The Ignorance of Growing Up

Hey guys!

Ignorance is Bliss, Bliss is Happiness, Happiness is Ignorance.

(THIS IS A REALLY SHORT STORY BUT IS IMPORTANT TO THE POINT.)

When I was young, in primary school, I was in the school's first chess team. In our second term we competed in our first chess tournament.  Being our first tournament, the team had extremely low expectations and it just a chance to get away from class. Because of how the system works, the last game is always the closest; you're matched with other competitors who have same or similar scores. In the end, I won from a losing position when my opponent made a critical mistake.

The win just, by the skin of teeth, secured third place for us.  Which meant we all got trophies and medals.  For a second semester team with no previous competitive experience, it was quite an achievement.

What I didn't know, was how critical that last game was. I didn't know how close my team was to getting medals. I didn't feel the pressure of my team mates analyzing my every move. I stayed in touch with my opponent afterwards. She mentioned that she knew the stakes and felt the pressure when she made the critical mistake.

(THERE! NO MORE STORY)

Being ignorant about what could go wrong and all the possible consequences that could happen is so often liberating. When we don't have that pressure to perform well, we can concentrate on what we need to do and our own goals.

And that is the worst thing about growing up.We become less ignorant and more educated.

When we're young, we're told we can do anything we want. Teachers get us to write and draw with crayons about what we want to be when we grow up, however fantastical it seemed. Some people drew pictures astronaut or being a firefighther or the Prime Minister of Australia. During sport, our parents would tell us the point of sport was to have fun. "Winning is just a plus," they would always say.

And as we grow up, we realise just how difficult it is to achieve those dreams. How, not everyone gets to be an astonaut or how there's only one Prime Minister and only the winner gets the trophy.

How life gets in the way of our dreams. As our needs and priorities become many, our dreams become increasingly narrow. Its just extremely disconcerting that as we grow up, our dreams narrow. 

I can't help but imagine what would have happened if I went to play that same game, knowing what I know now. Knowing all the things, that could go wrong with every move of the chess piece, knowing that all my teammates were relying on me so that they could get a medal. I don't know if I would have still won, but it definitely would have weighed on my mind.

It isn't so much the pressure that knowledge gives, its knowledge of all the things that could go wrong. Sometimes, knowing less might help us achieve more.

~TastyJacks~

Rotten Apple? Expectations of innovation leaving a sour taste in my mouth

Time for a bit of a change of pace. OK, so one of my many pet hates of recent years involves the tech industry, and more specifically, how they “innovate”. More specifically, I dislike the culture of expectation that has emerged, to the point where companies that aren’t seen to be constantly innovating are seen to be falling behind.

I’ll clarify what I mean: In the time that Steve Jobs was Apple’s CEO, the company blew the world’s collective mind on consecutive occasions through the introduction of “revolutionary” products such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Since Tim Cook took charge, many people lament the lack of innovation, specifically the lack of big-picture leaps in technology. They view Apple’s recent innovations as being purely incremental in nature, rather than the old days of huge new inventions unveiled with each fresh product-launch. And by “many people”, I mean the vast majority of tech websites (see: here, here, here and, my personal favourite (purely for the wordplay), here). 

I do not dispute these facts. Just because Apple has not stirred the proverbial pot recently, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad sign for Apple, or likewise a good sign for competitors. People cannot continually expect companies to churn out innovation after innovation, year after year – that’s simply not the way life works.

These “journalists” lament the fact that these companies no longer have vision, and see it as a point of weakness. What many journalists often overlook is the fact that these companies are just like other conventional companies; conventional companies where product innovations and R&D all cost substantial amounts of time, effort, and money. If these costs cannot be recouped through the marketing of the product itself, then it is simply not worth innovating. The bottom line is that, if Apple can still make a stack of money by incrementally improving its product design year-on-year, then why would it even bother continually re-inventing its products each year?

So then, this poses the question of why Apple is no longer innovating like it used to. In this respect, Everett Rogers’ work on the Diffusion of Innovation model provides a number of answers. As an example, I’m going to use the iPhone, or to define the sector more broadly, the “smartphone” sector. Rogers’ model has stages along the process from which an innovation is first conceptualised, to the point where it reaches full market saturation. These stages are, in chronological order: Innovators, Early Adopters, Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards.

