the attentive worker

http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1279

Hi all. Currently we're having a bit of a rest day in London, and planning to cook dinner for my cousin this evening. Tomorrow we're flying to New York, quite early in the morning.

I was just reading the above link regarding the politics of the Lisbon Treaty to restructure the EU and Ireland's "no" vote in a recent referendum. Analysis of voting patterns shows that people who are well-off and well-educated voted in favour, and those unemployed or notionally in the proletariat voted against.

Democracy is depressing sometimes, and this is one of the reasons. Speaking for myself I don't even really know whether to fear or admire (or both) a creaking colossus like the EU, but a typical voter's decision-making process is even more terrifying.

People regard their present circumstances as the conclusion of every one of the Universe's syllogisms. All roads lead to Rome; all causes lead to my effect. I am so-and-so, and such-and-such is happening, so such-and-such leads to so-and-so, and so on.

But here voters seem to be imagining their lives today as an outcome of events that haven't even taken place! As if a future restructuring of the EU is reaching back into the past to ruin or exalt them: anything that is happening, has ever happened or will ever happen (or might ever happen) serves, has served or will serve only to make each individual one of them what they are in this one instant.

Talk about space and time being curved -- oh well, not exactly ground-breaking, but I am on holiday!

Bride of Gossip Amnesty

Anyway, what's happening in your lives? I still don't check the feeds very regularly, so I'm missing a lot. Births, deaths and marriages? Jobs finished and started? Mammoth creative endeavours? Picnics? Give me the news, please! Comments are screened for your privacy.

We've been travelling for about six weeks now I think. Just got back from a pretty wild nine day jeep and camel trek around the Gobi Desert, and I'm sitting at a net café in Ulaanbaatar. About the only downside is that I'm recovering from bronchitis.

So, what are the haps my friends? I don't have regular net access anymore, so I have no idea what the big news items, personal and public, are. Let me know how you're going in the comments? I'll screen them so you can rat each other out if you like!

-- Tom

( Short clip of a highly impressive four-legged walking robot )

The linked video shows a prototype robot called BigDog walking in a wintry nature reserve.

About this time last year I was looking at a clip of a bipedal robot under development in California that could resist being pushed to a certain extent, but this thing seems to balance as well as a human. At 40'' it catches itself after a full-blooded shove from one of its minders. Later on it corrects itself after suffering a serious slip on an icy surface. It walks in snow, mud and water. It jumps over a foot into the air.

The robot is apparently a DARPA-funded project put together by a group called Boston Dynamics. It brings to mind a recent prediction by some futurist or other that by 2020, US troop deployments would consist mostly of robots. Or the Mechanical Hound from Fahrenheit 451.

Science is just another ideological framework.
Merkel is just another politician.
Islam is just another religion.
Football is just another male-dominated sport.
Negative gearing is just another instance of middle class welfare.

Generalise. Relate. Pluralise.

Observe. Distinguish. Specialise. Discriminate.



EDIT: That was all a bit opaque, see comments for an attempted clarification.
EDIT: via Google:
Obama is just another machine politician.
Atheism is just another religion.
Iran's constitution is just another secularo-fascist constitution.
A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.
Pedestrian is just another word for speed bump.
This latest report is just another example of journalistic irresponsibility.
Leonard Nimoy is just another Hollywood liberal.
Methadone is just another drug.

It has become more popular lately to use the noun 'female' in lieu of 'woman' or 'girl', and likewise 'male' in lieu of 'man' or 'boy'.

Well, Australia, I don't like it. I don't like anything about it. There's a distastefully clinical tone to it. It's especially aggravating when the plural is used in generalisations: "Males are all like that". And so forth. I think to myself "Male whats? Humans? Guinea pigs? Boll weevils?"

Ugh. I don't know if what I'm feeling is the first stage of an incipient and debilitating smug Frank Devine-esque wowserism, but I can't stand this one.

Today at the last minute I decided I would, in fact, detour to Parliament on my way to work this morning - hang the late arrival - and attend the public telecast of the apology to the Stolen Generation outside Parliament House.

