Lev Lafayette's journal

So this is a political entry. Starting on the global level, the announcement of radical changes in import tariffs by the United States of America has exposed the instability in global markets and the amount of fictitious capital but is founded on the bizarre calculation from debt. As one commentator put it: "The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence". Now, the administration has paused the imposition as global markets tumbled (except China, which has stood up and probably has the edge when it comes to economic resilience). The announcement of the pause seems to have been subject to insider-training.

The international effect of the US administration is influential in the current Australian political climate, with LNP leaders openly aligning themselves to the Trump administration. Policy-wise, they've followed the same playbook as their US counterparts: disastrous economic policies, wrecking public health, stripping the public service, "reforming" labour laws, and, as always, in the pocket of the wealthiest elite of the minerals and energy sector. Even their slogan, "Back on Track" means the track of Abbott, Morrison, and, the worst of them all, Dutton. High inflation, reduced real wages, higher taxes, and higher budget deficits. Weakening public health, education, and, as always, welfare. This 'is The Track' they want us to get back on, with the extra pain of Trump's chaos.

The LNP policies are so terrible they have to abandon them in days after announcing them. With an utter lack of economic literacy and an astounding inability to read the room, they are persisting with their plans for nuclear energy. Their campaign is a mess, with candidates being questioned and even stood down for extremist positions. They are led by a potato. Which we know in the Australian vernacular means a person of remarkable incompetence, the personality of a dullard, and is possibly poisonous. After leading in polls for months as a carping opposition, when actually put on the national stage and asked why they are a viable alternative, they have managed how unready they are. They are definitely not worth the risk; hence their sudden collapse in the polls.

Finally, on a personal note, a number of us met at the Union bar in Fitzroy this week for a small celebration of Tristan Ewins' life, who I wrote about recently. Led by Sarah H., the gathering was mainly made up of comrades from his Young Labor days (I was a bit of an outlier in this regard). All had stories to share (they far more than me), along with loving recognition of his personality traits, his conciliatory and balanced assessment from facts, his equally steadfast and passionate commitment to the underprivileged and working people, and the seriousness he took the public policy. The world is a lessened place by his absence, but we have his writing. I am quite prepared to go out on a limb and suggest that Tristan's writings be read and referred to for some time because he was always thinking about practical implementations and the long-run effects of policy, seriously and long-sighted.

I'm am pleased with the positive response and shares of the "Known Soldier" meme which I posted on ANZAC day, illustrating how public figures seem to care a great deal about war in the abstract (the war memorial) but not the concrete (the returned veteran with PTSD). I am not exactly fond of invasive wars and nor do I find States that declare effectively declare war on their own population to be tolerable either. The two trajectories combined, I suppose, makes one an internationalist on matters of principle, the opposite of the disturbing and clueless comments by Minister of Defence, Peter Dutton and his insistence that we should "prepare for war". This, from a government that has failed miserably on the submarines project, and has absolutely failed on diplomacy and aid when it came to the Solomon Islands.

Appropriately on ANZAC day, I hosted what become a very long brunch of some clever people, including the smartest person I know, one Clinton F. a lecturer in Strategic Studies, from University of NSW-ADFA, Deb S., the founder of East Timor Women's Australia, Anthony L., the Secretary-General of the Pacific-China Friendship Society and Robin M., the national President of the Australia China Friendship Society (who curiously do not have a national website). So you can imagine what that was like. Clinton an expert on defense matters, gave good factual information on why Taiwan will, and indeed, could not be invaded by China ("Don't argue with facts is a personal mantra of my life"), which makes the LNP beating the war drum all the more risible, dishonest, and dangerous.

This is not a "khaki election", it's an election about leadership and economic security. For both wage workers and those on welfare real incomes continue to decline, and rents continue to increase. Our economic system punishes the poor for simply being poor and it's getting worse. It's about time that was changed.

