Gina: I win

-->

I finished school in 1978, and since then, I have been unemployed for six weeks (not counting one blessed between-jobs interregnum when I actually treated myself to a two-week holiday with my wife).

I have worked at anything that came to hand, because it offends me not to be able to eat from my own income (or at least what credit I can raise by convincing a bank that there will be income!). I carry no grudge against the unemployed: it’s just that I so vastly prefer idleness to activity that I need a spur to my flank.

At the moment, by any normal definition, I have three jobs: I am a journalist; I am a data analyst specializing in telecommunications (tariffs and prices) and geo-analysis (which should be more valuable than it turns out to be). And I own and (with my wife) operate a small tourism business.

In the off-hours, I also care for my wife, who is seriously ill and currently living on a precarious balance between a life without treatment (which would be short) and a life with treatment (the side-effects of which, both theoretical and real, include cancers). We do what we can.

Gina: you wouldn’t know shit from sugar if you think “get out of the pub and work harder” is all you need to do to be more rich.

I can’t exactly recall my last visit to a pub: it was sometime in the 1990s. It’s not that I don’t drink: just that I never really enjoyed pubs (I don't include the family's enjoyable dinners at the Hotel Grand View at Wentworth Falls - friends all, but not the same as "some guy boozing in the pub").

Give up socializing of all kinds? Truly, I’d rather die.

Work harder? Actually, I’d lay a bet that it’s a lot harder to put in the hours for two jobs to subsidize a sometimes-marginal third business; plus raise two sane and capable sons without the help of trust funds, private schools and home help; plus cast around for extra work; plus make the tours of six – count them, six – medical specialists … than to give orders to minions.

There are treasures.

I have a blessing in my marriage. The heat of imminent death has welded my wife and I together; instead of fracturing, we cleaved. It would have been easier to separate us when life was easy: today, only unarguable necessity (say, a spell in hospital, or something with money in it) will draw us apart for even a few hours.

I have two blessings in my sons. When they were very young, the kinds of people you’d probably approve of promised us miserable criminals; instead, the elder is a stellar university student, the younger is finding his interests in late high school – and both can be relied on to work hard in the family business.

I have, as long as the bank’s forbearance and my ability to pay the mortgage both hold, the privilege to have a small slice of Australia that is as beautiful as my heart can contain, my brain comprehend or my words describe.

And I have as much work as anyone could accomplish, with or without the occasional trip to the pub.

What have I learned out of all of this?

The business of getting rich is not, and never was, about how much you’re willing to work: it was always whether you could earn more for your hour than it can possibly be worth.

I could sell myself and my corner of Australia to people like you, Gina, with only a little investment. I don’t wish to: because I can bet on a Ford Falcon carrying people who want to enjoy themselves, while a Mercedes-Benz will mostly contain whining princelings and princesses that cost more to satisfy than they’re ever willing to pay.

As I write this, people whose contracts would buy my business for cash are struggling over possession of a ball on TV. They train harder than I do, but do they work harder? Are they more abstinent (like hell)? Smarter? Or, differently to you but still comparable, were they merely favoured by genes and circumstances?

That’s just how life is. It’s not that I particularly resent your wealth: it’s merely the way of the world.

But I do resent you slinging out insults from your gilded cloister, as if you possess some understanding about life among the ordinaries – the workers, the white-collar strugglers, the blue-collars, the teachers, nurses, truckies and brickies – that is unique to you alone.

Partly through some examples that I had the fortune to study up close, I learned and rejected the secret of great wealth.

You only need one characteristic (apart from luck): the capacity to devote every brain cell, every waking moment, every thought and energy to one objective: the accumulation of money.

I have few close friends, but I would not sell any of them for one mining lease.

I have one wife, and for the time we have left together, I intend to treasure it.

My sons amaze me, and I would rather eat soap than alienate them over cash.

And even if I lose my corners of Australia, I will still know where they are and why they matter.

Gina: I have little to give up.

But what I have, you cannot possibly buy.

I win.

Anonymity and abuse: together forever

-->

Trolls and flamers have been with us as long as Internet anonymity. At every step, they’ve provided aid and comfort to those who try to block anonymous communications.

The Internet didn’t always offer anonymity. The demarcation between user and host was deliberate, but not for any lofty “First Amendment” reason. The early Internet was built around computers that supported many users; it was a pragmatic piece of engineering.

Anonymity was something that emerged, grew, was debated – and has always been in danger by the malicious, the evil, the stupid.

