If I was Prime Minister Of Australia, I would immediately see if I could convince the United States to give up being a republic and come back into the Commonwealth with the Queen as head of state, reinstate compulsory afternoon tea and ban this coffee nonsense and most importantly, get rid of baseball forever and give the United States full test cricket status - that way Australia could score 538, bowl the United States out for 187 and then enforce the follow-on...
... wait for it...
Make America Bat Again!
Thank you, I'm here all week. Try the veal.
Seriously. If you think that that was a joke, then what in red, white and blue blazes have I been watching for the past few hours? In this, 2016, the International Year of The Howling Moron, I think what we've just witnessed is the biggest joke in the history of politics but nobody is laughing.
What the actual four letter expletive deleted is going on?
On the 4th of July 1776, the thirteen colonies of America, declared their independence from Great Britain and formed their own country. In the interim 240 years after only counting black people as three-fifths of a person at law, going to war over slavery and generally becoming the most belligerent of democratic nations in the world, it is probably reasonable to assume that the United States Of America might have been a good idea in theory but it has kind of gotten out of hand.
The 2016 presidential election which followed eight years of the Presidency of Barack Obama, was fought between a sociopathic, racist, sexist, xenophobe who looks like he's spent the last eight years marinating in Fanta, and a lady who literally made deals with terrorists while Secretary of State and more than likely broke Federal law by keeping a private email server and then deleting the emails when it came time for the FBI to investigate.
In this grand battle between an angry Grandpa who has said all sorts of things which by rights should have invalidated him as a candidate and an angry Grandma who is so much of a policy wonk that she's the single most qualified candidate to run for president in US history (with the possible exceptions of Washington and Eisenhower), America has collectively decided by a minority of popular votes but the majority of the arcane and bizarre Electoral College votes, to install the angry Grandpa as the next President. If this is the brave new world we find ourselves in, then left is right, slavery is freedom, ignorance is strength and orange is the new black.
I have been watching this insane contest play out over the past nine months, in the same way that I'd watch a football match as a neutral. The difference is that instead of three meaningless points or the glory of etching one's name into the side of a trophy, the prize are the keys to the office of the executive of the most powerful nation on the planet and the only one foolhardy enough to use nuclear weapons in a war. America has decided that instead of letting angry Grandma drive around and scare everyone, they've handed the keys to angry Grandpa, who by the way is the first presidential candidate since about Nixon who has been mad and bad enough to joke about pushing the nuclear button. Mind you, when you compare that to nine months of racist, sexist, and otherwise vile remarks he's made, that joke doesn't seem that much out of character. This was someone who actually said that they could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and people would still vote for him. This as it turned out, might not have been a boast but a declaration of fact.
Strangely, this doesn't appear to be a rejection of Barack Obama. The outgoing president has just posted his lowest approval rating at 54%. That will probably increase during the so-called lame duck period as well. This also doesn't appear to be a rejection of the Republican Party as that side of politics may have feared. The Republicans will be returned with a majority in the House Of Representatives and the Senate doesn't look like total wipeout either.
If Donald Trump represents the change candidate in this election, running against the most establishment of establishment candidates of all time in Hillary Clinton, then maybe the underlying narrative isn't something like the rejection of Goldwater in 1964 but something else entirely. The only parallel that I can draw is the election campaign of prize narcissist Andrew Jackson who portrayed the image of running for the working class but still being fantastically wealthy. Maybe it could be that America is ready for a female president but that president isn't Hillary Clinton. I wonder if Michelle Obama, Madeleine Albright or Condoleezza Rice had run for President, whether they would have had to battle with the tag of being the second least popular candidate in US political history. Somehow, I doubt it.
It could also be that the American public haven't actually voted for the President but voted in that way because of the consequences of who the picks for the Supreme Court might be. After the death of Antony Scalia, the US Supreme Court was split 4-4 with socially conservative and liberal judges. The sitting Republican dominated Senate refused to give its consent to any and all candidates that Barack Obama might pick and held this out as a job for the next President. Maybe the Senate might give its consent to a Donald Trump pick but that pick would come from inside the machinery of the Republican Party. Of course, this could backfire if a Democrat dominated Senate refuses to give its consent to whoever Donald Trump might pick but we won't know how that will play out until we get there.
I don't know what the result of today's election means but I do know that America has been bashing its head on the coffee table for months and has given itself democracy brain damage. A sociopathic, racist, sexist, xenophobic, angry Grandpa, could very well be the perfect representation of what America currently is. If people think that Donald Trump has been elected because he is prepared to speak his mind, even when there's nothing in it, and he speaks what the country is thinking, then that must say that America is made up of a bunch of sociopathic, racist, sexist, xenophobes and given what we've repeatedly heard from the vox populi for the past few months, that might be true.
In the year that gave us the unlikely results of Leicester City winning the Premier League, the Western Bulldogs winning the AFL premiership, the Cronulla Sharks winning the NRL premiership, the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series, Britain voting the leave the EU, the unlikely has happened again with Donald Trump becoming the new president elect.
In the UK, Britain voted to leave the EU and David Cameron resigned because he couldn't hold the party togther. The current Prime Minister Teresa May always looks perpetually stunned and I would not be at all surprised if she too is knifed by a blithering idiot like Boris Johnson. It just might be possible that by the next British General Election, that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson could be leading the governments of the anglosphere. Of course Australia would have to follow suit at some point and probably appoint Spud Dutton or worse, Christopher Pyne or Treasurer Scott Morrison, to form a grinning triumvirate of Howling Morons across the anglosphere.
The only thing that I can say is that the Howling Morons are howling louder than ever before and it is beyond my ability to comprehend why. What is this? I don't even.
November 09, 2016
November 07, 2016
Horse 2187 - The Australian: The Racists' Newspaper Of Choice
Reading through Friday's edition of The Australian, I saw that the Associate Editor Caroline Overington, found it necessary to defend resident racist Bill Leak, over ongoing disputes with regards certain cartoons and Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The link is provided, but I find it interesting that Ms Overington is calling for pugilists to apply for a fight in "the arena of ideas".
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/bill-leak-doesnt-have-to-explain-himself-to-the-government-over-cartoon/news-story/4bd5087af4ff02dc5616f41718db8a3b
Come over here, and give us a good kicking, like those scallywags at Honi So it did with their satirical reworking of The Australian last week.
Don’t go running to the government. Come and join us in the arena of ideas.
- Caroline Overington, The Australian, 4th Nov 2016.
Okay then. I'll take that as an invitation.
Please explain why as Associate Editor, you think that your newspaper should have the right to publish whatever it likes; with absolute impunity? Presumably if you're so insistent on defending the rights of your staff, indeed this appears to be an ongoing issue within News Corp, then the only conclusion is that you enjoy the ability to publish racist material because you are in fact racist.
I didn't think that we were living in an area where people were judged on the basis of the colour of their skin but then again, I'm probably mistaken in my belief that all people are endowed with dignity that should be respected even if you happen to disagree with them.
Obviously a different culture exists at News Corporation, as evidenced by Caroline Overington's request for Bill Leak to refuse to produce evidence his cartoon was not racist to the The Human Rights Commission; also evidenced by Nikki Savva's casually racist remarks on ABC1's "Insiders" comment that “Anyone would think Malcolm Turnbull had killed a Chinaman.”
Alas, I open today's Australian to read that:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/ministers-push-pm-for-section-18c-race-action/news-story/dea21ad16e78d2e84b505484f5e8a1b3?utm_content=
Cabinet ministers are pressing for action to defend free speech after the Federal Circuit Court threw out a racial hatred case that took years to decide, building support for a move this week to explore far-reaching reforms to the Racial Discrimination Act.
Malcolm Turnbull has been calling Coalition MPs to gauge their views on the controversial law ahead of a partyroom meeting tomorrow that could spark an internal brawl unless a deal is struck on a pathway to consider reforms.
- David Crowe, Rachel Baxendale, The Australian, 7th Nov 2016.
Gee, I wonder where on earth these "Cabinet ministers" got that idea. As News Corp's own website states:
http://www.newscorpaustralia.com/brand/australian
The Australian website informs and leads public opinion on the issues that affect all Australians around the clock.
- The Australian wesbite as at 7th Nov 2016.
Now let's be perfectly honest here. I believe in the right to free speech but I also believe that the right to free speech should not be absolute. I am free to drive my motor car down the highway but that freedom is tempered by limits such as a speed limit which says that I can not exceed a certain speed, or a central line which limits my legal ability to stray into oncoming traffic. I would not for a second suggest that my life is significantly worse because my freedom drive my motor car has been tempered by road rules.
I would argue that all law to some degree limits some absolute freedom. Again, that does not mean for a second that our lives are worse for it. Speech which is hedged in by law does not make out lives significantly worse because it.
I shouldn't have to lecture to the people at The Australian that Racial Discrimination occurs when people are treated less favourably than others on the basis of their race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin etc. This might have ramifications with regards doing normal things such as trying to rent a house, get a job or even just go about their lives. I also I shouldn't have to lecture to the people at The Australian that the level of power that certain groups has, is less than a multi-billion dollar media organisation which publishes daily newspapers and owns other media online and one televisio etc.
Apparently this is beyond the people at The Australian, and if it isn't beyond their ability to comprehend it, then maybe they are willfully negligent.
I seriously doubt whether the people at The Australian, or indeed News Corp generally can seriously argue that their right to free speech is being made significantly worse because of the existence of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. The only reason that they would even care about it is because they've run foul of it and don't want to admit negligence under the act.
The only conclusion that I can draw is that the reason why they want Section 18C repealed is that the people at The Australian are so monumentally inept a their job that they can't help but be racist, or perhaps they want Section 18C repealed because fundamentally, the organisation is packed full of racists. Why else would you want this removed?
Elsewhere, Jennifer Oriel even questions the very point of the Human Right Commission itself; arguing that:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/jennifer-oriel/time-to-drain-human-rights-industry-swamp/news-story/1debafb67eeb23437dfb17a8a5ff3ddc
The AHRC has become an activist body with no useful purpose.
No useful purpose? I can see how you might think that the Human Rights Commission has no useful purpose but only if you happen to believe that the idea of human rights is also not useful.
The thing about living in a society which is made up of many individuals, is that we are not independent and completely solitary beings. As people who live in a society, the very idea of human rights is to remind us that we have an obligation to respect the inherent dignity of other people and by doing so, prevent injury which might be caused by our actions.
Laws exist for instance, to prevent someone from punching someone else in the face, to prevent the injury of people. If you happen to enjoy punching people in the face, then maybe you might be in favour of repealing the law which prevents you from doing so.
Clearly News Corp in general and The Australian in particular, has an agenda to remove 18C and they won't stop until they get it. They have a very visible national media group from which they can broadcast their ideas and clearly if as Caroline Overington suggests, they are looking for a fight "in the arena of ideas", it is because they enjoy metaphorically punching people in the face and not having to be responsible for doing so.
Specifically, The Australian seems to have a problem with people on the basis of race but they don't want to have to admit that anything they do causes injury to others.
November 04, 2016
Horse 2186 - Little New Hampshire Is The One To Watch
As little as a fortnight ago, the chances of Donald Trump winning the presidency were hovering around about 15%, across most of the various polls and news networks. As with any election race, the polls always appear to tighten as you get closer to the deadline and that can easily be explained with nothing more than simple mathematics.
Suppose that in the run up to election day, ten per cent of prospective voters on both sides decided to switch. Obviously, the side that started with more voters numerically, would also lose more voters numerically; that switch would increase a smaller base to a greater effect than a larger one. Likewise, if there was a pool of undecided voters and they happened to split evenly, then that would also have a greater effect upon a smaller base than a larger one.
The other explanation that is often given, as stated in previous posts, is the "Bradley Effect" where people don’t want to admit that they happen to support an unpopular candidate. I suspect that a great deal of this went on in the 1948 Presidential Election when Harry S Truman won the presidency over Thomas Dewey despite never despite never leading any of the polls conducted; including exit polls on election day. If Hillary Clinton supposedly has a difficult job in winning what amounts to a third Democratic term, then Truman seemingly achieved the impossible in winning the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democrats.
This being said, some races like California or Texas have been firmly in their own column for a very very long time and no tightening of the polls is going to have any effect on the result, unless there is a sudden and whelming flood of votes that change sides all at once.
Mostly I’ve been assuming that Clinton should have had this election in a virtual walkover but I’m increasingly having to rethink this as polls begin to shift wildly in the closing days. It could very well be that Trump might end up winning the Presidency, despite losing the popular vote and that would be as weird a result as 1948.
America is a vast and unwieldy country. It is so big that the contiguous 48 states cover four time zones and if you include all territory, the United States uses nine standard time zones. This has the effects that as polls close at night in the eastern states, people in Hawaii are still getting back from a late lunch. What this means is that watching results unfold in America can be like a slow moving story that takes far too long and you just want it to be over.
If you can’t be bothered to sit through four or five hours where not much happens, then I have the solution which I believe is the only race that you need bother with; that is New Hampshire.
New Hampshire is not a bellwether state; nor is it a state which is firmly in one column or the other. In the 2004 election when George W Bush was reelected, if flipped from Red to Blue and has remained there ever since. It flipped Republican for the 2000 election which installed Bush and in 1992 and 1996 it flipped to the Democrats in the two elections which Bill Clinton won; before that it had been solidly Republican as far back as Nixon in 1968.
New Hampshire then, isn’t a bellwether but acts more as a leading indicator and because it happens to be one of those states jammed all the way up there in the top right of the country, the results are known pretty early on.
Even though, Clinton leads by as many as 9 points in some polls. Trump is actually ahead in others. All the way back in July, Trump was leading the polls but that switched over after the party conventions had taken place. What makes New Hampshire particularly interesting, is that even though it is the 9th least populous of the states and only gets 4 Electoral College votes, those votes are notoriously difficult to switch but if you can get those to switch over, then the chances are that votes have switched in the country overall.
In the current 114th Congress which expires next January, New Hampshire sent one Republican and one Democrat to both the House of Representatives and the Senate; so if that’s any indication then the race for the presidency in the state could equally go either way.
The thing to remember about the race for the White House is that it is not one election but 51 elections all going on at the same time (DC isn’t a state but for the purposes of a presidential election it is treated as though it were one). About a third of all of the election races are almost foregone conclusions so you don’t need to worry about those; some of them like Florida dance on a knife edge and are impossible to predict; so it is places like New Hampshire which actually give the best indication of what the overall picture might look like.
Suppose that in the run up to election day, ten per cent of prospective voters on both sides decided to switch. Obviously, the side that started with more voters numerically, would also lose more voters numerically; that switch would increase a smaller base to a greater effect than a larger one. Likewise, if there was a pool of undecided voters and they happened to split evenly, then that would also have a greater effect upon a smaller base than a larger one.
The other explanation that is often given, as stated in previous posts, is the "Bradley Effect" where people don’t want to admit that they happen to support an unpopular candidate. I suspect that a great deal of this went on in the 1948 Presidential Election when Harry S Truman won the presidency over Thomas Dewey despite never despite never leading any of the polls conducted; including exit polls on election day. If Hillary Clinton supposedly has a difficult job in winning what amounts to a third Democratic term, then Truman seemingly achieved the impossible in winning the fifth consecutive presidential win for the Democrats.
This being said, some races like California or Texas have been firmly in their own column for a very very long time and no tightening of the polls is going to have any effect on the result, unless there is a sudden and whelming flood of votes that change sides all at once.
