Indian Giver

A politically incorrect phrase if ever there was one as I have no idea of its origins but it refers to someone who gives you something as a gift and then at some point asks for the gift back, presumably on the pretense that it was just a loan.

I mention this as I was asked about the lotto gift conundrum, i.e. someone gives you a lotto ticket presumably as birthday present or some such reason and low and behold you win the big prize of let’s say $5M, the conundrum at least in some people’s minds is that they may have an obligation to the giver of the ticket to share their new found bounty and if they do what amount is sufficient to discharge this obligation.

This doesn’t stand much logical scrutiny now does it?

Let’s change the scenario just a little. When you give the Lotto gift you have the potential to turn say a small gift, say $5 into a large gift say $5M. What if it is the other way around, you provide a higher priced gift that suddenly turns into a small value gift, eg You give someone an expensive set of Waterford Crystal Water glasses that set you back $1,000 for six glasses and the person you give them slips, drops and smashes the lot, turning them into zero. Would you be surprised if they turned to you and said, that was rubbish gift a load of broken glasses how about some more? Yes thought so.

How about a bloke goes into a bar orders a drink, gets into his car afterwards and drives into a bus killing 10 people. Is the bar staff responsible for this? (in NZ we have in part made them so but that is another story)  Surely the bloke in the car is really the responsible party.

What about a gun seller who sells a gun to someone who accidentally uses it to shoot a hunting companion. Is the gun seller responsible for the death?

In all of the above when there is a negative consequence we quite readily see the dividing line between us and the negative consequence, if we are the gift giver, bar staff or gun seller.

When there is a positive outcome that could ascribe a benefit to us (a share in a big win) we start to see shades of grey or “obligations”

There really is no difference just the outcome.

What if the giver purchased two tickets and gave one as a gift and kept one and that one was the winner, do you think they would feel they should share the winnings with the receiver of the gift who but for some bad luck could have gotten the winning ticket. No didn’t think so.

So there really is no logical obligation is there, but what about that other kind of reasoning the emotional kind. People trying to sell you products have known for thousands of years that if you give someone something then they are inclined to feel some obligation in return and may well buy something from your store.

I had a direct experience of this in Florence when a street hawker approached me and tried to sell me some scarves or hat or something I don’t recall. I told him no thanks and promptly ignored him. At which point he grabbed my hand and shoved a couple of carved animals into my hand “for you” “I give for you” says he and having regained my attention he whipped out some sort of flute and played a quick tune on the flute, then offering to sell me one. No thanks mate says I, already told you I wasn’t interested. He was most put out, he had given me a gift and put on a show, it was now my turn to anti up. When he realised I was immune to his charms such as they were he demanded back his gift, the carved animals, which I gave him and he then stormed off. (actually if he just asked about the animals I might have given some money for those, they were quite good but I digress)

So there is a sharing contract within humans and it usually works, I look after you, you look after me. When one of us breaks the contract we tend to get upset, like my hawker. The fact that I didn’t want to contract with him was his problem. If I had entered his shop and he had put on the same routine my inclination to go along with the trade would have been much stronger.

So to the lotto winner and the gift giver. I think it is inevitable that you would provide some reciprocal gift in return not because it is logical but because of the unspoken social contract. 

Like most gift giving the level would be commensurate with the initial gift and the relationship with the giver. In some cases your conscience could be soothed for little money in other cases it is going to cost you plenty.

It is all about the social contract that we have with our other human beings and about how we should treat them. Everyone has a copy of the contract that they keep memorised in their head. The problem is all of us have made our own copy with various clauses that others may or may not have.

Dopey Media

Name a drug that was discovered and brought to market by a government, any government any time anywhere. I have some spare time so I will wait while you think about it. Try googling it, I don’t mind.

Did you google it, if you did you will likely find an article or two pumping up the role that fundamental research plays in the development of drugs and even the development of actual drugs in a research lab. Great, well done, thanks very much we appreciate your efforts research folk really I do. But….. (who didn’t see that coming) none of them made it to market without a private company in the mix who picked up where the researches left off and actually got them into the hands of patients and that is what counts. Having the cure for cancer on a shelf in a lab is no use to anyone, distribution to the consumer (patient) is what makes it useful.

So what I hear you ask. Well today on the radio I heard a women campaigning and explaining how you could buy and import Hep C generic drugs into NZ because we do not current provide these through Pharmac with the only option being self-funding of the patent holders drugs at a very high price. We are talking $60k - $100k  for a course of medication (I think but she didn’t actually say) vs some $6k. So it is easy to see the attraction and let’s be honest with ourselves if I was dying of Hep C and could use her system to fix the problem I probably would.

But….. Yep another one, why is she allowed on the radio to promote this idea? Here is what she is actually suggesting in the long term. A drug company (don’t know which one) invested a ton of money developing the drug and getting it FDA approved to bring it to market. This costs on average $4 Bn USD and can be as much as $11 Bn. To give that some perspective the Health budget in NZ is only $11 Bn USD total. To make this worth their while they charge like wounded bulls for as long as they can or put another way until their patent runs out (20 years). At which point every other drug company in the world copies their drug and starts grabbing their market and the price inevitably tumbles.

In the case of the Hep C drug China and India in particular have decided to ignore US patents so drug companies in those companies start manufacturing at a cheap price straight away as they have not had to part out with the $4 Bn the other company did.

NZ plays ball and only uses patent medicines until the patent runs out and then we buy the cheapest we can get. If you don’t act that way then private drug companies will stop spending the $4 Bn to bring the drugs to market, and as we know, no one else is doing it, therefore no new drugs, i.e. the cure for Hep C would never make it out of the lab.

So the wide spread popularisation of her cunning scheme helps 20 years of Hep C patients (before the patent runs out) but condemns everyone else to potentially no new drugs as a result. 

Like I said I may well do the same as her if I had Hep C what I certainly would not do is allow her a powerful spot on my radio show (if I had one) to promote an idea that could harm many many people (the ones who won’t get new drugs) in favour of helping a few.

The lack of critical thinking of our modern media continues to astound. 

That's not fair...

Children go through a period of acute awareness of a type of justice as they discover that the world is unfair. They first discover that there are rules and that sometimes these can be used to their advantage. A complaint of “jimmy has two trucks and I have none” will likely motivate an adult to take one truck of jimmy for my benefit. Mostly we grow out of this childishness as we realise that trucks are earned not given.

