Too many spirits, not enough Christmas

Wanting to get into the Christmas spirit we rented ‘A Christmas Carol’. An animated adaptation of the classic book. Having seen Scrooge flying through the air, sliding down bannisters and lots of pretty colours and whimsical music in the trailer we settled in for some holiday cheese. Oh, dear God, were we not expecting what the next hour and a half would bring. This movie is dark; REALLY dark. Broken-jawed ghosts shackled in chains doomed to walk the Earth for all eternity dark. Struggling families with dying, crippled children dark. Being chased by the shadow of Death and his screaming shadow horses dark. The scenes that didn’t result in horrified recoiling were so lathered in Charles Dickens' olde English that it took all my attention just to decipher what the characters were talking about. Sure, there are a few scenes with pretty colours and whimsical music, but these mostly come at the end, after you’ve already been subjected to an hour of panicked screams, horrifying visuals and insights into the miserable lives of the Victorian-era working class.

I’m not having a go at the story. It’s a story of self-reflection, second chances and all that. The movie probably captured the mood and message of the book perfectly. I didn’t feel it was a particularly good movie in many ways (motion capture animation kind of weirds me out, I blame the uncanny valley, and I found the whole 'ghost of Christmas present' scene to be visually confusing). What struck me most about this is that this movie was marketed at children. It was marketed as a delightful holiday romp. If they hadn’t intended it for children, maybe the trailer should have included the scene where the shadow of Death (ghost of Christmas future) dangles Scrooge over his own grave while he pleads for his life.

There’s a certain ignorance from the studios that causes the mis-marketting of these movies. Anything that doesn’t feature live actors seems to be automatically assumed to be for children. It’s like giving a piña colada to a child because it looks like fruit juice. This phenomenon still dogs The Simpsons for some people. Those people are all the more moronic for it, but I have heard comments like ‘I don’t feel like watching cartoons’. 'Cartoons' they say! Heaven forbid they should ever buy their niece or nephew a birthday present from a Japanese video store ('oh look, this one has a girl in a school uniform holding some sort of microphone, it must be similar to High School Musical'). It also affected Fantastic Mr. Fox, one of my favourite movies and one of the funniest movies of the past few years. The jovial DVD cover image of the characters riding a sidecar was reminiscent of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and in no way did the movie justice. It’s like studios pay people to make movies, watch a 30 second highlights reel and devise a marketing strategy. But there’s more than just ignorance at play. There’s a certain level of irresponsibility that goes along with it. Insisting a movie is for children when it’s not simply because you can’t figure out a way of marketing animated films to adults is almost a form of child abuse. Saying A Christmas Carol is for children because it’s animated is the same as saying Event Horizon is for children because it has a spaceship in it. I wonder how many parents have sat their kids down to watch A Christmas Carol while they were doing something in another room, probably wrapping presents I suppose, only to come back and find them rocking gently in a corner muttering something about Tiny Tim.

I don't think it’s a new phenomenon either. Have you actually seen Dumbo? He gets wasted and starts hallucinating in a scene that would make Pink Floyd shift uncomfortably in their seats. Granted, the rest of the movie is pretty child-friendly, but that scene is a tenth of the whole movie. A lot of the animated films of the 40s and 50s were similar. I can’t say whether they were marketed towards kids at the time, or whether kids at the time routinely got hammered and hallucinated, but they're definitely marketed as nothing but kids movies now.

So, this is a plea to studios and the general public alike. The use of animation in movies and television does not automatically pigeon-hole them as perfect for children. Sometimes it’s not a case of being aimed at kids but still entertaining for adults (a la Shrek, Nemo, How to Train a Dragon etc…). Sometimes they are simply meant for adults, and should require a pre-viewing before subjecting little Bobby to a lifetime of therapy. A movie should be judged on its own merit, not assigned an audience based on how the poster is going to look, especially now that animation has become so versatile. Once the public acknowledges that, the studios might be willing to accept it too and we’ll see more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox doing well at the box office because they’re being marketed at the right audience. That means more movies like Fantastic Mr Fox being made, and that is definitely not a bad thing. We also might be able to start watching movies like A Christmas Carol with the proper expectations and not sit through an hour of dark, dark soul-searching, all the while waiting for the cutesy squirrel character to come bounding onto the screen and lighten the mood.

500m Straw Clutch

Australia did tremendously well at the recently closed Commonwealth Games in Delhi. They blitzed the field with gold after gold, showing that it's not the size of a country's population that matters, but how you use it. Congratulations to them and their athletes. They're a relatively small country that have consistently punched well above their weight. It's hard to fault their performance. Hard, but not impossible. What sort of Kiwi would I be if I didn't waste my time trying to find a way to bring the Aussie's down a peg?

For this I have burrowed through the data to uncover that vital piece of information that I can skew in such a way that if you squint it almost makes Australia look less-than brilliant, and hopefully move NZ up a couple of spots in the process.

In the interest of conciseness, and because making tables in HTML is incredibly tedious, I'm only going to list the top 5 countries (and NZ and Australia if they aren't up there).

Firstly, the standard medals table, ranked by gold medals (and then total if there's a tie):

Ranking	Country	Gold Medals
1	Australia	74
2	India	38
3	England	37
4	Canada	26
5	Malaysia	12
11	New Zealand	6

The only thing you can say about that is that Australia didn't get as many golds as in previous years; it's their lowest gold medal haul since Auckland in 1990. That's about as small a consolation as they come. That's gold though. There's a common line of thought that says that a bigger population means that you should win more gold medals. Another way of looking at it is that a bigger population gives you a higher chance of winning each gold medal because you have more people to choose from. So Australia had a 5 times higher chance of winning each gold than NZ. Wouldn't that be reflected in the total medal count then?

