This is my web log which contains all sorts of random thoughts I felt it necessary to record for posterity here. I've recorded ideas on all sorts of topics in here so I hope you find something interesting, and maybe even useful!
Think for Yourself
2026-04-25. Comments. Rating 4. ID 2440.
Why do ideas become popular and, for no particularly apparent reason, become dominant across society? In other words, what is the origin of the zeitgeist? If we look back in time we see various ideas rising and falling in popularity as time passes. What was considered unthinkable at one point suddenly becomes the accepted orthodoxy. Why?
I think it is because most people are not good at thinking for themselves. They lack independence of thought and derive their beliefs from others, especially from others with extra influence, such as teachers, celebrities, and both conventional and internet-based media, especially social media.
I fully understand that a case could be made to say that assimilating other people's opinions, when they are well thought out or based on expertise or experience, is just a sensible and maybe even inevitable phenomenon, but is it, and if it is, should it be?
I guess it's a matter of extent. Everyone (I'm sure that includes me, even if I don't always recognise it) takes on ideas from others, but it's important to be a bit skeptical of other people's ideas, and not to just automatically uncritically perpetuate them.
When I talk to people in person, or discuss or debate with them on-line, I often notice then repeating catch-phrases and reflecting opinions which seem somewhat less than completely original. Sometimes their statements are word for word what I have seen elsewhere. Sometimes their deeper beliefs are equally unoriginal.
So here are some examples...
I recently visited a friend to help with her computer. I launched her web browser and it opened to a news page which featured a picture of Donald Trump. She sort of shivered and looked away, clearly indicating a fairly emotional dislike of him. She commented on this, but I said that I sort of like ol' Trumpy! Needless to say, she was horrified and wondered how an apparently nice and reasonable person like me could like an evil tyrant like him.
So I asked exactly what it was about Trump that caused such negativity, and she really couldn't say. It was just something like he was arrogant and egocentric. I said, sure I agree with that, but what about other self-centered politicians like Jacinda Ardern. What did she think of them? Well, of course, she thinks Cindy was the greatest leader ever, but when pushed could offer no reason why, except she was "kind".
To me, the biggest difference between the two is that Trump doesn't hide his thoughts (even when maybe he should!) but Ardern, while being quite tyrannical and egocentric, portrays a fake image of kindness and generosity.
It seemed that the media loved to attach the label "kind" to Ardern so that's what this person decided must be true, but the same media consistently portray Trump negatively and she also accepted that, without much critical thought.
Now while I "quite like" Trump, I fully understand he has some character flaws. And while I dislike Ardern, I realise she had some good political skills which helped many people during the COVID epidemic.
In fact (I'm sorry to repeat this for those who have heard this before) I suggested her as leader of the Labour party prior to the 2017 election, and voted Labour at that election. But I saw through the facade and realised what a terrible person she really is, and I have never voted Labour since. So it seems that I did form uniquely personal opinions based on the circumstances of the time, unlike many others.
I was scrolling through posts on X yesterday and saw one from a young (22 year old) woman who is having her tubes tied so she cannot have any children. That is an individual choice which she is entitled to make, but it was the reason she did it which I thought was kind of sad. She thinks the world is such a bad place that it is unfair to bring any more children into it.
What made the world bad seemed to be the conflict in Iran and Ukraine, the rise of fascist dictators like Trump, and (of course) climate change. Now, there are genuine problems around the world we need to be aware of, but the general state of the world is actually quite good, with low numbers of deaths from war, overall lower rates of poverty, and generally good standards of living for an increasing number of people.
Looking at the headlines in the media this might not be obvious, but the stats show that things really aren't that bad. Unfortunately this person accepted the grossly exaggerated stories in the media, and those which are no doubt prevalent amongst her friends, without thinking about how true they really are.
Many people I encounter seem to believe that, because of climate change, the world is literally going to end in the near future. What "the world ending" actually means is difficult to establish, because they don't seem to know themselves. When pressed, they will say anything from increased conflict due to some regions becoming uninhabitable, to humans becoming extinct, to all life going extinct, to the planet physically being destroyed in some unspecified way.
When asked how any of these might happen, they have no answer, apart from the "increased conflict" scenario which does have some level of credibility. But they keep hearing about the end of the world so, when you don't think critically, it must be true... right?
So I say, listen to mainstream media, to celebrities, to activists like Greta Thunberg, but don't necessarily believe everything they say. Of course, the same applies to alternative media, and every other source out there. In the end, everything is just an opinion. Be skeptical, and think for yourself!
I said I would discuss the techniques used to establish the size of the universe on the greatest scales after talking about how the distance to relatively close objects could be found in my previous blog post, so let's do this. How far out can we go?
While there is no practical purpose in knowing this stuff for the average person, I think it is interesting to know what clever mechanisms astronomers have come up with over the years, and it is also nice to know that the numbers we often see are based on real facts and the crazy ideas of flat Earth believers and other conspiracy theorists can be safely rejected.
So last time I talked about parallax, and the big picture is that we start with short distances, then get progressively bigger using the previous results. For example, last time we start with the diameter of the Earth (13 thousand km), which was used to give the distance to the Sun (150 million km), which in turn gave us the distance to the nearest star (42 trillion kilometers).
The observations are difficult and only an approximation, but they are all we have, and many have been confirmed using different techniques, so we can be confident they are approximately correct.
After establishing the distance to stars using the mathematical methods I talked about in the previous post we can figure out how bright stars really are. The true brightness and the distance both determine the apparent brightness when seen from Earth. A star that looks bright from Earth could be genuinely bright or maybe just relatively close. Once we know the distance we can take that into account to get the true brightness.
After doing this we notice that certain types of stars seem to have roughly predictable true brightnesses, so a very dim star which we know is actually bright is very distance, and that distance can be estimated. The type of star is usually established by looking at its spectrum which can used to estimate its mass and temperature.
But this is only good as for a rough estimate, is there anything better? Well yes, there is. Some stars vary in brightness, and a particular type, called a Cepheid variable, has the useful property that the time it takes to go from bright to dim and back to bright is related to its mass and its mass is related to its brightness. So measure the period of the variation in brightness ot get the true brightness, compare that with the apparent brightness, and you can get the distance.
Cepheids are also bright (a thousand to ten thousand times the brightness of the Sun) so they can be easily observed at large distances, even in other galaxies. So if we know the distance to a star in another galaxy we know the distance to the galaxy too! This works for close galaxies, which means we are getting out to tens of millions of light years, a billion trillion kilometers.
About a hundred years ago an American astronomer, Edwin Hubble, was doing incredibly skilled work, taking spectra (turning their light into a "rainbow" of colours) of distant galaxies. He noticed the light from these was shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, and that the dimmer the galaxy (and therefore, on average, the more distant) the higher the shift was.
When an object is moving away from you, any wave phenomenon (like light or sound) is "spread out" (so sounds become lower, light becomes redder). You will have noticed this with sound when a fast moving car, train, or plane goes past you: the sound is higher as it comes towards you and lower as it goes past and travels away. We don't notice this with light because light is so much faster that the effect is impossible to detect with everyday objects (sound moves at 1200 kph, light at one billion kph).
Hubble had discovered that redshift (a concept already well accepted) gets greater the more distant the galaxy is (there are a few exceptions for really close galaxies). This is because the universe is expanding and the further apart two objects are the faster they are moving away from each other. So this means that if we measure the redshift we can estimate the distance, and this works for galaxies right to the edge of the observable universe, or 46 billion light years (460 billion trillion kilometers).
There are many details I have missed out here, and I did all this from memory, so I hope I got it right: I was an astronomy educator in the distant past but it's easy to forget details!
The thing I like about this is just how clever it all is, how amazingly precise the measurements are, and how one observation can be used as the basis of the next: the width of the Earth is measured with a couple of sticks, that diameter is used to get the distance to the Sun, which is used to get the distance to a close star, which is used to get the distant to more distant stars, which calibrates the measurements of Cepheids and bright stars, which gives the distance to close galaxies, which calibrates the redshift, which is used to get the distance to the edge of the universe.
Finally, a few associated points...
First, you might say one error in the first measurements might make all the rest invalid. That is true, but we have other methods to estimate distances and they would soon show us if we got this wrong, and that has even happened in the past before the reason was found and the distances confirmed.
Second, some people say redshift can be explained in other ways. This is also true, but that can be allowed for in calculations.
Finally, what is the "observable" universe? Well, because of the expansion of the universe the further away we go the faster the galaxies are travelling away from us. Eventually the speed will be at the speed of light, so the light of that galaxy will never get to us. The universe exists beyond that point (maybe to infinity) but we can never know anything about it directly because no information can travel faster than light.
So yes, thanks to the brilliant work of astronomers and other scientists over many years (starting with good old Eratosthenes), we can see and understand the universe really far out!
