Another Thursday, another Drinking Liberally at the Southern Cross. Tonight’s guest was Andrew Little who manages to be President of both the EPMU and the Labour Party at the same time.

He talked generally about the situation the world is in and suggested that it means the end of the finance-centric ideologies of the last 20-30 years. Instead we now had a chance to start talking about social justice, about providing useful and productive work, and generally recasting our politics and economy in a way that serves the people and not the corporations. There weren’t a lot of details about what that might mean.

Then it came to time to questions – and what interested me was that about half of them (including mine) were some version of “That left wing agenda sounds fine but it doesn’t sound like the Labour Party we’ve had for the last nine (or 25) years, how are you going to get it accepted by them, let alone the general populace?”

Unfortunately I thought he did a very poor job of answering it. First he said that he thought they were already there, secondly that the Labour Party was internally democratic, and finally that they had to follow and be led by general opinion (as different from lead and inspire!). In other words, he didn’t see the same gap between his rhetoric and the current Labour Party that a number of people in the room saw. And bear in mind that the Drinking Liberally crowd is generally pretty pro-Labour!

Speaking as someone who thinks we need Labour to reinvent and repackage itself it was kind of disheartening – and pushes me further towards the Greens.

P.S. I think we’re done on section 92a as a topic. Thanks.

Went to Drinking Liberally again last night, this time to hear Grant Robertson (Labour MP for Wellington) speak about the public service. It was a pretty standard defence of the worth of the public service and some of the major points included:

– no one quite agrees how to define it (should it include local government, should it include police and nurses, etc)
– that you can choose statistics from the past that prove that it hasn’t been growing per capita
– that it’s silly to try and divide them into “good” frontline staff and “bad” backroom staff, as they’re all needed to provide the functions that we want from government
– that the National government want to permanently reduce the public service
– that the National government has put the kibosh on pay equity reviews
– that privatisation of public services is bad

I was amused to see how keen he was to say that it’s not just a Wellington thing with, if I remember correctly, only 40% of “core public service staff” employed in Wellington.

All in all I thought the session was a tad boring. I generally agreed with most of it and didn’t really find it that informative. There was also an interesting contrast in style between the opinionated but not partisan Brian Easton and the very obviously partisan Grant Robertson.

While there I also had a chat to Mr Holloway about good old section 92a. In particular, we were talking about what he thinks it is possible to achieve within the current legal and cultural framework (i.e. ignoring the whole ‘copyright is obsolete/immoral/stupid’ argument). His position is that we need to find an acceptable way to help enforce copyright or else we’ll get another unacceptable way like section 92a.

If I understand him correctly, he seems to be arguing for changing the role of the Copyright Tribunal (yep, I didn’t know we had one either, apparently they very occasionally mediate disputes about licensing schemes) to have some sort of jurisdiction over copyright/piracy disputes. He further thinks that the desirable outcome would be where copyright infringers should have to pay fines rather than having their internet disconnected.

I agree with the idea that fines are a more appropriate punishment but I’m not sure about trying to repurpose the Copyright Tribunal in this way, especially as I didn’t get a chance to ask as to how he would see this working.

US presidential election – Nov 4th.

NZ national election – Nov 8th.

Question for tonight: Will the result of the US presidential vote have an influence on the NZ election?

I feel that it should have an impact… somehow. But I’m not sure what it would be. What if McCain wins? What if Obama wins?

In my last post, made a few months ago now, I argued in favour of passive index-based funds when choosing a KiwiSaver provider (i.e. a fund that tries to track a particular sub-market rather than one where people actively trade to maximise returns). This was on the grounds that they not only generate a better return when fees are taken into account, but that they often do better than the actively managed accounts on gross return as well. I’m still happy with that analysis.

However, I also argued that when investing for the long term the best returns have tended to come from investments in growth funds such as stock market index trackers rather than the more predictable cash and bonds; the idea being that while individual stocks may be risky the overall market has grown steadily.

Obviously this theory relies on the idea of the ever-growing economy caused by increasing production and consumption. I like to believe that this is possible, that the world will keep getting richer. The belief comforts me while I read books that describe the end of life as we know it through the effects of climate change, peak oil, or whatever other catastrophe looks good on the dustjacket.

I don’t know which outcome will come to pass in my lifetime or even which of them is the most likely. But I think there’s enough chance that I’ll live in a civilisation that will muddle through and growth-based funds will do well enough that they’re still the best choice. You could say that they track the success or otherwise of our civilisation.

However, at the moment I’ve chosen a cash-generating cash and bond index fund because I do think we’re in for a recession in the next few years. In this case I would expect stock market returns to fall in value or at least lag behind the high interest rates that are currently available. Why buy into it now when you could wait a few years?

I’ll tell you whether I’m right or not after it happens.

So, as part of signing up for a new job I’m also signing up for KiwiSaver. I’ve managed to put off learning about this for a while now but last night I finally put the time in to do a bit more reading. I knew the scheme is reputed to be generous and is generally seen to be well worth it for the individual but I needed to choose a provider and a scheme.