So chalked on the sidewalk today as I went for a lunchtime stroll was, “10% of NZers have 60% of the wealth, while 40% have just 3%”. This is a statistic from a recent Statistics NZ survey on wealth distribution in NZ as at 2015 and is an accurate reporting of at least what part of the report says.

I don’t know the motivation of the sidewalk chalk messenger but I suspect they wrote it because they felt it was wrong in a childlike response to a supposed injustice. Because in itself the quote tells us nothing about the situation or even if it is a good or a bad idea. It needed at a minimum a qualifier such as “large wealth inequality can lead to rebellion” (think French revolution if you want a famous example, let them eat cake and all that)

But is wealth inequality a bad thing, accepting that excess inequality is, but is this split particularly bad and why. I don’t pretend to know but some thoughts occur.

One household is a group of students and another is a couple just about to retire. No one would expect equal wealth between these groups now would they. Likely as not the students have no wealth and the retiring couple might own a house at the very least. But this is just a run of life variance, kids have no money adults have more money, wow who knew.

How about one person purchased a house in Auckland 10 years ago for $300k and one purchased one in Invercargill for the same amount, both equal at that stage, but now the Auckland house is worth $1M and Invercargill house is worth $350k. Again so what?  A big wealth disparity but both have one house each to live in, neither is really any better off unless Ms Auckland sells up and moves to Invercargill.

One couple decide not to have kids and another couple has three kids. Pretty sure the no kids group will have more money but perhaps a less fulfilled life depending on your value set. Would the couple with the kids feel worse off, even though they will be less wealthy?

Choices can make a big difference for example the South Islands richest man (at one stage) never left home and eventually took possession of his parents’ house, purchased only one car that he used rarely, would walk to the library to read the paper and never left the country and seldom left his home town. No kids, no pets, no hobbies (except making money), no life, but he died really wealthy but so what. I have met a lot of poor people who were much wealthier than him.

But I hear you say, there are really poor people who have nothing and really rich who have everything. Well the poverty is relative is my first comment, better to be poor in NZ than India or China and they have really rich people too.

Those really wealthy people also pay a lot of tax (yep even with their loopholes and fancy accountants) As we have also heard this week that 40% of households pay no net direct tax. The wealthy also invest in business etc which provide jobs and having a lot of gold bars or fancy cars does not make you healthier or necessarily happier.

Sure wealth inequality might not be a good thing but we need to get past the sandpit stage and provide better arguments than a bald quote designed to elicit whining “that’s not fair…” type response. 

Training to be a fighter pilot

There is one of those urban legends that suggests the US air force used to go to video arcades and look for future fighter pilots.
Personally I have my doubts that this ever occurred but I am sure it made the kids wasting their time and quarters feel better that rather than skipping school they were training to be fighter pilots.

When I was at university I did a fair few hours training to be a fighter pilot myself. Specifically on a game called Defender the premise was you were defending 10 people on a planet by flying your fighter ship against the alien invaders. A pretty generic set up.

The mechanics of the game involved a landscape that stretched past one screen full meaning you couldn't see what was going on across the entire battlefield only the bit you were currently in. There was a radar screen where you could get an idea of the remainder of the battlefield activity.
You had control of your ship for up, down thrust forward and reverse direction and of course shoot with a couple of less important bomb etc options thrown in.
The aliens were varied in their speeds and abilities and all attacked simultaneously across the battlefield. In a nutshell it was pretty complex and fast paced.

I was reminded of all of this the other day when driving which in some regards is just like the game without the shooting bit, I have control of left, right, thrust, brake etc and there are any number of aliens on the roads of varying speed and ability trying to get me. Well perhaps not trying to get me but it can seem that way.

And I tend to treat it just like the game, I watch all the variables and estimate collision points and track a safe path through the obstacles. Compared with the speed of the defender game, driving has less variables and is much slower paced so not that difficult.

My wife is not always comfortable with my decision making and tends to wish I braked or slowed down earlier, or at all, as sometimes I have calculated the car will be gone before I reach that point and don't brake at all. She worries that the driver will not act as I anticipate and so I should be more cautions by braking earlier. To a point she is correct, sometimes people don't act as I have predicted and I have to adjust sometimes quickly and it is very annoying. If I suffer from road rage at all it is this "stupid" choice that a driver makes that annoy or the other trait I notice is slow decision making or incomplete data decisions, such as arriving at a give way sign, coming to almost a complete halt and then looking for any traffic, why not look while approaching?

So I have now realised that the apparent lack of driving decision making skill exhibited on the roads is actually a lack of time playing video games during your younger years when your brain was still developing.
Did playing video games enhance my ability (such as it is) to handle a variable data set and make decisions, I would certainly love to see some research on the topic, or is this just a case of personal bias after all we know from surveys that just about everyone thinks they are better than average when driving. So potentially I am an undiscovered Top Gun candidate or deluded about my driving ability.....

Me Vs We

Jeremy Bentham is most associated with utilitarianism a philosophy which can be boiled down to "the greatest good for the greatest number"

It is the basis for any number of rationing systems with Pharmac and drug buying being a good example in this country.
Some drugs don't get purchased and some people go without treatment because the drugs are really expensive and would therefore use up the budget which could be better spent helping a larger number of people with less expensive drugs. Until the day that you need the expensive drugs people generally accept this as a reasonable basis for decision making, the greatest number of people are assisted within the budget available.

The rights of the individual have an even longer history which from an english law perspective can trace their origins back to the Magna Carta signed in 1215 which established the rights of the subjects vs the powers of the king.

But which is supreme, the rights of the individual or the rights of the society, or group. How you answer this question may well tell me which side of the political spectrum you are likely to fall on.

Those to the right of the spectrum tend to champion individual, you know individual responsibility, reward for effort, my money not the states taxes, small government, big market (a collection of individuals effectively)

Those to the left tend to champion collective goods or groups, increased taxes to assist... (insert group of choice) Protection of the enviroment, gay rights, womens rights etc.

Of course these domains are not clear cut and plenty of "right wingers" can be concerned about gay rights etc but if you listen to the way the ideas are discussed it is effectively group (we) vs the individual (me).

The possible reason why left wingers seem more virtuous as they care about "others" or groups, right wingers appear to care only for themselves "individuals"

This is a bit simplistic though isn't it, both groups seek to advance all, it is where the emphasis goes that counts.

