Posts by Mark Harris
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9187??? Dyslexic fingers - "1987" of course.
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As a former public service manager with around 20years experience, I second PSM's post and subsequent comments (except the bit about Bell, of course). Although s/he tries to be cheerful, I can hear the mounting frustration and distress, the same frustration that cost me a nervous breakdown trying to dance on the head of a pin ("Do More With Less!" - remember that little gem from the 90's?) and eventually led me out of the PS with a permanent paroxitine habit.
Yet most of the people I worked with were good, honest, hard-working people who really, really wanted the right result for the public. It's the system that's the problem, as PSM says. The State Sector Act 9187 cut at the strength of the Public Service by demanding it be run as separate businesses. You can still find two departments working at cross-purposes (though not as much as in the 90's) and both have their strategies signed off by the politicians, who jealously fight for their "patch" and so don't talk to each other.
Then you've got a serious dearth of senior management talent (and less backbone) and a rabid media pack more interested in witch-hunts than getting things done. You can almost time Plunket to the second in asking "Who's to blame for this?" during interviews. Sometimes shit happens, what matters is who's the poor fucker who has to fix it.
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For a lawyer, Franks really doesn't seem to have much time for natural justice.
Or due process.
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it's a pretty miserable situation if you're reduced to leaning on your "uncle" in the local government office for favours
For you and me, perhaps, but we're mired in democratic tradition. China doesn't pretend to be a democracy and never has. They've been working this way for many hundreds of years
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You may very well think that, I couldn't possibly comment. ;-)
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equally true but you'll find the people who do the loudness thing where you notice it are often the amateurs.
Well, yes, I'd certainly cite Metallica in that bracket.
the quality of the work as in how it achieves the goal it sets out to achieve is completely relevant when you're using the argument that home studio technology has reduced costs of recording. if it sounds over compressed and loud then the money saved on home studio is wasted if you wanted to make it big and wide.
Then no-one will want to listen to it, and they'll want to listen to stuff that is well made. Thus the "problem" is self-correcting.
I'm seeing a lot of people who have spent the last 3-5 years with home studios coming out and asking for help now. its not necessarily as simple as hit record. the difference between the sound they hear in their head and the sound coming out of their speakers can be quite sizable, and I'm using the word quality to mean artists desired result, not technical purity of signal.
Then they'll be filtering back into the studio to do their recording and all your worries about that will be groundless.
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They have a job that means they don't sit at a computer all day. Which, in between snickers, ought to make you perhaps reflect on how their ability to participate in public debates may be affected.
My partner is a childcare worker and I can assure you she's keenly aware of these shifts.Her capacity to participate may be diminished, but her opportunity is not. That's the empowerment. As with anything, it's up to the individual's decision to make the time to participate or to do other things they consider to be more important (and I'm not saying they're not important, before somebody speaking for you jumps all over that - my point is that individuals choose how to allocate their own resources).
I know plenty of people that do make time to participate in these sorts of discussion (I don't know about PAS, precisely) in several fora around the net - in their spare time, after work, in between shifts etc. Perhaps not as much as thee and me, but even I have to earn a living and step away at times. I'm not criticizing those who don't - I doubt that every living Athenian of the time actually spoke out in the agora . But they could.
Which is not to say that the existence of a platform for dialogue that can reach a very large group indeed (perhaps unprecedently so) of students, office workers, journalists, academics and the like is a bad thing, of course it isn't.
Good.
But it privileges and empowers certain people, and not others. Those people ought to perhaps try to bear it in mind, instead of assuming that they are the voice of democracy and speak for everyone.
Ooh, nice snark. But irrelevant. I speak for me, not those myriad others. I look at what is, and talk about what I think it should be, having applied logic, analysis and a sense of history. You may disagree with me, and it would be boring if nobody did, but not on the basis that I speak for everybody. I've never claimed that, to my memory. Feel free to cite any occasions when I have.
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da-dum, da-dum, da-dum...
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I actually think Packer's right -- if you're going to claim authority (whether it's through your persona as a fearless teller of "unpleasant facts" or having your musings printed in a major metropolitan daily) then you don't get to sex your copy up (to coin a phrase).
That's what's bugging me about the inaccuracies in Underbelly:Mr Aisia - they didn't need to sex it up. The true story is amazing enough.
The premiere last week is a reasonable dramatic piece of fiction, but I'm with Pat Booth - you can't call it a true story if it didn't happen.
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To pick a category of people almost at random, have you ever wondered why so few teachers write on PAS, by any chance?
Um, nope. Enlighten me.
(Ooh, maybe they're too busy, y'know, teaching?)