Mostly I’ve been assuming that Clinton should have had this election in a virtual walkover but I’m increasingly having to rethink this as polls begin to shift wildly in the closing days. It could very well be that Trump might end up winning the Presidency, despite losing the popular vote and that would be as weird a result as 1948.
America is a vast and unwieldy country. It is so big that the contiguous 48 states cover four time zones and if you include all territory, the United States uses nine standard time zones. This has the effects that as polls close at night in the eastern states, people in Hawaii are still getting back from a late lunch. What this means is that watching results unfold in America can be like a slow moving story that takes far too long and you just want it to be over.
If you can’t be bothered to sit through four or five hours where not much happens, then I have the solution which I believe is the only race that you need bother with; that is New Hampshire.
New Hampshire is not a bellwether state; nor is it a state which is firmly in one column or the other. In the 2004 election when George W Bush was reelected, if flipped from Red to Blue and has remained there ever since. It flipped Republican for the 2000 election which installed Bush and in 1992 and 1996 it flipped to the Democrats in the two elections which Bill Clinton won; before that it had been solidly Republican as far back as Nixon in 1968.
New Hampshire then, isn’t a bellwether but acts more as a leading indicator and because it happens to be one of those states jammed all the way up there in the top right of the country, the results are known pretty early on.
Even though, Clinton leads by as many as 9 points in some polls. Trump is actually ahead in others. All the way back in July, Trump was leading the polls but that switched over after the party conventions had taken place. What makes New Hampshire particularly interesting, is that even though it is the 9th least populous of the states and only gets 4 Electoral College votes, those votes are notoriously difficult to switch but if you can get those to switch over, then the chances are that votes have switched in the country overall.
In the current 114th Congress which expires next January, New Hampshire sent one Republican and one Democrat to both the House of Representatives and the Senate; so if that’s any indication then the race for the presidency in the state could equally go either way.
The thing to remember about the race for the White House is that it is not one election but 51 elections all going on at the same time (DC isn’t a state but for the purposes of a presidential election it is treated as though it were one). About a third of all of the election races are almost foregone conclusions so you don’t need to worry about those; some of them like Florida dance on a knife edge and are impossible to predict; so it is places like New Hampshire which actually give the best indication of what the overall picture might look like.
November 02, 2016
Horse 2185 - The Numbers Are Even More Vague Than They're Letting On
All indications thus far point to Hillary Clinton becoming the 45th President Of The United States. The polls that I have been watching over the last few weeks, point to her picking up between 44%-48% of the popular vote, with Donald Trump getting between 37%-45%.
The Presidential Election isn't a nationwide popular vote though. Owing to the fact that the United States uses a bizarre and arcane system called the Electoral College which apportions delegates according to the number of Congress members that each state has (and DC if it was a state), and most states in the Union operate on a winner takes all basis, it makes playing with the expected numbers of Electoral College votes really easy. Also because the United States has always been polarised for a long time, lots of states remain likely to vote for the same party's candidates.
As a result of all of this, the so called "battleground" states which will determine the swing of the election, really only boil down to Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and the biggest prize of Florida. If you watch those four states in particular, then the election result is easier to predict. Indeed in 2000, which Al Gore famously lost due to the ambiguousness of hanging chads in the punched cards which were used in the voting machines of Florida.
There is however one thing that remains difficult to predict and that is whether or not people are truthful when answering polls. There have been multiple studies which suggest that when people talk on pollsters, they might not be as likely to give an answer which is perceived as unpleasant. No racist is going to admit that they are racist to a pollster unless they are truly unapologetic. Likewise, no sexist is going to admit their misogyny or misandry openly. This is also known as the "Bradley Effect" after the 1982 gubernatorial election campaign of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American, running in the state of California. People tended to say that they would vote for Tom Bradley to the pollster on the other end of the telephone but within the privacy of the polling booth, all of the racists could express their electoral opinion without any qualms.
What I don't know about this election is to what degree that the Bradley Effect will have. Never before has there been an election where the approval rating of both candidates been so appallingly low; and justifiably so. Donald Trump as a populist candidate, has consistently said things which under normal circumstances would have had him ejected from any major political party. Then there's the persistent and obvious shadow of everything that he's done; with the possibility that 48 days after the election (which is Boxing Day), that he could be embroiled in a rape case. Hillary Clinton is also again being reinvestigated as a result of her keeping a private email server during her time as Secretary Of State, and the possible destruction of classified information. There is a real possibility that either candidate might find themselves in prison, after winning the election.
Now I don't know what effect this has on voters but I suspect that it equates to non-zeroes in election polling results.
One of the websites that I have been looking at is Nate Silver's 538. I don't know what sort of algorithms that they use but they run many thousands of simulated elections and then make their predictions based upon the polling data from multiple sources. The thing is though that all of the polls which go into creating the simulated elections, come from either people speaking to pollsters and are thus subject to the Bradley Effect, or are online polls which tend to be self-selecting and thus contain their own inherent biases. I think that the ranges which are being reported by polls are far far fuzzier than in any previous election.
As of this morning, the chances of the winner of the vote in Ohio was predicted as Clinton 49.7% and Trump 50.3%. That would suggest that Ohio is sitting on a knife edge but the world inside predictive models and data sets which are tainted by the Bradley Effect, could be wildly different to the one on November 8 when voters are all alone in the voting booth, with the ballot in front of them. All the secret racists and sexists who wouldn't dare speak a word in the light of day, might speak entirely differently. 50.3%-49.7% which is a margin of just 0.6% could very well be 58%-42% which is 16%; in either direction.
If this is true for Ohio, then the path to the Presidency for Donald Trump might be easier than previously expected. If all of the purple states and toss up states were in favour of Trump, then playing with the Electoral College map gives several ways to get to 270. It also could be true that this is just election hype, perpetuated by news outlets to sell copy too. We shouldn't believe what is being presented because at best, all we have are guesstimates. I just don't know about the truthiness of these numbers, it all seems a bit like peering into a fog.
If you play with fuzzy numbers, you can't expect anything other than fuzzy results.
The Presidential Election isn't a nationwide popular vote though. Owing to the fact that the United States uses a bizarre and arcane system called the Electoral College which apportions delegates according to the number of Congress members that each state has (and DC if it was a state), and most states in the Union operate on a winner takes all basis, it makes playing with the expected numbers of Electoral College votes really easy. Also because the United States has always been polarised for a long time, lots of states remain likely to vote for the same party's candidates.
As a result of all of this, the so called "battleground" states which will determine the swing of the election, really only boil down to Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina, Iowa and the biggest prize of Florida. If you watch those four states in particular, then the election result is easier to predict. Indeed in 2000, which Al Gore famously lost due to the ambiguousness of hanging chads in the punched cards which were used in the voting machines of Florida.
There is however one thing that remains difficult to predict and that is whether or not people are truthful when answering polls. There have been multiple studies which suggest that when people talk on pollsters, they might not be as likely to give an answer which is perceived as unpleasant. No racist is going to admit that they are racist to a pollster unless they are truly unapologetic. Likewise, no sexist is going to admit their misogyny or misandry openly. This is also known as the "Bradley Effect" after the 1982 gubernatorial election campaign of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American, running in the state of California. People tended to say that they would vote for Tom Bradley to the pollster on the other end of the telephone but within the privacy of the polling booth, all of the racists could express their electoral opinion without any qualms.
What I don't know about this election is to what degree that the Bradley Effect will have. Never before has there been an election where the approval rating of both candidates been so appallingly low; and justifiably so. Donald Trump as a populist candidate, has consistently said things which under normal circumstances would have had him ejected from any major political party. Then there's the persistent and obvious shadow of everything that he's done; with the possibility that 48 days after the election (which is Boxing Day), that he could be embroiled in a rape case. Hillary Clinton is also again being reinvestigated as a result of her keeping a private email server during her time as Secretary Of State, and the possible destruction of classified information. There is a real possibility that either candidate might find themselves in prison, after winning the election.
Now I don't know what effect this has on voters but I suspect that it equates to non-zeroes in election polling results.
One of the websites that I have been looking at is Nate Silver's 538. I don't know what sort of algorithms that they use but they run many thousands of simulated elections and then make their predictions based upon the polling data from multiple sources. The thing is though that all of the polls which go into creating the simulated elections, come from either people speaking to pollsters and are thus subject to the Bradley Effect, or are online polls which tend to be self-selecting and thus contain their own inherent biases. I think that the ranges which are being reported by polls are far far fuzzier than in any previous election.
As of this morning, the chances of the winner of the vote in Ohio was predicted as Clinton 49.7% and Trump 50.3%. That would suggest that Ohio is sitting on a knife edge but the world inside predictive models and data sets which are tainted by the Bradley Effect, could be wildly different to the one on November 8 when voters are all alone in the voting booth, with the ballot in front of them. All the secret racists and sexists who wouldn't dare speak a word in the light of day, might speak entirely differently. 50.3%-49.7% which is a margin of just 0.6% could very well be 58%-42% which is 16%; in either direction.
If this is true for Ohio, then the path to the Presidency for Donald Trump might be easier than previously expected. If all of the purple states and toss up states were in favour of Trump, then playing with the Electoral College map gives several ways to get to 270. It also could be true that this is just election hype, perpetuated by news outlets to sell copy too. We shouldn't believe what is being presented because at best, all we have are guesstimates. I just don't know about the truthiness of these numbers, it all seems a bit like peering into a fog.
If you play with fuzzy numbers, you can't expect anything other than fuzzy results.
October 30, 2016
Horse 2184 - 381,654,729
Matt Parker, the stand-up mathematician¹, in his book "Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension"², talks of a maths problem which he asked someone to give him so that he'd have something to do in the dentist's chair. It goes something like this:
Arrange the digits 1 to 9 in order so that the first two digits form a multiple of 2, the first three digits form a multiple of 3, the first four digits form a multiple of 4 etc. and finally the entire number is a multiple of 9.
The problem asks someone to generate a polydivisible number, which is a number abcdef... etc. where:
- Its first digit a is not 0.
- The number formed by its first two digits ab is a multiple of 2.
- The number formed by its first three digits abc is a multiple of 3.
- The number formed by its first four digits abcd is a multiple of 4.
- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera³
I work as an accountant; this means that as a far as mathematics goes, I am the absolute scum of the world. My whole job is virtually nothing more than the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and doing the equivalent of sudoku all day long by fitting numbers into fancy grids called tax returns.
Even so, doing this should be a piece of cake. In fact, it should be possible to go through all of the polydivisible numbers for all of the conditions such that:
Arrange the digits 1 to n in order so that the first two digits form a multiple of 2, the first three digits form a multiple of 3, the first four digits form a multiple of 4 etc. and finally the entire number is a multiple of n.
... for all of the digits in base-10,
1 digit.
1 - is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. All integers are divisible by 1 by definition; since we only have 1 digit, there is not choice.
2 digits.
12 - All even numbers are divisible by 2. Since the other way of arranging these digits is odd, that is wrong.
3 digits.
123 - All numbers which are divisible by 3, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by 3. We just happen to be lucky that 1+2+3=6 and 6 is divisible by 3. Also, 2 must appear in the middle to satisfy first two digits forming a multiple of 2. This is important as it also says that for every even value of n, these positions must also be occupied by even digits.
321 - See above.
4 digits.
Problem.
All numbers which are divisible by 4, happen to have the last two numbers as a multiple of 4. 4 cannot appear in the last position because 14 and 34 are not divisible by 4. This means that 12 and 32 are the only possible candidates.
Problem.
If 12 and 32 are the last two digits, then 4 must appear in position 2. That means that the three digits which are available for those first three positions are 1, 3 and 4 but 1+3+4=8 and 8 is not divisible by 3.
Therefore there are no 4 digit solutions.
5 digits.
Problem.
6 digits.
123,654 - All even numbers are divisible by 2. All numbers which are divisible by 3, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by 3. All numbers which are divisible by 6 are even multiples of 3. Since 1+2+3+4+5+6=21 then all even answers will be divisible by 6.
5 must appear in position 5. Even numbers must appear in even positions.
This means that the only real thing to nut out is what are those central two digits such that the result is divisible by 4 and what makes the first three digits sum to a multiple of 3.
Possible candidates for those central two digits are: 12, 16, 32 and 36, since 5 must appear in position 5 and all combinations with 4 in position 2, leave results such that the first 3 digits will never sum to a multiple of 3.
321,654 - See above.
7 digits.
I know of no simple test for divisibility of 7. They do exist but if it's too hard for me to bother with, then I don't care.
Apart from combinations of 1, 2 and 3 which work at the beginning, either 147 or 741 will also work in those first three positions since 1+4+7=12 and 12 is a multiple of 3.
Problem.
7 can replace 1 because 7-1=6 and that just means that the multiple of 6 that the sum adds to will be 6 more. 7 can not replace 3 because 7-3=4 and that means that the result will be out by 4. Therefore, the two candidates for checking are 3216547 and 1236547. Blunt force tells me that neither of these work. Therefore there are no 7 digit solutions.
8 digits.
38,165,472 - I have an 8 to play with now. 8 can replace 2 because of the problems discussed in the 7 digit problem and 7 can replace 1 as before. This would either mean that 8 or 2 are at the end. I only need to test 32165478, 32765418, 38165472 and 38765412. Only one of those works.
9 digits.
381,654,729 - All numbers which are divisible by 9, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by 9. Actually this is a fundamental fact among all bases. For every base-n all numbers which are divisible by n-1, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by n-1. 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9=45 and 45 is a multiple of 9.
I already know that there is only one solution for 8 digits and so I know that 98,165,472 will be divisible by 8 and 981,654,723 divisible by 9, but 7 is tricksy. 9,816,547 isn't divisible by 7. Boo 7.
Chuck a 9 on the end. That doesn't upset the rest of the digits.
10 digits.
3,816,547,290 - I've only got one solution for 9 digits and all all numbers which are divisible by 10, end in 0. That's not particularly exciting but there you go.
This will more than likely be familiar to every mathematician worth their salt but for those of us down here in boring boring accountant's land where all we need to do are the the four basic operations, then this is an amusing side show.
¹ Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths
² Website and where to buy - http://www.makeanddo4d.com/
³ Very well, your majesty - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHH6iwgIek
Arrange the digits 1 to 9 in order so that the first two digits form a multiple of 2, the first three digits form a multiple of 3, the first four digits form a multiple of 4 etc. and finally the entire number is a multiple of 9.
The problem asks someone to generate a polydivisible number, which is a number abcdef... etc. where:
- Its first digit a is not 0.
- The number formed by its first two digits ab is a multiple of 2.
- The number formed by its first three digits abc is a multiple of 3.
- The number formed by its first four digits abcd is a multiple of 4.
- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera³
I work as an accountant; this means that as a far as mathematics goes, I am the absolute scum of the world. My whole job is virtually nothing more than the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) and doing the equivalent of sudoku all day long by fitting numbers into fancy grids called tax returns.
Even so, doing this should be a piece of cake. In fact, it should be possible to go through all of the polydivisible numbers for all of the conditions such that:
Arrange the digits 1 to n in order so that the first two digits form a multiple of 2, the first three digits form a multiple of 3, the first four digits form a multiple of 4 etc. and finally the entire number is a multiple of n.
... for all of the digits in base-10,
1 digit.
1 - is one and all alone and ever more shall be so. All integers are divisible by 1 by definition; since we only have 1 digit, there is not choice.
2 digits.
12 - All even numbers are divisible by 2. Since the other way of arranging these digits is odd, that is wrong.
