afar: "One of the most surprising things for me to experience out of Australia was people saying–even in the American South!–Australia’s really racist, isn’t it?" Queen Emily, Hoyden About Town.

Drunks draped in flags: "the path that took us here is a complex one. Music festivals, drinking binges, the crystallisation of fears and resentments, the navel gazing over Identity, all that is part of the road, as well as politicians." Kim, Larvatus Prodeo.

The view from Menzies House: Tim Andrews celebrates Australia Day with a whinge about lefties and "self-appointed intellectual elites".

Be as Australian as you want to be: "Let us be frank: anti-racist prejudice is the worst kind of prejudice at all. It denies freedom of expression; it denies freedom of conscience; and most heinous of all, it denies courage." Ben Pobjie.

John Passant reports on the tent embassy protest: "Soon about 200 of the demonstrators moved from the Tent Embassy commemoration to the café to tell Abbott what they thought of him …" En Passant.

Steve Kates on the protests: "I must tell you my disgust is unbounded. We tend not to jail such people, but that is in the way of more fool us than anything." Catallaxy.

Missing the story: The press gallery "shine the light almost exclusively on the confected battle between tweedle dee and tweedle dum – the figureheads at the top of decaying political parties that everyone outside the inbred Canberra vortex can see are just shells of organisations pretending to believe in something beyond power itself." Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate.

Michael loves Heather: "She’s a saint. A princess. A fairy queen. A beautiful, kind, intelligent. imaginative, brave young woman with a wicked sense of humour and a shipload of empathy." Michael Stuchbery gets married.

One year on: "How do you grieve for someone who hurt you profoundly, repeatedly, and tore your family apart? Who was also deeply intelligent, cursed with mental illness, incredibly funny, and when he could be, loving?" Imogen, raw/roar.

What’s So Special about America’s 1%? "If we’re all embedded in a fundamentally unjust, exploitative global economic structure, it’s hard to see why the American 1% should be especially salient." Will Wilkinson, The Moral Sciences Club.

Social justice … Tea Party style: "A common trope for conservative policy intellectuals is that they want to ‘means test’ the welfare state – reduce its availability for those with high wealth and income and focus it on those with the least wealth and income. But the Tea Party base wants the opposite – they are opposed to a welfare state for the poor, young people, undocumented workers and other groups they think are undeserving." Mike Konczal, Rortybomb.

Dogs against Romney: Why is everyone talking about Mitt Romney’s dog?

Blog readers survey: Peter Chen is conducting a survey of blog readers. You can find the survey here: Australian Blog Readers Study (via Andrew Norton).

A) Hey, you know what today is? Invasion Day!

B) What?

A) Invasion Day.

B) Invasion Day?

A) Yeah,  ’cause it’s the day they invaded us Kooris.

B)  Oh, InVASion Day

A) So all those people wearing Australian flags are celebrating Invasion Day. ‘cept the ones that feel sorry for us.

C) We don’t want you to feel sorry for us, ya cunts.

What a load of old sensationalist nonsense. I’m seriously starting to worry about Giz. If I want to search anonymously there is a thing called an anonymous tab. And I don’t log into my Google account outside work because why would I? – My phone is logged in.

That’s how the first commenter responded to this piece in Gizmodo accusing Google of being evil because it – wait for it – shares identity information between functions. That’s right, Gmail can now share information with Google search with Google + and on it goes.

This is supposed to be some attack on our privacy. Well there are very nasty things Google can do to harm my privacy. Those things would be telling other people things it knows about me that it could reasonably expect that I might not want them to tell them.

But it doesn’t do that. It is just using all the data it has to further improve improve the adds and other services it provides me. WTNTLAT? *

My point is, as I said here, privacy law, and privacy activism should be focused wherever practicable on stopping conduct that actually threatens privacy – ie where that information is provided to agents other than the one that has the information in the first place. It always pissses me off when I have to wait to be read some stupid thing which tells me my voice is going to be recorded “for quality purposes”. If it’s for training purposes they can protect my privacy by making sure the recordings don’t get leaked and by destroying them after the couple of weeks it was necessary to hold them to use them for the entirely benign purposes of quality control.

