Salocin

Undoubtedly made for American civil war historians and fanatics, this movie will fail to satisfy even them. Boring us to death with the long-winded religious convictions of the Generals of the time, we watch for hours as the civil war is painted for us through a patchwork of battle scenes and extra-length monologues, the moral dilemmas and national issues of the time lost somewhere up the movies' own posterior, along with it's head.

This self-involved marathon of a film will have its audience's thumbs aggressively twitching as their subconscious seeks the fast-forward button. The movie suffers from having been transposed from paper, and completely fails to engender the kind of involvement from the audience that would allow at least remote sensations of loss at the deaths of so many people at the hands of their own countrymen.

What was undoubtedly a valiant attempt to illustrate the terrible cost of the events prior to Gettysburg results in a cold and emotionless increase in our knowledge of the facts of the time. The lack of attachment formed with the characters resulted in my telling them apart from the size and colour of their beards, which had fortunately been varied to ease the burden on our memories. Characters introduced at the beginning of the movie are only brought back near the end, resulting in a momentary lapse of understanding as we try desperately to remember who this person is and what side of the war they're on.

While moments in the movie let us know the pain that must have been felt by the individuals of the time (such as the Irish brigades on both sides of the conflict having to fire at each other), the construction of the movie doesn't properly build up our emotions such that we care, and I was left with a dispassionate understanding of the horror of it all, without so much as a lump in my throat.

This one-and-a-half DVDs worth of film is definitely worth avoiding. The best thing about it is that it's educational in an intellectual sense. The worse thing about it is that it is part one in a triology. May God have mercy on us all.

I am shamelessly stealing this bit of news from Slashdot, but it's worth repeating because it's just so unbelievable. Bill Gates himself has acknowledged that the data available to Microsoft indicates that windows-based computers crash more than twice per day on average. Then, in almost the same breath, he suggests Microsoft might start charging for the Windows Updates that allegedly plug holes in the software and make it more reliable! This is from an article in the New York times.

Goldman Sachs is outsourcing a number of back-office and administrative functions to India in a move designed to reduce costs and increase the efficiency of the organization. Much of it's UK IT staff are expected to go - although apparently not all 250 of them. The full article is available from the BBC.

Outsourcing IT work to India is a strong trend among large organizations at the moment, and a number of organisations have found profit in providing "outsourcing services", where they facilitate the oursourcing process and manage it on an ongoing basis for a fee. The largest companies have not gone through such intermediaries, preferring to set up and manage their own offices in India, maintaining control over the staff and the intellectual property and systems that they create and maintain.

Britain's largest professional union, Amicus, has voiced alarm over the plans, warning the decision could spark a "wave of copy cat actions" that would see tens of thousands of jobs lost in the UK.

 

Joint General Secretary Roger Lyons said: "Britain's major companies are teetering on the brink of outsourcing hundreds of thousands of jobs.

 

"Once one major company goes they all will but no one wants to go first."

 

The union added that a survey of industry experts and consultants - including Accenture, Adecco and Deloitte & Touche - suggests that up to 200,000 jobs are likely to be lost across the UK under the trend.

 

It added that analysts predicted an estimated 2m jobs could migrate from Western Europe by 2008.

 

Unions such as Unifi and Amicus are so alarmed at the growing trend that they have already persuaded some companies to sign agreements designed to protect UK jobs.

It's interesting to compare the shedding of thousands of jobs in investment banking to the shedding of hundreds of jobs in back-office services.

As literally thousands of bankers lost their jobs through downsizing over the last two years, they regrouped, looked for new work, made sad noises about the state of the economy, but generally accepted that the structure of the business was incapable of supporting their employment in such numbers, that they had drawn the short straw, and that it was therefore time to move on. While several of these individuals were quite wealthy, some still had significant levels of student debt to pay off (MBA debt can run as high as $100,000). Nevertheless, they listed their options, assessed their own skills, and started applying for jobs.