Yesterday I finished a rather hefty essay, "The Political Economy of Growth and Technology", that draws heavily on my current studies at the LSE on macroeconomics. There is an interesting econometric and conceptual history in the subject that eventually came to the realisation that the real determinant of long-run economic growth wasn't labour and capital, but rather education and technology. Alas, the neoclassical model which lumps land and capital into the same factor of production doesn't differentiate well between productive and unproductive investments, despite the same model justly railing against economic rents in other contexts. The net result is something that wage and welfare earners know quite well from experience already; despite the real price of many technological goods declining, the cost of monopolised necessities (especially land rents, but also so parts of healthcare etc) are increasing faster than the payments they receive; it's the continuing lesson of Progress and Poverty.

A few days ago I made my second visit to the local dentist who had to extract the second dead tooth, which was fractured well beyond any possibility of life. The third tooth, however, survived and has been patched up. I'm still a little sore, physically, and a lot more sore, psychologically, from the experience. It is now the point that I have to look seriously at implant options, but with three teeth down in total and an estimated $5K per replacement that's no longer the sort of money I have readily available; due to the circumstances at the time I threw pretty much every spare red penny I had to purchase the Southbank apartment, which I still haven't moved into yet (I've only just required sufficient coin of the realm to pay for what will inevitably be significant moving costs). Some have suggested "dental holidays" to places where the technology and technique are sound, but the labour costs somewhat lower; Thailand and the PRC both come to mind. But that will have to wait until 2022.

The weekend was a rather full one; it included a dinner with Anthony L., where we engaged in our usual wide-ranging plotting and geopolitical assessments, and especially in relation to prospective infrastructure changes in PRC. The following night was a regular catch-up dinner with caseopaya and a viewing of the new series of The Blacklist. Last night I visited Liza D., whom I hadn't seen for quite some years; expert in many matters theatrical, recent political lobbyist of some notable success, and we share a bond with Aotearoa. I must also mention that I've had multiple people in the past several days mention, quite independently, how much they enjoy reading my journal which is somewhat perplexing for me, but I promise to keep writing! One remarkable comment came from a relatively recent visitor to Australia who initially found the Melbourne lockdown period quite challenging, but found that my writings offered some insight and empathy to the life, aims, achievements, and struggles of a real human being. I found their remarks quite beautiful; a touch of old-fashioned human social solidarity. Let's hope some of it remains on this Earth.

Another week has somehow managed to go by and when I look back it there has been quite a lot going on. Today I am very pleased to announce that author and anthologist Sarena Ulibarri will be speaking at the Cyberpunk 2020 conference, specifically on the technology panel and with an emphasis on solarpunk; "the future is so bright, you'll have to wear shades". It fitted in well with virtual attendance of at the Cyberpunk Cinema that Travis Johnson had organised as part of the Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, and, I do suppose also matched with watching Black Mirror: Bandersnatch last night. Goodness there was a lot of association with my own teenaged-years in that semi-interactive film, right down to the Thompson Twins and the use of a Sinclair Spectrum (a 16K computer that I could carry in my coat pocket, "A computer in your pocket? Ridiculous!").

I've spent a bit of time in the evenings over the past several days working on a review of LexOccultum which, coming in two large books, still isn't quite finished yet, but will be published in the next edition of RPG Review, which will be out by the end of the week. It's quite an evocative game in a good setting (a fantasy version of 18thC France), but the game system is a little painful at times. Played our regular session of Cyberspace on Thursday night, which was largely a firefight in the Zone which was pretty sharp and bloody, as such things are in a Rolemaster-based combat system with firearms. Our GM has been pretty good with a style of session write-ups, which give the impression of speedy jump-cuts, which fits the genre. Finally, decided to offload a collection of Avalon Hill boardgames and RPGs this afternoon; within a couple of hours, nearly everything was sold.

There is, as always, many issues to report on about politics and in an Australian context the recent disclosure of war crimes being committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan is being described as "possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia's military history". On completely different tangents, I spent part of Wednesday night attending the annual general meeting of the Proportional Representation Society; a fair attendance, but an organisation lacking leadership, direction, and flexibility. Finally, whilst doing some basic econometrics studies, I decided to compare income inequality with the total proportion of tax to GDP in OECD countries. Guess what? The higher the tax rate, the less inequality (many caveats stated, of course).

