luv-talk June 2013

luv-talk@luv.asn.au

30 participants
29 discussions

by Andrew McGlashan

On 11/06/2013 9:50 AM, Petros wrote: > Technically, it is an Android 4.2 dual SIM phone with root access for > €325,00 incl. tax. At the moment it takes pre-orders from Europe only. > According to the website they reached there goal of 5000 pre-orders to > start production. > > I don't need a phone just now but I would consider it if I had a need. > > I am not a "smartphone expert" so I cannot judge whether it is good > value for money. If the radio specs are "fixed", then this will only be good for those using Optus network in AU. It looks like reasonable value, but not outstanding. My own view is that it doesn't offer enough flexibility for the price and parts/repair might be a real issue too. Cheers A.

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] be as generous as Bill Gates

by Petros

From: "Slav Pidgorny (GEUS)" <slav.pidgorny(a)anz.com> > Reductio ad absurdum, nice try. > > Check out work of Dambisa Moyo. This one is a good starting point: "Why > Foreign Aid Is Hurting Africa " > (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758895999200083.html). Good > intentions don't guarantee good outcomes, especially when the outcome is > not as immediate and tangible as that of eye surgery. Well, that is talking largely about government-run "aid" which is given from governments to governments. This "aid" is quite often decided by government and business priorities of the giving nation (think about Canberra's "aid budget" used for detaining asylum seekers, or giving aid coupled with political favours) and quite often just pocketed by corrupt governments in the receiving countries. Aid as coming from the Fred Hollows Foundation, Medicians Without Borders, Plan or UNHCR are examples of charity work that actually help. It needs a stretch of imagination to argue that they responsible for keeping people in poverty und hunger. The "lefties" are not responsible for misused government money, here and abroad. It's a cheap shot. Regards Peter

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] be as generous as Bill Gates

by Petros

From: "Slav Pidgorny (GEUS)" <slav.pidgorny(a)anz.com> > I posted link to work of Dambisa Moyo (which should imply little > research) and none of catch phrases and dogma. Affixing labels and > arguing to straw man seems to be your style of dialogue. > -----Original Message----- > From: luv-talk-bounces(a)lists.luv.asn.au > [mailto:luv-talk-bounces@lists.luv.asn.au] On Behalf Of Russell Coker > > On Wed, 5 Jun 2013, Petros <Petros.Listig(a)fdrive.com.au> wrote: >> Aryan and Pidgorny, could you please do a little research before > replying in future. Just posting dogma and catch-phrases isn't useful. I did not write these words. The quoting is misleading. Regards Peter

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] Fwd: Victorian Liberals want to privatise ABC and SBS

by Petros

Quoting "Peter Ross" <petros(a)fdrive.com.au>: > In spite of > this Cuba is competing well with the US and I think we should look carefully > at their example for ideas that are worth copying. Well, compare it with Haiti which had similar starting points in the late 50ies. I lived with a "Cuba-style" health care system in Communist East Germany, and it worked quite well. I never had to deal with any "where to go/how to spend money/where to claim/what can I afford" problems I am having now. When I was ill I went to a hospital which had all needed facilities under one roof. I saw a specialist in less than hour. My first "Western" experience after unification was an Odyssey of errors. It took three days until I saw an orthopedian to see what was wrong with my knee. I worked in West Berlin and had my flat in the East - the accident happened at work so I was treated (and not even properly diagnosed) in the West. The proper treatment happened after I was released there and still had problems and went to the doctor in the former Communist East - two hours later I had an operation in the hospital in the East. The teeth of the Big Issue seller in Clifton Hill are absolutely rotten, he has frequent toothaches and cannot afford to go to the dentist. He saves for a trip to Malaysia to get it fixed.. BTW: I read once that in old China the doctor was paid money when the patient was healthy (not when he was sick).. Sounds like a good idea in principle but I don't know whether it would be feasible to implement in modern society. Regards Peter

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] Victorian Liberals want to privatise ABC and SBS

by Petros

Quoting "Craig Sanders" <cas(a)taz.net.au> > profit is an inherent inefficiency, one that is acceptable for many > things (especially where there is significant *real* competition to > offset that ineffeciency or for luxuries and frivolous things), but is > completely unacceptable for either natural monopolies (like water, gas, > electricity, and wired telecommmunications supply) or essential services > like public transport (also a natural monopoly) and hospitals. Everybody who worked for a consultancy knows that you are having two masters to please, the customer and the employer. Similar things happen in every privatised business serving public interests. E.g. Metro: They get money if they are punctual. So they run late trains as express now - and I have to wait for another train that serves my station (so instead of late I'm later). That is not in the customer's, the public interest but in Metro's. There are many examples, e.g. toll ways that get tweaked during the planning process to increase profit (improving traffic flows comes second) and others. BTW: I lived in Hanover. They built innercity freeways in the 60/70ies - and knocked them down 30 years later. They realised that innercity freeways don't improve traffic. Berlin, after unification, did not build many free-ways - they renovated, expanded and unified the railways. As a result you do not hurry to a railway station fearing to miss a train - you know that the next train comes in three or four minutes. If I miss my train here, I have to wait 20 minutes. and the train from Macauley station to Southern Cross (two stops, less than 5 km) takes usually more than 10, most times up to 20 minutes, parking before reaching North Melbourne and then at Southern Cross again, giving me 5 or 10 minutes to marvel at the Etihad Stadium (Not that I would be faster by car, there are already two level-crossings in Kensington less than a km apart..) Nope, we do not need any better ways to get the trains from North and West into town. We don't need the railway tunnel. Just dig up the Royal Park instead, for another congested freeway to get stuck in. And the world is flat. So far my "lefties' bias". Wondering why it is actually anything is "left" about thinking about solving infrastructure problems. Or learning from other places. This ostrich-like head in the sand attitude of the Liberals cannot be in their genes. AFAIK Liberal governments were around before, and Australia is a well developed place. I think this "left" vs. "right" is just intellectual laziness. Regards Peter

