Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I tried Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking dictation software. I was less than impressed. Using my good quality steelsound headset produced very poor results and I wasn’t about to stump up for a new and expensive headset without being sure that it would be a success. What’s more, I wasn’t all that sure that the dictation process would work for me. About the time Vista was first released, I trialled NaturallySpeaking again (version 9 I think) but after a rather large download it transpired that NaturallySpeaking was incompatible with my 64-bit Windows.
I gave up in disgust once more.
Enter stage left a bit of pain in my right thumb which I’d put down to excessive mouse use but turned out to be a touch of arthritis. Old age is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Desperate measures were called for, so after reading a couple of reviews I decided to revisit Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Nuance no longer have a free trial available–perhaps because the software doesn’t perform well with most standard headsets. The home version is not very expensive and it comes complete with a compatible noise cancelling headset, so I bit the bullet and gave it a go.
During the Great Depression, there was more than one dead cat bounce. At least one economist believes that we are following the track and that the United States is now in a fully-fledged depression. Read about it right here.
Tens of millions of Americans are unemployed, under-employed, or have just given up looking for a job. Millions have lost their homes and millions more have negative equity i.e. mortgages which are underwater. Meanwhile, the financiers who created the mess are laughing all the way back to their profit-making, bonus paying, highway robbing banks and institutions.
The situation isn’t much better here in New Zealand and the gross mismanagement of the government guarantee scheme hardly designed to help.
In this article on the Huffington Post’s website: When Wall Street Rules, We Get Wall Street Rules Dean Baker puts into perspective the criminal damage that the democratic process has allowed to be inflicted upon those it is supposed to protect.
You don’t have to look too deeply to see exact parallels in New Zealand.
If you’re not a liberal when you’re 20, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative when you’re 40, you have no head.
I’m tempted to add a third sentence.
“If you’re either of the above when you’re 60 you’re just plain stupid”
Our political and economic system is morally and intellectually bankrupt.
In the United States, Mr “Yes we can” appears to have been snookered by the system and hasn’t had the political courage to fight back. Here in New Zealand, John Key’s government seems to be able to retain popular support while doing absolutely nothing to get the country out of the morass that it’s been in for decades.
Obviously the government was obliged to bail out South Canterbury Finance. Government Guarantee Scheme obligations aside, the teetering company relative to the size of our economy is bigger than Lehman Bros was in America.
Nevertheless, a billion or two of taxpayers money down the drain is no small matter. Could we have done better?
Too bloody right we could have.
Dodgy dealings
After signing up for the Government Guarantee Scheme, South Canterbury Finance —like others—took advantage of the taxpayers’ largesse to take on far more risky loans than they would otherwise have approved.
This fascinating video may keep you awake at night. It shows the asteroids discovered in the last 30 years and their paths. It starts off in 1980 when we only had a handle on a sprinkling of them and flicks through a week or two a second to add the ever increasing number of new findings.
Newly discovered asteroids show briefly as white before turning to green.
The worrying ones are coloured red and yellow. The red ones cross the Earth’s orbit and the yellow ones come fairly close.
Don’t lose too much sleep. It’s not as bad as it looks. There’s a lot of empty space out there and we only get clobbered by a real biggie every 500,000 years or so. If you really need something to fret about there are probably billions of quite large objects charging around the Kuiper Belt and trillions more farther out in the Oort Cloud.
Revelations of big spending on the part of government departmental heads come as no great surprise. On the heels of Mr Chris Carter’s squanderlust and his inability to see why he pissed tax-paying people off with his inability to see what the probelm was it’s just another reminder of how out of touch with reality many of these people are.
A while back I was a company General Manager. A big part of my job involved working and liaising with government officials and with the representatives of companies we dealt with. Now and again that involved me receiving or providing free meals.
I never, ever claimed expenses for the dinners that I gave. My wife and I regularly hosted people at our house and we put on monthly barbecues at home for my staff. I paid for the food and the beer.
I was paid a salary. I could choose whether or not to entertain. It is not compulsory. It most certainly should not be compulsory for most government departments.
Why the hell does the head of an educational institute need to entertain people at the expense of taxpayers? How can you lay people off and then go and spend several people’s wages on a piss-up?
Many of those tax dollars are paid by hundreds of thousands of Kiwis struggling to get by on New Zealand Super or $14 an hour and by small businesses battling to survive in a world economy wrecked by fellow-travellers of these small-time big spenders.
OK, I lied on the first point. They haven’t been banned.
The second point is true however. Almost three-quarters of road death crashes are caused by sober drivers. This sobering (sorry – couldn’t resist it) fact highlights the difficulty facing those who use statistics to justify lowering the driver alcohol limits.
There are those who maintain that even at 50 ppm drivers are impaired and that 15 deaths per year are attributable to New Zealand drivers at 50 – 80 ppm blood alcohol. Continue reading →
If you don’t know about the Economist’s Big Mac Index you can read about it here. It’s a clever idea and an interesting exercise, but after reading Brian Fallow’s column on the New Zealand Herald’s website I’m inclined to disagree mildly with the almighty Economist:
The New Zealand dollar is slightly undervalued, according to the Economist’s latest Big Mac index. Continue reading →
When Lord Robert Winston came to New Zealand a year or two back he told us that we’d got it all wrong obsessing over cows, sheep, rugby, Middle Earth and the America’s Cup and that we needed to get our act together.
We scurried off to emblazon headlines in the papers and we fronted The Great Man up on TV1’s virtual women’s magazine program, Close Up — at least we were spared celebs and ambulance chasers for 10 minutes. Farming folk were predictably outraged, myopically assuming that encouraging extra strings to our economic bow constitutes an attack on church, motherhood and the whole agricultural edifice.
When The Great Man left we happily continued upon our self-destructive way and carried on wrecking our country’s future.
Why can’t we listen to our own?
Professor Winston was absolutely correct, but why did we need a visitor to tell us that we’re gradually going broke? If we’d been paying attention to our own we we’d have been right on to it. Continue reading →
There’s too much misery in the world. Here are some nice people doing something about it. From the award-winning documentary, “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music”, come the uplifting “Songs around the world”. This one is a cover of the Ben E. King classic created by many musicians around the world each adding their unique flavour to the song as it morphs around the globe. Continue reading →
New Zealand is going West, literally and figuratively. One quarter of New Zealanders live in other countries.
Reverse a few decades of bad politics & there would be no better place on the planet. We need fundamental political change.
Let's do something about it.
South Canterbury Finance fiasco