I pulled up next to tentland on the lawn out front of Old Parliament House at around twenty past eight. By this time a sizable crowd was already building. There were scores of activists, photographers and media people around, and antagonistic placards, with slogans such as: "WHO OWNS PETROL STATIONS? WHO HAS BROUGHT THIS POISON TO OUR PEOPLE?" and "FATHERLESS CHILDREN - CHILDLESS FATHERS - ANOTHER STOLEN GENERATION - ABOLISH THE CHILD SUPPORT AGENCY".

There was a census' worth of types of person there: besuited public servants come up from Barton and Parkes before work, university students, hippy activists, couples who'd taken the morning off to be there, people who'd brought their toddlers for the history of it, unionists carrying flags and cheerfully marshalling each other about the place, men in fancy grommet shades and Reeboks, women in long shapeless dresses, in general more Aboriginals than many Australians would've seen gathered in one place at one time before. It was a true reflection of the plurality and variation on all sides of this story, which is often reduced to a simple black/white binary in our public discourse. It's not really two cultures, it's one hundred cultures and millions of different personal circumstances.

As I walked up from tentland to the new House, I saw Sky News interviewing Bob Brown on the grass and wondered a little what he might be saying. Up on the next lawn there was an indigenous band playing Warumpi Band style rock and roll, and covering Archie Roach's "They Took The Children Away".

Even on a solemn occasion the lines for coffee are the longest lines at half past eight in the morning, and I'm guessing the vendors on the other mobile stalls - donuts, juice, etc. - were wondering why they hadn't invested in espresso machines. And even on a solemn occasion, when you have to wait half an hour for a man in a grey suit to talk, the mind strays to absurdities. Standing there provided great opportunities for people-watching.

The crowd continued to build right up until nine o'clock, at which point the place I was standing, formerly on the fringe of the mass of people on the lawn of Parliament House, was no more than one third of the way back from the front. The atmosphere was electric and there was a tangible tension in the crowd waiting to be released, but the mood was happy and hopeful. Most people were smiling.

When we saw Kevin Rudd, up on the big screen, stand up to put the apology as the first motion of the parliament this year, there was spontaneous applause, which continued to break out during the course of his speech. The words themselves were confidently delivered, well written and to their purpose - a far cry from the Prime Minister's uneven effort on election night.

"For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry,"

he said, and there was loud applause and flags - Australian and Aboriginal - were waved throughout the crowd. Solemn clapping drowned out the cheers.

As Rudd's speech continued and its structure - a formal apology, an honest recounting of the personal history of a victim of the stolen generation, an expression of hope for the future and of re-dedication to the ongoing battle for indigenous equality and to the outcomes we all need to work together to achieve - became apparent, I felt a tremendous upsurge of hope that something good and lasting might emerge from this act. It was the most patriotic I've felt in a long time, and it was a patriotic feeling that stemmed from a gesture of openness and vulnerability, a far cry from the jingoism that we have become used to from our leaders during the past decade. I was there, I was buying into the spin - if it is spin - and I was appreciating the symbolism and its palpable, material importance.

There were snipes at the foot-dragging and mean-spiritedness of the Howard years, and insouciant allusions to past Labor leaders, to Whitlam's "It's Time" slogan, to Keating at Redfern in 1992, but the only true laugh in the thirty minutes of Rudd's oration sprang from the reaction shot of Brendan Nelson when Rudd announced a bipartisan indigenous policy commission (described as a "war cabinet"). To say that Nelson didn't look entirely happy at the prospect of not being given a permit to snipe from the sidelines over the government's term would be an understatement, and the crowd evidently enjoyed his discomfort. This government was once again lending some substance to its claim that it will reshape the practice of Australian politics.

Rudd's response to Nelson's comments about "inter-generational responsibility" on the 7:30 Report the other night? "1970 is not exactly a point in remote antiquity." He continued on to point out that some members of Parliament today had already been elected for the first time in the early 1970s, when the last children were taken.

And yes, there was plenty encoded in Rudd's repeated use of the word "partnership" and of the phrase "mutual responsibility", stand-ins for the new government's line on how the position of indigenous people should be improved, and for its refusal to consider monetary compensation to the victims of the Stolen Generation at this time.