It looks like I'm about to finish another 13-week MOOC, this time the macroeconomics course from UC Irvine, in one month, having powered my way through two week's worth in the past few days. Because this is what I do for fun, qute honestly. At least a fair bit of the time. And when I'm not learning, I'm teaching which often enough amounts to the same thing ("Lernen durch Lehren", as the Germans like to put it). Or, at least in my context, on-the-job learning becoming on-the-job practice, becoming on-the-job teaching. Which is an around-about way of saying that I have two workshop classes to conduct today and tomorrow; Parallel Programming (CPU-based), and GPGPU Programming (GPU based). It is also a gentle reminder that I should put my book with the snappy title, "Sequential and Parallel Programming in C and Fortran" on Smashwords. There's only so much content I can provide in two four-hour classes.

Much of the past several days have been spent getting content for the book chapter, "Processing Large and Complex Datasets for Maximum Throughput on HPC systems", which I am the lead author representing the University of Melbourne side of the equation, with some content coming through from co-authors at Universität Freiburg. At least some of the content from this chapter can be used in tomorrow's workshop (specifically the technological developments in HPC) and at least some of the content in the book chapter is coming from other presentations, the recent eResearchAustralasia conference in particular. I sometimes look with some terror at the 55MB of pure textfiles I have planned for content in future publications; that's around 100 books worth; I am never going to get that done, even at my rate of writing content (LJ/DW posts don't count, except for my tortured and not terribly interesting autobiography).

One thing I do plan on making happen this year, much later than originally, is a Cyberpunk conference, which must be held in 2020 for aesthetic reasons and must be subtitled "Year of the Stainless Steel Rat", also appropriately. Circumstances being what they are, there is nothing wrong with running it as a fully online conference as well. I have started getting speakers and a programme together for the day, so mark it down: Sunday, December 27, from 10:00 to 18:00 AEDST (a lazy Sunday after the Xmas events), with subsequent RPG events from 19:00 ASDST after that. The tentative programme includes sessions on hacking, technology, politics, culture, and, of course, cyberpunk gaming.

Surprising absolutely nobody, I have spent nearly all of the past several days preparing for my impending economics exams and, as is my want, have created an rather impressive set of study notes which, if I worked on them could be a textbook in their own. To be honest, I am still uncertain of taking the exams this year given that I started a few (up to five, depending on how you count it) months behind, and whilst I have learned a great deal in the subject it is not something that I had undertaken for almost 30 years. Despite this my biggest weakness here is not conceptual but rather mathematical - I simply don't have the experience or practise.

Despite having my nose almost entirely buried in books, (which is not an unusual state for me, it's just a question of depth), I have continued with my almost-daily 'blog of the Australian Federal Election. Major events of the campaign include a "Watergate" scandal of epic proportions, of which the former Deputy Prime Minister sounds like he had "a few drinks" prior to a Radio National interview on the matter, the multi-millionaire mining magnate preferencing the government, and the Labor opposition providing pathways from casual to full-time work.

It hasn't entirely been "all work and no play" however. Last Sunday played a session of RuneQuest Questworld, where our GM has placed us in the old "Griffin Island" region, and we successfully defended a town against some rather overwhelming odds. Last night played DungeonQuest for the first time (and somehow I survived in this rather deadly game), along with a session of Munchkin Cthulhu. In a further attempt not to go stir crazy visited the doctor a couple of days ago due to a stubborn skin infection in my lower leg (probably a minor case of cellulitis). The doctor's first reaction was "Oh no, this could be diabetes!". I felt like responding, "Nah, I'm just old and overweight", which of course is true, and my blood-sugar levels were quite normal. Almost forgot! Earlier this week received a "Ruby Feather" in Duolingo, with 7050 points for the week, which was #1 for the Asia-Pacific-European region, and maybe even the world? I don't need to do that again