I see a lot of weird stuff while on the internet, especially on social media sites (I use Facebook and X a lot). I've got to admit that it is hard to know who is serious and who isn't today, because I honestly sometimes can't tell the difference between serious comments and satire! But I came across one comment recently which did seem serious. It was about "space being fake". The person seemed to be claiming that the universe was really just the Earth with a small amount of space above it, then maybe a solid barrier, although they were a bit vague about that.
So I thought, apart from just taking the word of astronomers, how would we really know how big the universe is? Is there a way the average person could figure it out without investing millions or even billions in fancy, professional level, equipment?
So the answer is yes. I have been an amateur astronomer for many years and I must admit, I have never done these observations myself, because they do take a lot of time and effort, but theoretically I could do them if I wanted to.
So here's how I would do it...
Let's assume the stars are at varying distances from the Earth rather than being holes in that solid sphere which my conspiracy theorist friend thinks they are. In that case we could use parallax to estimate the distance to the star. So we could assume the brighter stars are probably closer and the dimmer ones more distant. Because stars vary in brightness, this isn't always true, but on average it is.
We must also accept that the Earth orbits the Sun once per year. Again, this is an assumption, but like all the others we will get crazy results if the assumptions aren't true, so let's just proceed.
Choose a day, let's say mid-summer, and look at the position of the bright star in relation to a variety of dimmer stars, then do the same thing thing six months later at mid-winter. During that time the Earth has moved 300 million kilometers from one side of its orbit to the other (the Sun-Earth distance is about 150 million kilometers).
To understand parallax, try this: hold your finger up in from of your face and look at where it is in relation to a wall when looking through your left eye, then your right. Notice how it moves? Now move your finger further away, and repeat, then closer to your eye and repeat again. The amount it seems to move is proportional to the distance from your eye. Now substitute your left eye for the Earth at mid-summer, your right eye for it at mid-winter, the finger for the close star and the wall for the distant stars.
The first problem is we cannot be sure that the dim stars are really distant and the bright ones close, but if we repeat the process with enough stars we will get a statistical measurement that we can use. The second problem is that when this was first tried no parallax was seen, but that was because the stars are so incredibly distant that the parallax was small. With better techniques it was observed and the closest star moved 0.768 arc seconds, the equivalent of the width of a coin about 2 kilometers away!
Do the calculations and it turns out that star is about 40 trillion kilometers away. This is just "slightly" more than the "space is fake" person claimed, but he was only off by a factor of about a billion, so nice try! Also remember this is the closest star (apart from the Sun). The most distant star measured with this technique is about 500 thousand trillion kilometers away.
By the way, the more skeptical of you might be asking, how do we know the distance to the Sun, which we need to do the calculation? Well, it was measured quite accurately in 1672 using simple trigonometry from observations from opposite sides of the Earth to estimate the distance to Mars, then a further trig calculation to use Earth and Mars to get the distance to the Sun. It's simple maths which no one would debate, although the measurements themselves need to be very precise. But they got a number just 7% smaller than the one we have today.
Oh, one more thing too: how do we know the size of the Earth, because the "opposite sides of the Earth" observation needs that. Well, that was established by one of my heroes, Eratosthenes, in 240 BCE. He paid someone to step out the distance between the cities Alexandria and Syene, then he measured the length of a shadow at those two points at the same time. The shadow at the city closer to the equator was shorter and by using some more trigonometry he estimated the size of the Earth just a few percent different to the modern figure.
It was utterly brilliant and not only showed the diameter of the Earth, but also proved it wasn't flat, another crazy belief some people still have (I'm not joking, there really are some people who think the Earth is flat).
So everything I have listed here just needs some very simple maths and a bit of effort. To make the parallax observations you would also need a telescope, but a decent amateur level one would be sufficient. There is nothing you need to accept from an authority, everything can be done by any careful, moderately intelligent person.
By the way, even the more distant star I mentioned above is still exceptionally close by the standards of the universe as a whole! How do we know about even greater distances? Well, maybe that's a subject for my next blog post.
The Guardian newspaper hasn't exactly got the best reputation as a moderate and well balanced source of real news. Well, I'm sure the more left oriented and naive (or are those two things the same?) people think it is great, but I don't think so.
Some news sources (and I use that word in a somewhat inexact sense because many of what we might traditionally call news services are really just a place to maintain propaganda and activist opinions) do provide some fairly thoughtful and interesting perspectives, and I'm fine with that, even when they differ from mine. But it's been a long time since I read anything which was even interesting or original in the Guardian, although I have to admit I rarely read it, so no doubt I have missed some of their better material.
Anyway, what is all ranting this leading up to? Well, an article by some silly woman by the name of Zoe Williams, who seems to be against the American space program in general, and especially the Artemis mission which launched recently.
You've probably guessed by now what sort of thing she is saying, because it is the same tired old nonsense we have heard for years: that the money and effort put into exploring space is wasted and would be better spent back here on Earth. Yawn... boring!
Here are a few statements from her article, along with my response to them...
Statement: It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes.
Response: At least she starts by saying that this is effectively her opinion ("self evident to me") rather than an alleged fact, so I give her credit for that. But I don't know what these "crises besetting this planet" might be, although I can have a good guess! The fact is there are no major crises besetting the planet, except in the mind of silly, ignorant, hysterical people like her. There are problems we should be alert to, sure, but the state of the world is actually fairly good if you look at the stats.
Statement: there might be little green people out there - who wouldn’t want to meet them?
Response: There are real scientific programs which attempt to find extraterrestrial life and even other intelligence in the universe, but that is not a significant aim of this one, and not an aim of most of the space program. Of course, finding life on other planets would be an amazing discovery, and NASA is very aware of the need to look, but that's not what Artemis is all about. And this "little green people" thing (the original phrase was "little green men" but this is the Guardian so it must be gender inclusive!) is so trivial and childish that you've just got to laugh.
Statement: There’s nothing out there except planets infinitely less beautiful than this one.
Response: This time her ignorant opinion is presented as a fact. How does she know? Who decides what is beautiful? It's just another very naive, ignorant piece of meaningless nonsense presented as if it had some level of intellectual value. Well, it doesn't.
Statement: others act as though I’m opposing innovation and modernity, which I absolutely am not.
Response: Yes, she is. Modernity is not defined by her woke ideology, that is just a temporary glitch in our overall forward progress (at least, I hope so). It's not necessarily just space programs themselves which drive innovation and modernity, but it is the attitude of wanting to explore, to do difficult things, and to take risks which do. Her attitude seems to be reminiscent of the Luddites more than anything else.
Statement: point to all the discoveries that wouldn’t have been made without the space-based wanderlust, most of which seem to involve finding better ways to kill each other.
Response: While there are some elements of the space program which are closely connected to the military, in general that is not so significant. Here are some technologies derived from the space program: memory foam, scratch-resistant lenses, freeze-dried food, cordless power tools, space blankets, CMOS image sensors, cochlear implants, implantable heart monitors, wireless arthroscopes, minimally invasive surgical tools, ear thermometers, infrared medical sensors, advanced water purification, firefighting equipment, fire-retardant materials, shock absorbers for buildings and bridges, aerogel insulation, grooved roads, wireless headsets and comms, laptop computers and miniaturised electronics, robotics advancements, 3D printing, additive manufacturing for habitats, improved personal locator beacons, AI and data tools, rugged video cameras, advanced air purifiers, electrostatic sprayers. I don't see too many related to warfare there, do you?
I could go on, but I've go to wonder why I would waste my time criticising such a stupid person. Why does the Guardian allow such ignorance to be published? Well, I guess it is sufficiently anti-western (especially American) and is silly and hysterical enough that it fits their preferred style. All I can say is: what an absolute moron!
I love a good conspiracy, in fact I love a bad conspiracy even more, but it's important not to take them too seriously. So after that inauspicious start, let's move on to what I really want to talk about here: my own latest conspiracy which I don't necessarily believe.
Amongst my geeky interests is aviation, and especially military aircraft, so I usually go to New Zealand's premiere air show, "Warbirds Over Wanaka". Previously I attended this in 1992 ,1996, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2012, and 2024. I also attended the Omaka Air Show in 2017. Of course, I have reports on these shows, including photos, sounds, and movies on my web site.
This year I got tickets a few months back and was quite enthusiastic about going, mainly because an F-22 was going to be there. That is a fairly modern American jet fighter, with some stealth ability. I like old planes, but fast noisy jets are my favourite, and this is one I hadn't seen before. Previous shows included an F-111, some F/A-18s, and an F-16.
So a few weeks back it was announced that the F-22 would not attend, and I never found a really detailed or convincing explanation why. In addition, other more modern aircraft, which are currently in use, from Australia and Singapore were also cancelled, and more recently the New Zealand Air Force also cancelled their visit, and the RNZAF has been at every other show I have been to.
Now, it is possible that the Americans needed the F-22s in Iran, but I doubt it. It is also possible that the extra cost of fuel made attendance too expensive, but I also reject this. By the way, those who criticise the show for its use of fuel during a global crisis should know that it uses about 50,000 litres of aviation fuel over five days, but New Zealand consumes around 24 million litres of fuel per day in total, so the use at the show is really just a "rounding error" (0.04 percent of the total).