3 digits.
123 - All numbers which are divisible by 3, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by 3. We just happen to be lucky that 1+2+3=6 and 6 is divisible by 3. Also, 2 must appear in the middle to satisfy first two digits forming a multiple of 2. This is important as it also says that for every even value of n, these positions must also be occupied by even digits.
321 - See above.
4 digits.
Problem.
All numbers which are divisible by 4, happen to have the last two numbers as a multiple of 4. 4 cannot appear in the last position because 14 and 34 are not divisible by 4. This means that 12 and 32 are the only possible candidates.
Problem.
If 12 and 32 are the last two digits, then 4 must appear in position 2. That means that the three digits which are available for those first three positions are 1, 3 and 4 but 1+3+4=8 and 8 is not divisible by 3.
Therefore there are no 4 digit solutions.
5 digits.
Problem.
All numbers divisible by 5 either end in 5 or 0. This will be useful for all subsequent problems. However, this means that 5 must appear in position 5; since 5 is in position 5 then 1, 2, 3 and 4 occupy the first 4 positions. If there are no 4 digit solutions and 5 must appear in position 5, there are no 5 digit solutions either.
6 digits.
5 must appear in position 5. Even numbers must appear in even positions.
This means that the only real thing to nut out is what are those central two digits such that the result is divisible by 4 and what makes the first three digits sum to a multiple of 3.
Possible candidates for those central two digits are: 12, 16, 32 and 36, since 5 must appear in position 5 and all combinations with 4 in position 2, leave results such that the first 3 digits will never sum to a multiple of 3.
321,654 - See above.
7 digits.
I know of no simple test for divisibility of 7. They do exist but if it's too hard for me to bother with, then I don't care.
Apart from combinations of 1, 2 and 3 which work at the beginning, either 147 or 741 will also work in those first three positions since 1+4+7=12 and 12 is a multiple of 3.
Problem.
7 can replace 1 because 7-1=6 and that just means that the multiple of 6 that the sum adds to will be 6 more. 7 can not replace 3 because 7-3=4 and that means that the result will be out by 4. Therefore, the two candidates for checking are 3216547 and 1236547. Blunt force tells me that neither of these work. Therefore there are no 7 digit solutions.
8 digits.
38,165,472 - I have an 8 to play with now. 8 can replace 2 because of the problems discussed in the 7 digit problem and 7 can replace 1 as before. This would either mean that 8 or 2 are at the end. I only need to test 32165478, 32765418, 38165472 and 38765412. Only one of those works.
9 digits.
381,654,729 - All numbers which are divisible by 9, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by 9. Actually this is a fundamental fact among all bases. For every base-n all numbers which are divisible by n-1, have the result that if you sum the digits, then that result is also divisible by n-1. 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9=45 and 45 is a multiple of 9.
I already know that there is only one solution for 8 digits and so I know that 98,165,472 will be divisible by 8 and 981,654,723 divisible by 9, but 7 is tricksy. 9,816,547 isn't divisible by 7. Boo 7.
Chuck a 9 on the end. That doesn't upset the rest of the digits.
10 digits.
3,816,547,290 - I've only got one solution for 9 digits and all all numbers which are divisible by 10, end in 0. That's not particularly exciting but there you go.
This will more than likely be familiar to every mathematician worth their salt but for those of us down here in boring boring accountant's land where all we need to do are the the four basic operations, then this is an amusing side show.
¹ Youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths
² Website and where to buy - http://www.makeanddo4d.com/
³ Very well, your majesty - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JHH6iwgIek
October 27, 2016
Horse 2183 - Sometimes, Specific Words Are Used For A Reason
The deaths of four people on the Thunder River Rapids ride at Dreamworld are a tragedy and devastating for the families affected. Sometimes accidents happen which change people's lives in an instant, forever. As a society, we assign the task of dealing with this sort of mess to people upon who we confer special responsibility and I think that we should also bestow respect upon these same people who work in difficult situations that I for one would not cope with.
This explains why I found the following tweet from journalist Mark Ludlow at The Australian Financial Review, so strange.
https://twitter.com/M_Ludlow/status/790809321768488960
Why ambulance and police officers use phrases like "sustained injuries incompatible with life" is beyond me. Such cold, impersonal language
- Mark Ludlow, 25th Oct 2016. (@M_Ludlow)
It's comments like this that make me wonder what the actual value of a journalism degree is. As little as a decade ago, journalists were at least somewhat concerned with the collection of facts as well as news for their reportage, but now when the news cycle has sped up so quickly to the point where the only thing that matters is getting copy out as quickly as possible, to ensure that your news organisation gets that first wave of eyeballs and clicks, then the idea that a journalist would do even ten minutes worth of research seems all too difficult.
I have not been blessed with a career in journalism; so perhaps I can look at this without looking at it through the fog of pressure from a newsroom but didn't it ever occur to the Brisbane Bureau Chief and Political Correspondent at The Australian Financial Review to be a little bit curious?
There are obviously reasons why people who are in highly responsible positions act in ways and say things in very singular ways. Granted that language is often used to obfuscate and confuse issues when it is used by politicians who want to avoid actually saying anything that they can be held to, but when people who act in their capacity as officers of the law and in matters severe legal consequence, then their language is going to be quite deliberate. If they don't use language which is deliberate, then we end up in wonderland and sleepwalking into the surreal.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ... "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Forgive me but I would have thought that someone whose job lived in the land of words, was going to be at least a little bit careful in their use. I know that when I write a piece for my audience of tens, I will rewrite things, fact check things and sometimes cut things out if I can not find an acceptable answer. Especially when it comes to events of tragedy, the use of certain words might have legal implications, and in this case it does.
http://www.courts.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/92868/m-osc-fs-information-for-health-professionals.pdf
Under section 30 of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 2003, a doctor must issue a cause of death certificate if they can form an opinion about the probable cause of death. It is not necessary for the doctor to have treated the person as they can consider other information such as the person’s medical history.
However, section 26(5) of the Coroners Act states that a doctor must not issue a cause of death certificate in relation to an apparently reportable death unless the coroner authorises it. Penalties apply for a breach of this section.
- Information for Health Professionals, Queensland Courts - Office of the State Coroner Queensland
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/qld/consol_act/ca2003120/s26.html
(5) A doctor must not issue a cause of death certificate for a person if—
(a) the death appears to the doctor to be a reportable death, unless a coroner advises the doctor that the death is not a reportable death; or
(b) a coroner is investigating the death, unless the coroner authorises the issue of the certificate.
- Section 26(5), Coroners Act 2003 (Qld).
Quite clearly, it is Doctors and Coroners who have the legal power to declare someone dead; NOT Ambulance and Police officers. Being dead, has specific consequences from a legal perspective; for instance, I can tell you that far far more people die on July 1st than June 30th and the reason has to do with taxation purposes. Even though first responders and initial caregivers such as Ambulance, Police and Fire Officers are all people in respected positions of authority, for them to declare someone legally dead would represent a clear and very present conflict of interest. Police have sometimes been accused of racism and by giving Ambulance and Fire Officers the ability to declare someone dead, this might remove the impetus for them to save certain people's lives; that isn't the sort of power that should be given out if that kind of accusation can be levelled.
The reason why we get "cold, impersonal language" is precisely because we have professionals who are dealing with serious and grave circumstances and doing so under the gaze of others, such as those in the media like the Brisbane Bureau Chief and Political Correspondent at The Australian Financial Review, Mark Ludlow.
I will freely admit that as an accountant I know diddly squat about a great deal many things. I will tell people openly that I know diddly squat about a great deal many things and the reaction that that sometimes gets can vary from the incredulous to the abusive. I can not give legal advice, financial planning advice; nor can I give people specific advice on which shares, bonds or debentures to buy and sell; nor can I give advice on when to do so, other than for taxation purposes. If I don't know the answer, or if I do know the answer but am legally compelled not to tell the answer, then I will positively not give that answer. If for technical reasons, an official in a responsible position can not legally give an answer, then you shouldn't be surprised when they do not give that answer.
The accusation that the language which is being used as being "cold" and "impersonal" is also strange when you consider that it is coming from someone at The Australian Financial Review. People in finance and economics often use language which acts more like a thieves cant than an attempt to impart knowledge. It's also somewhat hypocritical when you consider that the single greatest catastrophe in finance and economics, The Great Depression, was triggered by a single stock trader in the New York Stock Exchange who in making a trade yelled "we have a panic over here" across the crowded trading floor.
Words are important, they have the power to hurt and the power to heal. Words also have the power to confer the legal status of being dead or alive upon someone. When ambulance and police officers use phrases like "sustained injuries incompatible with life", they do so because there are specific legal constraints upon them. As people, they feel joy, sadness and hurt like anyone else; so it behooves journalists whose job it is to think about news as well as report it, to be a little bit more curious.
This explains why I found the following tweet from journalist Mark Ludlow at The Australian Financial Review, so strange.
https://twitter.com/M_Ludlow/status/790809321768488960
Why ambulance and police officers use phrases like "sustained injuries incompatible with life" is beyond me. Such cold, impersonal language
- Mark Ludlow, 25th Oct 2016. (@M_Ludlow)
It's comments like this that make me wonder what the actual value of a journalism degree is. As little as a decade ago, journalists were at least somewhat concerned with the collection of facts as well as news for their reportage, but now when the news cycle has sped up so quickly to the point where the only thing that matters is getting copy out as quickly as possible, to ensure that your news organisation gets that first wave of eyeballs and clicks, then the idea that a journalist would do even ten minutes worth of research seems all too difficult.
I have not been blessed with a career in journalism; so perhaps I can look at this without looking at it through the fog of pressure from a newsroom but didn't it ever occur to the Brisbane Bureau Chief and Political Correspondent at The Australian Financial Review to be a little bit curious?
There are obviously reasons why people who are in highly responsible positions act in ways and say things in very singular ways. Granted that language is often used to obfuscate and confuse issues when it is used by politicians who want to avoid actually saying anything that they can be held to, but when people who act in their capacity as officers of the law and in matters severe legal consequence, then their language is going to be quite deliberate. If they don't use language which is deliberate, then we end up in wonderland and sleepwalking into the surreal.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ... "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Forgive me but I would have thought that someone whose job lived in the land of words, was going to be at least a little bit careful in their use. I know that when I write a piece for my audience of tens, I will rewrite things, fact check things and sometimes cut things out if I can not find an acceptable answer. Especially when it comes to events of tragedy, the use of certain words might have legal implications, and in this case it does.
http://www.courts.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/92868/m-osc-fs-information-for-health-professionals.pdf
Under section 30 of the Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 2003, a doctor must issue a cause of death certificate if they can form an opinion about the probable cause of death. It is not necessary for the doctor to have treated the person as they can consider other information such as the person’s medical history.
However, section 26(5) of the Coroners Act states that a doctor must not issue a cause of death certificate in relation to an apparently reportable death unless the coroner authorises it. Penalties apply for a breach of this section.
- Information for Health Professionals, Queensland Courts - Office of the State Coroner Queensland
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/qld/consol_act/ca2003120/s26.html
(5) A doctor must not issue a cause of death certificate for a person if—
(a) the death appears to the doctor to be a reportable death, unless a coroner advises the doctor that the death is not a reportable death; or
(b) a coroner is investigating the death, unless the coroner authorises the issue of the certificate.
- Section 26(5), Coroners Act 2003 (Qld).
Quite clearly, it is Doctors and Coroners who have the legal power to declare someone dead; NOT Ambulance and Police officers. Being dead, has specific consequences from a legal perspective; for instance, I can tell you that far far more people die on July 1st than June 30th and the reason has to do with taxation purposes. Even though first responders and initial caregivers such as Ambulance, Police and Fire Officers are all people in respected positions of authority, for them to declare someone legally dead would represent a clear and very present conflict of interest. Police have sometimes been accused of racism and by giving Ambulance and Fire Officers the ability to declare someone dead, this might remove the impetus for them to save certain people's lives; that isn't the sort of power that should be given out if that kind of accusation can be levelled.
The reason why we get "cold, impersonal language" is precisely because we have professionals who are dealing with serious and grave circumstances and doing so under the gaze of others, such as those in the media like the Brisbane Bureau Chief and Political Correspondent at The Australian Financial Review, Mark Ludlow.
I will freely admit that as an accountant I know diddly squat about a great deal many things. I will tell people openly that I know diddly squat about a great deal many things and the reaction that that sometimes gets can vary from the incredulous to the abusive. I can not give legal advice, financial planning advice; nor can I give people specific advice on which shares, bonds or debentures to buy and sell; nor can I give advice on when to do so, other than for taxation purposes. If I don't know the answer, or if I do know the answer but am legally compelled not to tell the answer, then I will positively not give that answer. If for technical reasons, an official in a responsible position can not legally give an answer, then you shouldn't be surprised when they do not give that answer.
The accusation that the language which is being used as being "cold" and "impersonal" is also strange when you consider that it is coming from someone at The Australian Financial Review. People in finance and economics often use language which acts more like a thieves cant than an attempt to impart knowledge. It's also somewhat hypocritical when you consider that the single greatest catastrophe in finance and economics, The Great Depression, was triggered by a single stock trader in the New York Stock Exchange who in making a trade yelled "we have a panic over here" across the crowded trading floor.
Words are important, they have the power to hurt and the power to heal. Words also have the power to confer the legal status of being dead or alive upon someone. When ambulance and police officers use phrases like "sustained injuries incompatible with life", they do so because there are specific legal constraints upon them. As people, they feel joy, sadness and hurt like anyone else; so it behooves journalists whose job it is to think about news as well as report it, to be a little bit more curious.
October 26, 2016
Horse 2182 - The Thirty Year Light Bulb
Recently Mrs Rollo and I I were watching a documentary which was about the ways in which the consumer society which we find ourselves has been designed in such a way as to extract many of our hard won Dollarpounds, through the mechanism of not just planned obsolescence but planned disposability. One of the things mentioned was the great light bulb conspiracy of the 1924, where the big manufacturers of light bulbs (Osram, Philips, and General Electric etc.) got together and using their cartel power, imposed limits on the lifespan of light bulbs so that consumers would need to buy more because their light bulbs burned out. There is a light bulb in a fire station in Livermore, California, which supposedly has been going since 1901, and is often cited in reports and newspapers as evidence of the conspiracy.
Earlier this week, she was looking in our fridge and noticing that the fridge was old, she wondered how old the light bulb is. The truth is that I don't know but I have a suspicion that the light bulb inside the fridge could be more than thirty years old.
The fridge is so old that the brand General, isn't even sold any more. I think that General could be a sub brand of General Electric but again, I don't know. What I am fairly sure of though is that this fridge was in my grandparents' house before my grandpa died and my grandma moved to a smaller place, which means that the fridge dates from at least before 1987. Again, I don't know if the light bulb was changed in the period before I happened to acquire it but we certainly haven't changed the bulb, and if it hadn't been changed before we got it, then it might be the bulb which left the factory with the fridge. If it was replaced at some point, then it is at very least, an eight year old light bulb.
I have seen the General logo countless times and I still have no idea what it's actually supposed to be. Is it a stylized G? Perhaps a General in some sort of fancy hat? Who knows?
I haven't been able to find the Quality Assurance sticker on the back of the fridge and so, the only thing that I can say is that the fridge is at least 29 years old; to be honest, that's not bad at all. We had a washing machine that decided that went brain dead and the cost of replacement of the computer, was more than the price of a new washing machine.
