Tag Archives: Uncategorized

Concentrate in the important.

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The Times has an interesting set of comments. In New Zealand, we have, until recently, kept private things private. For we are fully aware that our politicians are not saints. But things changed… slowly. Having the PM and Leader of the Opposition have to play happy families — Paul Holmes visiting — has not helped. It affects the children. There have been suicides.

But… there are standards. I support the Whale in exposing rorts of credit cards for private meals, flowers, underpants and other things.

Like McCrystal, I have been at times scathing about my employers. I have had confrontations with the suits. I have advocated for staff. That is part of my job. However, if a reporter was present… I would turn into a jargon spouting eunuch. It’s called survival.

Then, after Vietnam, an ethos of exposure swept the culture. The assumption among many journalists was that the establishment may seem upstanding, but there is a secret corruption deep down. It became the task of journalism to expose the underbelly of public life, to hunt for impurity, assuming that the dark hidden lives of public officials were more important than the official performances…

In other words, over the course of 50 years, what had once been considered the least important part of government became the most important. These days, the inner soap opera is the most discussed and the most fraught arena of political life.

And into this world walks Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

General McChrystal was excellent at his job. He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.

But McChrystal, like everyone else, kvetched. And having apparently missed the last 50 years of cultural history, he did so on the record, in front of a reporter. And this reporter, being a product of the culture of exposure, made the kvetching the center of his magazine profile.

By putting the kvetching in the magazine, the reporter essentially took run-of-the-mill complaining and turned it into a direct challenge to presidential authority. He took a successful general and made it impossible for President Obama to retain him.The reticent ethos had its flaws. But the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important.

via Op-Ed Columnist – General McChrystal and the Culture of Exposure – NYTimes.com.

It may be that McCrystal has more honour that I, or any other Kiwi, has.

Old is good, modern is dross.

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Apparently the son has war poems next term. The best of these are old and not fashionable. In part because there has been a filter: the dross has been removed by time’s crucible. Owen is good…

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

via Wilfred Owen – Dulce et Decorum Est – .

This is new, and from the same war, but written 90 years later….

They were rum faced, blushing young Hauraki men

half pissed and smoking last cigarettes and fags in quiet groups,

…in the jumping off trench. Young men from Waihi, Paeroa, Tauranga,

Te Puna, Katikati, Kopu and Thames.

Dutch courage be buggered, Nelson had it right all along,

this was to be his 9th time over the top…”jumping the bags,”

and the rum cut right through, and “cotton-wooled”

the terror that was to shortly come…and it would come;

they all knew it.

Mike Subritsky: Up from the fire step

But this, is just horrible.

We charged in our Storm Trooper costumes
Blinding faceless shapes through dirty glass
With rifle mounted lasers
We were jumpy
We were ready

Danny Martin: Haddock of Mass Destruction.

But Kipling is the Master. He is deeply unfashionable, and I find him somewhat prophetic.

The smoke upon your Altar dies,
  The flowers decay,
The Goddess of your sacrifice
   Has flown away.
What profit then to sing or slay
The sacrifice from day to day?

"We know the Shrine is void," they said.
  "The Goddess flown --
"Yet wreaths are on the altar laid --
  "The Altar-Stone
"Is black withfumes of sacrifice,
"Albeit She has Bed our eyes.

"For, it may be, if still we sing
  "And tend the Shrine,
"Some Deity on wandering wing
  "May there incline,
"And, finding all in order meet,
"Stay while we Worship at Her feet.

Kipling, L'envoi

No point continuing to run deficits

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If Bill English runs deficits over the next year to stumulate the economy he willbe contradicting the Rsereve Bank.

The economy technically pulled out of recession in the second quarter, snapping a five-quarter streak of contractions and the longest downturn since the recession caused by the first oil shock in the mid-1970s.

Earlier this month, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand kept the official cash rate at 2.5% but signaled it would start raising interest rates in mid-2010 rather than the previous guidance of the second half of 2010 if the economy continues to recover. The central bank had expected the economy to expand 0.4% in the third quarter.

via HeadlineText – WSJ.com.

Four banks to pay IRD $2.2bn – Business – NZ Herald News

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This is sort of good news. TheIRD won on wht`at looks to have been a comlicated tax issue.It would be interesting to see what Cactus Kate says: this is her area.

As a mere research clinician, If I can’t explain it back to my advisor and show you how it works on the back of an  envelope, I don’t understand it and should not be involved.