"Tomorrow Me"

A smart chap I know talked with me recently about “today me” and “tomorrow me” as if they were two different things. It was his explanation as to why we don’t eat right, stop smoking, drink less, save more etc which are all things that have an impact on your future but not that much on your today. His inference was that we actually are disconnected from our future selves and regard the future me as an alternative person.

As is obvious I have been mulling this over and it is a good conceptual framework to consider things from. The best example of “today me” and “tomorrow me” is having a great time at a party and reaching for that next drink knowing that there is a likely hood that you will awake with a raging hangover tomorrow. Apart from your mental impairment brought on by alcohol ingestion we all know that too many drinks makes us feel sick the next day and yet often times we carry on drinking... because the hangover is a problem for “tomorrow me” to deal with “today me” is fine and having a good time. 12 hours later when “today me” is hungover “today me” has all sorts of issues with “yesterday me” but gets on with drinking water, sleeping or whatever to deal with the hangover.    

So why the disconnect, well I think we casually think about time as a sort of a ribbon or a path that we trundle along, we have a sort of general idea of a linear progress. This is of course how it looks when you look back over your life. Looking forward we also have general outline of how it will go because we have all met people older than ourselves and the general plot line is somewhat standard we start as babies grow up live for a while and decline. Yes there are people who’s line is interrupted but we are all generally on the same path.

But it is a very wide path we can weave left and right as we go along and the future is not really a ribbon. You see when we are out partying we can actually chose which “tomorrow me” we get, drink lots of booze and become “hungover me”, drink nothing but water become “not hungover me” two completely separate dots in the future from where we can start. So projecting forward you potentially have a scattered lot of dots that you can choose to pick as your “tomorrow me” instead of a just trudging along the path.

I have now begun to think of life as like the milky way which appears in the sky as a strip of clustered stars so if you went from one narrow end to the other if forms a sort of a path (the way) but hoping form one star to another would give you an almost infinite number of ways to get from one end to the other and each star is not really connected to the last one. The possibilities of who “tomorrow me” might be do not need to relate to “today me”

Which brings us to just “me” because I decide what “tomorrow me” looks like. No matter how you got to be “today me”, be it skill and brilliance or bad luck and terrible circumstances we all know that “tomorrow me” is at least in part a function of “today me” and there is no one on the planet who is as interested in “tomorrow you” as you.

When you meet “tomorrow me” will you be pleased? 

Capacity

Capacity: actual or potential ability to perform, yield, or withstand


I hear a lot about the ills of society these days and naturally this discourse tends to focus on the underprivileged which makes sense. Inevitably these underprivileged folk share some things in common and in particular they suffer from some “disability” which prevents them from getting on in society. I am using the word disability in a very wide sense such as a lack of education or skills as well as a physical or mental disability.

So here is a little thought experiment.

Think of a nomadic hunter gatherer tribe of say 20 odd people, basically a family unit making its way in the world as best it can. This is the human reality not so long ago (in a geological time frame). As the tribe hunts game and the like it will experience the usual tribulations of life such as some members aging to a point where they cannot hunt effectively or one of the tribe might get injured in a hunt and some of the 20 might be infants who can’t contribute to food gathering.

These “unproductive” members of the tribe will be supported by the rest and life will be fine. However for the sake of argument let’s assume you need at least 10 hunters out of 20 to make the system work ie each hunter can support one other person. This is what I am referring to as the Capacity of the tribe.

What would happen to the tribe if there were only 8 hunters and 12 young old or weak members? Not sure but it is bound to be bad for at least 4 members of the 12 to bring things into balance. If nothing changed then presumably all the tribe would slowly weaken and everyone would die in the long run.

So what?

Well all groups have a carrying capacity even our really complex industrialised societies. It is not so easy to see but it must still be there after all as nothing has really changed from the tribe days in terms of providing enough resources for all.

But I have never heard a conversation about whether or not we can “afford” the numbers of disabled persons that we carry in society. To be truthful I am not even sure how you would work it out and I know that the idea will seem a bit icky to some people because in the brutal world of our ancient ancestors some or all of the 4 would have been left to die and you could infer that is my idea for dealing with our disadvantaged (which it is not).

This idea potentially matters because let’s just assume the number works out to be 40% of society needs to be productive to support the other 60%. Let’s further assume that we currently sit at 62% unproductive. (there are a lot of kids and older folk out there) Then any attempt to fix the problem that does not address this issue is doomed to failure so it is important that we know.

The current solutions all really boil down to have the rich give some of their surplus to the poor. In comes in various packages but this is the central idea nine times out of ten. However if we are beyond capacity this will result in the death of the total tribe.

In NZ in 2006 (the latest census figures I could easily find) the population was just over 4M and the number of people in full time work was 1.4M so the 35% of the population supports the remainder. (yes I know part time work etc. but it isn’t going to get past 40% ) Bet you thought it was more than that.

Pugilism

“On 6 January 1681, the first recorded boxing match took place in Britain when Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle (and later Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica) engineered a bout between his butler and his butcher with the latter winning the prize.” Wikipedia

That about sums it up really, an upper class gent organising a bout of fighting presumably for the entertainment of his rich chums between a couple of the “servants” (read lower classes)

And it continues to be that way till this day. As a generally rule the backgrounds and education standards of a lot of boxers don’t appear to be that great. Sure some of them earn a lot of money but probably less than the promoters and they do it by putting themselves in harms way.


Does this look like a good time?

 I don’t understand boxing, amateur or professional. I do know the rules and I am not squeamish about it and I am not calling for it to be banned, (live and let die as always) but why anyone would participate and or be that interested in watching is beyond me. It is a version of the roman gladiators and I think as a society we should be over that by now. Boxing remains a signpost to the work we need to do to improve our thinking skills.

OK so boxing is not the only way to get injured at work and there are other dangerous jobs, bomb disposal springs to mind. But assuming you have a safe desk job etc why would you sign up for a spot of danger time?

So with that in mind what is with the current popularity of “celebrity” boxing matches. On the front page of the newspaper today are some pictures of some blokes from around the town punching each other in the face (well in truth one puncher one face owner per picture but you get the idea).

As a lawyer or CEO around town why would you sign up for this? It can’t possibly be a good time, it isn’t even dignified and surely in our modern society the promotion of generalised violence is not a good idea and these people should “know better”

The proceeds do go to charity but still a strange way to raise funds.