Sure, the fridge vibrates and hums a bit but that's because some bright spark thought it was a good idea to put down uneven slag tiling in one half of our house. What was wrong with nice wooden floorboards, I'll never know. It does mean that we still know that the fridge is working.
Our microwave oven has an equally interesting story. It also came from my grandparents' house and I have seen the QA sticker on the back; which proudly proclaims that it is a 1979 microwave oven. This in itself is somewhat remarkable because apart from the cost of microwave ovens back then, there was still a suspicion about the safety of microwaves and whether or not consuming food which had been cooked in that way, would lead to an increased risk of cancer. That's a little bit odd considering that in 1979, we were still perfectly happy with tobacco advertising on television, in print and in sport, when we knew that cigarettes absolutely cause cancer. The act of buying a microwave oven in 1979 might have been a progressive and revolutionary act.
Probably because most of the buttons are inductance switches, it means that there hasn't been physical movement and contact of metal tangs against each other. Physical wear is what limits the life of switches and so it would have been wise from a business point of view to have those fail, so that the customer would need to buy a new microwave. However, this was made in 1979, by Westinghouse Email and as such, it was of very good quality. Quite possibly, this microwave oven could have cost many weeks' wages in 1979; so it had to look as flashy and futuristic as possible. Hence the reason why it has a LCD display and inductance switches with no actual buttons. This very much looks like a product of the future, even if it looks dated now, with its very 1970s fake wood trim.
This was before the widespread use of LCDs in electronics and I bet that most microwave ovens of the day would have had a light bulb behind a plastic panel and a timer controlled by a spring. I note that our normal oven also has a green LCD display but that's probably from the late 1990s when the kitchen was remodelled.
Both of these appliances have moved between four houses and I can very easily picture in my mind, where they were in every kitchen that they've been in. They've seen eight Prime Ministers, five Presidents, they were around before the Berlin Wall came down, the fall of communism, the break up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Sudan, they've been around since before the War On Terror, the Global Financial Crisis, and have outlasted dictators, tyrants and other newer appliances. Just in the time that I've had them, they've outlasted four cars. I rather like it fact that they've bucked the trend for planned obsolescence by the manufacturer because it means that they haven't had to be replaced - the easiest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
Earlier this week, she was looking in our fridge and noticing that the fridge was old, she wondered how old the light bulb is. The truth is that I don't know but I have a suspicion that the light bulb inside the fridge could be more than thirty years old.
The fridge is so old that the brand General, isn't even sold any more. I think that General could be a sub brand of General Electric but again, I don't know. What I am fairly sure of though is that this fridge was in my grandparents' house before my grandpa died and my grandma moved to a smaller place, which means that the fridge dates from at least before 1987. Again, I don't know if the light bulb was changed in the period before I happened to acquire it but we certainly haven't changed the bulb, and if it hadn't been changed before we got it, then it might be the bulb which left the factory with the fridge. If it was replaced at some point, then it is at very least, an eight year old light bulb.
I have seen the General logo countless times and I still have no idea what it's actually supposed to be. Is it a stylized G? Perhaps a General in some sort of fancy hat? Who knows?
I haven't been able to find the Quality Assurance sticker on the back of the fridge and so, the only thing that I can say is that the fridge is at least 29 years old; to be honest, that's not bad at all. We had a washing machine that decided that went brain dead and the cost of replacement of the computer, was more than the price of a new washing machine.
Sure, the fridge vibrates and hums a bit but that's because some bright spark thought it was a good idea to put down uneven slag tiling in one half of our house. What was wrong with nice wooden floorboards, I'll never know. It does mean that we still know that the fridge is working.
Our microwave oven has an equally interesting story. It also came from my grandparents' house and I have seen the QA sticker on the back; which proudly proclaims that it is a 1979 microwave oven. This in itself is somewhat remarkable because apart from the cost of microwave ovens back then, there was still a suspicion about the safety of microwaves and whether or not consuming food which had been cooked in that way, would lead to an increased risk of cancer. That's a little bit odd considering that in 1979, we were still perfectly happy with tobacco advertising on television, in print and in sport, when we knew that cigarettes absolutely cause cancer. The act of buying a microwave oven in 1979 might have been a progressive and revolutionary act.
Probably because most of the buttons are inductance switches, it means that there hasn't been physical movement and contact of metal tangs against each other. Physical wear is what limits the life of switches and so it would have been wise from a business point of view to have those fail, so that the customer would need to buy a new microwave. However, this was made in 1979, by Westinghouse Email and as such, it was of very good quality. Quite possibly, this microwave oven could have cost many weeks' wages in 1979; so it had to look as flashy and futuristic as possible. Hence the reason why it has a LCD display and inductance switches with no actual buttons. This very much looks like a product of the future, even if it looks dated now, with its very 1970s fake wood trim.
This was before the widespread use of LCDs in electronics and I bet that most microwave ovens of the day would have had a light bulb behind a plastic panel and a timer controlled by a spring. I note that our normal oven also has a green LCD display but that's probably from the late 1990s when the kitchen was remodelled.
Both of these appliances have moved between four houses and I can very easily picture in my mind, where they were in every kitchen that they've been in. They've seen eight Prime Ministers, five Presidents, they were around before the Berlin Wall came down, the fall of communism, the break up of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Sudan, they've been around since before the War On Terror, the Global Financial Crisis, and have outlasted dictators, tyrants and other newer appliances. Just in the time that I've had them, they've outlasted four cars. I rather like it fact that they've bucked the trend for planned obsolescence by the manufacturer because it means that they haven't had to be replaced - the easiest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
October 25, 2016
Horse 2181 - Conservative Politics Isn't Dead, It's Reorganising
I think it weird that the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Independent all ran articles questioning the strength of conservative parties around the world at the moment. In the Anglosphere this conveniently ignores that the Conservatives under Teresa May have the British House Of Commons locked in until 2020 and possibly longer if the Labour Party continues to rip itself to pieces, the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia was returned to government in 2016 under Malcolm Turnbull and the exception is that the Grits hold power in Canada under Justin Trudeau but Canada is always the exception.
The media frequently makes the mistake of myopia by confusing what is going on in this exact moment with the longer arc of history; it needs to if it wants to sell advert space along side its copy.
Admittedly what we've seen in the United States is extraordinary, with the Republican Party not really taking seriously the prospect of an outside candidate using the rules of the party to secure their nomination for president and then watching as that same outside candidate explodes in a horrible fireball. On the other side of the race, the Democratic Party deliberately rigged proceedings to install Hillary Clinton as their nomination, and look surprisingly unified. The awful truth is that had Ms Clinton been running against a conventional candidate, then probably we'd have an actual race on our hands and she'd be subject to actual scrutiny but I digress.
What we're witnessing is nothing short of Duverger's Law play out yet again. Duverger's Law is the principle that where you have single member electorates, it tends towards two party politics in the long run; invariably it must do because a party can either be in or out and political power tends to organise behind either one of those two positions. As the Presidency can only be occupied by a single person, then as expected, power coagulates behind either the party that is in or out, and the generally the party that is out, goes through some sort of terrible rift before it reorganises itself again. What I don't know is whether or not this reorganisation of the Republican Party is one of those seismic shifts or not.
The Republicans assumed their position of social conservatism combined with a desire to raze government, some time before 1964 and this resulted in the embarrassing rejection of Barry Goldwater at the polls. The party continued on that path and arguably Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes merely followed the party. The Democrats had already split and cast off the section of ex Southern Democrats by about 1976 and so the party of Carter, Clinton and Obama, has been progressively progressive when it comes to social positions but kind of ambivalent on what it thinks the role of government is.
Possibly after Obama came to power, the Republicans already began to start shifting. The rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and then the so called Freedom Coalition are kind of factional experiments within the broader tent of the party. However, they do not really represent anything particularly different outside of the two rails of social conservatism and the wish for the neuterng of government which the party started heading towards in the 1960s. What Donald Trump is is a demagogue but the people who have followed him and installed him as the nominee, are those people for whom the erosion of government at the expense of surrendering the power of governance to private entities, hasn't worked for them. These people still remain socially conservative but they aren't exactly open to what the Democratic Party has to offer.
The interesting thing about this election is that although it has the veneer of a fog of insanity, it is rather easy to analyse. If you look at where the most populated urban centres are and then look at the Electoral College, there is a pretty good sort of direct mapping going on. In expected Electoral College votes, the west coast, the northeast and Florida are the things which will determine who becomes President. Those places also tend to be full of non-whites and more socially progressive people. Down ballot, the Republicans tend to get more people actively engaged in the more direct aspects of democracy; which is why the Republicans will almost certainly retain control of the House. These people also tend to be older and would have been the people who also voted for Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes.
What will be interesting is what happens over the course of the next four years.The Republican Party will need to address how to attract voters in urban centres whilst retaining the socially conservative people who make up a great chunk of their base. Donald Trump might have an air of absolute wingnuttery but his underlying set of positions fit in with the general raft of policies that the Republican Party has been floating around on for the past fifty years. Although he would pull the country in a more isolationist direction, that isn't particularly outstanding of socially conservative policy. One could argue that Brexit in the United Kingdom, is just a more fully realised version of what Trump is proposing; with the added advantage that there is already a forty mile moat in place of a wall.
Although what we're witnessing is the political self-defeat of a Republican presidential candidate, we're not necessarily witnessing the defeat of conservative politics or conservative parties. This looks to me, more like the blood letting that always happens after England gets knocked out of yet another football tournament, or when Australia loses a cricket test series. This is one team who is heading into a match and expecting a hiding to nothing. Conservative politics is rudely healthy though and even if Hillary Clinton wins the Presidency, the United States isn't going to broadly shift anywhere.
The media frequently makes the mistake of myopia by confusing what is going on in this exact moment with the longer arc of history; it needs to if it wants to sell advert space along side its copy.
Admittedly what we've seen in the United States is extraordinary, with the Republican Party not really taking seriously the prospect of an outside candidate using the rules of the party to secure their nomination for president and then watching as that same outside candidate explodes in a horrible fireball. On the other side of the race, the Democratic Party deliberately rigged proceedings to install Hillary Clinton as their nomination, and look surprisingly unified. The awful truth is that had Ms Clinton been running against a conventional candidate, then probably we'd have an actual race on our hands and she'd be subject to actual scrutiny but I digress.
What we're witnessing is nothing short of Duverger's Law play out yet again. Duverger's Law is the principle that where you have single member electorates, it tends towards two party politics in the long run; invariably it must do because a party can either be in or out and political power tends to organise behind either one of those two positions. As the Presidency can only be occupied by a single person, then as expected, power coagulates behind either the party that is in or out, and the generally the party that is out, goes through some sort of terrible rift before it reorganises itself again. What I don't know is whether or not this reorganisation of the Republican Party is one of those seismic shifts or not.
The Republicans assumed their position of social conservatism combined with a desire to raze government, some time before 1964 and this resulted in the embarrassing rejection of Barry Goldwater at the polls. The party continued on that path and arguably Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes merely followed the party. The Democrats had already split and cast off the section of ex Southern Democrats by about 1976 and so the party of Carter, Clinton and Obama, has been progressively progressive when it comes to social positions but kind of ambivalent on what it thinks the role of government is.
Possibly after Obama came to power, the Republicans already began to start shifting. The rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and then the so called Freedom Coalition are kind of factional experiments within the broader tent of the party. However, they do not really represent anything particularly different outside of the two rails of social conservatism and the wish for the neuterng of government which the party started heading towards in the 1960s. What Donald Trump is is a demagogue but the people who have followed him and installed him as the nominee, are those people for whom the erosion of government at the expense of surrendering the power of governance to private entities, hasn't worked for them. These people still remain socially conservative but they aren't exactly open to what the Democratic Party has to offer.
The interesting thing about this election is that although it has the veneer of a fog of insanity, it is rather easy to analyse. If you look at where the most populated urban centres are and then look at the Electoral College, there is a pretty good sort of direct mapping going on. In expected Electoral College votes, the west coast, the northeast and Florida are the things which will determine who becomes President. Those places also tend to be full of non-whites and more socially progressive people. Down ballot, the Republicans tend to get more people actively engaged in the more direct aspects of democracy; which is why the Republicans will almost certainly retain control of the House. These people also tend to be older and would have been the people who also voted for Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes.
What will be interesting is what happens over the course of the next four years.The Republican Party will need to address how to attract voters in urban centres whilst retaining the socially conservative people who make up a great chunk of their base. Donald Trump might have an air of absolute wingnuttery but his underlying set of positions fit in with the general raft of policies that the Republican Party has been floating around on for the past fifty years. Although he would pull the country in a more isolationist direction, that isn't particularly outstanding of socially conservative policy. One could argue that Brexit in the United Kingdom, is just a more fully realised version of what Trump is proposing; with the added advantage that there is already a forty mile moat in place of a wall.
Although what we're witnessing is the political self-defeat of a Republican presidential candidate, we're not necessarily witnessing the defeat of conservative politics or conservative parties. This looks to me, more like the blood letting that always happens after England gets knocked out of yet another football tournament, or when Australia loses a cricket test series. This is one team who is heading into a match and expecting a hiding to nothing. Conservative politics is rudely healthy though and even if Hillary Clinton wins the Presidency, the United States isn't going to broadly shift anywhere.
October 24, 2016
Horse 2180 - The Supreme Court's Ongoing Supreme Statemate
I think that it is pretty well much a fait accompli that Hillary Clinton will be the next President Of The United States. I've been watching poll results for quite some time now and the path through the Electoral College for Donald Trump looks well and truly blocked. I think that from here, it would take some sort of miracle or bizarre twist of fate for him to sit in the Oval Office chair,as he's consistently polling at figures less than 40% to Hillary's 45% and the only way to beat Hillary would be by flipping blue states to red and that ain't happening.
If we take this as lore, then this has implications down ballot and especially for the one unanswered question which has been hanging around like a bad smell in a house of farts. That is the question of what happens with the currently vacant position of the ninth Justice Of The Supreme Court.
I've run the numbers several times and taken averages across four different news sites and have come to this rough guide to what the Congress is going to look like.
House Of Representatives:
Dem - 193
GOP - 228
Ind - 14
Senate:
Dem - 55
GOP - 45
Firstly this means that Paul Ryan will more than likely retain his job as Speaker Of The House. In many respects he is the unluckiest man in all of American politics because he comes across as being the only sane man in a mad house. As the VP nominee for Mitt Romney in 2012, his own path to the White House became more complicated but that still means that 2020 could be a viable option for him.
The Senate though is where the abundance of insanity really resides and this is where the story of the last Justice Of The Supreme Court takes place.
Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2 of the US Constitution says that:
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.- Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2, US Constitution, 1789
Maybe not a decade ago but probably twenty years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem but in 2015 with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, in an increasingly toxic political climate, Senate Republicans refused to give assent to any nomination for the Supreme Court that President Obama was going to make; on the basis that he was a lame duck President and that the appointment should be held over for the incoming President whoever they may be.
The Senate is of course perfectly aware of its power under the Constitution and is perfectly legally allowed to withhold its advice and consent if it desires.
That issue has been thrown onto the back burners and was quietly forgotten about until it became obvious that Donald Trump is so toxic that he's not electable. I think that this is probably an example of one of the biggest sunk cost fallacies in political history being played out and should be a herald as to why both the methods deciding who the party nominees are, and the method for deciding who the President is, is so demonstrably idiotic as to be laughable. Except that this is no joke and it isn't funny. The pot of toxic liquid has boiled and now threatens to boil over.
