May 2013
1 post
5 tags
Has Bitcoin Decoupled The Sovereign From The Fiat?
Bitcoin may be redefining the Fiat. No, not the car, but the thing in your wallet: money.
Before I get to Bitcoin being a Fiat, let’s talk about the Sovereign Fiat first.
The filthy lucre in your wallet or purse is actually a lot more complex than you realise. The Gold Standard may be dead, but countries still back the money they print. Just not with anything as directly tangible as...
April 2013
1 post
9 tags
Labor Leaders: Don't Let Them Define You
Leaders like to define things, and they really like to define their organisations. This is fine when we are talking Steve Jobs and Apple, but not when we are talking about the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
The ALP is not a corporation that sells the Jesus Phone, it is a living organism made up of tens-of-thousands of people across Australia. It is a movement.
[[MORE]]
This is not an attack...
March 2013
2 posts
12 tags
Switching Your Online Identity Is A Pain. And It...
I live a lot of my life in the Google Eco-system and I recently switched to Google Apps, and some very high-technology companies aren’t ok with it. Including Google.
I had a Google+, Flickr, Xbox and YouTube account all linked to my old email address. Seems fine right? Nope.
Google+ will let you migrate your account. But only your circles. NOT your posts, +1’s or comments. Say Wha?...
6 tags
E-Voting Needs To Be More Transparent
Many forms of e-voting are not transparent. Not by a long shot. And they should be.
In our rush for all things shiny and new in this technological revolution we are living through, we are abandoning our voting values.
Private companies are very keen on the business of e-voting (including online), as you can literally set your clock to an election. Factor in state, local, union and so on,...
February 2013
3 posts
6 tags
The Kings Cross Branch Of The ALP
I am the Secretary of the Kings Cross Branch of the ALP. If you have been paying attention, you will know that Labor branches are dying.
And they are boring places where no real policy is debated. Just a bunch of old-timers talking endlessly about better days.
Both of these things are untrue. At least for the Kings Cross Branch. My branch is alive and well.
In fact it is growing, with a 19%...
5 tags
Insurance Companies Believe In Climate Change Even...
If you are looking for the canary in the coal mine of climate change, it isn’t sea levels, it is insurance premiums.
Yes, insurance premiums.
What we know about climate change or its old moniker, Global Warming, is that extreme weather events are going to become more intense and more frequent.
This isn’t some conspiracy, it is science. And it is getting more accurate. Better able...
5 tags
Republicans Are Still Not Interested In Democracy
The Republicans are not interested in navel gazing after their crushing defeat at the hands of Obama, they are more interested in cheating their way back into power at the expense of democracy. As it was ever thus.
Conservatives forces have never been truly ‘ok’ with democracy. They talk a big game when it comes to ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ but there isn’t so much of a iota of democracy in those...
January 2013
1 post
7 tags
Single Parents Are Not Sinners Or Bludgers
I was raised by a single mother. So it has not been a great few weeks for me as I have watched my own party treat single parents like they are sinners or bludgers or both.
In the first few weeks of 2013 we have seen the Gillard Government punish single parents to the tune of $100 per week by forcing 84,000 of them on to the Newstart Allowance, hence reducing their benefit.
At the same time, it...
November 2012
3 posts
5 tags
All Is Not Lost In Queensland: 10 Seats The ALP...
I’m no psephologist, but….
The last few months has witnessed a notable tightening in published opinion polls. At my last Branch meeting, a branch member asked Senator Thistlethwaite which seats the ALP could conceivably win, given that Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott are widely expected to lose their seats. (For what it’s worth, I think both independents could surprise).
A few days...
3 tags
Mitt Romney: The GOP Symbol Of Having Done Nothing...
Barack Obama won the election. No, really, Obama won it. But that’s not to say that the GOP didn’t make mistakes that helped. And one of the biggies is covered in ‘Crisis Management 101’: Admit fault.
I am so sick of using the phrase ‘The Great Recession’, but that ‘historically significant event that happened a few years ago, and whose effects are...
4 tags
Australia Needs To Get Over Surplus Envy
Surplus envy has gripped this nation, but what does a surplus really mean, should we want one, and at what cost?
Countries are not corporations. We have citizens not shareholders or customers. We have a social contract not a sales contract.
It is lazy politics and economics to treat the nation’s finances like that of a major corporation, and fixate on a surplus.
What is a...
September 2012
1 post
5 tags
The Internet Needs Less 'Big Brother' And More...
It is long overdue for governments to regulate the Internet. Don’t freak out, I am talking about protecting citizens, not stalking them. Let’s talk about password security.
I am no expert on this topic, but a great primer on the topic can be found here.
When we talk ‘internet regulation’ these days, it is code for either Big Brother or corporations trying restrict their...