Now if one of the fighters was a local figure that I didn’t like and the opponent was a trained boxer now that might be interesting......

And all the boards did shrink…

So now Maori own all the water in NZ or at least that is what they are trying to assert in the face of the government trying to privatise state owned electricity companies.

So in truth this is the nub of the problem, “they” don’t like the sale of these state assets. Who “they” are is a point likely open to debate, but what we do know is that by and large Maori (as a group) have been left voting for many decades (although there appears to be a shift in this) and the “left” (another handy generalisation) in the form of the Labour and Green parties don’t like the sale of these assets either.

The National party (slightly right wing) claims it has a mandate to sell these assets because it told everyone at the last election that it was going to do it. Likewise Labour campaigned hard on this matter as an evil idea that would ruin the country. National won in an MMP landslide (more like a small trickle of pebbles but that is what you get in MMP) and Labour suffered its worst defeat ever (I think, certainly in the running for the ever award) This does rather seem to support Nationals position.

But enough with the politics, is it a rational idea? Tough to know from where I sit because I don’t have all the information that Treasury does, however what I do know is how this would work for me as an individual.

Assume my income had declined by a good chunk for some reason (say 20%) but instead of stopping spending I decided to borrow some money and truck on with my current lifestyle. I am hoping to get a pay rise sometime soon so I can fix this problem. After a while the debt starts to mount up and the interest costs are getting pretty big. Now I am worried that the pay rise might be a while coming and I might not be able to pay off the debt.

Good news I have some investments (in a power company) that produces a good steady dividend, problem solved all I need to do is……..

Well that’s the point isn’t it, what do you do? In a normal rational household you would look at your dividend and see that it is say $1200 per annum and the shares are worth $27,000. You have now racked up $50,000 of debt at 7% (personal loans are really expensive) A quick calculation shows that reducing your debt by 27,000 saves you $1,890 per year in interest. You would be better off selling the shares than continuing to borrow to invest. Simple right?

Same answer for the government even though the sums are a bit more complicated as we would in truth be comparing the expected present value of the future stream of dividends versus the expected present value of the expected borrowing costs. (I think) And with the scale of government this can get complicated.

But actually this is not really a guessing game, roughly speaking Treasury knows the answer to this problem and I am assuming the advice they are giving is to sell.

Now in the face of presumably logical advice from Treasury and an election mandate a group of unelected (potentially unrepresentative) people are trying to use the Treaty to prevent government policy. Is that right?

Presbyterian Gays

Why do churches have a problem with gay people?


The Presbyterian Church here in NZ is currently considering the “issue” of gay marriage, or same sex union to give it the politically correct title they are using.

It is simple, either gay people are people (it’s sort of in the name really) in which case I don’t know of any Christian religion that thinks it is ok to discriminate against “people” or

They are not people, which begs the question what are they then?

And the marriage thing again, isn’t this irrelevant, if we have decided they are people and we don’t discriminate against people then how do you justify denying them any of the rights ascribed to all the other members of your church.

Or does membership now come in classes? Not necessarily a dumb idea after all there are a fair number of people who only see the inside of a church for weddings and funerals, personally if I was running a church I would have “B” class membership for these folks and “A” for the people who actually participate and contribute and I am prepared to bet that gay folk would show up in both the A and B category.

So the disclaimer, I am neither gay nor part of the Presbyterian church but I can’t stand people who can’t apply a tiny bit of logic to their arguments.

And don’t give me that clap trap about marriage equals children, no one is calling for a ban on infertile people getting married are they?

The Right to Bare Arms

So recently a high profile court case has concluded with a Maori activist and his mates getting into bother around firearms, their use of them and possession of them. This seems principally because they were running around in the bush playing at being soldiers. This as we know has been a popular game for little boys for as long as I can remember and the real problem seemed to be that these men were using real guns instead of sticks.


Given that they have an avowed aim of separate sovereignty that gave the government cause to worry that after they had gotten bored with their bush game they might decide to use the guns on the government or its representatives.

Fair enough I hear you cry, which does seem to be the majority view. And I agree that we don’t want nutters with guns in our society, however....... is it as simple as that ?

The Right to Bear Arms is famously enshrined in the American Constitution as the 2nd amendment and it is also closely linked to the National Rifle Association or the NRA who are the visible lobby group for the right to own guns. Charlton Heston was a long time president and by extension spokes person for the NRA and gave a speech concerning the protection of freedoms and finished that speech in a dramatic fashion by holding aloft a vintage rifle and said “from my cold dead hands” an exert from a the longer version of “I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold dead hands”. This has become the slogan and battle cry of the “gun nuts” as most non NRA folk see them.

All this has rather polarised and obscured the original debate about ones rights to protect one self, from other people but the often overlooked point is it allows you a measure of protection from the government itself.

If you cast your mind back to the time of the founding fathers of America you will recall that they had just spent some time sending King George and his merry soldiers packing from the land of the free. This was accomplished by a bunch of farmers forming militia with the rifles they had previously used for hunting. (Ok so they had some help from the French and others but back to the story). So the right to protect yourself from an oppressive government would have been fresh in their mind.

What is more given that most of them were very near term immigrants to the US (no native American involved in the establishment of the “new” country) they brought with them their ideas from back home. This would have included the British right to bear arms included in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which again was influenced by the troubles they were having with pesky monarchs who thought they could do whatever they pleased.

So I am a little unconvinced that persecuting the populace for waving guns about is a good idea. As far as I know no one has been shot or even shot at. (In another incident he drew some heat for shooting a flag in the middle of a public gathering)

Tame Iti the activist in question, his basic grip is his tribe didn’t sign up to the Treaty of Waitangi and therefore should be permitted independent sovereignty and self determination and rule. It is probably a fact that they didn’t sign (hard to fake that fact) so he may have a point. The practicalities of such a thing would be another issue. He also may not even represent the majority of Tuhoe (the tribe in question) but he does have some supporters (refer chaps in bush pretending to be soldiers) So it is pretty clear he is involved in a political struggle, regardless what I might think of his case. So it seems to me he might have a “right” to wave his gun around, especially if the government is trying to take it off him cause the don’t like him.

The ANC were not above the odd bit of gun waving before the end of apartheid in South Africa and more recently the west has been helping some Arab citizens over throw some “bad” governments with the use of citizens guns.