Ranking	Country	Total Medals
1	Australia	177
2	England	142
3	India	101
4	Canada	75
5	New Zealand	36

Well, I guess we moved up a few spots. Unfortunately, Australia didn't budge. It looks like I have to manipulate the data a little bit more to get what I want. Luckily I'm a scientist, so that's pretty much my job.

For my next trick I'll look at number of gold medals per capita. Surely a big old country like Australia will falter when faced with the likes of small-and-mighty NZ. I'll use millions of people per gold medal so the numbers don't get out of hand. The smaller the better in this case.

Ranking	Country	Population per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	0.01
2	Cayman Islands	0.06
3	Samoa	0.06
4	Australia	0.30
5	Bahamas	0.35
9	New Zealand	0.73

Curses! I suppose that knocked them off the top spot. I think I can do better than that though, and maybe even get New Zealand a little higher. Modern sports is all about money, right? Then GDP (in millions of USD$) per gold medal should weasel out the over-spenders.

Ranking	Country	GDP per Gold Medal
1	Nauru	$60
2	Samoa	$163
3	Cayman Islands	$1549
4	Kenya	$2516
5	Cyprus	$6227
9	Australia	$12497
16	New Zealand	$20860

Ha! Take that Australia! What's the matter? Earn too much money do we? So that's the first task, taking Australia out of the top 5. Sadly, NZ has also been pushed down, all the way to number 16. For us to overtake Australia I'm going to need to get things nice and convoluted on the home straight. Here goes. GDP in USD$ per head of population per gold medal. This can't possibly fail...

Ranking	Country	GDP per Capita per Gold Medal
1	India	$28.7
2	Kenya	$65.2
3	Nigeria	$97.1
4	Uganda	$232.8
5	South Africa	$476.7
7	Australia	$555.7
19	New Zealand	$4747.6

Damn it! Lousy Aussie overachievers. Australia actually did slightly better and NZ did slightly worse. That was a waste of time (unlike the rest of these tables...). Good on India though, sort of. They must have blown a lot of lunch money on training their athletes for these games.

I suppose whatever way you look at it Australia did pretty well. Not even the fact that they have the second highest GDP per capita of all the nations competing at the Commonwealth Games (Isle of Man has the highest) can account for the number of gold medals they are capable of pulling in, they just got too many. I would have loved to look at medals per athlete competing per country, but Wikipedia let me down there. Not even Google could find me the information I needed.

I've tried all sorts of combinations and I just can't get NZ ahead of Australia. I guess the only hope for all my Oz-bound friends, when faced with the inevitable gloating Aussie, is to point out that they earn 40 times as much per person than India and could only manage twice as many golds. If they start pointing things out, like the fact that we earn 30 times as much as India and only managed 1/6th as many gold medals, then just keep spouting figures in terms of foreign currencies, arbitrary multiplications and decimal points until they get bored and start hitting you. Anything is better than that bloody gloating.

Anand then...

I used to think television-induced outrage was reserved for the bitter elderly and the perpetually unemployed. I’ve realised in the past couple of days that it is now the right of every New Zealander to race into a state of hysteria without stopping to think that there might be something more important to worry about.

I am of course talking about Paul Henry’s latest controversy. The crux of the issue appears to be that him asking if Govener-General Sir Anand Satyanand was ‘really a NZer’ and then going on to ask the Prime Minister if he was going to appoint someone who ‘looked and sounded more like a NZer’ was deemed extremely racist. Judging from the sheer amount of outrage, media coverage and water-cooler conversation around the subject, I have to assume that it was more racist than Hone Harawira, a member of parliament, stating that he wouldn’t want his daughters bringing home a pakeha, or Winston Peters’ ‘Yellow Peril’ campaign from a few years ago, or Michael Laws opening his mouth. I don’t think that’s true, not even close.

Paul Henry may be racist. It’s highly likely that he is. Not in an overly malicious way, but from a number of his comments it’s reasonably clear that he holds different opinions for members of different races. However, the questions he asked were not racist, especially not as racist as everyone seems to think.

Firstly, ‘is he really a NZer?’. At it’s base, this is a sign of ignorance, if anything, rather than racism. I myself am a first generation NZer. My mother is Dutch and my father is British. People have said to me ‘oh, I thought you were German’. I wasn’t offended. I was a little taken aback, but that was it. If I did consider myself Dutch then I imagine being called German might be a little offensive, however I consider myself an NZer so I dismissed it as an odd observation. The truth is that in such a multi-cultural country, it is unclear who is an NZer and who is not. It doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t make it any more obvious. When Anand Satyanand was first appointed as Governer-General many people asked ‘is he an NZer?’. In fact, soon after his appointment Sir Satyanand himself said in an interview, ‘I imagine during [my term as Governer-General] there will be some who will say “there is one of us being one of them” while for others it will be a case of saying “there is one of them being one of us”. So even he acknowledged that his Indo-Fijian descent might cause a bit of confusion. The fact is that when you see a person of Indian descent (be it Indian or Indo-Fijian) with an Indian name, your first assumption isn’t that they are from NZ. With nearly a third of the World's population fitting that description and not being NZers, to make that assumption would be statistically ignorant (I’ll confess my own ignorance here, in that I’m not aware of the difference between Indo-Fijian names and those from countries in the sub-continent). It is also not a pre-requisite that the Governer-General be an NZer. So, assuming complete ignorance, that question in itself is not unreasonable, nor is it racist.

