my blog

I bookmarked this article a while ago, intending to do a post on it…

A few choice quotes:

the problem with democracy is the same problem we have with competition in markets: for it to work well requires more effort and attention on the part of voters (or customers) than they’re prepared to devote to it

With [market] competition, we expect to sit back while they compete with each other to attract our business, and this process produces the highest quality service at the keenest prices.

But it never works that way. … Customers have to put a fair bit of effort into making it work. If they don’t, the banks will still compete with each other, but they’ll do it in ways that yield the customer little benefit – advertising and phony product differentiation.

And I now see that competition in politics works much the same way. Unless enough of us pay close attention to what the pollies are doing and saying, they’ll find ways to compete that are easier for them and less beneficial for us.

In Sweden, laws provide 13 months of paid parental leave – but one parent can’t take more than 11 months of it. So to get all of the parental leave, dads must take at least 2 months (paid) leave. Looks likely that will change to 4 months soon.

NYT article

A study published by the Swedish Institute of Labor Market Policy Evaluation in March showed, for instance, that a mother’s future earnings increase on average 7 percent for every month the father takes leave…

Understanding what it is to be home with a child may help explain why divorce and separation rates in Sweden have dropped since 1995 — at a time when divorce rates elsewhere have risen, according to the national statistics office. When couples do divorce or separate, shared custody has increased.

A study into the effects on breastfeeding found …

Infants whose fathers did not take paternity leave during the infant’s first year were significantly less likely to be breastfed at 2, 4, and 6 months.

I’m currently working at a client site in the windows world. I find a *nix environment gives me much greater productivity.

The basics:

• Services For Unix – or Cygwin.
• Console2 – cmd.exe must die. console2 gives me tabs, proper cut/paste, working page-up/down and mouse wheel scrolling.
• Cream – I’ve turned off half the “cream” functionality, and could probably just go with raw gvim.

Other nice bits and pieces:

• Subversion (I’m using the CollabNet package) and TortoiseSVN
• Deja Vu fonts.
• graphviz

The 50m pool was closed today. I lost track of how many laps I swam this morning, but it was about the same distance as Monday. So much easier when you have proper swimmers rather than board shorts with brakes/pockets.

Swam 10(x50m) laps of Granville pool this morning. It wasn’t much, but it’s probably around 20 years since I last tried swimming laps, so I’m pretty pleased that I actually got out and did it.

Just read an article in the SMH, Comatose woman gives birth. It seemed a bit morbid, but had a positive outcome – a healthy child. Until I got to the last paragraph:

The child is now in a home after his father decided he was unable to care for him as he had to travel often for his job.

What! I find that incredibly disturbing.

Yes

Perhaps the most sensible comment on this latest NRL sex scandal’s I’ve seen. Not to deny the horror of these events, but I’m glad that Ms Willis sees signs of some positive changes.

Ethical men must fight for change

Treatment of animals: litmus test for a nation

… During the past few years the longstanding campaign by animal advocates to establish rights and protections for animals has been gaining ground …

Good to see that animal rights is getting some coverage in the mainstream media.