Courtesy of Google, I find that the venerable Link e-mail list over at ANU doesn’t record any strong debate about a right to Internet anonymity until 1996.

Let’s grab some rough time periods:

The 1980s: You (mostly) weren’t anonymous

The Internet was mostly academic; you connected as a user at a university. Even in America, the first ISPs emerged late in this decade. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) emerged in 1988. What anonymity existed was confined to the relatively small Internet community.

The 1990s: Emergent anonymity

Most people were “kind of” anonymous as the Internet grew: they were lost in the crowd, and their Internet identities (like their e-mail addresses) didn’t necessarily reflect their “real names”.

IRC became the focus of early anonymity debates. Here’s a paper (http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/misc/electropolis.html) from 1991 which notes that:

“The lack of self-regulation amongst users of IRC can be both positive and negative, as far as interaction is concerned. The safety of anonymity can "reduce self-consciousness and promote intimacy" between people who might not otherwise have had the chance to become close. It can also encourage "flaming" … the gratuitous and uninhibited making of "remarks containing swearing, insults, name calling, and hostile comments."”

Bruce Sterling, in 1992, quoted 1990 newspaper reports about hackers using the “relative anonymity” (my emphasis) of their computers (not, however, absolute anonymity) in his http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm book The Hacker Crackdown.

An early and popular anonymous message relay server was set up in Finland in 1992, for example, as is discussed http://people.dsv.su.se/~jpalme/society/anonymity.html here.

According to Wikipedia, the cartoon that probably epitomizes anonymity was published – “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog” – came from 1993.

In 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/31/us/computer-jokes-and-threats-ignite-debate-on-anonymity.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/R/Racketeering%20and%20Racketeers&pagewanted=2 this article from the New York Times estimated that there were around 25 anonymous remailers in the world.

I’ve picked out these highlights to illustrate the emergence of the debate about anonymity. Most people understood that computers were relatively anonymous. What emerged by the second half of the 1990s was a debate pro-versus-anti: “is anonymity a right?”

If anonymity is a right, it only has that status because people worked to make it so – and it’s a right that can be withdrawn or limited by governments, if they’re given a reason.

If you view anonymity as a right, it’s one that took some time to become truly accessible to the ordinary Internet user – and it’s all too easily denied by authorities.

Which is why I regard the kind of people who use anonymous Twitter accounts (registered in seconds, location “The Web”) to abuse and victimize others to be fools.

What’s happened to Charlotte Dawson is the kind of behavior most likely to erode what anonymity that exists.

Few things inspire legislators better than a cause celebre.

Defending what’s true against what’s fair

-->

The problem with regulating journalism is that it will mostly protect the wrong people – because the biggest failings with journalism happen when it decides to be too “fair” to people, and unfair to the truth, or to the reader.

Neither today’s Press Council system, nor what is proposed by the government, will do a damn thing to – as Twetter and blogger Mr Denmore puts it – protect the public.

To quote him fairly: “Just as the bill for banks' risk-taking is left with taxpayers, damage from lousy media standards is felt by the public they claim to defend”

This is perfectly true. Unfortunately, the main ways in which the public can be protected aren’t touched by media regulation.

I give you two examples, one hypothetical, the other real.

The Hypothetical

Imagine that a new “faith healer” arises somewhere near, say, Byron Bay. Possible media responses include ignoring him; denouncing him; hailing him; or “playing it straight” – giving the faith healer a platform with a handful of experts to offer “balance”.

The only sane options – the ones that don’t put your readers at risk of dying of cancer, for example – are to ignore the quack, or denounce him. Denunciation will almost certainly bring down the wrath of a regulator charged with upholding the nebulous values of “fairness” and “balance” rather than truth.

Meanwhile, a journalist who hails the quack as a savior will never suffer the wrath of a regulator; nor will a “balanced” journalist – but both of these will write the kinds of stories that will one day kill people.

The Real 

When Tim Johnstone of FirePower fame first claimed to have a pill that would give you 100 miles-per-gallon performance (just add it to your petrol tank!), there was only one simple piece of research that any journalist needed: find a university chemist and ask him.

Nobody did. Until the whole thing came crashing down, there was no interest in debunking – or, equally effective in the presence of a quack, ignoring – the story. Instead, a host of “business” journalists (which all too often means “stenographer to CEOs”) wrote about Johnstone’s deals, and sports journalists (which nearly always means “off in the dumb kids’ ghetto”) documented his sports sponsorships.

