Posts by Andre Alessi
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Damn it, I'm about 12 hours too late to interject with "She doesn't even go here!" into the derailing upthread.
-
Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
My feeling of stupidity is generally self-induced, right after I've hit "post", but before I've caught up with the rest of the thread.
I've accepted that that's my default setting here. Mostly it's something I like, but if my ego's taken a bit of a bruising from other sources I'm often not in the mood enough to post anything substantial because I know I won't deal well with the feeling of inadequacy. I think that speaks more to the general quality and expertise of the PAS contributors than it does to anything about me personally. Although I may just be a horrible idiot and everyone I have ever met since childhood has been too nice to tell me!
Well, barring a couple of ex girlfriends, anyway.
-
Up Front: Fairy-Tale Autopsies, in reply to Jo S,
On a slightly different tack – are there different levels for “lurkers”?
Which I probably nearly count as, being an extremely infrequent poster.It depends on how cool you are, obviously. Please post your CV and we will judge you, quietly but with great intensity.
-
Muse: Rugby World Kitsch, in reply to Jackie Clark,
You’re all very filthy people. I don’t see a dido in that at all – rather uncomfortable if it was.
Well, the handle is a nice touch if it iss. Two-handed jobby.
-
I think we're all missing the real story here: how will all these RWC thingies affect my view of the harbour from Devonport? My middle-class outrage is tingling and throbbing!
Or maybe not. But anyway, I think that the term "plastic waka" encapsulated enough topics that outrage the uninformed that it was always going to make waves (pardon the pun.) I wonder if there isn't some reverse form of PR where people are paid good money to think up effective anti-marketing campaigns to torpedo suggestions via pithy characterisations and quotable quotes.
-
To join in on the semantic nerdery: when I was first learning to Talk To People On The Internet, a "troll" wasn't a person. A troll was a post or comment intended to inspire an angry reaction. People "trolled" messageboards without being trolls themselves, and the usage of "Troll" as a noun to describe people wasn't common enough to register.
I'm not so sure about the Tink/Troll distinction anyway. It all rests on applying a distinction to what someone you probably dislike "really" thinks, which is always difficult to do objectively. After all, does it really matter whether the Wetboro Baptist Church folks really believe the stuff they say, or whether they're just doing it for the cash? It's what they say that matters, not why. Same applies with O'Connor-I really don't care whether he's a closet (no pun intended) homophobe or not. What I care about is whether or not he can reliably speak for the Labour Party, and his outburst suggests he can't.
-
One thing I've found rather interesting about the current debate on UFB is that suddenly a whole lot of people are singing the praises of the current Telecom Wholesale/Chorus setup. It's an odd experience, because we know the same problems are there today that were there last year when the same people were complaining about it.
My real concern is that however this thing finally shakes out, there'll be the same mistakes made at an operational level that we see with the current wholesale setup (whether or not there is ever any such thing as "Wholesale Fibre" as we know it.) Things like products and processes being designed for the lowest common denominator customer (i.e. urban residential connections) with a "one size fits all" mentality-so providers will have to work overtime to provide even a moderate level of service to business customers who will be (at least according to the rhetoric) the "wealth generators" in this brave new world. This is the sort of thing that won't ever make the newspapers even if it does happen, because people will believe (as they do with the current arrangement) that this is as good as it gets.
I'm also really struggling to see how rural customers are going to fit in to this equation. It's pretty obvious to me at the moment that they're not seriously being considered as a factor.
-
I really need to have more of a think about what I want to say about all this so this may turn into an amorphous brain-dump. Despite working in the industry, my own opinions on what should happen from here on out are conflicted. I don't think the "regulatory holiday" issue is as simple as Telecom wanting to protect its own potential investment via a new monopoly at the expense of the New Zealand consumer.
You have to look at the culture of the industry, which has always been inherently conservative-big projects are routinely cancelled early on if there's some suggestion that they might be affected by government regulation or changing market conditions. In an ideal, rational world we'd have started building a publically-owned national fibre network a couple of years ago, and we'd already be putting plans in place for the next network (whatever that might be.) Instead, we're still scambling around for a solution to the end of life of the copper network.
If Joyce and co really want to provide financial certainty for whichever companies are engaged to make the UFB happen, then that's what he should say: and he should work out a deal that actually provides financial certainty directly, whether through monetary guarantees, or the possibility of interest-free loans at a later date or whatever. I'm perfectly aware that this would be politically awkward, especially right now, but effectively it'd be no worse than setting up a new network monopoly, and probably a good deal better in the long-run.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Do you think they have Godwin’s law on soc.history.war.world-war-ii ?
You would be surprised! Saying "Contemporary Leader X is totally like Hitler" was pretty clearly out of bounds, as was "You say you admire Policy Y therefore you are obviously a Nazi lover and a fascist". On the other hand, saying "Churchill agreed with Hitler on the following topics" was totally OK.
Of course, things went a bit mental when the actual neo-Nazis and crusading Communists turned up.
-
Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I don’t think every philosopher should be expected to be intelligible to the layperson, much as the discipline as a whole need to be able to communicate with the broader society.
I agree, and the parallel you draw between “difficult philosophy” vs “difficult science” is a good one as far as it goes. But one thing that philosophy has traditionally suffered from is that “poorly expressed” philosophy is often assumed to be “difficult” until proven otherwise. Philosophy is a discussion, and it’s equally possible for a simple idea to be expressed poorly as it is for a difficult idea to be expressed as clearly as possible.
Aristotle and Heidegger, for example, are interesting philosophers but terrible writers, so frequently people who approach their work tend to struggle mightily until they find a summary or a helpful commentator who can help them make sense of things. (Which isn’t to say that every idea Aristole or Heidegger had was straightforward or simple, just that their writing style doesn’t help.)
Suggesting that what philosophy teaches is the ability to talk about things (or to tell a good argument from a bad one) would also imply that it doesn’t have a content outside of discourse itself and its meta-analysis, whereas I think that some of its insights are just as valuable as those of the hard sciences.
You’re right, and I didn’t mean to imply that that is all philosophy is. I spent a great deal of my time thinking and talking about Very Cool Stuff like brains in vats and time travel, and I do see the inherent value in investigating these issues and others like them. I just think that the distinguishing factor between philosophy-as-a-discipline* and rambling conversations at the pub about invisible aliens and the meaning of life is the structure that is applied to these discussions, a structure that comes from collaboration and agreement with other people. Otherwise you wander in to Ayn Rand and “That’s just like, your opinion, man” territory.
* – I almost wrote philosophy- qua -philosophy. Old habits die hard!