August 2012
1 post
3 tags
We Don't Mention The War (On Carbon) In Government...
The Gillard Government is afraid of one of it’s defining policies, the Carbon Price. All mention of it has been scrubbed from the advertising campaign selling the government benefits needed to compensate people for price rises, the Household Assistance Package.
The Household Assistance Package compensates people for the price rises caused by the introduction of the Carbon Price, not...
July 2012
2 posts
5 tags
iOS6 Feature Request: A Fire Hose Symbol Please
Smartphones are great, you can surf the internet, tweet, work remotely, control NORAD, whatever really. But only if you have speedy access to the internet. This is not the same as ‘having reception’.
Take a look at the photo above, has that ever happened to you? A smartphone that can’t access the internet is a dumb phone I’m afraid, except without changing the sticker...
4 tags
An Idea For Bus Stops: RFID Tags
RFID tags are very cheap and provide an opportunity to make timetables for buses better in several ways.
Bus stops are a funny beast, they are varied and dispersed and they sometimes move without notice. Sometimes they are just a little sign on a tree, or maybe a giant interchange. Either way, they are seriously lacking in a connection to the digital world that could make peoples lives easier.
...
June 2012
1 post
6 tags
The Greek Election: Finally Some Democratised...
There is an election this Sunday in Greece, and after years of government bailouts of risk-taking banks, shifting the debt to tax payers, the people have said ‘enough’.
The bankers, bond holders and even political elite are no longer in charge. At least not in Greece.
The people are.
It may be messy, and Greece may indeed leave the Euro with all the ensuing consequences, but...
April 2012
2 posts
5 tags
The Holy Trinity of Political Leadership: Being...
For a politician to be elected they need the holy trinity of political leadership - to be liked, respected and trusted. But you don’t need all three in equal measure, and that’s where it gets tricky.
Superficially getting elected is a popularity contest. Or who is ‘liked’ the most. We are all familiar with these votes from a relatively early age. Your school captain was probably the most...
4 tags
Gillard Needs To Focus On Gaining Respect
Julia Gillard is unpopular and not trusted, but what she could have from the electorate is respect. This could easily be enough to get her across the line at the next election.
In an opinion piece last month, Peter Hartcher wrote a lot about likeability and trust. Of which Gillard has a deficit with the public.
The ‘insiders’ in the ALP are going to try to frame the next 18 months...
February 2012
1 post
4 tags
Inference For Profit: How Corporations Are Using...
Who have you told you are pregnant? Who have you told you are having marriage problems? Well you should add to that list your credit card company, Target and many others. These companies have gone beyond just using your data for basic trend-lines of sales, to a point where they can predict your future.
That’s right, predict the future. No your credit card company is not psychic, scary...
January 2012
3 posts
4 tags
The Liberal Party Year Ahead: Dog Whistling In...
Labor has been in government for a few years now, so I had forgotten how exactly the Liberals like to win elections and stay in power: Dog whistling.
By now we have all seen the dramatic video and photos of the Prime Minister being carried away by her protection detail. And we have also the unraveling story of her advisor and his role in the what transpired. But let’s rewind the tape...
4 tags
Equal Marriage Is For Grandma Too
Equal marriage is for your Grandma as much as it is for gay people. I was reminded of this recently when a friend recounted a story of a woman who was having a baby and the hospital put down that she was a ‘single parent’, nope not really even close to what she is, married to a woman is a bit closer. Just not in this country.
It is easy to get caught up in the campaign for equality,...
6 tags
Google Is Brilliant, Not Stupid (Or Evil)
Maybe you have heard a ruckus over the last few days, Google has added ‘social search’ to Google search. Twitter is unhappy, Facebook won’t comment and the blog war has begun in earnest.
Let me address the obvious; this was Google’s plan from the beginning. Why is Facebook awesome (leave it alone, move on and let me make my point) - Facebook is awesome because among...
November 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Why Standardisation Of NFC Will Change The World
The real agent of massive global economic change is not one of the usual suspects, it is actually something rather mundane - standardisation.
Yes that’s right, standardisation. Incredibly boring I know. But it has changed the world before and is about to again.
The humble shipping container may not seem like the engine that drove globalisation for the 20th Century, but it is. And like...
4 tags
Political Purity Tests A Great Way To Stay In The...
Political purity tests have been around a long time, and they will be for some time to come I suspect, but the focus is more often than not the person who is attempting to overcome the test, not the testers. There is a perfect example of this going on in American politics with the Tea Party.
The Tea Party is a force to be sure, but their star will fade. Why? It will be because of the purity...
5 tags
How Physics Killed A Superhero: Big Reactors And...
