The politicians we deserve

The irony is strong in this one. Quite apart from the prospect of talking about "Colin Craig's Conservative Party" ("CCCP" seems an eerily appropriate acronym, for this instinctively statist social-conservative), there's the fact that he's breaking the law in order to campaign for tougher sentences.

This story should be funny. It's certainly embraced as funny by the big New Zealand bloggers.

But for me, the humour is overshadowed by sadness. Colin Craig sums up everything that is wrong with New Zealand. He's "a businessman" who made his money, not by making anything or providing any useful service (like a taxi driver or a hairdresser), but by renting apartments - in other words, by owning land and taxing people who do earn an honest living for the use of it. He's insular (proud of the fact that he never travels) and has no idea of what he really wants (his party platform is self-evidently incoherent). And he honestly believes, simultaneously, that he's better than the great rabble who aren't millionaires, and just as good as people who have comprehensively beaten him whenever they've contested.

On the back of these qualifications, this moron runs for office and sulks when he loses.

How will New Zealand ever drag itself into the modern world, if this is the calibre of our grassroots activism?

Mugged

In the face of extreme provocation from the media, I've refrained from venting my opinions on the astonishing implosion of western civilisation as it's unfolded, over the past month, in the USA, Europe and the UK. There's no shortage of people closer to the action who are doing quite enough commentating for all of us.

But just so's you know it's not just you...

Last Wedneday was the bondholders' meeting, at our local racecourse, for those who'd lent money to Blue Star Print Group.

(A brief diversion here: Auckland has several racecourses. Where I used to work, in Epsom, was just down the road from a racecourse. Where I now live, in Ellerslie, is just round the corner from a racecourse. Gambling is big. Sadly we don't have British-style betting shops; even more sadly, we do have the tallest freestanding building in the southern hemisphere, and it belongs to a casino.)

And since it was just round the corner, I thought I'd go along and cast our vote in person.

My first impression was - familiarity. As a magazine editor in the 1990s, I attended scores of press conferences by well-heeled consultancy firms, and those events looked very much like this. I saw a phalanx of spotless business suits. The occupants, none aged over 35, clustered in groups based on what was clearly, among themselves, a well established pecking order. With my years of journalistic training, it was the work of moments to elbow my way through the crowd to the coffee dispenser.

This crowd, however, was not what I expected to see. There had been much talk of "mum and dad investors", and my mental image had anticipated that the suits, and the bodies inside them, would be rather more worn. Clearly, these were accountants - either here as representatives of the auditors or the consultants, or simply drawn to the smell of blood in the water.

Ah, there they were - beyond this antechamber in the main conference room. A scattering of middle-aged, middle-class people, all smartly dressed. I took a moment to wonder why they troubled to dress up in order to be robbed. Must be a colonial thing. I sat down next to a red-faced gentleman in his 50s, who looked fit for a bit of barracking, and waited for the entertainment. After all, I was paying for it.

Proceedings kicked off with an opening statement from the referee - sorry, chairman - who invited some preliminary questions from the floor. Of these, the only controversial one was "will you tell us how many proxy votes you're holding?", which he twice refused to do. Looking back, we should have pressed him on that. He was, he explained, on solid legal ground - but when you're asking people to trust you, surely it's no time to hide behind legalities. He added that he didn't want to prejudice our votes, then went on to introduce a series of presentations plainly designed for no other purpose.

The presentations were slick and, up to a point, persuasive. They pointed to a glowing future for the company, if we would just help them over this little temporary difficulty. But what struck me was that they didn't really seem to be aimed at us. We, the bondholders, still wouldn't get our money back even if this rosy future came to pass. There was a clause specifying, in so many words, that even if the company was sold for its weight in uncut diamonds we still wouldn't get more than about half our money back: the shareholders would keep it.

A few people explored this clause in their questions, but it didn't get much attention, because everything we heard was designed to massage our expectations into a very narrow range - the range in which we would get about half our money back. The chairman said that he'd opposed the clause, but negotiations had been bitter and bloody and in it stayed. (So why would the shareholders fight for a clause that would not be triggered under any plausible scenario? - is just one of the questions that didn't occur to me until some time later.)

