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.

It is amazing. 

I was a little concerned that the obviously low cost headset would be fairly hopeless but in fact it’s excellent. The program does everything Nuance Software claims. It even coped right from the start with my Kiwi accent. Apart from working through the initial creation of a user profile, which didn’t take very long, the software worked magnificently right out of the box.

It’ll take me a little while to get used to talking to a screen instead of bashing away at the keyboard, but it’s a lot easier than I expected and I suspect that this software is going to change my life.

Well done Nuance, I’m really impressed and as a result I may have to say goodbye to Linux for good.

This post was dictated using NaturallySpeaking and no keyboards were harmed in the process.

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.

We need to find a better way.

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.

I confess

I voted for him.Not because I agreed with his pre-election policies. I voted for him because I hoped perversely that his government – just like every other would-be government in living memory – would go back on their election pledges.

I thought that perhaps he had a cunning plan. I thought maybe he would do what needs to be done.

He had no plan.

He’s not going to fix anything. He’s not going to enable in New Zealand to catch up with Australia. This government has neither the desire, the courage, nor the intellectual capacity to make the changes that his almost unprecedented popularity and political capital would have allowed him to accomplish.

Mr Key could have gone to the electorate after the election and said “The system is broken. We need to spend a decade tightening our belts and fixing it. We need to make wholesale changes for the benefit of our grandchildren. To do this I will need to go back on my pre-election promises. I’m therefore calling for a new election. Give me a mandate and I will do everything I possibly can to build a new and better New Zealand.”

I can dream.

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.

Failure of the regulators

Was it too much to expect that when the new regulations were put in place that this type of stupidity and duplicity should have been foreseen and guarded against by our well-paid lawmakers and regulators?

If I mislead my insurance company they won’t pay out. Let’s say I take out health insurance and I tell my insurance company that I’m a non-smoker. I subsequently decide to start smoking and I don’t tell the insurer. When I contract lung cancer and die will the insurance company pay out on my policy if I’ve kept them in the dark?

No way.

After a lifetime of doing good works Mr Hubbard, his company or his advisers appear to have taken advantage of the taxpayers’ generosity to enthusiastically rort the system. Several other companies have done the same thing.

To add insult to injury, not only are the taxpayers bailing these companies and their investors out. We are also paying the investors the excessive interest which the stupid dealings encouraged. The guarantee scheme would have worked just as well if investors in failing companies had been insured against loss of investment but not loss of interest. At the very most they should receive interest at the same rate as that paid by responsible commercial banks.

To add insult to injury Bill English says it’s not such a big deal because the money was already set aside. Now I’m quite sure that our Finance Minister understands the economic concept of “opportunity cost”, but perhaps he is hoping that the average voter doesn’t.

Bring on the foreign buyers?

We can be reasonably confident that this fiasco is going to lead to a fall, perhaps that should be of further falls, and farm prices. Is this the death knell for the Prime Minister’s touching concern that Kiwis should own their own land. It will be very tempting for the government to hope that foreign investors will buy up vast acreages in order to increase land values and the values of the dodgy loan book at the same time.

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.

It’s a lot clearer and more interesting if you watch it on YouTube using their HD setting (see the image top right). Here’s the Tiny URL: http://tinyurl.com/33l6yw4


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.

Most of them are believed to be fairly stable.

Probably.

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.

It’s not on.

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.

On the other hand, there have been studies going back decades which have shown that those who’ve had a three or four drinks are better drivers than when they’re stone-cold sober. Mainly because they’re more relaxed than when totally alcohol free.

It’s not a black and white issue and we need to make sure we get it right. I’m all for dropping the permissable level to zero if that will save lives. But I’m not convinced that it would. I’m not in denial, but I’m sceptical.

What we should be demanding immediately is more pro-active policing of the currrent laws. Let’s go draconian:

• Any death caused whilst the perpetrator is carrying out a criminal act—which includes driving drunk—should be classified as murder.
• Anyone convicted under the current law should lose the car they were driving.
• One conviction should bring a 5 year driving ban and a passport ban.
• A second conviction and you’re banned for life.

More bang for your burger

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.

The index is its tongue-in-cheek application of the theory of purchasing power parity. At an exchange rate of US71.9c, a Big Mac in New Zealand is 4 per cent cheaper than in the United States, implying the kiwi is 4 per cent below fair value against the US dollar.

By the same measure the Chinese yuan is 48 per cent undervalued.