Nelson delivered his own speech following the Prime Minister and started well, but the weaselly language of the past week's internecine warfare in Coalition ranks soon began to creep in. Far from Labor's statement of unqualified apology, the wording used by Nelson repeatedly insisted that no guilt could be transmitted from one generation to the next, and that none could be ascribed to actions undertaken with - he claimed - the best of intentions. "No one," said Nelson without the slightest irony or insight, "should bring a sense of moral superiority to this debate."

His miserly expressions were rapidly killing off the mood in the crowd, and I had to get to work, so I walked back to my parked motorcycle as he phrase by phrase dismantled the generous spirit of the government's gesture. His voice was carried over sound systems to me all the way back to my bike. I hear now that several of the Aboriginal elders present at the Parliamentary sitting turned their backs on him as he spoke, and I find it unsurprising. Nelson, and those who think, talk and act like him, are missing the point, and it's a sad thing.

As an Australian citizen whose family history in this country extends back to the 1850s at least, I state today that I feel as much responsibility as anyone for the current circumstances of our indigenous population. I am adding my voice to all the other voices that are currently raised to join in the collective apology for the wrongs of the past. Writing that here isn't enough, obviously - perhaps, probably, won't achieve anything - but: I am sorry. I will do what I can to support whatever measures can be taken by everyone concerned in order for us all to be reconciled in a free Australia, where all citizens are equal in their opportunities and in the basic respect they obtain, and injustices of the magnitude of the Stolen Generation never again occur.

The single most interesting critique of the domain of "software engineering" that I've read in quite a while can be found here.

The whole field is currently rife with recurring arguments that fall under the aegis of what is discussed in this article: whether static or dynamic typing is better, whether software engineering is really engineering, whether detailed specifications and requirements are an important first step in the whole process of answering a problem, and what the terms "hacker" and "exploratory" connote anyway.

Some other links for and against here and here, the first is a critique and the second is a PDF of the slides from the OOPSLA talk that inspired the article in the first place.

EDIT: I don't know, maybe it's not that interesting, or what have you, after all. I might have had my expectations lowered by an excruciatingly boring and micro-managed day at work.

EDIT: Well, perhaps it is interesting, but only once you delve a little. The foundational idea of "modernist" software practices discovering "post-modernist" software practices is hackneyed in advance. A pluralism of perspectives on design, and a discourse to describe the betterment of systems-in-progress seem better.

"I continue to have great difficulty with the notion of inter-generational responsibility for the good or not so good things that were done by our ancestors."

That was Brendan Nelson on the 7:30 report the other night. Leave aside the fence-sitting "good or not so good".

Why is the concept of inter-generational responsibility difficult to grasp? I don't find it hard.

Thought experiment: A kills B and moves into B's house. Years pass, and A's children now live in B's house while B's children have nowhere to live. Do A's children not have a responsibility to B's children?

That, to within an order of magnitude, is the recent history of Australian settlement. We, the invaders, are the descendants of those who came to the country and profited from the forceful dispossession of indigenous people by the British. Before us, other descendants of theirs removed indigenous children from their families and used them as cheap labour, with traumatic effect on their psychology and their people. So they were also profiting from the misery of others.

In this way, responsibility is transmitted. There's attenuation. There might be mitigating circumstances. But our hands aren't clean.

An award-winning writer has received £115,000 in an out of court settlement over chemical exposure that reduced her to writing a thriller instead of a literary masterpiece.

Well, that's how the story is running in the media.

The writer in question actually did incur nerve damage from chemical fumes, so compensation seems well in order to me.

The opening paragraph of her new book, the "entertainment" (as Graham Greene would've put it) Bleedout, seems odd to me:

"Even after Hugh Freyl lost his sight he was invincible. But late one night, in the library of the elite law firm that bears his name, he was beaten to death."

Although it's not incorrect, I'd prefer 'bore' to 'bears' there. Perhaps she could sue again for having lost her ability to straighten her tenses.

Via alias_sqbr and tommmo, a list meme calculating my level of privilege.