Senator John McCain, expressed the opinion that any Supreme Court nomination that Hillary Clinton would make, would be sight unseen, unacceptable.
http://www.npr.org/2016/10/17/498328520/sen-mccain-says-republicans-will-block-all-court-nominations-if-clinton-wins
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) said Monday that if Hillary Clinton is elected, Republicans will unite to block anyone she nominates to the Supreme Court.
Speaking on WPHT-AM radio's "Dom Giordano Program" in Philadelphia, McCain pledged to obstruct any Clinton Supreme Court nomination for the current or any future vacancy.
Sen. John McCain speaks to the media, March 16, shortly after President Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland to the Supreme Court. McCain said that the confirmation of the next Justice should occur after the election. Now he vows to block Hillary Clinton's choice if she wins the election.
"I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up," he declared.- NPR News, 17th Oct 2016.
This as I see it, leaves only two possible outcomes. Firstly, if Hillary Clinton is elected as President, then whoever she nominates for the Supreme Court will be rejected because Democrats won't have the numbers on the floor of the Senate to give advice and consent. Secondly, if America collectively loses its mind and votes Donald Trump in as President, then the Republicans will find themselves on the receiving end of their own tactics and whoever he nominates for the Supreme Court will be rejected because Republicans won't have the numbers on the floor of the Senate to give advice and consent.
In both scenarios, both side of politics have played the game of obstruction so elegantly, it should come as a surprise to no one that the machine of government has come to a grinding halt. Both sides have come to the conclusion that the other side is worse than hate incarnate and as such, even if someone like Santa Claus or Lady Liberty herself was put forward as the candidate for the last remaining Justice Of The Supreme Court, they still wouldn't be accepted on the advice and consent of the Senate because party politics is overruling good government.
Actually, right there is the reason why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were ever considered in the Presidential race at all. Both of them purport to represent that great swathe of people who feel as though the Congress isn't capable of doing anything. It would appear that they are right.
I wouldn't be surprised if that last remaining Supreme Court chair ends up being vacant for a considerable amount of time.
Although the justices of the Supreme Court are appointed for life, some of them decide that retirement or resignation is the best decision for them. The worst possible outcome is what happens if any more Supreme Court judges start dying off though.
As it is Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 years old, Anthony Kennedy is 80 years old, Stephen Breyer is 78 years old; with the next oldest being in their late 60s. That means that statistically, there's a fair chance that within the first term of whoever winds up being president, there could be as many as four appointments which have to be made. If obstructionist Republicans refuse to give the advice and consent of the Senate on all appointments that Hillary Clinton might make, then the Supreme Court might shrink to just five judges through natural causes. The last time that the Supreme Court was that small was in 1807.
Considering that these people make decisions which have implications on how the law is interpreted, in some cases for literally more than a century, then playing politics like this from both sides seems incredibly petty; yet another reason why I think that that US Constitution is a melting pot of insanity.
If we take this as lore, then this has implications down ballot and especially for the one unanswered question which has been hanging around like a bad smell in a house of farts. That is the question of what happens with the currently vacant position of the ninth Justice Of The Supreme Court.
I've run the numbers several times and taken averages across four different news sites and have come to this rough guide to what the Congress is going to look like.
House Of Representatives:
Dem - 193
GOP - 228
Ind - 14
Senate:
Dem - 55
GOP - 45
Firstly this means that Paul Ryan will more than likely retain his job as Speaker Of The House. In many respects he is the unluckiest man in all of American politics because he comes across as being the only sane man in a mad house. As the VP nominee for Mitt Romney in 2012, his own path to the White House became more complicated but that still means that 2020 could be a viable option for him.
The Senate though is where the abundance of insanity really resides and this is where the story of the last Justice Of The Supreme Court takes place.
Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2 of the US Constitution says that:
He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.- Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2, US Constitution, 1789
Maybe not a decade ago but probably twenty years ago, this wouldn't have been a problem but in 2015 with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, in an increasingly toxic political climate, Senate Republicans refused to give assent to any nomination for the Supreme Court that President Obama was going to make; on the basis that he was a lame duck President and that the appointment should be held over for the incoming President whoever they may be.
The Senate is of course perfectly aware of its power under the Constitution and is perfectly legally allowed to withhold its advice and consent if it desires.
That issue has been thrown onto the back burners and was quietly forgotten about until it became obvious that Donald Trump is so toxic that he's not electable. I think that this is probably an example of one of the biggest sunk cost fallacies in political history being played out and should be a herald as to why both the methods deciding who the party nominees are, and the method for deciding who the President is, is so demonstrably idiotic as to be laughable. Except that this is no joke and it isn't funny. The pot of toxic liquid has boiled and now threatens to boil over.
Senator John McCain, expressed the opinion that any Supreme Court nomination that Hillary Clinton would make, would be sight unseen, unacceptable.
http://www.npr.org/2016/10/17/498328520/sen-mccain-says-republicans-will-block-all-court-nominations-if-clinton-wins
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz) said Monday that if Hillary Clinton is elected, Republicans will unite to block anyone she nominates to the Supreme Court.
Speaking on WPHT-AM radio's "Dom Giordano Program" in Philadelphia, McCain pledged to obstruct any Clinton Supreme Court nomination for the current or any future vacancy.
Sen. John McCain speaks to the media, March 16, shortly after President Barack Obama nominated Merrick B. Garland to the Supreme Court. McCain said that the confirmation of the next Justice should occur after the election. Now he vows to block Hillary Clinton's choice if she wins the election.
"I promise you that we will be united against any Supreme Court nominee that Hillary Clinton, if she were president, would put up," he declared.- NPR News, 17th Oct 2016.
This as I see it, leaves only two possible outcomes. Firstly, if Hillary Clinton is elected as President, then whoever she nominates for the Supreme Court will be rejected because Democrats won't have the numbers on the floor of the Senate to give advice and consent. Secondly, if America collectively loses its mind and votes Donald Trump in as President, then the Republicans will find themselves on the receiving end of their own tactics and whoever he nominates for the Supreme Court will be rejected because Republicans won't have the numbers on the floor of the Senate to give advice and consent.
In both scenarios, both side of politics have played the game of obstruction so elegantly, it should come as a surprise to no one that the machine of government has come to a grinding halt. Both sides have come to the conclusion that the other side is worse than hate incarnate and as such, even if someone like Santa Claus or Lady Liberty herself was put forward as the candidate for the last remaining Justice Of The Supreme Court, they still wouldn't be accepted on the advice and consent of the Senate because party politics is overruling good government.
Actually, right there is the reason why Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were ever considered in the Presidential race at all. Both of them purport to represent that great swathe of people who feel as though the Congress isn't capable of doing anything. It would appear that they are right.
I wouldn't be surprised if that last remaining Supreme Court chair ends up being vacant for a considerable amount of time.
Although the justices of the Supreme Court are appointed for life, some of them decide that retirement or resignation is the best decision for them. The worst possible outcome is what happens if any more Supreme Court judges start dying off though.
As it is Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 83 years old, Anthony Kennedy is 80 years old, Stephen Breyer is 78 years old; with the next oldest being in their late 60s. That means that statistically, there's a fair chance that within the first term of whoever winds up being president, there could be as many as four appointments which have to be made. If obstructionist Republicans refuse to give the advice and consent of the Senate on all appointments that Hillary Clinton might make, then the Supreme Court might shrink to just five judges through natural causes. The last time that the Supreme Court was that small was in 1807.
Considering that these people make decisions which have implications on how the law is interpreted, in some cases for literally more than a century, then playing politics like this from both sides seems incredibly petty; yet another reason why I think that that US Constitution is a melting pot of insanity.
October 21, 2016
Horse 2179 - The Election Won't Be Rigged, That's Way Too Hard
Believe me, despite frequent protestations from a certain orange haired individual, the United States' presidential election isn't rigged and there isn't some sort of massive conspiracy to install Hillary Clinton in the White House by the Russians. The election won't be the biggest disaster in the history of the world and there isn't the amount of voter fraud going on, on anything even approaching the sort of scale required to swing the election. Even if you include the case of Florida in 2000, where the chads either did or didn't fall off, that was caused by electoral incompetence rather than deliberate fraud. Never attribute to malice, that which can be attributed to stupidity.
The amount of election rigging to the degree which is being suggested is simply impossible; if anything, voter suppression is going on, particularly in mostly black communities in the south, through Voter ID laws and by lack of provision of adequate polling equipment. That being said, the reason why I can definitely say that they election isn't being rigged by the Russians or the Chinese, from the other side of the world, without doing any research whatsoever, is because of one tremendously obvious reason that has been forgotten by that orange haired individual and that can be summed up in just one word - America.
One of the keys to understanding how the United States works, or continues not to, is that the United States isn't top down Commonwealth in the same way that the United Kingdom is. The United States in principle is a union of fifty states, who mostly don't like each other and who constantly bicker with each other. Those same fifty states retain what is known as a republican form of government; which as far as I can make out, entitles them to retain whatever rights not ceded to the federal government that they can claim and the eternal responsibility to be right nasty pieces of work to each other. Most of the states in the union impose their own income tax in addition to whatever taxation that the federal government might impose and several Supreme Court rulings including White v Texas 1869, confirm that people are citizens of their respective states in addition to being citizens of the United States Of America.
Because America is made up of fifty states, this means that there is not an election to decide who the President will be. Rather, there are fifty elections to decide who that state's Electoral College members will vote for in the real presidential election. I know that I am being quite pedantic here but there is a very good reason for doing so. Those fifty elections are run by the fifty states and those states as republics within the union, have the right to conduct their election in any way that they see fit. In practice, those fifty elections vary wildly from state to state; to the point where the Hank Green from Crash Course, had to make fifty videos to explain how to register to vote in each of fifty states.
On August 9th this year, we had a practical demonstration as to why electronic voting is a fundamentally bad idea. The Australian Bureau Of Statistics blamed the failure of the census website to foreign hackers but it was probably just caused by inadequate testing and the fact that 23 million people all tried to log on at the same time. It showed why having a single centralised place of service would be easier to hack but America doesn't have a single centralised bureau who is responsible for elections. How do you launch a plan to rig fifty elections all at the same time? The logistics for such a plan would be a nightmare.
This gets right at the crux as to why I think that I can say with absolute confidence that there is no rigging of the election. The problem with people who say such a thing, is that clearly they've totally missed the fact that there is not one election but fifty which need to be rigged. A concerted effort to rig fifty elections in the United States, would mean that the entity wanting to rig those elections would firstly have to understand fifty different sets of voting processes and secondly, invent strategies for hacking into those fifty different sets of voting processes. If we bear in mind that not even the federal government in the United States runs the election, then the required machinery needed to rig fifty elections from outside the United States is going to be pretty obvious. In some states, they literally still use mechanical voting machines which were built in the 1920s; so rigging those machines is going to mean a physical presence in polling stations. Unless you can find a lot of sympathetic Americans who will help you, then it's going to be pretty obvious when Sergei turns up to fiddle with the machines. If there is systemic vote rigging going on, then someone will have noticed somewhere that several thousand Russians all mysteriously arrived a week before election day.
I think that the biggest problem for Trump isn't that the election is or isn't being rigged, but that everything that he has said has made him unacceptable to large portions of the population. You win elections by securing the most votes and ironically, suggesting that the election is rigged might cause less of your own supporters to vote because they'd be less confident of a win. If Trump loses, it will be more to do with his own campaign's ineptitude than anything else.
The amount of election rigging to the degree which is being suggested is simply impossible; if anything, voter suppression is going on, particularly in mostly black communities in the south, through Voter ID laws and by lack of provision of adequate polling equipment. That being said, the reason why I can definitely say that they election isn't being rigged by the Russians or the Chinese, from the other side of the world, without doing any research whatsoever, is because of one tremendously obvious reason that has been forgotten by that orange haired individual and that can be summed up in just one word - America.
One of the keys to understanding how the United States works, or continues not to, is that the United States isn't top down Commonwealth in the same way that the United Kingdom is. The United States in principle is a union of fifty states, who mostly don't like each other and who constantly bicker with each other. Those same fifty states retain what is known as a republican form of government; which as far as I can make out, entitles them to retain whatever rights not ceded to the federal government that they can claim and the eternal responsibility to be right nasty pieces of work to each other. Most of the states in the union impose their own income tax in addition to whatever taxation that the federal government might impose and several Supreme Court rulings including White v Texas 1869, confirm that people are citizens of their respective states in addition to being citizens of the United States Of America.
Because America is made up of fifty states, this means that there is not an election to decide who the President will be. Rather, there are fifty elections to decide who that state's Electoral College members will vote for in the real presidential election. I know that I am being quite pedantic here but there is a very good reason for doing so. Those fifty elections are run by the fifty states and those states as republics within the union, have the right to conduct their election in any way that they see fit. In practice, those fifty elections vary wildly from state to state; to the point where the Hank Green from Crash Course, had to make fifty videos to explain how to register to vote in each of fifty states.
On August 9th this year, we had a practical demonstration as to why electronic voting is a fundamentally bad idea. The Australian Bureau Of Statistics blamed the failure of the census website to foreign hackers but it was probably just caused by inadequate testing and the fact that 23 million people all tried to log on at the same time. It showed why having a single centralised place of service would be easier to hack but America doesn't have a single centralised bureau who is responsible for elections. How do you launch a plan to rig fifty elections all at the same time? The logistics for such a plan would be a nightmare.
This gets right at the crux as to why I think that I can say with absolute confidence that there is no rigging of the election. The problem with people who say such a thing, is that clearly they've totally missed the fact that there is not one election but fifty which need to be rigged. A concerted effort to rig fifty elections in the United States, would mean that the entity wanting to rig those elections would firstly have to understand fifty different sets of voting processes and secondly, invent strategies for hacking into those fifty different sets of voting processes. If we bear in mind that not even the federal government in the United States runs the election, then the required machinery needed to rig fifty elections from outside the United States is going to be pretty obvious. In some states, they literally still use mechanical voting machines which were built in the 1920s; so rigging those machines is going to mean a physical presence in polling stations. Unless you can find a lot of sympathetic Americans who will help you, then it's going to be pretty obvious when Sergei turns up to fiddle with the machines. If there is systemic vote rigging going on, then someone will have noticed somewhere that several thousand Russians all mysteriously arrived a week before election day.
I think that the biggest problem for Trump isn't that the election is or isn't being rigged, but that everything that he has said has made him unacceptable to large portions of the population. You win elections by securing the most votes and ironically, suggesting that the election is rigged might cause less of your own supporters to vote because they'd be less confident of a win. If Trump loses, it will be more to do with his own campaign's ineptitude than anything else.
October 20, 2016
Horse 2178 - The Last Of A Dying Breed
One of the things about living in a city which is constantly changing is that the furniture which makes up the civil infrastructure, also changes. Not even a city like Rome which has literally thousand years under the pavement, can claim to remain static for terribly long. Great cities of change like London, Paris and New York do retain airs and graces of the past but they too, change almost imperceptibly. London had a major sweep clean after the Great Fire in 1666 tore through the old city but 450 years later, little if anything remains from that time. New York as a thing has been almost entirely replaced since about 1880 and even Paris' most famous icon, the tower which Eiffel designed for the exposition of 1889, was only supposed to be up for a few years until it was decided that disposing of it was too difficult.
