8 posts tagged “globalization”

The below is from an entry I made at my main blog, based on some very basic maths after reposting a graph from the Historian’s blog.

Just last week I was listening to the radio—one of the foreign-owned stations that seem to populate the FM airwaves (probably Coast)—and the DJ gave one of the less intelligent commentaries about oil prices I had heard. He also referred to ‘gas prices,’ which of course is the incorrect term here where gas refers to gas, not petrol or gasoline.
   Petrol prices in New Zealand rise and fall based on American news—something that is not that relevant when it comes to how much we pay for oil. When there is a rise in the US dollar oil price, but the New Zealand dollar has strengthened over the same period, then that rise should not be felt at the pump as greatly.
   Let’s assume oil prices are at US$120 a barrel and there is no inflation between 2000 and 2008. (Of course, it was less than $120 in 2000 and more than $120 now.)
   In 2000, with the New Zealand dollar at an all-time low against the greenback, we would have had to fork out NZ$300 to get that barrel.
   In 2008, with the New Zealand dollar having gone back to around 1982 levels against the greenback, the equivalent is NZ$154.
   So for a New Zealand company buying oil, it actually costs less.
   However, I am ashamed to note that once you factor in the real prices, we are looking at these figures:

2000 price of crude, US$27·39 (real, not adjusted), equalling NZ$68·48
2008 price of crude, US$134, equalling NZ$171·79

Pump prices—and I know I am ignoring refining costs and a whole bunch of other stuff—are:

2000: NZ$0·97 per litre
2008: NZ$2·14 per litre

This actually means the rate of increase New Zealanders are experiencing is not as bad as the oil prices offshore based on New Zealand dollars, even if our prices are rising more quickly than Europe’s.
   While the Americans, relative to their dollar, are paying four times more, we are paying just under three times.
   Whatever the case, I think it’s worth informing the public—especially on whom we might be able to blame these price rises. And that demand and supply have nothing to do with these high prices, because demand is actually dropping—so we can stop blaming the Americans for their big SUVs and the Red Chinese for buying new cars.
   The targets are most likely the speculators, institutional investors, price fixers, the corporations and the cartels.
   And it seems to lend some weight to isolating a small country from these threats, globalizing where it makes sense—and in other areas, developing a better model in isolation to show the world how things might be done.

The Guardian makes it sound like Ashes to Ashes’ second episode was a ratings’ disaster. The headline: ‘Almost 1m viewers desert Ashes to Ashes’.
   That makes 6·1 million viewers in the UK, which admittedly makes the headline true, but it was obviously written by a glass-half-empty type.
   A positive headline would have been ‘Six million watch Ashes to Ashes’ because, when you think about it, six million is still a lot of people.
   In fact, six million is more than what the series première of Life on Mars managed in 2007.
   The desired effect may be to get more viewers deserting the new series if they feel things are looking down. And that will be a sad indictment on us as gullible people, watching what we are told is popular.
   On Friday, at lunch at the Villa Margarita, I asked a young Briton from Leeds what was popular in her home country.
   She replied that Heroes, Lost, Desperate Housewives and other American shows were the must-sees in the UK, just as they are here thanks to heavy promotion and good timeslots. New Zealand programmers will follow their American network counterparts, too, scheduling without regard to local tastes. There are exceptions, such as TV3 with Outrageous Fortune, but a visiting American would feel quite at home here (providing one waits several weeks to numerous months for the episodes to catch up to where the US is). The best American (or British or domestic) shows that have found limited audiences do not make it, or get stuck in bad timeslots. Americans themselves are annoyed at the dumbing-down of their networks, so what they are being fed is hardly something they have asked for.
   Does this suggest a willing globalization in television programming, shutting down local industry in favour of a commoditized broadcast? Will we have more singing and dancing competition shows and reality crap shoved down our throats?
   Few want more reality junk but it is cheap to make. Ashes to Ashes isn’t cheap, with all of its sets, photography and music usage. When in doubt about a bad decision, just follow the money.
   As if to show the power of a headline, Ashes to Ashes may still lose viewers for episode three, thanks to a weak outing last week. Life on Mars wasn’t always perfect, either, and had some off-weeks. But the producers of the new show know what our expectations are like, and I had hoped that things would remain or build on the high that Matthew Graham gave us in the pilot. Last week, things had settled too much and Ashes to Ashes felt uncomfortable in its own skin, with Gene Hunt having fewer great lines.
   Six million one hundred thousand still means that enough Britons think that Ashes to Ashes is among the best shows in the UK, and let’s hope the third episode gets us back to the high of the first, or even that of Life on Mars. I’d hate for the newspapers to think their headlines actually affect us when in reality their circulations are dropping, and for the producers pushing cheap reality and quiz fare to think they can win against properly scripted shows.

