Posts by BenWilson
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to recordari,
Pure speculation. Can I have a pass on the heavy internal fiskiness that has been going on here lately? No?
You've felt it too, young Padawan? Like a thousand posts were written, and then suddenly trashed without publication?
I too feel that Goff has become the problem. Well, actually, I always felt that, but my feeling was that National would have to screw up majorly to not get 2 terms, and Goff was just a placeholder until they did.
Now, I feel strongly that they have actually screwed up. I think this election has suddenly become contestable if only a strongly decisive Labour with charismatic leadership could actually come up with the fucking patently obvious alternative, a strong response to recession, NZ's next New Deal.
Things I'd like to see are:
-Compulsory savings
-Increased taxation, targeted upwards
-Job creation through badly needed infrastructure projects
-Crushing property speculation by
1. Removing the tax incentives
2. Legislating on minimum equity requirements.
-Massive repatriation of debt by building up our government bank.
Here's a wild thought on repatriation: You can't claim a pension if you own property with the debt held offshore. So you have to refinance to Kiwibank.I expect all the foreign banks would scream blue murder about this. Fuck them. Our main financial problem is private foreign debt. Solve that problem.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Matthew Poole,
That might be plausible if it were demonstrably true.
The whole recruitment process is half the problem here, and I stand by my belief about what employers "really" want. But recruitment processes often can't deliver what they really want, only what they think they want. And they are so often completely wrong. Not surprising, they're only human.
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Studying for the sake of intellectual extension is a luxury most people can't afford.
At least they think they can't afford it. The funny thing is, the career oriented degrees don't really raise your chances of any job other than something highly specific, straight out of University. The things that still lands people the good jobs is articulacy, being interesting, and being demonstrably able to learn basically anything. Being highly self-directed helps, which is quite unusual in people who have allowed some degree to dictate their career path. Being unable to take an interest in things outside of a perceived optimal path is extremely frustrating to employers who want flexible workers who can come up with ideas.
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Most of my classmates said they thought it was a complete waste of their time, having to study things unrelated to their degree.
Mind you, this was a growing feeling even when I was there, especially amongst the career oriented degrees. It was funny to hear them ragging even on papers within their own chosen subject that they felt were not going to maximize their trajectory into that dream first job. Like any of them had any clue what they'd be doing in 5 years.
I had a related problem, finding great umbrage in subjects that I found boring. But mostly that was down to refusing to let them get past the initial hard yards of learning the terminology. One such paper that I failed and had to do again, just managing to scrape in the second time, turned out to be the most directly useful thing I ever learned at university. It was about designing compilers, something I could never see myself doing. But along the way to that, learning to write parsers was an incredibly valuable skill (to me).
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Did you check out the Blog I think I impressed me there too ;-)
You've not been idle this summer!
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Yes, varsity sounds like a horribly swotty place now. But maybe I'm just being nostalgic.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Steve Barnes,
the lack of real ideas that go with that short sighted vision has twisted the argument about productivity, I would suggest that this fact alone is enough to place the blame on the "dole bludgers" rather than where it really lays, with those that value money over those that want to work and produce something.
Well put, Steve.
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This. I’m pleased that you said it though. Philosophy has been one of the best tools in my armory while managing.
TBH, I think most Arts subjects would be quite useful, since they tend to focus on understanding and articulating stuff that's rather vague. Not sure how many people I'll shit off with that suggestion, but I stand by it.
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I sympathize with recordari, my brief foray in management simultaneously increased and decreased my respect for it as a job. I worked out that it's actually a really difficult job to do well.
But when you get right down to it, isn't that what distinguishes management from a plain old administrator?
I only got into the theory of it in a small way, having been trained as a techo, but the broad functions of management are:
-Planning
-Organizing
-Leading
-ControllingDifferent managers are involved in these to different degrees. They are often not restricted to just being managers, either, and have other roles - certainly I still had techo work to do as a manager. Also, people who are not technically managers have a lot of input into these functions. Planning would often involve system architects. Organizing required help from admin staff. Controlling sometimes required human resource help (most for hiring and firing, but also training). Leading can very much come from below, from motivated people just inspiring the people around them.
The real fun begins when you get to "manager's managers". These people are often specifically trained in management. This becomes more prevalent the higher up you go, until you get CEOs who can move easily from one organization to a totally different one, in totally different businesses. Lotsa MBAs there. But they do sometimes come from shop floors too.
Curiously, I was quite apt to the task - philosophy finally paid off as a subject, since most of what managers do is abstract, high level, and involves a lot of talking, explaining stuff up and down the chain. But I found quickly that I also hated the work. It's highly uncertain, the goals very inspecific, the hours awful, and if you came from some tech background you feel yourself de-skilling every day. It can be very Machiavellian too, empires built and defended by whatever means, lots of double talk, politics basically. That was what finally put me off it, that despite a lot of hard work, everything you did can just be destroyed by some move coming from the secretive layers above you, and you're the first casualty.
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would that sweeten the pill?
It would, depending on the certain percentage. Shareholders would not even necessarily suffer as a result, because stock prices would probably rise, so they'd just make their profits in a different way. But how much reinvestment? 50%?
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