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really really enjoyed this piece - had to share it. bravo Tony Wright.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/...y-wins-over-all-20180524-p4zh8h.html#comments

He asked to be held as he died, teaching us humanity wins over all

A few years ago I visited the Googleplex - the Silicon Valley campus in California that is home to squadrons of bright kiddies who have taken over our lives, stolen our need to use the memories inside our own heads and who lay claim to mapping the future of the universe.

It was as mindblowing and exciting as it might have been to visit Robert Stephenson’s factory in Britain in the early part of the 19th century as his first passenger steam train rolled down the line.

The design of Google’s buildings and the quiet tap-tapping on notebook computers were less impressive than Stephenson’s shrieking and fire-breathing steam train foundry must have been, but you knew that here, too, were being developed unimaginable means of moving humanity through space and time.

Since that visit to Google, the expanding influence of high-tech has lost a fair coating of its early sparkling promise.

Facebook has turned out to be an invasive personal information-gathering outfit, ripe for the picking by potentially malevolent forces, which - irony of irony - helped lever Donald Trump into the White House.


Google and Facebook together have made off with the vast share of the news media’s income, and have delivered not much in the way of worthwhile truth-telling in return.

Amazon and its worker-free, robot-heavy warehouses are threatening the existence of streetbound retailers everywhere.

If you happened to find yourself early this week watching on ABC a TV documentary called Secrets of Silicon Valley: The Disruptors, you likely were left shuddering about where the technology revolution might be taking us all. (The second episode will screen on Tuesday, May 29, at 9.30pm, or you can catch up any time on iView, thanks to technological innovation itself.)

The documentary looks behind the sheen of Silicon Valley and discovers a community of ethics-free young billionaires who think it’s a splendid thing to kill off existing industries and replace them with the shock of the new. And damn the consequences.

Uber undermines the taxi industry, and that’s a good thing - until the presenter finds Uber drivers in India committing suicide because they’ve been led into debt by unfulfilled promises. Airbnb is another great “sharing” innovation, but in places like Barcelona, furious residents can no longer find apartments to live in because Airbnb landlords have locked up the rental stock for tourists.

Disruption, it’s called, and we’re barely at the beginning.

The documentary finds a new young master of artificial intelligence who demonstrates how simple it is to use technology to replace even doctors, and predicts massive human job losses everywhere in the next four or five years. A truck speeds along a highway ... and no one’s driving it.

A former executive of Facebook retreats to a remote forest, builds a teepee and practises shooting his semi-automatic, convinced by what he saw on the inside that the disruptors will destroy democracy and usher in an era of social chaos.

What if all this really means we are rushing towards a future where a few super-billionaires control our destiny and most of the world’s population have no jobs?

Disruption is progress, shrugs a dead-eyed young fixer who organises lakes of investment money for start-ups.

Disruption, however, has always been with us. And it hasn’t always meant progress.

The greatest disruption of the 20th century was World War II. Tens of millions of lives were engulfed in deadly change.

Consider the young men enslaved in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps on the Thai-Burma railway. They could never have imagined such a fate, nor what their future might hold.

And yet they clung to something that today’s arrogant young masters of the universe might not recognise.

Humanity.

As one of those who survived, John Carrick, neared the end of his long life some days ago, he had a special request of his three daughters.

He asked them to hold him while he died.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull told the story in parliament this week, biting his lip to continue.

Sir John Carrick, who died on May 18 aged 99, was a senator from 1971 to 1987 and a Liberal eminence for all those years and beyond.

The broken years of his youth in Changi Japanese POW camp and on the slave railway had taught him more than artificial intelligence will ever know.

“In those prison camps the prisoners of war, deprived of all dignity, so far from their families and those they loved at home, had a pact between them that no one would die alone,” Turnbull said.

“And so those brave men who had endured so much were held until they died. And so Sir John Carrick died in the arms of those he loved.”

In a world disrupted beyond imagination, humanity won.

Carrick came home to devote his postwar life to politics and the Liberal Party, just as another Thai-Burma railway survivor, Tom Uren, chose to serve the Labor Party and the peace movement.

Carrick and Uren, who both eschewed hatred, believed education was the hope of individuals and that strengthening democratic political systems was the hope of nations.

“It's not people who create the savagery,” Carrick said, “but the systems of government … Human nature depends upon the political and social environment in which it finds itself.”

We might hope for leaders to champion such a philosophy of hope as a new, enormously powerful force sweeps towards us, its commanders chanting that disruption is good while failing to take into account the human cost.
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Got another mates Bux end of the month, big Demon supporter

His attire just arrived

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DERO said:
I actually had someone call me about an hour ago to see if it was us. Not my boys, thankfully. I reckon I could work out who the guys are though.

Very lucky that they only have minor injuries because it is not a requirement to wear a harness in a swing stage (god only knows why). They could have fallen out. I won't let any of my guys work in one unless they are attached.
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One of yours here, DERO? :p

 
So run the facebook page for a Dance Eisteddfod, I'm cultured so what, and the entries closed in late March.

However the amount of mums messaging the page going "I know entries are closed and you said its final but can you please let me precious little snowflake compete so they don't know Mummy forgot to put them in" is amazing.

Honestly I get that time gets away and all that and people genuinely forget things but I just can't fathom how many people expect the rules to be broken for them and get outright abusive when I tell them no.
 
Sounds like fun.
 
boncer34 said:
So run the facebook page for a Dance Eisteddfod, I'm cultured so what, and the entries closed in late March.

