BARVENNON.COM
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
7th November 2008. Obama, Telstra, Lights.
Barvennon agrees with Murdoch that President Elect Obama will probably
tip the recession into full on worldwide depression if he follows the
stated policies of himself and the Democrats. We can hope that
good sense prevails.
Similarly we hope even more earnestly that PM Rudd revokes his stated
green policies and concentrates totally on keeping employment
high. A good starting point would be to get Julia to strengthen
the "work choices" legislation by allowing employers to reduce salaries
and wages and sack surplus workers.
TELSTRA boss Trujillo is reported as being extremely reluctant to
accept the government's offer to submit a bid for that $5billion to
help build the broadband backbone that was promised by Labour in the
lead up to the election. Sol is concerned that the government
will
not guarantee that it will not force Telstra separate out it's retail
and wholesale businesses if it's bid wins. I accept his
contention that it is not in his shareholder's interest to do
that. Barvennon advised John Howard to enforce that separation
back when he was selling Telstra to the public. I guess Johnny's
greed got the better of my good advice. Now the horse has bolted,
and trying to corral it would almost certainly earn a high court
challenge that could see Telstra shareholders asking for massive
reparations (say in the region of $3.00 a share refund) from the
government. Well all we can say now is, Kevin should not have
made those promises. (But then, the Rudd government does seem to
be making a lot of mistakes, doesn't it? Unlimited bank deposit
guarantees*, the $10 billion giveaway, trying to save union jobs in the
auto industry by raising tariffs).
LIGHT BULBS of the incandescent variety are apparently now illegal to
import, and soon to be illegal to sell. I think that I just might
stock up on all those lamps that are to be restricted. Hopefully
this madness (like that about closure of the analogue TV signal) will
go away, but the storage cost is unlikely to be as expensive as would
be rewiring my lighting system.
* I tried to find a parliamentary capital and asset register for
the PM and his wife, but could not find it. To me it seems that
it would have been a conflict of interest for PM Rudd to give an
unlimited guarantee to bank deposits if Rudd's wife had a $100 million
in a bank.
11th November. Reserve Bank economists say: "Recession is deepening, but better
next year."
I have theorized before (1) (2) that this is not
just another recession, but
rather it is the harbinger of change from the era of industrial
capitalism to (I don't know
what to call it, but maybe) the "Dynamic Data" era. We could
construct
metaphors from the changeover from feudalism to industrial capitalism
and apply them to this change. As Feudalism (based on land
ownership)
lost it's power, industrial capitalism supplanted it. The feudal
barons were still powerful The change had been a pareto
improvement. However the landowners had lost out
relatively. They had a somewhat larger slice of a very much
larger pie.
The peasants had gained independence from serfhood, now they could get
a (wage slave) job in a factory.
Now industrial capitalism is, in it's turn, losing it's stranglehold on
our society. A data wizard who knows how to
exploit data flows can carve out an empire like early
industrial capitalists Henry Ford or Carnegie.
That is what the owners of Microsoft and Google have
done. Data flow wizards do not need equity
capital to do their thing. Niche businesses are evolving and
employing labour outside the corporate model. Some of those
businesses will explode, and equity will not be available until they
have begun to decline.
Expansion of the equity in industrial corporations is finished.
Another Pareto improvement is happening. Those that will prosper
will do so as a smaller part of the total economy. IPO's will be
seen for what they mostly are, a way of flogging dead horses. It
follows that the world's stock markets have
lost their nexus position. The only investments left that are
worth tuppence are monopolies. Monopolies can be defined
as legal monopolies (e.g. patents and copyrights), and "natural"
monopolies, (such as e.g. infrastructure, mines, bandwidth etc.)
Technology is making patents and copyrights increasingly difficult to
enforce.
The economists of the world cannot see what is happening because they
look backwards. Like the warriors who constructed the Maginot
line, they are trying to fight this recession with the
tools that they think would have worked in the Depression.
We must reconstruct our
society. Government needs a new tax paradigm. IMHO they
could do worse than look to Henry George. In the interests of
fairness and simplicity, the natural monopolies are the best source of
government funds.
19th November. Clover & Wet Footpaths.
Congratulations to the City of Sydney's Mayor Clover Moor on her
resounding victory at the recent election. I was a voluntary
helper to her campaign. Let me tell you about one of the reasons
that I support Clover.
Old people are the bane of our society. They contribute nothing,
yet they vote, and huge amounts of tax money are channeled to their
cause. In cave man days, they would have been used as food when
there was famine, or just left behind when the tribe went South for
winter.
Clover has thought of an innovative way to ameliorate the
problem. (Well probably her predecessor Frank Sartor should get
some credit, because he started it during the olympics). Her
method has been to introduce pavements that, in wet weather, become
very slippery. Sure, they cost a bit more, and as a selling
point, they look good when they are just installed (although after a
few service people have done their thing, they look quite crappy.)
The thing is, for a young fellah like me, slipping over isn't really a
problem. But those pensioners would probably hit their head and
pffft!!
It occurred to me that the city might be legally liable if some
do-gooder legal eagle did a bit of pro
bono. (since most of those pensioners don't have enough money to
mount an action, and the rich oldies have minders and private
transport). So I wrote to Clover, and got a nice letter back,
that referred me to the city engineer, who noted that all the pavements
had to comply with Australian
Standards AS 3661.1/1993. I went to the city library, and
photopied the relevant page.
Lets get a bit technical here. The measure of slipperiness
between two surfaces is called the "coefficient
of friction". This varies between near zero (an ice skate on
ice) up to above 1 (rubber (eg tyres or thongs aka flip-flops) on
bitumen.) The coefficient of friction between two materials
is actually the tangent of the slope down which an object would
slide.
A slope of 45 degrees has a tangent value of 1. If the
coefficient of friction is 0.4, then the object would slide down a
slope of 22 degrees. Put another way, on a level surface,
where the coefficient of friction was 0.4, a person of leg length 80cm
who walked with a step size above 60 centimeters would slip. I
found this paper on the
www, and it discusses the matter in some depth.
So ostensibly, the Mayor can state that she obtained advice from her
Engineer, the Engineer obtained his specifications from the Australian
Standards institute, which is a QANGO that constructs standards with
technical committees.
Our
Technical Committee members are the lifeblood of standardisation. They
willingly give their time and expertise to advance the principles and
practices of standardisation. Their contribution to Australia's
well-being cannot be overestimated. Although they give their time
freely, it is estimated that their contribution is worth more than $30
million per year to the national interest.
Of course our pro bono lawyer
might decide to check the constitution of that technical committee, but
so what if the people most qualified happened to be working for those
organizations that had connections with the manufacturer of footpath
materials? As I read it, the city council would be exonerated,
and the AS is obviously an impartial body.
So well done Clover. Even if you did not originate this brilliant
strategy, you must certainly be given the credit for not curtailing
it. And IMHO the city is unlikely to have to pay damages to
pensioners who hurt themselves falling over, (although with those
liberal judges, you never can tell)
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