( Read more... )

( Subsequent rambling )

Mmm. Breakfast nog. Loot, love and lazy camaraderie.

I haven't been bothered by the various LJ censorship kerfuffles over the past few years. In fact I've mostly argued that LJ's owners at any given time have the right to control content on the site.

The idea that certain types of user content are considered outside the terms of use and blocked, banned or sanctioned doesn't disturb me. My logic is that

• the site is run by a business that provides a free service to most users, and has an arguable right to set the terms of use of that service


• all communities involve censorship and boundaries on speech of some sort, and so do almost all print publishing outlets


• in my experience of the internet moderation is usually a good thing


• vast uncontrolled tracts of the internet are still fair game for anyone who's seriously troubled by censorship on this site


• it has never been an issue for me

On the other hand, stuff like this irks me, because it displays contempt for the site's user base. An average programmer could probably improve the new search-blocking algorithm by an order of magnitude within a couple of hours. I suspect simply matching the terminological blacklist on word boundaries instead of on substrings would cut out 95% or more of the false positives listed.

It's a worse instance of the incompetence that characterised Six Apart's recent effort to automatically delete a bunch of questionable users and their blogs.

All issues of ethics, convenience and freedom aside, if this is any indication of the general quality of the technology going into LiveJournal under SUP ownership (although I'm guessing the technical staff won't have changed much from Six Apart's tenure), the site's future isn't looking bright.

SUP should beware of visiting substandard software upon LJ's users, because they may find themselves getting wiped out in six months.

* No, I don't mean the kind that are lazily evaluated, I mean the kind that are lazily written.

O'Farrell says dumb stuff.

My blog seems to consist of swipes at the Liberal Party lately. Oh well.

Mr O'Farrell cited as an example of the problem he was referring to the loss of the Liberal-held seat of Lindsay, following the distribution of a bogus leaflet by a fake Islamic group just prior to election day.

The scandal became more damaging when reports surfaced that Liberal members chose to ring the Labor Party head office about the incident, Mr O'Farrell said.

"Now that is a symptom, delegates, of the worst that we've seen in our party over the last few years and it's got to stop," he told the audience.

Surely a symptom of the Liberal Party's worst ailments would be the Lindsay debacle itself, and not the subsequenting shopping of Kelly, Chijoff et al. to the ALP.

Come on guys. If you just put your heads together, you might learn a thing or two.

Footnote unrelated to relentless, feeble flagellation of the Liberal Party

My favourite news item of the past couple of days (via capnoblivious) is the one about the Pope's astronomer bagging out Creationism.

According to this man, who I suppose probably does not have the ear of the Pope at all times, but may well speak with papal blessing, "religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism - it's turning God into a nature god."

That's a sharp shot at various other Christian denominations -- "sorry guys, you're pretty much superstitious pagans" -- and also an expansive statement on behalf of Catholicism. One which not all Catholics would equably accept.

It's cool that the Pope has an astronomer, especially one called Brother Guy Consolmagno who works "in a Vatican observatory in Arizona". Is that a sekrit Opus Dei observatory? I suppose things must have gotten a lot more formal since the seventeenth century, when if the Pope needed an astronomer he just picked one and kept him under house arrest.

Finally it makes me happy when the Catholic Church makes these fairly rational positioning statements, even if I believe they probably do so to paint themselves as a denomination that is of the Centre politically, and as theologically distinct from the evangelicals, rather than out of any particular doctrinal fervour. As a son of lapsed Catholics and relative of scores of devout Romans, I feel some sense of responsibility for a lot of the stupidity orthodox Catholicism brings to the table, so it's nice to see the holy ledger rebalanced in these small ways.

And yeah, I realise when I describe a statement against Creationism as a rebalancing of past stupidities I speak from my own perspective, and not from the hub of all truth to the outer crystal spheres of ignorance. The centre is nowhere, and everywhere is the centre.

Continuing today's balanced and impartial coverage, I'd conjecture that possession by Bob is the most reasonable explanation for Nelson's switch from the ALP to the Libs ...

Soundbite from incoming Liberal party leader Brendan Nelson's first sip at the poisoned chalice:

"I feel very strongly about any retreat at all from unfair dismissal law provisions. We've got to make sure that we work in a job-creating society at the same time as understanding what Australians have said to us."