And remember, although Google is probably mostly thinking of optimising advertising here . . .

1. making advertising relevant is a source of considerable value to the world and
2. there are lots of other ways that the data might be able to be used to simply provide improved services to people – such as search, prompting connections with others, or with information of relevance to users, task management and all the other things that I can’t think of.

So broadly speaking, and with the caveat that I’ve not researched all this in great depth, I submit these views to you O Troppodores and Troppodillians.

* “Define: WTNTLAT” doesn’t generate any answers in Google, so we’re on the ground floor here Troppodores. This could be Troppo’s big break – our own little footnote in the English language, our own corner of the universe.

British Leyland devoured billions pounds of taxpayer’s money before it was finally broken up and sold off. According to New York Times journalist Nelson Schwartz the Thatcher government’s bailout "remains the classic example of a futile government intervention."

Mrs Thatcher was unable to resist the car maker’s insatiable demands for cash. According to Schwartz, her government ended up handing over £3.6 billion (£11 billion adjusted for inflation) to keep the factories open. "On any rational commercial judgment, there were no good reasons for continuing to fund British Leyland", she concedes in her autobiography. The company was a high cost, low volume manufacturer in a world where low costs and high volumes were essential for success. So why did she do it? The "political realities had to be faced", she says, "BL had to be supported":

I knew that closure of the volume car business, with all that would mean for the West Midlands and the Oxford area, would not be politically acceptable to the Cabinet of the Party, at least in the short term. It would also be a huge cost to the Exchequer — perhaps not very different to the sort of sums BL was now seeking (p 120).

As political scientist Fiona McGillivray explains, no government could afford to allow British Leyland’s huge plant in Longbridge to close:

(Continued)

Quite funny

Herewith my  column for the SMH and Age in Ross Gittins’ spot while he’s on vacation. It’s the column of the essay which is here.

As he was wheeled around on the emergency ward trolleys, Kristian filmed the whole experience with the video camera he had concealed under his clothing. Who is Kristian and what (on earth) was he doing? He’s a designer from the top global design consultancy Ideo. And the video camera? It goes pretty much everywhere Kristian goes on assignment.

Welcome to the new world of service design. If you haven’t heard, design is on the crest of a wave. Apple teeters on being the most valuable company in history because of its mastery over design – not technology, at which it is unremarkable. And the world’s largest business services firm, Deloitte, wants ”design thinking” at the centre of its operations – from consulting to audit.

So what is design and why is it important? We economists tend to think that once ”incentives” are sorted, for instance once competition forces producers to compete for customers, that everything will be hunky dory. But in a complex world what if the seller doesn’t understand what the buyer wants?

Before the Apple Macintosh was designed, no one understood how important user friendliness was to computer users – certainly not IBM and Microsoft. Some people think of design as an aesthetic overlay on products. But as Steve Jobs insisted, good design isn’t about how something looks, but rather how it works.

The driving force of design is looking at things from every angle. And usually the producer’s angle is already dominant. That’s where Kristian’s ”patient’s eye” video cam came in. (Continued)

White to play Vidmar vs Euwe 34. ? See game for solution.

As Troppodillians know my definition of an immortal game is one that involves some serious sacrificing and that the only pieces of the winners side that are left on the board have a role in the final checkmate. Click through at the top of the diagram to play the game and watch the puzzle be solved.

Also, in case people are interested, an annual event that’s been running for decades at Wijk aan Zee is on again and has the two top players in the world amongst others battling it out – Carlsen and Aronian. You can watch the games – live – here. They even have a computer to tell you how each player is going and what moves they should be making and anticipating.

I wouldn’t be expecting the New Zealand economy starts catching up to Australia any time soon. While they have their usual ideological stoushes there’s something that sticks out like a ham sandwich at a bar-mitzvah. NZ is capital starved. Owing it seems to our compulsory super system, we are not. These charts from a bit of work I did on NZ are now out of date but make the point nicely.

Our own household savings performance has been pretty woeful up till the GFC, as we reduced our household savings nearly as fast as the compulsory super system forced us to increase them. But the GFC has put paid to all that with our savings rate shooting up to around 10%. Banking Day reports as follows on an OECD study.

