A Networked World

Mega

2009-10-29T09:52:57+13:00

Lomania

The sooner this guy self destructs, the better for us all. Tamaki's 700 'sons' swear oath of loyalty

The leader of Destiny Church, Brian Tamaki, who not long ago anointed himself bishop of the church he founded, has now proclaimed himself the church's "spiritual father" and designated the male members of the church as "spiritual sons".

At a special service during the church's annual conference in Auckland at the weekend, about 700 male members of the church swore a "covenant oath" of loyalty and obedience to Mr Tamaki and were given a "covenant ring" to wear on their right hands.

A church document describes the covenant as "a solemn oath of commitment that is binding, enduring and unbreakable. You are bound to covenant ... Covenant is an irrevocable, undissolvable oath of commitment".

There's another word for that kind of relationship; slavery. And if these 700 "sons" don't wake up to their "father's" serious ego problem, they will become his shock troops next.

There's a time to stop this dangerous crap, and it is now, before it gets out of hand. He has feet of clay like the rest of us, someone needs to dig them up pronto, although he is as cunning as a fox, he already has the antidote in their veins.

"You will hear all sorts of statements and opinions but you must be
prepared to ignore them and consistently hold him in the same high
regard no matter what you hear."
Somewhat surprisingly, the protocol says that Mr Tamaki is human and does make mistakes.
However, the sons must "be prepared to defend against any problems arising out of his mistakes.
A
loyal man is supposed to 'cushion' the effect of a mistake on Bishop
and to protect him. NEVER intentionally expose his weakness."

Now, we know that he knows that there is something under the covers. All that matters is what that something is.

Jim Kunstler asks the question

2009-10-28T08:28:22+13:00

While he can go over the top a bit, Kunstler is definitely on my team when it comes to the reality-based life. And once again, in Self-jiving Nation he asks the question that nobody else seems to have thought of:

I'd like to know what folks imagine we are recovering to. To a renewed orgy of credit-card spending? To yet another round of suburban expansion, with the boys in the yellow hard-hats driving stakes out in the sagebrush for another new thousand-unit pop-up "community?" For a next generation of super-cars built to look like medieval war wagons? That's the "hope" that our officials seem to pretend to offer.

Exactly, the talking heads all talk about this recovery, but its always a recovery "from" the crash and never, ever, about what our lives and communities and economies will look like once we have "recovered".

It's completely inconsistent with any reality-based trend-lines, by the way.

When the Australian Government commissions a report that says nearly a million homes are in direct danger of rising sea levels and that it should consider compulsory acquiisition and demolition of some homes as an option, the destination of the recovery looks a lot less sunny than most of the discuission would have us assume. Make evacuation plans

Urgent action to cope with the impact of rising sea levels needs to start now, including improving evacuation routes for coastal communities during extreme storms and flooding.

As well, a sweeping federal parliamentary report calls for an overhaul of the building code to make homes more resilient and for the legal liability for future property losses to be sorted out.

Warning that ''the time to act is now'', the bipartisan report brought down last night states that thousands of kilometres of coastline have been identified as at risk from the threat of rising sea levels and extreme weather events caused by climate change.

The only note of compulsory cynicism I can muster for this one is that, coincidentally, the coastline is disproportionately owned by the wealthiest members of society who would probably be handsomely bailed out by such legislation.

A few years ago they were squawking about their properties being protected and told they would have to suck it up and take the hit because the community could not afford to protect coastal landscape to that degree. Looks like they may have found a good fairy after all.

Love my daughter

2009-10-19T16:06:37+13:00

Check out her small business here.
Summer 09/10 Collection Gallery - Mardle NZ Designer Womens Fashion

Mardle's inaugural collection is small but irresistible!

With a style nod to French illustration this mini-series of prints on our 'perfect' tee is a combination not to be missed.

Then buy a tee and help her keep her father in the manner to which he would like to become accustomed.

NSS

2009-10-19T09:36:53+13:00

Well I'll be danged, media suckered again. Sheriff says balloon boy a hoax

FORT COLLINS, Colorado - A Colorado sheriff said it was a hoax when parents reported that their 6-year-old son was in a flying saucer-like helium balloon hurtling away from their home.

Sheriff Jim Alderden said Richard and Mayumi Heene "put on a very good show for us, and we bought it."

"We believe that we have evidence at this point to indicate that it was a publicity stunt done with the hopes of marketing themselves or better marketing themselves for a reality television show at some point in the future," Alderden said.

