December 2016

Ah the Brits. Always the xenophobic losers. The 'reliable' German beats the 'ability' of the Brit. When it was Bradman the Brits did what they always do when they don't have the talent - they spoiled. Like Hamilton the wanker in that last race, a German would have been run out of the country for driving the way Hamilton did. Brexit couldn't come soon enough. Let the Brits stew in their own mediocrity.

Hmm :)

Who remembers slide nights? Where you sat through a few hundred snaps from somebody's holidays and family life? Eerie echoes of FB.

Westworld has been magnificent. Hopkins is a master.

Happy birthday buddy

Happy birthday twinnie!

Was your birthday yesterday? Sorry to be a day late, happy birthday!

This man still thinks the best way to fix the Australian economy is to give $50 billion to businesses based overseas. It would be funny if he wasn't so serious about it.

Ricky Gervais saw this with The Office. Millions of people spend much of their lives working in organisations that they think are fundamentally stupid. Understanding why they put up with it is great reading. "A recent study by psychologists at the University of Virginia found that over half of the people they tested would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit and just think for between six and 11 minutes."

The cause is noble. But the idea is really, really stupid.

Happy Birthday teach :)

It says something about the times we live in that the feats of astronauts like Glenn are openly challenged by the nuts who are gaining positions of power, some of whom question whether we even went to the moon. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/john-glenn-dies.html?_r=0

Remember when people said who needs unions? Young people say that a lot.

We really need to seriously consider this.

Happy birthday! Guessing you're jumping out of a plane or something equally as laid-back ;)

Thanks again to Adam Hyland for this one. Sydney once had an extensive network of trams, and it's now desperately trying to restore a small fraction of that sort of transport with light rail, at enormous cost. Let's never forget that the NRMA was probably the main culprit in having the trams ripped up. The NRMA had a cuddly reputation with the public (before it got into insurance anyway), but they were ruthless lobbyists in having the trams removed. It's one of the great public acts of vandalism in Australian history.

A little bit risky to see history through the lens of human development, but is the Western world stuck in a rut of adolescence? Adolescence is a time of ruthless comparison, of defining yourself according to others and where you fit. In adult life that's often called status. It's a necessary phase, but you're supposed to move beyond it. Status is a dominant organising principle in Western lives now. Often through the things we buy and own, whether it's homes, phones, clothes, cars, schools etc. The 'neoliberalism' view of the world makes this inevitable, it strips away all other distinctions in favour of your position in a market. In the process both childhood and old age get neglected or ignored, we refuse to fund or pay much attention to either of them, shunting our kids and elderly off to decrepit institutions to keep them out of our way. All the lessons that the young and the old are supposed to teach us, every day, by having them in our lives, get lost in our focus on status. We're often more interested in getting kids onto the rungs of the status ladder than in understanding them as kids. It's as if the entire society has become one massive high school, with people endlessly jockeying for position.

Happy Birthday Helen :)

Happy birthday old mate!

Maybe this year if everybody subscribed to a decent newspaper, it might help the world a lot. Journalism is really struggling to survive. Seriously, it doesn't cost a lot to do. Personally I'd avoid anything owned by Rupert Murdoch except FOXTEL, which I think is great. There aren't a lot of journalists in the Murdoch stable, and the opinion writers they hire instead are one of the main reasons journalism is on its knees.

For those interested in the universal basic income idea (everybody getting a living wage whether they have a job or not). Not a bad summary of the underlying ideas at the link below, here's a taste: "In the mythology of our economy, incomes are determined by how much one contributes to the marketplace, thus such outcomes are “fair and just” (from each according to their abilities, to each according to their deeds). Yet the reality is that power determines incomes more than anything else, and this power is distributed not according to the necessary requirements of an efficient economy, but according to past income and wealth and how the “rules of the game” are set. Incomes are determined by bargaining, and how well you can bargain is determined by your initial position and the context of the bargaining process (laws, regulations and customs). If you belong to a strong union, or if your industry has considerable market power (few competitors) or if you have the political clout to get the government to set the rules in your favor, and most important, if you can exclude others from competing against you, and encourage them to compete against each other, you will have significant power and can greatly determine your income. The less economic power you have the lower your income will be...The rules of the market are created by those with power and thus have never benefited the poor and marginalized, and have only benefited the middle class to the extent that they have been able to influence these rules through collective action."