I love classical physics, you can grasp so much of the world with it (ok yes I am nerdtastic, deal with it) and as long as you don’t try to put a cat in a box with poison, things are dandy. And so it is with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, easy to understand with just a glass of cold water half full and a glass of hot water poured in. Equilibrium is the word you are looking for.
But...
October 2011
4 posts
5 tags
Your Reputation Precedes You: Hard Data, Retweets...
What do you bring to a job interview when you are a journalist, or an aspiring one? Probably a portfolio, but how about analytics, followers and ad revenue?
I recently helped a friend (for a small fee) to set up her own website that would act as an online portfolio for all the content she is creating as a journalism student, radio presenter and as an intern at a major news network.
But it got...
5 tags
Television To The Rescue Of Voice Recognition?
I am not a linguist, or a computer programmer. But I do watch a lot of television. Well not actually television, but television shows. Does anyone really spend that much time watching live television anymore? I digress.
What all television shows on DVD have in common is: subtitles. In English for the hearing impaired and in other languages for the overseas market. And if you include the entire...
4 tags
Corporate Personification: How The Republican...
You would think that it was pretty clear, the line between what is a corporation and what is a human, but for those on the right of the political spectrum, it is their life’s mission to make the distinction confusing to the populace. And they are winning.
Thanks to the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court (and a precedent that dates back over 100 years) we now quite readily accept that...
4 tags
The World Needs A Haircut
The world economy is in trouble, and it has come time to deal with the real cause and for a real cure: Haircuts for everyone.
It didn’t have to be this way, but austerity made it worse and now we are on the brink (again) and the only real solution is for an across the board reduction in the value of assets and debt, or as it is also known, a haircut.
This will fix the short term problem...
September 2011
3 posts
5 tags
Obama Jobs Plan: Accepting The Republican Premise
The newly announced Obama Jobs Plan has some great stuff in it, but it is the weighting that is completely wrong, and once again we have a progressive leader accepting the economic premise of the conservatives: Tax cuts create jobs. $240 billion of the $447 billion package are tax cuts, and the rest is small amounts to individual programs that are in dire need of massive investment.
You can...
3 tags
5 Tips On How To Lobby An MP And Not Be Ignored
Penny Sharpe MLC is a Labor member of the upper house in New South Wales. Penny is one of the new breed of politician, who see social media not as something the kids do, but integral to the functioning of democracy and accountability, as such you can find Penny tweeting, Facebooking, blogging and even on Linkedin. This article was originally posted on Penny’s blog.
This morning I awoke to...
6 tags
The Malaysian Solution: The Plibersek Test Of...
The Malaysian Solution is many things, but is it ethical? If we judge it by Federal Member for Sydney, Tanya Plibersek’s test of ethics in politics, the answer surely must be no, and it must be surely no for Julia Gillard too.
I attended the Inaugural Trevor Davies Ethics in Politics Forum* this week and among the speakers was Tanya Plibersek who spoke on some of the ways she judges...
August 2011
1 post
4 tags
Standard & Poor's Gets It Right: Bush tax Cuts...
I am not a fan of credit rating agencies or their role in global economies. In fact I think they should be replaced by similar organisations that are not-for-profit, but those words are for another time. Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the USA, everyone and their dog paid attention to it, but no one of any note said it was justified. Well hold on because here I go: It was...
July 2011
6 posts
6 tags
Commercial-In-Confidence: Lies, Shame And Murder
The reality of commercial-in-confidence information when governments are involved is not healthy for citizens, governments or for the ideals that they both purport to want. Commercial-in-confidence causes lies, shame and in extreme cases, murder.
There are many examples of this, but the three that I will focus on start locally in New South Wales, then off to a nearby island of the Christmas...
6 tags
A Lie Repeated And Unchallenged Becomes The Truth
We humans are very powerful hypnotists. Not so much with the spinning fob watches or the quacking like a duck on stage, but with ourselves by self delusion and politically with mass audiences with lies that are repeated and that go unchallenged.
Self delusion on a personal sense is so powerful and so prevalent that we indoctrinate our kids with it from a very early age: “I think I can, I...
4 tags
One Voice, One Message: Presidentialism In...
There has been a shift over the last ten or so years from a parliamentary mentality to politics, to a more presidential one. Nothing epitomised this more than the national outcry of the axing of a sitting PM by his deputy a year ago; when the nation was aghast at the loss of the ‘president’ they had ‘elected’.
Whilst it is an interesting shift for a relatively new...
5 tags
Democracy And Justice For All
Living in a free and democratic society is important to me, and I would argue that it is important for the world to have more of them. But these concepts although very dry, must be constantly engaged with, analysed and evaluated. Are we actually living in a democratic society? Is it free? What do we define as “democratic” anyway, or “free”?
And also very important to...