But of course those were “good” causes and we (a majority of western politicians, still heavily white middle class males) agreed with those causes. Brown guys in the bush with guns hmmm could that be a “good” and “just” cause? Don’t be silly.

What I did in the holidays

I have been on holiday, unfortunately not quite as long as the silence on this blog but long enough for some reflections.

Firstly the very idea of holidays is very middle class, I was watching an episode of Downton Abbey (which I would recommend to those yet to discover it) and at one point a new character to the house is speaking of doing an activity at the weekend, at which point the Dowager Duchess asks “what is a weekend” delivered in a priceless put down tone.

So other than it being the name commonly given to Saturday and Sunday it does occur that a weekend is only relevant to those who have a working week followed by a period of “leisure” or at least not paid employment. Of course the rich and or idle barely notice the passing days, a phenomenon I observed on holiday when I was barely able to tell you which day of the week it was. At the other end of the spectrum are those who work all the time or 6 days a week when the idea of a leisure period every five days is laughable. Funnily enough self employed shopkeepers or hospitality providers fall into this category these days. So really only the privileged 9-5ers among us now enjoy a weekend.

So it is with holidays, some folk never seem to get holidays and some seem permanently on some sort of holiday. (I do realise that this may seem to include those seeking work but having experienced this I know it is not a holiday.) So I decided that being able to describe myself as having returned from holiday is in some ways privilege. It shows I have some work to do but at a sufficient level that allows me holidays. As I say very middle class.

The other thought that struck me was the parts of the holiday that I enjoyed the most, of course the ability to indulge in idle time is great but the catching up with friends and family who you don’t see through the year was also a joy. Mostly this was combined with food and or drink of some sort or another, either a picnic at pleasant spot or an evening BBQ, or just a cup of coffee or glass of wine.

Which reminded me of Epicurus, one of those long dead but not forgotten Greek philosophers, who’s name these days, in the form of Epicurean, has been appropriated as a by word for the enjoyment of food in particular but normally fairly flash food, certainly not a sausage off a BBQ served with tomato sauce and bread.

But while Epicurus promoted hedonism his actual view on what that constituted was good bread and olives and some wine shared with friends. To him this was the height of pleasure, good but simple food shared with friends.

Like a lot of holiday spots ours is simple and less grand than my usual life but the simplicity does not detract from enjoyment. So just like Epicurus simple food shared with friends brought great pleasure. Of course the silly thing is that my usual life could be simpler if I chose. The logical outcome of working 5 days a week is not a more complex life and I know from experience that fancy food at fancy restaurants does nothing to enhance your life really.

So my new year’s resolution is to choose simple but important stuff. Good bread, a little olive oil perhaps and a glass of reasonably priced quality wine shared with good friends as often as I can and take a moment now and again to be grateful that I go on holiday but also that I have the option to work.

Rise of the Machines

Close Up (a news magazine show) last evening featured an item on Robots in a rest home here in Auckland. This is a trial that is underway to evaluate various robots to see what help if any they can be within the aged care setting.


The robots seemed at the lower end of what is possible, mostly reminding people about their meds taking blood pressure readings and the like, they certainly were not mobile or truly autonomous. The feedback that the show presents after items such as this was enlightening, two comments were presented and both of them referred to this simply being a cost cutting exercise to eliminate wage costs. No such mention had been made of anything like that in the actual article so this is probably a sub conscious display of peoples fears of such technology.

This article is another example of synchronicity for me as I had already been considering the impact of robots on our society. This interest had been sparked by the release of Honda’s latest robot, Asimov. Who is more the embodiment of what we generally think of as a robot, a mechanical person. It was the sophistication of this particular robot that had me thinking as it can clearly perform a lot of interesting tasks and it is only a development project currently. (refer Youtube.com and search for Honda Robot)

The fact that it is Honda’s robot is also of interest, Honda clearly makes mass market “things” and is presumably investing in this technology because they think there is or will be a market for them. I mean who wouldn’t want one of these fetching you a drink or better yet doing some chores like ironing etc. The meet, greet and direct function demonstrated on one of the videos is a useful application right there for some larger organisations. Not a great leap to see these things in stores walking the floors and helping customers. Do you want to buy a skill saw? Follow the robot assistant to where they are and it can then answer your questions about the saws, once you have selected one pick it up and carry it to the register where potentially another one completes the check out and then the saw is carried to your car for you.

This is far from science fiction; Asimov could clearly do this right now without any problems. But what happens to the people that do this now? Well clearly they are out of a job right but that is just the way of technology so why worry, when blacksmithing went into decline we had the rise of the mechanic so no big problem.

Well I don’t want to sound like a Luddite but this time I suspect this is different. Just think for a moment of all the jobs that can be displaced by robots and it is a lot, basically it is any job that does not require creativity. Factory jobs, pretty much all gone. Food service, all gone. Shop service, gone. Construction, gone. (yes construction, while complicated once the plans a drawn the rest is pretty much a process.) Information provision (thinking teaching). Surgery, perhaps not gone but there are already robots doing brain surgery. Robot Surgery

See the problem with this technology is that it is so pervasive and is specifically designed to replace humans not to augment them. How does the world work when most people have no work to do? Who is going to buy the goods and services all the robots produce? I can’t imagine my way to how this works out but what I do know is there is a robot coming to your life very soon (think 10 years) either as your helper or replacement. Something to think about.

I came across this little bit of doggerel some years back which now seems potentially prophetic.

When Machines do our work and machines do our play
For then we shall all be in clover
We’ll have nothing to do all the live long day
Till the machines that do nothing take over

The measure of the thing

Recently, if you follow such things, there has been some internet chatter about the possibility that some CERN scientists (the LHC chaps) have found neutrinos travelling faster than light. For those of us focused on the mortgage and such like this is fairly dull news but for physicist this would put a major dent in the theory of relativity and everything else that is built on this theory, hence the chatter.


Because of the importance of this issue a lot of attention has been focused on the experiment and some criticism made of the accuracy of the measurements involved. One of the measuring devices (don’t ask me which one) had a potential error rate of 30 billionth of a second, which apparently at light speed could be an issue so they have improved it down to 3 billionth of a second for their second try. (Just sit and try and imagine how small that is for a moment.). Next issue is the distance from the start of the race and the end, they are using about 450km and for some reason an exact measurement of this is important also. (I would have thought if both things travel the same distance and one is first the exact distance wouldn’t matter, shows what I know) But the main point is that measurement is important if you want the correct answer.

