never could get the hang of thursdays
If there’s one thing I think you’ll appreciate, it’s the following from The Daily Show:
The Daily Show isn’t exactly a bastion of independence, so let the AP sort out a little fact check on various things said over the last couple of days (via Dooce). Here’s another fact-check from AP on Palin’s claim that she “opposed the bridge to nowhere”, when she did no such thing.
I thought it was an interesting nomination, but it’s proving itself to be quite a bit of a farce.
Barack Obama on MLK and the Civil Rights movement: Obama (and his speechwriters?) is bringing back the great art of oratory (via).
I obviously can’t vote in America, but Obama seems to be the most well-spoken and inspiring candidate out there. The other candidates all look like they’ve calculated their lines and positions by polls; if Obama has, he’s a lot more subtle about it. Whoever gets the nomination, if it’s not him, fer cryin’ out loud, make him your VP.
Howard lost!
Can’t believe it’s finally happened. I mean, it’s been looking like it was going to happen for the last month for sure, even more so at the start of the week, but it was just like supporting the Indian cricket team – you look only through the cracks in your fingers, hoping against hope that the trend that is as plain as anything eventually turns into the result desired. You could never put it past Howard’s Coalition to pull one more rabbit out of the hat.
And now our Prime Minister is one Mr. K. Rudd. (Ed: Crap, did no one look at that initialised form?) The Liberals are in disarray as the loss reverberates, Costello taking the very smart option of going while the going is worth it – good not quite being the operative term here – and who can really blame him? 13 long years he waited, and was denied time and time again.
Now as a conscientious member of the anti-establishment left-liberal chardonnay-sipping brigade, what do we do when the people we were supporting get in? Colour me miffed (a light magenta, I suspect).
Facebook came out this week with their real business plan – to leverage the network of people and the information they have on them to create an advertising behemoth. Using the ideas of viral marketing, combined with targeted advertising based on the interests and activities that many users list in their profiles, Facebook hopes to deliver an effective advertising platform that surpasses others simply because of the social power behind it.
It’s a great business move – with that much data on interests, and people piling in to add more, along with the value of the links between people, it’s an almost foolproof business case. Advertising targeted at user interests means they are more likely to react to it, allowing advertisers to tailor their messages and get the maximum payoff for their investment, which means advertising distribution agencies will lap it up.
Add in the viral marketing angle, where advertising effectively comes with a personal endorsement of someone you (vaguely) trust or at the very least have some shared experience with means you’re more likely to take a look at the message and consider it – for however many hundredths of a second – to be a real message, again making it more likely that you will follow through on it. Personal recommendations have always carried the greatest weight, and only recently have marketers tried to leverage it.
Great move, Facebook. I’m buying none of it.
Picture the scene – 10 people in a classroom-esque environment, learning about Hedge funds. Most of the people in the room come from financial or legal backgrounds, and most are also, if not senior, certainly not junior. Except one, who is a graduate, and in IT at that. Can you pick me yet?
The instructor asks a question. Result? Not one word. Instructor shrugs it off, answers his own question.
More questions. “Why do banks love hedge funds?” Still no response, even from the guy on the hedge fund-facing desk. I’ve learnt all I know about finance off the business section of a newspaper, and I pipe up “Because they do stuff?”
Chuckles. But the instructor doesn’t chuckle – he just grins and says “Exactly!”
By the end of the class, I had cred for the sheer fact that I spoke up, even if I was way out. Perception is just so much easier than actually knowing the stuff.
I have no idea who thought this a good idea, nor who actually bought into it, but if it was possible to have a more daft idea about retail, I’m yet to see it. Shoppers are not shop assistants (hence the “assistant” part of the latter), nor should they be doing the check out. They get confused. They don’t do this every day – they’re slow at it. The rate of throughput goes down, not up. And you still have to have one person for about every 3 – 4 tills to keep the bastards honest (as the saying goes) and to handle the exceptions (you try getting veggies through a self-serve checkout).
Plain idiocy as far as I can see, and yet people line up for it here. It’s like, “I want to interact with the minimum number of people possible in my day.” What miserable sods.
Side note: same applies for daft idea of packing the groceries in the bags yourself. Oh, it helps the checkout chick/guy get your things scanned quicker, but they will invariably wait for you to finish packing before proceeding to the next customer, or even before asking for you to pay. And yet Europe – old fashioned and service oriented and all – seems to have embraced this inconvenience, perhaps for a few pennies knocked off the price of your bread and butter. What a nutso model.
What silly weather.
That is all.
How come, in England, I can get 8mbit ADSL with unlimited downloads for £10 a month, but in Australia, I’d struggle to get anything close for $25?
Screw the bush, I want decent service where I can get it. Honestly, as much as I am all for equal opportunity, I think the fact that the phone companies here are required to provide the same (approximate) level of service to the bush is holding the city service back. When the difference really is that great, it should be acknowledged and the market allowed to vary.