An OECD ranking of household savings rates puts Australia fifth among the 23 countries surveyed, with 10.4 per cent of household disposable income going into savings in 2011.

Switzerland is top of the table, with a savings rate of 12.1 per cent in 2011, followed by Sweden (11.7 per cent), Germany (11.3 per cent) and Belgium (10.7 per cent).

Back in 2006, before the financial crisis brought the country’s borrowing binge to an end, Australia’s household savings rate was 2.1 per cent. Its OECD ranking that year was 16th.

OECD economists are forecasting that Australian households will maintain their high savings rate. The forecast for the current year is 10.3 per cent and for 2013 the expected rate is 10.5 per cent.

Among the weaker savers last year were New Zealand, with 0.6 per cent of disposable household income going into savings, Denmark (negative 1.7 per cent), the Netherlands (2.3 per cent), the Slovak Republic (3.1 per cent) and the United States (4.6 per cent).

The Jericho amendments: At Grog’s Gamut Greg Jericho checks out the Australian Public Service Commission’s new guidelines for public servants engaging in public comment. Some of the principles are "so obvious or dumb as could only be written by a public servant", says Jericho, while another is "utterly stupid."

Left-wing Paulbots are go! Left-wingers, greens and progressives should be supporting Ron Paul‘s bid for the Republican nomination, writes Leichhardt Greens Councillor, Daniel Kogoy.

Ron Paul on the "whole global warming terrorism" thing: In 2009 Paul said that the Copenhagen treaty on climate change "can’t help the economy. It has to hurt the economy and it can’t possibly help the environment because they’re totally off track on that. It might turn out to be one of the biggest hoaxes of all history, this whole global warming terrorism that they’ve been using, but we’ll have to just wait and see, but it cannot be helpful. It’s going to hurt everybody.” He made similar comments in an interview with Fox Business (at 7:00).

Industry subsidies and political tribalism: At current levels, subsidies to the car industry are third-order, writes John Quiggin. So why all the fuss? "It’s taken for granted on the cultural right that some technologies and industries (nuclear power, oil, finance) are good and others (wind energy, electric cars, Hollywood) are evil – essentially a mirror image of what they think we on the left think. For people who are supposed to believe in the free market, this is a big problem."

There’s a margin in error: "Like advertising, journalism now is mostly about constructing a version of the truth that suits a chosen market. It’s about making an impact and attracting eyeballs and building a brand. And the greatest shame of it all is that a gullible public buys it." Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate.

Voting is about values not interests: "It isn’t rational to vote for your economic interests. It isn’t rational in the economist’s sense to vote at all. Why not, because your individual vote doesn’t count." The Philosopher’s Beard.

The Great Gatsby Curve: Alan Krueger calls it the ‘Great Gatsby curve’ — the finding that countries that have more inequality across households also have more persistence in income from one generation to the next. As Matthew Yglesias points out, that’s bad news for Republican claims that America doesn’t need to redistribute income because it’s the land of equal opportunity and upward mobility.

Hands up if you want downward mobility: "Someone in society is going to end up doing crappy jobs," writes Megan McArdle, "because trash needs to be hauled and Alzheimer’s patients need to have their diapers changed. The primary job of a middle class parent is to ensure that their children are not those people."

Technological change and economic growth : Steve Kates picks a fight with a ‘socialist’ blogger who claims that free markets drive technological change and generate wealth. “Gimme a break" he says, "It is free markets that drive tech change and generate wealth. But it is not ‘tech change’ as such, but entrepreneurs, those people, like Mitt Romney, who do the driving and if they succeed, end up very wealthy. To present it as ‘tech change’ means that rubbish like the NBN or batts in the belfry might get counted."

Mobile phones and the price of fish: Mobile phones are transforming the way people in countries like India do business. In a 2007 paper economist Robert Jensen explained how access to mobile telecommunications allowed fishermen in Kerala to get the best prices for their catch.

"My mother died in 1976. Is she all right?" Kerryn Goldsworthy visits the supermarket.