It reminded me that we are quite keen on measuring things, you can go to university and do a 4 year course on it if you like (surveying). It also reminded me of when we adopted the metric system in this country and there was an extended education campaign. As a kid the most memorable item was a ruler that had inches on one side and centimetres on the other side. It was made of wood and made a very satisfactory sound if one end was held by the lid of my desk and the other end was twanged to make it vibrate. Very educational but probably more about the relationship of pitch to wave length, (not that I could have told you that at the time), than measurement.

So of course the measurement issue comes up a lot, if you want your view point to sound authoritive it doesn’t hurt to have some numbers or statistics to back it up. A technique that I frequently use myself I will admit. But there are some numbers that are simply irritating due to their actual lack of substance versus their perceived importance.

One that irritates me a lot is the “Poverty Line” we hear all the time that people are this or that in relation to the Poverty Line. Well let’s start with, in NZ there is no such agreed number. So this so called line is presumably where people wish to place it which isn’t much of a yard stick is it.

A recent idea that has had a bit of press lately is “there are 220,000 children living in poverty” this comes from the commissioner for children and he has at least had the good manners to define what in his view poverty is and according to him these children are living in households with income less than 60% of the median income. OK so what is the median income, well according to Statistics NZ’s June 2011 survey it is now just a touch under $41,000 per annum, so 60% of that is approx $25,000. So to make the remark easier to understand if you have an income of less than $25,000 and you have children you are according to the children’s commissioner living in poverty.

So who are these people, well despite my dislike of the idea of minimum wage legislation this is useful in this conversation as it is currently $13 per hour or roughly $26,000 per annum. Therefore it is easy to conclude based on the above that poor people in NZ are those that either don’t work or only work part time. (for whatever reason) So reframed the idea is “If you don’t work you don’t earn much” Gee what a shock.

Yes, yes I know there is no work out there etc, but that is a different issue isn’t it. Do we really expect people who don’t work to be well off?

Tough Sell

I have sometimes wondered about the poor chap that took up the job of telephone salesman to sell the first telephones. I mean think about the sort of conversations he would have had.

“Good Morning Lord Meldue, I would like to interest you in the very latest technology, the Telephone, it will revolutionise all aspects of commerce and social discourse”

“Well that sounds exciting what does it do?”

“Well you simply pick up this part and you can talk to anyone you like without leaving your house”

“Marvelous old chap, let’s talk to Lord Budgie I need to send word to him about lunch”

“Ah, well you can’t actually do that yet”

“Why not?”

“Well Lord Budgie would need one too and then we, the telephone company need to run a wire from your house to his house”

“I see, well who can I speak with?”

“Well currently no one because you will be the first”

“So I should buy this thing, so that it should do nothing until such time as my friends buy one, also to do nothing, until after you have run wires to and from all of their houses to mine, and then the thing will work”

“Exactly sir you have it now”

“Thank you but goodbye to you”

When you think about how did this system ever get going, the very idea of running wire from every house to a central exchange seems extraordinary but that is how it works after all.

And there is a lot of this stuff when you start thinking about it, Sir Walter Raleigh who brought tobacco back to England. “well you take these leaves place them inside a paper roll put one end in your mouth and set light to the end” or “you take this powder of ground up leaves and shove it up your nose” You really do have to admire the salespeople who pulled off getting tobacco off the ground.

But the tough sell I was really thinking about was God, without Heaven. Is there a religion that does not promise an afterlife which is as far as I can tell an improvement on the current state? So why do all religions have a heaven?

There is no automatic connection between the existence of God and the existence of an afterlife, apparently according to most religious traditions this is exactly the proposition that holds for all creatures on earth except us of course. Dogs don’t go to heaven according to any priest of minister I have ever spoken to, which in my mind is a yawning gap in the system as I like my dogs a lot more than most people I know.

I reckon you don’t find a God without a heaven because it would be a tough sell. It would be similar to the conversation above wouldn’t it. “you should worship God and do as he says” “and if I don’t” “well he will be really grumpy with you”, “umm I’ll get back to you”

So it seems potentially that Heaven may potentially be nothing more than an air points scheme dreamed up by religious advertisers to encourage people to join their team. As a scheme of course it is perfect because the liability to deliver is placed on someone else and only after the customer is dead and effectively worthless from a mortal bound churches point of view.

Based on my scant understanding of Buddhism this appears to be a system of Heaven but no God which may be a step in the right direction, also dogs presumably are part of the cycle of life they seem to believe in. Not sure if the orange robes would come in my size and then there is the whole don’t eat meat thing... Hmm it’s a hard road finding the perfect religion.

Occupy

These occupy people have become cause for some head scratching. Originally I thought they were the usual grab bag of professional protesters and complainers and I still think some of them are. And I have no idea what they want. Well yes I know they want the world to be fairer and nicer and lets all hold hands and the like but.... what exactly is their proposed solution to the problems they have identified. It is hard for concrete thinkers like myself to get on board with ideas based on feel good slogans. But gradually and grudgingly they have earned a level of respect from me.


Our City Council is desperate to have them removed and stop them from making the place untidy and has called on the police to “do their duty” and forcibly evict them. The police refused which made the Mayor very unhappy. Trouble is I find myself agreeing with the police. These people are being totally peaceful and very polite. They don’t shout and carry on, they don’t get in the faces of passersby no one is prevented from their lawful business and I suspect with Christmas approaching and their “campground” normally be used for various events they are more than likely to politely move out of the way for the event and move back once it is over. It’s actually hard to dislike people who are acting reasonably even if you don’t understand what it is they want. Live and let Die I have always said so why should they be “bullied” by the police.

The other level of success for the protesters is I have been paying more attention to the rich / poor divide and wondering what the solution to this is. The current political flavours don’t seem to work. On the right we have “every man for himself and work hard” On the left we have the equally silly “let’s all share everything evenly” Then we have the Green movement which seems to desire a great leap backwards to a non existent fairytale world of gentle farmers.

So articulating the problem is pretty easy, the economic cake is not shared evenly enough. We decide what share of the cake you should get by assigning value to the inputs you bring to the economic table be that labour, mental labour or capital. So based on that equation some peoples inputs are not valued at a high enough level to make it work for them and they become (or always were) poor.

Assuming for a moment that the laws of supply and demand still work then the assumption must be that there is an oversupply of certain inputs which drives down the price. So who in our society is poor... as a general and almost universal rule it is the unskilled and the uneducated.