The deals and sponsorships were build on shit: there was no technology, merely a lame attempt to build a Ponzi scheme on the back of brain-donor investors and AusTrade money.

As with quack medicine: journalist could have refused to publicize the scam; they could have (and did) hailed it; they could have denounced it; they could have (and did) try to “play it straight”.

Nobody ignored the story – once there’s “a story”, it doesn’t get ignored, because the editors (all of whom need to be emasculated for their willingness to publicize FirePower before the fall) can just assign the story to some other sucker*.

(*When the story comes with champagne, air travel, celebrity brush-with-fame and glad-handing, few journalists let it be assigned to someone else.)

Some hailed it; some “played it fair”; both varieties were responsible for helping suck investor dollars into a lie.

Until Gerard Ryle, nobody went for the jugular. Nobody denounced Johnstone outright. Nobody denounced the non-science behind his claims.

Until FirePower’s collapse, as far as I can tell, neither the existing nor the proposed media “regulation” regimes would have defended the public. Johnstone would have had a better chance at arguing he’d been treated “unfairly” than a journalist at defending “truth”.

And: neither the existing nor the proposed media regulation environments give a member of the public a comeback against damage caused by a publisher peddling utter shit in the pursuit of clicks.

Any close reading of the Press Council’s decisions will hint that the Tim Johntones of the world can play “fair” as a trump card over “true”. Politicians can bluff the council four hands out of five. Neither is a good argument for any kind of media regulation beyond the laws of defamation.

Anybody can get an outright lie up in the mainstream press, and get it a good hearing, and wrap the Emporer’s cloak of “fairness” as an unvulnerable defense. Who defends the truth?

The dark side of import price rorts

-->

Oh good: now price discrimination is getting drafted into the politics of how to squeeze low-paid workers.

It’s unfair to single out Lenovo simply for following the rest of the industry in gouging Australian customers. If its products are priced 60% higher here than in America, that’s simply normal vendor practice.

The usual reasons are trotted out in http://www.crn.com.au/News/313278,lenovo-defends-60-percent-aussie-tax.aspx this CRN piece – “warranty, margins, channel and support”.

Since the Productivity Commission isn't convinced by these arguments, I don't see any reason to be. Worse: those with a drive-down-wages agenda want to draft retail prices into their political agenda.

 

Peter Reith – former Howard government minister, defender of Work Choices, and uncured sufferer of Relevance Deprivation Syndrome – told the ABC this morning that it was necessary to cut retail wages so as to help local companies compete with international purchases over the Internet.

For some reason, he didn’t think that price discrimination – the simple “whatever a market will bear” approach to geographical price-setting – is significant, even though it’s been identified by the Productivity Commission as the most convincing reason for the way the Australian market is slugged.

Then there's the question of price discrimination for products that exist only in the digital world. If a product leaves a California data centre for an Australian customer, you can’t blame retail staff prices for markups that might land it here at ten times the US street price.

The IT industry isn’t the whole story – practically any industry plays the same game. But I wonder if, as the industry currently in the spotlight, the IT sector wants to find itself drawn into the “Reith strategy”?

Cybercrime amendment a shadow of “#Ozlog”

-->

It’s like this: I don’t like it when people who consider themselves the “good guys” spread misinformation, apparently believing that it’s okay if it’s “for the cause”.

1.     The bill isn’t the same as the National Security Inquiry

Either because they’ve confused two government activities, or deliberately, some have conflated the Cybercrime Amendment Bill 2011 with the National Security Inquiry.

The NatSec Inquiry – which does include proposals for broad-scale data retention – never got as far as presenting even draft legislation: it’s reportedly been put on ice (although Nicola Roxon, Attorney-General, hasn't made a statement to that effect).

The Cybercrime Amendment Bill has, on the other hand, been in the pipeline since 2011.

2.     Why weren’t we consulted?

Some journalists and commentators have complained that there wasn’t a public consultation. There was: they’ve just forgotten it, because it took place in 2011 – or they took no notice of it anyhow.

The submissions to the consultation can be found here: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jscc/cybercrime_bill/subs.htm

The report was published last August: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=jscc/cybercrime_bill/report.htm

3.     It’s not warrantless surveillance

Unlike whatever as-yet-undrafted proposals that may arise from the National Security Inquiry, the Cybercrime Amendment Bill doesn’t allow law enforcement to get information without a warrant.

