Decline and fall of the newspaper

One of the pleasures of living in New Zealand is that the newspapers are really quite bad. Journalistic standards are lacking, and they print the strangest things. For example, Wellington's leading paper, the Dominion Post, recently devoted half a page to some guy describing his struggles with enlarged prostate. I read the entire thing in search of some point to the story. It never came.

In terms of actual reporting, all of the international news comes from newswires, and the domestic news is rarely investigative or probing at all. Front-page coverage alternates between (a) small scale political scandals, (b) murders, and (c) hilarious non-sequiturs. And then there's the editorial page.

I read this tour de force of a letter today:

So nuclear-free Wellington is to have a radioactive isotope enhancer. Does this mean the United States will promise to bomb us, just as it threatens Iran for the same process?

It starts off with a perfectly reasonable point: that Wellington is planning on building a facility to scan cancer patients, a project that bears an uncanny resemblance to Irans alleged plans to build nuclear weapons.

I'm told that people who undergo medical treatment with radioactive isotopes may not take anything home afterward, including their clothes, because of the danger of radiation contamination. What difference does that make? They'll die anyway.

So what happens to the clothes then? Are they dumped into Cook Strait?

The "experts" tell us that the isotope isn't dangerous, so why does it need walls 2.5m thick?

The correspondent then proceeds to note that the facility is likely to irradiate us to death. In fact, it is liable to further sicken cancer patients... because what gives people cancer? That's right: radiation.

I had to laugh when I read that the National Radiation Laboratory has ensured it meets international standards. No standards exist and everything coming from the laboratory is lies, anyway. This is the same gang that permits cell sites emitting microwave radiation next to people's homes or high-tension powerlines with destructive magnetic radiation over the top of houses.

And tin-foil hats are a perfectly reasonable way to protect yourself from the deadly rays that an international conspiracy of medical "experts" and utility companies is blasting into our tissues at all times!

All radiation is destructive. Radioactivity is now the favoured method worldwide to get rid of political opponents and spies.

By this point, you may have noticed that a slight strain of paranoia runs throughout this letter...

I'm sure cabinet ministers won't be living next to this hospital bunker.

Watch this correspondent carefully - if he dies of mysterious radiation sickness anytime soon, we will know that the New Zealand government, or possibly just the Wellington health board, is willing to kill to keep its secrets.

Notes found scribbled on bar tabs inside my coat pockets

(Photo credit: Anne)

Drinking with all our favorite video store clerks. And anarchist bike-repairmen and sleazy DJs with landing-strip goatees.

Taped to wall: "CIGARS".

Singing Lust for Life with smuggled liquor in a Korean karaoke room.

Why is there half a liter less whisky now?

Afrikaans-speaking.

4am again. This time, American Astronaut.

Tickets to the NZ Symphony Orchestra donated to us.

It's like Xiu Xiu says: Don't make fun of my night out.

Full of foolish hobgoblins

Shoot, I have all the inspiration I want. I would set traps for consistency.

Protest at the Ministry

This is a new experience: I've never seen protesters outside my workplace before. Here is a picture of them taken from within its safe walls:



Today this small group of activists gathered outside the Ministry to protest what was going on inside. Specifically, they were protesting the government's decision to open up a significant portion of the conservation estate for mining. In a speech to the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, Minister of Energy and Resources Gerry Brownlee stated that:

There is no doubt that New Zealand is a mineral rich country.

A recent report by Richard Barker estimated our metallic mineral potential to have a gross in-ground value in excess of $140 billion, with lignite alone at least an additional $100 billion.

[...]

For my part, as Minister of Energy and Resources, I am committed to unlocking New Zealand’s mineral potential for the benefit of all New Zealanders, both present and future.

[...]

In my short time as Minister I have become acutely aware that one of the fundamental barriers to mineral exploration and development is access to prospective land, particularly to land administered by the Department of Conservation.

Reasonable access to the mineral estate in Crown-owned land, particularly conservation land, is a key issue.

There are obviously competing objectives here but there is scope to explore how economic development objectives could be better reconciled with other land values.

There is the potential for more flexible arrangements that do not undermine conservation and environmental objectives.