I remember earlier this year that various activists were commenting that displaying current military aircraft while they were also being used in various conflicts around the world was "inappropriate". This was before Iran, so I guess they were referring to Gaza and Ukraine. By the way, whenever I see the word "inappropriate" I assume we are talking about some major BS, because all it really means is something the activists don't like.
So my conspiracy is that anti-war activists have threatened violence (oh, the irony) or damage of some sort if modern jets are displayed at the show. Alternatively the government has got involved and requested they not attend to prevent any embarrassing connection with current unpopular wars (this would have come from the pathetic National Party, not Act or NZ First).
This seems to make more sense than the aircraft being required in an actual combat role or the somewhat increased price of fuel being a factor. Can I prove it? Well, no, of course not, or it wouldn't be much of a conspiracy theory, would it? The best conspiracies are those where there is some superficial evidence, but not enough to result in any firm conclusion!
Anyway, that's my theory. if you have any better explanations, leave a comment, but I want you to know: all good conspiracies are totally unaffected by the facts!
Well, the conflict in Iran is maybe the biggest global news story at the moment (sorry about that, Palestine, Ukraine, and global warming) so I guess I should present some opinions on it. Needless to say, these opinions will contain plenty of nuance, because that's what I try to do. Anyway, let's get started...
The war started at the end of February, so it has been going for a month now. Is it too early to know if it is a good or bad idea, a success or a failure, a moral necessity or an abomination? It's a bit of all of those, and when the US gets involved with wars it is always terminating them and what comes next which is the problem, so it is too early to judge, but Im going to judge anyway!
The Iranian regime was recognised by almost everyone as a bad one. When a government kills tens of thousands of its own people for demonstrating against it, you know something is wrong.
When a country is not trusted even by its neighbours (and yes, I do recognise the difference in the Persian origin of Iran versus the Arab roots of other Middle Eastern states, and the difference in Shia versus Sunni Islam) that is not a good sign.
When a country is known to be supporting and funding terrorist groups whose intent is the eradication of its ideological enemies (especially Israel) then you can see why we might be right to feel a bit nervous about it.
And when a state is governed according to a religion which some people refer to as a death cult, and that country is desperately trying to create a nuclear weapon, well yes, we have a problem.
There were signs that the Iranian people might have been ready to rise up against the government, so you can understand why the US and Israel might want to use their military option to help that process along. It hasn't worked out that way, but the idea was arguably good, and there might still be some possibility of success.
So looking at these factors you might conclude the war was justified, but for balance, let's list some counter-arguments...
First, there are many bad governments around the world and many would ask why it is up to the US (and to some extent, Israel) to judge which are sufficiently bad that the use of force against them is justified. There is also the unfortunate fact that when the US does try to "fix" these issues it often turns into a complete debacle. Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan were not conspicuous successes, were they?
So we have to ask if there any moral basis by which this can be justified, and practically speaking, will there be a positive outcome, or "will the cure worse than the disease"?
Second, if we are going to criticise the theocratic elements of its culture, should we not also condemn the religious rhetoric from the US and especially Israel? I have often said that I think Islam is a far worse religion than Christianity or Judaism, but I also say "those who believe absurdities will commit atrocities" and that applies to both sides to some extent.
Third, it wasn't so long ago that the US attack on Iran's nuclear enrichment facility was claimed to be a great success, so you might wonder why it is now necessary to start a genuine war against them for the same reason. Sure, I agree that some ability was maintained and they are not going to stop their nuclear program voluntarily, but maybe just additional strikes agains those facilities might have been more justifiable.
Finally, did the US and Israel understand the global repercussions of this war? The world is now suffering from fuel shortages and the associated increase in prices, which is turning a lot of opinion against the war. Did they not realise the tactical use of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran was likely, because they do not seem to have planned ahead to prevent it.
Some people are engaging in more extreme rhetoric and claiming they can see World War III or a nuclear Armageddon being the eventual result of this action, but I don't think anyone with much credibility would believe that. On the other hand, by stopping a genocidal theocracy getting nuclear weapons and very likely using them, maybe those things can be prevented.
If you think the price of fuel is bad now, imagine what it would belike during a nuclear exchange in the Middle East! Maybe now is the right time to attempt a meaningful regime change and prevent a truly catastrophic conflict in the future. I'm not totally sure that is a reasonable idea myself, but it is an idea with some merit.
Maybe we just need to let this proceed and see where it finishes. And if that is not acceptable to people (especially the anti-Trump mob) because of the civilian and military losses, maybe they would prefer to go back to where the Iranian government was killing its own people instead? It's important not to look at just what is happening now, but at what would be happening, both now and in the future, if this action had not been taken.
So those are my thoughts for now. As things progress maybe I will change my mind, but the only way to truly judge this will be how the US exit strategy unfolds and what the new Iranian government looks like. We can only hope that this will be the exception where things turn out for the better!
When debating people it is always useful to have some perspective on where their ideas and philosophical preferences come from. By "philosophical" here I mean in a very generic sense, covering politics, religion, and other fundamental beliefs.
One of the reasons I think I am sometimes quite effective when debating against others is that I have "been there, believed that" myself in the past. For example, politically I used to be fairly firmly on the left and regularly voted for Labour, along with even the Greens on one occasion. And when I left school I was quite credulous about a lot of paranormal claims, and was quite the opposite of the skeptic I am now.
So when I see other people making those same mistakes I made in the past I know exactly where they are coming from, and I am often quite understanding of their position, because I used to have the same ideas myself!
I saw this comment recently on social media: "Everyone starts off as a lefty, and then wakes up at some point... After you start either making money, working, or trying to run a business, you realise what crap ideas they are and go right".
Of course this claim of "everyone" cannot be taken literally. Maybe better would be "most people" or even "every rational person", but even those claims are debatable.
There are also these quite common concepts: "If you don't vote left when you are young, you have no heart; if you don't vote right as you get older, you have no head" and "I still feel I support the left like I did 10 or 20 years ago, but the left has gone so crazy it has left me behind, so the right is now my only option".
I can identify with all of these points. Many people who have more extreme views opposing mine are either very naive (especially younger people), or live in a "bubble" where they don't have to face many of the realities others do (the main example here being academics and teachers), or base their opinions on emotion rather than rationality (dare I mention that many of these are women, especially young women).
Note that in no way am I saying that all young people, or academics, or women are out of touch. This is a purely statistical argument. There are plenty of older non-academic men who believe a lot of nonsense too, just like there are plenty of young people, academics, and women who are very reasonable.
Also note that when I use the word "right" I use it as a convenient shorthand rather than an exact description. I do not think of myself as a conservative, although I think some conservative ideas are good. Currently I think of myself more as a libertarian, although I also recognise many weaknesses in that belief system.
And many of my ideas might be seen by some people as quite left leaning, although I would say they are just common sense and supportive of individual freedoms. For example, I support gay marriage because what harm is it doing me? What right do I have to try to control the lives of gay people? And I am not religious, unlike many conservatives, so I tend to reject the religious ideas of people I otherwise might agree with (Charlie Kirk for example). And I agree with government controls over the worst excesses of capitalism, although I would prefer to see less of those rather than more.
So I fully recognise how ridiculous some of my opinions were when I was younger. I'm not an academic myself but I did work in a university for a long time and I know how many of them think and I agreed with them for years. And I'm not a woman (could I identify as one for a while to get their perspective?) so I guess the point of this post is a bit weaker because of that.
When I see the arguments some people try to use against me, I recognise them for the same arguments I used in the past. I can remember what caused me to change my mind and reject them, and I know exactly what the attraction of them is. This makes it a lot easier to fight against them. Sometimes I even say "been there, believed that"
I just noticed that I have written almost 2500 blog posts and I have not done a humorous one recently, especially about the worst form of humour ever: feghoots! It's hard to believe, but it appears to be true. Anyway, what is a feghoot, I hear some of you ask. Well, it's an amusing and rambling story which ends in a lame pun. It generally elicits a groan rather than a laugh. You've been warned! Anyway, here are some of my favourite feghoots and a brief explanation of each...
Feghoot 1: Some friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise the funds.
Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, the rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. He asked his mother to go and ask the friars to get out of business. They ignored her, too.
So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town, to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close shop. Terrified, the friars did so, thereby proving that...
Only Hugh can prevent florist friars.
Comment: The catchphrase "only you can prevent forest fires" comes from a US Forest Service campaign starting in 1947. It has become very well known, so I hope you know about it or the "joke" is even more lame than usual!
Feghoot 2: Back during the stone ages our ancestors mostly lived in grass huts supported with wooden rafters. The highest technological achievement was stone cutting and most tribes would have their best stone cutters craft elaborate thrones for their tribal chieftains. These thrones would be a source of pride among the tribe and stealing another tribe's throne was a way to demoralize a rival and a way to show superiority without resorting to open warfare.