The bill allows them to request storage, either covering someone’s communications for a single day, or communications for 30 days. Enforcement can only see the stored information if it gets a warrant – if it can’t get the warrant, the storage request expires and the data can no longer be held.

4.     If I’m defending the Act I must support it, right?

Wrong.

I like debates to work with the facts.

People who take misinformation into a political debate are fools, because they’re handing a get-out-of-jail-free card to their opponents. Someone – say, Nicola Roxon – gets to focus on correcting the misinformation, and doesn’t have to spend as much time explaining, justifying or defending the reality.

The National Security Inquiry will be revived. It will improve everybody’s debating position if they learn to work with facts rather than exaggerations and urban myths.

Climate change is wrong because …

Wired has http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/all/ this long piece by Matt Ridley. I’m not Wired, but I’m in a rebuttal kind of mood …

I’ll sum up Ridley’s argument this way: apocalyptic scientists are always wrong, so stop worrying about climate change.

The problems with the article are so many (his discussion of infectious disease gets down to the plainly silly) that I have to pick just the high points:

1. Misdirection
2. Blaming the scientist for the media
3. Ignoring the caveats
4. Misrepresentation

1. Misdirection

Ridley is happy enough to attack Rachel Carson – but not over her science. He doesn’t address her writings at all; rather, he devotes more than 100 words to attacking not Carson, but “her chief inspiration” Wilhelm Hueper.

Ridley then goes on to smear Carson’s warnings about environmental chemicals and cancer with this throwaway: “cancer incidence and death rates … have been falling now for 20 years.” Cancer research, of course, has stood still that entire time, and DDT use has grown – right?

2. Blaming the scientist for the media

In discussing air pollution, Ridley cites not a scientist as his first source, but Time. It’s a well-established way to attack science: blame the media’s handling of science stories on the scientists themselves (we saw this in 2011 and 2012 in the “faster than light neutrino” story: the press first played up the wildest possibility, then blamed the scientists when their preferred outcome didn’t eventuate).

Some scientists “throw the switch to vaudeville” – and frequently get called out by other scientists. More often, in my experience, the “apocalypse” happens when journalists cherry-pick the extreme end of the projections to get a better headline.

The majority of sources Ridley cites are not scientists, but journalists - with a couple of economists, one medical doctor, a politician and TV presenter thrown in for colour. In what way do their witterings cast doubt on sicence?

3. Ignoring the caveat

Ridley then goes on to blame the scientists for presenting an apocalypse that didn’t happen. He freely admits that regulation helped cut air pollution emissions – but obfuscates the cause-and-effect: people applied regulation to polluters because the science predicted dangers. Blaming the scientist for the lack of apocalypse is just silly.

The caveat on DDT in the 60s, air pollution, and the ozone hole in the 80s was always the same caveat: “unless we do something”.

If government and private enterprises actually take action to avoid a problem – it’s stupid to then say “see? The science was wrong!”

4. Misrepresentation

“There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect”, Ridley writes.

First and foremost: on the current trend, Ridley is flat-out wrong. According to http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/meteorology/annual_data.html NASA, the peak size of the Southern Hemisphere ozone hole in 2011 was 12 percent smaller than in 2006.

More seriously, Ridley isn’t presenting the whole facts on the CFC phaseout:

1. The 1996 ban was the end of the reduction process, not the beginning; and
2. Developing nations were given until 2010 to complete their phase-out.

In Australia, for example, nearly 90 percent of CFC reduction predated the 1996 ban agreed in the Montreal Protocol. Any sensible developed nation did likewise.

We should also remember that the protocol gave developing nations until 2010 to complete their phase-out. I don’t propose researching the trajectory of the entire developing world, but you get the point: emissions stopped growing, and so did the ozone hole. But we have a lot of CFCs still to get out of the system.

Scientists said “if emissions continue to rise, this will happen”. Politicians took their advice (and the economy didn’t collapse for lack of CFCs), and emissions didn’t rise.

Only reluctantly – and late in the article – does Ridley note that some of the “apocalyptic” scenarios he derides were “averted by action”.

Action followed scientific fact; it’s depressing that people will still smear scientists because of what journalists write about them.

MSM as mutual masterbatorium

“The Internet ate my homework” is the lamest excuse that exists. Ask the solipsistic morons in mainstream media why their publishers are in trouble, they’ll include “the Internet” in the answer. Ask retailers the same question, get the same answer.

“The Internet” isn’t the problem: people who can’t adjust to new circumstances are the problem.

