December 2017

How the rich have changed.

More old photographic techniques, this an example of a glass-plate photo, where before film was invented images were often captured using an emulsion on glass plates. There’s a quality to these old images that can be breathtaking. This is a shot from NSW Police files of William Munro, taken in 1924, a criminal of the time. Mug shots were artistic back then. Every male criminal I’ve seen in the extensive collection is wearing a suit, this was the days before casual clothes.

And another. Mildred Kruss,1919. Imprisoned for bigamy for not divorcing her first husband before marrying her second. The photos are beautiful, the people come alive. I’m assuming Mildred didn’t weigh 467 pounds, but don’t know what L.B. means.

Ah, tax cuts. Freeing us from the terrible burden of government stealing ‘our money’. Do you believe that sort of thing? I’d be interested to hear. Trump’s just-passed tax cuts will probably almost destroy the American economy, and the benefits flow all to the super-rich, who are his real constituency. Ditto for the proposed Australian tax cuts. We can be a lot smarter than this. These people are taking us for a ride.

So very kind of the banks to write the terms of reference for the banking royal commission. They even managed to include industry super funds, whom they loathe because they outperform the rubbish superannuation products they put out themselves. They have nothing to do with the banking industry, their inclusion is clear evidence the banks designed this royal commission. Banks would desperately love to get their snouts in the superannuation trough, to financialise super (meaning turn it into a big casino, with Biblical-sized profits to themselves).

This sign is most peoples’ wet dream writ large. But it’s bollocks. Here’s to the bureaucrats, society’s heroes. Why? It’s pretty simple. Every generation lives a certain time. It can’t reinvent history in every generation, and rediscover everything that has come before, the vast majority of what it knows and does it has to inherit from the past. And how does it do that? Through institutions - ‘bureaucracy’. They carry the collected wisdom and knowledge of history, in habits and procedures and laws etc. Ever noticed that during elections, life goes on pretty much as normal? That’s because nearly all the running of the country is done not by politicians, but by bureaucrats, implementing those long historical processes. And it’s the same even when we’re not in an election. Watch Yes Minister. If you want to live in nothing but the present with no bureaucracy, and with apologies to Michael Kato who banned my use of this reference, go and live in Syria. Or Afghanistan. Or Sierra Leone. Or look at Trump’s populist America, unrestrained by any experience and wisdom, from its bureaucrats. Let me know how you get on.

Peak bullshit, now there’s a phrase that could catch on.

So much of the behaviour the #metoo phenomenon is complaining about is explained by this picture. How do men and women end up as sexualised objects of desire first, people second? The simplest answer is, as one woman said to her son, “be friends first, boy/girlfriends second”. Boys and girls need to understand each other as people first, sexualised bodies second. It’s not just kids that need to know this, and kids today are much better at this than even my generation was. Have a look at the number of adult social events where the men and women are largely separate groups. That’s what people grow up learning, it’s a big part of the problem, in plain sight.

I identify with Milo, the sort you sprinkle on ice cream, and which never dissolves properly in milk. Not with this Milo. Who also identifies with “let’s shoot the police” Leyonhjelm, it appears, what a sweet couple.

From the New York Times, a piece on whether what an artist is like as a person also determines in some way the value of their art. I’d add another wrinkle to this, and say is art devalued by becoming propaganda? One of the reasons protest music has always left me cold is that I think it often lacks art, and mistakes the role of art at the same time. “Caravaggio was a murderous thug. Ezra Pound was a pro-fascist and pro-Nazi anti-Semite. Virginia Woolf had an anti-Semitic streak of her own. T. S. Eliot out-and-out hated Jews. Picasso treated the women in his life abysmally; two killed themselves. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. Walt Whitman likened the “intellect and caliber” of blacks to that of “so many baboons.” William Golding tried to rape a 15-year-old girl. The list could go on.”

Sometimes it’s the little things. We need to get rid of friction brakes I think, they’re filthy. The air we breathe is chock full of the rubbish these things produce, and it’s seriously bad for us. There are frictionless brakes, a bit more expensive and more complicated but they also allow energy recovery from braking. Trains have had them for years.

I'd have to ask that person for the $2 first, she has all the money too.

