I really like slothphil's later comment on my original post, so I'm highlighting it here.

My ISP doesn't pay the sites I visit on the Internet in much the same way as the bus company doesn't pay the places I visit when I go into town.

I think that's a really useful model, but not a comparison/connection many people are going to naturally make.

Thanks to cthulhu_dream challenging my mental model of the internet in response to this post, I have a few more thoughts.

Analogies are often drawn between the internet and other media. It's a bit like TV, a bit like print, with proper two-way communication added in. It's a whole lot of other things as well, but for most people I imagine their mental model of the internet is strongly based on its resemblance to the preceding media which we grew up with. Only now are we getting adults ... well teenagers, who have grown up with the internet and perhaps model it based on it's own merits.

As mentioned in my previous post with earlier media we pay for our newspaper/TV either directly* or by accepting intrusive advertising. If we stop and think about it we realise that some of that money trickles back to the people who made the content and thus they get paid, but mostly those links of the transaction chain are invisible to us.

So with the internet - or more accurately the World Wide Web. We pay our money to an ISP for access to the internet and lo, www content appears on our screens. Subconsciously our mental model says 'we've paid for all this'. But in reality we haven't, because there isn't a transaction chain from the ISP back to every site we visit.

We see banner ads and other ads on websites and think "this is paid for by the advertiser", when in practice the economics of advertising on the internet are dramatically different to those of advertising in print/radio/TV and most people fail to make money from the ads on their sites. (The differences are elaborated in the article at Activity Press which sparked this.)

I'm not in any way saying that we shouldn't make full (legal) use of everything available to us on the internet. But the next time you have a few spare dollars and find yourself wondering what to spend it on, take a moment to wonder if you've actually paid for everything you've used recently.

*Who remembers that we used to have a TV Licensing Fee in NZ? Now the equivalent funds just come out of the general tax take - I guess it could be considered something GST covers.

John Roughan in the Herald, after getting some insulation put in.

Two days after the Budget the installer returned to put in some final brackets and I said I guessed his business must be booming on the subsidy just announced.

Like hell, he replied. It had completely ruined his cash flow. Of the 28 orders on his books before that Thursday, all but two had cancelled.

The rest were going to wait for the Government's grant next month and most of them, he reckoned, were waiting in vain; the job they wanted would not be nearly enough to qualify.
...
"Eeca", as the authority is already known to my insulation man, prefers firms large enough to meet its Maori employment quota among other criteria he mentioned.

He described an industry thrown into disarray and said he would find someone to say so publicly, but hasn't. Half a dozen insulation firms contacted by the Weekend Herald last week all said they were busy. Two were planning to take on staff.

They were among the 33 approved providers of the government scheme. The authority is taking applications from others but a spokeswoman said it would be September before more may be approved.

Forget about who introduced the scheme, what we're talking about could be the law of unforseen consequences but in all likelihood is the result of someone not thinking or just not caring about all the likely consequences of introducing a new scheme. Like the person who decided a mixer had to be added to the out-pipe of hot water-cylinders to reduce the temperature without considering what this could do to the pressure at the tap/showerhead, this policy was obviously implemented without thinking about what people who were about to get insulation put in would do when they might suddenly get it a $grand cheaper by cancelling their order and waiting a month.

The scheme is a good idea, the implementation is a bit fail. Sure I wouldn't have thought of it but it's not my job to catch these things. I do kind of expect better from the experts who supposedly staff government departments.

~~~
Also from the Herald, the possibilities inherent in adding technology to the national trucking fleet.

If there's a government fee regime that's ripe for an electronic makeover, it's the collection of road user charges from the national diesel truck fleet, totalling about $800 million a year.

The article mentions that persuading the industry establishment to implement the new technology is a major stumbling block. On that note ReadWriteWeb recently had an article about why the 'smart-grid', which could lead to an internet-like burst of innovation around electrical and other utility services, isn't going to be with us any time soon. The earth2tech article which inspired that post also has a bit of a follow up here.

She draws a comparison with real time GIS location data, which telecom companies initially objected was too expensive to deliver and not really needed by consumers. When the killer app of turn-by-turn driving directions was invented, that debate was put to rest and the real time geolocation data infrastructure was born.
...
What's the killer app for smart utility grids? Fehrenbacher says she doesn't know and that's the point - we can't even imagine what kinds of cool and useful applications will be developed on that platform once it's available. The lack of a killer app leads to less support for the building of the platform, though, a catch-22 we can relate to from discussions of our calls to open up aggregate activity data from social networks for analysis.

Fibre to or from the farm - there's another possible example from my special interests :D
~~~

Finally, great little newspaper motto via Busytown - "If you don't want it printed, don't let it happen."