The problem, in media, is at least partly that the big publishers are turning themselves into a stupid parody of journalism, in which stories about journalism are somehow given equal billing with real stories about facts and events.

Item: The Paul Kelly incident

Like Laurie Oakes, Paul Kelly now only exists as an outlet for his self-importance. He lets out his sail, and blows to make wind. Paul Kelly has an asinine and infantile tantrum at the Prime Minister on TV – and suddenly there’s a story.

Since the story doesn’t have a fact worth its name to stand on, it’s now all about Paul Kelly’s tantrum. So what goes around the rest of the mainstream outlets is “Kelly said” and “Gillard denied”. That isn’t a story – and it doesn’t rate on the give-a-shit meter of anybody except the Canberra class: a curious bunch of people whose minds are addled by living in a cloistered world in which every story is validated by the consensus endorsement of every outlet running the same damn story.

Everybody’s agreed that their news agenda is the Right News Agenda. If the punters are fleeing the publications, it’s not because the news outlets are boring them to death. It couldn’t be: this must be a story, because everybody rates it as front-page, top-billing, This Is An Important Story.

Rather than being bored rigid, the punters are heading elsewhere. Who’s right?

Item: News Scoops Fairfax Board Negotiations

This is even better than the first example: News Limited claiming to be privy to Fairfax board negotiations.

It’s not only that the story is pointless to absolutely every reader except that small handful (a) who actually work in the media and (b) care (which given those two conditions must be a vanishingly small number).

It’s that every News Limited staffer and shill was sent out on Twitter to pimp the stupid story.

It’s that the only point to the entire story is to let News Limited tell the world it got a chance to stick its thumb in the Fairfax eye, to “singe the beard of the King of Spain”, to pimp its ability to piss in its competitor’s teacup.

What infantile bunch of self-abusers can possibly think that its ability to be a corporate bully is something the rest of the world considers “news”? To be more direct: who cares? You can plant a stool pigeon in the Fairfax board: well done, News Limited, that’s right up there with snooping citizens’ phone messages, buying crooks in the UK, and practicing jihad against science.

If Murdoch’s nasty, polluted, corrupt empire collapses, and its brood of coprophiles have to abandon this absurd pretence at News, journalism will endure. We’ll just have to find some way to do without this crap.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the NBN

I don’t propose making this blog a full-time refutation of every misstatement made about the National Broadband Network: I’d never have time to write anything else.

Henry Ergas tells us in The Australian (probably paywalled) that the Sydney Harbour Bridge can’t be used as an analogy for the NBN, because (a) the Royal Commission that examined the harbour crossing in the early 20^th century created a cost-benefit analysis (based on forecast rising property values and rail income), (b) on the basis of that analysis, the bridge was expected to yield an operating profit on rail income alone, and (c) rather than being “gold plated”, Bradfield settled on the second-cheapest tender and avoided “novel” designs.

There may have been a cost-benefit analysis of the dear old coathanger, and it may have offered up a model for cost-recovery - but it was based on cost estimates that by the end of the project were no longer accurate.

While the original contract was more than £100,000 below Bradfield’s estimate, and well below the £6 million originally authorized by the NSW parliament, the final cost more than doubled Bradfield’s expectations.

Some quick details from the Sydney Morning Herald via Trove:

The original tender was for a little over £4.17 million pounds (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/1228584?zoomLevel=1)

The builders, Dorman, Long and Co, eventually received £4.9 million pounds (attributing the increase to higher wages, among other things – http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/16845323?searchTerm=sydney%20harbour%20bridge%20sums%20up&searchLimits=).

In 1931, before the bridge opened, the NSW Auditor General estimated the total project cost had already passed £8 million (http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/46623699#pstart3444730).

Different sources put the ultimate cost at about £10 million – but even at the lower £8 million, the blow-out was sufficient to completely invalidate any cost-benefit analysis. We ended up with a toll to cover the balance.

Finally, a word about “novelty”. Optic fibre is not a “novel” technology by any reasonable definition of the word. Australia began to take notice of the technology in the 1970s; there were deployments by Telecom in the 1980s. Optical fibre is, technically, no more novel than the design of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Bleating about the NBN opt-out again

-->

(Cue background music: “One of These Things is Not Like The Other, from Sesame Street)

Everyone’s up in arms about the “opt out” NBN, it seems. Here’s some snippets.

“The three biggest states have opposed the move by NBN Co to install fibre-optic connections to homes and businesses without asking permission” – The Australian Financial Review.

