Posts by Matthew Poole
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Apple's slim new box will run iOS4 and provide access to a TV version of the App Store, which will offer streaming video, dedicated interactive apps from major news organisations and other content providers, games, and whatever else the app development community thinks might fly
Which is all well and good, but remains thoroughly useless in a country where data is metered by the gigabyte if you're lucky, by the megabyte if you're not, and is mostly not discounted even if it originates over a connection that costs your ISP a very nominal fee per month to maintain.
I've been on Orcon's Purple+ at my new home for a couple of months now, and absolutely love the speed (we're training at 20Mb/s, and getting nearly all of it at the desktop), but am really disappointed that the O-zone appears to have stagnated in the 15 months since it was launched. The launch partners are still the only content providers involved, despite there being many, many sources of streaming media and large, legitimate downloads around NZ. It's somewhat reflective of the general malaise in the NZ ISP environment about encouraging use of peering and making things like the iTV affordable to users by keeping traffic as local as possible.
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It'd be darkly funny and ironic - not to mention hypocritical - if Mr Hyde abolished the local body system he designed, out of sheer sour grapes.
Hopefully by the time it would become apparent if Brown was going to be as adversarial toward a right-wing government as Livingtone was, Rodney will've suffered brutal electoral defeat in Epsom and Act will be but a nasty memory on our parliamentary landscape. He's certainly doing his utmost to ensure that he's unelectable by the burghers of Epsom, especially if National put up a worthwhile candidate.
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I think you need to move on dude, it was a long time ago.
Purely hypothetical, Kyle. But you do illustrate the point :)
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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.
Quite. When the only check on the power of the Legislature is civil uprising or the triennial electoral process, an inordinate amount of damage can be done by the likes of Sir Roger and Ruth-less and there's precious little that can be done to stop them.
Talk of rolling things back is all well and good, but when some of the changes have undone decades of work it's like saying you can just re-build that 1:25 scale replica of the Cutty Sark that you constructed lovingly from matchsticks over the last 20 years, after dear great-aunt Harriet, who's at least 70kg overweight, tripped over and sat on it.
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At present, there is no statutory basis which establishes the office of Attorney-General
You didn't finish the quote about the Office being referenced in statute, however. The office of Attorney-General is referred to widely in statute law.
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It will still be cheaper to produce in Vietnam or cambodia or China - just not quite as cheaper as it is now
And if it's not enough cheaper, the jobs will go away again. If it comes down to a 5% tax break to the company to get it to come back and employ local workers, most western governments will pass the law before the ink is dry on the statute. Especially in the big pork economies of the EU and the US. Wages off-shore have to be a lot cheaper to make up for the incentives that can be offered by governments that want to keep jobs on-shore.
Is your objection to off-shoring the loss of local jobs, or the fact that foreign workers are paid considerably less than local workers for the same work?
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Some places, like Venezuela have chosen not to be a big sweatshop for the West.
Venezuela being, of course, greatly aided in that choice by the presence of significant mineral reserves of great value to the West. Countries lacking in such natural bounty tend to have fewer choices about how they improve their economic performance.
Musing: if I was from a developing country I'd find it terribly wearying to be expected to be so *aspirational* all the time.
Not surprisingly, really. But even if they don't aspire to the full western ideal (and if you listen to fundamental Muslims it only takes a few doses of MTV to "fix" that) most people anywhere in the world want to be able to afford to feed their families, drink clean water, get medical care, etc. These "exploitative" employers, generally, pay better than most other jobs in these economies. It may not be much better but it's still better, and that money does help to improve the lives of the workers and their families.
Have some multi-nationals taken horrible advantage of workers in developing nations? Yes, absolutely. Did they pay their workers better than the normal wage in those economies? Largely, yes. And for a lot of people in those economies, working 16, 18, 20 hours a day for a pittance piece-rate is still better than the alternative. Does it excuse the hours and conditions? 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. It doesn't quite work that way, and the zealots may well find that if they get their way they actually make the lot of the developing-economy workers worse because the jobs will dry up.
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gio, and it's only western companies that exploit workers in developing economies, eh?
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what would be so bad about a reduction in the pace of the outsourcing from the developed world?
Hate to say it, but I'm something of a free-market purist when it comes to trade. I don't believe in artificial protection of industries. If your local supplier cannot make a convincing case to be retained, why should you continue to use them? If cost is the only consideration for your company then you're pretty bloody stupid, but if you go out of business because people stop using you and start using your competitor who's still using the local supplier, well, sucks to be you. You should've looked more widely than just the $ figure at the bottom.
You talk about indexing this minimum wage concept to the local cost of living, but what makes you think that the wages being paid by these "exploitative" companies isn't more than sufficient for the local economy? In which case, what are you gaining? And how do you do these index calculations?
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gio, the problem is that you consider these jobs to be exploitative because the pay is very low relative to wages in the developed world. But until you compare those wages to the median income in that same country you cannot possibly make that assumption. Is it better to have a job that pays you $2/day, against a national median of 50c/day, or no job because some uppity westerner decided that the company has to pay $90/day and the company thus decides to just bring the jobs back to its home country? Because that's what will happen.