In the smartphone realm, Blackberry (and to a lesser extent, Windows) were the Innovators and Early Adopters of a phone which paired internet connectivity (and its web browsing and email capabilities) with the conventional mobile phone. These phones were marketed to businesses, with high levels of success. However, they had limited success with individual consumers, due to their inflexibility and lack of real utility for average consumers.

Following this, along came Apple in 2007 with an offering which was directly targeted at the consumer market, offering a sleeker, more practical and more customisable solution to Blackberry’s offering. It was an instant success. In this sense, Apple were the Early Majority to the smartphone market, with the android system (and its myriad of manufacturers including Samsung) lagging behind a year or so, classing it as a Late Majority.

Finally, just as the market is heading towards the point of full innovation saturation, and realising the error in their ways, both Windows and Blackberry re-launched their smartphones towards 2012-2013. They ditched their business-aimed phones and adopted a format closer the consumer format chosen by Apple. In this sense, they had undergone a transformation from being the Early Adopters to being the Laggards of the market. This just goes to show that having the upper hand as an innovator or early adopter does not always guarantee success, and shouldn’t be put up on a pedestal as always being the optimal thing to aim for. More often than not, a strategy of imitation can be just as successful as a strategy of innovation.

This pattern is replicated over and over, no matter whether the product be tablets, phones, computers, smart-watches, etc. etc. Such a process can be expected each time a disruptive innovation is presented to the market, and it is not always guaranteed on who will seize the opportunity at the right moment and create a successful innovation. Innovation doesn’t always equal success, and as such it is unreasonable for tech writers to continually whinge about having a lack of it in big tech companies.

For more information, see Rogers' book.

#J.Nic#

How to: Play God

To what extent is it acceptable to determine fate with mathematics? The neutral tweaking of numbers until they present a logical and precise conclusion, a simple solution to the most complicated of problems.  It seems…natural, right? How else can one ever come to an objective conclusion without calculating probabilities and the effects of external variables, without forming an equation, like a question, and a solution, like an answer. In the movie the Imitation Game, Turing and his team of cryptologists, in conjunction with the British Secret Service, determine which populations to save, and which to abandon, using cold, hard maths. As someone who relies on lists and values straight and logical answers to every problem, this method of determining the future seemed acceptable to me. These people had true power – they were playing God, and helped the Allies win the Second World War. And there is a sense of comfort that these people were only using statistics and mathematics to wield that power; perhaps if more mathematicians and cryptologists were in government, or if the politicians listened to them more, the outcome of various current situations would be different. I think a lot of issues would be treated differently on a global scale if utilitarian ethics were employed (the greatest good for the greatest amount of people) by people who only looked at the facts and figures.

Take climate change, for example. The numbers would show that the effects of climate change would change the lives (negatively) for billions of people in future generations, and perhaps even some people now (take the island of Tuvalu, for example, which will be shortly under water due to rising sea levels). So, instead of climate change becoming a political issue, which is manipulated this way and that for votes and popularity, the theoretical mathematicians, scientists and statisticians that are in charge would put measures into place immediately, for the greatest good to the greatest amount of people. Future circumstances would be considered over current ones (like profits gained from oil and fossil fuels) and in general, the larger masses of not-so-rich people might benefit, as opposed to a small and privileged few becoming still richer.

I can’t say I’m a politician, or a mathematician, or even particularly well versed in global issues. I do think, however, that on a large scale, cutting out all the ‘politics’ behind politics, and just assessing a situation objectively through mathematics and statistics, could turn out better in the long run. Alan Turing and his team couldn’t publicly announce that they failed to stop the bombing of Coventry because it would mean the Germans would realise they’ve cracked the Enigma code, hence causing the war to be delayed. The politics behind that statement is just a nightmare. But, in reality, the employment of their objective techniques severely shortened the war, and hence minimised the amount of lives lost regardless. The problem comes into it when people point fingers, and ask the question: “what makes them able to choose who lives and who dies?”

