Posts by Duncan McKenzie
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
All this talk about staring at a monitor for a living, and the relative contributions of Aucklanders and farmers to the economy, puts me in mind of my late father-in-law, a man of strong if not entirely logical opinions. Don, a true southern man who never lived north of the 45th parallel, thought that real men should work outside. He and both of his sons were builders, one son in law a farmer and one a lineman – I rather let the side down by both living in Auckland and working in an office (which does involve a lot of staring at a monitor) for a living. Don also believed that women’s role was to provide the domestic support for the outdoor men in their lives, but later moderated that view to concede that some women could work in offices and stare at monitors, thereby liberating the likes of me to do real work.
It does seem that the economic argument that this thread has given rise to confuses GDP with overseas income. GDP – a general indicator of economic activity - is generated by farmers and office workers, as well as by latte-servers and importers of cars, and we Aucklanders are responsible for generating one-third of it. For overseas income, which pays for all those goods and services that we import, we are dependent on farming and tourism. It appears that both GDP and overseas earnings are important. The success of the overseas earnings part of the economy is dependent - perhaps uncomfortably dependent - on our natural environment (both actual and perceived). There have been various attempts to reduce this dependence, both by import substitution/import controls and through establishing export-oriented secondary industries. Those industries cannot compete directly with the low-wage economies of the “third world”, which is why there is the attempt to focus on high-value niches where the price tag is not so important.
My experiences with these high-value niche industries do not, however, give me great confidence that they will get anywhere. Two examples:
A high value industrial electronic product, with a good global market share, was being manufactured by a skilled workforce (of which my brother was a part) in a provincial city. The owners decide to sell out to an international competitor and take the money. The business is closed within two years.
The marine industry has been identified as a market niche whose development should be encouraged - at the same time as it’s being nimbied off the Auckland waterfront by apartments. The local branch of a multi-national marine engineer sought to set up a business in this industry on the opposite side of the harbour. Despite neighbours’ hostility and consent authority resistance, consent was obtained – but in the meantime, the overseas parent lost interest in its local branch which was then closed down.
So it seems to me that we will continue to depend heavily on the farmers and the tourism operators, and try to manage their environmental effects (or perceptions thereof). We just have to be thankful that farmers are stubborn souls who want to keep on producing food for export when a more “rational’ decision might be to subdivide the farm for holiday houses. That is, the farmers are more in the mould of my father-in-law than of the owners of the now-defunct electronic and marine engineering plants.
-
The time distortion test you describe reminds me of the story about Ken Kesey when he was the subject of experiments on the effects of LSD (in the 60s). One of the tests was to estimate when 1 minute had elapsed. To everyone's amazement, KK could do it to within the second every time, no matter what the state of his head.
It transpired that they had been taking Ken's pulse regularly and that it was always 70 bpm. So Ken surreptitiously took his own pulse, counted to 70 and said "stop".
Probably, for some time after that, one of the recorded effects of LSD was "enhanced ability to estimate the elapsing of time".