One such tribe wanted to honor its chieftain and so a group of young warriors crept into their main rival's camp and stole their throne. Wanting to surprise their chieftain the warriors hid the throne up in the rafters of their grass hut. Unfortunately no sooner had the chieftain walked in then the rafter broke and the chieftain was killed by the falling throne. The moral is, of course...
People in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.
Comment: Starting to see how this works now? The pun sounds very much like the old proverb "people in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones". There is even a Spoonerism here as well, but I will not discuss those on this post.
Feghoot 3: The big chess tournament was taking place at the Plaza in New York. After the first day's competition, many of the winners were sitting around in the foyer of the hotel talking about their matches and bragging about their wonderful play. After a few drinks they started getting louder and louder until finally, the desk clerk couldn't take any more and kicked them out.
The next morning the manager called the clerk into his office and told him there had been many complaints about his being so rude to the hotel guests: instead of kicking them out, he should have just asked them to be less noisy. The clerk responded...
I'm sorry, but if there's one thing I can't stand, it's chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.
Comment: Apparently, chestnuts roasting in an open fire are a great thing, although I've never tried them that way. Hopefully anyone trying to make sense of this joke will recognise the phrase, though.
Feghoot 4: Mahatma Gandhi walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him...
A super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.
Comment: The last sentence resembles the word "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" when spoken quickly enough, and it is actually a real English word which was made famous in the Disney song from the movie "Mary Poppins". This is one of my favourite feghoots, and not just because it is the shortest! The word actually pre-dates the movie and its meaning is explained like this: it is a compound word made up of: super- (above), -cali- (beauty), -fragilistic- (delicate), -expiali- (to atone), and -docious (educable), with all of these parts combined meaning "atoning for being educable through delicate beauty".
So now you know. Never say you din't learn something reading my blog!
There are a lot of people out there who I refer to colloquially as "control freaks". These are people who aren't happy with trying to control their own lives, they want to control yours and mine as well. They range from partners and friends at the bottom level, to managers and colleagues, to police and other authority figures, and (of course) at the top (or bottom, depending ony our perspective) we have politicians!
Of course, most of these people don't think they are trying to control others for no good reason. They generally think they are doing what is best for everyone, including the person being controlled, because the leaders are either more knowledgeable, more moral, or just smarter than those "beneath" them.
I'm sure there are examples where this is true: where leaders genuinely are making good decisions which are for the good of the majority, but I am equally confident there are a lot of those decisions being made which are based on poor information, or toxic ideology, or just some sort of subjective factors which might not be easy to justify.
The need to control others is often based on some sort of moral panic. The leaders see a major problem in society which has to be fixed, and as the only holders of truth and high morality, it is up to them to do it. But they are usually wrong, deluded, and just distorting the true situation for their own benefit, often (I suspect) subconsciously, which is far nore dangerous than those who know that they are following a corrupt or irrational path.
Let me give you some examples of moral panics from the past: witch hunts and especially the Salem Witch Trials, McCarthyism, the Pedo Panic, the Satanic Panic, and many others. There is a list of moral panics on Wikipedia with 30 or 40 examples.
And what is the latest panic that we must rely on our "betters" (our esteemed political leaders, activists, and other control freaks) to fix for us? I say it is the internet and social media in particular, which allegedly causes a lot of harm to people, especially younger people and kids.
I have already blogged about this issue in "Too Much Control" from 2025-12-11, but more information has appeared recently, and I wanted to mention it here.
According to a guest on a recent podcast from the New Zealand Free Speech Union, there is no good evidence that social media specifically causes any harm, because the studies which might indicate this are not detailed enough and fail to account for the difference between correlation and causation.
So people who use social media might have higher levels of anxiety, but is it the social media causing that, does higher anxiety cause people to use social media more, or does a common cause lead to both? We don't know, and don't know what specific social media activities these anxious people are engaging in.
Surveys of young people about the causes of their anxiety don't indicate social media is the major cause. In almost every case the cause is school, and especially exams and excessive homework. So if we want to reduce anxiety levels maybe we should abolish school, or at least abolish exams and homework!
There is research, by well known scientists like Jonathan Haidt, which does but more blame on social media, but this is just one view, and is not the complete picture. So it is possible to pick and choose evidence to support whichever side is convenient. Why do politicians emphasise the alleged problems but ignore the poor evidence and downplay the benefits?
Maybe it's because it gives them a chance to be control freaks. For years now, they have wanted to control free speech with their so-called "hate speech" laws which were really nothing more than a way to control opinions they didn't like. Sure, a small part of it might be reasonably classified as genuine hate speech, and there was undoubtedly misinformation involved as well, but I have seen what I might view as hate speech and what is by any reasonable definition mininformation come from government sources as well. But those would never be censored, would they.
The strategy of controlling young people in schools and universities has worked well for the groups wanting to destroy Western civilisation and capitalism in recent years, and this just seems like an extension to it. Stop young people seeing alternative views on-line now and you can control them in the future.
Sounds like a conspiracy? Sure, it is. But remember some conspiracies are real. They say that if you want to see who is oppressing you just look at those you're not allowed to criticise. This sure does seem like a moral panic being created out of very little, then used as an excuse for draconian controls over free speech. I think a little bit of risk is worth accepting in order to gain greater freedom. Don't agree? Maybe you're part of the problem then. Is this just another witch hunt?
No one is entirely consistent in their beliefs, and as a person's ideology becomes more extreme they tend to become less consistent than the average, at least in my experience. It is not limited to any particular society, culture, or political group, of course, but it does seem particularly bad amongst the stragglers who still haven't moved on from woke-ism yet.
Before you feel like criticising me for that statement, let me save you the bother. Yes, I know I am somewhat infatuated with woke-ism but I do believe it has been the cause of many of our societal problems over the last few years, so I don't apologise (well maybe a little bit) for concentrating on it. Also, my little dig about the "stragglers" suggesting that most people have already moved on is based on societal changes I think I have seen (that woke is no longer the force it was) but that could be debated.
But let's move on to my main point: I recently saw a post reflecting this lack of consistency, specifically aimed at the woke mob, so let's have a look at what it said and see if it is valid...
Comment: They call you racist, but say black people are too dumb to get ID.
Response: This is in reference to proposed voter ID requirements in the US, which some people claim are unfair to black people there. It seems to imply that those people are too incompetent or stupid or whatever to provide ID to vote, which does seem racist. Of course, they would claim it is because of "systemic racism" but have no evidence that it exists, as well as ignoring the ID requirements for many other parts of normal living, like driving, etc. So sure, there does seem to be some inconsistency here.
Comment: They call you a science denier, but say men in dresses are women.
Response: This is an obvious dig at the constant posts we see saying "trans women are real women" which by any objective standard is clearly false, although it depends on your definition of words, and woke-ism is very much an offshoot of postmodernism where redefining words is a common tactic. Again, there does seem some merit in this. If redefining words and ideas is fine in one context, why can't it also be in others? Better still, let's just stick to the definiton of words we already have.
Comment: They call Elon a Nazi and say you shouldn't buy a Tesla, but buy Volkswagens.
Response: The Volkswagen company was originally created partly through pressure from Hitler, so it does have a problematic past, but I think we can safely move on from that by now. The Germans are now some of our best friends! But calling Elon Musk a Nazi is just stupid. He clearly isn't one, and it just degrades the meaning of the word, just like has already happened to "racist", "Islamophobe", and "misogynist".
Comment: They kicked religion out of schools because "indoctrination" but are fine with drag queen story hour.
Response: The drag queens would deny they are there for indoctrination, but it does seem in some cases as if this is a fair point. Young people are very impressionable, and it is OK to question their motives, just like we would question the motives of religious people wanting influence over children. So this is another fair point.
Comment: They call you fascist for wanting secure borders, but create "safe spaces" to keep out people they don't agree with.
Response: There does appear to be a double standard here, although a case could be made that the people wanting to cross the border are often in dire need of help, but the people being kept out of safe spaces have little need to be there. Despite that, I think there is some merit in this criticism.
Comment: They preach to you about climate change, but fly in private jets.
Response: This is a very obvious case of hypocrisy, and seems to be very common. But the elites who are at the front of "climate action" are not well known for their connection with everyday life. Another very obvious case of double standards.
Comment: They say you're intolerant, but shout down and try to ban speakers they disagree with.
Response: Yes, they love to push tolerance and diversity, but are very intolerant of some opinions and the diversity never extends to opinions they disagree with. Clearly another double standard here.
There are a few others but I'm sure you get the point by now. The post finished with the comment "Liberalism is a mental illness", which is problematic because "liberal" means very different things depending on which country you live in, and on the context. All I will say is the American style of liberalism has almost nothing in common with the classic form of it. That would never succumb to these obvious inconsistencies.
