BARVENNON.COM
AUSTRALIAN DIARY
April 2009. Rudderless Broadband.
Kevin Rudd is one of those fellahs who always has to up the
ante.
Malcolm and others wanted a bank deposit guarantee of $100,000, so Rudd
gave us an unlimited guarantee (we won't mention his wife's possible
benefit). Now Telstra has an impregnable position, so
Rudd proposes a counter strategy.
To bring you up to sped. Telstra (aka Trujillo) refused to bite
the poisoned pill by bidding for the broadband contract. So now
Rudd proposes to replace Australia's final mile with optic fiber.
At an average cost of approximately $5,000 per telephone
connection.
(Based on a $43 billion cost to an estimated 8.6 million families in
Australia.)
So lets put the question. Would you think that it's worth paying
the average of $5,000
to upgrade from 1 MB/S (ADSL) to 100 MB/S?(FTTH) (Not to mention
technical issues, like "do sourced domains have the upload capacity to
service multiple internet demand of 100 MB/S?"). Or would you
rather pay an average $500 for a fibre to the node upgrade,
which would produce speeds of around 10 MB/S? (And if you wanted
it, you could then upgrade by paying possibly about $1,000 for that
final bit of fibre from the node to home? Of course, if you were
on a remote farm, that final connection from node to home might cost $1
million.)
Kevin should keep his fingers out of that pie. However,
unfortunately for Telstra shareholders, (one of which I am not) Sol has
signaled departure, and the new management will be unlikely have the
guts to call the bluff of the political machine in Canberra.
BOAT PEOPLE
Following an explosion aboard a refugee boat off NW Australia around
16th April, Kevin Rudd made an impassioned speech, castigating "people
smugglers"
as the "vilest form of life". Well he would say that, wouldn't
he. The truth is, his policies on boat people made the likelihood
that refugees who got to Australia would be accepted as immigrants much
higher, and so the
demand for boat places rose. If I was an Afghani I expect I would
do just about anything to become a citizen of Australia. Those
people smugglers apparently charge around $10,000 for a place.
Well they no doubt have to pay lots of baksheesh, and even unseaworthy
hulks cost money. I personally think the "vilest form of life"
epithet should be applied to terrorists who kill children and corrupt
politicians.
The Australian Labour party (ALP) was conceived and gestated by
interest groups that represent monopolies for the supply of labour in
the trade and professional organizations. As such, the ALP is be
totally against any change in the status quo that would weaken the
bargaining position of it's constituency. Not to put too fine a
point on it, anything that encourages a change that permits a weakening
of those monopolies will be viewed as a "vile form of life."
(Like the "work choices" legislation.)
Personally, I am not against immigration. Immigration,
like free trade, produces the greatest
good for the greatest number of Australians. It is the "invisible
hand" that helps even out the swings in the supply and demand for
labour and
capital. The economy of California is dependent on the massive
labour
influx from Latin America. Australian fruit would rot on the vine
or tree or whatever if it were not for immigrant labour.
To me, the people smugglers who help fulfill the demand for
immigrants
are not "the vilest form of life", they are heroes. Those would
be immigrants are desperate. They risk $10,000 and their lives
for what? A 50% chance of becoming an immigrant? We want
that sort of citizen.
Our government should issue open work visas to people who would qualify
as immigrants, against a $10,000 surety.
TERRORISTS WHO KILL CHILDREN
As foreshadowed in
2003, Muslim terrorist organizations have been in
decline since they first turned against Muslims. Similarly, there
is no excuse for Muslims to kill children. It is
a bit like one of my favorite stories about the Sufi Mullah Nasrudin.
Nasrudin once lost a gold coin in the dirt at night. So he
started
searching for it. A villager passed by, asked what he was doing,
and
started helping. Soon there were about 10 people searching.
After
fruitlessly searching for about an hour, one of the searchers
asked Nasrudin "Where exactly did you drop the coin?"
Nasrudin responded "Over there" pointing to a place about 10 meters
from where everyone was searching.
"Well why were you looking here?"
Nasrudin pointed to the street lamp overhead. "The light is
better here."
To gain credibility on the world stage, terrorists should only be
attacking the actual decision makers who were the persons responsible
for the situation that turned them to terrorism.
The current
behaviour of terrorists appears to be specifically designed to cause
more centralized and more oppressive governments to evolve worldwide.
COPYRIGHT
As advised six
years ago, the prosecution of Pirate
Bay and other copyright breaches is quite pointless. It is
designed to impress artists and media shop proprietors. Artists
are already beginning to open their own download domains and selling
direct to the public. Opening a new media shop is a money burn.
It is extremely unlikely to turn the flood of pirate downloads which is
one of the growth industries in this depression.
30 April 2009 H1N1
I have in the past reported
on possible pandemic threats. Then various people around the
world with more expertise started sites. The best that I have
found is effectmeasure,
whose incognito authors claim to be medical academics.
The latest threat to our culture is now named H1N1 which is derived
from it's medical descriptor. ("bird Flu" was H5N1). H1N1
is probably going to be a full blown pandemic. The important
question now relates to it's virulence, which is also known as the case
fatality rate, which is the probability that an infected person will
die. So far, the death rate could be anywhere between about
0.0001% and 5%.
There is no vaccine, and a vaccine is unlikely to be developed in
anything less than 9 weeks, probable more than 3 months. Sick
people can be treated with Tamiflu, which is an antiviral "poison" that
kills the virus. Unfortunately, viruses quickly develop
resistance to drugs of that type.
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