That leads me to the next question in question, ‘are you going to choose someone who looks and sounds like an NZer?’. Now I admit, that is a stupid and irrelevant question. It’s not racist, at least nowhere near the level of racism that it’s been elevated to, but it is stupid. It doesn’t matter if the Governer-General instantly portrays an image of being an NZer or not, that's never been a consideration in their selection, so why ask? Most likely it was blurted out to get a cheap laugh, which evidently was a bit of poor judgement. As for the alleged racism buried in the question, I don’t believe that Paul Henry was referring to Sir Satyanand himself. Rather, he was likely referring to the fact that Sir Satyanand looks Indian and has an Indian-sounding name. Given that the Governer-General’s parents are Indo-Fijian, I doubt that stating he looks Indian or has an Indian sounding name would cause him any offense, no more than calling me Dutch or British would cause me offense. The reference Paul Henry made was to the man on paper, not the man himself, and it most certainly was not a reference to every NZer of Indian or Indo-Fijian descent. Extrapolating a stupid question about a man’s name deisgned to get a cheap laugh into full-blown xenophobia is more than a bit extreme.

I like Paul Henry. I think he’s often very funny and is the only celebrity that regular calls out the media on its lazy practices. I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his extreme right views of some things such as Government spending, and he can definitely go too far at times. On the whole though, I think television is a better place with him on it. I’m glad to see that Rick Ellis, CEO of TVNZ, has said in an interview that he has no intention of sacking him.

People in this country have become extremely sensitive, and often I feel that that sensitivity is extremely misguided. It’s like there are people in this country who just meet up for a protest, pick up a newspaper and decide what to write on their signs. And too often that newspaper is the New Zealand Herald, which makes matters that much worse.

I’m not condoning racism here, I’m saying that I don’t believe what Paul Henry said should be considered racist. I hope everyone moves on before October the 18th, so Paul Henry can come back to Breakfast and start gearing up for the next bout of over-blown controversy that will inevitably come. I expect nothing less.

Update (08/10/2010): Really India? You're angry at NZ because one TV personality laughed at the name 'Dikshit'? Newsflash India, sometimes your names appear funny to us because they contain certain portions that we consider to be rude words. That's funny. Was there a national incident when Billy Birmingham released any of the 'Twelfth Man' CDs, most of which contain jokes about the names of cricket players from the sub-continent? The name 'Dikshit' is actually quite funny because it contains two very closely related rude words. That's not racist. It's only funny when mispronounced anyway, so Paul Henry wasn't even laughing at her real name (although when pronounced properly it's possibly funnier; Sheila Diksit - sounds like an Aussie porn-star). It was childish, but not racist. When I was in London, I giggled to myself every time the voice came over the speaker and said that the train terminated in Cockfosters. And that only has one such word in the name. It isn't a racial slur if you laugh at someone's name. It's not a reflection of the person and it certainly isn't a reflection of their entire race. It's just a reflection of that inner child in all of us that still smiles when we see the word 'poo'. It might be insensitive if you laugh in their face, but the act of laughing alone simply denotes ignorance and immaturity, not racism. Maybe the bit about the name being appropriate because she was Indian was a little racist... If he'd just pronounced it correctly and gone with Aussie porn-star there wouldn't have been an issue.

The GST of it.

I'm sick of all this talk about the GST rise. Firstly, you're not going to pay GST on existing GST. Since every $1 you spend currently includes 11.1¢ of GST, you'll only notice a 2.235% increase in the cost of things, not 2.5%. It's a small detail, but it bugs me nonetheless.

Secondly, the new tax rates will mean that even someone on the minimum wage will be getting an extra $12.28 per week. Sure, that's not much, however they'd have to spend $549.50 in goods and services each week for that extra income to be eaten up by the GST rise. Since they only earn $510 a week before tax, I doubt that's going to happen.

Even if the tax cuts weren't happening it would barely affect you, so stop complaining about it, you're not going to suffer. Unless you're buying a new car, but then if you're doing that you hardly have money issues do you?

I like GST because it's easier for the individual to control than income tax; so have this one National, because you don't get my support too often.

This just inbox.

As an update to Cost. Benefit., I thought I might point out that when the media reports on 'how the government is spending your money', causing major outrage at 'our taxes' being spent on 'blah, blah blah', they're neglecting to report one small detail. Individual income tax only makes up about 39% of the government's core revenue. And that's core revenue; that excludes Crown entities and state-owned enterprises. Core revenue is only ~74% of the government's revenue. That means that individual income tax accounts for ~29% of the government's revenue. You might argue that GST, which makes up 24% of the core revenue, is also 'your money'. I suppose it is, but you have control over that, unlike income tax; and really, who considers GST when they go to buy something? You see a price and decide whether to pay it. Don't even get me started on the fact that the GST rise will see you spending and extra $2.50 for every $100. You'd have to be spending more than $4000 to see the extra expense soar into triple digits.

So, back to the point at hand, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, the media should be taking any ballpark figures they happen to glance at on the internet and dividing them by three. They'll still be doing a shitty job, but at least it will show that they're doing a bit more reporting than just checking their inbox.

Cost. Benefit.

After yet another conversation about the lousy, do-nothing scum that is the unemployed, in which I always do my best to defend those that were once my brethren, I thought I’d look into something that I’ve been wanting to know for some time. To find the information I was after I had to burrow into that most unholy of creations, the government website.

