Far be it for the pond to dance on the grave of the latest newspaper news, as reported - behind the paywall of the lizard Oz - in Digital delivers on sales, print fades.
Uh huh, what's that you say? It's just a jump to the left, and then a step to the right, with my hands on my hips, and I bring my knees tight? It's the pelvic thrust that really drives me insane?
Oh yes, I can do the dance ...
But why, you ask, in a hurt little pitiful voice, does the pond feel so vengeful and so pleased to note that the lizard Oz has dropped 6.6% on its daily edition and 8.9% on the weekend, while only picking up close to 46,000 digital subscribers? (yes, there are 46k fools in the land)
Well you see for years the lizard Oz has railed against the NBN and new technology, not seeming to understand that the new ways were coming and you could either stand defiantly in front of the headlights and get run over, or you could change, and be quick about the change, because these days, change happens by the day, the week and the month as well as by the year ...
Fairfax didn't get it either, and so the circulation figures for all but the Australian Financial Review (+18.2%) on a Saturday are down, with the drops ranging from moderate to startling (Sun-Herald, -24.4%).
What's even more pitiful is the way for years the Murdochians mocked the New York Times, and now the lot of them are hastily racing off to embrace the NYT online model, which has delivered a healthy 1m subscribers to the rag, while allowing casual use as a way of keeping itself in the intertubes conversation.
The ostriches are reaping what they've sowed, yet the fact that each of the rags will somehow manage to lie about and crow about their own figures, shows just how much they've abandoned truth to desperate circus routines and denialism.
If you can deny the implications of your very own circulation figures, why then it's an easy step to deny everything else ... climate science, the NBN, you name it ...
Speaking of the NBN, the pond has been following with fascination the case of man love being displayed by Stilgherrian for Malcolm Turnbull, as you can see in You'll love the How Fast is the NBN site ... until you read this ...
Actually the pond loved how fast the NBN might be - should it ever arrive in the inner west and save us from Optus - and how much faster it might be with subsequent, and relatively cheap upgrades - after reading the Stilgherrian gabfest, but was at the same time slightly nauseated by the ongoing cheering for big Mal's vision.
The best conclusion short of any actual information? Surely Stilgherrian must be hoping against hope for a job with big Mal on the revised Not so Bloody fast Network, oh please pretty please big Mal ...
First the Stilg starts out with the whinge that the NBN rates comparison site is misleading in its figures, and then came the infatuated and extended quotation from big Mal's furious blogging ...
It sounded all so ... uxorious ...
Turnbull is right, of course ...
And he's right about many other things ...
He's right, too ...
Right, you're bloody well right big Mal.
And then the parting of the ways with the geeks:
Alarmingly, the Stilg gets to vote too, and presumably he'll be voting 1 for big Mal and the futurist vision of big copper!
You see, those bloody geeks didn't listen to him last time he expounded on big Mal's dream of big copper as the future solution!
As I wrote last time, central to the Coalition’s policy is the idea that the needs of the few don’t justify the more expensive and slower-to-deploy infrastructure of FTTP for everyone when it’d be quicker to do a FTTN rollout and get at least some improvement sooner for more people. Anyone who needs more speed sooner can pay for it. But will that argument cut through? I thought it would.
He thunk it would. He thought the big copper dream would be the answer, without thinking that some might actually live in real copper world right here and now and are mightily discontented with it. Let alone the poor hapless buggers who end up with HFC and Optus and can't even stream a two minute trailer to their Apple TV without incessant interruptions ...
And he simply can't conceive that there are some people out there who understand that with 4K TVs rolling out right now, and while allowing for the benefits of the H.265 codec, the future is upon us now.
But why, you say, should we care about a few people wanting video, thereby putting television stations in the same jeopardy as newspapers currently find themselves in?
And the answer is that old classic, the unknown unknowns.
The pond can remember all through the 1990s the Stilgherrians and big Mals of the tech world explaining why enough was enough already, and why bulletin boards and modems were state of the art, and the crawl to download email was fine, and why images had to be the size of a thumb nail, and why the world didn't need all this useless data.
And then things exploded and people began uploading the history of the known universe and all that was happening now and worked out ways to mine the data and began skyping and soon enough will be hosting 3-D interactions with people far away, and no doubt there'll be big moves in health and medicine, and soon enough people will want to upload as much as they want to download ...
And yet Stilgherrian and big Mal want to sell the country on the copper already in the ground. Which has naturally led to the geeks taking offence, and big Mal attempting some fancy footwork in defence of copper
But it seems that fans are only seeing sentences like this one from Turnbull’s blog post:
“We have clearly stated NBN Co will be asked to increase download date rates to at least 50 megabits per second across at least 90 per cent of the fixed line footprint by 2019, two terms of Parliament from now.”
Labor’s plan gives them a potential 1 Gbps from the day the fibre is connected, and they don’t seem to be noticing, or caring about, the difference in timing or cost.
Damn right, and damn big Mal and damn the Stilg.
No matter how you cut it, no matter how you dress the sow's ear of copper in some kind of fancy finery, damned it you can turn it into the silk purse of fibre optic connected to the home, with all the potential that offers for the future.
And in that sense the NBN speed site is just pointing out the bleeding obvious, however much it might be alleged, argued or contended it's being done with a rosy glow ...
That's because fibre optic has a rosy glow. Copper has the stench of Victoriana, lacework, what nots and aspidistras about it. Not to mention the occasional green blue patina ...
Big Mal's plan is a cheap-skate half-arsed attempt to gild the Tony Abbott lily. It's understandable as politics, but Stilgherrian's climbing on board with it is completely mystifying ... illogical and in the end unconvincing.
No, belay that remark. Bring the pond some spinach. It's completely reprehensible, and there's a price to pay in attempting to delay the future. As the newspapers have discovered, and as big Mal will discover when he tries to sort out his copper folly ...
Has the pond got an inner west sodden wet ruined copper network standing by for him ...
I have a theory of why the Stilgherrian loves Mal and it all has to do with his upbringing (surprise surprise I hear you say). You see Stilgherrian comes from a place south of Adelaide called Mt Compass which is conservative to its bootstraps, so much so that they think their ex local fed member, one Alexander Downer, can walk on water. Nuff said really. Therefore Stilgherrian is attracted to this type of stupidity because evidence is obviously emotionally based, not scientifically when it comes to political preference for him.
ReplyDeleteCome on, dorothy, surely Chairman Rupe is slipping the Stilg a few under the table....
ReplyDeleteI get the impression that Stil-whatsit is more that slightly up himself. He constantly refers to himself in the 3rd person on his about page and he was into role playing games at Uni (so was I, a bit, and I recognise the type).
ReplyDeleteNow now Ian, Rupe doesn't own Crikey, the Mt Compass theory is much more enticing. That's further south than Willunga, where playwright Andrew Bovell hides amongst the almond blossoms. Apparently it was a dairy farm, and the pond's partner grew up on a dairy farm - a major clue as to the madness that can erupt, along with a desire to get somewhere else
ReplyDeleteI loved the snide assertion that people were too dumb to care about the timing or cost that ended the piece. He's right of course obviously a nation whose fiscal position is the envy of the developed world needs to scrimp and save 10-15 billion dollars over a decade to build a half-assed network that will probably cost as much to maintain as it saved in capital expenditure.
ReplyDeleteIan, I think Chairman Rupe is past slipping anything to anyone!
ReplyDelete