So on to solutions, the most popular are to either “create” more jobs or upskill the unemployed. Neither of which will work. There are no more unskilled jobs to be “created” we don’t need them any more and any way how does this help presumably more low paid work doesn’t really assist with raising living standards. As to upskilling, well despite a bit of hand wringing every now and then there are very good opportunities for education in this country so that doesn’t appear to be working. It’s the “lead a horse to water” thing.

In normal economics if there is an oversupply of anything leading to a reduction in price then people stop producing that thing which brings the supply demand equation into balance. Think of farmers and crops, if the price of corn falls too low they switch to growing grain or whatever. So here is where it starts to get tricky the obvious conclusion must be that we need to limit the “supply” of the unskilled and uneducated and this means limiting the support we give to people to have children. (see told you its tricky, and yes I am not unaware of the issues that sort of statement will raise in peoples minds) Yet as a society we like children and we do lots to help and promote the idea of children, but in lots of ways it isn’t helping. Apart from unemployment and poverty exponential growth in the population isn’t exactly helping the planet either. Time for society to stop promoting children. Try winning an election with that as a policy.

Let them eat cake

This much repeated quote is attributed to Mary Antoinette and has passed into general language as a put down towards protesting mobs. Of course history shows that things didn’t work out very well for Mary ultimately losing her head to the French Revolution guillotine alongside her husband.

No expert in the area but my understanding is that the cause of the French Revolution was the widening gap between the rich and poor, with the breadless peasants vs the French Queen the ultimate example and hence the power of the supposed quote.

So as we know those that ignore history are destined to repeat it and while I think we are some distance away from the “peasants” taking over the streets they have made a start with the Occupy Wall Street protests which seem to have morphed into just Occupy.

We have our only local version here that are camping out in The Octagon, a central green space in the heart of the city and just outside the front door of the council offices. I was taken to task recently for referring to them as an “idiotic mob” with my critic pointing out that they were peaceful and well meaning with some valid points to make. So I would have to concede that what he said was true as far as it went but I still stand by my comment on the basis that these folk (the local version) are against a lot of stuff but “for” absolutely nothing (well for the environment, people first etc) but there is no how, what do they want to see done exactly? They have no answers to the problems they pose so they are just noise machines. I am against cancer but protesting on the streets won’t fix that either.

As to mob, well all of them as far as I can tell are living off “the state” or put another way the system they despise is allowing them the income to sit around protesting and because they don’t believe in central authority they are a group of individuals acting for the time being in concert, eg a mob, as opposed to a political party or movement.

But overlooking the short comings of the way they are going about it, there are certainly shades of the French Revolution in the current world wide unrest.

Locally there seems to be an increasing theme around the widening gap between rich and poor (so called as both terms are relative to the society within which you happen to be measuring) and there is no doubt that this is ultimately a bad thing for all. Problem is the solutions seem to be missing. On one side we have “trickle down” economics and on the other we have “wealth redistribution”, neither option really seems to deliver on its promise.

The other interesting plot line that is playing out is “do we care and should we care”. As I have mentioned before the idea that the poor should be anything but that is a reasonably recent idea and alongside that idea is “blame” for being poor. Once upon a time being poor was not your fault and you couldn’t change it. Both ideas are currently in question. Then we had the rise of social justice, “we should help people not be poor”, which is somewhat in conflict with the “they should help themselves” idea.

Once again the clash comes with a poorly defined statement of the problem, “no poor people” or “helping the disadvantaged” are very worthy ideas but what do they mean in practice. How do you define poor, a percentage of average income seems popular but obviously flawed. Helping often turns into dependency and is it even possible with 20 something percent youth unemployment at the moment, how exactly do you “help” these people into employment there are simply not the jobs... although perhaps the youth have the wrong skills... or too expensive to take on.... or not paid enough to attract them to work. Seems I don’t have the answers either so I am off to The Octagon with my tent.

William Webb Ellis

So Mr Ellis lived from 1806-1872 and were it not for his “invention” of Rubgy was unlikely to have been one of history’s stars. The idea that he invented Rubgy by picking up the ball and running with it during a football match doesn’t seem very likely but none the less this myth is strong enough for the Rugby World Cup trophy to carry his name.


At the moment with NZ hosting this competition and the general religious zeal with which some Kiwis treat rugby it seems as if the future of the nation hangs on one last game in the finals when the All Blacks play France. The AB’s bogie team at world cups just to add some interest to the match.

This cultural phenomenon where the emotional wellbeing of the nation in some part hangs on the performance of roughly thirty men (the total squad size) playing a game of rugby is rather intriguing, for a start how did rugby come to have such a dominant position as the sport of choice of so many Kiwis.

In the majority of the world Rugby is an elite sport played most often at private schools as a sweeping generalisation only in NZ is it the game of the masses. Most other countries have soccer in that position and in the country of origin of so many Kiwis when it was first settled, England, this is certainly so.

So presumably I can deduce that NZ was settled by the upper classes who brought with them a love of Rugby and the poor working classes that followed went along with this and abandoned soccer when they saw what their betters had to offer in the new country......Hmmm doesn’t seem that likely and even less so when you sprinkle in some facts for example it was the working classes who settled the land and given that life was quite comfy in London for the rich I can’t see hordes of them volunteering to come out to a land “lacking in culture and refinement”.

So why is soccer not our dominant sport? Well it seems to be down to the efforts of one Charles Munro who learned the game while being educated in England, presumably in one of those private schools. Upon his return to Nelson he established a team at Nelson College, but who did they play is the key they played the Nelson Football club (i.e. the soccer boys) and this set a pattern that was to be repeated as the energetic Mr Munro established the game in Wellington and then organised tours of the country. Every where the team went it played the lads from the local soccer club as presumably they were the only easily contacted local sports teams who could organise 15 lads for a game. Clearly some of the clubs enjoyed their rugby outing and presumably switched codes, in fact quite a number must of because the game took off quite quickly and was a sporting force in the country within 10 years of Mr Munro’s return from England.

So well done Mr Munro for setting in place a cultural icon of NZ for at least the next 150 years (I think there are threats to rugby’s current status but only time will tell.) This idea that an individual who is not a recognised leader can influence the culture of a nation is intriguing but when you think about it a bit more this must always have been the case.

