Politics

Continue reading "Why I think the Quality Vacation Club is a Dubious Organisation"

Posted by Dominic White

Posted by Dominic White

I was interested to see if my political leanings (as described by the Political Compass test) had shifted since having left University, gotten a job, started paying taxes, converted to Catholicism and having grown older.

It is interesting to note that my results are very similar to what they were in 2004, and less libertarian and economically right wing than they were in 2006. Me and Nelson Mandela are still home boys though.

Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.13

Continue reading "Political Compass 2008"

Posted by Dominic White

Posted by Dominic White

Satire: Blending criticism and humor to expose a fault or problem; often used ironically.

David Bullard, a noted South African columnist specialising in satire, had a dig at bloggers. There has been a major sense of humour failure [1], and there is a full on multi-blog, distributed flame war going on against the guy. I guess this is why satirists aim for the holy cows: the response is so much fun.

[1] Personally, I rarely find Bullard's satire funny.

Posted by Dominic White

Definately worth a read for those of you that think Ubuntu is a linux distribution.

Posted by Dominic White

Continue reading "Why Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and TRIPS+ are harmful to libraries"

Posted by Dominic White

The competition to the bloated bureaucracy, Telkom, was launched on the 1^st of September. Ladies and gentlemen, Neotel.

They currently aren't offering consumer services but plan to by April 2007. They have a fairly comprehensive FAQ available. Currently they are only offering wholesale broadband which should result in lower broadband prices from ISPs soonish. They have also done a good job of selling international carrier throuput to the cellular providers and claim we will soon have international CLI as a fringe benefit.

While it is a pity our government has chosen not to pursue a policy of full deregulation of this market (gosh, did I just say that), I welcome any competition to our evil monopoly Telkom.

Posted by Dominic White

The iSummit starts today in Rio. Daniela has been hard at work for the past couple of weeks organising it. I had a listen to the summit CD, there are some great tracks, I was particularly proud of South Africa's contribution. The DVD is more, um... bizarre, the documentary on Chinese body-builders is a hoot.

The iSummit page hasn't gone live as yet, but I have some inside info, you can check out two SAffies (Vhata's word for South Africans) profiles (daniela, colin), both ex-Rhodes students. Despite his picture, Colin is actually a nice guy.

Posted by Dominic White

Recently the ANC Youth League claimed that the fact that Jacob Zuma was found not guilty proves that the rape allegation was a set up whose purpose was to discredit Zuma and his political aspirations.

This has a very dangerous presupposition that I have seen trotted out in far too many articles and quotations on the matter.

Continue reading "Jacob Zuma and the ANCYL Conspiracy"

Posted by Dominic White

Daniela has recently started her work for Creative Commons South Africa. It seems they are in charge of the iCommons, an organisation trying to extend the reach of the Creative Commons into other free culture areas. Lessig explains it better. Daniela has been hard at work and already regularly writing for the iCommons blog. Check it out.

Continue reading "iCommons"

Posted by Dominic White

Posted by Dominic White

Posted by Dominic White

I had the pleasure of watching Paul Bremmer being interviewed on CNN earlier this morning. For those of you that don't remember, Paul was put in charge of the temporary government after America trashed Iraq. Paul made three interesting statements; he insisted that there were WMDs in Iraq and that there were clear links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam and that the insurgents wanted to re-install an oppresive dictatorship.

You see, all insurgents basically want to install oppresive facist regiemes. Like those terrorists n South Africa who wanted to install that facist communist government. Beware die swart gevaar!

But, his first point was the most fun, he gave two powerful reasons as to why there are WMDs. First, nobody has proven they weren't taken to Syria. Ha! This is aking to saying "I will only believe you if you eliminate every other possibility, including that the nukes were hidden in cheese blocks and exported to the moon!" The next reason gave me a better insight into how Paul lives with himself. He said "Who would know better than someone who lead 15 000 americans in a search for them!" The implicit premise here is that if you look for something it must be there, the alternative would be that Paul would have to realise he had wasted his time and been complicit in a corrupt invasion resulting in many deaths and the destruction of a country.

Nobody wants to be Skeletor. In truth few are commited to evil, rather their sense of righteousness blinds them to their deeds.

Posted by Dominic White

I almost completely agree with something posted on commentry.co.za, I don't check there often, and I generally expect to disagree with their opinion, but not this one:

If we really want to "fix" the Telkom problem, we need radical free market reforms. Here's what needs to happen:

1. Government should sell all its remaining shares in Telkom. That way, they won't have a financial incentive to protect Telkom and ensure that their profits remain as high as possible.
2. Deregulate the market. Abolish the ICASA licensing process. Anyone who has the capital and is willing to take on the risk should be allowed to start their own communications company, regardless of whether they want to sell cellular, landline, or internet connections.
3. Exercise the AT&T option: break up Telkom into about five different companies. The most obvious approach would be to divide them into a long-distance operator, three local operators (centered on Durban, Gauteng and the Western Cape) and a company that controls the SAT-3 submarine cable.

I don't think 'radical free market reforms' are an answer to every underperforming parastatal (and I don't think Laurence does either), I think parastatals can perform a vital role. I would advocate a particularist approach.

Posted by Dominic White