What I wanted to know is exactly how much the New Zealand government spent annually on the unemployment benefit. People often quote it as one of the country’s largest expenses, something that I can never believe.

The first bit of data I could find was exactly what the government wanted me to find, i.e. a nice big pie chart with over-simplified values designed to both wow and enrage. According to these wedges of need-to-know information the government will spend $70.7 billion in the 2010/2011 financial year. Of this rather significant pie, $21.2 billion will be spent on ‘social security & welfare’. Well, well, well, that is a decidedly fattening slice of pie. I guess I was wrong…or was I…and if I was then by how much…

Burrowing a little deeper, and overcoming such obstacles as the use of the word ‘vote’ to mean an area of spending (seriously government, you can’t go round using a randomised vocabulary to confuse your loyal subjects; it’s undemocratic etc.), I managed to find a breakdown of exactly what ‘social security & welfare’ meant. Here are some of the ‘scopes of appropriation’ that fall under that particular ‘vote’: care and protection services for children ($0.3 billion), orphan’s benefit ($0.1 billion), Ministry of Social Development - capital expenditure ($0.1 billion), student loans ($1.6 billion) and Superannuation ($8.3 billion). That’s nearly half of expenditure that comes under social security & welfare, and although you could argue that orphans, students and retirees are all unemployed, they’re not the ones targeted in the typical anti-DOL-bludging tirade. For those we turn to the next group of scopes, if that makes sense.

Firstly, the domestic purposes benefit. These are the lowly house-bound mothers that would rather pop out a few more children than join the workforce. Their filthy maternal ways are costing the government $1.7 billion a year. Why that’s nearly double the $1 billion we spend on ‘climate change’. Think of all the false economies we could put in place if poor people stopped having children!

Next we’ll look at those most undeserving of our help; those people so arrogant that some of them have turned a blind-eye to society, literally. That’s right, I’m talking about the invalid’s benefit. All those people that are “totally blind, or permanently and severely restricted in their capacity for work”. This isn’t for the sick, they have their own benefit. Our government is giving away $1.3 billion to a group of people that are no longer valid. The merely sick get a mere $0.7 billion. For an extra $0.3 billion we could put together a whole other defence force to prevent people from getting sick and injured in the first place.

Finally, we come to the one. The big daddy. The one benefit to rule all benefits. I am of course talking about the mighty unemployment benefit. The place where all your hard-earned taxes go, just so that some pot-smoking pox on society can sit around the house all day watching the Rugby Channel. In the 2010/2011 financial year, our government is expecting to spend nearly $1 billion on these low-lives; $0.948 billion to be exact (to within 3 decimal places). That’s quite a bit. I’ve run out of other ‘votes’ to compare it to it’s so big. I could add some up, like $0.2 billion for Maori affairs, or $0.1 billion for ‘statistics’, but that wouldn’t change anything.

So it’s quite a lot of money we spend then. Nearly $4.7 billion on the big four is quite a bit of cash. However, all sarcasm aside, I urge to think of it this way. That’s only 6.6% (update 01/09/2010: I hadn't realised Crown entities and state-owned enterprises weren't part of the revenue figures I was looking at; it's really only 4.9% of Government revenue). of the annual budget we spend on people that wouldn’t be able to live otherwise. Sure they could get jobs, possibly. But what if they can’t? I don’t have the numbers for how many people are in complete need of a benefit versus those that are simply ripping off the system. Some of them, possibly the majority, don’t have a choice. Isn’t it a government’s job to look after the people? 39% of the government’s revenue comes from individual income tax. Roughly, that means that only $2.60 (update 01/09/2010: $1.90 with the new calculations) out of every $100 you earn goes towards allowing people far less fortunate live something that to you would barely resemble a life. Sure, you’re funding the odd joint, Sky bill or pint of Lion Red, but mostly you’re spending a couple dollars out of every hundred to try and lift people off rock bottom. If after all that you’re still furious at the amount of money that gets siphoned off the government bank accounts like so much petrol through a stolen hose, then I suggest you take a trip to rock bottom, and see how much you think a roof over your head is worth. More than a couple of dollars I’d wager.

PS: stop whining about all the money our Ministers are spending. Everything they do, including support personnel, official trips and the odd not-so official lunch, costs $60 million a year. That’s $0.06 billion for consistency. We spend more than that on treaty negotiations. These people are running our country. If you’re jealous of all the perks they get then run for office. Literally no one is stopping you.

PPS: if you really want to get riled up about something, how about the fact that our government only spends $0.77 billion on research, science and technology. That's less than they spend on carbon credits. Now that's something to whine about.

Oil be back

It may not be news to you to hear that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill isn’t the first oil spill that’s occurred since man first discovered petroleum on an otherwise unsuccessful hunting trip (I’m a bit shaky on the history). However, it may surprise you to find that despite the immense volume of crude oil that has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since the 4/20 day celebrations got a bit out of hand (current estimates are between 213,000 and 367,000 tonnes of crude oil so far), it is not the biggest oil spill on record.

The Lakeview Gusher holds that title; this accidental oil-geyser pumped out over 1 million tonnes of crude oil over an 18 month period, from 1909-1910. But that was on land. It may have flooded an entire valley, but it couldn’t get any further than that, not like when it happens at sea. Surely it’s much worse when that sort of thing happens at sea. Well it already did in 1991.