“The opposition communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull said the shift to an opt-out policy confirms that the NBN business plan depends on compulsion” – The Australian.

“Victoria’s … technology minister has confirmed that the state does not support the introduction of Labor’s preferred ‘opt-out’ model for the National Broadband Network” – Delimiter. 

“If Australian consumers want a fixed line for telephony or Internet access, they are going to have to use the NBN’s line” – Malcolm Turnbull on his blog. 

Customers “will be forced into connecting to the national broadband network (NBN) unless they ‘opt-out’” – The SydneyMorning Herald.

How many of these stories have a 2012 dateline? One. The rest are from 2010.

For whatever reason, The Australian Financial Review treated a years-old government policy as a Major News Announcement, duly handing a stick to three state governments, pointing to a piñata called “The NBN”, and letting them swing.

I wonder how the premiers would feel if the Federal Government challenged their water utilities’ rights to fix sewer mains running under private backyards?

The fat and comfortable gang up on an idealistic youngster

-->

I was old and cynical by the time I became a journalist.

Not so old, I guess: I was in my late 20s. Not so cynical, either. But I had previously worked in the security industry and rock & roll. I would have been hard to shock*, even in a place like the Herald-Sun newsroom that shocked a young intern so much she wrote about it.

The piece isn't all that good - yet every glass jaw in the country feels itself personally assaulted by an impersonal and originally anonymous rant. Fools formed a queue to try the shoe on, just in case it fitted and they could take a swipe in return.

I find myself more in sympathy with Sasha Burden and all her faults – in spite of her over-sensitivity,  inexperienced writing, and the rest – than to align with a collection of fogies old and young explaining why she’s wrong.

So far, criticisms of her boil down to the following:

“That’s just how things are, put up with it”

“Keep it in the family”

“She should have done X”

“Get inside the system before you change it”

"When I were a lad..."

…and so on.  Strip away the indignation and self-justification, and everybody is giving Ms Burden a paraphrase of "don't rock the boat".

Why the hell not? 

If Ms Burden’s approach is wrong, and you know the right way to change the world, then how come, in 2012, the world remains unchanged?

As for the the “harden up” argument – “it’s what I put up with when I was 20”. In other words, journalists who are now fat and forty don’t want their consciences priced for their own (natural) cowardice when they were twenty.

If the Herald-Sun had the balls it professes, it would recognize a troublemaking ratbag who has the basics of a writer. The proper rejoinder to Ms Harden is a job offer. “You know better? Here’s the rope. You can climb it or hang by it.”

(*Actually, the most shocking workplace I ever entered was the old international telephone exchange at Paddington, in an era where international operators still existed. Their habitual conversation taught me things about blue language - and human anatomy - that made each day an agony of blushing.)

Blowout? What blowout?

-->

Here’s a forecast: there will be more delays in the NBN project – not because the project is impossible, nor due to the incompetence of anyone, but because it’s a very large project, and construction delays are almost inevitable.

Not that this will help Mike Quigley or Senator Conroy in any way: as with the budget, timing is now considered nailed down by a press whose project management skills don’t have to go far beyond the next deadline.

As for the relentless use of the word “blowout” – spotted in the wild at Fairfax, News Limited, the ABC and even TheConversation – what a bunch of dills. The new figures from NBN Co diverge by just 3.9% from the company’s forecasts: in the world of accounting, this would be considered a high accuracy forecast.

In looking at the NBN corporate plan, please keep in mind that there’s a difference between “premises” and “households”. The NBN will pass 12.7 million premises – according to the forecasts in the corporate plan – but that’s not 12.7 million households.

Let’s take a guess that there’ll be 11 million households by the end of the build (there’s about 7.7 million now). The rest of the premises passed are not households – they’re businesses, schools, hospitals, and so on.

This might seem like pointless pedantry, except for this: if some enterprising analyst sits down to try and run their own projection of the NBN’s income based on 12.7 million households, their numbers will be out by around 15 percent. That kind of puts the 3.9 percent everyone’s worried about in the shade.

(Actually, the error will be bigger than that, since the 1.7 million premises getting miscalled households would actually be the kind of premises that spends more than a household. But I’m not about to try and put estimates to that!)

Mars shot successful, while Google classifies kooks as “science”

-->

Here’s an image to mull upon.

That’s the Google News Australia home-page “science” category at the moment. At the time, about 6pm AEST – several hours after the Mars Curiosity touched down (wow. Just wow.) – Google hadn’t got around to promoting that above the Olympics in Australia.

