Public Address - Island Life (Home)

Feeding the hens | Feb 28, 2008 08:14

Google will readily tell you how to make a pipe bomb, how much tax Kerry Packer contrived to not pay, and where to find Paris Hilton looking like a racoon, but it's more coy about telling the world just how many thousands upon thousands of computers it has yoked into service in its many, many server farms. They are not state of the art computers; they're basic PCs bought at good rates and loaded up with the operating system you can depend on: Linux.

They are silicon-chipped battery hens.

They work to satisfy your urgent requirements, your idle curiosity; your panting lust.

How many of them are there? Wikipedia takes a stab: "a 2006 estimate cites 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters at data centers around the world."

And where are these data centres? As close as they can get to nuclear power plants, according to the man who knows the inconvenient answers, Juha; anywhere where the power is cheap, because boy, do they hoover it up. Here beginneth the carbon footprint lesson.

Is that search really necessary?

If this is news to you and you care about the planet, your immediate thought will doubtless have been: what can I do to cut down my Googling? You may wonder if there is some kind of Google ride-sharing option available. Is there a Google bicycle alternative to the Search Engine SUV you have double-parked outside MySpace? Can you recycle some of your old searches?

These are all good ideas, but if you punch them into Google, you won't get far. (Disclosure: this may be incorrect. I am interviewing my keyboard at this point. The surname is what it is.)

Something needs to be done.

Every time you type Britney nude into Google, the servers suck a little more juice off the grid, and you know the rest. Fossil fuels burn, the greenhouse gets warmer, a tiny butterfly flaps its wings one last time, drops to the floor of the rain forest and, as ever, God strangles a kitten.

Think global, act local. We're all in this together. Let's pool our ideas.

Like I say, I'm just interviewing my keyboard, so I have but a few modest ones. But it's a start, eh? Here are my suggestions.

Idea one: Make Kiwiblog your friend. Don't go using up energy to seek out your current affairs information! If it's news in New Zealand, it will be relayed from the original source to the columns of Kiwiblog. Not only that, entire wasteful paragraphs will be eliminated in the retelling, in the style of Reader's Digest, (if Reader's Digest were your noisy uncle). Excerpts of columns and editorials will also be offered at sufficient length to save you the bother of seeking out the original. Likewise the time-saving Kiwiblog humour service, in which a link to a YouTube clip is prefaced by a precis which includes the punch-line. You can be laughing at Sarah Silverman and back into the billable minutes in 30 seconds without using up a single Google CPU cycle.

Idea two: The five dollar test. As you type in the name of your ex for the fifteenth time today, ask yourself: would I be doing this if it cost me five bucks each time? If you find the answer is still "yes" beyond a hundred dollars, you should disregard anything Pharmac has said this week about the efficacy of antidepressants.

Idea three: Leave it all to John and Bill. Look, they haven't announced a lot of policy yet, but that doesn't mean the next Government doesn't have a plan. In a funny kind of way they would love to start saving the planet now, but there's an argument you can make that if they told us their solution right away, Labour would just pinch their ideas, and then what? But hey, if you're worried about what might happen in the meantime just stop using the Internet until the election. It's full of stuff that's frankly not all that good anyway.

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National Landslide, or Key-Fuelled Rage?

 | Feb 25, 2008 10:39

When supper time came the old cook came on deck

Saying fellows it's too rough to feed ya

At 7PM a main hatchway caved in

He said fellas it's been good to know ya

Old songs take you back. So can new headlines. I have been reading about the widening polling margin between National and Labour, or perhaps that should be: John Key and Helen Clark, and it takes me back to doomed days on the 9th floor of the Beehive in 1990 when we tried in vain to avert the sinking of the good ship Labour Government IV.

The similarities are many.

In 1990, the Frontline programme asked questions about political patronage as it pointed the cameras into the dining room of Vogel House at a gathering of knights of the realm and captains of industry taking tea with senior Cabinet ministers.

Mortgagee sales were on the rise; the property market was in the doldrums.

Television was full of dross.

People weren't sure if Winston Peters would support the leader of the National Party if they were to win the election.

And with just months to go, Margaret Wilson quit.