During the Gulf War, Iraqi soldiers dumped crude oil from several tankers into the ocean. Estimates of the total amount of oil spilt into the ocean range from 250,000 tonnes to 750,000 tonnes. The coastline affected didn’t have the level of biodiversity that can be found elsewhere, such as the Gulf of Mexico. Because of this the environmental impact was relatively low, although by no means immeasurable. Many of the ecosystems have since fully recovered; those that haven’t need more time due to the lack of wave energy which breaks up the suffocating tar crusts that form on shorelines.

Next on the list is the Ixtoc I spill, which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979 and loosed ~420,000 tonnes upon the seas. The events that surrounded the disaster were so eerily similar to the current events that it’s as though the oil industry is taking after Hollywood and simply ‘reimagining’ major catastrophes rather than coming up with something original. It took ten months to cap the rogue oil well, so my money’s on February 2011 for the current spill to be finally stemmed.

The list of ocean-based oil disasters goes on. The Atlantic Empress spill near Trinidad and Tobago in 1979 (260,000 tonnes); the ABT Summer spill near Angola in 1991 (260,000 tonnes); the Castillo de Bellver spill near South Africa in 1983 (230,000 tonnes); the Amoco Cadiz near France in 1978 (202,000 tonnes); and so on and so on… The Exxon Valdez spill, the one you hear so much about, is way down the list at number 54 with a mere 102,000 tonnes.

Finally, there’s the biggest oil spill of them all. If you think it’s strange that I’d put this so far down the page it’s because this one is different, this one’s natural. That’s right, natural crude oil seepage occurs throughout our oceans, and not just a little bit. As much as 2 million tonnes of crude oil seeps into the World’s oceans all on its own, every year.

My point here isn’t that the current oil spill is inconsequential. I don’t want to be labelled an environmental-holocaust denier. This is just a literary relief well, designed to stem the flow of man’s ego. We’ve stuffed up. Ecosystems are in danger and it’s entirely our fault. Be concerned, but please, don’t panic. We’re just one little speck on the face of this planet, our actions may seem apocalyptic, and eventually to us they very well may be, but the planet is a big girl; she can look after herself. She’s had to deal with this sort of thing before, worse in fact, and she’s always pulled through. Heck, she does this sort of thing to herself just for kicks. She’s developed ways of dealing with excess oil; although her time frame is just a little longer than we’re used to. In the mean time, we’ll cap the well. We'll wipe down the pelicans and polish up the swamp reeds. Don’t be too hard on our species. If nothing else the reaction to this event shows us that while some of us are money-hungry, self-serving Earth-haters, many of us still care. Now stop worrying about it so much. We will have forgotten all about it by the time the oil industry brings out their next disaster anyway; and unless they have a burst of much-needed inspiration, I'm betting that will involve Iraqi soldiers.

---

PS: This is a not-so brief announcement to anyone who thinks boycotting BP until they clean up the spill, or boycotting any oil company for any reason, is in any way noble or even effective.

The idea of a boycott on one particular petrol station is flawed. It assumes that oil companies make money on petrol sold at petrol stations. In truth, most of the money made by oil companies is through back-room oil trading. Petrol stations make their money on food sold when people come in to buy petrol. That’s why there’s been a massive trend to sell a range of food in petrol stations. Now, the next bit requires a very basic understanding of economics. That’s exactly what I have, so most of you should be fine.When one petrol station chain is boycotted, demand on petrol decreases. This means that they have an increased supply. If people are boycotting one petrol station they must be using another. This means that demand increases at the other stations, decreasing supply. At this point the boycotted company has more oil than the others. The companies with a sudden increase in demand now have to turn to the boycotted company to get their oil. The boycotted company can then charge exorbitant prices for their oil, increasing profits.So, what you are achieving by successfully boycotting BP is actually increasing their profits and decreasing the profits of other companies. This may seem counter-intuitive, but what you actually need to do if you want BP to suffer is boycott all other petrol stations. If everyone used BP and no one else, then BP would be forced to buy high-priced oil from other oil companies. Once their supply matched demand everyone could then boycott BP for a month or so. BP would not be able to balance supply with demand and it would make life very difficult and expensive.However, it is most important to remember that many petrol stations are independently owned and simply franchised to a particular company. A boycott on BP, in all likelihood, will increase BP’s profits and bankrupt small-business owners. Maybe keep that in mind next time you burn a few extra litres of petrol to go out of your way to avoid BP, all in the name of an environment that probably doesn’t really care what we do.

Sadly, we can't all rise again

Another Easter holiday has passed and after all that relaxation and delicious chocolate we call sit back and listen to the media tell us all about the worst possible aspect of the 4-day break.

This Easter saw the worst road toll in 17 years. Thanks for that little bit of joyous information there, media. So how many tens of people were horrifically killed on our roads this most doomed of years? Only eleven you say... I’m not saying I was hoping for more deaths, it’s just that when you hear about the worst road toll in 17 years you think it’s got to be pretty big. After all, in the last ten years alone there are approximately 500,000 more light passenger vehicles on the road (a 21% increase), and nearly a million more vehicles in total (MoT - NZ Vehicle Fleet Statistics); surely that alone would cause the road toll to rise. So if you make a big deal about it, it’s got to be worse than a slight increase due the larger number of vehicles on our roads?