I often rant about the poor state of the media. It's not that most media companies are lying to us, it's more that they are biased, opinionated, and selective in what they tell us.
For example, every time Trump is mentioned on left-oriented outlets like RNZ and TVNZ (while I am concentrating on New Zealand media here, a similar argument applies to other countries) there is an explicit or implied criticism of him in various ways. I could say it is subtle, but when you are alert to this it really isn't: anything which is clearly positive is ignored while anything the media disapprove of is reported with a negative spin.
So the media are reporting fairly factually, but they are selective in which facts they report, when they have opinions they are almost always from one perspective, and instead of just reporting the facts they can't help adding some sort of moral judgement as well.
Here are a few examples...
The negative effects of climate change are constantly reinforced, but any positives are completely ignored. So we might hear that we expect more people to die from the effects of extreme heat, but we don't hear how currently about ten times as many die form extreme cold and this number is likely to reduce.
And the negative effects of increased CO2 are openly reported, even when some of them have become more uncertain, but the greatly increased plant growth and forest cover which has appeared over the last 10 years is never mentioned.
I'm sorry to be repetitive about this disclaimer, but I need to say again I am not denying that climate change is happening and is likely significantly caused by human activity, but I am debating the net effect of it, and I am debating the effectiveness of the steps taken to allegedly mitigate it.
Here's another one I saw recently on social media, which I think has some merit: "We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners and bikers by the actions of a few lunatics. Funny how that works." (relating to recent events in Australia).
In other words, when a Muslim carries out an atrocity it is not connected (by the mainstream media) to their religious beliefs so the bigger picture is ignored, but when a crazy person uses a gun to murder someone that is connected to the alleged underlying cause: too many guns.
And from the same post: "Seems we constantly hear about how the Australian Old Age Pension Plan could run out of money. How come we never hear about welfare and illegal immigration support running out of money? What's interesting is that the first group worked for their money, but the second group didn't."
TO be fair we would need to know the cost of each of these schemes before reaching a conclusion based on practicality, but to reach one based on morality I think is fairly clear that this biased reporting is deeply problematic.
How much reporting do we see on the current civil unrest in Iran? Considering the number and type of casualties there why is it that we hear almost nothing compared with the war in Gaza when it was at its height? Gaza was a real war where the target was terrorists, Iran involves a government murdering thousands of its own citizens for protesting.
And the general state of dysfunction in many other Islamic countries is also ignored, or at least minimised. Why? Surely this doesn't represent a genuine effort to present the news in a factual way. It seems more likely that it is a deliberate effort to emphasise news which fits the ideology of the news source while ignoring the news which contradicts it.
And then there is news which is not even news, but fits a woke agenda. I often see items about people who are pursuing some sort of activity which is seen by the media as admirable but is actually quite inconsequential, and shouldn't really be classified as news at all.
For example, a presenter on a local TV channel decided to leave her job to study the Maori language full time. This was news, apparently. But if the person had not been part of the media in-group or had been studying a language not currently seen as significant to the woke majority in the media, would it have been news? I can't prove a counter-factual but we all know it would have been ignored, don't we.
I do have to admit that there are exceptions where some news sources do make some sort of effort to present all sides of a debate. For example, my local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, has published two quite significant articles defending a mining company involved in what is probably the biggest current controversy here: new gold mining activity in Central Otago.
I should add though that even when I am complimenting them there is still an apparent bias against the mining company, because more items against the mining are published and they tend to be in more prominent locations. Still, at least we heard both sides, so well done the ODT.
So how do we overcome this problem? Well, I'm not suggesting not consuming news from mainstream sources, because they do an adequate job on non-contentious issues, and they do present controversial material which is at least worth considering. But we should be doing two things: first, don't believe everything they say; and second, try to get contrary opinions from alternative media (which we should also be suspicious of).
I really think that critical thinking skills should be taught at schools. Not only are these useful for any further study but they are also essential for functioning in modern society. I don't think I would have gained these skills at all if I hadn't taken a couple of psychology papers at university which emphasised them. But most people don't to that, so they are more susceptible to media inconsistency.
I often write a post about New Zealand's (alleged) national day, Waitangi Day, and it is generally fairly negative because it isn't a national day at all, it is primarily an opportunity for Maori activists to whine about how bad things are and how they should be given a whole pile of undeserved money and special privileges.
Many people will say I am a racist for calling out this phenomenon, because it involves a "minority racial group", but I equally criticise any other group which utilises similar tactics, and it is the activists I am talking about, not Maori in general. Also, many activists for Maori causes are not Maori themselves, so I think it is fairly clear it is the idea I am against, not any particular racial group.
At this year's Waitangi Day commemoration the leader of New Zealand's libertarian party, Act, made a few comments which got the woke mob into a bit of a bit of a state. While that party is nominally libertarian, it is fairly moderate in fact, and it's only because politics has gone so far to the left that some people dare to suggest it is "far right", which it is not, or course. See my blog post on the Overton Window from 2024-06-19 for a discussion on how what is labelled, left, right, and centrist has changed in recent times.
The comment that got most attention was one on the positive aspects of colonialism. The British colonised this country and the Treaty of Waitangi (which is primarily what our national day commemorates) served as an official agreement on how the process of colonisation should proceed, to ensure that all groups were treated fairly.
Unfortunately there are several issues which affect how the Treaty is interpreted and utilised. First, there is more than one version, with potentially different meanings. Second, some words in the Maori language do not have an exact English equivalent (and vice versa) so the Maori and English speaking sides might have had different expectations. Third, in recent times a new concept, known as the "principles" of the Treaty has emerged which tries to add extra obligations which aren't mentioned directly anywhere. And finally, both sides have not followed even the most basic requirements very well resulting in claims for compensation.
Many people think the Treaty is no longer fit for purpose (that is assuming it ever was). I tend to agree. The Treaty was written in a time when there were two very distinct cultures in the country, and when there was almost constant war, primarily between different Maori tribes, and it was necessary to bring some order to the situation. But New Zealand is now a modern, mainly peaceful and fairly affluent society, so the original pupose is no longer relevant.
Now the Treaty is more a mechanism to generate division than it is one to create unity. It is an excuse to give one group (Maori) special privileges that others don't have (and yes, I can list those if necessary). It is a way to get woke ideology included in places where it can have the most effect, especially in education, where naive young people are being indoctrinated with pro-Maori propaganda.
So apart from a few Maori elites, and a group of super-woke morons, no one is gaining much from this worthless travesty of a document: it is time for it to go. Of course, that will never happen, because those groups I mentioned above have too much to lose, and too many people have been taken in by the propaganda about the Treaty being an important founding document. All we can really do at this time is to resist the nonsense they are trying to spin.
So the point that colonisation had both good and bad aspects, just like everything else, was seen as controversial. But this is absurd. Nothing is all bad, and even if you believe that colonisation was primarily a bad thing (something I reject entirely) it is ridiculous to say that we should ignore the positives.
It is because of colonisation, and not a lot because of the Treaty or anything Maori did, that we live in that prosperous and peaceful country I mentioned above. And those positive things apply as much to Maori as anyone else. Sure, it is possible that if the country had not been colonised that Maori might have developed an advanced society by themselves, but would they really? And even if they had, how much longer would it have taken without the colonisation process acting as a sort of shortcut to advancement?
There have been very few cultures, outside of Western society, which have advanced to the same degree as those which were colonised. Even India, which did have a quite advanced culture in some ways before the British arrived, benefitted hugely from colonisation. India, like almost every country previously colonised, is now independent, but the benefits the British brought with them are still there.
So I say let's celebrate colonisation and when I am accused of being a coloniser I often say "yes, that is true, you can thank me later". Of course, as an individual I am no more a coloniser than anyone else, because that is ancient history, but the culture I identify with (Western) was a coloniser, so I accept both the criticism and the thanks which should go along with that.
Colonisation was a thing of it's time. It was bad, it was good, but it is no longer really relevant. The same applies to the Treaty and to our horrible national day which derives from it. I think it is time to forget Waitangi Day, and to forget the Treaty!
Many people who make decisions on behalf of others seem very convinced that they are right about everything. Obviously if you are the sort of person who feels that you can do that you probably have an unrealistic view of your own infallibility, especially when you live in an echo chamber of sycophantic positive feedback. But I think if these people were more honest and considered opinions from a wider range of sources they might be a bit less confident and just maybe might make better decisions.
To be fair, there are usually very good reasons why decisions are made, and superficially they often seem to make a lot of sense. But there are always unintended consequences to every change, and awareness of that fact is often lacking.
I was working with someone recently who works for a large corporate entity. He suddenly found that all of his services, such as email and wifi access, had stopped working and his devices were telling him that his password was incorrect. We tried all sorts of things but it looked like his account had been locked for some reason, which happens automatically after a certain numbers of attempted logins with an incorrect password. But he had been using the same, correct password all along, so that didn't seem likely.