Perhaps it's the understanding of the underlying economics faced by the firms that makes individuals more accepting of the situation. Whatever the reason, their frictionless departure allows sectors like investment banking to scale down dramatically when their business dries up, and this variablization of their labour cost allows the companies to survive. Come the recovery, these organisations see a resurgence in their business, and are able to scale up again dramatically, hiring thousands to fill the seats vacated only a couple of years ago.

Another branch of economics, popularised by Michael Porter in his book, "The Competitive Advantage of Nations", introduced the concepts of competitive and competitive advantage, which are the forces at work behind the outsourcing of IT functions to India. With it's large population of highly trained IT specialists, and the lower salary rates present in the market, India has a competitive advantage over the UK (and most of the rest of the world) in general IT functions, including application development and maintenance, software testing, IT systems administration and software design. In a world increasingly without borders, it is not surprising that multinationals seek to relocate functions to maximise returns and efficiency. It is possible to resist these forces through protectionist measures, but only by ignoring the lessons of the past can we do so in the belief that it will somehow work out in the long run.

To resist the forces that drive the allocation of resources, we must resort to distortions in the economic model that governs those allocations. Those distortions take the form of union power, government subsidisation or protection, regional (EU) legislation or political decisions at board level. Regardless of the source of the power that distorts the decision, the effect is to either isolate the organisation from the forces of the outside world, or to deliberately ignore those forces. This cuts the companies off from competitive pressure and removes the constant need to drive costs down and increase efficiency.

This, at first, seems like a good thing, because where companies that are still in the maelstrom of competition are shedding jobs and going through painful restructurings, the employees of the protected company are safe with their guaranteed jobs, pensions, and health insurance. But the transformations undertaken by the competition result in a lower cost base, which in turn allows them to charge lower prices. To compete, the protected company must also lower its prices, but in their case, since the cost base didn't take the cut, profits do. As profits drop below the zero line, the companies turn to the original source of protection to ask for more of it, in order to allow them to stay afloat. This generally takes the form of subsidies or protection of the home market through a tariff on imports. We've seen this in coal mining, agriculture, textiles, steel and shipbuilding to name but a few. The very existence of the protection removes the imperative to become externally competitive, thus making the domestic industry dependent on the protection for its own survival.

So to return to the original point - the unions are fighting a losing battle. At best they will postpone the inevitable, but unless they can find a way to provide the same level of service at the same cost or lower, they cannot compete with the Indian IT labour force. Any attempt to do this through distortions such as forcing companies into long-term contracts will merely make the transition more violent and painful at a later date, or will damage the competitive standing of the companies they are a part of.

What to do, then? Employees should seek retraining within their firms so as to be able to transfer to parts of the employee pool where the competitive advantage has yet to drive the jobs abroad. There will always be a need for local IT specialists, and companies are unlikely to outsource parts of their business that are critical to success, such as the development and ownership of IT systems developed in-house. In the long run, they have to accept that companies are now global, and that the performance of certain parts of the IT function in the West, such as administration and software maintenance and testing, are no longer sufficiently value-added to justify the kinds of salaries one has to pay to employees in cities in Western Europe. As salaries rise, the skill-level required to justify them also rises, and jobs which can be performed elsewhere at lower cost, but just as effectively as they can domestically will go. The sociological implications may be disturbing, but isolation or protection from the underlying economics will not solve the problem.

The heat brought people to Rittenhouse Square, and Philadelphia Weekly - the local newspaper - arranged for there to be a concert, but then storm warnings caused a rescheduling, and a local instrument-wielding person got on stage and sang for the crowd. He was soon joined by others also wielding instruments, but together they made sounds less pleasant to hear than might have been the case individually.

The guitarist in the middle was the first to the scene, and he sang - not particularly well, but sufficiently well to draw a few people to him - a few songs from his repertoire. A bit later, he was joined by the drummer on the far right, who can hold a beat, but not the same beat as the guitarist. The trumpet player on the far left was the next addition, and he would ad-lib in the gaps between verses, when the guitarist would stop singing. A second trumpeter joined him, and did something similar, but very different, and at the same time. Finally, the man you see crouching down by the guitarist is holding a flute case in his hand, and he started playing something that was entirely his own construction, and had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the noise.