However the amount of mums messaging the page going "I know entries are closed and you said its final but can you please let me precious little snowflake compete so they don't know Mummy forgot to put them in" is amazing.

Honestly I get that time gets away and all that and people genuinely forget things but I just can't fathom how many people expect the rules to be broken for them and get outright abusive when I tell them no.
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The more my kids get involved in extracurricular activities, the more I'm amazed at how completely unorganised many parents are.

What you're going through, especially for an event of that scale, in not surprising at all.

You know the parents blame you when they tell their child they can't compete, don't you? It's always someone elses fault.
 
Pweter said:
The more my kids get involved in extracurricular activities, the more I'm amazed at how completely unorganised many parents are.

What you're going through, especially for an event of that scale, in not surprising at all.

You know the parents blame you when they tell their child they can't compete, don't you? It's always someone elses fault.
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Yeah I know its 100% my fault in the parents eyes.

I had one parent tell me she was sorry but since her child has been practising for 10 months in preparation I just had to let her in.

Uh no, no I don't.
 
boncer34 said:
Yeah I know its 100% my fault in the parents eyes.

I had one parent tell me she was sorry but since her child has been practising for 10 months in preparation I just had to let her in.

Uh no, no I don't.
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I think the parents will know they screwed up but they sure as hell won't tell their kids that
 

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boncer34 said:
Yeah I know its 100% my fault in the parents eyes.

I had one parent tell me she was sorry but since her child has been practising for 10 months in preparation I just had to let her in.

Uh no, no I don't.
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Surely you'd be enjoying those delicious melts.

'I'm really sorry but if I make an exception for your child then I have to make an exception for every child whose parent doesn't care enough about them to pay attention to these things'.
 
Beerfish said:
Surely you'd be enjoying those delicious melts.

'I'm really sorry but if I make an exception for your child then I have to make an exception for every child whose parent doesn't care enough about them to pay attention to these things'.
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Yeah that's what I want to say but I have to stop myself.
 


he is whats wrong with our media - and football media in general

look, I admire where hes gone and his ambition and the way he wore the footy show sacking.. but

he is the exact reason we are in trouble, just a bloody minded bloke trying to break stories and get them out first no matter the cost or the collateral damage... no matter if its even right or wrong! just wanted to get famous and get there fast, before ethics or humanity.

this is new journalism in a nutshell.
 
Howard Moon said:


he is whats wrong with our media - and football media in general

look, I admire where hes gone and his ambition and the way he wore the footy show sacking.. but

he is the exact reason we are in trouble, just a bloody minded bloke trying to break stories and get them out first no matter the cost or the collateral damage... no matter if its even right or wrong! just wanted to get famous and get there fast, before ethics or humanity.

this is new journalism in a nutshell.
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True. Its also a product of society.

We reward those who are first and not necassarily the most ethical or correct.
We are impaitient most of the time and all we do is consume and damn the consquences of how, where from and how much we consume.

Maybe a bit of chicken and egg but i think its more a reflection of where we are at overall rather than just a journalism issue.
 
Mercurial89 said:
True. Its also a product of society.

We reward those who are first and not necassarily the most ethical or correct.
We are impaitient most of the time and all we do is consume and damn the consquences of how, where from and how much we consume.

Maybe a bit of chicken and egg but i think its more a reflection of where we are at overall rather than just a journalism issue.
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I wonder if social media wasn't a thing , would the instant me first news breaker be so prevalent?
 
Makes me think of The Staircase. Watching the courtroom footage and then watching CourtTV's spin where they basically had already decided he was guilty because that would rate higher and presented everything in that light to the point they were actually making stuff up. And this was in the early 00's before social media was a thing. Then after he's spent 8 years in jail for a crime he probably didn't commit they get all the ratings from that story and his fight for justice. They don't give a rat's tossbag about being right.
 
the other thing that made me wonder...

Hutchy openly said he stood on many toes and upset many existing journos on his way through - as a cadet at the HUN he really annoyed his existing colleagues - Sheahan was one of them.

then years later when he was news hound on the footy show I notice Sam Newman gave him no credit, infract he was openly derisive to him, mocked him, belittled him..

Im pretty sure Sam was flat broke way back when, then began writing for the paper in an interview style thing, and he is very tight with shehan and a few others in the paper game.

Part of me wonders if Sam who is supposedly very loyal to his friends, was giving Hutchy the big 2 finger job and pretty much saying you never paid your dues kid, you upset my mates, so im not going to respect you.
 
The fact that a journo decided to interview another journo about his life is everything you need to know about these people.

It's all about them, sport is second.
 
Howard Moon said:
and the other big irony - open mike is billed as the show that talks to footballs biggest stars..

and here we have a journo being interviewed - just shows how its turned, this whole cult of personality or whatever it is - the news bringer is now the news maker, the star
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Should have read this before I posted.

My post above is now looked at as lazy writing without doing my homework. I am no better than Hutchy.

i will go now, sorry everyone
 
It's really an insult to all the past greats of the game that should be getting a call up to this show. It's become a joke.
 
Beerfish said:
It's really an insult to all the past greats of the game that should be getting a call up to this show. It's become a joke.
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in fairness I think a lot knock it back - he often says at the end of interviews.. well, mate finally got you, it took many years...

Still - I couldn't see TD knocking it back, or Tim Watson, so why haven't they had a go!! in fact he and Tim work together on radio.
 
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