Anyway, it was a bit of a mystery and I was going to visit to help him, but then he called to say that after enquiring at the helpdesk (which had been closed previously) it turned out his account had been locked by security staff after he reported a phishing attempt where he clicked a link but didn't provide any further information, something which on a Mac is almost impossible to result in a major security concern.
So the security "experts" had followed what was probably standard procedure (which of course, was totally unnecessary and arguably more trouble than it was worth) by locking his account, but they hadn't bothered telling him. They claimed they had no way to contact him even though he had a phone issued by the same organisation.
But what is the consequence of this? Well when he asked me what he had done wrong I said he shouldn't have reported the phishing incident. He said thet they were told they should, and I said yes, in theory it is a good idea, but are you prepared to put up with the end result of that report? He replied, no.
So by instituting inflexible and dogmatic procedures to manage this sort of alleged security incident the management had ensured that people were less likely to follow the prescribed actions in future, and presumably that actually decreased security. Clearly an unintended consequence.
And this particular problem was made much worse because of the use of single sign-on. SSO means that one user name and password is used for all services at an organisation. Sign in once, and those credentials automatically propagate to everything else. It's good in that there is only one password to remember and often the login is handled automatically, but that can just as easily be achieved using password managers, like Apple's iCloud keychain which is built in to every Mac. It also means security is handled by one service and maintaining password changes and forcing password minimal requirements is easier.
But the down side of this is that you are putting "all your eggs in one basket". If a user accidentally gives away a password for one service, especially if it is one with minimal security issues associated, they are also exposed for every other service covered by that SSO password, including potentially really basic services they might need to fix the problem, such as login to the computer, and connection to the the network.
In my opinion SSO is just an inherently bad idea. It is standard practice in large corporations and many people would say that indicates it must be a good thing on balance, but I'm not so sure. I know how large organisations work and making sensible decisions based on deep knowledge of a process is not a common event! As decision making evolves further up the hierarchy the people tend to be less involved with the technicalities of anything and also less attuned to the needs of the people they are theoretically there to help. So they make worse decisions, not better.
So it seems to me that SOO is another example of something that leads to unintended consequences. It is something that seems like a good idea in theory, but in practice the bad aspects outweigh the good. As I said, this is just my opinion and I realise alternative views are possible, but I haven't ever heard a really strong argument supporting it, except it is what "everyone else does".
There is one last element of this I should mention too. The institution involved in this case requires employees to have a long and complex password which is changed regularly. Again, superficially this is a good idea, but what about those pesky unintended consequences?
Well in this case people cannot remember their passwords (because they are too long and because they change too often) so they write them on a sticky note next to the computer. This is additional security how, exactly? I agree it increases security against remote attacks, but it reduces it massively for casual local access.
Along with my computer science degree I also majored in psychology, so you might say I understand both computers and people (a claim I don't take too seriously, BTW) but it does seem that many other people making IT related decisions are ignoring the human nature aspect of their decisions. They're ignoring the unintended consequences.
I work in IT and often have to help people who have run into issues with their computers, phones, and other devices. Sometimes the people I am helping sort of apologise for not being able to resolve the issue themselves, and it is true that sometimes if they just read the screen, slowed down a little bit, and put a bit of thought into it, they could have fixed it themselves, but more often there is something genuinely weird happening which is not their fault.
If you use a computer you have probably noticed that things don't always work as advertised, and that the suggested solutions sometimes make things worse rather than better, and that an expert is needed to make any progress. Also, the solution is often to restart the device, log out then log back into a service, or wait an hour and try again. Do those solutions sound like they are really fixing the underlying issue or just temporarily disguising it? To me, it sounds a lot like the second.
In fact I don't like restarting a computer to fix a problem because that is not a permanent fix, it is just resetting stuff to a previous state which could easily result in the problem returning. That's not to say I don't use that method some times, but when I do I don't like it!
So now is the time to list a few recent examples of this phenomenon...
A client recently bought a new printer and was told by the staff at the shop some sort of convoluted story about using a smart phone to set it up. When he tried to do the setup he got nowhere because the instructions didn't appear to have any connection with the actual printer he had (a Brother in this example, which are usually quite good). He thought maybe the instructions were for a different model entirely.
When I looked at it I could see that the instructions did apply to his model, so I followed them carefully to try to get the printer working. But did it work? By now you have probably figured that the answer is "no"!
I should clarify the situation here, and say that this was to get wireless printing set up. Normal printing through a cable on a Mac is usually very easy and reliable, but some wireless printers are not so simple.
In the end I just threw away the instructions and used my experience and intuition to install everything "the hard way". This involved steps like entering passwords by selecting letters in a grid using up, down, left, right keys, and other frustrations, but in the end it did work and seems to be reliable.
A couple of months back I had another wireless printer issue which, despite many calls to the manufacturer (Canon in this case), was never resolved. The client had to give that printer away and we bought an HP instead, which worked after only one weird glitch: a miracle for a printer!
It's not just me either: an IT geeks group I follow on Facebook often has posts making fun of problems with printers. A favourite joke is that the band "Rage Against the Machine" was named that after a particularly bad experience trying to get a printer to work!
I have several wireless printers at home even though I almost never print anything. In fact, you could say I use paper a negative number of times, because if someone gives me some information on paper I take a photo of it with my phone, store it as a file on my computer - and in iCloud so it is accessible from all my devices - and hand them the paper back again.
I don't use paper for various reasons: first, I don't want more trees killed just to store information in an archaic way (on paper); second, I can store the equivalent of millions of pieces of paper even on small devices like my phone; third, searching on a digital device takes seconds but a manual search for paper might take hours; and finally, I just want to show that the "paperless office" we were supposed to have decades ago is actually possible.
But sometimes I might want to print a poster, or a photo, so the printers do exist. Also my wife likes to print stuff, just like a lot of people do, and that's fair enough: I have given up trying to convert people to a paperless system like I have. My printers are connected to a print server, so the server does the connection to the printer through a cable and the computers wanting to print communicate with the server wirelessly. This is more or less 100% reliable, although I do realise that most people don't want half a dozen servers of various types cluttering up their house like I have!
This post was going to be a rant about IT problems in general but it seems to have degenerated into a whinging session just about printers. Maybe I will leave the complaining about other issues for a later date. All I want to ask the printer manufacturers at this point is this: why so hard?
As most of my readers know, I work in IT, and I recently took voluntary redundancy from a job I have had for almost 40 years. I am at retirement age anyway, but I would have continued working if I hadn't been hit with yet another restructuring: I guess about the 6th time that had happened since I started.
It is fine to change the structure of an institution, group, or company, but there has to be a good reason for it, and the changes need to be focussed towards making things better for the real people the organisation exists for. The restructurings I experienced though, seemed to be driven by the personal ideology of a senior "leader", or just a bunch of idle managers trying to justify their existence.
In my case, the changes always made things worse for the actual clients I was supposed to be supporting. I'm sure they made things better for some people - most likely the management - but that really just isn't good enough. Over the last 30 years the institution has grown the number for managers by massive amounts while technical, academic, and general staff have been "let go" in large numbers.
Morale has sunk to new lows, valuable people have left, and most people see the place as being a "sinking ship" after years of perceived gross incompetence in management.
Hey, I don't work there any more so I guess I can tell those of you who don't already know that the institution in this case is the University of Otago.
I used to discuss the state of the place with many people I worked with, and the opinion amongst the academics and general staff was almost universally negative towards the management. In fact there was only one staff remember I ever spoke to who thought the reorganisations we were forced into were a good thing, and that person is now in senior management. Apparently, if you support the power hierarchy and ignore the facts you can go far in an organisation like that.
Note that I am not saying the university is uniquely bad, because any large organistion infected with the curse of rampant managerialism will have similar problems. In fact, the only other really large employer in Dunedin, the hospital, is reputed to be even worse than the university. That might explain a lot about why our health system doesn't work. I suspect the main problem there is not so much lack of funding, but overbearing and incompetent management, and many people who work there support that view, although most of them would also like more money as well!
So I am now self-employed, doing casual IT support work for the Apple users around town. Of course, I do miss many parts of my previous job, because I genuinely enjoyed working with the vast majority of people at the university, except for the managers of course, which I avoided interacting with at all costs!
For example, I almost never went to their silly meetings, which really just degenerated into a talk-fest where a bunch of self-important bureaucrats talked for an hour while saying nothing. Honestly, if I didn't know better I would say they were trying to denigrate themsleves through satire. The mindless management jargon was so unbelievably awful that it was hard not to laugh at them some times.
And I know that IT tech people also sometimes use a lot of specialised language, but when I talk to people who aren't IT experts I adjust my vocabulary to use words they will be familiar with. I suspect that if managers also did that the true vacuousness of their thoughts would quickly be revealed, because without all the gibberish there is almost nothing left.