I too "feel strongly" about a "retreat" from unfair dismissal "law provisions". Retreat! Run for the goddamn hills! That's what I say. None of this tactical withdrawal bullshit.

It really is time to put a bomb under this pernicious lie that being able to sack people liability-free is a net creator of jobs. It's only slightly more accurate than the idea that torture is a great way of obtaining reliable survey data.

If you make it easier to sack people, more people get sacked. That's not job creation!

The ACTU, the Your Rights At Work campaign etc. have been hard at work on this issue, and I've seen media reports about the large majority of business owners not giving a fig either way whether unfair dismissal laws are or are not in place, but Brendan Nelson still seems to think they're a necessary core of WorkChoices that needs fighting for in Opposition.

Whose interest is he representing? This stand is nothing more than workplace relations fundamentalism. Employers don't care, and workers would definitely prefer to have the right of appeal if sacked in dodgy circumstances.

To accept the idea that unfair dismissal laws created jobs, you would have to assume that the instances in which such laws

• influenced small business people who otherwise wouldn't have to hire new staff, because the knowledge they can sack gives them confidence


• were used by top-heavy organisations to terminate highly-paid senior staff to take on additional juniors at a reduced salary

would outweigh the instances in which they

• were used to sack expendable low-salaried workers and casuals to keep running costs low or restructure

I don't believe for a moment that the first set of circumstances arises more often than the second. Data anyone?

There's a reason they're called unfair dismissal laws. It's because if you have a decent reason other than ME HUNGRY ME BIG BUSINESS HONCHO CONSUME WORLD AND SOULS NOW you can sack people. I realise the Liberal platform is eroding faster than fairyfloss in a hurricane but Nelson will need to find a better fortress of solitude to mope in than this irrelevant shitpile.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/11/25/2100538.htm

Must be the first real surprise of the post-election fallout, and it leaves the Liberals looking decidedly thin on the ground. Who will lead now? Turnbull? Abbott?

This is a decision that will forever stamp Costello with the title of the Great Couldn't-Do-It of Australian politics. It can't bode well for the future social policy of the Coalition, as Costello was probably one of the wetter members of the pre-election Cabinet, despite his rabid anti-unionism.

The idea of Tony Abbott leading them from Opposition with people like Kevin Andrews in tow is, frankly, appalling. Although such a pairing would probably also disturb an even greater majority of Australians than that which has just put the ALP in power.

Costello's already mapping out an alternate career in "the commercial world" from which I infer he's about to call in his connections and favours to acquire lucrative directorships, consultancies, etc., much as many outgoing politicians have in the past.

This flip is also the pettiest of revenges against Howard, whose departing speech, in which he endorsed Costello several times as his successor, now makes him look less in touch with reality than ever. I wonder how long this decision has been in Costello's mind and how many opportunities he has passed up to inform JWH of his intentions contigent to defeat?

I'm quite sad to read that Matt Price has died. I didn't even know he'd been ill.

Call it for Australia, call it for Bennelong.

I've been sitting around since six, eating pizza and drinking beer, and watching the ABC result predictions roll in with a cadre of friends and acquaintances. It's looking great on all fronts.

It was time, after all.

Something pretty worthwhile linked from Crooked Timber (which seems to have really gone downhill since I started reading it a few years ago): China Miéville on the feasibility, deliberate omissions, and varying shapes of the dreamed-of libertarian floating utopia.

Particularly to be enjoyed for bites like this:

"... advocates of “seasteading” are disproportionately adherents of “libertarianism,” that peculiarly American philosophy of venal petty-bourgeois dissidence."

and this:

"the resoundingly portentous blatherings of Ayn Rand"

and this:

"In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy."

Over the last few days my f-list has been littered with friends trying to convince their audiences to enrol, enrol, enrol to vote!

Now the deadline for regular enrolments has passed, it's my time. The time to bitch-slap those who failed. So:

If you could've been enrolled to vote at the forthcoming Australian election and you chose not to enrol, or somehow fluffed your enrolment, you're a chump*.