More 'anti-gravity' magic, @[1348521951:2048:David Gorman]. And I know you love gyroscopes @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato].

The best lighting for breakfast.

Maybe he could take a few other wingnuts with him?

Every politician who offers you a tax cut should be told the same thing. I would rather have: - decent and affordable schools - decent and affordable health care - affordable and effective transport options - power that I can afford - water that is clean and that I can afford - a decent, living wage - enough time off work to spend time with my family - good quality, clean and affordable food - a natural environment that isn’t a desert, and - air that is clean.

"The data is designed to help governments, industry and communities to make better decisions. It will be updated each year." If the data is telling them that an average life expectancy of 80 means we're all going to live to 80, a lot of money is going to get wasted. http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/snapshot-shows-which-australians-live-the-longest-feel-the-safest-and-are-the-most-inventive-20171207-h00get.html

Happy birthday Pen!!

This is HUGE. "Put another way, the scientists chose to set aside the molecular box which has proven so vexing, and to focus instead on the context of the box itself." There's a reductionism in a lot of modern medicine that says the 'cause' and cure of things must be buried somewhere in our genes or in this or that bit of biochemistry. But the human body is a fully integrated system, and it's that which modern medicine has almost entirely forgotten. Look at any part of the body in isolation and you can get as much complexity as you like (and set up a highly lucrative medical specialty), but it won't tell you how that 'part' interacts with all of the others. The same criticism applies to something like neuroscience, which is determined to assume our 'thought' resides in our brains. Bullshit. https://aeon.co/ideas/lifestyle-changes-not-a-magic-pill-can-reverse-alzheimers

Everything Elizabeth says is (scandalously) true. And similar arguments apply to private hospitals and private health (who also use the same lying excuses, such as ‘it takes the strain off the public system’). I wouldn’t get rid of them though. I would make all schools and healthcare driven by evidence-based outcomes. That would include evidence on cost, or value for money. If you want to set up a school or a hospital, you have to demonstrate that you’re actually teaching or healing, across agreed measures. The sad reality is that neither the public OR the private system, in either education or health, would pass that sort of test right now. There are no agreed measures, just measures on one side that favour teachers and doctors, and measures on the other that are brutal, simple cost-saving measures. And schools overwhelmingly across both sectors that add nothing to student learning, and healthcare that adds nothing to health.

Traffic is fascinating. Seriously 🙂 Look at all these intersection options, and the traffic flow efficiency of each. This is a fairly passive approach, not including the input of drivers in real-time, which is changing things dramatically, particularly with GPS. Self-driving vehicles will change things even further, they should allow much more efficient traffic flows. https://youtu.be/yITr127KZtQ

Happy birthday Inez :)

If you play an instrument, and if you start to feel at any point that you’re getting pretty good at it, then it’s time for some Art Tatum. (And he was blind.)

Was having a look at how AirTasker works. This one looked a bit kinky.

If you look up at the sky at night you can see planets, moons, stars, meteors, and so on. You can see them all ‘at the same time’. But they don’t all share the same time, some of that light you’re seeing is billions of years old, some of it may be a few minutes old, some a few hours, some a few years. The starlight you’re seeing might be from a star that blew up millions of years ago. So does that star ‘exist’, now? What does ‘now’ even mean?

Saw this on FB. Do many women use sex as a bargaining tool like this?

@[606028898:2048:Jason], you’d mentioned being interested in the ideas about our consciousness being spread between ourselves and the world around us? Manzotti, the Italian robotics researcher and philosopher who’s at the forefront of a lot of the thinking on this, and who writes super entertainingly, has a book out summarizing the ideas right now, and you can get the ebook version for only $1. Hugely recommended to anybody. http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/the-spread-mind/

Sigh, flamenco. That and the tango, music and movement for grown ups. I joked to Kell that I could imagine being somewhere in Spain with a cold Sangria listening to this live. Her smile tells me that could cost me a lot of money.

Anybody else noticed this happening? Crowdfunding requests for entirely selfish things. http://time.com/money/4270854/crowdfunding-selfish-cause/

Here's a genuine question to puzzle-through. I think it's an important topic, and there are some interesting myths around. Many supporters of private education say it saves the public money, because the public subsidy to private school students is less than what it costs the government to educate a student in a public school. Both private hospitals and private schools use this argument. So...what's wrong with the argument? Or is it legit?

