Travels

Melbourne, London.

I know that I have been a little quiet on my blog of late. It consumed me for 18 months or so while Jacinda Ardern did her darndest to kill every New Zealander whether consciously or not (and I think consciously). Her recent resignation was likely forced on her and her replacement Chris Hipkins, despite the propaganda which indicates that he's dumped her policies, is no real change. This is just pure exaggeration as most of them are only off the agenda until the election later this year. Ardern's recent elevation to online hate at Harvard is suited to such a hateful woman (she hates us all) in some respects and totally beyond her capabilities if you were to treat it as a genuine appointment.

Jacinda gets Harvard gig

The reality is that she's been working for this crowd a little longer than a few days.

Jacinda already had the Harvard gig

It’s always good to get away from New Zealand these days. Recently myself and my wife (who is now back in NZ) spent a week together in her hometown Melbourne, partly for business and partly for pleasure. We also met up with our daughter who was returning from 3 weeks away most of it spent in Scotland and England with a school friend of hers whose mum and stepfather currently live in Cambridge, England (they’re academics). But anyway Australia. The outward signs of the so called Pandemic have all but disappeared. There is some attempt to cajole those who are willing to be cajoled into flu or covid vaccines but it's half hearted really (but enough to convince one person that I know of). The CBD of Melbourne is still a basket case, the office workers still not back as the managers have yet to work out that nobody who likes working from home is actually doing much work. Nevertheless the main focus has moved elsewhere. Liberal (small L) Australia is currently being conned by "the Voice" which as co-governance is in New Zealand seems an attempt to remove water and land from community or private ownership and give it to corporates. It is though being dressed up as something to address equity for Aboriginal people. The woke and corrupt of the Aboriginal tribe (actally many, many tribes but I digress) are of course putting their hands out. But I suspect most of them are utterly unimpressed. It is being pushed by the current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (who I think has a 1st generation Italian Australian father and an Irish mother, but don't quote me on that). Anthony is a very unimpressive Prime Minister and in no way, as Joe Biden, does he make decisions.

There is another Antipodes issue, topical right now, which is that Australia has opened up citizenship to NZrs again and in effect is encouraging them across the Tasman due to higher wages mostly. Other than that this benefits Australia to plug their labour shortages one should ask the question why are NZrs being encouraged to leave their clusterfuck of a country, so often derided of late by the same talk show hosts who gave Jacinda promotion that no other NZ PM has ever received.

One further tidbit of interest may be that the Mabo decision from the 1990s, eliminating the terra nullius claim of earlier Australian governments may put the claim of any government in Australia as that of an illegitimate one. But other than that I think Australia is a little better served in its commentariat than those who do the same in New Zealand. At least in Australian media you still get real discussions about real issues even if its political representatives, like New Zealand's, is completely, or damned close to it, corrupt. Effectively when you leave the South Pacific environs it is clear that New Zealand's main commentariat are very, very pathetic even in comparison to Australia's. And that includes Sean damned Plunkett. Even more pathetically most of this commentariat would be secure in their view that they are superior to their trans tasman cousins.

Anyway Tuesday afternoon I left these issues behind me and hopped on Cathay Pacific to London via Hong Kong. I was only in Hong Kong for 90 minutes so I don't have a lot to say about that other than that the transfer to another international flight involves scanning your passport and having your cabin bags put through another check. My suspicion was that this was purely a data gathering activity, your face being registered to what is effectively Chinese databases. Hong Kong airport is new and food and coffee quite cheap for an airport. Both flights were mostly uneventful, the first one bouncing a little as it crossed the equator the second one diverting up towards Russia in Western China to avoid in all likelihood a storm (we bounced for about 30 minutes). The second leg then detoured south of Odessa and avoiding Ukraine. In the previous flight one can also forget how big Australia is sometimes and several hours after leaving Melbourne the land below us was still evidently Australia. The views were excellent although the hostesses had to be ignored demanding that the window cover be pulled down. At one stage I figured I could see the right hand side of Papua New Guinea as it trailed off into the Pacific from our vantage point of maybe a few hundred kms east of Katherine. And I also must admit to the flat earthers that it does look pretty flat down there from 36,000 feet. Maybe the Earth is a little more complicated than round or flat I wonder. Those quantum physicists may have a point or maybe it's my mind playing tricks with me, as it does interpret the data our eyes receive, it's not a straight representation. Maybe I need to take a telescope next time but it’s still my eyes right? They might just see what they want to see.

Also of interest maybe is that only 20 passengers were masked on the earlier flight and most of them were Asian on a flight that was only about 30% Asian. Of the staff all the women hostesses were masked and the sole male host was not masked. They were all Asian. Anyway we were supposed to arrive early to London courtesy of a tail wind. But those diversions had their effect and I think we landed a little late instead. Of note too is that the Cathay Pacific pilots were both Australians. Also by the by the food was awful.