I liked working with Margaret Wilson very much. She is smart, and she is a realist.

She would no doubt look at the list I've just recited and point out significant differences.

The issue that outweighed everything else in that election was unemployment. More than 10% were out of work; worse yet for Maori, for whom the rate was nearer 25%. Economic prospects looked miserable.

You could say that LGIV was punished, in the end, for doing too little in the face of enormous problems. This lot looks likely to be turfed out for doing too much about problems that did not warrant the attention: the so-called social engineering issues. Such legislation has been but a small part of the business of the last three terms, but it has served to mark out Helen Clark and her governments as intrusive and meddling and them voters, they don't like it up 'em.

It's a broad phenomenon, he said, turning to personal anecdotal experience. A friend who is immune to the hysteria of political fashion, broadly liberal, but an independent thinker all the same, declared over drinks a few weeks ago that he had reached his limit at a TV ad imploring him not to drink and fry. For God's sake, he said, we're grown ups.

Mind the gap. It's now about twenty polling points, and widening.

The fashionable political meme has become: there is a disconnect. The phone is off the hook and the electorate is not responding. I doubt that people stop listening altogether, and I doubt that they form an opinion that can't be unmade, but it certainly takes something quite unexpected for political leaders to be cast in a new light. The idiot son in the White House, for example, notwithstanding his thoroughly unheroic initial response, was made a great man by two planes hitting the twin towers. If it takes an event of such proportions, let us hope there will not be a fourth term. Having said that, unless the man who would be Prime Minister can become a little more clear in his thoughts or at least in his technique of conveying them, one rather hopes for a cataclysmic circuit breaker that might take place without anyone getting hurt.

I spoke this morning to Greg Robertson of the Bay Report, who has been fielding many media inquiries about a story he ran just before Christmas that offered the remark by John Key that "we would love to see wages drop."

The story has become a he said/she said did/didn't trail of confusion, and it may well be Mr Key's good fortune that the tape recording has not survived the two months that elapsed between publication and the sudden flurry of interest in the exchange.

According to Robertson, he invited the president of the Kerikeri business association to sit down with Key in a local cafe and put some questions to him. Robertson recorded the exchange and, he says, the results were transcribed accurately and verbatim. The words yielded by the tape were these:

Another point raised by Ms Brookes-Quan concerned the exodus to 
Australia by New Zealanders, lured by attractive wage compensation, 
and the recent call for employers to pay more.

Mr Key would like to see the opposite occur.

"We would love to see wages drop," he says.

"The way we want to see wages increase is because productivity is 
greater. So people can afford more. Not just for inflationary reasons, 
otherwise it's a bit of a vicious circle as it comes back at you in 
higher interest rates."

I think the sentence that Jon Stewart would repeat, before meaningfully pausing, would be "The way we want to see wages increase is because productivity is 
greater." I can't help feeling that this would have made more sense if Milton Friedman had been trying to explain it, or even, dare I say it, Don Brash.

We could really do with a good debate about productivity, both about how the spoils of that are shared and how we achieve it in the first place.

Now would be good. Let's just hope the incumbents won't be too busy bailing water to take part.




The Captain wired in he had water coming in

And the good ship and crew was in peril

And later that night when his lights went out of sight

Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.





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The Honorary Donor | Feb 19, 2008 22:07

Owen Glenn stood in the rear of a gaming room at the Monte Carlo casino, among the croupiers and Russian call girls, watching. It was an evening like so many others. The croupiers, the girls, the biased roulette wheel -- these had been what Glenn first saw of his adopted country. The years had changed nothing.

He could not measure himself exactly how substantially he had been under the influence when he offered to take on the title and thereby 'give something back' to the country where he had been raised and where he had learned to pick the winner of the second leg. Once to a mannish woman who had cornered him in Soul Bar he had said, "I left Auckland to get away as far as possible from the socialists."

The sky was dark by now so the holiday makers who had been trailing him all day would likely have retreated to their budget hotel. Since the morning months ago when he had begun receiving the calls of tourists who had mislaid their travellers' cheques or been rolled by con artists, Glenn found he was ill at ease in his fellow New Zealanders' company.