They say it’s the worst in 17 years. Nominally perhaps, but statistically? Between 2004 and 2008 the average annual road toll was 404 (MoT - Road Toll). That’s roughly 1.1 road deaths per day. So in any typical block of four days you would expect there to be 4.4 deaths on our roads. So the road toll was 2 and a half times greater than any random selection of four days. OK, that’s pretty bad. But that’s just a typical daily average taken across a whole year; long weekends do not contain typical days when it comes to traffic. I can’t find statistics for the increase in volume, however conservatively I would say there is at least twice as much traffic on the roads over Easter, particularly on State Highways where people are more likely to speed and overtake in a dangerous fashion. Taking that into account, one would expect an increase on the average road toll. And what’s this, the road toll includes Thursday afternoon and early Tuesday morning? Nearly half the daily traffic flow is in the afternoon, so that could account for more of the increase on the average road toll. Even though it finishes at 6am on Tuesday, that’s still time to include some people who are merely commuting to work. Their deaths are equally tragic, but they can hardly be considered to be part of the ‘holiday road toll’, yet they are.

Don’t get me wrong, eleven deaths is a lot. It’s at least eleven too many, and people definitely need to be more careful rather than thoughtless douche-bags. But, minor fluctuations in the daily average aside, the Easter road toll itself has barely changed in 30 years (MoT - Holiday Road Toll); despite the fact that if there has been an increase of more than one million vehicles on our roads in the past decade then there are at least two million more vehicles than 30 years ago. Since 1980 the average Easter road toll has been 9.4 (±0.8), so a road toll of 11 is statistically only 1 death above the 30 year average. The average Easter road toll in the 1980s was 13; in the 90s it was 9.4 and in the 00s it had dropped to 5.6. If we convert that to deaths per million vehicles (the numbers being no more than an educated guess) that works out at roughly: 1980 (1 million vehicles) – 10 deaths, 1990 (1.5 million vehicles) – 6.3 deaths, 2000 (2 million vehicles) - 2.8 deaths.

If anything the media should be focussing on how something seems to be getting through to people, since the road toll is barely changing despite a near exponential increase in vehicles on our roads. I know there are still idiots and thoughtless pricks on the roads, however on the whole the road-going public appear to be doing something right. Instead the media chooses to ram the worst of the weekends news down our throats like we all spent the weekend speeding through crowds of children. I’m surprised they don’t just go all in and show us a nightly running average of the road toll over the past few days just to remind us that no matter how relaxed or responsible we get, there is death. They could fit it in somewhere between the 6:30pm rain prediction and the 6:45pm rain prediction.

What goes around

In order to solve traffic woes, quell the uprising of the vocal cyclist and probably, in some misguided and convoluted way, to save the polar bears, it was decided in recent history that bicycles would follow the same rules as any other road-going vehicle. ‘At last’, sighed the previously oppressed cyclist, ‘I can finally claim my rightful place on the road’. However, there was a problem. Cyclists didn’t have a rightful place on the road. The majority of roads were never designed for more than two cars to travel safely past each other at speed. Add to this equation a vulnerable meat-sack on a flimsy metal frame and it won’t be long before that place on the road that was so passionately sought becomes more permanent than one would ever have wished. So what then? The footpath? That’s not safe for anyone involved. Cyclists have become the pariahs of the transportation world, all because the government made a knee-jerk response to a growing problem. I’ve recently come across a secret that evidently wasn’t available to the government at the time. Bicycles are not the same things as the motor vehicles that New Zealand roads have traditionally been designed for. There are more and more cycle lanes being put in, and it is a major consideration when designing new roads. That’s good; I’m not saying that cyclists should stay off the roads. What I am saying is that a lot more thought needs to be put into how bicycles are treated on the roads other than just upgrading them to the status of something they are not.

For a start, motorists are tested on their knowledge of the road rules before being allowed to drive a vehicle on the road. Some motorists are still more than a bit hazy on the finer details, but at least the little card in their wallet proves that at some point before getting behind the wheel they had at least glanced over the road code. The first paragraph of the ‘Official New Zealand Code for Cyclists’ states that: “Before cycling on the road you must know the road rules. They apply to cyclists as well as those using motor vehicles”. How many cyclists do you think there are that have read and understood the road code before getting on their bike and heading off to school/work? Granted, many will have a driver’s licence, but what about all those children that adopt all the legal responsibility of motorists every time they head off to school? There should be some form of standardised testing for cyclists to ensure that the majority of them know the road code that they are legally obligated to follow each time they get behind the handlebars. It wouldn’t have to be as involved as the road code for motorists, there’s no need for an 8 year old kid to know that the load on a trailer cannot extend more than 4 metres behind the rear axle just to get his 10-speed to school and back, just as long as cyclists could carry a little card in their wallet that proved that at some point they understood the road code basics. ‘How can an 8 year old be expected to sit a test like that?’ I hear you ask. Maybe they can’t, but then how can you expect them to go out on the roads and compete for their little bit of tar seal alongside road rule-resistant bus drivers and adrenalin-fuelled couriers without demonstrating a basic understanding of who gives way to who?

The second point I wish to make is that if a bicycle is legally the same as a motor vehicle, how come cyclists don’t need to obtain a warrant of fitness or a vehicle licence (that’s ‘vehicle registration’ to those who haven't caught up with the latest lingo from the NZTA (that's the LTSA))? A bicycle frame snapping due to structural rust while a cyclist is travelling at 50kph through traffic is just as likely to end in tears as a similar fault with a motor vehicle. Again, it doesn’t need to be as intensive or anywhere near as expensive (but then neither does a WOF for a motor vehicle); it just makes sense that if the stature of bicycles is going to be promoted to big bad motor vehicle, there should be checks in place to reduce injury and prevent deaths in the same fashion. As for vehicle licensing, why should cyclists have lanes designed specifically for them and not be required to pay for them in any direct way? Not all bicycles would need to obtain these of course; if you only take your bike out to the park every other Sunday then there’s no more need to licence it than there is for a motocross bike or a farm tractor.

