Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Justin Milne must go ...

The pond continues to enjoy a reptile-free life, but sometimes it's still provoked beyond endurance.

The pond has no time for Michelle Guthrie, but what to say of Justin Milne, still wrecking things as he's done from the days that he couldn't even run a small film company without running on the shoals of a financial reef …

Fairfax here

What a lickspittle toady of the forelock-tugging kind.

Editorial independence? Sounds like News Corp is more his beat ...

What to say? As usual, David Rowe says it all, with more Rowe here




14 comments:

  1. "Father of Broadband"

    FM actually D.

    https://www.afr.com/business/media-and-marketing/tv/justin-milne--from-father-of-oz-broadband-to-abc-chair-20170709-gx7qgc

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  2. Thanks dot. Still awaiting your recommendation for a loonpond alternative please.

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    Replies
    1. Dunno about an "alternative", Anony - they're hard to come by. I think I'd kinda settle for just an occasional diversion, myself.

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  3. "The pond has no time for Michelle Guthrie, but what to say of Justin Milne..."

    Truly nothing of any vaguely civilised nature to say about either of them, but yes indeed, Milne is truly an R-soul. And unfortunately, he is far from being the only one.

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  4. And now for something entirely different ... well, not so very different, really but today, after 3/4 of a century, I actually found out that 'Bullshit receptivity' and 'Bullshit sensitivity' are actual psychological diagnoses. And that combined with an exaggerated belief in 'agency', this is what strongly increases belief in conspiracies.

    Oh wau. The overdone belief in 'agency' is an obvious human psychopathy - clearly responsible for all that nonsense about God and religion, and only now is it finally showing signs of weakening - except in the Liberal Party, and amongst the reptiles, and in the US Republican Party, that is.

    Anyway, if, like me, you are amused or bemused (or both) about all this, see:

    Not Even Bullshit [Bullshit receptivity and bullshit sensitivity]
    Between the manifest and the unmanifest, there is bullshit.
    Joachim I Krueger Ph.D. Posted Dec 06, 2015
    https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/one-among-many/201512/not-even-bullshit

    Sorry, DP, normal service may now be resumed.

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    Replies
    1. There's quite a bit of literature about the evolutionary basis of "agent detection", the tendency to see intent in all sorts random or unassociated events and the predisposition it creates to belief in conspiracy and religion. Bullshit does capture the sense of it nicely though.

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    2. Ah, but I reckon the craziest instance of an agency+bullshit illusion is in physics: the nonsense that some physicists go on with about how it takes a (usually 'conscious') observer to collapse a wave function.

      Clearly, if you believe that one, then you must believe that the entire universe is in some kind of 'Schrodinger cat' superposition of existence-non existence (and how's that for bullshit ?). Either that, or you believe that some kind of distinct consciousness is immanent with the universe and always has been (and how's that for 'agency' ?).

      Oh yes, it's boojums all the way down.

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  5. What's stunned me about this is the sheer stupidity of the people involved. Who, in their right mind, would have committed these suggestions in writing?

    It leads me to wonder about the business types who are entrusted to manage public enterprises because of some imagined talent. How many are like Turnbull himself, chancers who have made a career of doing sharp deals and then moving on before the excrement hits the cooling system?

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    Replies
    1. And now we know why nothing ever works - at least never in the way it should.

      In my younger days, I was frequently one of life's foot-soldiers on fairly long running projects in what we then called ADP (or EDP now ICT). Very often there would be an initial project leader who would get the project up and running, and then after a year or two, move on to do the same thing for some other undertaking.

      Therefore, these guys (and, BOC, they always were guys) were never around when the negative consequences of many of their decisions surfaced with very deleterious consequences for quite a few projects. And thus they never, ever learned from their own mistakes and went on to repeat them many times over (hoping for a better outcome this time ? No, since they fondly imagined they'd already produced the best of all possible outcomes in this best of all projects.)

      I kinda view Milne's efforts in that light.

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    3. "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." I suspect that you could substitute "indifference" for "ignorance". The actual task doesn't matter, success is measured in dollars, titles, CV entries - - anything but actual outcomes.

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  6. In case you want to peep into the herpetarium - someone left the lid open (wish they hadn't)

    https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/positions-vacant-its-hard-work-for-companies-trying-to-fill-jobs/news-story/5405ea5acee1b4c6b232abff1823571d

    It seems the unemployed are all on drugs. Leads me to wonder what the Mordochs are on.

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  7. Don’t know about business so much, Befuddled, but I had a couple of opportunities to observe another phenomenon within academia at the upper echelons.

    Down amongst the As, Bs and even Cs, incompetence is almost always localised and treated, if at all, as incompetence. That is, if it’s noticed. Above that level, among the more highly-paid AssPros, Profs, Deans, Proctors and VCs, it is often rewarded, in effect. When an academic head is so shit that s/he he must be ousted, the tributes and letters of recommendation are at their most fulsome, in order to facilitate a swift move on. Thus, the nincompoop believes that the mess s/he leaves behind is the work of genius. Learning from ones mistakes is essential for normal people but not for those who never have to clean up after themselves.

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