Enough with the sneaker net already!

I don't really know where I was going with this link but I thought it about time that I mentioned where I felt communications were up to in Australia. I have this feeling that so much of our effort of day to day life is working an elaborate sneaker net of information. All too often it isn't enough to send a picture, sound or video, and one must bring the object to the person or vice versa, just as in the old days we needed to save something to disk to move it to another computer. The more everything gets connected, the less this has to happen, although I think that shirts that can be screen printed by remote are a long way away yet.

There appears to be a fierce level of competition between carriers in the mobile Internet arena, and a bit of a lack of service in the adsl+ department. The NBN seems to have progressed to a level where even a sudden change of Government would find it hard to reverse the general gist of the new structure being formed in the industry. I believe that not only the current wireless competitive environment, but the future fixed broadband environment will also be fiercely competitive. The main scope for future differentiation between brands will be overall service, how plans will combine with other related comms, and total monthly data plans as before. Speed will be even less of an issue than it is now. There is virtually no chance that either the NBN co. will struggle to make ends meet, nor that the investment made by taxpayers will cause Australia to approach European US or Japanese levels of public debt levels.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

I have so much in my head at the moment, and a great desire to write it down, but it is completely incoherent.

For the global warming debate, I feel it is important to demonstrate my non-partisan take on it. One easy way to do this is to show an example of a policy belief of mine usually associated with the far left (Green party or left wing of the Labour Party) and a contrasting belief that is associated near the other extreme (National party or One Nation or Right wing of the Liberal Party).

This is not because I want to present myself in the middle ground, but that what I believe to be true takes up a point in idea space far away from the political left-right line that at the moment takes up all the discussion space in virtually every forum I visit.

For instance, I am vehemently against solar PV tarriffs above the wholesale market rate for electricity.

I am also very in favour of a Carbon Tax.

I steer away from arguments that question whether global warming is "real" or not. To me it is like a question of whether I believe in God or not. I perceive both these questions to be a device to flatten my beliefs and squeeze them down onto the political continuum line from their proper place in multiple dimensions - with an aim to push me with denial or acceptance of various assertions one way or another to the correlated viewpoints of (in this case) the left or right of politics.

There is no "references" I can point to in regards to this basic philosophical idea, but it should be simple enough for the casual reader to understand.

The question remains as to how I can convince someone to my same viewpoint. It is much easier to convince someone that solar PV tarriffs are bad because Global Warming is bunk than it is because it makes the energy market dysfunctional. It is also easier to convince people that we should have a Carbon Tax because AGW is real and a threat, than it is because it moves tax reform down a sensible direction (broad based, flat, easy to administer, can replace messier taxes or even carbon trading)

Another question may be why I think minor structural detail of the laws which underpin the energy market are more important than the global risks of catastrophe or conversely wasting our time, money and energy on a non-catastrophe.

The answer is to me, that the underpinning structural detail is absolutely vital both to succeed in whatever aims that voters think is important with regards to energy usage, and to not waste any time, money or energy in that achievement. Laws which make markets act in functional ways are a net profit to society, laws which don't, are a net loss - pure and simple.

Dick Smith living up to his name

(re Dick Smith's opinion that Australians should be limited, Chinese style, to two children)

Dick smith has got a point. If we want to limit population to any amount at all, we may want to have a target no of children per family. However, putting an individual limit and fines analogously to what the Chinese (RMP) do, risks overshooting considerably and also sets a fuse for a deadly demographic time bomb, as well as relying heavily on abortion as a means of enforcement of these policies. What is required is a target for an average(say 2) children per family, and a way to trade fertility allocations with those that do not want any children, analogously to water trading. Personally, I would find it easy to trawl my FB friends to find enough who would be willing to sell theirs to me. At any rate, our average in Aus is already at about 2, so further limiting people's reproductive rights would dangerously undershoot, eventually, when it is too late to rectify. 


However, as good as this (fertility cap and trade) sounds, it is not quite ambitious enough. There is still the dual issues of many children being unwanted to the point of being aborted, while many that want to adopt a child are thwarted by a lack of children to adopt and a heap of red tape - which leads to most adoptions being "soft immigration" ie. from other countries.

I am not suggesting the prepurchase of babies from females pregnant with unwanted babies by couples desperate to adopt, mediated and encouraged by the government. That would be the barbaric purchase of children akin to the economics of slavery and other barbaric uses of people trade and smuggling.

What I am suggesting will be viewed as a legitimate alternative to abortion - At a family planning clinic, pregnant teenagers (or other age groups) would be given the option of the fetus being carried to be made a ward of the state while in utero. The medical costs, as well as the loss of employment opportunities, stress and a range of other emotional and actual "costs" current and future, would be reimbursed financially by the state (including the fertility right trade).

At birth a pre-arranged adoption would take place. Rather than a prospective Adopter being limbo (and the baby being in limbo in foster care), there have been at least 6 months to arrange the details and documentation for the adoption to take place.

For the prospective adopter it will be a legitimate alternative to overseas adoption. Of course they would have to reimburse the Government for costs associated with the transfer of care, but this would likely be less than the costs associated with overseas adoption.

A couple of questions remain. Would a prospective birth parent rather get a whole heap of money for letting their baby live, albeit with someone else than making it die and it costing her? Would a prospective adopter prefer to live in the same country as the birth parents rather than on the other side of the world?

I don't know - I guess only people in that position could answer surveys to get a feel for whether this whole idea is bunkim or not.

Quote of the week

"They think we should wait for some science fiction fantasy to jump out from behind a bush, (but) we've got an offer on the table, and we're going to take it."

