[This is a repost]
All Kiwis have an interest in the economic success of Auckland. For those living here, the reasons are obvious. But even staunch mainlanders, who know in their bones that Auckland sucks, would get more of that wonderful solitude if more of its residents were attracted north by better prospects. So lets assume it’s a common goal. How do we get there?
I’m looking forward to the next capital structure plan from Fonterra, due to be launched on Friday 18th September. The co-op has probably redeemed itself in the eyes of many farmer/shareholders by ruling out a sharemarket float which derailed the first attempt at reform. But I doubt they recognised any connection with the late great Bob Marley when they did so.
The old joke has come true. A carrier pigeon has thrashed the ISP of South Africa’s incumbent telco for speed (full report):
11-month-old pigeon, Winston, took one hour and eight minutes to fly the 80 km from Unlimited IT’s offices near Pietermaritzburg to the coastal city of Durban with a data card was strapped to his leg.
Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.
Sounds spectacular, but note that file transfer took almost an hour (presumably this was 2 transfers: onto and off the data card), so this was a LOT of data. Still, its a great story. (HT: NZ Herald)
According to Computerworld correspondent Mark Pascall, the open source web development software Ruby on Rails is set to explode in popularity. Mark puts it down to two basic features:
Convention over Configuration (CoC), which creates a default towards normal (conventional) things, and Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) which saves heaps of time. The developer we use also refers to Ruby as “self healing”.
Anyway, it looks like a big leap forward by the open source community. Isn’t amazing what you can get free?
As the recording industry struggles to cope with its broken business model, it is increasingly seeking cash from new sources. Prime targets are businesses that play music to customers and potential customers, but are not paying a royalty. Recent news items are here, here, and here.
In yesterday’s NZ Herald Canvas magazine, Greg Dixon rejoices in the hope that these actions will induce some firms to stop playing music altogether:
So bring on the PPNZ fee brouhaha. Try making ‘em all pay for inflicting bloody Beyonce or Britney on the rest of us and hasten the hopeful consequence: the blessed return of the sound of silence.
I agree entirely, and many people with nuanced musical tastes might share this view: either play what I love, as it is meant to be played, or leave me in peace.
Instead, it seems that commercial (eg retail) music programmers go for broad appeal, and in the process they annoy most people who actually care about music. Cementing the irony, they manage the annoyance risk through the volume, which is why if we ever do luck onto a great track in public, we miss most of it in the ambient clutter.
Here is the question those firms approached by PPNZ should ask themselves: should I pay for the right to annoy music lovers so that I can offer wallpaper music on people who don’t really care about music? I reckon silence would be definitely worth a shot for broad-based situations like supermarkets.
By raising the price, PPNZ might also find that diversion happens in other ways. For example, those firms that think they have a good idea of their target demographic could just tune into the most appropriate radio station, which has already paid the royalty. And maybe gyms that need highly specialised hard driving music for their workouts will consider direct deals with some of NZ’s enterprising domestic drum’n'bass purveyors?
Good to see the Commerce Commission proposing refinement to its leniency policy for cartels this week in line with international innovation in this area. In case cartel leniency seems an odd concept, the idea is that the state promises not to prosecute you for involvement in a cartel IF you are the whistleblower. So cartel members eye up their mates, wondering if they’re about to dob everyone else in, and the result is often get a race to confess.
The details of the refinements will be interesting I’m sure, but in the meantime, it reminds me of a news item I gleaned during the mobile termination bunfight in Wellington this week.
As I understand it, the Germans have recently allowed for cartel victims to sue for damages. Fair enough you probably think, but one consequence is that it undermines the leniency programme. The state won’t prosecute the whistleblower, but the victims can. It seems to me that they could easily have extended immunity for whistleblowers to the private action legislation. Must investigate further.
Seamus Hogan posed an interesting question about methane emissions recently. He didn’t see how this was much of a stock problem (if you’ll pardon the pun) because methane, while a particularly nasty greenhouse gas, doesn’t hang around up there for long. He says
I am puzzled about why we should worry about methane emissions, given that they result from a circular process whereby carbon in grass is converted into methane by cows, but then carbon is reabsorbed from the atmosphere to re-grow the grass.
BK Drinkwater, I think correctly, pointed to fertiliser extracted from the ground and used to grow grass which (once eaten by cows) generates extra methane emissions; this is not part of a closed carbon cycle. But Seamus then observed that
my memory from high-school science and geography is an important source of New Zealand’s advantage in agrigculture is that we don’t have need for nitrogen fertilisers (something to do with clover), just for superphosphate. And a quick Wikipedia search confirmed that while Carbon is present in urea (a typical nitrogen fertiliser), it is not present in super phosphate.
It is true that clover is a nitrogen fixer, so we can & do get nitrogen from including it in the pasture mix (the salad bar). Also cow piss is unbelievably high in nitrogen, so we also get lots like that (too much actually, but that’s another story). However the key point is that, notwithstanding these facts, it still makes economic sense to apply urea because doing so accelerates grass growth and at current prices the value of the resulting milk is worth the cost of the urea.
So (in my current state of ignorance) it seems that the policy implication may be to tax urea.