On Sunday Bernard Hickey posted Ten tips to tax NZ out of dire straits in his blog at the NZ Herald. I hope his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this one, because I don't normally I don't find his views too extreme.

Much on the list can be torn apart, although I'm aware that they all represent desperately loved and defended ideologies of the far right. I'm going to take issue with one here.

5. Impose a flat tax on land, as is the case in Hong Kong. This would incentivise investment in capital and business ideas rather than land speculation. It's also much cleaner and cheaper to administer than a capital gains tax on property investment. Farmers and property owners would scream blue murder, but they have made out like bandits for decades.

Firstly, we have one of these already, although it's not strictly speaking flat. It's called 'Rates' and is paid to local government. And frankly farmers already pay much more (by virtue of the areas of their properties) for fewer services than those of us in the city.

I think I get a pretty good deal in town for my $1500/year just between roads, rubbish collection, water, sewerage disposal, without even getting into parks, libraries, public events.... My rural parents pay a lot more for .... of the above; roads I think, maybe water. And sure there's more road per head out there but there's also not much in the way of the other things.

Secondly, and following on from that, some farmers may have 'made out like bandits' (if you believe the main stream media), but I'm positive it's not the majority needed to make a blanket statement like that stick. Especially if you haven't been in dairy over the past few years it has not been all strawberries and cream. (Tangent: from the high of 70 million sheep in 1984 the NZ flock now numbers only 34 million).

And if they are, so what? Someone has to have the money to spend to drive the economy and who better, those who put in the hard hours and the sweat of their brow or the fat cats who take and sell the hard made commodities and skim off the profits?

Thirdly, he's just plain wrong about the flat tax in Hong Kong. Someone was kind enough to point it out in the Herald comments but the Hong Kong property tax is on rental income.

Ultimately though the problem with this is that it strikes deep at the concept of property ownership, which happens to be one of my personal bugbears. A man's home is his castle, except when it's actually owned by his feudal lord to whom he pays a tithe ... see the similarity to Mr Hickey's suggestion?

There is in New Zealand at least the illusion that anyone can aspire to actually own property rather than leasing it from the powers that be. It's a pretty tenuous illusion at times, with all the permissions you have to get to actually build or grow anything on the land you theoretically own. To some extent it's a price you pay for living in a modern society - but that's a different rant. This suggestion would pretty much destroy that illusion - if you want to 'own' the government's land (because it's all the government's land) you pay them for the privilege.

Now if it was actually clear what services you were paying for (as it is, relatively) with rates, it could make more sense. Like road taxes should be spent on roads first and then excess into the general fund (or out, in the case of a shortfall). Like tobacco taxes should go directly to health (actually I believe tobacco should be de-legalised, but again that's a different rant).

Income tax can go wherever it's needed, before some smart-ass asks.

Against a net reduction in research funding in the 2009/10 New Zealand budget was an increase of $190 million over four years (followed by $70 million annually) to what they are calling a Primary Growth Partnership initiative, so in theory to be matched dollar for dollar by industry, to promote innovation in the primary sector. I've taken a strong interest in this because of my rural and on-farm-research history.

Bunch of links mostly from Hon. David Carter, Minister of Agriculture
Initial announcements
David Carter's blogs, one, two
NZ Herald article

Today's speech at Canterbury Employers' Chamber of Commerce Budget Breakfast with more details.