Bob Katter criticising the opposition (essentially crossing the floor) regarding amendments to NBN legislation put forward by the opposition.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/labor-claims-nbn-milestone-in-marathon-day/story-e6frfku0-1226029637347#ixzz1HtBKgPVh

NBN vs alternatives, again

I don't really want to offer a counter anecdote at this stage, because there is something more fundamental about the NBN plan than the simple "Cost for Cost - speed for speed" rationalisations of the argument between the plans broadly outlined by the Government and opposition.

The fundamental thing for me is the experience Australia had with the privatisation of Telstra in the first place, and whether the mistakes made then can be made up with a new plan.
The rationalisation of privatisation at that point and generally was that investments formerly provided by the Government would be made by private enterprise, and that costs would be borne by the end consumers who were most willing to pay for the services provided.
The main unexpected downsides was that voters even in cities were not happy with the disparity between country and city services, so a regimen of regulation was built up so high, Government became a virtual "owner" of Telstra's minimum service, but in a much more inefficient way than *actually* owning the associated infrastructure.

A second downside was the inefficient duplication of things like mobile phone towers, which provided neither more coverage, nor extra reliability.

A third issue can be illustrated with an anecdote. When a *Telstra* Fibre cable was accidentally cut, all services *other* than Telstra, including mobile phones stopped working for huge swathes of regional areas, including many which ostensibly should not have even relied on that connection. Ironically many Telstra services continued working at a slightly lowered reliability.

The ownership structure of the NBN is the real key to why it will resolve the failures of privatisation without harming its successes.

Ok. I admit it . the Economist is privatisation biased

Having read the Economist Intelligence Unit's brief accessible summary on broadband plans compared among dozens of countries, it has become obvious to me. Australia's broadband plans have been scored low because of the high comparative cost and mediocre quoted speed.

The issue I have (as I had with their take on university privatisation) is how the length of term of investment is never even considered as an issue. Wireless (Next G as oposed to Wi-Fi) has excellent returns on investment in the short term, but is in no way future-proof.

The real crux of the issue - Who should pay for and/or own infrastructure as opposed to running costs and retail sale of bandwidth etc, is never mentioned. It wouldn't be an issue to me, if the alternative suggestion was the government owning and spending money on a much reduced infrastructure - That would be a reasonable alternative, but in the long run, it wouldn't actually be cheaper. To me it is like Mr Windsor said - "You do it once, and you do it with fibre".

The biggest returns will happen once Moore's law catches up with the capacity of the network. Memory capacity still doubles every 18 months, but data generation and traffic on the internet is doubling quicker than that, about every 12 months. Therefore, given that if you build it, the traffic will eventually fill it - it makes sense to optimise the cost of the end-point infrastructure, rather than requiring a shorter timeframe to gain a payoff with something that will need to be upgraded again, duplicating a lot of the initial work.

FTTH Broadband was the key after all!

It appears that Fibre To The Home was what sold the Labor party plan to the New England independent representative Tony Windsor. I don't know if my blog made any difference to that decision, but I do feel vindicated nonetheless. There are two striking things that I've noticed about similarly balanced (hung) parliaments in other countries - There is a tendency for

1) Policy sclerosis - it is often easier to get a majority opposing a new policy than a majority to be in favour.

2) More deficits than otherwise - It is way easier to push policies through that *spend* more money than ones which *save* or *tax* more money.

3) Balance of power bias - The independents (and greens in the senate) will have a policy say disproportionate to the number of electorates/seats they hold. This will be especially good for environmental programs which also benefit rural Australia, reasonably good for rural policies which don't particularly rile the Greens and policy inertia (unchanged policies) will tend to be the way with practically everything else.

A democratised stimulus

The latest payments as part of the stimulus, which as far as I can tell are indiscriminate cash quantities for just about everyone registered with the Govern-mint, have an appeal to me even as it mindbogglingly blows my mind thinking about future taxes required to pay it back eventually.

Essentially, instead of bailing out whatever, or dictating prices for bread, etc. it empowers the individuals acting independently. If they deposit it in the bank, it strengthens that bank's capital in a way that bailouts couldn't. We will have more that we can decide to donate for disaster relief, improve our individual bottom line such that fear of destitution is allayed, without it being enough to feel that we are rich and can be reckless. Of course fools and their moneys are soon parted, which means the money should eventually concentrate in the hands of the less foolish. Eventually it should filter through to profits or income to someone who will then pay tax.

It neither attempts to save those that have lost everything in the crunch, nor does it punish those that profited from payouts from entities requiring bail-outs. WE decide who is deserving of our measured piece of this stimulus.

As a counter-cyclical plan from a government that has been very conservative through a boom, it is almost masterful. To get the impression that this sort of thing can be done at any other time for any other reason, is foolishness.

Perhaps I was a bit harsh on Miranda Devine

Back in 2006 I derided her for trivialising the effects of Cyclone Larry.

But now after a pointed attack on greenies, I am starting to come round to her style.

Collective Political Decisions

I am still trying to make a reply to Anonymous's comment

A much more robust and satsifying system than American or Australian 'democracy' with a proven ability to function in a multicultural environment. referring to the very democratic Swiss model.

There is some things we can learn by How animals make collective decisions, and the point I was trying to make was that I judge collective systems by how regularly they come up with the "right" decision over how regularly they reflect majority opinion.

The recent Australian stimulus package wrangle was a case in point. With the Swiss model they would be wrangling longer, and come up with a worse "populist" decision in the end anyway. The Australian senate is unequalled in both investigating policy and in coming up with appropriate amendments quickly.