The past few days I've had the opportunity to get stuck into my preferred pastime of RPGs; much of this afternoon, which should have been a session of RuneQuest but our GM was under the weather, was spent editing the Cow Orkers supplement for Papers & Paychecks - the word count is over 90% complete but that last few percent is slow-going as I'm taking out one word for every two I put in. Thursday night was our regular Megatraveller game where we not-pirates investigated the ruins of the old Sindal empire - and were set up on a cliff-hanger situation with psychic forces against us. Yesterday was our irregular cheesequest-lunch-gaming with ser_pounce and hathhalla, which provided the opportunity to play my reconstructed version of the old D&D scenario The Lost City, with a summary write-up of the session available. We also took the opportunity to watch two "lost" episodes of Moral Orel, a rather twisted WASP adult animation comedy; curiously did better apparently in Australia than it did in the United States. Maybe something to do with the irreverent Australian culture. The lunch also provided the opportunity to crack open my previously unused Oneida cutlery set which, (in a Morel Orel related tangent) is what remains of a 19th century Christian free-love commune that became a silverware manufacturer.

As part of the luncheon I made a carrot cake. One of our guests isn't great with wheat, so I made up some oat flour and used that instead. One could say it was a "carroat cake". It was pretty tasty, but I was surprised when I was told by hathhalla (who admitted being very fond of carrot cakes in general) that it was best thing they had ever tasted. For something that takes about ten minutes of preparation time that's quite a call. Anyway, this provides a nice segue to the wonder that was International Carrot Day! which is to be taken with good humour. I couldn't help but notice that their translation links for Spanish and French weren't operative, so I fired off an email to the owner of the site and shortly afterwards provided translations for the aforementioned along with Esperanto and German. So that's my double-carrot contribution to the international day.

Apart from this the usual requirements of work and study take up my time. I've had a few positive developments with the International HPC Certification forum, but will leave that until things are more set in stone. Tomorrow and the day after I have training courses to run - this time they were booked out in 42 minutes, which gives an indication of demand. I've been doing a lot of study on economics, specifically Public Economics and Macroeconomics, and mainly tax and fiscal policy respectively. The fact that the current government is defending thoroughly uneconomic subsidies (negative gearing, capital gains, franking credits etc) serves as a good example of the problems in public policy and class-based partisan capture. I still rather wish that I had the extra few months to complete this course which I feel is owed to me. Insofar that isn't going to happen it is fortunate that are holidays available later this month which I will take advantage of. I am not really optimistic I can make up the ground, but will do the best I can under the circumstances.

The rolling study machine continues on with daily (or at least, travel time to-and-from work, and evenings) intensive studies in economics dominating. I think I might have gone off the deep-end when I started suggesting that due to diminishing and eventually negative returns of utility in all goods that indifference curves would eventually be circular. This is the sort of mad speculation that one engages in late at night, but it just goes to show that economics isn't all dull. Not at all dull in the wrong way when you have an economy that has just slipped into recession, as my local Federal MP and national treasurer Josh Frydenberg, has been called to task for continually misrepresenting Labor's fiscal policies. Little wonder that the LNP is spending $1m to save his sorry arse in what is supposed to be a safe seat.

In other study news I received my mid-semester assignment result back for my MSc in Information Systems with quite acceptable 80% grade. That was cause for some elation, but it has been significantly soured by the University of Otago suspending my access to the elearning tools because of an alleged $25NZD debt - basically they took my fees (over $4K I might add) decided without reason to deduct $25 and now claim I have a debt, but with no feasible means of making a payment. I am nevertheless continuing this MHEd course courtesy of working directly with the course co-ordinator who is a lot more reasonable in comparison. Seriously though, it is like Otago University is making every effort to prevent students from participating. Hopefully, this will all be sorted out soon. On the other end of the teaching experience, next week I'll be organising a two-day course for High Performance Computing for Mechanical Engineering, which is like my standard courses but with an emphasis on various engineering applications and OpenFOAM in particular, horrible software that it has become.