"I'm from the generation of the Beatles; I believed that love is all you need. [We believed] by the time we came to power there would be no more wars, no more racial discrimination, no more hatred towards the LGBT and trans communities. We'll all love each other, and [yet] arguably, the world is much worse now than it was then." Everything that went wrong is right there in the words he says. Naive hippie rubbish, which went on to make the hippies the wealthiest people ever to live on Planet Earth. They trashed institutions that had taken millennia to build, and cashed in on the wreckage.

Frank Sinatra, Gladys Knight, Patsy Cline and Ella Fitzgerald. What did they have in common? All discovered in talent shows. Just a handful of greats who were.

Happy birthday mate! 30 *cough*

Wednesday morning philosophy. One of my hobbies is trying to show that philosophy is as practical and important as building roads, or fixing gutters. Things don’t exist, or not exist. They *happen*. All things are EVENTS. We always forget time, we think there are objects existing ‘in time’, but that’s not true. Each thing or person or object has its own time, it has a duration that is part of how you define it. Events are like housework, a clean house has to be constantly made and maintained, it isn’t either clean or not. All objects and people are the same, they have to be maintained in existence, in each moment (that maintaining is what makes the moment, ‘time’ needs work to exist). The implications of this shift in view are huge, and apply to anything you want. Which I’ll do off and on, in future posts, in case anybody is interested, or can’t sleep. Da Vinci studied turbulence with similar thoughts, and tried to capture it in drawings.

Happy Birthday Helen :)

A warning about electricity and gas providers. It seems increasingly they don’t even send somebody to read the meter, they’ll use an average or estimated figure instead which can be way off what you’ve actually used. I take photos of my meters now at each end of my billing period, has come in handy more than once.

Happy birthday mate, is it the big 50?

Our ‘curated’ selves, ‘sharing more and revealing less’. It’s making people very unhappy and anxious.

Here’s a Christmas serviette idea.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is on a mission with this same message. Pollution, particularly of air, is the globe’s greatest killer. We’re way too complacent about it. Lithgow for example has had alarming air quality for many years.

Arnold. Listen.

Happy Birthday Boudi :)

Schnitzel and crinkle cut chips. Deep fried in dripping. Heaven.

Who can do this?

One of the reasons I think the modern world seems a disaster to people is that they’re used to things being scripted. Real life seems too messy, so they retreat to stories. People are increasingly obsessed with the universes their favourite stories create, they inhabit fantasy worlds and those worlds are increasingly overlapping with the real world. Some might say it’s just a bit of fun. But it seems more like we retreat to fantasy when we don’t have the stomach for actual reality. The US elected a president who was selling pure fantasies. This stuff matters.

A day late, but Happy Birthday!

Continuing on stories. People hate politics, but actually it all makes a lot more sense if it’s looked at as stories. The two main sides of politics, around the world, each have their own story. Roughly, these: Story 1 - Conservatives (LNP in Australia). Individuals are the heart of society. Institutions like government (and their taxes, and ‘nanny state’ ideas) get in the way of individuals. The ‘economy’ is really just all of these individuals, and we will be richer if we can take as much weight (taxes, regulations) off individuals as possible. Story 2 - Progressives (Labor in Australia). Individuals live in communities, and communities provide the foundation for individuals to prosper. Government and regulation are the necessary checks and balances on individuals, to make sure everybody gets a fair go, and also build frameworks for individuals to work within. There are also smaller stories, that minor parties tell.

New day. Same theme.

Not many of these issues are about the little people being screwed? They’re about the problems of small scale?

Ouch.

The definition of a fanatic or extremist is somebody who will insist on doing the same thing, despite all the evidence to the contrary. The new Trump tax cuts will be like the George W Bush tax cuts, crippling the American budget without producing jobs or growth. It’s not like you have to look hard to see it having been tried before. The twits in power in Canberra at the movement are following the same songbook. They’re fanatics, because we already know big tax cuts only do one thing. Make rich people even richer. But they know that, that’s their real constituency.

What is Anthony wiggling?