Sydney is a relatively young city and really the only thing which remains from the founding of the city are a few lines on a map which describe where the streets run. Nothing remains of Bennelong's House, nor of the first governor's house and the grandest and oldest of buildings didn't even come about until after there was a gold rush and money started flowing into the colony after it had achieved self government in 1855. So it is with the railway stations as well. The old Sydney Railway Station stands on Regent Street as a kind of forgotten museum piece, the old Rookwood Mortuary Station has been repurposed as a church in Canberra and a lot of the initial railway stations have been torn down and rebuilt. I return to Wynyard Station because of three things which remain from an older time.
Perhaps the most obvious and striking thing left from the original fitout of Wynyard Station are the wooden slat Otis escalators. Apart from two escalators which have not been yet replaced at Town Hall Station (and are slated for destruction in the near future), these are the last deep cut wooden slat escalators left in the world.
Before the refit in the Myer Building on George and Market Streets, there were some cousins in the central escalator chamber in the middle of the building. It used to be fun to clank your way up to the eighth floor and step out into a virtually empty space. The toy department used to sit on the seventh floor but nothing much was up on the eighth except when there was a major store display of something. When those escalators were removed and replaced, it certainly opened up the building and gave it far airier sort of feel but it destroyed the impression that you were in an older style department store which was as permanent a fixture in the social landscape as a bank.
Myer got rid of its wooden slat escalators, Town Hall Station wants to be rid of its and thus Wynyard Station will be the very last in a world which is moving too quickly to care about where it has been.
There are two more things of note here. The first is the cream and two shades of brown tile work that Wynyard received in the 1960s. As far as I can make out, Wynyard got this colour scheme after the Cahill Government decided to poke out the eyes of Sydneysiders in an act of willful shortsightedness when the tram lines were pulled out and Wynyard lost platforms numbers 1 and 2 to a car park.
I imagine that Central"s white, green and yellow scheme which it was given, was part of the set with Town Hall and Wynyard.
Eagle eyed observers and people prepared to walk that little bit further (about ten steps) will notice that behind a set of fire doors, are the older set of tiles that Wynyard would have worn when it was opened in 1932.
I'd seen Wynyard's older roundels in black and white photographs only; never in person and never in colour. Since I was a kid, Wynyard has worn black and white roundels, the 1980s multicoloured line signs, and set of corporate boringness in both blue and now orange. The roundels in the style which all stations in the City Circle used to wear proudly and which only Museum and St James wear now (Town Hall had them for a brief period of time before they were ripped away again), were different colours for each of the various stations around the line. Now I know that Wynyard's roundels were blue and not black.
The surprising thing was that as I was busily snapping away and taking photographs on my phone, I had a member of station staff approach me. I fully expected him to be unhappy but he waxed lyrically about the station and wanted to know if I was from a preservation society or something. It seems that my nerdiness for the built environment is shared by at least some of the general public and he wanted to know if I could get the roundels put back in the station.
He also expressed a lament that the old wooden escalators would be taken away 'soon' but he didn't know when that was going to happen but as he'd already worked out that I was a passenger and not anyone with any power, his lament was more of a good old fashioned whinge.
I'm not some sort of Luddite and automatically think that just because something is old that it must be better (I'm tapping away on an Android device on the train in writing this) but I do think that it is good to keep some old things around because they are aesthetically pleasing. Absolutely I accept the argument that a newer set of escalators would be safer because the combs at either end are smaller and ladies won't get their heels caught in the slats. It is impossible to argue that modern escalators with automatic cut out in case something gets caught in between the slats and the combs is a bad thing. It still doesn't change the fact that these older style escalators, due to their being the last of their kind, are worth preserving and if they continue to do their job, then why not keep them in use? I don't think that the benefits outweigh the expense of replacement when what's currently working, is currently working.
Sydney is a relatively young city and really the only thing which remains from the founding of the city are a few lines on a map which describe where the streets run. Nothing remains of Bennelong's House, nor of the first governor's house and the grandest and oldest of buildings didn't even come about until after there was a gold rush and money started flowing into the colony after it had achieved self government in 1855. So it is with the railway stations as well. The old Sydney Railway Station stands on Regent Street as a kind of forgotten museum piece, the old Rookwood Mortuary Station has been repurposed as a church in Canberra and a lot of the initial railway stations have been torn down and rebuilt. I return to Wynyard Station because of three things which remain from an older time.
Perhaps the most obvious and striking thing left from the original fitout of Wynyard Station are the wooden slat Otis escalators. Apart from two escalators which have not been yet replaced at Town Hall Station (and are slated for destruction in the near future), these are the last deep cut wooden slat escalators left in the world.
Before the refit in the Myer Building on George and Market Streets, there were some cousins in the central escalator chamber in the middle of the building. It used to be fun to clank your way up to the eighth floor and step out into a virtually empty space. The toy department used to sit on the seventh floor but nothing much was up on the eighth except when there was a major store display of something. When those escalators were removed and replaced, it certainly opened up the building and gave it far airier sort of feel but it destroyed the impression that you were in an older style department store which was as permanent a fixture in the social landscape as a bank.
Myer got rid of its wooden slat escalators, Town Hall Station wants to be rid of its and thus Wynyard Station will be the very last in a world which is moving too quickly to care about where it has been.
There are two more things of note here. The first is the cream and two shades of brown tile work that Wynyard received in the 1960s. As far as I can make out, Wynyard got this colour scheme after the Cahill Government decided to poke out the eyes of Sydneysiders in an act of willful shortsightedness when the tram lines were pulled out and Wynyard lost platforms numbers 1 and 2 to a car park.
I imagine that Central"s white, green and yellow scheme which it was given, was part of the set with Town Hall and Wynyard.
Eagle eyed observers and people prepared to walk that little bit further (about ten steps) will notice that behind a set of fire doors, are the older set of tiles that Wynyard would have worn when it was opened in 1932.
I'd seen Wynyard's older roundels in black and white photographs only; never in person and never in colour. Since I was a kid, Wynyard has worn black and white roundels, the 1980s multicoloured line signs, and set of corporate boringness in both blue and now orange. The roundels in the style which all stations in the City Circle used to wear proudly and which only Museum and St James wear now (Town Hall had them for a brief period of time before they were ripped away again), were different colours for each of the various stations around the line. Now I know that Wynyard's roundels were blue and not black.
The surprising thing was that as I was busily snapping away and taking photographs on my phone, I had a member of station staff approach me. I fully expected him to be unhappy but he waxed lyrically about the station and wanted to know if I was from a preservation society or something. It seems that my nerdiness for the built environment is shared by at least some of the general public and he wanted to know if I could get the roundels put back in the station.
He also expressed a lament that the old wooden escalators would be taken away 'soon' but he didn't know when that was going to happen but as he'd already worked out that I was a passenger and not anyone with any power, his lament was more of a good old fashioned whinge.
I'm not some sort of Luddite and automatically think that just because something is old that it must be better (I'm tapping away on an Android device on the train in writing this) but I do think that it is good to keep some old things around because they are aesthetically pleasing. Absolutely I accept the argument that a newer set of escalators would be safer because the combs at either end are smaller and ladies won't get their heels caught in the slats. It is impossible to argue that modern escalators with automatic cut out in case something gets caught in between the slats and the combs is a bad thing. It still doesn't change the fact that these older style escalators, due to their being the last of their kind, are worth preserving and if they continue to do their job, then why not keep them in use? I don't think that the benefits outweigh the expense of replacement when what's currently working, is currently working.
October 19, 2016
Horse 2177 - The House That Smashed Avocado Built
Smashed Avocado inadvertently became the topic of talk-back radio earlier in the week, after a column from the Weekend Australian by demographer Bernard Salt was published. In particular, one of the paragraphs towards the end seems to have attracted a media pile on.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/moralisers-we-need-you/news-story/6bdb24f77572be68330bd306c14ee8a3
But all of this is mere ephemera. It gets worse. I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn't they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.
- Weekend Australian, Bernard Salt, 15th Oct 2016.
I know that Bernard Salt's column in the Weekend Australian was supposed to be making fun of both the self righteous sorts who sneer at young people and of young people themselves but it seems that this column has inadvertently struck a raw nerve here. In making fun of the inner city types who might pay $22 for a grilled smashed avocado sandwich, he's exposed the poignant fact that many young people have been priced out of the housing market altogether and no matter how hard they work, they will never afford a house and be condemned to renting forever.
The actual material in the article is mostly grandstanding and given that it is in the magazine and not the newspaper proper, I think that it's supposed to be satire. Indeed, I did a search to see if I could actually find a smashed avocado sandwich for $22 in Sydney and found nothing.
Foolishly, I went to Twitter and asked for suggestions and was bombarded with candidates including The Gourmand Deli and The Grumpy Baker which are both in Vaucluse, Collier's Sandwich Company which is in Woolloomooloo, Republic Sandwiches & Salads in Darlinghurst and Monty's Sandwich Shop in Bondi Junction, and none of them offered any sandwiches for more than about $12. Clearly this article has been written in the land of hyperbole but not in any suburb in Sydney (though maybe Melbourne might have $22 sandwiches).
There's just something very very hollow about an article accusing young people of being spendthrifts and wastrels from someone who happens to be a partner at KPMG and who got their Master of Arts degree from Monash University in the days of Whitlam's free tertiary education and then advises those same young people to stop indulging in something which a) doesn't exist to b) solve a problem which they never caused.
Taken to the only conclusion which can be reached here, maybe if these young people worked harder on developing time travel to 1974 instead of working away in jobs which pay less than at any stage since real wages peaked in 1978, then maybe they could afford houses which have risen in price from four times the yearly average salary to more than ten times the yearly average salary, in the same period.
I mean quite clearly the problem here isn't falling wages, or university education which governments want to raise to the cost of six figures, or the fact that manufacturing has been sent off shore; clearly the problem in Australia is breakfast.
Who are these young people who think that paying $22 for a smashed avocado sandwich is a good idea anyway? It's probably not the sort of young people who have been saddled with student loans, or students for that matter and it's almost certainly not those people who live in the scum western suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne. The young people who are likely to be in the sorts of suburbs where you are going to find a $22 for a smashed avocado sandwich, are the young people who already live there; presumable if they already live there, they're not exactly short of money in the first place.
Economic fortune, especially in spread out cities like Sydney or Melbourne, is one of the biggest self sorting systems that exists. Because people's incomes tend to dictate where they live more than any other factor, it means that places where we live are becoming increasingly filled with similar people who earn roughly the same incomes as we do. If the $22 smashed avocado sandwich exists (which I doubt), then it's going to be sold at a sandwich shop which is frequented with people from roughly the same socioeconomic group that Bernard Salt comes from.
"How can young people afford to eat like this?" Because they come from phenomenally wealthy backgrounds; money isn't an issue for them. "Shouldn't they be economising by eating at home?" Well, why should they? They come from phenomenally wealthy backgrounds; money isn't an issue for them.
The thing that the rest of the media has missed, Including the ABC, is rather obvious fact that this was published in the Weekend Australian, which by demographic has an older readership than all the tabloids and indeed than the Fairfax mastheads of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Mr Salt's column appeared in a publication which is really only being kept alive because it is Rupert's own little baby and therefore the doyenne of News Corp, and because it's read by the political circle in Canberra in lieu of any other proper journalism. The Oz frequently reads like a wish list from the Liberal Party's donors and it basically spends its whole editorial life in singing to the choir on the conservative authoritarian right.
Bernard Salt can afford to sneer at young people because if he's regularly going to a sandwich shop which can put a smashed avocado sandwich on the menu for $22, then obviously he's doing all right; thank you very much. The irony is that the newspaper that he writes for, made a concerted campaign to cut penalty rates on Sundays; which would have reduced the wages of the very people who are bringing him overpriced sandwiches. How can young people afford to eat like this when you want to pay them less?
The lesson here is for young people. Give up bothering to raise the funds to put towards a deposit on a house. All of this is mere ephemera. It gets worse.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/moralisers-we-need-you/news-story/6bdb24f77572be68330bd306c14ee8a3
But all of this is mere ephemera. It gets worse. I have seen young people order smashed avocado with crumbled feta on five-grain toasted bread at $22 a pop and more. I can afford to eat this for lunch because I am middle-aged and have raised my family. But how can young people afford to eat like this? Shouldn't they be economising by eating at home? How often are they eating out? Twenty-two dollars several times a week could go towards a deposit on a house.
- Weekend Australian, Bernard Salt, 15th Oct 2016.
I know that Bernard Salt's column in the Weekend Australian was supposed to be making fun of both the self righteous sorts who sneer at young people and of young people themselves but it seems that this column has inadvertently struck a raw nerve here. In making fun of the inner city types who might pay $22 for a grilled smashed avocado sandwich, he's exposed the poignant fact that many young people have been priced out of the housing market altogether and no matter how hard they work, they will never afford a house and be condemned to renting forever.
The actual material in the article is mostly grandstanding and given that it is in the magazine and not the newspaper proper, I think that it's supposed to be satire. Indeed, I did a search to see if I could actually find a smashed avocado sandwich for $22 in Sydney and found nothing.
Foolishly, I went to Twitter and asked for suggestions and was bombarded with candidates including The Gourmand Deli and The Grumpy Baker which are both in Vaucluse, Collier's Sandwich Company which is in Woolloomooloo, Republic Sandwiches & Salads in Darlinghurst and Monty's Sandwich Shop in Bondi Junction, and none of them offered any sandwiches for more than about $12. Clearly this article has been written in the land of hyperbole but not in any suburb in Sydney (though maybe Melbourne might have $22 sandwiches).
There's just something very very hollow about an article accusing young people of being spendthrifts and wastrels from someone who happens to be a partner at KPMG and who got their Master of Arts degree from Monash University in the days of Whitlam's free tertiary education and then advises those same young people to stop indulging in something which a) doesn't exist to b) solve a problem which they never caused.
Taken to the only conclusion which can be reached here, maybe if these young people worked harder on developing time travel to 1974 instead of working away in jobs which pay less than at any stage since real wages peaked in 1978, then maybe they could afford houses which have risen in price from four times the yearly average salary to more than ten times the yearly average salary, in the same period.
I mean quite clearly the problem here isn't falling wages, or university education which governments want to raise to the cost of six figures, or the fact that manufacturing has been sent off shore; clearly the problem in Australia is breakfast.
Who are these young people who think that paying $22 for a smashed avocado sandwich is a good idea anyway? It's probably not the sort of young people who have been saddled with student loans, or students for that matter and it's almost certainly not those people who live in the scum western suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne. The young people who are likely to be in the sorts of suburbs where you are going to find a $22 for a smashed avocado sandwich, are the young people who already live there; presumable if they already live there, they're not exactly short of money in the first place.
Economic fortune, especially in spread out cities like Sydney or Melbourne, is one of the biggest self sorting systems that exists. Because people's incomes tend to dictate where they live more than any other factor, it means that places where we live are becoming increasingly filled with similar people who earn roughly the same incomes as we do. If the $22 smashed avocado sandwich exists (which I doubt), then it's going to be sold at a sandwich shop which is frequented with people from roughly the same socioeconomic group that Bernard Salt comes from.
"How can young people afford to eat like this?" Because they come from phenomenally wealthy backgrounds; money isn't an issue for them. "Shouldn't they be economising by eating at home?" Well, why should they? They come from phenomenally wealthy backgrounds; money isn't an issue for them.
