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.
A few months ago, during a raining spell, I slipped a couple of times
on some of that nice looking granite pavement that has been installed
around the city. I suspect Clover's predecessor Frank Sartor
should get
most of the credit for beginning the installation of granite pavement,
because (it is my recollection that) he originated the idear leading up
to the 2000 olympics.
Sure, it probably costs a bit more, and as a selling
point, looks good (at least when just installed).
Although after the foundations have subsided, or a few service
people have done their thing, they break and begin to look quite
crappy. (see for instance the NE corner of the Victoria and Liverpool
streets intersection, shown below).
So I wrote to Clover, and got a nice letter back,
that hoped I did not hurt myself & referred me to the city
engineer, who when I contacted him advised that all the pavements
had to comply with Australian
Standards AS 3661.1/1993.
I went to the city library, and
photocopied the relevant page. The
important point on that page is that the tested value of Mu, aka the
"coefficient of friction" between rubber and the pavement, can be as
low in wet weather as 0.35 and still comply with the standard.
(The standard
requires the average value should be 0.4, but in any one specimen, the
coefficient of friction can be as
low as 0.35). This is like the weakest link of a chain.
If the quality test required that the average strength of the links
of a chain should be 40 tonnes, but that the chain would not be
rejected if one link
tested as low as 35 tons, then it's no good trying
to sell someone that chain as a 40 ton chain on the ground that the
average strength of
the links is 40 tonnes. It is a 35 tonne strength chain.
Likewise, somebody is going to slip on the slipperiest bit of pavement.
Let us get a bit technical here. As a Mechanical Engineer, I have
dealt
with the theoretical aspects of friction on a daily basis. The
measure of slipperiness
between two surfaces is called the "coefficient
of friction". This varies between near zero (e.g. an ice
skate on
ice) up to above 1.0 (rubber e.g. tyres or thongs aka flip-flops on
bitumen.) The coefficient of friction between two materials
is actually the tangent of the slope angle down which an object would
slide.
A slope of 45 degrees has a tangent value of 1. {Tan (45) =
1.0}. If you had to
tilt a board to 45 degrees before an object on the board would slide
down the slope,
then the coefficient of friction between the object and the board would
be 1.0. If the
coefficient of friction (Mu) were 0.4, then the object would slide down
a
slope of 22 degrees. If Mu were 0.35, then the slope down
which the object would slide would be
19 degrees. Put another way, on a level surface,
where the coefficient of friction was 0.35, a person of leg length 70cm
who placed their feet 50 cm apart would slip (as in, do the
splits). Or
if that person walked carefully on a level surface with steps longer
than 50cm, s/he would
almost certainly slip. If the footpath has a slight incline (say
5 degrees uphill) then any step longer than 35 cm would cause a fall.
It gets even worse. That data is for static friction. That
would be where the pedestrian put each foot down carefully, only
increasing the weight on that foot gradually. But when people
walk, their feet impact the pavement. So the reality is, in
normal walking, we have dynamic friction.
I
found this paper on the
www, and it discusses the matter in some depth. These engineer
authors
claim to have been consulted for civil damages claims where pedestrians
hurt
themselves. According to them, a "coefficient of dynamic
friction" below 0.4
(equal to a static friction of 0.5) is "unsafe" and a "coefficient of
dynamic friction" below 0.3
(equal to a static friction of 0.4) is dangerous.
So Sydney streets are, in those experts' opinion, (and my own
experience) dangerous in wet weather.
Only when Mu reaches 0.6 do they consider the
situation to be "safe". (I wear thongs a lot. I would
prefer Mu
be 1.0, which is thong on bitumen or concrete)
So although according to at least one professional engineer with
expertise in the matter is of the opinion that those footpaths are
"dangerous", City of Sydney Mayor Clover Moore can safely state that
she has
obtained advice from her
Engineer, & her Engineer can state that he obtained his
specifications
from the Australian
Standards institute, which is a QANGO that constructs standards with
expert technical committees. And that QANGO cannot (according to
it's
charter) be
held liable for anything. A quote from their website...
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 a civil claims lawyer
might decide to check the constitution of that particular technical
committee, but
so what if the people chosen as most qualified happened to be working
for
organizations that had connections with the manufacturer of footpath
materials? As I read it, the city council would be exonerated,
and Australian Standards is obviously an impartial body.
So it is unlikely that the City of Sydney would have to pay damages to
litigants who hurt themselves falling over, (although with those
liberal judges, you never can tell).
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