Christmas caption competition. Winner gets, um, international stardom.

Trump called his plan ‘tax relief’. Cunning as sewer rats with the words, conservatives - “relief”.

Happiest time of the year for many. But a very difficult time of year for people with depression, like Bri.

Yum?

I watch this, but rarely last even one innings. I’m not some traditionalist, but it’s a circus really, one day cricket is now seen to be a bore, and T20 will go the same way. It’s seen as a shot in the arm for cricket, but really it’s just a gravy train for cricketers and promoters to make shedloads of money. There’s far too much cricket being played, as a mass game it’s pretty much dead outside India, and I see T20 as the perverse last rites of the game. Bread and circuses, like the end of Rome. ‘Big Bash’ says it all, really. It’s like the porn version of cricket, eventually gimmicks run out of gimmicky ways to keep peoples’ attention.

This is the biggest present I’ve ever seen. Wonder what it is.

Well, this seems like a Christmas message.

I’m never eating again.

Christmas music is some of the most special music. Sacred music. The Real Group are a wonderful Swedish a cappella group. This is how Silent Night should sound, I reckon. Pick which one is the bass singer. Can you hit that bass note right at the end @[1222290127:2048:Tobias]?

"We had put up Christmas lights and I wondered if we had put them up wrong."

“The sensation of free fall is similar to the feeling of weightless astronauts experience in space – because, says Dr Gilmore, astronauts are in fact free-falling, rather than experiencing true weightlessness. "They are falling. It's just through the clever design of their orbits that they keep falling and missing the Earth."” True weightlessness? Weightlessness is weightlessness, Dr Gilmore. One for @[100001374621876:2048:Kato].

We travel far too much. We privatise far too much. Every time I step on a plane I wonder about maintenance. For good reason.

Can we make 2018 the year when fundraising in schools gets some needed attention? I don’t think more than two weeks go by without a new fundraising initiative. It needs to stop.

Dr Claire Weekes was a great Australian, but much more known overseas than here. She helped thousands, if not millions, overcome anxiety and panic, through simple, powerful wisdom.

It’s not a popular view. But I reckon there are many who hold it, maybe secretly. And I like thinking about the people for whom this time of year is horrible, and who can’t wait for it to be done. (That’s not me, incidentally, but I think they’re wiser than we acknowledge.) Holidays and travel are things we often pretend to like, but deep down ‘there’s no place like home.’ They’re just a contrast from jobs or lives we don’t like, so they seem a great thing. All feelings are contrasts, if you sit in a smelly room for more than a few minutes, you won’t notice the smell. Ditto for life, holidays seem like the bomb because they’re a contrast from our other routines. “Our natural habitat is the office, the shop, the bank, the building site. The ocean is for fish, the rainforest is for frogs, foreign cities are for foreign people. There is no experience more comforting than to return from holiday, sink into that luxurious swivel chair, click the on button and try to remember your password.”

Happy birthday!

The joys of test cricket on a BBL ‘bash the bowlers’ pitch. Evidence for the prosecution (T20 destroying cricket), exhibit A.

Well I did know he seemed to be still bowling at express pace in the BBL last night, another example of how T20 is gutting cricket. He ‘retired’ from cricket a couple of years ago, meaning he left serious games to go after the dollar. What’s a ‘tennis scholar’?

Yeh.

The weakest force in the universe - gravity - is what shapes the entire universe. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth. At the time of the writing of the gospels, ‘meek’ meant gentle, or soft. Gentle people shape the world much more than the strong. Gentleness is the opposite of weakness, a ‘hard man’ or woman is the weakest of all human beings. It takes real strength to be gentle, in the face of life’s challenges.

My wish for 2018 is that the millions of us working in organisations for much of our lives start to be relieved of the stupidity that increasingly makes every day in them frustrating and stressful. No cheap shots here, it’s not just ‘the management’ who are at fault, that’s too easy. For the same reason politics has stopped working properly, organisations are struggling because people don’t understand them. For every useless manager I’ve ever met, I’ve also met 10 employees whose idea of working together is bitching and backstabbing, and blaming management for everything. So we can all do better. Karen Phelan is as good a place to start as anybody, I think. A simple, brilliant and uplifting read, going way beyond consultants.