The thing that the rest of the media has missed, Including the ABC, is rather obvious fact that this was published in the Weekend Australian, which by demographic has an older readership than all the tabloids and indeed than the Fairfax mastheads of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Mr Salt's column appeared in a publication which is really only being kept alive because it is Rupert's own little baby and therefore the doyenne of News Corp, and because it's read by the political circle in Canberra in lieu of any other proper journalism. The Oz frequently reads like a wish list from the Liberal Party's donors and it basically spends its whole editorial life in singing to the choir on the conservative authoritarian right.
Bernard Salt can afford to sneer at young people because if he's regularly going to a sandwich shop which can put a smashed avocado sandwich on the menu for $22, then obviously he's doing all right; thank you very much. The irony is that the newspaper that he writes for, made a concerted campaign to cut penalty rates on Sundays; which would have reduced the wages of the very people who are bringing him overpriced sandwiches. How can young people afford to eat like this when you want to pay them less?
The lesson here is for young people. Give up bothering to raise the funds to put towards a deposit on a house. All of this is mere ephemera. It gets worse.
October 18, 2016
Horse 2176 - Rethinking Godzilla In The Cold Light Of History
It's hard to believe but it's been a little over 22 years since that rainy Sunday in October when "Gentleman" Jim Richards called the motorsport fans of Australia a "pack of nasties*" after winning the Bathurst 1000 in a car which not less than ten minutes earlier, he'd crashed into a wall. Of course this has to be put into perspective when you realise that:
a) The car which had finished second had actually crossed the finish line instead of crashing into a wall.
b) The car which had finished second was a Ford; which is important in a tribal sport like motor racing.
c) The Nissan GTR was seen as being even more cheatery that the Ford Sierra Cosworth because it was four wheel drive as well as being turbocharged.
d) Jim Richards had defected from the Holden Dealer Team to drive a BMW and then a Nissan; which is kind of extra specially cheatery.
e) Jim Richards was a New Zealander, which just made it all worse.
Let's back the whole thing up a bit and look at this.
In 1984, Australia was running a set of Touring Car regulations which took highly modified production cars and pitted them against each other. The problem was that Ford Motor Company of Australia had stopped selling the V8 Falcon part way through XE and there was no V8 XF Falcon. People who were running Fords complained that there would be a day coming soon when the regulations would render the Holden Commodore as top dog because there was no Ford counterpart to the Holden V8. From what I can gather, Ford competitors met with the Confederation Of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) looked what they could do about the problem and still retain a production based Touring Car category as the premier category of motor sport in Australia; they found it in the FIAs new set of regulations which became known as Group A.
Group A was adopted across Europe and Asia and quickly became the default Touring Car category in the world.
This also allowed Australian competitors to buy cars from overseas; this meant that the Volvo 240T, Jaguar XJS, Rover 3500, BMW 635i and later M3, Ford Mustang and later Sierra, and Nissan Skyline GTS-R started to appear.
Something of a horsepower arms race began with firstly the Rover 3500 and the BMW M3 being the weapons of choice in Europe and then as people learned how to turn the dials of turbocharging up harder and harder, the Sierra became the absolute capital weapon.
Nissan after running their HR31 Skyline GTS-R to some success but never outright victory in anything, went away and read the rulebook carefully and then designed the R32 Skyline GTR to the letter of what the law would allow. In consequence, unlike the Commodore, Sierra or M3 which were derivations of road cars which went racing, the Skyline GTR was a race car which had had 5000 examples built for the road. It perfectly met the design brief and promptly began winning races around the world; to such a degree that the various motorsport confederations across Europe, Asia and eventually Australia, wrote new rules to exclude the Skyline GTR and it acquired the mystique and the moniker of "Godzilla".
That's the short story of motorsport twenty and a bit years ago but it doesn't quite tell the complete story. The R32 Skyline GTR did win the Bathurst 1000 twice, the Spa 24 Hours once and a record which is always totted out that it won 29 of 29 races in the Japan Touring Car Championship that it was entered in.
I'll speak about Australia first because that's where I live. If you look through the results of the Australian Touring Car Championship for the period, you find that the Skyline GTR had two circuits on which it always consistently failed. The first was Lakeside in Queensland and the other was Amaroo Park in Sydney. Both of these circuits were smaller and tighter than others in the country and the car which consistently beat the Skyline GTR on these circuits was the BMW M3. This was when the M3 was still a 2.5L motor car; which meant that it was physically smaller and therefore nimbler than the competition that it faced. On larger circuits with longer straights, the Skyline GTR could out power other cars and its four wheel drive advantage meant that it could transfer that power to the road better than a Sierra or Commodore could. However, the BMW M3 being a physically smaller thing, could turn tighter and would point more accurately in corners than the Skyline GTR ever could.
For 1992, the Skyline GTR was knobbled with a weight penalty and so it was brought back to the field a little bit but it was still kinder on tyres and as such, won races because tyre performance never dropped off in the same way as it did for other cars.
It's Australian record is that the car arrived in 1990 far too late to have an impact and then when it faced the endurance races, it broke because it was still too new and fragile. In 1991 and 1992 when it won the Australian Touring Car Championship, it was dominant and on the two occasions that it won Bathurst, it was very good but not quite so impregnable that it couldn't be beaten. If the 1992 Bathurst 1000 had gone the distance, then it absolutely would not have won.
In mid 1992, the two big manufacturers in Australia basically conspired to get rid of Godzilla and a set of regulations were developed to kill it off. In 1993 the V8 Supercars regulations came into effect and so the Skyline GTR as far as Australia was concerned was consigned to history.
Therein lies the bigger story. The only place that the Skyline GTR ever faced any real competition was Australia. The European Touring Car Championship was disbanded at the end of 1988; the DTM had changed to a new formula in 1990 and the British Touring Car Championship was run n to a two litre formula from 1991 onwards.
In its native Japan, the R32 Skyline GTR won all 29 of 29 races that it competed in, in the Japanese Touring Car Championship from 1989 to 1993. This very much betrays the fact that it only faced underfunded Ford Sierras in 1989 and the odd one in 1990, and for 1991, 1992 & 1993, it was the only turbocharged car competing; with its opposition being the occasional BMW M3 at 2.5L and 1.6L Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas. If a car which was turbocharged, four wheel drive and not quite double the engine capacity of its competitors couldn't win every single time, then you'd have to assume that there'd been torrential rain.
Actually on that note, when Gibson Motorsport who had run the Skyline GTRs applied to race in the Fuji 500 in 1992, they were denied entry with no explanation given. One can only assume that the Japanese Calsonic team objected because they knew that they be wiped off the floor.
The other record which is waved around is the Skyline GTR's win in the 1991 Spa 24 Hour race. Again, it was the only turbocharged Group A car which had been entered and it's opposition came from some Porsche Carrera 2s, running 3.6L normally aspirated non-turbocharged engines and built to production car Procar Division 4 regulations. There was such a disparity in performance as to be utterly laughable.
The Nissan Skyline GTR R32's record is impressive but when you give it a deeper look, its mainly because the serious competitors which could have faced it, had already left before it arrived. The truest test came in Japan when the R33 came along and eventually as Japan morphed it's premier category into the GT500 class of the Japan Grand Touring Championship, Toyota and Honda both found ways to beat it. It certainly deserves the praise that it gets but as with so many things, context is important.
*not the real word.
a) The car which had finished second had actually crossed the finish line instead of crashing into a wall.
b) The car which had finished second was a Ford; which is important in a tribal sport like motor racing.
c) The Nissan GTR was seen as being even more cheatery that the Ford Sierra Cosworth because it was four wheel drive as well as being turbocharged.
d) Jim Richards had defected from the Holden Dealer Team to drive a BMW and then a Nissan; which is kind of extra specially cheatery.
e) Jim Richards was a New Zealander, which just made it all worse.
Let's back the whole thing up a bit and look at this.
In 1984, Australia was running a set of Touring Car regulations which took highly modified production cars and pitted them against each other. The problem was that Ford Motor Company of Australia had stopped selling the V8 Falcon part way through XE and there was no V8 XF Falcon. People who were running Fords complained that there would be a day coming soon when the regulations would render the Holden Commodore as top dog because there was no Ford counterpart to the Holden V8. From what I can gather, Ford competitors met with the Confederation Of Australian Motor Sport (CAMS) looked what they could do about the problem and still retain a production based Touring Car category as the premier category of motor sport in Australia; they found it in the FIAs new set of regulations which became known as Group A.
Group A was adopted across Europe and Asia and quickly became the default Touring Car category in the world.
This also allowed Australian competitors to buy cars from overseas; this meant that the Volvo 240T, Jaguar XJS, Rover 3500, BMW 635i and later M3, Ford Mustang and later Sierra, and Nissan Skyline GTS-R started to appear.
Something of a horsepower arms race began with firstly the Rover 3500 and the BMW M3 being the weapons of choice in Europe and then as people learned how to turn the dials of turbocharging up harder and harder, the Sierra became the absolute capital weapon.
Nissan after running their HR31 Skyline GTS-R to some success but never outright victory in anything, went away and read the rulebook carefully and then designed the R32 Skyline GTR to the letter of what the law would allow. In consequence, unlike the Commodore, Sierra or M3 which were derivations of road cars which went racing, the Skyline GTR was a race car which had had 5000 examples built for the road. It perfectly met the design brief and promptly began winning races around the world; to such a degree that the various motorsport confederations across Europe, Asia and eventually Australia, wrote new rules to exclude the Skyline GTR and it acquired the mystique and the moniker of "Godzilla".
That's the short story of motorsport twenty and a bit years ago but it doesn't quite tell the complete story. The R32 Skyline GTR did win the Bathurst 1000 twice, the Spa 24 Hours once and a record which is always totted out that it won 29 of 29 races in the Japan Touring Car Championship that it was entered in.
I'll speak about Australia first because that's where I live. If you look through the results of the Australian Touring Car Championship for the period, you find that the Skyline GTR had two circuits on which it always consistently failed. The first was Lakeside in Queensland and the other was Amaroo Park in Sydney. Both of these circuits were smaller and tighter than others in the country and the car which consistently beat the Skyline GTR on these circuits was the BMW M3. This was when the M3 was still a 2.5L motor car; which meant that it was physically smaller and therefore nimbler than the competition that it faced. On larger circuits with longer straights, the Skyline GTR could out power other cars and its four wheel drive advantage meant that it could transfer that power to the road better than a Sierra or Commodore could. However, the BMW M3 being a physically smaller thing, could turn tighter and would point more accurately in corners than the Skyline GTR ever could.
For 1992, the Skyline GTR was knobbled with a weight penalty and so it was brought back to the field a little bit but it was still kinder on tyres and as such, won races because tyre performance never dropped off in the same way as it did for other cars.
It's Australian record is that the car arrived in 1990 far too late to have an impact and then when it faced the endurance races, it broke because it was still too new and fragile. In 1991 and 1992 when it won the Australian Touring Car Championship, it was dominant and on the two occasions that it won Bathurst, it was very good but not quite so impregnable that it couldn't be beaten. If the 1992 Bathurst 1000 had gone the distance, then it absolutely would not have won.
In mid 1992, the two big manufacturers in Australia basically conspired to get rid of Godzilla and a set of regulations were developed to kill it off. In 1993 the V8 Supercars regulations came into effect and so the Skyline GTR as far as Australia was concerned was consigned to history.
Therein lies the bigger story. The only place that the Skyline GTR ever faced any real competition was Australia. The European Touring Car Championship was disbanded at the end of 1988; the DTM had changed to a new formula in 1990 and the British Touring Car Championship was run n to a two litre formula from 1991 onwards.
In its native Japan, the R32 Skyline GTR won all 29 of 29 races that it competed in, in the Japanese Touring Car Championship from 1989 to 1993. This very much betrays the fact that it only faced underfunded Ford Sierras in 1989 and the odd one in 1990, and for 1991, 1992 & 1993, it was the only turbocharged car competing; with its opposition being the occasional BMW M3 at 2.5L and 1.6L Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas. If a car which was turbocharged, four wheel drive and not quite double the engine capacity of its competitors couldn't win every single time, then you'd have to assume that there'd been torrential rain.
Actually on that note, when Gibson Motorsport who had run the Skyline GTRs applied to race in the Fuji 500 in 1992, they were denied entry with no explanation given. One can only assume that the Japanese Calsonic team objected because they knew that they be wiped off the floor.
The other record which is waved around is the Skyline GTR's win in the 1991 Spa 24 Hour race. Again, it was the only turbocharged Group A car which had been entered and it's opposition came from some Porsche Carrera 2s, running 3.6L normally aspirated non-turbocharged engines and built to production car Procar Division 4 regulations. There was such a disparity in performance as to be utterly laughable.
The Nissan Skyline GTR R32's record is impressive but when you give it a deeper look, its mainly because the serious competitors which could have faced it, had already left before it arrived. The truest test came in Japan when the R33 came along and eventually as Japan morphed it's premier category into the GT500 class of the Japan Grand Touring Championship, Toyota and Honda both found ways to beat it. It certainly deserves the praise that it gets but as with so many things, context is important.
*not the real word.
October 17, 2016
Horse 2175 - Predicting The Electoral College Result
I am probably so late to the party that people are already filing for the exits and wondering about who's going to drive them home before the headache hits but I'm going to make the most obvious prediction in the world and say that Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States.
If you set aside everything that Donald Trump has said and done over the last year and a half and also discount the fact that Hillary Clinton is the first female nominee of a major political party in America; even if you ignore both candidates entirely and assume that the election was between a tin of baked beans and a tin of spaghetti, then the way that this election will turn out well be entirely expected.
The way that the United States elects a President is via a method which is so arcane and utterly ridiculous that it has been copied by precisely zero other countries. The Electoral College awards one vote for every seat in the Congress, plus three extra votes for D.C. which it would have had if it had been a state; bringing the total number of Electoral College votes to 538 with 270 being required to win. Those Electoral College votes are then allocated to the states to decide how to apportion them but most states in the union award them on a winner takes all basis; thus for the vast majority of states, polling companies only need know who will win the state and so building predictive maps is relatively easy.
In 2016, without even looking at the map as I write this, most of the blue states are on the east and west coast, with outliers like Colorado and New Mexico also being blue. Most of the states in the middle are red and have been ever since the last seismic shift in American politics, which happened after the Southern Democratic Party imploded. Most of the so called "flyover" states which remain socially conservative, vote Republican and the only truly strangely swinging state is Florida which blinks red and blue like a mad thing.
Thus, if you look at the predictive Electoral College map for the 2016 election, it looks broadly the same as 2012 and 2008, which is when Obama was elected. Usually the next election after a President has sat two terms is far more open but on this occasion, even if you completely ignore both candidates entirely, what we're left with is an Electoral College map which basically describes the numbers of rusted on voters in America.
These three maps tell the most telling story of all:
Really apart from the change that each state gets in terms of Electoral College votes, and the fact that Indiana reverted to being a red state in 2012, then rest of the state of play is unchanged.
The United States doesn't have either compulsory voting nor preferential voting, though some states are beginning to toy with the idea of the latter. This means that from an Australian perspective, the United States' voting system looks like one giant effort to overcome laziness by the major parties to get people out of their houses to vote; rather than the begrudging masses in Australia who must give their consent to whomever wants to rule them.
Consequently, this election which will probably have a far lower turnout than either 2012 or 2008, will more than likely send Hillary Clinton to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue simply because that's the way that the rusted on voters will play out. Donald Trump on the other hand has been so offensive to people even within the party upon whose ticket he is running, that they just won't even bother to show up on polling day.