And superficially I followed the rules while bending them to breaking point when no one was watching. Of course, I occasionally got caught doing this sort of thing, and on one occasion I had to hire a lawyer to defend me against management attacks, but they were shown to be wrong and had to pay me out for the stress and loss of reputation to me. But that made no difference to them at all: the nice thing about being a manager I guess, is you can be totally wrong and still suffer no consequences.
Some people say I am wrong to criticise managers because they can see the "big picture" which I can't. But I say there is no *the* big picture: there are many big pictures and they vary depending on your philosophical and political beliefs. No one big picture is necessarily better than any other. The management's is just one of many, and not even close to being the best, in my opinion. Yes, it's just my opinion, but one which appears to be shared by many others.
People sometimes ask why I speak so critically of the university and why I continued to work there if I disliked it to that extent, but that is (maybe deliberately) misrepresenting my view. I criticise the management because I want the university to succeed. If I didn't care, why would I have bothered make myself a target like that?
In fact, a few years back I realised that there was no way anyone could make any real difference, so what is the point in even trying. After that I still tried to do the best for my clients, despite the rules making that difficult, but I accepted that I had to work in a bureaucratic environment. You've got to understand what can be changed and what can't. There's no point in making your life harder for no good reason!
I think it is time to start the year of blogging with something good and controversial, unlike my usual stuff which everyone agrees with (I'm being sarcastic). So let's have a quick look at the "invasion" of Venezuela and the "kidnapping" of Venezuelan (ex?) president Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
The anti-Trump brigade jumped on this immediately and denounced it as an example of "fascism" or "colonialism" or "economic warfare", but are these claims fair? Well, I think we would have to say that controlling access to Venezuela's vast oil reserves is part of the reason this has happened, but there might be more commendable reasons as well.
Let's face it: the US has a reputation for getting involved in foreign politics and hasn't hesitated in the past to remove any leaders they didn't approve of, or to attack a country with minimal justification. Additionally, although many of the actual invasions went well, there is a frequent problem in establishing when the "mission is complete" and to organise a better form of government after the US forces have left. Iraq and Afghanistan are good examples of this problem we have seen in recent years.
As well as somewhat questionable outcomes, these wars have resulted in significant civilian casualties: hundreds of thousands in Iraq and tens of thousands in Afghanistan.
So how does what has happened in Venezuela compare? Well it's far too early to know whether any useful regime change might happen, or whether the new leadership there might be even worse than the current one, but at least I approve of one thing: the low number of casualties, especially civilians.
I quite like the concept of directly targeting problematic leaders and leaving the civilians and even military personnel relatively untouched. There is no reasonable doubt that Maduro was a terrible leader, and the exodus of millions of Venezuelans should clearly demonstrate that. Venezuela is an example of what happens when economic policies err to much towards socialism.
Note that I'm not saying that policies which might be described as socialist in intent are always bad; there is room for that type of thing to some extent in a fundamentally capitalist society, but when the basis for the economy has major Marxist elements to it, there seems to be only one outcome: tyranny, economic ruin, and general failure.
But is it the US's job to "fix" these problems when they arise? Well, that's the big question, isn't it. The US is often seen as the world's "police force" and is generally expected to help out in situations where more positive intervention us required, such as providing development money and disaster relief, so I guess we have to accept the more questionable aspects of this role as well.
And if they are going to intervene in "badly run" foreign governments then this targeted approach seem to be the way to do it. I also like the way Israel has done this to a lesser extent, with its attacks on terrorist leaders and the infamous 2024 Lebanon pager attacks on terrorists. While I am uncomfortable with any government killing any people for any reason, I would prefer a more direct attack on the genuine cause of the problem rather than a less targeted one.
And, yes, I know if you look at Gaza it doesn't look like the Israelis have been too successful in attacking just the "bad guys", but remember those terrorists deliberately located themselves in civilian areas, and despite this the civilian to military casualty ration in Gaza is remarkably low. Could Israel have done better? Well, sure, but they could have done a lot worse too.
If you don't like Trump's actions in Venezuela I invite you to compare them with the death and destruction brought about by Obama. The numbers are difficult to know exactly, but there were at least tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of civilians killed during his time as president. He also had more bombs dropped than anyone else, and conducted airstrikes in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
And, just for the record, some Mexicans referred to him as the "deporter in chief" after he had over 3 million illegal immigrants deported.
So whatever you think of Trump's actions, it could be worse, a lot worse, if Obama was still president. It seems to me that Trump really does prefer a better type of war!
The end of the year is approaching so I guess it is time for a summary of 2025. Of course, what are the most important events of the year will depend on the person making the appraisal, so these are just my thoughts. Feel free to share yours in the comments.
First, it was a good year for Trump. He still has plenty of critics, but I have started to get the feeling that a lot of the whining coming from them is more out of habit rather than anything involving genuinely individual thought or fair commentary on his actions.
What we have long suspected: that the media are inventing stories to make him look bad, has been shown to be real, with the revelations of the creation of apparently deliberately misleading stories at the BBC, and if you think it is limited to just them then you are showing an embarrassing level of naivety.
His work to improve the situation in Gaza has been recognised even by some of his harshest critics. One prominent and intelligent person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome), Sam Harris, has even suggested he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, even though he still thinks he should not be president.
The US is also progressing relatively well with border control, the economy, and a limited control over the rabid fringe of extreme leftist hysteria, including LGBT issues.
Second, AI continues to become part of our everyday lives. I specifically use it several times every day, and it is also built into many functions I have used without AI enhancements in the past.
Whether AI will progress to the extent its supporters believe, whether it will ever rival humans in general intelligence, and whether it will ever become an existential threat is more uncertain. There are credible people who think it is just another tech "bubble" that will burst like so many others, but there are others who think it will revolutionise society, not necessarily in a good way. I tend to think it will continue to improve and that we will have major changes in our lives because of this within 10 or 20 years.
Third, there appears to be less of what I have been recently referring to (somewhat unkindly) as "hysteria". In this context I mean totally exaggerated claims of imminent disaster, often as a result of the actions of what might traditionally be thought of as the "good team" (the Western world, Israel, capitalists).
My first example of this is COVID. There is no doubt that this was a serious disease and well worth paying attention to, but the over-reaction by leaders, including our own repulsive tyrant Jacinda Ardern, was pure hysteria. At least COVID is no longer much of a source of interest to the vast majority of people.
I must admit that I still see people wearing masks, even though we know they do almost nothing and might even be more trouble than they are worth. Why? I guess because it marks the wearer as a "good person" who follows the rules, even when the rules no longer exist. There will always be a few people more retarded than most, I guess!
Then there is the "climate crisis". I think climate change is real and worth being aware of and taking reasonable steps to either avoid or to adapt to, but it is not a crisis, nor an emergency, and it certainly isn't an existential threat. Many countries, including New Zealand, are backing away from climate commitments, and I think that is a good thing. Targeted spending on adaptation seems like a better choice than the useless nonsense organised in the past by the world community.
I have noticed a lot less activism around the Palestine conflict recently too. Even the idiots in the Green Party seem to have stopped talking about it since the Sydney terrorist attack. Maybe they know that by implicitly supporting terrorism they were part of the reason that atrocity occurred. Maybe they will back off from the hysterical claims of genocide and other nonsense they have been pushing in recent years.
In general I am a bit more positive as this year closes than I have been for a while. There does seem to be a genuine push back against woke-ism and other irrational hysterical ideologies. The leftist leaders who remain (Starmer and Albanese in particular) seem to be the subject of a lot of ridicule and distrust.
Where it will go, who really knows, but it's going to be an interesting time.
About 7 years ago I wrote a post called "End of an Error" about how my wife and I sold our cafe. When I say "my wife and I", it was mainly her, because she was the owner/manager and did most of the work, but I did help out, and I suffered financially through it not being a great money maker despite it taking about 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
So the second end of an era (or "error" if you prefer) I am announcing today is that I am leaving my job at the University of Otago. I was a computer consultant there for almost 40 years, but when I was offered voluntary redundancy during the latest restructure I decided the time was right to go now.
I have lost count of how many restructures I have endured during my time, but this one was just one too many. Occasionally these changes do produce some positive benefits, but in most cases things just get worse. Additionally, it takes years to adapt to these changes and sort out the inevitable problems, and guess what happens just as you reach the point where things are working as efficiently as could be expected: that's right, you get another restructure and have to start all over again.
I have go to say that this is both a happy and sad milestone in my life. There are many great things about the university, and most of the academic and general staff are really nice people and fun to work with. But the changes in how the place is managed just don't suit my personality. Standardisation, policies for everything, massive numbers of managers at many different levels, and just general oppressive bureaucracy might be what I should expect in a large organisation, but they don't really suit me.
Because, as I have said in many posts in the past, I prefer to use rules and regulations as a guideline rather than an absolute prescription of how things must be done. I like to have informal work relationships rather than take on work through a complex and sometimes inefficient set of procedures, and I think of my clients as the ultimate source of what needs to be done rather than have that come from a management structure.
I should say at this point that I am not necessarily right. You can make a case to say that strong policies and formal procedures are the best way to run a large and complex organistion, but you can also make a case to say they aren't!