Thirdly, just because there is currently no cycling license, WOF or vehicle licensing does that mean that cyclists are both above the law and above common sense? Any cyclist riding without a helmet is asking for a visit to the emergency room. Any cyclist whose helmet is dangling from their handlebars is asking for sterilisation. Yet I have seen numerous cyclists riding sans helmet, recently right past a police officer, and I strongly doubt there is much chance they’ll get reprimanded accordingly. What about cyclists who ride with the flow of traffic, despite council money being spent on the cycle lane that runs right alongside them? I’ll say it again, roads are not designed with cyclists in mind; cycle lanes most definitely are. If cyclists have all the rights of a motorist on the road, then does that mean that as a motorist I have every right to drive up the cycle lane? Of course not, so surely cyclists should be legally required to use cycle lanes where provided, and be fined if caught using the roads alongside them. The point of all road rules is public safety, and if there’s a safer option for one particular road user then they should be made to use it. No one wants to hit a cyclist any more than a cyclist wants to be hit, as a general rule anyway.

Cyclists should be able to get to work without being forced to devolve into motorists. For this to be a safe option, however, a lot more thought needs to be put into legislation to protect the safety of all road users. Bikes are not cars, and it will take a lot more than a 1.5 metre bubble to bring harmony to our increasingly congested roads.

Hungry, hungry hypocrisy

Aren’t people strange? Why just the other day someone was having a dispute with their neighbour over the number of dogs he had on his property. This man thought he would solve the problem himself. He had the foresight to get his neighbour to sign a document giving him permission to get his shotgun and rifle and go about “destroying” each of the dogs himself. Pity he didn’t have the foresight to inform the authorities. How strange. Although, that’s not the strangest part. It’s the most horrible, the most sickening and the most inexcusable, but not the strangest. What I find strangest are some of the responses and attitudes of the general public. Not that they disagree with his method of choice, but rather the hypocrisy that flows so freely from them.

Today I noticed that there was a group on facebook entitled “The sickos who killed 33 dogs in NZ should be publicly shot”. On this group’s ‘wall’ there are countless outcries of disapproval, including such hypocritical pearls as “Shoot them in the knees leave them for dead” and “I hate violence, but COKSUCKERS like him can get tortured alive !!!!!!!!”. One kind soul has even provided the man’s name, address and mobile number, just in case someone feels the need to act out their grammatically-deficient threats. Now I am in no way condoning what the man did. I’m a dog owner, and it made me nauseous just to think about it. I strongly believe that there should be harsher penalties for cruelty to animals, particularly towards animals registered as pets. It just terrifies me that someone can effectively say ‘what that person did was totally sick; how could someone even THINK of doing something so horrible? I’d like to gut him with a knife and feed him to my dogs’.

The belief that it’s okay to commit acts of great violence towards people who have committed acts of great violence is in itself barbaric. I don’t doubt that the majority of people who make these bold statements would never, and could never, act on them themselves. So presumably they’re asking some higher power to commit these acts. Are these acts then acceptable if done in the name of justice? I’d agree that Police should be able to use force to diffuse a situation. There are non-lethal solutions; however they shouldn’t be convicted if lethal force is required as a last resort. That’s a different story. While it is taking lives in the name of justice, the offender is still offending and therefore still poses a threat. Calling for violence in the name of justice when the offender poses no threat is archaic and disturbing. Public hangings stopped being trendy for a reason. Wishing for violence makes you no different from the perpetrators of violence before they acted on it. By all means, call for justice though. People shouldn’t get away with actions that negatively affect the lives of others. That’s why we have a justice system, which brings me to another point.

The problem with the justice system is that our society is stuck in limbo; somewhere between capital punishment and group discussions. While some members of the public may demand blood, the truth is that it wouldn’t make any difference to their lives whether the guilty party was dead or locked up. In fact, if any of those people ever put their gallows where their mouth is, they might get enough of that blood on their hands to realise that the death penalty is really a lose-lose kind of deal. So instead we lock our criminals up in small rooms and feed them for a pre-defined period of time until we let them out again. How quaint. Whenever I drive over the Khyber Pass on-ramp in Newmarket and look down at the stone walls of Mt Eden prison I get a feeling of depressed confusion. We’ve repeatedly sent people into space, we’ve got remote control toys on the surface of Mars, video calling is available to anyone with an internet connection and movies can be filmed and shown in all three glorious dimensions. We’re living in the future, and yet locking criminals up in small rooms and feeding them for a pre-defined period of time until we let them out again is the best we can come up with?

There are other options I suppose, such as home detention and mental health counselling. I think part of society wants an alternative approach, it’s just too hard to deal with, and much easier to keep locking people up in small rooms. I can’t offer any better alternatives myself. Puppies Behind Bars sounds like a good idea, although it’s more part of the prison system than an alternative to it. The program “trains inmates to raise puppies to become service dogs for the disabled and explosive detection canines for law enforcement”. That may just be the worst possible treatment for the person mentioned above, or it could be the absolute best. Helping criminals understand how their actions have impacted on the lives of others by putting them in their shoes may not be such a bad idea.

I guess the question is do we genuinely want to rehabilitate criminals so that they can become functioning members of society, or do we just want to vent our rage and anger before putting them out of sight and out of mind? Is it even possible to change someone’s mindset enough for the justice system to ever work? I like to think so. I also hold onto the hope that society’s mindset will continue to change. It’s taken a long time for the death sentence to be frowned upon, with any luck the prison system is next. I just hope that in the meantime there are enough people who are refraining from wishing horrendous torture upon criminals long enough to come up with a decent alternative.