I haven't just been doing work and study, however. Last night attended a meeting of Linux Users of Victoria with Adrien Close talking about ZeroTier, which looks mighty fine for people who don't like to muck around with tunneling and IPSec whilst on the road, and Enno Davids on some recent less than ethical events in the IT world over the past several months (Australian Census, encryption access, Supermicro, TCL phone data redirects). Further, despite the heat, the RPG Review Cooperative managed to hold its annual Fruit Bat picnic at Bell Bird Park which had a few visitors from Ballarat as well. Finally, last week Mac the Cat ended stuck 6m up a tree; I eventually managed to coax him down with food at 10.30pm to a knot at 4m and then drag him home. A couple of night's later he turned up with a young ring-tailed possum in his mouth, so I guess that's how he got stuck in the first place. We try to have a sunset curfew for Mac, because cats are murderers, and sometimes he gets away with it.

With an hour to go before being collected by shuttle to Dunedin airport and then en route to Wellington and Melbourne, it is opportune to review the past few days which have been dominated by the subject title. On the sightseeing side of the journey I took the opportunity to visit the Dunedin Chinese Garden which, despite several prior trips here, I had never been to. It was a pleasant environment and includes a good documentary of said people in the early days Dunedin (gold, market farms and laundries, and terrible discrimination) which match experiences elsewhere. I was very fortunate to have an impromptu musician playing a huqin which was a highlight. Afterwards made my way to the Art Gallery which has a small selection of early modern European and Australian material, some awful abstract expressionism, and a exhibitions on contemporary Chinese art which didn't interest me, but the Artificial Wonderland by Yang Yongliang (cyberpunk-industrial landscape in digital media with traditional style) left a strong impression.

On the study and university side of the equation, attended my first tutorial in-person for Critical Reflections on Higher Education, followed by a lunch with Jim C., and David E., at the rather nice Otago staff club. We chatted about the restructuring that the University IT services are experiencing and how this does leave open the opportunity for a good eResearch program. Jim C., also received a hand-delivered copy of Papers & Paychecks. A couple of evening's prior I dropped in to visit the local university RPG club, OURS and deliver a copy to those said folk as well and played a couple of rounds of Red Dragon Inn. Another related venture was a long meandering walk from the city to St Clair beach via South Dunedin and St Kilda, suburbs which I hadn't really explored before. I spend the better part of a day there, watching the surfers as the tide comes in, whilst at The Long Dog cafe. It was a curious observation I made of myself - whilst others had come here to surf, others to visit the seaside cafe and chat with friends, I had come here to study advanced macroeconomics, such is the madness of 'lifelong learning'. This said I have completed an extensive content review of all course material related to this postgraduate economics degree which now gives me two months to complete an intensive review, with a strict timetable in place.

It's been a busy week on the gaming front, with the most important even being the launch of tickets for RuneQuest Con Down Under III. It's shaping up will with guest speakers, panels, auctions, gaming sessions, larps, and all the Kryal Castle events, plus lashings of food, but I am of course in a mad panic until the requisite tickets are sold (I am hoping to hit the half-way mark by the end of the weekend). In addition to this there was our regular RuneQuest game on Sunday, plus my Exalted China on Thursday - and I finally caught up on a few of the write-ups which I had hitherto been neglectful. One very nice RPG-related event was a youngster in the US naming some dragons (FB link) after me as they were designing a world for Megatraveller.

Today was a class for Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC, and next Friday will be the same for Parallel Programming. I have also revived two old enrolments which I didn't follow through with a couple of years ago - one for the University of Otago for a Master in Higher Education, and one for the University of London for a Graduate Diploma in Economics. It's been a few years since I've picked up a degree and I really want to do these. I have this funny feeling that around my 60th birthday when I have ten degrees, speak eight languages, and have a financial buffer of several year's income I'll have sufficient self-confidence to seriously push myself forward in the workplace. In the meantime I just soldier on, hope that my ridiculous levels of productivity are even vaguely noticed by the powers that be, and have forlorn hopes that the people who make architecture designs are the people who have to work with the decisions. For what it is worth, went to the NTEU post-campaign celebration for our new agreement which was mostly a victory (direct action delivers the goods) at the Potter Museum of Art, which appropriately had an relevant exhibition on unions in the workplace.