For the most part, questions and answers were predictable. Would management and board be taking pay cuts? (No.) Is this really your best offer? (Yes.) Will the banks really call in the receivers if we turn you down? (Yes.) There was a surprising lack of passion, but I was cheered by much talk - and applause - for "voting on principle". Surely, I thought, they can't muster 75% agreement from this crowd unless the proposition includes lynching the shareholders. (It didn't.)

After a couple of hours of this, the crowd dispersed more or less peacefully, and I went home to await the announcement of receivership.

Instead, about 2.30 in the afternoon, I saw the news that the offer had been approved.

I was stunned. I would suspect dirty work in the counting, but that was the job of those nice accountants, and surely if they were going to jeopardise their good name for a quick buck, they'd take it from someone who was more solvent than this? Surely...

Still, the message went out from that meeting loud and clear to the New Zealand exchange: "We small-time bondholders know our place, and will gratefully accept whatever crumbs our betters deign to throw us. There may be such a thing as an offer that is too unfair or treats us with too much contempt, but you haven't managed it yet. Try harder next time."

So there you go. If ever you're tempted to lend money to a New Zealand company, don't. You might as well take it to the races.

Financial analysis

We got a nice chunky package in the mail yesterday.

I was quite excited. After all, nobody takes the trouble to send a chunky package for bad news, do they? A single sheet of paper - that's a rejection letter. An acceptance contains all kinds of inserts - contract, conditions, instructions for your first day, occasionally even a complete employee handbook. A bulky package must be good, right?

Turns out, not so much.

The package is from Blue Star, a troubled printing company in which we invested some money a few years ago. (Mind you, I don't recall anyone using the word "troubled" back then.) We bought bonds. Now - stripped to its essentials - the company wants us to trade in those bonds for new ones that will be worth considerably less. If we don't, they threaten without much ceremony, they'll go out of business and we'll get nothing.

Well, first thing to note is that times evidently aren't so hard that they can't afford to put together a 150-page, glossy, full-colour prospectus for these new and improved bonds. Mind you, it's a printing company, they probably got a good deal on that.

But something stinks about this offer. How can a company renege on its debts, and continue trading? Surely that's the definition of 'insolvent'. If they offered to renegotiate the debt, that's one thing - but this isn't negotiation, this is blackmail.

See, while we bondholders are being asked to take a scalping to the tune of at least half of our investment (and absolutely no guarantee that it won't yet be 100% - in fact, the de-ranking of our debt makes that even more likely), the shareholders aren't being asked to give up squat. On the contrary: one shareholder in particular, Champ Funds, is offering a loan of $15 million - at an interest rate way higher than we've been offered - in return for getting higher ranking among the company's creditors.

Seems to me, that's not the sort of terms you would offer if you had much faith in the company's future.

I was taught, way back in economics class, that it's shareholders who take the risks - when the company thrives, they get the profits, and when it sinks, they take the hit. Bondholders get a smaller return for a smaller risk. But that's not what's happening here. We, the bondholders, are being asked to bail out the shareholders. (Well, one shareholder in particular, but others will obviously get a renewed window of opportunity to dump shares that would be worthless if the company folds immediately.)

The company's own 'independent advisor' - KPMG - endorses the offer in the weakest possible terms. I paraphrase, but the gist of it is: "on the strength of the information we've been given, we can't be sure that this is a complete ripoff, so we don't quite have sufficient grounds to prevent it from being put".

I say the hell with it. If the company is insolvent, let it fold now. If it isn't insolvent, then it can come up with a better offer than this. Worst case, I'm willing to lose a few grand to uphold the principle that shareholders don't get to just take money from small investors.

It may seem irrational to choose nothing over something, but if the price of 'something' is that your economy is to be run by bandits - I'll take a big ol' handful of nothing, thanks.

Microsoft: digging holes since 1997

For a while there, I was almost starting to like Internet Explorer.

When my bosses told me to "slick up" our website, with scrolling headlines and graduated tints and rounded corners and shadows and all that tired old tat, I rubbed my metaphorical hands gleefully and settled down to learn the very latest web languages (by which I mean, HTML 5 and CSS 3). That didn't take long. But then, as I'd expected, the hard part began: learning how to make these gimmicks work in each type of browser.