In this case, I think my line of argument can only be successful in large scale situations. Emotions, compassion and subjectivity are important in everyday life, and must in no way be diminished or looked down upon. They are the cornerstone to social interactions, and emotional intelligence is vital in understanding the issues that must be addressed in the first place. So perhaps, from a grassroots level, emotional intelligence is important in affecting social change, but from a top-down approach, calculated mathematics can be the most effective way to solve a problem. 

Capital Punishment

The temptation was pretty high this post to write a rebuttal to Tasty Jack’s previous post, about the metadata, and his tomato as a fruit analogy. But turns out I’m far more opinionated on other issues, so this week I want to talk about capital punishment. It has come up again in the Australian news due to the eminent executions of two members of the Bali 9 group in Indonesia, Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan. For me this isn’t a debate, it honestly shocked me that people, Australians can be against capital punishment in our own nation, but see it as legitimate in other countries, Australian citizens or not. These people are totally wrong (sorry to my bf and Tasty Jack but you are) and I’m going to tell you readers why. We shall start with why in my opinion any truly civilized person that values human life would not condone judicial executions. And then move on to the whole other issue of national sovereignty and interfering in other nations judicial system if you are all not bored by the end of this rant.

Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is the court-ordered execution of a person for a serious crime.  And I firmly believe that under no circumstances it is the right course of action, capital punishment dehumanizes and desensitizes all those involved and has a corrosive effect on society itself. Essentially by a nation condoning the legalized murder of a criminal; the state and justice system send the message that in some circumstance it is ok to kill. I don’t believe you can have it both ways and say murder of a citizen by another citizen is abhorrent; and the murder of a criminal by the state is not. Forcibly taking someone’s life is murder, even if you dress it up with fancy courts and court documents. Taking some inspiration from Andrea’s earlier post, on good and evil, I also don’t believe in the arbitrary good versus evil person, no person is all good or evil, and that fundamentally “people are worth more than the worst thing, crime, that they have done”. By having judicial executions a nation is accepting that the value of a person’s life is lowered because of what they have done, and thus that not everyone is equal. “Taking one life even for the most heinous of crimes in no way upholds or protects the value of all human life.” all it achieves is the diminishing of a life. If your humanity can be lowered because of what you have done, then it opens up more serious issues such as can your humanity be lowered because of who you are? Where you stand in society? Your background? etc. This leads nicely into the issue of the justice system being fair for all people of all classes. Going to my trusty statistics I’m going to say it’s not.  “The death penalty, both in the U.S. and around the world, is discriminatory and is used disproportionately against the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities.” (Amnesty international http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/us-death-penalty-facts) Looking at some fun facts also from Amnesty USA, and thus relate to the United States experience; almost all death row inmates could not afford their own attorney at trial. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 82% of all executions have taken place in the South. Since 1977 the overwhelming majority of death row defendants 77% have been executed for killing white victims, even though African Americans make up about half of all homicide victims. Essentially when dealing with the justice system don’t be black, Hispanic or any minority group and most importantly don’t be poor that way you can be sure to receive some actual justice, and avoid being murdered by the State.  

While some countries employ the death penalty as a deterrent for what they believe to be unforgivable and unacceptable crimes, statistics have shown that on this front it also fails. Evidence increasingly shows that judicial executions are in no way a deterrent,  e.g. for 2013, the average Murder Rate of Death Penalty states in America was 4.4,  compared with the average Murder Rate of States without the Death Penalty was 3.4 (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/murder-rates-nationally-and-state)  “In Texas, the United States Jurisdiction in which more executions are carried out than any other, there has actually been an increase in the number of homicides in recent years”. Despite the rhetoric of the Indonesian government “Ample evidence from Singapore, Malaysia and other countries proves its ineffectiveness in deterring drug trafficking and reining in drug use” http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/02/05/indonesia-uses-faulty-stats-drug-crisis-justify-death-penalty .Statics have shown that the death penalty is not a deterrent and does little to achieve justice and peace for the victims and their families, which makes it pretty useless as a tool against crime.