Heathrow is throwing a wobbly with Europe right now so the preferential queue was for the British along with Canada, the US, NZ & Australia and a few others with the Europeans being shafted into the 'others' queue. Going through Customs was effortless, an automated gate, yet another photograph that I tried to fudge but that just meant the camera kept going up and down just as I did and then shortly after that the airport staff showed absolutely no interest in checking bags despite my attempts to avoid the photograph. Heathrow staffing is almost completely South Asian, in the vicinity of 95%. Anyway after a brief stop at Earl’s Court as I was told erroneously that there was storage there I parked my case at Paddington Station, not that cheaply, and proceeded via a few wrong turns and a 20 minute walk to London Olympia where the Retail Technolgy show was on.

Initially I met up with the company providing our Point of Sale. They were a little wondrous that I'd turned up in London. But although I made a point of getting here for this show, it's not the main reason that I'm here I told them. I might also wonder what that main reason is as the unconscious is quite a tricky character. Ostensibly it's for business. Ostensibly. Anyway like any good trade show there's various presentations on during the day. The two of interest here would be the one on sustainability, carbon zero, ESGs etc. And the other would be the one on retail technology especially the part on Artificial Intelligence. But first allow me a digression. One of the stands I stopped at was boasting environmental and green focuses. I thought it might be supply chain, or maybe packaging but no. The guy gave me quite a spiel the first part of it sounding like parody so I chuckled which probably made him think that I was rude. But no he was quite serious, apparently they had packaged sunlight that meant that you didn't need to use sanitizer on the screens and he said that stopped the screens from being damaged which got my response of 'do you know what else would stop the screens from being damaged would be if everybody stopped believing in viruses' and walked away with a harumph aimed at my back. Honestly this is,to my eyes, no better than snake medicine. In fact considering the South African accent maybe the guy was in that industry. Anyway let's get back to the presentations.

The first as I said was in interview format with someone who specialized in locking the retail industry into suicidal wars with their customers. I sat gobsmacked almost all the way through. Most of the talk was on compliance and enforcement both roundly approved of by the person asking the questions and the guy answering them. I would suspect both had only a very passing understanding of what they were talking about (except the enforcement parts) and gobbed on and on about measures that, even if you believed that CO2 is the agent of climate change, would seriously have such little impact that it is tokenism at best.

2014 film One by One starring Rik Mayall. Please note that the recent COVID vaccination campaign may have been a military one.

Legislation was mentioned, ESGs were mentioned once in passing but hardly ever were any substantive suggestions made. Enforcement was the main focus. Threats the other. The audience although not lapping it up were not exactly bolshie either. I got to ask the second question which was along the lines of "as the United Kingdom imports most of its food and most of the CO2 emissions are in the transport of food how were they planning to deal with this, by starving?". The guy in his response to my view outright lied and tried to make out that the same United Kingdom produced more like 80% of its food and the remainder came from the European Union who were so dandy with their ESGs too. Also no plastic packaging, woo hoo. So no Egyptian strawberries, no Turkish fruits, no Moroccan blueberries, no Chilean apples, no Equadorian bananas. They're all produced in Germany along with the pineapples they grow along the Rhein. I didn't get any bravos for my dissent and as they'd spent the previous 25 minutes suggesting ways that retailers could be made to be enforcers of WEF theory, how they should just take the slug on lower sales and encourage customers not to buy too much (seriously the guy answering was from the British Retail organization, god help us). Also the fines for not doing as demanded are very high, 10% of global turnover. My notes mention "fucking arseholes". One could also mention their incredible lack of knowledge of retail and their allied stupidity which to my eyes was off the rails. Need I mention that they went very briefly over EVs as delivery vehicles? And they mentioned greenwashing too, not a sign of any irony. The term so beloved of the 2020s “go woke, go broke” is about to get a very a large work out. Bye bye corporate retail.

The other main presentation, a panel discussion on technology with only one guy knowing anything about the topic meant that he took about 70% of the discussion (five on stage including presenter). He worked for deliveroo so had some self interest in the budding attempt at dystopia. He had one interesting point and that was that a lot of ‘photographs’ online are no longer taken with a camera but are coded up with no photograph involved. Otherwise I found him far too enthusiastic about dystopia. Artificial intelligence was mentioned, robots were also mentioned but mostly in favourable terms. What none of them knew, even Catherine the only woman there and the only one to dissent on any of the pro-tech views put forward, is that humans automate most of our decisions as well which means that we're well over 95% robot and that robot part is something that AI can and will target meaning that free will, in the age of AI, will go the way of dinosaurs. AI is very, very dangerous. None of them got close to acknowledging that. In fact they universally thought that AI was exciting although the only use that any of them made of it was for writing out legal documents for employees (in other words I’m using it more than they are). They also mostly thought that all human contact would and should be removed from retail, that drones will deliver everything that we need and that this was wonderful. It took an audience member to point out that maybe people preferred social contact with other people rather than screens or robots. Or worse AI bullying them despite a lack of self awareness or will. But then maybe that would just make it worse if AI gained that....

I was somewhat astonished at these two presentations. I was not expecting such ignorance, blindness and ultimately idiocy. I guess they were just there to collect their salaries.