I'll spare you the ins and outs of that - the stylesheet is kinda messy, and at almost 600 lines it's about three times as long as it has any business to be, but it works. (It's even technically valid, at least according to w3.org.)

When I handed my designs over to my bosses for feedback, they loved them. The pages, though I say so myself, look pretty cool when viewed on PC, Mac, tablet or notebook. For good measure I even checked them on my Nintendo DS. Lovely. My only negative feedback came from - what else - Internet Explorer 9.

But how? I've got IE9 myself. The same version, on the same platform, looking at the same pages - yet the results are completely different. (For instance: my version of IE9 has no problem with supporting display:table-cell, whereas yours evidently thinks it's the work of the devil.) What goes on?

It took me a whole afternoon to work out the answer to that.

Microsoft, rot their vile souls, have built "handy" features into Internet Explorer called "browser mode" and "document mode". Which means that the same browser can apply completely different sets of rules to interpret the same code.

On paper, like most of MS's output, it's not a bad idea. In practice, also like most of MS's output, the implementation is awful beyond description. See, the thing is: there's no way to control which settings someone else's browser will apply.

Oh, in theory there is. There's a tag you can put in your page header to tell it "This page is meant to be rendered in IE 9". That's annoying enough in itself - why would a browser need to be told not to pretend it's something else? And obviously it doesn't work if the client isn't using IE 9. But what's really winding me up, right now, is that it still won't work even if they bloody are using bloody IE9.

For a partial explanation, look at this unholy monstrosity. But even that is only a small part of the horror. See, while the page author has some minimal control over the "document mode", they have no control at all over the "browser mode", which overlaps with and partly overrules the "document mode". The browser user sets that at installation time - usually without even realising what they're doing, because it's disguised as a question about "how would you like to view the web?". And if you've downloaded the page in "IE7" mode, and then tried to apply "IE9" layout to it, the result is an ungodly hybrid that would make Doctor Moreau blench.

To add insult to injury, the mode that sometimes gets applied without realising it is "IE7". So I have to hack the design to work in IE7, despite the fact that nobody in the entire world actually uses IE bloody 7. (Well, okay. To be strictly accurate, according to our website logs, about 10% of IE users do - although I'm guessing most of those are really using later versions that are just pretending to be IE7.)

What people do still use, in their droves, is IE6, which is an entirely different pain in the fundament.

So now I'm having to insert four, count them, four separate stylesheets - for IE6, IE7, IE8 and (every other browser including IE9). And just hoping to goodness that IE10 works acceptably with the IE9 design.

Keynes, famously, is supposed to have argued that in times of recession, it would be worthwhile to pay the unemployed to dig holes only to fill them in again. That's about how useful I've been feeling this week.

Poisoning the cloud

A lot of Europeans seem to have got their knickers in a twist over Microsoft's plain speaking on data protection. Stripped to its essentials, the CEO of Microsoft UK said that Microsoft doesn't do data protection as required by EU law, because US law explicitly forbids it.

I can see why this causes some consternation, but legally it seems quite straightforward to me. Microsoft, by its own account, can't provide a "safe harbor" for personal data on European citizens. Therefore, any European company that tries to store such data in a Microsoft-provided "cloud" service is opening itself to legal action from its European customers (and/or European governments, prosecutors or regulators, depending on the individual country's law). Those companies, in turn, might sue Microsoft for misrepresenting its service (before last week, at least), and they and Microsoft might sue the aforementioned governments and regulators for losses arising from negligence in applying their laws.

All of which could get messy, sure, but it's hardly the gutters-running-red-with-the-blood-of-the-aristocracy.

The interesting question is, why has Microsoft gone out of its way to declare itself incompetent to serve European data storage?

Simple answer: it doesn't want the business. Much better for Microsoft if people don't store data in clouds, but instead spend tens of thousands of dollars on licenses for SQL Server, and training on how to administer it. That's where the profit is.

Of course, in poisoning its own cloud, MS has also poisoned Google's - and every other US company, for that matter, but Google is the one it cares about. And to Google, the cloud isn't a low-margin fringe activity - it's a whole business model.

So what does Google have to say on this story? Not a word, as far as I can tell. Google is just waiting for the whole thing to blow over.