It all sounded ok from a distance, because I could only ever make out one instrument at a time, but when I approached them as I left the square, the true nature of the cacophony assaulted me, and I fled for the safety of my CD collection. There's a lot to be said for a recording studio and 500 takes of each song.

And yes, I know it's blurred, but I was far away, on maximum zoom, and they wouldn't stay still. I took 5 pictures and this is the least blurred of the lot.

Against my better judgement, and the judgement of pretty much everyone I know, and despite the absolutely horrible experience I had with Mission to Mars, I decided to rent this and see just how bad it was. It turns out that my chronically low expectations actually prepared me for the movie, and I managed to enjoy it a little.

Red Planet is set in the not-too-distant future, when the wise leaders of a seemingly peaceful planet earth have finally come to terms with the fact that they've well and truly messed up the ecosystem. Never mind water shortages, there's oxygen shortages. The overpopulation problem has developed just like we predicted and the planet has reached breaking point. So scientists set about terraforming Mars (by exploding nuclear weapons at the poles and smothering the planet in alien algae - good start).

Suddenly, the oxygen levels on Mars start to drop, and a team is sent to find out what happened. The initial voiceover narration is cheap scriptwriting at its best as the writer (Chuck Pfarrer, who also wrote Hard Target, Barb Wire (a shameless and abysmal Casablanca rip-off) and The Jackal) tries to get around the introductions and backstory as quickly as possible so as to get to the special effects and the action. The crew are introduced by their Commander, Kate Bowman, played by Carrie-Anne Moss and indelicately slotted into character boxes that all but spell out who is going to die, who the love interest will be, and who will metamorphose into a jerk with an attitude problem by half time.

Fast forward to the arrival on Mars, cue the predictable disaster that awaits them the second they reach orbit. Knock out pretty much anything remotely technologically useful including their communications, habitat, guidance system, air supply, space ship, and landing craft, and turn their friendly pet robot into a murderous commando quadruple-jointed pooch from hell. Throw in some machismo and a whiff of cabin fever, and you're all set to film the remainder of the movie in some remote corner of Australia (and a bit in Jordan), with a red filter attached to the lens, thus radically cutting down on your production costs, which makes you wonder what they blew the rest of the $75MM budget on.

The film makes some un-followed-up-on connections between faith and science, plays God with the laws of physics, and the continuity people were clearly sleeping on the job, but all that nit-picking aside, the movie is quite watchable. The pace is maintained reasonably consistently and there are sufficient known threats and believable deadlines that we are at all times expecting the next bad thing to come along. Meanwhile, the movie avoids the catastrophic pitfalls that Mission to Mars catastrophically encountered, such as the reliance upon a single unbelievable plot point to the extent that the entire film is just packaging, or the creation of characters so shallow they seem to be mere cardboard cut-outs - not that there's much depth to the characters here, but when you compare them to Mission..., you have to give credit where its due.

Should you watch this? Probably not - I'm a fan of Space Operas, and keep hoping that someone will come up with a film that comes close to doing justice to the literary works of Iain M. Banks or Alastair Reynolds, and as such I continually throw myself at these movies despite their reviews in the mistaken belief that perhaps others simply don't have the same tastes as I have. In fact, they're mediocre at best (Red Planet), and marketing-driven excrement on average (Mission to Mars).

Everyone's talking about it these days, "blogging" has become the new pet subject. It's probably the most self-absorbed art there is, since so much of the thoughts posted by bloggers seem to be about blogging itself, like a snake eating it's own tail.

I was interested in an article from the blogosphere mentioning the critical mass of blog entries it takes before a newsitem takes on a life of its own in blogspace (or whatever they're calling it today)

I'm also tickled by Downhill, a system that works out degrees of separation between weblogs using the blogging ecosystem. Now if blogosphere.us could stop pinging my front page 12 times a day and expiring all my adverts, that would be a step forward.

The Blogosphere.us article that I'm referring to asks how many sites have to link to something before is causes a cascade effect that runs through the blogging ecosystem.