As I said, I worked at Otago for almost 40 years, and I saw a lot of changes over that time. When I first started I was a mainframe (remember those) programmer and also wrote software for PCs. Note that I was not a Mac fanatic initially, even though my previous job was at an Apple dealer. As time passed I specialised in Macs as the mainframes all went away. The internet became more and more critical (when I started we didn't even really have an internet as we know it today, because the web was in its infancy), and serious software became available making the computer the most important tool people used in their work.
So there have been a lot of IT related technical changes I have experienced, and no matter how bad you think computers are now, they are utterly amazing compared with what we used to have. Sometimes I fire up one of my vintage computers just to enjoy the nostalgia of using one, and then I realise those happy memories from the past are not really what they seemed!
Of course, it is not all good, because while the computers got better, the work environment got worse. Again, I have to say that these are my opinions and I know that other perspectives exist, but the biggest change I have seen is the destruction of autonomy. People today are expected to work more like robots than humans, everything is standardised, there is close supervision, and rules come from a very top-down approach.
And apart from the lesser individual freedom there is also the scourge of the modern work environment: the open plan office and hot-desking. Sure those might seem to be a cheaper and more efficient way to have people work, but I have to wonder about the bigger picture and whether there is any genuine benefit when all things are considered. For example, I know of open plan work spaces which are at least as big as individual offices would be, plus there are rooms (such as so-called breakout spaces, and specialised rooms for confidential meetings) which appear to use far more space than a set of individual offices ever would.
Considering management spend so much time talking about cost-benefit analyses, I really do have to wonder whether they ever do any, or if they actually do an analysis like that, whether they just specify the paramaters in a way that will get the result they want. Of course, confidentiality rules stop the results of any analysis like that being made available to people like me who might be a bit credulous of them.
So that was then and this is now. What is next in my life? Well, I am at retirement age, so I could just stop working, but instead I plan to be self-employed as an Apple specialist. Dunedin has a lot of Mac, iPhone, iPad, etc users, and even though Apple stuff is generally very reliable and easy to use, there is still a need for people to get help with their Apple devices, software, and peripherals, so that's what I will be doing.
If you live in Dunedin (or in surrounding areas if you don't mind paying a bit extra for my travel) and need help with your Apple gear then you know who to call. You also know who to refer your friends and family to if they need help: Owen Baxter, Apple Specialist and Consultant. Email ojb@mac.com, or text/call 021 251 2910.
What sort of person wants someone else to control their lives? This isn't necessarily a rhetorical question because there are people who actually do want to relinquish control to someone else, whether it is a partner, boss, or politician. Another question is this: what sort of person wants to control another person's life or wants the government to do that? Again, this is a real question, and the control they want isn't always bad.
I'm presenting this subject because of the social media ban implemented today in Australia, and which might soon spread elsewhere, including New Zealand. The ban is for young people less than 16 years old and there are numerous restrictions already for what that age group, most of them fairly well justified, so surely this is another good move to protect them from harm?
Well maybe, but protection always involves limitations on freedom, and as Benjamin Franklin famously said: "Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". Of course, like all quotes of this type, it is debatable, and it really depends on how much security is gained for what level of lost liberty.
The particular case for social media can be reasonably argued both ways, but my bigger philosophical opinion in this is that we should be striving for less government regulations and control rather than more. So I am against this new law for philosophical reasons, as well as issues of practicality.
Already, a day after the ban, there are piles of young people continuing to use the same services they always have as if nothing had changed. It has taken minutes for them to bypass the restrictions, often with the help of the parents who allegedly wanted this law enacted. They're breaking the law, but is that so bad when the law isn't a good one?
I understand that there are negative aspects to social media, including bullying, time wasting, and misinformation, but there are a lot of positives too, including support, time saving, and good information. So it depends on which aspects of these services you want to concentrate on whether you might see the ban as a good or bad thing.
Many people in government love control, which is a great reason we should resist new laws like this as much as possible. If we genuinely want to reduce the negative aspects of social media, why not do that, while maintaining the good parts.
If it is possible to monitor a social media account looking for signs the user is young (as they claim to ba able to do now) then why not use that to filter what they can see rather than preventing them from using the service completely? I know that sort of censorship is also bad in some ways, but at least it's a step up from a complete ban, and in the case of young people it is easier to justify, although even then I am uncomfortable with the idea.
Or maybe there should be a "help" button somewhere which notifies a person in some sort of authority (maybe a parent) about bullying or other issues. AI could even monitor the person's feed and activate the notification automatically. Again, this is far from perfect, but a less extreme step than a total ban.
Finally, it's not too difficult to place time limits on use so that the user doesn't waste too much time, and might use the time they do have (maybe an hour a day) more productively.
At a press conference in 1986, US president Ronald Reagan said, "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help". I think that most government actions really are done with good intentions, but the people making the rules are so totally out of touch with reality, and so lacking in reasonable criticism of their ideas, that they will almost always make the wrong decision.
Regrettably, we need some government control to protect the weaker groups in society (including children and young people) and to limit the actions of the more harmful members, but we don't need to be so enthusiastic about it. Let's have protective laws, but if we need them, make them as lightweight was possible. The last thing we need is a government with too much control.
Education is pretty important, don't you think? In that case, why do we trust teachers to provide it? I mean, I'm sure there are some good teachers out there, although I can only think of about 3 in my entire educational career (including university). Why is this? Well to some extent it is because "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" but also because education is totally infused with woke ideology, and (to be fair to teachers) it's a really tough job.
Why is it tough? Well, for three main reasons, I think...
First, there is the motivation and discipline problem. Most students don't really want to be there, and don't put much effort in when they should (and yes, that included me when I was at school), as well as being disruptive and uncooperative.
Second, teachers are expected to teach a class of about 30, which includes a wide variety of skill levels, intelligence, and interest in the subject being taught. If a math class has people who can barely add as well as others who are already doing algebra, how is the teacher going to teach them all at once?
Third, formal teaching environments do not encourage flexibility, attention to individual needs, dialog and discussion, or the ability to revise or move on as required.
So what's the answer? Well, it is AI, obviously. Famous educator, Sal Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, did a well-known TED talk (millions of views on YouTube) a few years back, when AI was just gaining prominence, extolling the virtues of an AI system his organisation was working on, called "Khanmigo".
Here are my thoughts on why I think AI is a good fit for education. Most of these ideas are also generally supported by Khan in his talk...
Everyone learns differently, and ideally every learner would have their own teacher. Additionally, every teacher should be able to adapt to teaching in a way that suits the individual style of the learner. Clearly this cannot be practically done using human teachers, but what about an AI which can give individual attention to every student, and adapt to a style which works best for them?
Different people learn different parts of a subject at different speeds. They might understand algebra intuitively and quickly, but have problems with calculus for example. Or maybe something just didn't quite make sense at one point in a subject, and that has held the person back for the rest of the subject. Because an AI can change speed, go back, and pause to clarify a point, it can overcome this problem where a teacher might not be able to.
AIs are, potentially at least, free of bias, ideology, impatience, personal favouritism, and other unfortunate human frailties. I do say "potentially" here because AIs have been created which are deliberately very ideological because of the bias of their creators (I'm talking about you, Google). But at least it is theoretically possible to create an AI free from these defects, which every human is susceptible to.
Teachers' knowledge is constantly becoming outdated. For many subjects this doesn't matter too much, but for others it does. Many teachers do have ongoing training on new material, but this can be infrequent and inadequate. AIs, on the other hand, can learn constantly, and never rely on outdated material. One AI can teach a million students simultaneously in a custom style, while also learning new material. How could a human teacher compete with that?
And finally, there are many specialised subjects a student might want to learn. For example, in an advanced programming course, a person might want to learn more about AI programming. But what if the teacher knows nothing about that particularly focussed subject? Well, the AI knows, because it knows about everything!
There are issues, of course. Education is about socialisation and other "soft" skills as well as learning facts and techniques, so an AI might not do that as well. And there is the well known phenomenon of the AI "hallucinating" where it treats totally fake information as if it was real. And what about more "manual" skills like sport, woodwork, cooking, or performing chemistry experiments? Also, what are those teachers going to do when their job has been replaced by a computer? I guess the same thing as all the rest of us, which is, well yes, good question.
The work done at the Khan Academy has safeguards: for example all "conversations" with the AI are able to be reviewed by a human teacher, all AI interactions are checked by a second AI, and human teachers create the lesson plans and guide what material is taught, but all of these will all become unnecessary, eventually.
Kahn says the AI is great for debating in a non-judgemental way with the students, for making the student think about the answer instead of giving it to them, for detecting why a student might give a wrong answer, and for providing high level philosophical answers to questions like "why do I have to study this subject?"
Unfortunately, access to Khanmigo is not free, so I could not test it myself, but I think this might be one of the most important functions AI can provide. Soon it will be easy to get a good education.
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