The Honorary Consul had never caught anyone else doing a selfless act in the whole principality. When he dined out he saw only leather faced millionaires attending to tax haven business. There were sometimes tourists with misty eyes collecting mementoes of the late Princess, but few lovers on the benches or contented women with shopping baskets, and scarcely any socialists.

People when they had first heard of his new title had looked at him with fresh curiosity. Perhaps they thought it was a custom peculiar to Antipodeans. It was not exactly unmanly, but it was certainly foreign. The men here preferred to strip assets or stand at the deck of their yachts and compare lengths, or sit at their desk with lawyers and scheme, or ring up a tax consultant and make her jump though some hoops and all the time, while she jumped, they touched themselves. In public Glenn touched nobody. It was a sign, like his New Zealand passport, that he would always remain a stranger: he would never be properly assimilated.

He began to read the letter again. "She has been working in an unbroken silence, accepting the media torment, like the bad polling, as a law of nature. We have to do something."

It could not be said that Williams wrote badly. There was a heavy music in his style, the drumbeats of destiny were never very far away, but Glenn sometimes had a longing to exclaim to him, "Life isn't like that. Life isn't noble or dignified. Nothing is ineluctable. Life has surprises. Life is absurd. Talking to the media is absurd. Because it's absurd there is always hope. Why, one day I may even talk straight with them."

I am a man with machismo, the Honorary Consul reflected ruefully, as he picked up the receiver.

Another mannish-sounding woman reporter. 'Frank'?

He listened to her for a moment and sighed.

"Why do you always want the truth? Contrary to common belief the truth is nearly always funny. It's only tragedy which people bother to imagine or invent. If you really knew what went into this goulash you'd laugh."

He paused to listen to a long stream of questions and assertions.

"Check again," he said. "Mate."

He added, "You people usually lose to me more easily than that."

"Your game's improved."

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More time with the family | Feb 14, 2008 07:41

Could Katherine Rich be the first politician in a generation to actually mean it when she says she's quitting politics to spend more time with her family? As soon as I say that, I realise I'm forgetting Paul Swain, whose intention also sounded sincere, and of course there may be inside knowledge I'm not privy to. Perhaps she was hoping to be a part of a Velvet Revolution and she has dejectedly concluded that it's not worth hanging around for something as slight as a Beige Makeover.

If she does mean it, though, I can entirely understand. We see many friends with young children who have found that a pair of high-pressure careers is one too many to sustain.

Sometimes the father has made the change, more often it has been the mother. In some instances, ours included, the father has made the larger initial adjustment, but in the end the mother has been the one who has made the greater and more enduring change, and has been left feeling uneasy about the consequences.

The conversations we have had about this – both among the two of us and with friends - have been many, long, and generally lacking any clearer conclusion than: this is lopsided and disheartening. Biology might not be entirely destiny, but it for certain is no level playing field.

Looking at the way parliament works, I don't see any obvious way to change that peculiar and somewhat unreal existence to make it better for young parents. Male or female, you give over a ridiculous amount of your time to the life.

Out here in the real world, though, we must surely be able to do better. Just for starters, there is the tyranny of simple arithmetic. There are thirteen-odd weeks of school holidays a year, and, typically four weeks of annual leave. For most families, sheer economic pressure mandates that both partners work.

This is not having it all; it's having it all up against you. For all the prevalence of the computer, and the potential for job-sharing and portability it carries, our enterprises don't seem inclined to rearrange themselves sufficiently to accommodate a parent who hopes to maintain her career past the first epidural.

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Verdict: Not proven | Feb 11, 2008 10:09

Conclusions must be supported by the evidence, according to the Minister for Clarity, Trevor Mallard.

Hear, hear! In this age of reason, we must not be leaping to unsupported conclusions. Here is a taste of what lies ahead as this clear-eyed policy is applied more broadly to our daily business.

Maths curriculum

2+2 = unproven

840,000/49= not known

Ministers' speech notes

And in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, redacted.

Film

And the Oscar goes to Alan Smithee

Judiciary

You are a blight on civilised society, Christie, and you are hereby sentenced to be advised

Music

And in the end,
the love you take
is equal to the love
you censored

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It's the way you tell them | Feb 05, 2008 09:52

Here are the last rousing lines of a speech by Winston Peters in the election of 2002.