(A few minutes after Curiosity out-ranked the Olympics, it fell again. Either we’re depressing, or Google News is.)

Oddly, over on “Classic” view, it isn’t just the presentation that changes – so do the stories.

Yes, I realize that there’s a top-of-page section about Curiosity* - but why the hell is a group of acpoaclyptians (it’s a word now, OK?) classified as “Science” in the first place? (*Spelling – because Curiosity is an American venture)

There is absolutely, utterly, one-hundred-percent of number-twenty-seven nothing about that story that qualifies it as Science, except for the arcane mysteries of the Google ranking algorithm.

Oh well. We’re luckier than Americans, who right now aren’t being offered a Science category at all. What a depressing thought.

(By the way: it’s not some quirk of my Google News personalization. I haven’t yet bothered to personalize: no particular reason, I'm just lazy.)

Today’s marmalade

-->

Except for setting, which drives me nuts, marmalades are easy. So while I wait for the marmalade to set, here’s the receipe.

It’s based on the St Benoit’s Three-Day Marmalade recipe from Jane Grigson with some wrinkles. First, I’m not strict about the timing. Second, I usually mix the citrus up. Third, my wife usually adds some subtle spices. Here’s what’s happening today:

Ingredients

Six small tangellos

Four Seville oranges

Water

Sugar

Star anise

Technique

1.     Slice the fruit (thinly!), put in a boiler, and cover with water. Bring to boil and keep it simmering for about 40 minutes.

2.     Leave 24 hours, add a few star anise seeds, and simmer for another 40 minutes.

3.     Add sugar – roughly 1:1 with the weight of the fruit and water. Bring to the boil and keep it boiling until it reaches setting point.

4.     Bottle in clean, sterilized jars.

If, as often happens to me, you have to delay bottling, just heat the mix each day so it doesn't spoil.

I don’t really know how long it will keep. I’ve got jars that are more than a year old and are still fine when I open them.

The next marmalade will feature blood oranges and kumquats. Stay tuned…

Fixed line decline: real but over-stated

-->

This post arises because of a Twitter conversation, in which people were speculating about whether political polls have become skewed because of the decline in the landline. If the pollster can’t call you, you’re left out of the sample, and there’s so many no-landline homes now it must destroy the accuracy of the poll, right?

Wrong, I suspect.

Because it’s a Sunday morning, and because nobody’s paying for this, I don’t propose even trying to start crunching the numbers. But I believe that the “landline decline” is frequently overstated. So here are some thoughts on the factors that are left out of the story.

Telstra’s PSTN decline

There has been a fairly dramatic loss of basic PSTN services revealed in a decade’s worth of Telstra annual reports – but that’s not a reliable guide to the number of “no home phone” households. Most of the services disconnected since 2002 represent the consolidation of multiple lines down to a single service. The drivers for this are outlined below.

Broadband – once ADSL became widely available, nobody needed a second line for dial-up Internet any more. That drove a five-year drift in the number of services, starting about 2001-2002.

Faxes – there are still more fax machines out there than the people think, but they have been declining steadily for a decade. A business that disconnects a dedicated fax line contributes to the loss of basic PSTN services.

Business IP telephony – SMEs routinely bought multiple incoming phone lines (I suppose many still do). However, each time a business buys a data service connecting to its IP telephony server, it eliminates an unknown number of individual PSTN services.

Naked DSL – if someone abandons their Telstra landline service and buys a naked ADSL and home phone combo from iiNet, TPG or whoever, they fall out of the Telstra data. However: they might still have a phone number visible to the PSTN.

Cable telephone services – Consumers who connect a PSTN phone to their (say) Optus HFC service don’t count as using a basic telephone service, so there’s a few hundred thousand services that are often forgotten by analysts prepping numbers for the media.

The Naked DSL and HFC services exemplify another difficulty: if you have no Telstra fixed line service, but you do have a PSTN-visible phone number, how should you be counted?

With all of these factors coinciding, it’s quite feasible that Telstra could shed a couple of million basic PSTN services without a single household opting to abandon the fixed phone completely.

The all-mobile individual

Most surveys I have seen identify all-mobile individuals – and there’s a fundamental problem with using this to estimate the number of households without a PSTN service: the individual isn’t the household.

It’s quite feasible for someone to say “I don’t use a fixed line” while still living in a home that has a fixed line – because they’re not the person paying the bill. This is especially true in a world in which young adults no longer leave home at the first opportunity.