New Zealanders and Americans are divided by a common language, it seems.
   All the reports I read about the US election said that the economy is the number one issue on Americans’ minds. Why, then, did Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton do so well in the Super Tuesday primaries for her party? She has just taken California, I see.
   As a Wal-mart board member, Mrs Clinton was quite happy to be anti-union and see jobs outsourced to Red China. That was her position from 1986 to 1992.
   By the time she was First Lady, her husband presided over an administration that saw this trend continue in full force, satisfying the technocrats. That was her position from 1993 to 2000.
   Today, while Sen. Clinton says Wal-mart no longer represents her beliefs and that she respects the right of workers to unionize, she still took $20,000 in campaign contributions from Wal-mart. That is her position in 2008.
   Add the 2004 joke she made about Mahatma Gandhi being some guy who pumps gas in St Louis, and it’s plain to see that Sen. Clinton is no friend of the American worker. She spent only a year working with a non-profit—certainly her record is not as grand as she would like voters to think.
   Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks along élitist lines and that is the one consistent position she has had throughout her life. Watch any speech she gives: she thinks she’s better than you.
   If it’s about the economy, stupid, to borrow a 1990s phrase, then she would be the last person whom I would associate as being a friend of the American worker.
   Or of any worker.
   Sorry, Democrats, this guy sitting in New Zealand just doesn’t get it.
   Mind you, if she gets her party’s nomination, this sure is ammo for the Republicans to use.