For example the Japanese interest in achieving perfection in what they are doing has always fascinated, I mean to become a sushi chef can involve up to 10 years training and the first three are cooking rice only. To western eyes taking 3 years to learn to boil rice seems a bit over the top but that is Japan for you. This is one example of their approach, so how did this get started? Well presumably it must have been one person and others must have said you know what Fujita is on to something there and followed.

The other question that arises is some cultures have traits that we don’t always admire, so how did that get going? Why would we copy a loud mouth to the extent that it became part of a national identity?

Back to the power of one, looks like a good example could still change the world or at least your part of it which might spread, just like Charles Munro and his love of rugby. So pick your desired cultural norm and practice what you preach you never know what might happen.

Pick Me..

It is election time here in three months and the billboards and campaigning have already started. I spotted a Labour Party billboard at the weekend which beside the shining face of the candidate had “Vote Labour” (naturally) “Minimum Wage $15” (For anyone who is interested this is an increase from $13) So I have rubbished the idea of a legislated minimum wage before and if this was the answer to a low wage economy why don’t they suggest $25 or $45 an hour? Any way the over arching thought I had was that this sort of blatant electioneering nonsense is what needs legislative change. Therefore here is my answer to a change of governance structure.


Firstly as a society we have limited difficulty coming up with collective desired outcomes or “policy” if you will where the debate starts is the best way about achieving the required outcome. The increase in the minimum wage is an example the policy requirement is a liveable wage for all employed persons. Just about everyone will agree that sounds ok (I am going to walk past the definitional issues for the moment) It is the how we get there where it all goes wrong. In this instance the best people to answer this question are probably economic researchers and potential social analysts. Not well meaning, slogan wielding, power hungry, ego driven, vested interest politicians. (some or all of the list normally applies to all of them)

So first it is clear that we need to arms of governance, we need the policy arm and the implementation arm. The Policy arm, let’s call that the Peoples Parliament (PP) would have the same elections, party politics etc that we know and love now but no power to pass any legislation, only the power to pass Policy in the form of Legislative Requirements. These Requirements would be passed to the Governing Parliament (GP) for implementation.

The GP would propose the method for enacting the Policy and design the legislation to give effect to the Policy, this would be referred back to the PP Passing into Law or Veto. If they Vetoed they could offer comment of course but there would be no requirement on the GP to do anything further. The PP would have no right to alter the legislation.

Contained within the GP would be the Prime Minister character and Ministers as we know them now and the various Department Heads would answer to this group.

So the obvious question how do you get into the GP? Answer the PM would be appointed by an Electoral College and they (the PM) in turn would appoint Ministers. The PP would have the power of Veto over any given Ministerial Appointment but not the PM.

Who is this mysterious Electoral College? These would be people elected by the citizens to appoint the PM and after they had completed this task they would go into recess only to reappear between elections if the PM needed removed for some reason (governed by a constitution). To be able to stand for the Electoral College you would have to have no political affiliations, have a suitable level of education and passed a simple test on the constitution. Anyone could stand for Electoral College if they qualified.

What’s the point? Well that way hopefully we get a legislative and implementation arm of government less effected by political influence (no one is totally unaffected but hopefully better than now). You get people in the GP who are suitably qualified for the roles they hold without having to pander to vested interest groups etc.

This is unashamedly designed to put a buffer between the masses and the leadership of the country, hopefully allowing a rational consideration of the facts to dictate government decisions in pursuit of an agreed vision provided by the people.

The opportunity for such a radical experiment seems remote but that’s my idea for what its worth.

The LHC and Me

So the LHC is The Large Hadron Collider which most of us will have heard about (http://lhc-machine-outreach.web.cern.ch/lhc-machine-outreach/lhc-interesting-facts.htm) It is part of scientists ongoing quest to find a unifying theory for the various forces they observe in the universe. It is a massive undertaking in terms of size, money and time and of uncertain benefit in terms of putting food into the mouths of the hungry etc and the inevitable question will be why bother? The simple answer is “because you don’t know what you don’t know” Sticking with what you know only gets you what you already have.


However this is not in support of The LHC (it is big enough to look after itself) but an observation on a desire to have a unifying theory in the first place. As humans we seem to prefer this approach and have great difficulty dealing with messy unpredictable things. I presume it goes back to the way our brains work where to avoid information overload we just focus on difference and ignore the standard things. This gives us a lot less information to process and is why something new in your living space keeps catching your attention for a while till your brain categories it as “standard”. Or why travelling is so tiring, because there is no standard so your brain is on alert the whole time.

Recently Fruitcake at http://scuzei.blogspot.com commented on what she thought was my world view through the lens of these posts. This surprised me at a number of levels but the big challenge to me was that I could be categorised into a single box which is not how I saw myself. This of course posed the question what was my world view or the lens that I applied to the challenges I see around me. Am I a conservative or a liberal what level of state intervention am I comfortable with in my life, do I believe in private charity or social welfare, am I a social Darwinist as Dina suggested once (I denied that one).

When I came to try and categorise myself I didn’t find a unifying theory unless you consider evidence driven pragmatism a unifying theory but there is no real hint of what my view might be on any given subject contained in that phrase.

There are two parts to this though. My thought process tends to be given a desired outcome of X what do we need to do to achieve this. So the evidence driven pragmatism is easy for the “what do we need to do” bit although I am constantly surprised that the choices people make do not follow this. The harder part is agreeing what the desired outcome is. To that end I guess I am a Utilitarian – The greatest good for the greatest number. This seems the only sensible position to adopt for a society, however we also have the Tyranny of the Majority to look out for. Eg taking “white” farms and giving them to “black” farmers in Zimbabwe might pass the greatest good test but seems inappropriate from other stand points.

So just like the scientists I seem destined to keep searching for a unifying theory for my points of view. I am comforted that for the last hundred years or so (the period of the surge in scientific endeavour) Science has happily operated with no unifying theory and it hasn’t stopped them making significant progress in the various scientific disciplines along the way. They also remain open to the idea of sharing information and adopting learning’s in one area to inform seemingly unrelated areas.

So while searching for the perfect unifying theory of everything in the world let’s remember that you political opponent may sometimes have a better answer than you in some areas. Of course this isn’t always true a political party of many years ago now since gone from the local political landscape called Values was the butt of a bumper sticker joke that said “I am voting Values cause I’m pissed” this pretty much summed up the worth of their policies. A bit like these guys but less fun http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGillicuddy_Serious_Party