Posts by BenWilson
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Funny how a blazing summer's day in agreeable company is great Grinch solvent.
Yes! Totally. I stopped being po-faced about horse racing after my first Melbourne Cup. It's not about the stupid gambling. It's about the hats, and the hotties under them. And carousing. Most people only gamble in a sweep anyway, so the odds are fair, unless it's for some minor cause, in which case I always just wrote the money off as a contribution.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I thought the red socks thing was annoying bullshit, and yachting’s for bores from the Shore
My thoughts exactly. But just like you, I liked it when the tournament was here, it made a buzz that Auckland sorely lacks in it's fucking dire nightlife. The fact that it justified a transformation of our waterfront seemed like a good flow on benefit - we now have another facility in the city, one that I've used many times. It will be part of Auckland forever, now.
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Is it possible, Gio, that you haven't grasped that the "joyless" advertising is a joke? It's actually NZers poking fun at themselves about taking the RWC seriously. The abstain thing is, too. The entire idea, so far as I can see, is to make us have threads like this, which are all about the rugby. The fact that it's totally silly is the point. Self-deprecating irony is a long suit in NZ humor. If you have something funnier to contribute, please do. I very much doubt we're actually expected to abstain from sex. The point is to get us talking about rugby, and sex, thereby conflating thoughts about rugby to heights in our minds that are generally only occupied by things like sex. Which is hardly ever going to work on Islander, who has said many times that sex never enters her head at all. It's not going to work on you, because you don't like rugby and don't get the joke. But it is going to work on hundreds of thousands of fans.
It's deliberate self-mocking hyperbole. OK? I hate explaining jokes, it makes me sound German, and robs them of any humor they had left, but sometimes people don't get it.
Personally, I don't actually give a shit about this ad campaign, nor any of the other promotional stuff. I don't ever take advertising seriously. It might make for a few weak laughs and a bit of ice-breaking with foreign crowds getting stuck into any black ring they see. If they do, the main point of it, is that they're thinking of kiwis as sexual beings rather than bitter sporting enemies, and that's all good, because we actually are. Nothing more serious than that, really. I don't actually care that rugby has become commercialized, because it was never a sacred cow to me in the first place. I don't care that Dan Carter can frequently be seen in his underpants on billboards, nor do I really think that's why we keep losing the World Cup. He's still IMHO the best rugby player in the world, however much he might be selling undies to girls and gays.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Because the bit you quoted is bipartisan – Labour and National have both bought into the idea that we should use interest rates to guarantee a quota of unemployment and control wage inflation and inflation more generally. This is not up for debate or a matter of opinion – it’s our rolling agreement with the Reserve Bank.
The Reserve Bank attempts to control price inflation, sure, that much is their brief. But they can't, because they don't control the price of anything outside this country, and their only lever within the country is interest rates. That is only very indirectly related to unemployment rates and, for that matter, prices. I do not accept that there is some grand union conspiracy to maintain unemployment to control inflation. Controlling inflation might, however, have led to stable levels of unemployment. Maybe. I think it's more a factor of expecting controlling interest rates to somehow make jobs, or create markets. It doesn't, and can't. It doesn't matter squat what the Reserve Bank does to interest rates, they can't stop the American and European economies imploding, drying up export earnings, nor can they do anything about the price of oil, or cars, or computers, or nearly everything that is available to us here other than things we make ourselves. Even then, in a globalized economy, we could just opt to buy foreign food. Hell huge amounts of our debt isn't even in this country, so what control do they have over that?
Just as financial markets and monetarism can't save us and don't work, they also aren't to blame for everything either. NZers have made lots of conscious choices about the kinds of things we invest in, some of which have paid off more than others. We invest heavily in agriculture, but not so much in manufacture. It's not the Reserve Bank making that choice. We keep making roads instead of rail - that's nothing to do with the Reserve Bank, and creates quite a large sensitivity to the price of oil. We don't drill for our own oil and gas so much - these are environmental choices that have impacted inflation in this country. We refuse GE, this impacts farming efficiency. We opted to make students take out debt for their education - that affects the availability of skilled labour, when labour itself can take the next plane out if all it has in NZ is a big fat bill. We allowed total deregulation of telecommunications, and hence still don't have a national fiber network 25 years after the technology was invented. We have virtually no military, so we're rather lucky not having to foot that particular bill. Our taxes are low so we can't afford much welfare.
There's way, way more to growth and inflation and unemployment than just interest rates, which is why I made my point that I really don't think the "tories" are that smart. I think they are actually scratching their heads about what to do with our economy, because what's happening now just doesn't fit into the monetarist playbook.
The obvious thing to do is throw away the stupid playbook, and come up with our own plans for how we can work our way out of the depression. There are so many real possibilities which actually could be bipartisan that it's just fucking horrible to hear how public debate goes these days, banging on about the same old shit my elders were talking about in the early 80s. Get with the second decade of the third millenium, things have changed. We're low wage, and we need to decide for ourselves what we will do about it, rather than desperately looking across the Tasman or the Pacific, or crapping our pants about China.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Whether they will be persuaded to do it or not is the issue. You know the line about immigrants “doing the jobs that we don’t want to do”? There is some truth in that.
A lot of truth.
But more importantly, it is also why a guaranteed pool of unemployed people keeps the cost of labour down.
I guess. I don't think most of the other unemployed people are keeping the cost of my labour down at the moment. Except for people who happen to have my skills and are unemployed. But yes, the value of unskilled labor is most likely affected by the general pool of unemployment.
I'm not entirely convinced that the "Tories" are that clever, TBH. I think they'd rather keep unemployment down too (it looks bad), they just haven't got the first idea how to do that.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Deborah,
Yes, it could look that way, although how to get to that is a mystery. Le Guin depicts it as a mass exodus from Urras, to Anarres, which is effectively Terra Nullus, and has virtually no resources. This is the Urrasti response to massive scale civil unrest coming from the Odonian cult. This isn't an option for us Terrans.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to James Butler,
But my contribution to my customer's profits is easy to measure.
Right, but that goes to demand for your services. The higher they can sell your services/products, the higher your demand is. What would lower it would be many other people willing and capable of doing the same job as you. It doesn't matter how clear the connection is. There's an easily measured value of the toilet cleaner to the contracting company too. But there's millions of people who can clean a toilet in this country.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Islander,
some brave scholar
Heh, I bet it's been done already on some fan site. And nothing will ever top Terry Brooks for the most famous total fantasy book ripoff.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to Danielle,
Also, "if ladies do it in large numbers, it is worth less".
I'm not sure if that's the cause or the effect, though. It could be "that as the price came down, men deserted it", rather than "as the number of women rose, the price went down". Correlation is a bastard like that, distinguishing cause and effect is problematic.
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Hard News: Is that it?, in reply to James Butler,
Almost as bad as, say, coercing the top physicists and mathematicians of a generation to invent more and more effective and brutal ways of killing more and more people.
Nowhere near as bad as that. I loved Le Guin's insight that "Ainsetain" from Terra (I presume she was referring to Einstein) had a very peculiar refusal to allow mathematics and mysticism to cross, whereas the Cetians didn't see any difference. Considering the influence of Pythagoreanism on Western thought, I think she's on the money - the boundaries of science are always going to sit in ontology land, and it's odd just how uniform the ontology of science is, considering the possibilities.
Of course, she was writing Sci Fi, not doing science, and the idea of mystical insights in science is one of the oldest memes of the genre. Science is magic - the rest of most Sci Fi storylines follow Fantasy paths constantly. Speculative fiction is a continuum from science to magic.
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