Posts by Kong
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Every day I write software that takes tasks away from human beings. Every minute I spend working amounts to hours that other people don't have to spend, or even makes possible what there simply wasn't time for previously. All of that work goes to making other people more productive. As a measure for myself, it's mostly useless. My own productivity is very hard to measure. Sometimes one minute's work produces thousands of hours of savings. Other times, I can work for hours and make no progress whatsoever, indeed I've sometimes gone backwards and made the software less stable. Even worse, sometimes I've made changes that have actually wasted a lot of other people's time. Innovation itself, as an output, is hard to measure, and yet it is the source of most other improvements in productivity. I find it extremely hard to believe any grand system can reliably improve productivity. It's a hit and miss affair. All I know is that if we're not working at it, then it certainly won't happen, and then we fall back on the age-old ideas of productivity improvement, the whip, starving people, tying productivity to their own well-being, etc. Which works only within a narrow band, there's only so much you can squeeze out of people. There is, however, no limit to what can be squeezed out of innovation, it's just very unpredictable.
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Funny thing about innovation, it almost never comes from the top. In the workplace, the number one source of innovation seems to be between customers and designers, where necessity meets invention. In politics innovation is anathema, because it involves taking extreme positions. I can't think of the last time I heard a new political idea. Just new words for old ideas. That's what political and management innovation always seems to be, some new metaphor to justify some ancient practice. Some new name for some shade of policy as different from the last as one sheep is to another.
Actual innovators are seldom welcome in the company of politicians, they are too likely to say something whack. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I'd want them pulling strings either. Politics is slow moving and uninspired for a reason - when things move fast it's usually at immense risk and/or cost. Radical ideas seizing power can just as easily be bad radical ideas as good ones. The downside risk usually outweighs the upside, except in times of the direst need. I don't think things have got that bad, nor are they likely to.
The Nats would be far better off being honest about this. They are not expected to solve the recession for NZ, just to make the best they can of bad times. They could be honest about the antiquity of their approach, it's hardly like the alternatives that we've been living with under Labour are ground breaking, just good old fashioned socialism-flavored capitalism. If the Nats want to try good old fashioned capitalist-flavored socialism instead then they probably have a mandate for it. Does anyone really expect anything different?
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I/S I wasn't ragging on you personally. I got that you were really saying much the same as me. But my slant is that ragging out Australia is not going to convince people, that's just more dick-measuring. It's the entire focus on competition with foreign nations that is at fault.
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I'm sick of constantly being told I have to compare myself to Australians.
I'm not.
I am. I can't see any sense in picking some nation to beat. Surely our aim should be to 'improve', rather than cherry-pick some nation on the quite arbitrary ground of being culturally similar and geographically close, and politically aligned to whatever policy we are cherry-picking for.
It's like randomly picking a neighbor in your street and making it your life's mission to be richer than them, by emulating them. Never mind that there are millions of other people you could have chosen who have found paths to success totally different to that neighbor. Never mind that you may be very dissimilar to that neighbor in skills and resources. Never mind their head start. Never mind that you may be totally unprepared to do what they did to get where they are, or you may have missed the opportunity altogether. It wouldn't matter what country was chosen as our guiding light, it would still be an extremely limited and unimaginative goal.
Keeping up with the Joneses is a futile endeavour. Why let the Joneses dictate how you run your life? NZ has a lot more to offer to the world than becoming a small, weak, poor clone of Australia. Personally I think of Australia not as a competitor, but as family. It's a place where cultural ties and proximity enable us to deal with them in a way that is mutually beneficial, most of the time, and our difference from them makes the family stronger. Australians that I know are deeply inspired by NZ a lot of the time, despite loving to lord over us anything they excel in. This is why NZers fall into Australian company abroad with such ease, why NZers find it so easy to work in Australia (and vice versa).
So making it our life's mission to be better than them just seems like the petty ambition of a spurned 'unsuccessful' sibling. I want my family to all excel, and if I'm never richer than my brother, I'll just be happy for him.
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The people are exactly the silly arseholes I'm talking about. But for all of the current problems of California, the system being decried here as though it were a serious criticism of direct democracy rather than a cherry picking farce, is the exact same system that also made California incredibly rich and desirable in the first place. Which it will continue to be when the dust settles.
Referenda can be used for stupid things. So can simple power, like it was in the hands of George Bush 2. But the nice thing about what's happening in California is that the people don't have anyone to blame but themselves, so with any luck a lesson may actually be learned.
It's also worth noting that there are some other things the Swiss system doesn't get right.
It's worth noting that every system gets things wrong at times. But there are a lot of things to be said for Switzerland so it's hardly the knockdown argument against direct democracy that Angus seemed to think. As for California, even calling it a direct democracy is a joke - it just has elements in it's constitution much like most democracies. That they've been used in ways that seem foolish hardly knocks the system down. It just knocks the ideas they voted for down.
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wtf blaming it on direct democracy, that makes you sound hysterical, provokes a flippant answer.
Kong, the problem here is that you essentially don't know what you're talking about :). At least in respect of California.
You really think this is a serious debate man? It's a joke. I actually presumed as much given how stupid the comparisons were. California has recently made some silly choices. Not because they are a direct democracy (they aren't) but because the place is run by silly self serving arseholes. If you have enough arseholes running your house then you can fuck any system up. The last 9 years of representative democracy in the USA have pretty much proved that one.
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No. It is famous for being a heavily armed, highly conservative, insular country with retrograde immigration laws, secretive mega-capitalist banks, the UN and some damn fine ski resorts.
Sounds boringly well managed to me.
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California being bankrupt is like Donald Trump being bankrupt. A minor setback. But are you seriously blaming it all on 'direct democracy'? They have representative democracy last I heard.
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California is probably the richest state on the planet....is that disastrous?
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switzerland is not famous for its bad government either