Posts by Tom Semmens
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Labour seems to have completely out-thought and out manoeuvred Lynton Crosby, whose reputation now must lie in tatters. One advantage of having lots of younglings on board (like the Corbynistas) is you don’t need to focus group the zeitgeist, you just ask the gathered crowd. Labour backed itself, backed it’s core beliefs and it took risks -the manifesto, backing hope to trump negativity, and backed Corbyn to out-campaign the Maybot. Their campaign was brilliant. It tapped the mood for hope and change when the Tories ran on a platform on doubling down on more of the same.
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Gosh! a newly minted left wing Labour party is caning the SNP in Scotland? Who would have thought?
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And Guyon Espiner interviews hardened neo-liberal fifth columnist Josie Pagani for “lessons for the left” in the UK election.
That woman wouldn’t know the left if she fell over it, got up, dusted herself off, and it then bit her on the bum.
Mike Treen, of the Unite! Union is in the UK at the moment. He is ACTUALLY left wing, why didn't they interview him instead of an apologist for the discredited "new Labour"? I guess that might scare the Tories who run RNZ.
It also sums up how our dim-witted, ideologically brain dead MSM only spans the ideas spectrum from the radical centre to neoliberal apologia.
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It used to be that the players in your region came from your region, parochialism at its finest
Those cheats in Canterbury were buying in players back in 1960s.
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The loss of passion for me began with the reduction of the provincial championship to a second rate feeder comp for the five professional teams. Even though the super rugby teams have been around for 21 years now, they have never really commanded the sort of fanatical parochial passion that the provinces did/have. I spent many a provincial match yelling at the screen, peeking from behind a cushion and moving around the living room from couch to chair to doorway to floor in the agony of a close match. My province’s fortunes were a more important barometer of the success of the rugby season than the All Black win/loss record.
The loss of that parochial passion is why IMHO the stadiums now stay stubbornly empty. It is the missing X factor that is present in the AFL and NRL as famous clubs, from somewhere real and steeped in history, battle it out in front of crowds who show absolute in-group loyalty to their suburban team. That has gone from NZ rugby now.
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Hard News: Rugby Now, in reply to Russell Brown,
I don’t think the NZRU thinks that. They’re contracted into the present deal until 2019, so the action starts next year. The chair of its board is former Mediaworks CEO Brent Impey, who I am very sure has been exploring the options already.
I am not sure if the NZRFU can afford to wait until 2020 to ditch Sky. There was a story the other day that that the “average” household will soon be consuming 1TB of data a month, and if the anecdotal evidence of my peer group is any guide the slide away from Sky in favour of increased broadband based services is turning into an avalanche.
Sky hasn’t got the faintest idea of any of this – as other commentators have noted their whole (mediocre) broadcasting culture and package is firmly rooted in a half-arsed, half-remembered pastiche of 1990s New Zealand. I used to watch a lot of rugby, but once I got rid of Sky I hardly even care anymore. I very occassionally watch a bit of AFL on freeview, the huge crowds and the belief from everyone involved they are doing something important, interesting and of high drama couldn’t contrast more with the empty stadiums, cliche riven, bored sounding coaches, and the calling-it-in old men and has-been commentators that Sky put up. Sky is far to cosy and the whole rugby circus from Sky to the snivelling, sycophantic Tony Veitch is a circle jerk of untalented white male assholes.
The other day a mate and I watched the World of Tanks e-sports EU/RU grand finals on twitch, it was great – the prize pool is 3.5 million US so the top teams are all pro players, and the production values are fantastic. best of all, it is a game I play so I could relate to what was going on. A couple of times I yelled at screen, something I haven’t done to a rugby for a long time.
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When you give up Sky, rugby ceases to exist. A huge section of the population won't even notice the Lions and, thanks to the NZRFU seeming to think the game is safe with the dying Sky business model, care even less a few months after they sent the decoder back.
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My point is that people are focussing on the wrong issue. Big data - be it light bulbs or "social investment" is an insidious and creeping reality that has the ability to make choice an illusion, and by extension create compliant populations manipulated by constant data enhanced surveillance.
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As has been pointed out, AI has limited ability to replace human workers with machines. However, big data is a completely different kettle of fish. What if your ISP knew what you wanted before you wanted it, when your connection was playing up before you did and what sort of data plan you’d like before you requested it? That is rapidly becoming possible, and when it does every retail and call centre job in the world will be redundant.
My view is history will judge 2007 – the year of the first smart phone and when Hadoop turned up – as one of the watershed years of human history. Information from devices like smartphones and increasingly all your other appliances when subjected to distributed data apps capable of processing billions of record in a matter of seconds is what is going to drive the AI to call you and tell you that the supermarket has dispatched your groceries you didn't order but need, and when you get your groceries you’ll be pleasantly surprised it includes a light bulb for the one that just popped in the kitchen because the big data noticed when auto-analysing your line for power fluctuations a type of fluctuation that with a 99.85% probability indicated an immanent light bulb failure of that type in your house. And that sort of analysis is already possible, BTW.
Humans moved from factories to the service sector with automation. Big data will wipe those jobs out as well.
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Speaker: The Brexlection, in reply to Ben Austin,
I went to his launch speech a couple of months back in London and it was really quite amazing to watch him in action.
Yes, well. Don't believe everything Polly Toynbee and Nick Cohen tell you.