We’ve ended January 2008 here in New Zealand with 10 murders. The government is saying this is an anomaly, but is it?
   Crime has been rising in New Zealand steadily since I have been observing the numbers and for older New Zealanders, the latest figures are a disgust.
   I am not overly surprised, given the rising gap between rich and poor, suggesting a mismanagement of the economy and an absence of jobs, while values and education have suffered at the same time.
   Those older New Zealanders who can remember back to the 1950s remember a country with roughly half the population and 18 convictions for murder between 1951 and 1957.
   I realize actual murders and successful convictions are different, but assuming that there were a couple of murders in this period that didn’t lead to a conviction, then we’re still looking at 20 over a seven-year period from January 1951 to December 1957.
   That’s roughly three per annum. If there’s double the population now, then we should expect statistics to show that there are six per annum for 2008.
   Remember that medical science wasn’t as advanced, so if we adjust for that, then maybe this estimate isn’t actually that far off.
   In this election year, I wouldn’t buy any party line that says things are all right. I wouldn’t even buy policies that talk about tougher sentencing. Because neither of these address the root problem.
   We need policies in New Zealand that say: we will address this rich–poor gap.
   How? Well, how about recognizing what’s going on instead of kowtowing to multinational corporations operating here?
   Since the end of Muldoonism, New Zealand has become the poster boy of the technocracy, doing everything that the economic experts said should work: privatization, free markets, the ending of tariffs.
   Ask yourself, even in the last five years, can you afford more or less of the things you want in your life? I don’t care if you are a student or a wage-earner or even a small business boss. The answer is probably no.
   When will we wake up and realize that these policies have driven a wedge between the rich and poor in a nation that once prided itself on being a fair, just, middle-class country?
   Since Labour sold off so many state assets in the 1980s, something National continued doing in the 1990s, we now have a lot of things in the hands of foreign corporations.
   Now, if these corporations were running these assets more efficiently, logically the government should be able to increase its tax take, which leads to more money for hospitals, schools and social services.
   But the idea of being a private corporation that spreads its activities across different countries is the ability to minimize the tax you pay, by writing some of it off with the operations you have in other places.
   So the opposite has happened. Meanwhile, these corporations have shed staff so the people who used to work there wound up on the dole, and there’s less money to pay out.
   The rich in cahoots with the big companies have done well while everyone else has suffered.
   To make up the shortfall in government coffers, the Labour Government introduced Lotto and basically became the biggest attraction for gamblers. Now we are reporting a rise in calls to gambling helplines.
   The other idea behind liberalizing our markets was so New Zealanders could go and compete globally. But how were we expected to make that leap? Even the richest New Zealanders of the 1980s didn’t survive the decade in good financial shape.
   We need to innovate and create and start new businesses but the support, as any entrepreneur will tell you, is not there.
   Yet New Zealand is a place of great, novel ideas that often stay dormant, unless that Kiwi goes offshore and has a foreign company become interested.
   I have repeated this example many times: if TradeMe was really that successful, it would have bought Fairfax, not the other way around.
   The solution must be to have New Zealanders own New Zealand businesses, so that New Zealanders have jobs and taxes and profits stay in New Zealand.
   This is not about putting the barriers back up. The multinationals have embedded themselves too much into New Zealand.
   We can only hope to create global businesses that do for us what the multinationals have done here. We also need to encourage entrepreneurship at the small- to medium-sized business level so that everyone can have a chance to get his or her idea off the ground, beating the world. We are still blessed with a fairly good internet infrastructure that can become a useful tool for New Zealanders. 
   We need to consider tax policies that help the poor and penalize the sources for the inequity in New Zealand. The next government needs to play, essentially, Robin Hood. It needs to create policies for the middle class of New Zealand and what makes them happy wage-earners or self-employed business people, because that is where the majority of the tax will come from. ‘Teach a man to fish and he will eat for life.’ Time to stop handing the fish out and pretending it was a conjuror’s trick. (It was only cool when Jesus Christ did it with the 5,000, anyway.)
   And while I am a globalist at heart, this economy is too small at this point to allow technocratic policies to have free reign, without someone seeing to the interests of the Kiwis that need the most help. I want to see food banks disappear in five years because everyone has a job.
   An innovative government that might create new businesses itself can be a useful agent in the business community. In the 1970s and 1980s, New Zealand’s dual-fuel natural gas infrastructure is still a dream for most countries. Yet a huge percentage of the nation’s cars ran on natural gas back then, able to fill up at the majority of stations across New Zealand.
   Government participation in a modernized Keynesian model could just work in 2008 and one only needs to look at Singapore and Malaysia for nearby adaptations of the very policies New Zealand had only 30 years ago.
   No one can claim they are paupers, and Malaysia itself did find, in 1997, that the technocratic way of thinking didn’t work for them. Having a strong man as a prime minister worked in its favour as Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad was able to say what he thought of the corporations wreaking havoc on his country’s financial markets.
   And with relatively little corruption in New Zealand, government innovation is not a bad idea, provided these state enterprises do not get overmanned to the levels they were at in years past.
   Remember, Absolut, the people who make the vodka, is a government-owned enterprise. No one seems to urge the Swedish Government to divest for the sake of the technocracy.
   Then, those who might find themselves in similar situations to the 10 murderers won’t suffer from envy, depression or rage.
   In the 1950s, New Zealand had about nine people unemployed. In the 2010s, we should be looking at 18. Full employment is key and the policies we are following now—policies which Labour and National predict they will essentially follow—won’t lead to any change in our rising crime rate or the widening gap between rich and poor, which neither party has even mentioned in the lead-up to the 2008 elections.