Now of course as a web author, you're always hoping something like this happens to you (unless you get slashdotted, at which point you probably get angry phone calls from your web provider). But the only way to do be the genesis of a story which ripples through the weblog community is to be a true web author, rather than someone who accumulates news from elsewhere and comments on it.

While your comments may be insightful and interesting, people are going to find the news itself more interesting than the fact that you commented on it, and the links all go to news.bbc.co.uk (in my case), or some other news or newspaper site. This is a good thing, insofar as it encourages people to write content that actually might be interesting to others to read, rather than just those articles that the author thought were interesting today.

Scripting news is a good example of a blog that draws interest for it's content. While most of it is just links to things the author found interesting, every so often he sounds off (usually on the issue of standards) and gets so many people's backs up that they feel compelled to retaliate in kind, providing his site with the very links that make it so popular. I suppose the old adage is true that all publicity is good publicity, with the proviso that you have to have reached a certain threshold of notoriety before it works.

My second link is to the Degrees of Separation Engine, unfortunately named "Downhill". I was surprised that despite the dearth of incoming links to this site, it's possible to find links to salocin.com from pretty much any site in the database. To find me you just have to click on 6 links, 3 of which are stuck in the middle of a blogroll that could stretch from here to the moon if it weren't in 5pt type.

It's a neat (if not novel) use of the blogging ecosystem and a fun way to discover that you're not completely anonymous after all.

I couldn't handle reading only Inifite Jest, the book's too indigestible, long and convoluted, and everything's new (it's set in the near future), so you're constantly dealing with new vocabulary that he doesn't explain other than through either convoluted, in-character footnotes or contextual references and inferences, so reading it is really quite hard work. I'm taking a temporary break and reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, which is a better reason than any dietary plan to never touch processed food again.

You know how the BBC has "talking points" which allow the users of the website to add their point of view to an issue? You know how you read them and end up just desperate to answer them in your most sarcastic tone of voice? You know how I haven't the willpower to resist? This is in response to Should web music swapping be banned?

I have thousands of CDs that I have bought from record shops. I continue to buy 2 or 3 albums a week on CD. I am a music addict. But I also download songs. I do this because I like to hear a track or two from the albums before I buy them, to see whether I like them or not. If I had no opportunity to listen to them in this way first I wouldn't buy them. How am I hurting the music industry?
Nick, UK

Egocentricism at its best - it's not all about you, you upstanding paragon of commerical honesty, unless everyone else happens to feel exactly the same way. If all you do is listen to a couple of songs and then delete them or buy the CD, then good for you - most people don't do this, and you don't need peer-to-peer networks in order to do it, as many songs (especially the more popular ones) are played over and over on the radio, and you can get 30-90 second previews of most tracks without resorting to downloading a pirated copy from someone else. You can also walk into Tower Records (since you're there once a week at least anyway) and ask to listen to any CD they have in the store, they're usually very willing to do that.

I've just been to dotmusic.com to check out legal downloading of music. What a nightmare! It's unbelievably complicated, and the restrictions on what you can do with the music you download are draconian. Make it simple and easy to use, or no-one will use it. I can't believe they expect you to pay for a track, and then keep on paying over and over again for a licence to play what you've already bought! Now that ought to be illegal!
Brian, UK

It about what kind of license you want to buy. You want the music for much less, then you only get limited use of it. Since we've already shown the music companies that if they don't use DRM to protect the work, it gets shared with all and sundry, they're taking precautions. If you want full access to the song, and the ability to make 3rd generation copies of it, then you just pay the normal price for it. People are using filesharing as a lever to force prices down, based on their own (undoubtedly expert) view of the industry's finances. How much an industry makes isn't grounds for forcing them to reduce their price, because how much money they make should be based on how much people are willing to pay for something. That economic model breaks down when people get the option of obtaining it for free. If you want something, and it's worth $20, and someone is offering a perfectly good version of it for free, who's going to pay $20, even if that's what it's worth?