Capital punishment removes any chance of redemption or rehabilitation, which as far as my knowledge is one of the core ideals of the criminal justice system/prison system. Redemption and rehabilitation is what is ultimately need in healing the wounds that have been inflicted on all those involved, which achieves a sense of justice and peace while still upholding the value of life. Often the death penalty is often employed as a way of seeking revenge and justice offering little peace or relief for those involved.

All this has not taken into account the series issue of what happens when an innocent person is wrongly accused. I acknowledge that this is not really an argument in the case of the Bali 9, but it is still an important point in the anti-capital punishment debate. A life imprisonment for a wrongly accused man can be overturned but an execution cannot be undone. There is significant chance that an innocent man can be wrongfully convicted and executed, especially if you look at the argument above and death penalties bias towards the poor and minority groups. “DNA testing has suggested that as many as 70 of 1076 Americans executed since 1976 might have been innocent”. Not only has unnecessary traumatic pain been inflicted on the wrongly accused person and their families, but on the victims and their families, pain that cannot be undone. So yes, I’m going to air on the side of caution and say it is better to have no executions than to wrongfully execute even one innocent person.

Okay so this went on a little longer than expected, but let wrap up with the national sovereignty bit/linkage to the Bali 9. Yes they are Australian citizens who committed a crime in another country, with different laws and customs. I agree that laws of a sovereign nation should be respected, my arguments against the Bali 9 members not being executed do not relate to them being Australian citizens, but that capital punishment in any country be that the United States, China or Indonesia etc. should be criticised and protested against due to the arguments I have given above. Capital Punishment is not something you get to cherry pick, its wrong under all circumstances. It is easy to say that Australia has a terrible human rights record, and still perpetrates human rights abuses (asylum seekers being the big one) and therefore say that we should not criticise the Indonesian government. I think this is a weak argument as all nations have failures when it comes to human rights abuses. And that instead you should criticise human rights abuses such as capital punishment wherever they occur. I’m quite happy to lay out Australian’s failings with regards to Asylum seekers in my next post. 

-Mrouge-, 

Freedom of Speech, Australian Governent, Religious Freedom

Hey guys! This is a reply to Jnic's post last week which can be found be clicking here! 

First the qualifiers. I think most of my friends know my views on religion and society. Despite, having a Catholic education and a church attending parent, I have remained agnostic at the best of times and downright atheist at the worst. In preparing to write this post, I spent the better past of this week researching the issue at hand and these views of course will reflect the qualifiers above.

Egyptian Newspaper

What has happened in France has of course sent shockwaves across the Western world. France, compared to the other Western country has a relatively high Muslim population and has for at least the past decade, had a very strong separation of secularism and state. France, whose national anthem is from revolution, who's chant of Viva libertie and viva la France, has always represented the ideals of freedom. Now, in the 21st century, it feels like the Western world is increasingly being forced to choose between freedom of speech and freedom of religion. (I understand these are vast generlaisations but lets roll with it.) Even France, with all its ideals set in freedom, is facing the same problem. From here, I feel #Jnic# in his last post more than adequately set the context for this post.

Rally at Paris

In Australia, Tony Abbot's government approval rating has polled at appallingly low numbers. Yet for whatever reason, he and his party was chosen by the majority of Australians in the last election. If we believe in what we are taught from day one, that democracy is the best political system that is on offer, then we at some point need to trust democracy. To do so we need to trust the government that we choose. When they believe that some invasion of privacy is necessary for the safety of the country, we  can't just plug our ears and ignore the facts.

Which isn't to say, we shouldn't criticise and demand something different but when there's no viable alternatives on the table then I don't see the point in complaining. At the end of the day, both Sydney and the latest massacre happen within a month of each other. Not half year before that, the same thing happened in Canada. It may be alarmist of me, but doing nothing seems to be downright negligent.

If the government was to decide, that they need metadata to ensure my safety then so be it. Because at the end of the day, the metadata which our government are taking from us, I trust, will be used for the right reasons.