5 tags
From Gay To Equal: A Semiotic Evolution
The recent victory of Equal Marriage in New York State was a wonderful moment in American and gay history. But what is more remarkable is how quickly it turned around from defeat in 2009, to victory a mere two years later. There are many factors that helped this time around and I will go in to some of them, but at the core of them all I think, was a shift in the symbolism and language of the...
4 tags
Google+ And Its Real Strength: Depth Over A Book...
I love Google, even when their mantra of ‘don’t be evil’ seems to be slipping a bit now that they are the 600 pound guerilla in the room. I think that their new product, Google Plus (or Google+ if you want), will be a success and here’s why: Email.
I know, email is dead, email is evil, email is ruining our lives. Email killed Kennedy. Some people are ending the email...
June 2011
8 posts
4 tags
What Would Whitlam Do: How To Win Elections With...
Political rhetoric is powerful and transformative and it is not being used enough or loudly enough by the Labor Party at a federal level. “What would Whitlam do” is what I quipped recently when Bob Carr suggested that Gough would not sit idly by when his great policy was being denigrated and misrepresented.
This was in reference to the Labor response to the Global Financial Crisis...
5 tags
Perspective And Positive Action In Times Of Peril:...
I went to a Labor Party meeting last night about reform and reflection. That’s how I roll on a Tuesday night, don’t judge me. An older man got up and spoke (as he had done the night before, don’t judge me) about how he was from a country area of New South Wales and there was no Labor voice in his area.
I wrote in my last post what I think Federal Labor should do about it,...
7 tags
Economically Irrational Leaders: Looking For...
What do you do when your framework doesn’t work? Ben Bernanke must be close to asking himself that question today, quoted in the Washington Post as saying “We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting”. Seriously. This guy is in charge of the money supply in the US (among other things).
The oft quoted statistic of 70% of the US economy is made up of...
5 tags
Bitcoin: Freedom, Fallacy Or Anarchic Fantasy...
Bitcoin has come into the public consciousness all of a sudden. As with all things like this, it actually has been around for a while, but the “mainstream” didn’t know about it, until something sexy like drugs being bought without anyone being able to track it comes into public view.
Wired writes about the drug aspect here, but what I think has not been explored properly with...
5 tags
The Noosphere And Digital Immortality: Complexity...
Where do we go when we die? It is a question that is as old as time itself I suspect. But there are seismic shifts in consciousness and technology that I think will alter what we define as death and afterlife.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin writing about the Noosphere (and also the Omega Point) foresaw a complex sphere of human thought. The internet before the internet: “the noosphere emerges...
5 tags
John Faulkner Delivering History (And A Speech)
Senator John Faulkner has been a hero of mine for some time. Faulkner’s constant and principled examination at Senate estimates hearings during the dark Howard years of Government were a bright spot for Labor and for me.
He is well described as “the conscience of the Labor Party”. So it was with great pleasure that I went to see him deliver the third annual Wran Lecture. Much...
4 tags
Beware Journalists Bearing False Dichotomies:...
Over the last decade what we define as news has changed, and changed in ways that serves the interests of those who seek to sow doubt and maintain the status quo.
News now frequently consists of false dichotomies that are served up as hard hitting debate between two equals. Journalism as a profession has abdicated its analytic responsibilities, abdicated reason and fact.
This is not an...
5 tags
A One Sided Class War
Income redistribution is not class warfare, but draconian industrial relations laws certainly is. The funny thing is that only one of these situations is actually ever called “class warfare” and it is not the one you would think. That’s right, class is still alive and well in the upper class, and not in the working class. When ever a Labor Government seeks to redistribute...
May 2011
7 posts
7 tags
Google Wallet: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité?
Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood is a pretty good motto for a revolution (I’ll leave out the bit about dying), and Google is definitely revolutionary. Gmail has singlehandedly got an entire generation accepting cloud computing as the norm. No mean feat. Google Wallet on the other hand is not revolutionary nor is it embodying that revolutionary motto when it should. I like it, I want...
6 tags
Labor: Death of the Titans, Rise of the Olympians
Have we witnessed the last of the Titans of the Labor Party? It is a question that resonates with me, as we move further in to the 21st Century, and Labor is in the doldrums. I was having a drink with some friends recently and one was talking about the great Labor figures of a bygone era; Gough Whitlam, Jeff Shaw, Gareth Evans, Frank Walker, Paul Lander, Lionel Murphy and Bert Evatt. I am...
4 tags
Is Poverty Silenced Speech?
The US Supreme court in Buckley v. Valeo ruled it seems that money=speech. By this rationale, rich people are capable of more speech than poor people. As ability to buy speech is hampered by their inconvenient and optional poverty.
Does it not follow then, that the Bush Tax cuts that benefit the rich are increasing the exertion of the First Amendment? But by the same logic, increased taxes...