The Minister of Conservation and I have agreed that officials from Crown Minerals and DOC are to work together with a clear directive to make progress on improved access to conservation land across three fronts.

These are, first, a review of Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act.

Second, improvements to DOC processes for access arrangements

And third, consultation on the reclassification of DOC administered land

I now want to briefly discuss each of these areas of work in more detail.

Starting with Schedule Four, let me put it into perspective.

I understand that DOC administered land hosts a majority of our mineral potential – an estimated 70%

About 40% of that land is listed in Schedule 4 of the Crown Minerals Act.

That means something like 30% of our most prospective land is off limits because the Minister of Conservation is not allowed to enter into any access arrangement for any area described in Schedule 4, except for certain low impact activities.

This effectively precludes all mining activities and most exploration activities on that land.

Collectively the areas currently covered by Schedule 4 make up around 13% of New Zealand’s total land area and include the highest value conservation areas.

Some of the areas within Schedule 4 are known to host significant potential for zinc, lead, copper, nickel, tin, tungsten and other metals.

The current inclusion of these highly prospective areas in Schedule 4 has potentially denied significant opportunity for economic benefit at both a national and regional level.
I have directed Crown Minerals to undertake a strategic review to determine areas possessing significant mineral potential that, with the removal of the access prohibition provided by Schedule 4, could through responsible mining techniques contribute considerably to our prosperity.

Full disclosure: I report to Minister Brownlee in his capacity as Minister for Economic Development. So I can't and won't go into the rights and wrongs of this argument. However, it is worth examining this in comparative terms. There's a total of NZ$240 billion in minerals, much of which sits in the conservation estate. Compare that to the total value of goods and services produced yearly in NZ - about NZ$180 billion. In other words, if everyone in the country were to stop doing what they were doing and mine instead, they could support themselves at the same level for roughly one and one-third years. I leave you to decide whether that's a lot of dosh or not.

The protesters, one of whom was shouting into a megaphone, seemed to have two key messages. First, they thought that the indigenous biodiversity held in the conservation estate was more valuable than the dollars gained through mineral extraction. Second, they were opposed to the fact that most mining companies were overseas owned, and hence repatriated the profits offshore rather than keeping them circulating in local communities.

Some of it was incoherent - such as their leaflet, which was inexplicably printed in small font. (Said leaflet mixed opposition to mining on conservation land with poorly-stated anticorporate and anticapitalist messages, e.g. "By opening up land protected under Schedule 4 to support an unsustainable destructive industry that will further enrich those at the top of our capitalist 'democracy', the government would directly jeopardise the survival of our already ecosystems and thereby, not help, but destroy the quality of life for future generations." Too much!) Other bits of propaganda were more succinct - such as the chant "Parks are for people, not profits".

I went outside to check out the scene during my lunch break. There were police officers in the lobby and looking on from the sides. Afterward, Anne tried to bike home, without a helmet, and was stopped and questioned for ten minutes by a police officer. (Evidently, being helmetless is a serious offence.) She played ignorant American, and one of the protesters came up to videotape the incident and argue with the cop.

Here is a picture of the protesters taken from the lofty heights of the Ministry. We could still hear the dim drone of the megaphone from here.

Oyster Stoat

A new beer, long promised: Oyster stout, an old New Zealand specialty. From Wikipedia:

Oysters have had a long association with stout. When stouts were emerging in the eighteenth century, oysters were a commonplace food often served in public houses and taverns. Benjamin Disraeli is said to have enjoyed a meal of oysters and Guinness in the 19th century, though by the 20th century oyster beds were in decline, and stout had given way to pale ale.

The first known use of oysters as part of the brewing process of stout was in 1929 in New Zealand, followed by the Hammerton Brewery in London, UK, in 1938.[34] Several British brewers used oysters in stouts during the "nourishing stout" and "milk stout" period just after the second world war.

Modern oyster stouts may be made with a handful of oysters in the barrel or, as with Marston's Oyster Stout, just use the name with the implication that the beer would be suitable for drinking with oysters.

It is worth noting that New Zealand is still one of the few places where this particular monstrosity is brewed, and then only by a few small places. I happen to think that oysters are vile, and stouts are delicious, so I have no idea what will transpire with this brew.