This has severe implications down ballot, with the Republicans fearing that apathy will rage so fiercely that Democrats will win races for both the House and Senate and thus take control of both. If this is the case then the passage of bills through the Congress will be far easier than the obstructionist "Do Nothing" Congress has been for the past eight years; which is ironic considering that a technocratic Hillary Clinton will have got more done than Obama who had a broader vision about what he wanted to achieve. Therein lies the problem.
With factions within the Republican Party splintering off such as the Tea Party, coupled with the total chaos which the global financial crisis wrought, this opened the door wide for a demagogue like Trump to waltz on in and hijack the nomination; which is precisely what happened. Trump represents a disaffected America but is personally a liability; so the resulting Electoral College map will basically be made up of all the states which the parties would have naturally won anyway, with no states being inspired enough to flip from blue to red. Thus the map looks kind of like it has done since 2008.
Presumably if someone like Marco Rubio or Speaker of the House Paul Ryan had won the nomination, then the trajectory from the end of the party convention would have been to try and broaden the voting base. Trump's strategy, if there is indeed such a thing (which I seriously doubt), has been about suring up the existing core of voters who would have voted for him anyway. He might very well pick up 48% of the vote nationwide but he has done nothing about flipping over those states which he needs to go from blue to red in order to swing the Electoral College; from the perspective of an election strategist, that's pure idiocy.
I think that the polls have more or less solidified at this stage and barring the Republican National Committee finding some clause to eject Trump from the ticket, or Trump resigning in a pique of rage, then I think that the results will remain identical to how they stand now.
If you set aside everything that Donald Trump has said and done over the last year and a half and also discount the fact that Hillary Clinton is the first female nominee of a major political party in America; even if you ignore both candidates entirely and assume that the election was between a tin of baked beans and a tin of spaghetti, then the way that this election will turn out well be entirely expected.
The way that the United States elects a President is via a method which is so arcane and utterly ridiculous that it has been copied by precisely zero other countries. The Electoral College awards one vote for every seat in the Congress, plus three extra votes for D.C. which it would have had if it had been a state; bringing the total number of Electoral College votes to 538 with 270 being required to win. Those Electoral College votes are then allocated to the states to decide how to apportion them but most states in the union award them on a winner takes all basis; thus for the vast majority of states, polling companies only need know who will win the state and so building predictive maps is relatively easy.
In 2016, without even looking at the map as I write this, most of the blue states are on the east and west coast, with outliers like Colorado and New Mexico also being blue. Most of the states in the middle are red and have been ever since the last seismic shift in American politics, which happened after the Southern Democratic Party imploded. Most of the so called "flyover" states which remain socially conservative, vote Republican and the only truly strangely swinging state is Florida which blinks red and blue like a mad thing.
Thus, if you look at the predictive Electoral College map for the 2016 election, it looks broadly the same as 2012 and 2008, which is when Obama was elected. Usually the next election after a President has sat two terms is far more open but on this occasion, even if you completely ignore both candidates entirely, what we're left with is an Electoral College map which basically describes the numbers of rusted on voters in America.
These three maps tell the most telling story of all:
- Electoral College Results 2008
- Electoral College Results 2012
- Predicted Electoral College 2016
Really apart from the change that each state gets in terms of Electoral College votes, and the fact that Indiana reverted to being a red state in 2012, then rest of the state of play is unchanged.
The United States doesn't have either compulsory voting nor preferential voting, though some states are beginning to toy with the idea of the latter. This means that from an Australian perspective, the United States' voting system looks like one giant effort to overcome laziness by the major parties to get people out of their houses to vote; rather than the begrudging masses in Australia who must give their consent to whomever wants to rule them.
Consequently, this election which will probably have a far lower turnout than either 2012 or 2008, will more than likely send Hillary Clinton to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue simply because that's the way that the rusted on voters will play out. Donald Trump on the other hand has been so offensive to people even within the party upon whose ticket he is running, that they just won't even bother to show up on polling day.
This has severe implications down ballot, with the Republicans fearing that apathy will rage so fiercely that Democrats will win races for both the House and Senate and thus take control of both. If this is the case then the passage of bills through the Congress will be far easier than the obstructionist "Do Nothing" Congress has been for the past eight years; which is ironic considering that a technocratic Hillary Clinton will have got more done than Obama who had a broader vision about what he wanted to achieve. Therein lies the problem.
With factions within the Republican Party splintering off such as the Tea Party, coupled with the total chaos which the global financial crisis wrought, this opened the door wide for a demagogue like Trump to waltz on in and hijack the nomination; which is precisely what happened. Trump represents a disaffected America but is personally a liability; so the resulting Electoral College map will basically be made up of all the states which the parties would have naturally won anyway, with no states being inspired enough to flip from blue to red. Thus the map looks kind of like it has done since 2008.
Presumably if someone like Marco Rubio or Speaker of the House Paul Ryan had won the nomination, then the trajectory from the end of the party convention would have been to try and broaden the voting base. Trump's strategy, if there is indeed such a thing (which I seriously doubt), has been about suring up the existing core of voters who would have voted for him anyway. He might very well pick up 48% of the vote nationwide but he has done nothing about flipping over those states which he needs to go from blue to red in order to swing the Electoral College; from the perspective of an election strategist, that's pure idiocy.
I think that the polls have more or less solidified at this stage and barring the Republican National Committee finding some clause to eject Trump from the ticket, or Trump resigning in a pique of rage, then I think that the results will remain identical to how they stand now.
Clinton 343 def. Trump 195.
October 14, 2016
Horse 2174 - Tales of The Unthinking Unmannered
Dear Manspreaders,
You know who you are and what you are doing. As a fellow owner of similar equipment, I can tell you from personal experience that unless you have some sort of medical problem, there is no need for this course of action. Nor is there really any need for extreme protection such as heat shielding or physical impact guards because the likelihood of encountering either welding flames or fast moving objects like cricket balls doing ninety miles per hour, is so close to nil as to be negligible. This is the 06:52 train to the City and the North Shore; not a train carrying molten steel from Port Kembla, nor does it pass through Silly Mid-On at the SCG.
I happened to be stuck between two behemoths engaging in manspreading on the morning train to the city and I honestly felt as if I'd accidentally sat in the middle of some sort of gravitational rip in the cosmos. It was as though my internal organs were occupying hammer space and my knees were being clamped together in a workbench vice. I think that I was close to having both of my knees shatter due to compression stress and most of my internal organs spontaneously liquify.
Meanwhile the two cousins of Goliath were blissfully unaware that their manspreading was playing havoc with the local laws of the space time continuum and that we were seriously in danger of causing a temporal rift in the fabric of the universe. I suspect that this phenomenon could be harnessed in some way and could form the basis of intergalactic travel in Star Trek because I'm sure that this must be something similar to a warp drive.
Maybe on those older style seats which are just benches, there is an excuse for manspreading but on a newer style seat, there are three clearly demarcated spaces. Just like when you are at Aldi and get to slam down the divisional marker to show where your shopping ends, nobody else should let their person invade your territory. In biblical times there were admonitions not to move ancient boundary stones and likewise, the boundaries between people's space on a train are clearly delineated. As far as I'm concerned, there is no real excuse for unilateral annexation of the most serene independent republic of commuter space.
To some degree I can forgive the accidental noise pollution which spills out from people's headphones and mobile phone conversations. In a quiet place like a train, there will invariably be some bleed of sound going on; that also entitles other passengers to listen in on those conversations. That also means that I will suffer the chorus of "all the single lettuce" for what has to be at least the thousandth time in two years but the sensation of having my knees clash because people on both sides are trying to point on knee at Queensland and the other at Victoria is both unpleasant and disturbing.
What's so valuable about these people's equipment that they need that sort of ventilation anyway? It's not like the next heir of the British Crown will hail from their loins; nor is it likely that their offspring will be the future President Of The United States, so if not, what then, and whyfor?
<><><><><>
Dear Queuers,
I know that y'all are in a hurry to get on the bus or train but d'ya really need to be literally that pushy about it?
At Wynyard Station of an afternoon when a million people all want to leave the city simultaneously, as soon as those doors open, the platforms resemble something akin to what you might see at Myer on the morning of the Boxing Day sales. As soon as those doors open, great hordes of impatient commuters all try to barge their way on, as if the defences of a ship of the line have been breached. A weak point in a wall opens up and the charge of the Platform 3 Army begins.
I was in Mosman the other day and just about to get on the bus. The door had opened and I could see that someone with a pram was trying to get off and so, like a sane person, I stood to the side. Almost immediately, I felt two hands in my back, pushing me forwards in an effort to get me to move forward. I looked behind me and saw that it was an older lady who had pushed me. Of all the people in the world who I would expect, someone with a pension card and purple hair isn't one of them.
Or maybe I should.
There is apparently an age where you no longer think that manners apply to you any more. At some point, after a lifetime of being told to respect your elders and make way for them, you then stop running out of elders and so I guess that a sense of entitlement must creep in. Unless being nice to people has become a habit, I can only assume that the pretense of being nice must just fall by the wayside and that old people are just children who have been around a really long time.
The thing about a normal bus, is that because they don't have raised platforms in the same way that a train or tram might do, then the distance from the door to the pavement can often be quite large. That's not a problem for a spritely and tallish gent like myself but if you happen to be an elderly person who is trying to get off the bus, hence the reason why I stood to the side in the first place, then this poses a very real and present danger of falling. That might not be a problem for a four year old, a teenager, a chap of a few decades advanced like myself but having a fall is a serious problem for elderly people who are more fragile and brittle.
That's what I find so utterly bizarre about this. I imagine that elderly people might have developed sympathy or at very least a degree of imagination to predict that someone like them has similar issues to them. Maybe it's precisely because I am a white male aged 25-65 that I'm perceived as being thoughtless but clearly that's not actually the case if I'm standing to the side to allow others to alight the bus.
<><><><><>
I'm increasingly becoming aware that the very rich in society don't care about manners because they don't see other people as being worthy; the poorest people in society don't seem to care about manners because let's be honest, life's hard enough without having to worry about that sort of thing, or it could be that they simply don't care; which leaves the only people who do care about manners and being nice and respectful to other people, as the middle class who are trying to push upwards and or don't want to be seen as being common.
I don't expect people to say 'please' and 'thank you' because I think that that is a stretch beyond most people's ability to grease the machinery of social interaction these days and so I have to concede that maybe my expectation that people at least allow others to move through space, is probably also increasingly archaic. Maybe I should just accept the fact that we now live in a world of unthinking unmannered brutes, who can either be clad in a blue singlet or blue rinse.
You know who you are and what you are doing. As a fellow owner of similar equipment, I can tell you from personal experience that unless you have some sort of medical problem, there is no need for this course of action. Nor is there really any need for extreme protection such as heat shielding or physical impact guards because the likelihood of encountering either welding flames or fast moving objects like cricket balls doing ninety miles per hour, is so close to nil as to be negligible. This is the 06:52 train to the City and the North Shore; not a train carrying molten steel from Port Kembla, nor does it pass through Silly Mid-On at the SCG.
I happened to be stuck between two behemoths engaging in manspreading on the morning train to the city and I honestly felt as if I'd accidentally sat in the middle of some sort of gravitational rip in the cosmos. It was as though my internal organs were occupying hammer space and my knees were being clamped together in a workbench vice. I think that I was close to having both of my knees shatter due to compression stress and most of my internal organs spontaneously liquify.
Meanwhile the two cousins of Goliath were blissfully unaware that their manspreading was playing havoc with the local laws of the space time continuum and that we were seriously in danger of causing a temporal rift in the fabric of the universe. I suspect that this phenomenon could be harnessed in some way and could form the basis of intergalactic travel in Star Trek because I'm sure that this must be something similar to a warp drive.
Maybe on those older style seats which are just benches, there is an excuse for manspreading but on a newer style seat, there are three clearly demarcated spaces. Just like when you are at Aldi and get to slam down the divisional marker to show where your shopping ends, nobody else should let their person invade your territory. In biblical times there were admonitions not to move ancient boundary stones and likewise, the boundaries between people's space on a train are clearly delineated. As far as I'm concerned, there is no real excuse for unilateral annexation of the most serene independent republic of commuter space.
To some degree I can forgive the accidental noise pollution which spills out from people's headphones and mobile phone conversations. In a quiet place like a train, there will invariably be some bleed of sound going on; that also entitles other passengers to listen in on those conversations. That also means that I will suffer the chorus of "all the single lettuce" for what has to be at least the thousandth time in two years but the sensation of having my knees clash because people on both sides are trying to point on knee at Queensland and the other at Victoria is both unpleasant and disturbing.
What's so valuable about these people's equipment that they need that sort of ventilation anyway? It's not like the next heir of the British Crown will hail from their loins; nor is it likely that their offspring will be the future President Of The United States, so if not, what then, and whyfor?
<><><><><>
Dear Queuers,
I know that y'all are in a hurry to get on the bus or train but d'ya really need to be literally that pushy about it?
At Wynyard Station of an afternoon when a million people all want to leave the city simultaneously, as soon as those doors open, the platforms resemble something akin to what you might see at Myer on the morning of the Boxing Day sales. As soon as those doors open, great hordes of impatient commuters all try to barge their way on, as if the defences of a ship of the line have been breached. A weak point in a wall opens up and the charge of the Platform 3 Army begins.
I was in Mosman the other day and just about to get on the bus. The door had opened and I could see that someone with a pram was trying to get off and so, like a sane person, I stood to the side. Almost immediately, I felt two hands in my back, pushing me forwards in an effort to get me to move forward. I looked behind me and saw that it was an older lady who had pushed me. Of all the people in the world who I would expect, someone with a pension card and purple hair isn't one of them.
Or maybe I should.
There is apparently an age where you no longer think that manners apply to you any more. At some point, after a lifetime of being told to respect your elders and make way for them, you then stop running out of elders and so I guess that a sense of entitlement must creep in. Unless being nice to people has become a habit, I can only assume that the pretense of being nice must just fall by the wayside and that old people are just children who have been around a really long time.
The thing about a normal bus, is that because they don't have raised platforms in the same way that a train or tram might do, then the distance from the door to the pavement can often be quite large. That's not a problem for a spritely and tallish gent like myself but if you happen to be an elderly person who is trying to get off the bus, hence the reason why I stood to the side in the first place, then this poses a very real and present danger of falling. That might not be a problem for a four year old, a teenager, a chap of a few decades advanced like myself but having a fall is a serious problem for elderly people who are more fragile and brittle.
That's what I find so utterly bizarre about this. I imagine that elderly people might have developed sympathy or at very least a degree of imagination to predict that someone like them has similar issues to them. Maybe it's precisely because I am a white male aged 25-65 that I'm perceived as being thoughtless but clearly that's not actually the case if I'm standing to the side to allow others to alight the bus.
<><><><><>
I'm increasingly becoming aware that the very rich in society don't care about manners because they don't see other people as being worthy; the poorest people in society don't seem to care about manners because let's be honest, life's hard enough without having to worry about that sort of thing, or it could be that they simply don't care; which leaves the only people who do care about manners and being nice and respectful to other people, as the middle class who are trying to push upwards and or don't want to be seen as being common.
I don't expect people to say 'please' and 'thank you' because I think that that is a stretch beyond most people's ability to grease the machinery of social interaction these days and so I have to concede that maybe my expectation that people at least allow others to move through space, is probably also increasingly archaic. Maybe I should just accept the fact that we now live in a world of unthinking unmannered brutes, who can either be clad in a blue singlet or blue rinse.
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