Increasingly, we are worried about the erosion of our freedom and privacy. I feel what has been overlooked in many cases is how many more ways we now have to express our freedom. With the advent of social media, the internet and the ability to reach potentially millions of people, we have been given more freedom than any of forefathers could have imagined. Whilst some of that may have been taken away we need to understand, this generation, in the here and now, has more 'freedom' than any other generation before us.

 

 "I am a Muslim and I love Jews", "I am a Jew and I love Muslims" at Paris rally

They say that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable. Wisdom is knowing that it doesn't matter; it still makes a good vegetable soup. Freedom, gives us the right to say what we want. However, we need to recognise that a lot of things that we say, could be conceived as extremely offensive to large groups of people who are willing to act on it. Whilst we cannot let extremist, change what we do, we need to think more critically on the effects of what we say. It is in this light, I don't understand why the magazine which was targeted chose to publish their latest edition and why it has been so popular. I honestly hope that it has been popular to support victim's families, rather than just proving a point. Surely there are better ways than to express our freedom of speech.

Religious freedom however, is a completely different beast entirely.

In VCE English, we were taught that there's no right way to analyse a text. In primary school, we were taught that we are allowed to choose to believe and follow in whatever religion we chose to. So what happens, when people use religion to justify horrendous actions, such as the ones we've seen in the past couple of months.

There are ways to contrive anything to become something that it originally was not intended to be. I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert on the Islamic faith, but at some level, we need to make judgement as to what a group of people represent or at the very least, intended to represent. Fundamentally, from all the values that I was taught, from the people I have met and my own life experience, I believe that (many) religion are a ideal which provides a lot of positive guidance for people lives and that it has a hugely positive influence on society.

So when, extremist group, use the ideals of Islam (or any other religion) to justify their actions I feel more than justified in saying, their interpretation is wrong.

I heavily frown upon using the populace argument, but in this case I'm going to. At its very core, religion is shaped by its followers. The belief of a religion should evolve and change over time, directed by its leaders. It should follow that, the belief that the majority of a religion is the belief of the majority of its followers. Following that, when the majority of Muslim would rather not associate themselves in the same light as ISIL followers, than again, I can justify myself when I say their interpretations as wrong.

 More state power, not free speech, the likeliest we-are-Charlie result

Reddit user raises an often understated point.

Odd World Leaders at the march

~TastyJacks~

The freedom-safety tradeoff; why we should refuse gaining one at the expense of the other

This post is in response to the content of this article:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/01/george-brandis-is-using-paris-sydney-terror-attacks-as-a-lightning-rod-for-metadata-laws/

">MFW trying to define metadata" ~ George Brandis

The events of the past number of months have been undeniably shocking. It can be argued that terrorism has not been this prevalent since the watershed attacks of the early-to-mid 2000s. Each time issues of national security are raised, I become despondent as to how ruling authorities of many countries behave. My apprehension is not so much towards the direct military/police action that is taken following an attack (although I am by no means condoning all of these responses as weighted or proportionate); rather, it surrounds how massive sacrifices to freedom are made under the façade of “national security”.

Ultimately, governments seem to believe that they need to be taking part in a constant trade-off situation, between the freedom and liberty of its citizens on the one hand, and the safety of the broader public on the other. Herein lies the hypocrisy of many nations. Western democratic nations constantly and sometimes loudly (*cough* ‘Murica *cough*) espouse the values of individual freedom and relative-libertarianism. While the extent to which this is an actual portrayal of reality is always being debated, it is plain to see that, since the fateful morning when those planes descended upon Lower Manhattan, the collective freedom of individuals right throughout the Western-hemisphere has fallen – this coming despite the onset of the Information Age and all of the extra freedoms that should have come with it.

The “safety-precautions” taken post-9/11 most definitely exceeded their original scope of terror-prevention and detection. This has been most recently confirmed by Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA’s PRISM program; a clandestine, electronic mass-surveillance program which treats the entire population as persons of interest, in spite of the lack of the law’s usual requirements of probable cause. This scattershot, blind luck approach is not only largely ineffective, but also highly invasive and restrictive. In spite of this, elements of the US government has remained largely unaccountable for this mass privacy breach due to the consistent playing of the “national security” card- an over-played catch-all trump card used to justify the unjustifiable.