Firstly I'm not prepared to believe in any more of that money than has been allocated in this budgetary year ($30 million) which is divided between:

- $2 million to five sections: pastoral and arable production (fibre, meat, milk, cropping); horticulture; seafood; forestry and wood products; and food processing.
- $15 million in a contestable fund open to any sector to bid for.
- $5 million for a new Centre for Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research, with the rationale that Our emissions profile, made up predominately from ruminant animal emissions, leaves us in a unique situation when compared to other developed nations. It makes sense that New Zealand leads the global effort to develop agricultural emission mitigation technologies.

Tentatively I'll accept that the next two years of funding are feasible, then it's an election and all bets are off.

There are other reasons to doubt that much will come of this. The Minister said today

For 20 years we, as a nation, haven't invested enough in primary sector research and development.
Many of the recent productivity increases we have achieved on-farm are as a result of research done almost 30 years ago.

Looking at how the PGP will work (second link) it's all about business plans. No money for the fundamental research which might lead to a game-changing discovery/product - or might not. If you've already done the hard work and can convince the powers that be that you already have a product that could be sold, then you'll get some money. If you already have a product and want to offload half your development costs to the public purse, you're in.

From my time in the industry I know that the reason we're stuck with 30 year old research is exactly this focus on not funding something unless it already shows enough promise to be marketed. It's really hard to do innovative research under those conditions - real innovation comes from venturing into wild new territory, following leads that may not immediately pan out commercially but which still provide useful information to build on.

Profit driven industry may fail to make a good case for this 'non-commercial' research, but this is the funding gap that government (blue, red, green or plaid) should be looking to fill with it's use of public money (and I'm not just talking about in agriculture here). Don't force our top minds to take their inspirations overseas for funding, or restrict them to what they can cobble together in their garages at the weekend.

So while the money is great, I don't think this approach is going to address the actual problem even though it's been so clearly, if accidentally, identified.

Draft of an article I've written for the next Out of Character about designing the one-off I ran this year, posted for feedback.
( skip if you're not interested in scenario design )

There is a feature titled "The new divide" in yesterdays your weekend (Christchurch Press insert). It takes a look at some of the ways broadband is getting out to New Zealand's largest industry and therefore the one where there is huge potential for productivity improvement - the farmers.

Of course it's not available online (try your local library) but much of the article is talking about the changes in a place called Mangamaire. I found an earlier article from the Manawatu Standard which touches on some of the points.

As an IT worker with a rural background and family* the topic of getting the benefits of the Internet to the farm is automatically of interest. Some quotes from the weekend article to illustrate the necessity:

... had to get online to pay her farm hands and GST. There were the milksolid reports to check, the tanker pick-up schedules to sort, the herd records to update. It's all electronic these days; all part of making New Zealand farming efficient.

... the internet has become a utility, as essential to daily life as your roads, your water, your electricity supply. His wife needed the web for her studies to be a midwife. The farm needed it for the bed and breakfast they ran as a sideline.

...The internet should be making life easier for those outside the city. There are now grat services like Fatso, the DVD rental site, which will post your movies out to you. Not so great, however, if it takes forever to scroll through the selections - "To turn a page to look at what was available, you basically walked out of the room each time, it was that slow,"

I don't believe we as a country should be accepting this connectivity gap. The article points out that a token (my word) 30th of the governments $1.5 billion broadband partnership fund has been set aside to address 'rural' areas. With those same rural areas providing the basis for 60% of our export earnings, even small improvements to their productivity nationwide could make a big difference to all of us. (Even just maybe in the grocery prices.) When I think of how much of National's vote comes from these same farmers it becomes even less understandable.

So, no use waiting for the government and we know Telecom isn't interested in the rural market. Two last quotes from the article to sum it up:

Stuff Telecom and the big boys, they are saying. Time to employ some of that good old backyard Kiwi ingenuity; that make-do lateral thinking which Kiwis are supposed to be so famous for, and get on with it by ourselves.
...
"We've been talking all the time about getting fibre to the farm. But you can really change your thinking by talking instead about fibre from the farm," Newman reckons.

*The same background is a big part of why building clean, low footprint, fast loading sites is so important to me.

Yoinked from nishatalitha's journal into mine because I have no idea where my archived text file of this is. I first encountered it many long years ago, possibly on FIDOnet.

(niennahirilfia you are absolutely not allowed to click on this cut until all your uni stuff is done).

( snip )