The SkyCity's the limit

I love a good movie. I even love quite a few bad movies. What I don’t love is the ever increasing cost one has to pay for the privilege of seeing the movie on the big screen. There was a time when a night at the movies cost nothing more than a lazy Kate from mum, half for the pre-movie combo and half for the movie itself. Admittedly, there was probably a time when a movie cost nothing more than sixpence from Aunt Mildred, half for the movie itself and half for a to the local opium dealer. I don’t remember those times, and there’s a chance they never existed, so let’s stick with the age of the lazy tenner. As time passed the price of tickets increased. That’s not all that strange, the price of everything increases over time due to inflation, with the exception of air travel, for some reason. It’s important that I note here, before I get swept away by the rant inside, that when I refer to ‘cinema’ or ‘they’, I am really referring to SkyCity Cinemas, who own somewhere in the region of 97% of cinemas in New Zealand. There are plenty of other, non-SkyCity cinemas in New Zealand that may be doing a damn fine job, or a damn lousy one, I just haven’t had much experience with them so I’m unable to comment.

In New Zealand the inflation rate is currently 4.3%. So if a movie cost $5 in 1992, due to inflation alone it should have cost $7.38 in the third quarter of 2009 (thank you RBNZ for the handy calculator). Instead, movie tickets were $15.50 in the third quarter of 2009. But wait, you smugly decree, you were a child in 1992, a child’s ticket would have cost $5, not an adult’s. Smugly noted. However, in the third quarter of 2009 a child’s ticket cost $9.50. That’s more than $2 higher than inflation. Not all that much for the individual, but when there are more movie cinemas than ever, implying that movie attendance is higher than ever, that’s a lot of extra profit for movie industry. I’m sure a similar situation exists for adult ticket prices.

During the age of the lazy tenner, 1992, the highest-grossing movie was Aladdin, bringing in US$504,100,000, that’s NZ$931,276,556 at the 1992 exchange rate (thank you again RBNZ). That’s a lot of money, especially when the movie only cost US$23 million to make. You would assume then, accounting for inflation, that in 2009 the highest-grossing movie would make about US$777,122,000. After all, there was a recession on, times were tough, biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Ahh, but when you’re eating soggy newspaper for dinner and living in a shoe box in the middle of the street, what better way to spend the money you earned shining shoes outside the local speakeasy than visiting the world of Pandora in ground-breaking 3D. A world where creatures are almost identical to those on Earth but with an extra pair of limbs; a world where nobody ever takes down their Christmas lights; a world where it’s somehow more cost effective to transfer the consciousness of a biologist into a genetically matched Alien body to go out and observe the local flora than it is for them to simply wear one of those gas masks. It’s also a world where inflation means nothing. US$777,122,000? Try doubling it. In less than a month Avatar grossed US$1,346,805,340 worldwide. That’s 10 digits right there. Titanic has only managed to gross US$1.8 billion in 12 years. Granted, charging an extra $1.50 for the novelty of seeing it in 3D (which is totally worth it by the way) helps boost profits. It’s not like it was the only movie to post an obscene profit in 2009 though. Harry Potter raked in US$934 million, Ice Age 3 got US$887 million and Transformers 2 took in US$835 million. Good lord, even Alvin and the Chipmunks managed to get their grubby little paws on US$177 million, and that was just in a week, or should I say in a 'squeak'? No, definitely not.

The rise in movie ticket prices, therefore, can’t be because of inflation, and since inflation takes into account increases in the average wage, it can’t be blamed on the high-rolling individuals the cinemas employ. Movies are continuing to haul in more money than Scrooge McDuck could swim in, so it’s not a failing movie industry that’s driving the price up. I’d like to say its pure greed; however I don’t have all the facts. What if the mob has SkyCity’s daughter and is demanding they increase their ticket prices at a slightly greater rate than inflation over a 20 year period or they’ll kill her? What if SkyCity is in some sort of corporate competition to see who can offer their customers the least value-for-money? Well, if the latter is the case, I hardly think SkyCity can win. The tobacco companies not only charge a lot for a product that costs very little to produce, but they actually say on their packaging that using their product will kill you or worse and people still freely hand over their money! We’re still a good few years away from paying $25 to sit in a cinema while being heavily irradiated, so for now you can rest assured that at least buying a movie ticket is better value than a packet of cigarettes.

I think I lost the point somewhere in the last paragraph. I’ll try and get back on track long enough to wrap this up. Movie companies, like most other companies, exist solely to make the biggest profit they can. I’m sure there a few very wealthy people sitting in a room screaming “another 50 cents!” and rolling around on the floor laughing as they watch more and more people flock to fill up the ever-increasing numbers of cinemas. To those people I begrudgingly quote Brian Tamaki: enough is enough. We get it, you all make a lot of money and you’re diamond-encrusted lifestyles are very impressive. But please, why don’t you try offering us, the loyal customers, a brief respite from your profit-mongering so that we can enjoy the cinema without having to decide between a couple of hours in Pandora and a weekend in Wellington. I promise if you cut a little off the top, maybe taking it back to the age of the lazy tenner, without the combo, I’ll see twice as many movies. That’s a 33% increase in profits. And even if others don’t follow my lead then worst case scenario is that you lose a bit of that wealth and have to go back to simpler, gold-encrusted lifestyles. I’m sure James Cameron can lend you a few million if times get really tough, he owes you that much.