I am drinking a Three Boys seasonal beer. (Three Boys is a generally good microbrewery from the South Island. ) Here goes!

It's not as oystery as I feared; in fact, it tastes more or less like a decent stout. Salty overtones appear after a second or two, and the aftertaste is distinctively marine. It leaves my mouth feeling somewhat slimy, although that may be slightly psychosomatic. As a stout, it is certainly respectable - I would order it in a bar were it available. (The dearth of stouts in New Zealand is despicable!) And it is 6.2% alcohol by volume, which is the strongest beer I have had in this country.

Strangely enough, I'm not sure what else there is to say. I was hoping to be traumatized by this experience, not lulled into complacency. I should have bought tequila instead.

Three statistics or pseudo-statistics

1. Today, I ran 5k in 18:48. It was a relatively calm day, not raining, and I was feeling my Weet-bix. This is the fastest that I have run since my final season of collegiate cross-country, and a bit faster than I would have run in high school. I can go faster.

2. Before the 1980s, the US didn't collect statistics on homelessness as it was too uncommon to be worth measuring. Since Reagan, the homeless are a common sight on every city in the US. This point hit home when Anne's sister visited, and was astounded by how clean Wellington was: the streets! the public toilets! the buses! Where were the bums, she asked? Well, we've only got about half a dozen, I replied.



3. International trade, after growing strongly for a couple of decades, crashed spectacularly in the last year. Unsurprisingly, this has a range of physical consequences. The above picture, taken from a remote shore on Southern Malaysia, illustrates one of them: The water offshore rural fishing villages glows at night with the lights from an armada of hundreds of idle container ships and tankers. A Daily Mail article, The ghost fleet of the recession, captures the scope of the shipping crisis:

Here, on a sleepy stretch of shoreline at the far end of Asia, is surely the biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history. Their numbers are equivalent to the entire British and American navies combined; their tonnage is far greater. Container ships, bulk carriers, oil tankers - all should be steaming fully laden between China, Britain, Europe and the US, stocking camera shops, PC Worlds and Argos depots ahead of the retail pandemonium of 2009. But their water has been stolen.
...
'A couple of years ago those ships would have been steaming back and forth, going at full speed. But now you've got something like 12 per cent of the world's container ships doing nothing.' [Said Briton Tim Huxley, one of Asia's leading ship brokers.]

[T]he slump is industry-wide. The cost of sending a 40ft steel container of merchandise from China to the UK has fallen from £850 plus fuel charges last year to £180 this year. The cost of chartering an entire bulk freighter suitable for carrying raw materials has plunged even further, from close to £185,000 ($300,000) last summer to an incredible £6,100 ($10,000) earlier this year.
...
Some experts believe the ratio of container ships sitting idle could rise to 25 per cent within two years in an extraordinary downturn that shipping giant Maersk has called a 'crisis of historic dimensions'.
...
Martin Stopford, managing director of Clarksons, London's biggest ship broker, says container shipping has been hit particularly hard: 'In 2006 and 2007 trade was growing at 11 per cent. In 2008 it slowed down by 4.7 per cent. This year we think it might go down by as much as eight per cent. If it costs £7,000 a day to put the ship to sea and if you only get £6,000 a day, than you have got a decision to make.

'Yet at the same time, the supply of container ships is growing. This year, supply could be up by around 12 per cent and demand is down by eight per cent. Twenty per cent spare is a lot of spare of anything - and it's come out of nowhere.'
...
Christopher Palsson, a senior consultant at London-based Lloyd's Register-Fairplay Research, believes the situation will worsen before it gets better.

'Some ships will be sold for demolition but the net balance will be even further pressure on the freight rates and the market itself. A lot of ship owners and operators are going to find themselves in a very difficult situation.'