I do not doubt for a second the need for adequate preventative and public safety measures, though. Do I care that I’m unable to take a bottle of water with me on a plane? If it’s going to lessen the risk of me dying aboard a bombed flight, then of course not. Do I still have faith and believe in the necessity of our police and security services (ASIO and ASIS)? Of course I do, since there has, and always will be, hateful people who intend to bring harm upon others.

Instead, what I would advocate for would be measures, proportionate responses to these threats, as opposed to the over-reaching, counter-productive responses that have been taken by many governments around this world. I’m all in favour of surveillance, so long as it is highly-targeted and done in cases of reasonable suspicion. In the same way, I’m all in favour of people having more freedom, just so long as it does not impinge on the ability of others to safely enjoy their own freedom. The current Australian government, with its proposed metadata laws, is acting as if it is offering the golden key to all public safety; an easy-fix for all sorts of crime prevention. In reality, these ineffective metadata laws are thinly-veiled in their attempts to hand more control to the government. I sincerely doubt the passing of these laws would make any sort of noticeable impact upon a crazed individual’s capacity for delusion and hatred.  

It simply doesn’t have to be a contest of picking one over the other. It doesn’t have to be freedom vs. safety; national security vs. individual privacy; over-reaction vs. under-reaction… Just because we aspire to live in a safe society, it doesn’t mean that we have to sacrifice our freedoms in order to achieve this. As a famous little girl from the Old El Paso ads once said...

#J.Nic#

'Tis the Season

So this week(s) I’ve really struggled to put anything on the page, despite having over 6 weeks now to think up and write something, I’m sorry to say I have nothing profound or noteworthy to say. I imagine the responses elicited by this post will be “Cool story bro” and I am going to use Christmas as my excuse. It’s the silly season and Christmas and New Year’s is a complicated time for blog writing; Do I write about my own personal Christmas celebration? My unimaginative New Year resolutions? Do I write about the money spent? The unwanted presents? The Band Aid song going around? My Cats? In the end dear reader you are going to get to know what I love about Christmas and why I like spending money; not exactly ground breaking, I know.

I love Christmas. It is that simple, it is by far the day I look forward to the most in any year. I could list while all the other holidays don’t compare, Easter (I dislike chocolate and don’t do religion), Halloween (I’m Australian.) But the take home point is that I love Christmas. It is not the giving or receiving of gifts that I love the most nor the food (though the food comes a close second), but the overwhelming sense of security I get from being surrounded by the people I love. Even as a child, my fondest memories are dominated by a sense of security most keenly felt in the moments before I feel asleep for the traditional mid-Christmas day nap, essential in my family after having a large meal. It was those moments between not being awake and not being asleep either, where I could hear the various rooms of my Grandma’s big house filled with the voices of my family. Their conversations unimportant, people who I knew loved me. These moments gave me such a strong sense of  self and belonging, security in knowing that in this wide world filled with 7 billion people I had my own people who supported me no matter what and a place within my family.

Essentially the point of that rambling story is that I draw security form those around me, which is I am sure true of a lot of people. What I do not draw security from however is money. Not that money isn’t important, it is, it gives you options, choices. However largely due to my upbringing money is not a measure of security for me. My family lives by the saying “you can’t take it (money) with you into the next life”. Money is therefore in my opinion meant to be spent. Now I don’t mean all in one go or right now, you can have it marked for future expenses etc. but sooner or later the money will be spent. There is no point for me having it sit there just to make me feel secure. Money itself has no intrinsic value; you can’t eat it or wear it. What it does gives you, is options and choices, if I can reasonably afford something, why not? Even debt often frowned upon I feel gets an unnecessary bad rap.  As long as the debt is feasible it’s “all good”. This view has been strengthened through uni, debt is simply you curbing your future consumption for current consumption, e.g. uni I would not be able to go to uni without student HECS debt. It’s a necessary evil. I do acknowledge however that at my current stage of life I largely have a lot of freedom and no responsibility, no kids, no house etc. However regardless of what stage of life I am in I adhere to the ideal of working to live, not living to work. 

-Mrouge-