La Dolce Far Niente. The Art of Doing Nothing. You can forgive the Italians for the San Remo song festival because they also believe in this. In a world determined to always be doing something, in work or play, they say just do nothing. Bliss. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-happiness-rx/201409/the-art-doing-nothing

Hope you're having a wonderful day :)

Yeh, goosebumps. Can imagine that huge sound in a shopping centre. https://youtu.be/S_bMFqUfyhA

Bankruptocracy. The world you live in when banks control economies, replacing work and investment with finance. And then becoming 'too big to fail', so that real or potential bankruptcy of banks becomes a gun to the head of the entire society. https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2011/03/02/the-road-to-bankruptocracy-how-events-since-2009-have-led-to-a-new-mode-of-reproduction/

You know on aeroplanes where they show you the 'brace' position to prepare for a crash? Might be worth practicing that. And maybe the fact that the 'economy' is looking stillborn even *with* this much private debt trying to pump-prime it tells us just what a bunch of clowns the LNP are as economic managers. They couldn't tell the difference between an economy and their elbows.

Shows the true nastiness of casinos and the gambling industry. This 'cheating' seems like just skill to me.

Who remembers going to Hayes? It was like the wand shop in Harry Potter, loved those old shoe shops with boxes piled right to the ceiling, or across double storeys.

Still one of my favourites. Taken with a plenoptic camera, click on the image and hold that click, and then move the mouse/finger around.

There's something in this. All those slide nights make one big whole. FB doesn't give you the way to zoom out to see the whole, you just sort of live it. But the company that does that will be the next FB.

Almost time for the annual 'price of Singapore crude' Christmas miracle, where the oil companies ask Santa for a big heist in prices over the Christmas break.

They have long nights in Finland.

Thankfully not me, but I know people for whom this is the most miserable time of the year.

All I want for Christmas is a world run by people more like the Danes, and less like boring men in grey suits droning on about fiscal conservatism, migrants, elites and debt and deficit.

I know there are lots of Brian Cox fans, and he's a lovely and smart guy, but sometimes comedians see to the truth of something faster than anybody else. Laughing makes me cough lots at the moment, so this was a hard one to watch!

The poor Finns are copping it today...

Happy Christmas everybody. Let's celebrate with more Finnish dancing.

Finish guy dancing has a part 2. I'm still wondering if the dance is him trying to make some room in his shorts.

Nothing says Christmas better than matching turtlenecks. And a cat. And fondue.

More Christmas fun snaps. What do you get the kids who have everything? And...um...

It's nice that beneath all the gum-flapping hot air of everyday arguments, shit just happens anyway. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-06/wind-and-solar-are-crushing-fossil-fuels

This will infuriate politicians. And it should. This is maybe one way that a constitutional monarchy is still a better system, nobody else of prominence is saying these things so well right now. And I'm still connected to the 1930s through my own father, who lived under the Nazis, and to me it's also beyond belief that the same patterns can repeat again, and people barely notice. Tens of MILLIONS of people died the last time we didn't understand populism. "We are now seeing the rise of many populist groups across the world that are increasingly aggressive towards those who adhere to a minority faith...All of this has deeply disturbing echoes of the dark days of the 1930s. I was born in 1948 – just after the end of World War II in which my parents' generation had fought, and died, in a battle against intolerance, monstrous extremism and an inhumane attempt to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. That, nearly 70 years later, we should still be seeing such evil persecution is, to me, beyond all belief. We owe it to those who suffered and died so horribly not to repeat the horrors of the past."

This is a beautiful experiment. But you can learn a lot about teaching by asking people what they think this experiment actually means. Some come away thinking it means gravity has something to do with air, and the reason things seem to float in outer space is because there's no air there.

Broken glass and urine-soaked sand. Straya! Never tell Australia it has a drinking problem. People are just having a good time.

I'm fascinated by the desperate need many people feel to always be doing something. Not just at work, but even in holidays. Some of it is just having new experiences, no doubt, but there's a lot of it that feels like desperation - if you just do nothing for a while, you're confronted with yourself and your feelings, or you may even have to take stock of a situation and think "what's really happening here?" And people don't always want to go there. Boredom seems often to be about the uncomfortable knowing of yourself and your work and life. Travel can be like that too, the desperation to go to the next new place, always on the move and never really living with any sort of presence, anywhere. We lay waste to our own places and then go looking for somebody else's to spoil. It's probably one of the defining features of our culture, this endless search for distraction and inability to just be.

The ourworldindata.org site is a great place to play to sort the crap from the reality in what's happening in the world. Like this beauty, all the worry about overpopulation. Population growth rates stopped growing in the 1960s.

Happy birthday :)

Those T-plates will keep them on the right side of the road for sure. Dumb is winning.