When this hit the screens I wandered over to Google and looked up the the average weight of a six year old kid and the lifting capacity of Helium, did a few basic calculations with a spreadsheet and came up with a spherical balloon about 12 feet in diameter.

I didn't bother trying to figure out how big a balloon it would take to rise to 7,000 feet in that short time, nor the effect of its evident partial deflation, what we were seeing was just too small to do the job.

Besides which, any child would have to have been inside and breathing helium for the whole time which would have killed him.

But nobody suggested any of these things, the media, the military, the cops and uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all chased yapping after it as if it was real. We happily sit in front of the idiot box and watch session after session of MythBusters and the net result is that the level of thinking achieved by the media is still subterranean.

Logos and meaning

2009-10-19T09:12:12+13:00

There's a fierce amount of BS that gets spouted around the launch of a logo, especially where its a rebranding exercise. Millions have to be justified by some tiny graphic object and many pages are spent going into its deep psychology; how "it" represents some deep yearning we have for the company's products and services etc etc etc ad bleeding nauseam.

So, I thought I'd turn it inside out. Here's the logo.

What does it represent and whose logo is it?

If you know for a fact, ie you have stopped by the forum I found it on or the original, please hold off identifying it, I want to know whether it conveys anything by its essence.

My take is that logos mean whatever we vest in them over time, none of them have any inherent meaning so they can't express anything at all until they have been in use for a while.

This has meaning

But this

Doesn't.

Although once it did. It meant failed product and the name still does, but the logo, not so much

Or, never mind changing the shade of the lipstick, what have you done with the pig

Transitions

2009-10-15T10:07:57+13:00

I've been thinking about this post of Jon;'s for some time and I think I'm getting somewhere with its content. Wirearchy · The New Realities of Engagement – Stories That Drive Action Planning and Implementation

This new model is the antithesis of the model that it may replace. Clear signs of what this new model are all over the place.
(To help explain, we’ve used diagrams from Geoffrey Moore’s widely-accepted “Crossing the Chasm” model for the progression of uptake of new modes of behaviour or new paradigms)

One of the things that has troubled me is exactly that image. I think it betrays us because it takes no account of transitions, it looks only at those who "win" and doesn't deal with the dynamics of the process.

So I've done a little graphing of my own to help me explain what I think happens.

Its a way of trying to show how messy this process is and it too by no means conveys anything like the reality. There is nothing there yet that shows people vacillating as they shift from preferring one side or the other to being unsure of which side their best interests lie.

In the media business, for example, there is a lot of that going on right now as old media tries to stop the net from destroying it. Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content. So Why Doesn't He Stop Them?

At a meeting of media executives going on this week in Beijing, Murdoch and Curley gave impassioned speeches, saying they're mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore. They warn that aggregators like Google had better start paying up, or else.

"We content creators have been too slow to react to the free exploitation of news by third parties without input or permission," Curley told the audience.

These guys have passed through ignoring it, trying to take it over, trying to be hip and "get it" and still watched their major business investments going down the drain so they have moved to shouting, resisting, calling for the lawyers etc, even though they know that they can't afford not to play either. The conflict stage is both external and internal.

Another point is that we have no way of knowing where we actually are in the process. In the huge shifts taking place in the world right now we may think we are in the chaos phase as the old order of the capitalist scorpion commits suicide from programmed mindlessness but we may in fact still be at the conflict stage where the old orders tries to defeat the new by looting it six ways to Sunday.

The graph is of no value except in hindsight, as is any model that has an element of chaos.

But wait, there's more. The two graphs still show the transition from one state to another and there is absolutely no guarantee that we will make that transition. This is also every bit as possible.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, to say that the outcome will be better, or even different. It is entirely possible that the bankers may keep their teeth into our throats and we move to the apogee of financial capitalism; the slave state.

Retaining value - what exactly does that mean?

2009-10-12T12:22:14+13:00

James West has an interesting piece at Midas Letter - Gold Price Prediction

When anything, be it stock, bond, currency or commodity, reaches a new high, the impetus for selling into strength and taking profit off the table are enhanced dramatically. With gold’s new record high, there are plenty of holders of bullion who started acquiring it in the first years of the millennium who are now sitting on profit equivalent to 3 times the money.

The question is, however, sell gold in exchange for what?

Certainly trading gold for U.S. dollars is akin to forward selling gold at an incrementally lower price. Anyone smart enough to own gold since 2001 is unlikely to be so silly.

Renmibi might seem like a good trade. The only problem with that is you can’t easily spend renmibi at Home Depot or Safeway or Nordstrom.