More inetersting is that we needed this windfall to go into surplus. We need to be balancing our budget — even if you are a Keynsian (I’m not) then we are moving into recovery and stimulus is not needed.

lancing the books New Zealand's big four Australian-owned banks and the Inland Revenue Department have announced a settlement of their disputes over structured finance deals that involves the banks paying the government a gross NZ$2.2 billion.This represents 80 per cent of the amounts owed by the banks and is the largest commercial settlement with the IRD in its history. Updated with comment from ANZ, ASB, BNZ, Westpac and the IRDThe settlement follows years of legal fights and two high court rulings in favour of the IRD. The banks will not pay penalties and the full details of the settlement are confidential, although they are paying 80 per cent of the total tax owed plus interest. The amount was enough to boost New Zealand's current account into a surplus in the September quarter for the first time in almost 21 years.

via Four banks to pay IRD $2.2bn – Business – NZ Herald News.

Best kiwi comment for the week

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I don’t get comments here. But this is the best from the kiwi blogs I found this week. On the warmists….

I’ll believe there’s a crisis when the people telling us there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis”.

I think this goes to the heart of why nothing will come out of Copenhagen, and is why I gave this post its title. If you’re still considering a private jet and a limo service absolute necessities, I’m not particularly interested in hearing how you need me to bung you wads of cash to reduce carbon emissions (through some obscure, magical process).

The science is another matter. It seems obvious enough that carbon emissions are going to cause us trouble, I just suspect a lot of what we're hearing right now is rank alarmism based on computer models that aren’t worth sh_t. Propose some useful mechanisms to reduce pollution and encourage moves to renewable resources and I’ll be all for it – but propose jacking up prices so money can be traded by financial scammers and handed over to corrupt Third World officials to no useful environmental effect, and strangely enough I’m not going to be enthusiastic.

via Blogger: No Minister – Post a Comment.

Outlook next year part 1.

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I appreciate that Kate Ross (who works here) has had a year where keeping going has been hard. However, the screening that she mentions is (for most businesses, who cannot afford to have a huge HR department) a good reason to use her service

An example of this – last week we advertised a middle management role. We had 9000 views, 750 applicants read the advertisement and over 300 applied statistics from Seek. 300! We have numerous positions to fill and this is incredibly time consuming when 90 per cent of the applicants do not even meet the brief. When clients have a few roles to recruit they will approach an agency and ask for the “best price.” Fair enough, we all need to be flexible.

via Kate Ross: What have recruitment agencies learned from 2009? – page 2 – Business – NZ Herald News.

In health the problem is getting enough quality staff. It takes at least 14    years to train a spccailist. It takes at least 7 -10 years to train a nurse or social worker (I know their degrees take three years, but they need a lot of supervision for at least some years). Good people are hard to find. Hiring bad people is very very expensive both emotionally, financially and often not acceptable from a risk management point of view.

So, we have been recruiting in health. For empty jobs. However, the ceiling on these jobs is shrinking, as we are being asked to make even more cuts.

Kate sees some hope for next  year, based on what she is seeing happening over the last few months. This timing fits with a typical recession. The risk, however, is that the recession elsewhere will be prolonged and worsened by US and EU policies. As we rely on exports, the recovery elsewhere is as important (or more so) than our domestic situation.

Wednesday Hail

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Over the afternoon, the weather turned nasty. The staff were talking about snow. To 300m. Have not seen any, but it is unseasonally cold.

p1010642

One son, who has cross country tomorrow, is praying hard for snow. The other is praying for no snow because he has  a school trip.

Regardless, it is unseasonably cold.

Which reminds me of this article. To quote them:

Thanks to misreading the significance of a brief period of rising temperatures at the end of the 20th century, the Western world (but not India or China) is now contemplating measures that add up to the most expensive economic suicide note ever written.

Go read it.

Use A Command Line At Boston College… Have Your Computer Equipment Confiscated | Techdirt

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I’m glad my IT department has a clue. Note to any police: clt-Alt F3 (or any function key apart from f7 will bring up a virtual terminal. These are useful for big jobs when you don’t want a graphic interface. The term for this is a command line.

And any parent who works from home should have seperate logins for the kids and him or her: the spouse may not inadvertantly trash you data, but the kids probably will type rm -rf * at least once just to see what it does….

A bunch of folks have submitted various versions of a story in Boston, involving Boston College police being granted a warrant which they used to confiscate the computers of a student as part of an investigation over an email sent to a mailing list. The troubling part is that the warrant was given without any real reason. In fact, part of the warrant application focused on the scary fact that the student in question used a command line on his computer:

Mr. Calixte uses two different operating systems to hide his illegal activities. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.

There are other accusations in the filing, but reading through it, it seems clear that this is a pure fishing expedition by the police, rather than any real probable cause.

via Use A Command Line At Boston College… Have Your Computer Equipment Confiscated | Techdirt.