This raises a number of interesting possibilities: What if international trade collapses but economies recover? Would that mean that people produce more things for their region, buy more things locally? Perhaps that would be better for the planet, better for social connectedness. (Shipping goods across the world costs the biosphere, through carbon emissions. And it's easier to make a business decision to make workers redundant when they live thousands of miles away and speak different languages.) I'll ignore those for the moment and perform a Benjaminian juxtaposition, instead quoting a most quotable author on the subject of globalization:

All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
...
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

One thing worth noting, I suppose, is that any future society isn't going to be any less complex than the one in which we currently live. (Barring the return of entropic conditions following a decrease in the energy available to us, or some sort of disaster of a military or viral nature. Peak oil, nuclear war, and swine flu, in other words.) The challenge isn't to eliminate our current interconnected, multidimensional, multicultural world. A world literature, our correspondent notes, is one of the consequences of world trade. The challenge is to reconstitute it so that we no longer need poverty and inequality, or the crisis itself.

Over to David Harvey:

The way I would think of a crisis is as an irrational rationalizer of an irrational system. The irrationality of the system right now is fairly clear: you have masses of capital and masses of labour, unemployed, side by side, in a world that's full of social need. How stupid is that?

He forgot to mention: Masses of ships.

Martinis and trade policy

Or: Where exactly is that vermouth from?



At a party last night, I came across a remarkable artifact. We were plumbing the depths of an ancient liquor cabinet to find the ingredients for dry martinis (according to Kingsley Amis, 15 parts gin to one part vermouth, chill, add a cocktail onion, and promptly fall over drunk). We came across the bottle pictured above. It contained what appeared to be a standard brand of dry mermouth, long since undrinkable, that had been made since 1884 by Distillerie Stock, S.p.A. in Trieste, Italy. That in and of itself is completely unremarkable.

What was incredible, at least to my post-trade-liberalization mind, which blithely accepts products shipped in from every corner of the world to my local convenience store, were these lines on the front label:

COMPOUNDED WHITH (sic) IMPORTED INGREDIENTS
TO THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN FORMULA
PRODUCED AND BOTTLED IN NEW ZEALAND
FOR
DISTILLERIE STOCK (N.Z.) LIMITED
AUCKLAND

In other words, this bottle was a pre-1984 relic. As I have mentioned earlier, before the Fourth Labour Government liberalized the economy, there were extremely high barriers to importing anything that could be produced or assembled in New Zealand. Essentially, if a domestic firm could make something, they could apply to have imports of it virtually prohibited. But those firms could still import the materials needed to assemble the finished product.

That's evidently what was done in this case. This "Kiwi-made" vermouth would have started out as vermouth concentrate in Trieste, shipped halfway around the world, and then "compounded" with local water and decanted into (perhaps locally-made?) bottles.

A further twist presents itself, however. In the lower right corner of the label, in almost unreadable letters, there's the phrase: "PRINTED IN ITALY". The label itself was made in Italy and shipped overseas to New Zealand, a country that had a domestic paper industry and would have been perfectly capable of printing its own labels. At this point, I'm envisioning ships steaming back and forth, carrying little cardboard boxes, each one full of a vermouth assembly kit containing the labels, the bottle, the cap, and a small measure of concentrated vermouth. Just add water!

And on each end, slightly perplexed workers: Italian print-shops wondering why they are printing labels that explain that the vermouth was made in New Zealand when everybody knows that it actually comes from Italy. And bottling-plant workers in Auckland who perhaps occasionally reflected upon the strangeness of their assembly job - and who would have almost certainly been among the 76,000 Kiwi manufacturing workers to lose their jobs after the post-1984 reforms.

Technological history

I have been reading this fascinating site lately: Technology Innovation in New Zealand. Before you dismiss this as the bizarre interest of a pointy-headed economic policy bureaucrat, you should take a look. It's a fascinating story!

The site covers the history of technology and large-scale industrial developments in NZ since the early days of the colony. It goes from railroads and hydroelectric dams all the way through Rob Muldoon's Think Big projects in the late 70s and early 80s.

An aside: I have been increasingly interested in what New Zealand was like in the pre-1984 days, before Labour Finance Minister Roger Douglas sold off the many state-owned enterprises, opened the country to trade and financial flows, removed subsidies and deregulated the economy. The Wikipedia article on these radical changes describes Rogernomics as "the dismantling of the Australasian model of state development that had existed for the previous 90 years, and its replacement by the Anglo-American neoliberal orthodoxy based on the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School." But what difference does this make? And what exactly was the "Australasian model"?