Assuming that we the people were allowed to force a company to reduce it's price because it was making outrageous profits on it's goods, then we'd be buying Coca Cola for $0.07 per can, McDonalds french fries for $0.03 per carton, and the latest Harry Potter book for less than a dollar. There would also be no wealthy success stories such as J.R.Simplot (inventor of the frozen french fry), J.K.Rowling (Harry Potter author) or Scott Adams (author of the Dilbert cartoons).

Most of the music on CDs is twaddle. I've spent hundreds on computer games, music and films in the last few years. Not any more. I realised how much I was being ripped off, and now I'm getting my money back. If you go by what the record companies say, soon you'll be sued for whistling a song without the proper licenses....
James M, Glasgow, Scotland

Oh good - is that a new rule, every time I get into a contract which, with hindsight, I'd rather not have signed, can I just get services for free from the company I signed it with (or anyone else in their industry) until such a point as I feel I've been fairly compensated? I don't like much of the music on my CDs, because I buy them for a few better tracks. I realise that artists can't consistently churn out songs that I will personally find brilliant, in the same way as I don't find every article in a magazine as well written as the last. You don't see me filching the next copy of the magazine off the newsstand to satisfy my desire to be compensated though, do you?

Suing your customers is only going to make them bitter against the companies and discourage them from buying their music - they will be digging their own graves!!
Triston Smith, UK

They're not buying the music. They're downloading it, and then making it available to millions of others to also download for free. Losing them as customers isn't going to cost nearly as much as having them continue as free distributors of pirated work.

Everyone against music swapping states how it's unfair on the artist. If all of the £12+ for an album goes to the artist then people might think differently. Fact of the matter is that the record industry that publishes the music wants more profit, and probably only pays the artist £2 of the final cut. Why should us consumers have to pay the fat cats when we can download for a fraction or none of the production costs?
Mike, UK

Ok, so by your estimation, ten pounds is sufficient to cover not only the printing costs of a CD, the jewel case, and the glossy brochure on semi-plastic paper inside, but also to cover for the recording studio time, the designers who put together the brand's image, the distribution costs of running music stores across all the continents of the world, the shipping costs, the agents who get the interviews in the magazines and the most expensive cost of all - marketing, without which the band would most likely remain an unheard bar tour in their local county. If the artists didn't want to compete in the big game, they wouldn't need the kind of money it takes, and would be content recording their music themselves as independents, and distributing it themselves. The fact is that they don't have the money, and no bank in its right mind is going to lend it to them because it's a very very risky proposition. Enter the recording studios that are actually willing to take that risk, and give you lots of support to help you succeed. Financially, you get rewarded on your investment based on the risk you take in that investment in the first place. If the risks were small, the margins would be too, but since the risks are big, the margins are huge - not because they're greedy, but because they somehow have to make up for all the times they pay for the development of a new artist and never get their money back.

Take that a step further, and you realize that ten pounds on a CD doesn't even come close to covering the launch costs for a new artist that doesn't sell a bucketload of albums, and that the established artists that sell millions end up subsidising the new artists that are trying the break through, and the music studios are the clearing house where all this is made possible. Sure they take their cut on the way through, but they don't make as much money as you think they do. They also manage and maintain a huge system that channels billions of royalty payments from radio stations, DJs, nightclubs, television shows, films and other media back to the artists who made the music in the first place - that royalty clearing system costs millions to run and maintain, and without it artists would never get their due, because there'd be no way of tracing who owes them money.

Does the RIAA have jurisdiction across the planet? Can they sue someone in Canada or Nigeria for sharing music? This now becomes an international legal matter. How will they enforce it all?
Zelko, Canada

This is so stupid I can barely muster the strength to phrase the reply. An international crime doesn't become Ok just because it crosses borders. The RIAA has no limit to it's jurisdiction, just because you break the law from canada doesn't mean they can't pursue you through the laws of your own country, I believe the concept of copyright exists there also?