If you are concerned about immigration - and what Kiwi who thinks about it for a few moments is not alarmed by the current mess - then you have only one choice in this election
Only Winston Peters and New Zealand First are committed to urgent action to bring immigration under control
Can we fix it? Yes we can!
If you are concerned about the division that continues in our city and in our country because of a Treaty industry that has taken on its own life - then you have only one choice.
Only Winston Peters and New Zealand First are committed to urgent action to put an end to the Treaty Industry.
Can we fix it? Yes we can!
If you are concerned about your safety and security and the falling social standards - as we must all be when we witness the attacks on the police that we saw here in the weekend - then you have only one choice in this election.
Only Winston Peters and New Zealand First are committed to urgent action to regain control of our streets and to arrest the disastrous decay in our social fabric.
Can we fix it? Yes we can!
In seeking your support to once again serve you and our community I am also seeking your support for my Party so that we have the strength in numbers to fix these things.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been honoured to serve you. 18 years ago I promised that if you voted for me then there would never arise in Parliament any issue of economic or social importance, without people first turned and asked - what does Tauranga think? I have kept that promise and today I renew it.
In the words of my namesake, "Give us the tools and we will finish the job".
Can we fix it?
Yes we can!

On the eve of Super Tuesday, it is worth reflecting on New Zealand's contribution to the contest.

Hillary Clinton's parents, as we have long known, did not get around to finding her a name until she was a toddler, at which point they called her Edmund.

Barack Obama, we can now see, is also a student of life down here at the last bus stop on the planet. "Find me the most successful politician they have down there and get his speech notes" he must have told a researcher. We can see from the foregoing passage that the researcher was drawn by the force of magnetic rhetoric. Alternatively, Obama enjoys watching children's television on a slow afternoon, but that is not the inference I feel inclined to draw in the midst of the heady spirit of Kennedy reincarnation.

Why are the words 'Yes we can' working so well for Obama, when they presaged near obliteration for Winston?

This kind of oratory is not easy to carry off. Obama has the preacher cadence pitch perfect, and that's important, but what matters more is the sense that he might really mean it. I don't know if he does or not, but the numbers suggest that many people have been persuaded.

Peters has been the critic and the rebutter and the master of the gotcha for so long that when he holds himself out as a potential leader with constructive intent and a will to share the ball with the rest of the team, it just doesn't sound credible.

Get down from the table, Mabel, the money's for the beer.

Whenever you get to your feet to give a speech you have to understand this: you can choose to use many different styles of delivery; what matters most is that it sound authentic. There's no point trying to be Martin Luther King if you're not advocating for the largest of ideas, and there's no point trying to advocate for those ideas if you don't really believe them.

As few as three words can sound profoundly different coming from two different speakers. Obama wants you to see a torch. Winston can't help himself; he wants you to see the joke.

Context matters, too. America has been wrenched by terrorism, war and dissent. Here, our Public Enemy Number One is a man adorned in moko with a taste for street theatre whose wife is giving him grief for disrupting their domestic tranquility. We have been delivered an economic lifeline in the form of galloping world demand for dairy products and naturally, we fret that it now costs fifteen dollars for a bigger block of cheese. Rural spending rises, cholesterol levels fall, and it's all as the young people say, good.

One matter troubles me, though, and it's this business about people leaving the country. Let's say there's a young guy who grew up in a Christchurch State house who is proving to be very good at dealing in currency. He's got a good job in Auckland and we want him to stay here. We look out across the uneven playing field and we ask: is this something we can fix? 'Yes we can' we say and we cut taxes sufficiently to make this young man ambitious for New Zealand. He stays right here in Auckland, doing trades for the next twenty years. He has two kids, buys a house in Howick, watches the All Blacks lose another four world cup tournaments and teaches his boy to play soccer.

One day when he's 43, he decides to go into politics, and in just a few years time, he's running for Prime Minister against another guy with the same background who went to London, spent quite a lot of time above the Atlantic, sat on the board of the federal reserve, and got entranced by the Irish tiger economy.

Can we work out which one people will assess to be the more capable Prime Minister? Yes, I think. We can.

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