[Cross-posted] I’ve had to keep this under wraps till today, but since we’re about three weeks from launch, I now have permission to let you all know of this nice development at Lucire: the launch of a new magazine, Twinpalms Lucire, for a specialist market in Thailand.
   It’s been such a smooth process working with Miguel, who has done a huge load of work on the new print magazine. And I take my hat off to Twinpalms Phuket, which has been very accommodating of our own wishes. The Twinpalms brand appears first for various historical and contractual reasons.
   Richard Machado’s first shoot for Lucire, ‘Papillon’, re-appears on the cover.
   If you look inside the magazine, Miguel is very much a proponent of the Swiss grid and Helvetica is the main typeface. It’s very different in feel to Lucire in other countries, but I still love what he has done. It’s a classy, elegant production.
   There are plenty more articles saved up for the next issue, too. We plan on the title being six-monthly.

Lucire launches in Thailand

International fashion magazine collaborates with Twinpalms Phuket and Asia Design Consultants for latest country

Lucire, the international fashion magazine headquartered in New Zealand, has announced that it has collaborated with the Twinpalms Phuket resort and Asia Design Consultants Ltd. to see an extra print edition in Thailand.
   Twinpalms Lucire launches February 20 with 5,000 copies distributed through the Surin Beach, Phuket resort and its sister properties.
   The magazine has features on fashion, lifestyle and travel, with a lesser emphasis on beauty when compared to Lucire’s other print editions.
   Miguel Kirjon of Asia Design Consultants oversaw the production and editorial mix, in collaboration with Lucire founder and publisher Jack Yan, deputy editor Sylvia Giles and assistants Dominique Whittaker and Ashleigh Berry.
   Many of the Lucire articles had been commissioned by Laura Ming-Wong, the magazine’s editor in New Zealand.
   Mr Yan says, ‘This is another small step in growing the Lucire brand, targeting it at an aspirational audience that says, “I want to be a step ahead.” We’re confident that the Twinpalms audience will love our mixture and socially responsible approach to fashion and lifestyle reporting.
   ‘I’m also delighted that Miguel has created a unique look founded in the Swiss school of design. It’s very different from the home edition and it’s a classy production.’
   In addition to its design direction, Mr Kirjon has commissioned many additional, original articles for the Twinpalms’ side of the magazine.
   Twinpalms Phuket is a member of Small Luxury Hotels of the World, one of the most exclusive collectives of hotel properties internationally. The resort is privately owned, with a private beach club and an enviable location next to Millionaires’ Cove.
   Lucire started as an online fashion magazine in 1997 and is notable for having diversified into print, rather than adopt the print-to-web approach of its competitors. Its Webby-nominated website remains a popular destination for fashion leaders, while the print magazine is regarded as a luxurious and socially responsible publication.

070323 Letter from New Zealand no 6

[Cross-posted] I thought it was the fifth when I made the recording, but it’s actually the sixth. This is a long recording: 15 minutes long, but I think it is more enjoyable than a few of my earlier ones. Click at the left icon to stream.

0.00 Introduction
0.06 My blog-hating phase
0.53 SFist attacks Jennifer Siebel: America does not want transparency
2.40 Earlier today on Good Morning: what if your partner is gay?
4.24 Helen Clark goes to Washington
6.39 The free-trade agreement with the US
7.08 Helen Clark must know that our economy is shaky and visits Arlington National Cemetery
7.57 Irish company outsources editing and layout of its New Zealand publications
8.51 I buy Pam’s orange juice and not the foreign stuff
9.11 Marc Ellis is not the quintessential Kiwi bloke
10.04 Miss Universe New Zealand
10.25 Running into Lorraine Downes: her tips on who should win Miss New Zealand
12.00 Text and vote for Miss Universe New Zealand
14.24 Sponsors of Miss Universe New Zealand

Even I, Mr Globalist, thinks this is weird: I had gone out to Lambton Quay, bought myself a Paris Match, and crossed the road to get in my Renault. It struck me that I really am a Francophile. Anyone seeing it may have thought it odd. I like being odd.