But the Economist cautions that its “burgernomics” needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, especially when comparing countries with very different levels of income, as most of the burger’s cost depends on local inputs such as wages and rents.

Norway’s kroner is the most overvalued, by 93 per cent.

I believe that The Economist is hiding it’s lamp under a bushel, at least regarding the Kiwi dollar. As a continual traveller until 2000 I watched the Big Mac Index for years and, despite the Economist’s disclaimer, I’m convinced that it’s been a far more accurate indicator of the true value of the NZ$ than any other measure.

Our dollar has been consistently undervalued, usually by a lot more than it is now, and that’s been part of our problem. Particularly in allowing foreign buyers to “compete anti-competitively” when buying Kiwi property and assets. With unfortunate consequences for property values in general and farming in particular.

Despite the exporters’ continual whining about the perceived benefits of a low dollar, it’s absolutely not a good thing. It’s currency volatility, not the base value, that’s the problem for business and particularly for exporters.

To illustrate. If we have a low dollar and wages rise everything’s OK – until the dollar appreciates significantly. Then the lucky wage-earner gets to buy cheaper petrol and appliances but if his employer relies on exports he faces falling income. If it get’s too serious the no-longer-lucky wage earner loses his job. A steady increase over time is a much healthier situation but it’s not going to happen as long as we keep borrowing too much offshore.

When the unenlightened were calling for yet another devaluation years ago, Roger Douglas said something along the lines of “If a 10% devaluation is good, maybe a 500% devaluation would be outstanding.” Sir Roger gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but he’s usually right and he’s always worth listening to.

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.

A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country.

One of our best and brightest has been telling us this stuff for years. He’s at least as well qualified as Lord Winston, at least as good a speaker, and as a Fellow of the Royal Society, even more honoured by his peers than is the good Baron.

We ignore him.

Sir Paul Callaghan set out to discover why a nation which has every advantage it could wish for is steadily going down the gurgler. He found the answers and he’s been promoting the message eloquently to groups across the country ever since. Unfortunately the message doesn’t appear to be getting through to those who matter.

Professor Callaghan is a fascinating speaker. In a thoroughly convincing presentation to audiences around the country he makes disturbing connections between current and historical data from New Zealand and around the world.

“Our landscape is magnificent and helps define who we are. But this lecture will argue that we have the potential to be a great deal more besides, and that we must be if we are to build the society we want our children to thrive in. It will argue that we can enhance our prosperity through sensible investment in science and technology, coupled with culture change.
The first part is the easy bit. The second requires self-belief and a sense of purpose. David Lange once said New Zealand’s destiny was to be a theme park (and Australia’s, a quarry). We can surely think and act beyond that. Indeed New Zealand is such an interesting place to live precisely because we are so capable of determining our future.”

Dr Callaghan’s take disparate facts that we already knew and links them in ways that we hadn’t previously noticed. His argument is totally convincing. We’re in a hole, we’re still digging, and it won’t get better until we change our ways.

Along the way he demonstrates clearly that we must spend far more on R&D and that it should be mainly targeted on science & technology — the areas that give the best economic bang for the buck.

There’s nothing wrong with farming and tourism, but they have limits. They produce relatively low returns on investment and they provide low-wage jobs. We’re not going to catch up with the rest of the field until we shift up a level.

Just some of Dr Callaghan’s accomplishments and accolades

In case you’re thinking “Not another academic with a barrow to push!” this is a clued-up Kiwi.

• Professor of Physical Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington.
• Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials & Nanotechnology.
• Past-President of the Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
• Founding director of Magritek, a successful high tech business.
• Fellow of the Royal Society of London.
• Awarded the Ampere Prize in 2004.
• Awarded the Rutherford medal in 2005.
• Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

I will hammer this issue at my wits’ end. You’ll hear more about Sir Paul and I’ll be harping on about GDP, productivity and political change. We’re in trouble and I intend to make a noise about it.

Set aside an hour and a half and click here to watch Sir Paul’s interesting and disturbing talk. If it inspires you or changes your outlook, please help to spread the message.

Songs around the world

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.

It all started with vocals and guitar recorded in Santa Monica by a street musician called Roger Ridley. The producers then set off around the world with a laptop and some microphones.

Playing for Change is a multimedia movement created to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music… ….musicians from all over the world are brought together to perform benefit concerts that build music and art schools in communities that are in need of inspiration and hope.

Visit their website right here.