The reason I can’t be bothered properly crunching the numbers on a Sunday morning should now be clear: anyone who wants to work this out properly needs a week or a month.

Call this “balance”, Fairfax?

-->

In its desperate search for “balance” on a climate change story, Fairfax has decided to give oxygen to the deluded world view that says that climate science is a conspiracy to rule the world by a cabal of banks.

Not only that, but this unbelievable assertion closes a story unchallenged. Here is the story: Climate change sceptics unwarmed by scientist’s reassessment of cold facts.

And here’s the relevant quote:

“Mr Roberts [of the Galileo Foundation] said climate change science had been captured by "some of the major banking families in the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal".

“Mr Roberts said he understood that the group's views might sound strange, but claimed they were increasingly popular. "It does sound outlandish," he said. "I, like you, was reluctant to believe it [but] there are significant things going on in Australia that people are waking up to".”

Ignoring the notion that the “popularity” of a view has anything whatever to do with reality, this kind of conspiracy theorizing simply isn’t news. Unlike a climate scientist who has the misfortune to have a journalist call, Mr Roberts is not challenged, asked to provide evidence, or answered by any reasonable voice.

The sole fact in the Galileo Foundation quote is the fact that Mr Roberts said something – and that is not sufficient foundation for the inclusion in the story.

I can’t blame the author, Ben Cubby, for this. There’s some policy set by some editor who has an eye to current and future employment … you know the story.

My only hope is that by quoting kooks, Cubby is trying to punk the system: to hold up the Galileo Foundation to the public ridicule it so richly deserves. That’s a pretty faint hope, but it’s the best I have.

Asylum seekers: what you know makes you guilty

 

(Sorry for the cryptic headline. Unless I want to agonise about them, I suck at headlines.)

Having lived through Australia’s refugee debates of the 1970s, I have wondered many times why today’s debate is so much different. Part of it is, I believe, that we know so much more today than we did then. 

In short: in the 1970s, we knew about the boats that made it here – and didn’t suffer headlines and agonies about the boats that didn’t.

I spent quite some time looking over Trove (if you’re not familiar – the National Library’s online archive) for references to the “boat people” from the 1970s. There are plenty (it documents Ita Buttrose's pro-refugee campaigning in Women's Weekly, for example), but something’s missing: that era lacked today’s debate over preventing tragedies at sea.

While the political decisions made in that era by Malcolm Fraser eventually did “stop the boats”, it didn’t happen instantly. Several years elapsed between the government deciding how many refugees would be accepted, the implementation of the policy – and the cessation of boat arrivals (in the early 1980s).

Today, for reasons both humanitarian and political, an urgent imperative is given to “stopping the boats”.

I went searching for some other data to explain this – and when I couldn’t find it, I tried to confirm it with a good source.

If you go looking for the numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee boats that went down in the 1970s, good luck: I could not find any such data, and the Australian Border Crossing Observatory at Monash University confirmed that it held no such data (it hopes to launch research to document this; again, good luck).

Nor could I find any headlines talking about sinkings.

This is the cold equation: in the 1970s, we didn’t worry about the boats that didn’t make it, because we didn’t know about them.

In those days, a boat might carry a map and, if it were lucky, a ship-to-shore radio it was probably reluctant to use. Today’s vessels are no more seaworthy, but communications technologies are available and affordable: neither GPS nor portable satellite phones existed in the 1970s, nor emergency beacons or mobile phones – all of which are both available and affordable today.

Also: Australia has vastly expanded its patrols. Also: there are vastly many more satellites watching over the ocean. And so on.

Which leads me to a question: to what extent does knowledge make us responsible for what happens to the boats? Are we, in trying to find a “quick fix” to “stop the boats”, assuming a responsibility that properly belongs to the people on the boats?

Yes: if we take our time implementing a policy, as the Fraser Government did, boats will set out and never arrive. In trying to make ourselves responsible for preventing those deaths, we have created a political impasse that’s frozen our policy that’s lasted so long that…well, so long that if we’d had the leisure that the Fraser government had, we would now have a policy in place that would probably be reducing the number of arrivals.

The sad irony is that our consciences – whether prompted or unprompted, unforced or exploited by politicians – are contributing to the very thing that makes us uncomfortable: the boats are still setting out. We could demand better policy from our leaders; but not if we keep demanding a fast fix to stop the boats setting out.