I wonder if a European, at this point, can take out an injunction to prevent companies she does business with from storing their data outside European jurisdiction? Seems to me that the prospect of a jail term for contempt of court would give CEOs more pause than the distant threat of a corporate fine.

Just something for you Europeans to mull over.

What the CIA learned from Trotsky

Good news, sort of, from Syria: at least one person is not in danger.

For a while now, the BBC's line on Syria has been - ambivalent. About a month ago, I heard a very interesting 'From Our Own Correspondent' slot about how the government's brutal repression of protestors wasn't quite as one-sided as most news made it out to be. Long story short: there was plausible evidence that the unarmed protesters were, in fact, fighting back quite violently, and (at the time of that report) more than 50 Syrian security force personnel had been killed.

As compared with several hundred civilian casualties, that may not sound like all that many - but it does suggest that the Syrian government may have a genuine terrorist problem on its hands. Not that the Syrian government is justified, but there is a case to answer

He also pointed out how effective the Syrian opposition had been at taking videos and leaking them onto the internet - a process that takes organisation and planning on an impressive scale. We have solid evidence that the rebels have access to readily concealable cameras, in numbers large enough for many to be present at a single event; and to internationally-operable satellite phone SIM cards. These are, I'm reliably informed, not things that you can just walk into any Vodafone shop in Syria and buy for yourself.

Now, it's easy to characterise the BBC's Mid-East reporting as biased (and here is one self-appointed media watchdog doing just that). But it's not clear why such bias should inspire it to take sides in the Syrian business, nor why there were no comparable doubts expressed about Egypt or Tunisia or Libya.

I'm reminded of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine. At the time, I was lucky enough to count among my friends both an American (whose wife had worked in Ukraine) and a Russian. The American regaled me with stories of vote-rigging by the Ukrainian government, while the Russian told me about the Americans who gave out free smartphones and orange shirts to favoured political groups. It was an interesting time.

Now there's this report, which shows that at least one of the causes célèbres of the anti-Syrian-government lobby is a deliberate, systematic fake, created by - an American.

Of course, it's possible that these Americans are all just private citizens exercising their rights to free speech, using money provided by anonymous private-sector donors. And it's possible that "Just Journalism" is a nonpartisan group of citizens with a love of Pure Truth and no financial connection to any government. And it's possible that I'm a brain in a jar.

Conclusive proof that I'm not Elect

The more I read about the Rapture, the dumber it gets.

We all know by now that the latest prediction, by some engineer-turned-numerologist, didn't happen - thus bearing out the predictions of the great majority of both Christians and non-Christians alike. But the last I heard of the prediction itself was that it set not only the date, but the precise time of the event: 6:00 p.m., wherever you happened to be.

Thus it would strike Tonga first, then roll westward across New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Asia, Europe, and finally sweep across America and Hawaii, ending up in Samoa 24 hours after it began.

I'm not clear whether it was supposed to be guided by 'official' time (so that whole timezones would be struck at once), or real astronomical time, so that it would roll steadily westwards at constant rate of approximately 1000mph (at the equator). If official time, then I wonder how long it would take for governments in all points west of New Zealand to hastily amend their own timezones? If astronomical time, then why would it begin at the International Date Line? - I would have pegged Jerusalem as the obvious starting point.

This is what happens when engineers get hold of holy scripture. They (we) are ferociously literal-minded people (Osama bin Laden was educated first as an engineer, before the CIA trained him to be a terrorist).

There's something about a certain type of religious fantasy that appeals to people who believe in "working things out". Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic bilgewater, describes himself as "... raised by a crossword-puzzling, poetic father and an anagramming, word-loving, Latin-knowing, grammarian Mother".

When you look at a crossword, you can be reasonably sure that there is a solution. And when you look at the world as something designed by a higher intelligence, it's very tempting to see it in the same terms - as a puzzle, with clues inserted for those with eyes to see. And if you get your predictions wrong, that's just like getting a 'x' from God - it doesn't mean your whole approach is flawed, just that you've made a mistake somewhere.

For people who think like this, the idea that there are no clues, there is no plan, there is nothing to be worked out - strikes at the heart of their belief.