As my government-enforced retirement age of 65 is some years off I have chosen a growth-oriented scheme with a concentration in the share market. My understanding is that, over the long term, share markets have historically given the best returns. Of course this won’t go so well if we have an economic collapse triggered by climate change or runaway gray-goo or whatever and slide into a post-technological world – but my retirement plans are going to be in trouble if that happens anyway.

More importantly, I have chosen a ‘passive’ fund. This is one where they don’t have smart managers who wheel and deal to choose the best stocks/investments at any given time. Instead they just invest in shares/securities so that the fund tracks well-known indexes like the NZX 50. Therefore if the stock market as a whole goes up you’re winning, and vice-versa. It’s easier to manage so fees are a lot less.

Now, the interesting thing about ‘dumb’ passive funds is that they typically out-perform the ‘smart’ active funds. All that wheeling and dealing costs money (in transaction and management costs) and any increased returns are typically eaten by that. Indeed, I seem to recall that actively managed funds typically perform worse than passive funds, even *before* transaction and management costs are taken into account. Most people aren’t Warren Buffett and are apparently pretty crap at investing. Of course, the managers still get paid their lovely salaries so at least they’re happy about it.

The only major flaw in KiwiSaver (from my selfish perspective) is that the government doesn’t guarantee the investments – but also doesn’t let you spread your risk by splitting your KiwiSaver contributions between 2 or more companies. So, it looks like all my eggs will be going into the scheme run by the ASB.

[Some of the things I believe about climate change and our environment, arranged in such a way as to resemble an argument. Comments are welcome, if I find them suitably compelling I’ll publish a new version with them incorporated.]

That nature has no desire to keep Earth a nice place for humans to live.

That climate change has happened in the past and will happen again.

That climate change will result in changes that make our world a place less suited to human existence.

That the climate is a chaotic system and that we can not know what will happen with it next.

That the current predictions of what is happening with climate change are the best we have to go on and are worth paying attention to.

That there is a good chance that some sort of feedback loops will interfere with predicted climate change.

That the effects of one strong positive feedback loop overrides any number of negative feedback loops.

That human activities are influencing climate change.

That the modern consumer lifestyle directly contributes to climate change.

That people greatly enjoy the modern consumer lifestyle and that many people who do not currently enjoy it aspire to do so.

That individuals can reduce their personal contribution to climate change.

That those individual changes send useful messages to corporations and politicians that will influence behaviour in wider populations.

That these individual and collective changes in behaviour are insufficient to seriously reduce the human impact on climate change.

That there will never be the political will to voluntarily give up the modern consumer life style.

That humanity would rather ride the spiralling corpse of the current ecosystem down into the abyss than voluntarily give up the modern consumer life style.

That this is likely to happen.

That I don’t want it to.

That we can possibly develop new non-damaging technologies to both replace those that contribute to climate change, as well as ameliorate the effects of other technologies’ contributions to climate change.

That these technologies will need significant funding to be developed.

That commercial bodies may not see the benefit in funding the development.

That some form of collective funding (i.e. government) will be required.

That it is is better to spend more of our current resources on developing these technologies than to spend them on reducing activities that contribute to climate change.

That this doesn’t excuse us from trying to reduce activities that contribute to climate change.

That we should get on with it.

My first computer was a 1990 i386 with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive, scrounged from the offices of a local shipping company. Complete with serial mouse, IBM Model M keyboard, and 15″ color VGA monitor, it was my parents’ hope for making me into a competent writer, but it better succeeded in making me a PC gamer. This ancient machine, 17 years old, is incredibly outdated in the physical basis of every technological detail, except one: its hard disk.

This is the introductory paragraph for a rather lightweight article about hard drives. It’s also a great example of a writer saying something obviously stupid purely because it suited the rhetorical framework that they had chosen to use.

Yes, the hard drive does still take the basic form that it did 17 years ago. But when kept to the same level of required similarity, so does the memory, the CPU, the motherboard, the case, the power supply, and the keyboard. Indeed, the only two major physical design changes I can think of when it comes to the common PC is the replacement of ball mice with optical mice, and the rise of the flat-screen LCD monitor.

Don’t you just hate it when reality gets in the way of a good line?

Ah, IT commentators, some of them are so young. About Microsoft:

They’ve got this new “consumer” bug where they think they’ve got to be a player in every consumer market. I think they would be better served sticking to their enterprise roots and not chase every consumer trend.

Enterprise roots? Microsoft may be the company that ended up changing how enterprises (I don’t like the term and it hurts me to use it but it’ll have to do) implemented IT but it took a long time to happen and they definitely didn’t start there. Indeed, the enterprise fought against Microsoft and their silly PCs for quite a while, and even when they let PCs in to the front office they still weren’t prepared to let Microsoft into the datacentre.

If you had to pick a term, “hobbyist roots” would probably be more accurate.

In an earlier post I complained about Vodafone’s rapacious pricing of casual data rates ($11000 per GB).

Now in the comments at this post from Rob Drury we get the Vodafone PR guy Paul Brislen boasting that “The front page of Stuff alone would cost a fortune to open…”

So, he’s using his company’s unconscionable pricing model to justify providing their own limited walled garden (Vodafone Live) that they just happen to make lots of money with.

They really do have no shame.