Turns out the SIM card which Haneef “recklessly supplied to terrorists” (allegedly) wasn’t anywhere near either of the incidents that have landed him in so much shit. And the police knew. And they didn’t say anything about this crucial bit of evidence on which the charges against Haneef hang.
Oh. But he’s still going to be in jail, or detention, and most likely deported, and his future tainted by the fact that his visa was cancelled and his passport suspended. Chances are he’ll never visit a foreign country again, at least through legitimate channels.
Hey, Howard et al, wanna know how to make people not like you and plan acts of violence against you? Lock them up on beat-up non-existent charges. An innocent man beat down by a blatant abuse of power does make for delicious justification.
Or, hey, let’s apply the same theory to the wider public. The National Health Service first up, no doubt, should be locked up for supporting these men by allowing them to enter the country. How is that not reckless! Foreign doctors!
Hey, why just the person who gave the SIM card? Why not the whole freaking mobile company? Y’know, if only the government controlled communications it’d be a-ok, right?
These were just enablers! What about the actual ingredients of the attack? Get Jeep, and Mercedes, and the gas company, and the hardware store where they bought the gas, and the petrol pump! All these people assisted in the committing of an attempted terrorist act! And all that is neglecting to mention the critical party: the match makers. Pure evil I say.
Bloody ridiculous farce is what all of this is. Andrews should resign for his blatant abuse of power; Keelty deserves to at least face a reprimand for allowing this to go ahead, and showing his bias and political pliability (but that’s exactly why he’ll stay). Messers Howard and Ruddock themselves have some explaining to do.
Sorry to be bringing this back, but it does make me angry to see something like this occur.
You’d have to think there’s something about the Immigration portfolio which requires the minister in charge to check their conscience at the door. First we had Ruddock with the Tampa, SIEV X, the “Pacific Solution” and all that illegal immigration muck.
Then we had Vanstone and that little bit of nastiness around the lady deported to the Phillipines, not to mention Cornelia Rau, the German-born lady who forgot who she was momentarily and was locked up for it.
Now, we have Andrews and his total lack of shame at blatantly disregarding the presumption of innocence and the upholding of due process.
Am I making it a political issue? Very well, so I am. It damn well should be.
I’m going to be tagging anything I find relating to this and putting it on del.icio.us – see http://del.icio.us/karanj/haneef
It just gets better for Mohammed Haneef. He wins bail, walks out of the court… into the arms of the Immigration department. His 457 visa has been revoked and he will now be put into a detention centre for illegal immigrants. Ironically, he was trying to leave the country when he was arrested.
The reason? Section 501 of the visa. With a special proviso.
What’s that, you say? Guilty, by association, until proven Innocent, you might say:
Under section 501 of the [Migration] act, a “character test” applies to people seeking visas to enter the country.
A person fails the character test if, among other things, he or she has an association with another person or group whom the minister suspects is involved in criminal conduct.
Lemme say that again, with emphasis:
he or she has an association with another person or group whom the minister suspects is involved in criminal conduct
They were his cousins! How could he not have an association with them? Mr Andrews said he had considered information provided by the Australian Federal Police. But he doesn’t have to wait for a judgement on these people; no, no, no, as long as the minister suspects, the guy fails the test and is locked up.
What’s that? The minister is an elected official and so should be trusted? Oh, that’s alright then.
Oh but wait! You can challenge a conviction or decision, can’t you?
Haneef has two avenues of appeal … But his chances under both of those avenues are made harder because Mr Andrews has invoked a special “national interest” element of the section 501 visa cancellation process.
Ah, the Get Into Jail Free Of Conscience Clause. Cry foul my friends, because this is injustice in motion.
Ed: Senator Andrew Bartlett (Dem., QLD) gets my vote. (What? So what if I can’t vote for him?)
Ed 2: I just want to quote more – see this and this and this. And more and more. With editorials here and here. News Ltd paper The Daily Telegraph sees nothing wrong, as usual, proving themselves to be the lapdogs of the Liberals. Which is not to say Labor’s any better with their “in-principle” agreement, which disgusts me.
Dr Mohamed Haneef, the “Australian connection” in the recent terror scare in the UK, is to be charged with “recklessly supporting terrorism by supplying the SIM card to his second cousin, Sabeel Ahmed”, and therefore he had “supplied the alleged terrorists with a usable alternative identity.” He faces up to 15 years in prison for giving his mobile SIM card to his cousin.
Un-frickin-believable.
If this case had any real basis, the prosecution would have to demonstrate that he actively knew that his cousins would engage in a terrorist act, and that the SIM card could be a way for authorities to monitor and track his cousins. When clearly, they had no bloody idea that anything was going to happen, and the ‘alternative identity’ apparently provided by the SIM card had no role to play in the terrorist act.
If this man is prosecuted, I have major doubts about how serious the authorities are in pursuing real perpetrators as opposed to chasing down the easy ones to provide visible ‘victories’ against terrorism.