No, there’s really no substitute for gold at this point in the global currency landscape. And so, the normally present impetus to sell and take profit has been castrated by the lack of anything else capable of retaining its value.

OK. I get that. But the question then becomes, what exactly does he mean by retaining value? If there is nothing that you would accept in exchange for it, how much "value" does it have?

I always look at the extreme case such as me having the last plate of food on earth and you having all the gold. How much of that gold would you give not to starve to death? How much gold would I accept to commit suicide?

Since the person who survives gets all the gold anyway, the only thing that has "value" is the food and even that is losing value the longer I remains uneaten.

I completely agree that exchanging gold for fiat money is a fools bargain, but once you have the gold you too can get fooled by seeing its exchange rate (as distinct from its value) constantly rising against all other possible "stores of value". Storage of any kind only has value if it is able to be released. from water in a dam to grain in a warehouse to savings in the bank, the storage part only works if the release part can take place. So how do you release the value stored in gold?

At some point you have to exchange it for something in the certain knowledge that you will never be able to get it back at that price, it will always go higher.

Well it will until all those left holding all the gold realise that it can't be eaten, worn, lived in, burned or used as medication, and if all anyone else wants is food, shelter, clothing, fuel or medication, how exactly do you sell your "assets" in exchange for something you actually need.

In complex societies the location of value is seriously camouflaged, and we can get carried away by the idea that, just because gold is durable and unchanging it has some kind of intrinsic value that can be locked away. I don't believe it.

Show me the mechanism.

Towards the new normal

2009-10-07T23:13:07+13:00

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

Low energy dismantle-ability
Repurposing all manner of manufactures
Building things that can be applied to new uses
Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills

What else?

Nobody is in charge - this is a good thing

2009-10-04T09:32:23+13:00

Johnnie Moore comes across some great stuff and this is one of the best. Leadership in a self-organising world

Harrison Owen created, or maybe he just channelled, the Open Space process many years ago. He says he did so in two martinis and 20 minutes - pretty productive for a process that's been used hundreds of thousands of times around the world.

Here's Harrison talking about the paradox of leadership in a self-organising world. It's fabulous stuff. He serves his metaphorical liquor 100% proof and with great charm. I certainly feel challenged to up my game in future when talking about this stuff.

Harrison Owen - Talk I - Leadership in a Self-Organizing World from Harold Shinsato on Vimeo.

As usual there are a couple of points I want to argue with.

Owen, and possibly Johnnie and others still want to talk about leadership and, if they are right about self organising systems and I'm sure they are, then it is not fruitful.

It begs the questions of how we get to decide where we want to lead, how we decide whose leadership to accept, including our own. and leaves unspoken the issue that we almost always abandon those leaders because they fail us. Leadership embodies exactly the kind of idea that Johnnie and Harrison argue so strongly against, that of being able to stand outside the system and, to some degree, direct it enough, or disrupt it enough, to instigate changes in a desired direction.

Leadership is change directed, management is homeostatic, but both entail an ability to stand outside, and you can't.

Which raises for me the much more interesting question of how real change occurs, how actual decisions are made and how they so often offer such great potential that is equally often fail and produce outcomes that can be significantly worse than the problem they were supposed to solve.

I've spent 2 years working around my property with an overall objective of it being as productive and as sustainable as possible. I am building and implementing stuff now that I had no concept of when I first started, I am using spaces that have been transformed utterly from what we inherited and there is much more to come. But I had, and have, no plan.

Along the way I've developed what I recently started calling "listening to the garden", literally standing still inside the space, looking around it without making decisions or judgements, noticing (ht Johnnie) new stuff and blurring other stuff into the overall picture and then carrying on with whatever I was doing. At some point an idea will start to germinate about what needs doing next given the current state of the place and our desire to reach those objectives. A bit later I'll start moving some stuff or building something which I will often stop building for days or weeks until the next bit of it becomes clearer.

I like the process and I'm pleased with the results but here's the thing, everything I build, the raised beds, the trellises, the garden workbench, the toolshed platform, every single thing, is screwed together because I completely expect that some of them will need dismantling and rebuilding or removing and replacing altogether at some future state of the process and I want to be able to reuse the parts.

I have no idea whether what I am doing is in fact right and as long as I am prepared to take apart something that doesn't, or ceases to work, I think I'm OK.

But I have no idea how I make those decisions or where they will lead. Now, what would you call that process? Because I want to see a lot more of it.

The other quibble is with this metaphor We're all surfers in a self-organising world. Some of us prefer the beach, and some of us think we're in charge of the wave. The challenge is to be in the flow of the wave.