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] Victorian Liberals want to privatise ABC and SBS

by Tim Josling

This discussion would be good fodder for a case study in logically invalid arguments. E.g. Labelling: that argument is "extreme" Meaningless assertions with no evidence: the ABC is "right wing". Ad hominem: "Is there no woman at all who you care about?" http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by+Subject/4125.0~Jan+2012~M… Market failures exist. The market does not capture all the relevant costs and benefits. Externalities, imperfect information, information asymmetries, short termism, agency problems, oligopolies. Government failures also exist: Capture by powerful interest groups, capture by the staff of the agencies, weakening of incentives to be efficient, the rule of power hungry liars. Both are subject to the problems of fending off parastitism. The worst is what we often end up with: crony capitalism which seems to combine the worst of both worlds. The ABC is a hard problem. I personally listen almost exclusively to the ABC (Radio National in the car, Classic FM at home). I prefer intelligent "lefties" (eg Phillp Adams) and diluted classical music to full-on populism, but the ABC is going down market at a terrific pace. At present trends it will not be worth preserving within a generation. Tim

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] Fwd: be as generous as Bill Gates

by Petros

From: "Aryan Ameri" <info(a)ameri.me> > charity creates dependency and stifles innovation and development. > If you ask me, one of the major reasons why we still have poverty > and hunger in this world is due to the left's need to "save the > world". http://www.hollows.org.au/our-work Please explain your approach to overcome the problem, and why donating money for eye operations preserves poverty and hunger. Regards Peter

9 years, 9 months

free E2160 system

by Russell Coker

I have a NEC E2160 mini-tower system that's free. The only down-side is that it only takes IDE disks not SATA. Let me know off-list if you are interested. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

9 years, 9 months

Re: [luv-talk] How to know when a field is worth learning? (was Victorian Liberals want to privatise ABC and SBS)

by Tim Josling

How to know if it's worth learning a field of knowledge? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This discussion raises an interesting and important question: how to decide when it is worth spending time and money investigating some field of knowledge or understanding a viewpoint? The book I recommended is only $12 or so, but I agree that the time investment is substantial. How do you know a field of knowledge has any value, without investing a lot of time learning it at which point it is too late? Personally I have wasted a lot of time learning about things that proved to have little or no value to me e.g astrology, deconstruction, literary 'theory', psychoanalysis, behaviorism, string theory, semiotics and post-structuralism . Other things like religion and gender feminism seem to be important IMHO only as social or political phenomena. Others have snippets of goodness within large piles of dross eg modern marco-economics, Austrian economics, Marxism, academic music post ~1920, sociology. I am interested in any ideas beyond these: http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ba/some_heuristics_for_evaluating_the_soundness_of/ Another set of heuristics is to ask, "Does a field allow its practitioners to: 1. Build novel things that work, or 2. Make correct and falsifiable prediction of the future, or 3. Explain the otherwise inexplicable?" As an example, studies suggest that marriage counsellors have less skill in predicting which marriages will survive than simple regresion analyses, and do not reduce the incidence of marriage breakups. My conclusion is that they basically know nothing. In contrast the theory of relativity satisfies all three criteria (GPS needs relativity time adjustments), predicted gravitational red shift and starlight bending, and explained the orbit of Mercury. Psychiatiry may have some grain of truth Its practitioners seem to have no skill in making people well again other than suppressing the symptoms with drugs, have less skill in predicting the behaviour of their patients than simple regressions, but Freud's nephew seems to have had enormous success in inventing modern public relations using some of the insights of his uncle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays ----------------------------------- On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Russell Coker <russell(a)coker.com.au> wrote: > Firstly please don't edit text that you quote. I've edited it back to > what I > originally wrote. > My intention was to edit it back to my original satirical text, but I did not make that clear. > You can suggest that I waste some money and a lot of time reading a book, > but > it's not going to happen. > > Looking at your posting history and web site, and this discussion I don't see any evidence you know much about these issues or that you have any will to learn about them so I guess there is not much point continuing beyond these couple of points. It may seem obvious that spending money on welfare payments, for example, will make people better off. But this ignores second order effects, which are often more important. Recently the ALP introduced changes to make the supporting parent benefit less appealing. They did not do this merely because they are mean and heartless, but because they realise that encouraging people to have children who are going to live on welfare has all sorts of harmful side-effects, such as increasing the number of children who are born into deprived circumstances. Such policies are also costly for the rest of the community in financial terms and in terms of dealing with the dysfunctional and/or criminal adults who come disproportionately from such situations (these effects persist even after correcting for income). The recognition in the US of the downsides of the welfare state has reached the point where some black commentators are arguing that Johnson's Great Society was a plot to put down the black man. Not that I agree with that, but the fact that blacks can argue this shows that people perceive a problem. > Please cite some examples of "community based cooperative solutions" that > have > worked in practice. Before the welfare state, there were many cooperative organisations such as churches, clubs, service organisations, mutual societies, and charities which helped people in need. People also saved more money as a nest egg for hard times. Families supported each other more strongly. These solutions were not perfect but neither is the welfare state. The welfare state has had a destructive effect on many of these organisations and mechanisms eg mutual societies have been mostly turned into for-profit companies (eg AMP). Tim Josling

9 years, 9 months

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luv-talk June 2013