The TechHistory site actually goes a long way to answering that. It describes, in great detail, the genesis of various key features of the present-day New Zealand economy. The political and geographical wrangling and overseas advice that led to the construction of narrow-gauge railroads. The technological hurdles that had to be overcome in order to develop the unique method of steel forging used at the NZ Steel foundry, and the government's sale of the business at a cheap price days before a stock-market crash. The debates within the Ministry of Works over electrifying part of the North Island Main Trunk railway. The 1918 first issue of the New Zealand Journal of Science and Technology, which laid out many of the key issues that would be addressed over the next six decades.

In some ways, it was a quite dynamic and forward-looking time. Vast resources and expertise were marshaled in order to bring forth technologies that had never before existed in New Zealand. (The post-1984 era of liberalisation can seem a bit disappointing in comparison - for all the talk of increased economic dynamism and flexibility, financial speculation and overseas ownership (and exploitation) of resources has been more the rule.) But in other ways, it seems quite bureaucratic and regimented: discussions over which projects to pursue were carried out between the Ministry of Works, the Treasury, and the Department of Industrial and Scientific Research. For example, the construction of cables to carry surplus electricity from the South Island to the North were held up for years by South Island politicians who preferred cheap energy on their island, by Ministry of Works officials who wanted to keep their workers busy on new, relatively expensive power projects in the north...

It must have been a strange time; a bizarre mix of headiness and frustration. I wonder whether there was a sense of futuristic economic optimism engendered by Muldoon's Think Big projects, which were set up in a time of rising oil prices to convert natural gas from a large new find into substitute petroleum, fertilizer, methanol. Or would it have grated or felt like a statist imposition?

I suppose that it's not that different from our time. But now, economic-developmentally at least, our dreams and our dull practical limits come from elsewhere.

Addendum: Or maybe this is all too much high-flying theorizing. New Zealand then was just a frontier country full of practical men working hard to make it work, make it pay off for them. They probably didn't bother to think about development models and theories - it was probably more of a matter of building what could be built, in whatever way, and inventing what was needed. It's no coincidence, then, that economic dogmas started to take hold in New Zealand (through Roger Douglas at first) after the Labour Party filled up with academics and intellectuals, rather than its traditional trade union men.

Self-defeatism

Looking at graduate schools in political science, I realized a couple of things.

First, I look a bit different on paper than I am in person. On paper, I'm a math and political science double major who has spent a year (as of yesterday) working in economic policy. I can convincingly sound like a policy wonk, and (courtesy of my job) I am getting some experience with econometrics. But off paper, I'm a theory guy. I am trying to see how ideas and facts fit together. I want a supertheory of supereverything.

Second, my interests make me look towards schools with some sort of specialty in political theory (especially of the radical kind), political economy, and conflict studies). Unfortunately, there seems to be almost no crossover between these types of schools and schools that focus on public policy and quantitative methodology.

Third, my majors and work experience would probably make me look quite good to public policy and quantitative schools. And they seem more likely to take the GRE test, which provides a numerical measure of one's aptitudes, seriously. And I am probably going to score quite highly on that. But I'm not applying to the places where I'd look best on paper - because they don't do what I want to do.

This sort of thing frustrates me. It's like accidentally stabbing yourself in the back.

Communications from elsewhere

As of today, I've been working at the Ministry for a year. Peter the public servant. Who would have thought?

Life leads us down strange pathways.

Castro on the US Congress

Fidel Castro weighs in on the terrible contradictions of the American Congress: That legislators have an easy time approving money for robotic flying weapons, and an impossible time providing basic health care to millions of its citizens. Castro is actually really funny:

If robots in the hands of the transnationals can replace imperial soldiers in the wars of conquest, who will stop the transnationals in their quest for a market for their artefacts? Just as they have flooded the world with automobiles that today compete with mankind for the consumption of non-renewable energy and even foods converted into fuel, so too they can flood the world with robots that would displace millions of workers from their workplaces.

Better yet, scientists could also design robots capable of governing; that way they could spare the U.S. government and Congress that terrible, contradictory and confusing work. No doubt they would do it better and cheaper.