Surfers have an exhilarating ride to be sure, but they can only ever end up back where they started, and the wave leaves them on the sand or dumps them on the rocks but it only ever takes them back to the place they left their towel and their car.

I much prefer the metaphor of sailing. A sailor can go to any place they like, what they can't do is get there by any route they choose, they have to work with the prevailing conditions of sea and wind and their boat. Sometimes they need to tack across the wind for hours to achieve even some small headway towards their goal, and at other times they need to abandon the goal for a while and just ride out the storm.

The process requires determination, skill, patience, wisdom and persistence, but most of all it demands a direct and honest engagement with the reality you can perceive right now and a willingness to accept that the reality has changed on you, either because you have learned to see it better or because it has in fact changed.

Sailors need to listen to the sea as I listen to my garden and deal honestly with the facts of their situation, not those facts that they would like very much to be the case. Those who can't do that, or refuse to, are called strong or determined or leaders and, when they are also lucky they get away with it and are hailed as heroes. But that is just survivorship bias, most of those who act that way drown quite quickly and are erased from the story.

Nevertheless, watch the Owen piece, its a gem.

The read Johnnie's other piece. as usual, he has got there before me.

Behaviour change, revisited

Meanwhile, we're so busy dreaming up desirable futures for each other, that we don't notice all the subtle changes that are going on around us anyway. And while we craft our master strategies, we don't even think about the little experiments we could make to nudge the system and see what happens.

You know, stuff we could do right now, or at least in the next day or so.

I'm starting to notice that the more discussions revolve around the importance of strategy, purpose and other such abstractions, the more likely I am to start daydreaming about what to have for tea or going for a nice walk somewhere.

I love it, nudge the system, see what happens, nudge it again. Its about the best we can do.

Expertise and analysis

2009-10-03T10:48:01+13:00

This in Marketwatch today. U.S. job losses accelerate to 263,000 in September

Nonfarm payrolls fell by a greater-than-expected 263,000 in September, the Labor Department reported. It marked the 21st consecutive month of job losses.

None of that is a surprise to anyone paying attention to what is happening in the world but something that troubles me is beautifully shown in the attached graphic.

The orange marker is what the experts and analysts agreed would be the number. But it was wrong, not just a bit wrong, but badly wrong. Its been happening all over the map; the only thing that experts these days appear to agree on is something that is wrong. How come they are still experts? I'm a bunny, I dropped out of University in my first year but not only did I see all this coming, I took actions to prepare for it and I now work on the assumption that my analysis of the situation is pretty good - supported, led, guided etc by other people for sure, but people I have chosen because they appear to have a realistic understanding of the world, ie, my analysis of their performance is also good. So I have to wonder what the hell these experts are looking at and how they are able to reach their inevitably erroneous conclusions. And when it comes to analysts, what in hell are they, in fact, analysing, and what kind of analytical tools are they using on these data?

And above all, why don't they seem able to learn that what they are doing is SNAFU? seems to me that the only part of their title that is valid is the anal part, they seem to be pulling a lot of their work from there.

The only answer that I can come up with is corruption. There's almost certainly some of the "if you give me the words I want I'll pay you lots of money" kind of corruption, but I think it goes further. I think we have reached the point of "this file cannot be opened because it is corrupted". Somewhere deep in the workings of our system, things are not right, the DNA appears to have been corrupted, mutated into a form that may not be compatible with survival. Convince me I'm wrong

Updated responding to Brane and Robin below

Pretty much agreed with both of you.

It seems to me there has been a marriage (make that a prostitution) between mathematics and magic called economics.

But what really gets me is that we are all dealing with pretty much the same data and drawing such hugely divergent conclusions. Which means that there is something seriously wrong with the psychological algorithms governing their thinking.

You and I look at the entrails of a dead chicken and we see entrails, and maybe dinner, they see things that make their owners happy.

There is a market for economic theories and those that feed the preferences and predilections of those already in power will get the attention, regardless of how wrong they may be.

Or to use the infamous words of Tony Blair and co, they "fit the facts around the policy"

Unfortunately, this works pretty well for a long time (the universe appears to be very tolerant of stupidity and corruption) right up till the moment when it fails completely.

No doubt the Roman divines managed to read endless success for their owners until the barbarians smashed down the gates of Rome. If only those smashing our gates were no more than a more successful tribe. They are not, we have pushed our habitat to its limits and now we are hard up against the laws of physics and genuine mathematics.

BTW, I tried to post this in the comments field and got the response "We're sorry we cannot accept this data. Anyone else experienced that?