Posts by giovanni tiso
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SteveH and I were discussing the decision to have the iPad act as a remote when Keynote is in play mode, rather than simply mirror. It's probably not the best design decision, but I don't see that it's evil or anything.
If there is a circle of hell for this heinous crime, I'm sure it's still several rungs farther from the bottom than the one where the designer of PowerPoint is going to be spending eternity.
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Have you tried wearing a turtleneck? Maybe that's the workaround.
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Are these 'centres of resistance' similar to the upper houses and state legislatures in Australia? They've certainly provided an effective check there on the kind of crash-through 'reforms' we've experienced in NZ.
My personal favourite is "five hundred thousand people will hit the streets within two hours". But yes, that too. And a constitution, in Italy's case. I thought the fact that the govt could simply shrug off the attorney general's advice on welfare reform earlier this year was simply appalling - in Italy it would have just stopped the legislation dead, end of story.
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Not the most uplifting of reads, is it?
No. Great book though. I'm not watching the film for love or money.
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But mostly I couldn't really get their sentiments, the politics seemed weirdly backwards and conservative, whilst at the same time far more socialist than NZ.
That's where Bruce Jesson's comment about New Zealand being a hollow society, without centres of resistance, rings true to me. In the whole history of unified Italy (from 1860 onwards) the centre-left was never in power until 1994. Yet we had and continue to have pretty good social welfare provisions, even under Berlusconi who would dearly love to enact neoliberal reform a-la Rogernomics. But he can't, because Italy is in fact full of centres of resistance (not all of them good, it must be said). The impression I get of Australia, which is certainly not direct, is similar: more conservative parlamentarians in many respect, a more conservative public discourse than NZ, but a more textured society that makes it harder to enact pure free-market measures
I have spent a grand total of five days in the country so I hasten to add I base this entirely on hearsay and conjecture however.
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My mother gave me a copy of the book two years ago when I visited, and I made the mistake of reading it on the plane. It set me up for a classic "crying in an enclosed public space" moment.
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Sorry, I don't mean to be competitive but the situation is a little worse over there. (Apologies for self-linkage, don't have time to look for another summary in English.)
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No, it doesn't, but it's easy for us as people living in countries with labour protection standards and minimum wage laws to get all sneery about how exploited workers are in developing economies without considering that, once upon a not-so-long-ago time, workers in our economies were being exploited and underpaid and all the other ills we're now determined to abolish elsewhere.
In Italy we still have sweatshop, actually. Beside the horrifying conditions in which the largely foreign seasonal workers are kept in the agricultural industry in the south, there are honest to god sweathshops in the textile industry, run by the mafia (although often the end product belongs to very respectable companies, including major labels), employing Italian nationals as well as immigrants. And yes, it's often the only work they can get, and yes, they get beaten up or worse if they talk to the press. It's still how a lot of families survive, but it's still wrong. And it still needs to be put a stop to. Otherwise, why not eliminate labour protections, everywhere, including at home, and let the market decide how much the workers of your country are worth? Why have a forty hour week? Why have a minimum wage? Doesn't it lead to what you wonderfully called "inefficiency" upthread, which is to say, not paying your workforce the absolute minimum you can get away with?
Krugman may like to call it an aesthetic as opposed to an ethical standard, but we need to draw a line somewhere. Poorer countries will always have a cheaper workforce than ours whilst they are poorer, so they need not lose their competitive advantage. But so long as they are manufacturing the stuff that we buy, I think we should expect that their workers be treated with the minimum standards of dignity that we afford to ours.
Fair and sustainable development is not compatible with the exploitation of the most desperate, worse still if it is allowed to masquerade as giving the developing world a fair shake. And bad empoyers hurt everybody, including the workforce in the first world whose jobs are being outsourced.
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Enjoying and being satisfied with it are subtly different though. You can enjoy a job and yet not be satisfied with it, or vice versa. Point taken however.
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An old (very old) Krugman piece in support of your side of the argument springs particularly to mind.