And though you may rightly take heart from the idea that your absent vote almost certainly will turn out to make no difference (except a marginal one, to the forthcoming public funding of your preferred parties), you should be dismayed by the fact that the absent votes of you and all the chumps like you probably could have.

So, the election.

I'm finding it a little hard to get excited about it. No, scratch that. It's hard to get excited about it in the right way - to feel righteous about the issues, and to try to persuade friends and acquaintances to my point of view. The election grabs my attention, but what I'm drawn to is the empty games of the campaign - where Rudd's meta-L-plate-advertisement was a nice touché, an advanced anticipatory strike, or when I'm struck by the surrealness of his remark about the worm:

"Why punish the worm?" Mr Rudd said. "Everyone in Australia likes the worm. Let's be friends of the worm."

And today Costello was out telling the world that unionists are the enemies of small business. Come again? Here I was thinking that unions were, for the most part, the stick in the bloodied cartwheel of big business, of those employers with large, fungible workforces. I doubt the staff at most tuck shops and bookstores are card-carrying union members. But of course, Baptist Peter. We know, good family man, self-sacrificing "team player". The words "small business" chime sympathetically in the auris populi, don't they? Even those nice Exclusive Brethren folks run small businesses. Of course, they don't have to worry about the unions.

I think one reason it's becoming harder for me to get excited about domestic political issues is that in my case, my investment in them is almost entirely liquid, and on the behalf of others. It's hard to find a policy difference between the ALP and the Coalition that will effect a tangible swing on my well-being. I don't mean the immaterial material, the basic stuff like dollars in the bank or houses on the market. I mean that the way I actually feel day to day I am convinced is largely independent of the policies of the sitting government.

Another reason is that the policy announcements in the coming weeks will be based not on serving the public interest, but on winning votes. The tax cuts of yesterday are a typical example - the classic Howard and Costello golden gag - but I predict that most of what the ALP serves up will be the same nutritionless fare. So I do still care, and sometimes I will argue for what I see as the right choices until I'm blue in the face, but at the end I leave it alone and feel nothing much.

The last thing that really gets me going is the possibility of that horrible human cancer, John Howard, being permanently excised from my daily life. In fact I'd like the whole country to go into blissful remission from Howard, without any relapses this time around.

I was reminiscing about the first time I heard of John Howard the other day. I was nine years old, and my parents were laughing about the scandalous Kennett-Peacock carphone conversation of 1987 (actually, I misremembered it as a Howard-Peacock phone scandal, and needed the ultimate crustiness of accy in all things Australo-political to disabuse me of that). Howard was the vaguest figure of ridicule to me then, bearing in mind I barely knew even by 1990 whether I was supposed to be barracking for Peacock or Hawke.

And I didn't hear anything worth mentioning about the little creep again, until he popped up to take over from Downer in 1995 and usher in the "relaxed and comfortable" era in which we now find ourselves.

And then a news story comes up which really does leave me feeling a bit gutted: I wonder whether carers, the most depressed cohort of Australians out there, think the election matters one way or another.

This quote from that article I found particularly grim:

Professor Cummins says most carers are clinically depressed, meaning they use lot of community resources and are not very productive, so he says the government should help them financially and invest more in respite services.

But Professor Cummins says by the time people reach their 50s and 60s they are more content.

"They engage in thought processes that are more tied to their reality than people are at the age of 20, when they're still imagining a life that's full of all sorts of wonderful things," he said.

So carers are severely depressed until they become "tied to their reality" eh? Does that mean that realising that your life has always been, and will always be, a great big bag of shit is a good thing? That must be a wonderful moment of revelation when it comes, or does it come not as a bolt from heaven, but as a stabbing gout of ... what? Apathy?

The first person I thought of, reading that, was my former neighbour Gwen, whose son Ian was retarded, confused, sometimes violent and nearly always heavily medicated, and lived with her until the day she died, by which time he was getting up towards what would've been retirement age if he'd ever been employed himself. They had a bitter, inarticulate screaming match about every couple of days on average, even though she was in her eighties.

* modified from "nonce" by popular demand of my lone commenter.