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

History never repeats..

So say Split Enz a 1980’s band in a minor hit of theirs This group contained the Finn brothers who more famously turned up later as Crowded House, but enough musical history and the dubious wisdom of pop songs. I am more taken by the line “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it” an observation I believe was originally made by Edmund Burke but more famously attributed to Winston Churchill more often than not.

If we are to accept the quote then in the context of war there are a lot of people not paying attention as it keeps repeating over and over. Is it simply in the nature of humanity to go to war. Can we never learn to control this presumably powerful instinct?

This thought thread was sparked by the current hand wringing going on over 9/11 and of course the “war on terror” that resulted in the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Which lead to thinking about the nature of war more generally.

So my neighbour rang me a while back and asked me in a roundabout way to cut down a tree that is at the bottom of my garden because it blocked his sun and made his house colder. I don’t want to cut down the tree as rather than a view of a mature tree I will have a view of his house. This may seem unreasonable my view versus his comfort but the house was built there years after the tree was fully mature so the lack of sun due to the tree shouldn’t come as a surprise to him. I am therefore not inclined to correct his folly by transferring his pain to me. Any way that is not the point so to wrap this point up the law is on my side (right of wrong). After chatting around the thing for a while he said “you are not being helpful, can’t we come to a compromise” to which I replied that if he could explain the compromise position between chop down and not chop down I would listen. (pruning wouldn’t change anything it is a big tree) The point being some problems just don’t have compromise outcomes some of them have a winner (so to speak) and a loser. So what now for my neighbour having encountered my unreasonable intransigence? (from his point of view).

Well because he is a civilised individual (albeit grumpy with me potentially) he accepted the position but he could have “gone to war” with me by executing a commando raid in the dead of night over the fence and poisoned the tree. (he wouldn’t be the first) and I could have retaliated by shooting him in the head. (ok that would be a bit extreme but you get the point)

Effectively we had a competition for resources (he wanted the sunshine that my tree was using) and I didn’t want to share because in this instance we couldn’t. So the end of war would seem to be an acceptance that the status quo is acceptable and no one will do anything to alter that state without the express agreement of the other parties that might be affected. That is how our mini battle did not escalate to war.

So how likely is it that there will never be an “uncivilised” neighbour in the world who will not resort to force to get what they want. Well if you continue with my example then presumably when we all feel we have an appropriate share of the available resources.

If I could have cut the tree in half vertically that might have been a compromise, it just doesn’t work with trees. But trees aren’t what we have real wars about are they, it does tend to be resources that we could deal with differently. Contented people seldom go to war only the disenfranchised.

Lest anyone make the mistake that this is a call to socialism, it isn’t, I used the term appropriate not equal or desired share of resources. So it is back to the debate about how we allocate resources appropriately and ensure people understand and accept that this is so.
For example most people are happy that doctors get paid more than labourers. They can see that it takes a lot more training for one thing to become doctor so we have an unequal share of economic resources but an understanding of why this is so. So when I am driving my Toyota and my doctor is driving his BMW I don’t really feel bad as I understand and accept that. When my banker is driving a Ferrari because... well because I don’t feel so good and potentially have a desire to "deal" with my bankers excessive consumption presumably at my expense, look out I see the potential for "war"