The general tone of this discussion reflects an almost total lack of morality on the part of those who think taking that which does not belong to them is anything other than stealing. Justification for stealing based on the alleged evils of the true owner of that which is being stolen is nonsense.
Bill, USA

This pretty much sums it up, especially the second part. You can't justify stealing from someone based on a perception that "they deserve it because they rip us off". You don't like the price, don't buy the music - it's that simple. You don't have a God-given right to own anything you like, in the same way as if you create something and sell it at a price, I don't have the right to take it and pay you less than you're asking - even if what you created was digital rather than physical. The comments above show some pretty twisted moral compasses, and a complete disregard for the rules that have governed commercial transactions since the 1800s.

I've always been a little confused by people's reactions to strikes, and the justification for walking out on one's job. I can understand it in the case of significantly bad working conditions or systematic mistreatment of employees, but nowadays - especially on the continent - workers will walk out for the slightest thing. The recent strike by British Airways employees has me more confused than ever.

The BBC states that

Passengers have criticised BA's response to the industrial action, saying no staff are on hand to help those stranded - causing "human gridlock".

There seems to be a logical flaw in that. What should BA's response to the industrial action have been? They obviously can't assign staff to the desks since the staff just walked away.

The workers were protesting against a new swipe card entry system, called Automated Time Recording, which allows managers to monitor their working hours.

 

It is understood staff are worried that the system, due to be introduced on Tuesday, could lead to staff being sent home during quiet periods.

This is another source of confusion for me. This is a timecard system. Similar systems have been in place in many industries for years. It helps the company track the cost of labour and catch people that systematically arrive late or leave early. The fact that the union should be resisting it so vehemently seems suspicious to me, and I wonder whether their stated reason is the real purpose behind the strike.

Perhaps the union hasn't made any noise in so long they felt they were becoming redundant and decided to find some issue to make themselves relevant again? Or perhaps some employees complained that the company is "looking over their shoulders" and not trusting them. Maybe that's the case, but going on strike is a questionable way of restoring a company's faith in the dedication of its workforce.

And what about the travellers trust in the company's employees? I now know that my travel plans, my holidays, my business travel needs and an entire day of my time are respected so little by the employees of British Airways that they're willing to sacrifice the lot so as to not have to punch in. If it is politically convenient for BA's staff to damage my welfare in order to improve their lot in life, they're happy to do it. What if many people chose not to fly BA anymore as a consequence - would the workforce and the union be willing to take the hit in their paycheque if the company's earning power were damaged by their actions? Seems to me they're willing to play such games so long as they're playing with other people's money and other people's welfare.

A union source said staff had returned as "a gesture of goodwill to passengers".

I suppose the passengers should be grateful to the union for not ruining their holiday plans now? And what of the passengers who had to sleep the night in an airport? Are they grateful? Will they blame the company and not fly BA again? What damage has the union really done? Given that BA is generally much better than its American counterparts, it'll probably be all right, but I've certainly lost some respect for it's ground staff.

I love my country, and so when this article was pointed out to me by a friend, I would have dearly loved to disagree with it. Unfortunately, (apart from the drink driving thing, which is violently enforced in my part of Brussels), the article is more or less spot on. Stupid laws executed and enforced by self-important petty bureaucrats who know they can't be fired and have nothing better to do than make other people's lives difficult. Belgium's a great place, with lots of things going for it, but its bureaucracy is a bit screwed up.

While we're at it, let me put a few of my own examples up.

• Car radio tax - mentioned in the article, this is true, I got the bill the day my car was registered.
  
• Special tax on Diesel cars - since diesel costs less than other forms of gas, they hit the owners of these cars with a special tax "to even the playing field"
  
• Trash bags - the payment for trash collection services is collected by making you buy special trash bags with the local council's seal on the side, and only these will be collected. This has resulted in a new Belgian crime: people now steal trash bags from supermarkets.
  
• Courts system screwed - the laws provide lots of support and protection for the victims of crime, provided they're willing to wait up to eight years to have their case heard.
  

On the flip side, we've got a fantastic health system, nice people (for the most part), a great capital city, a beautiful country, historic cities and towns and entrepreneurial talent so strong even the punitive Belgian tax system hasn't managed to crush it, although it continues to try.