gary’s web sofa

I just saw this on Moby’s blog. CNN New Zealand did a vox pop on the streets of the USA asking questions like "where is the Berlin Wall?" and "What religion are Buddhist monks?" and asking them to point out places like Iran and North Korea on the map… It’s very funny and more than a bit scary, but makes you wonder about the information these people are being given about the world around them.

The US government & military are waging war abroad on behalf of their citizens without properly explaining to their people why, and communicating the repercussions (i.e. that nobody likes them or trusts them anymore). It’s often said that you can ask 10 people on the street why Iraq was invaded and 9 of them will say that it was to do with Iraq supporting Al-Qaeda, when in fact a fundamentalist Islam movement like Al-Qaeda would have nothing to do with a very secular regime like Iraq.

Over here every political and military action is scrutinised and dissected in the media on a nightly basis, so we’re pretty much on top of who’s doing what to whom in the world, but this obviously isn’t happening in the US. There’s a possibility that the heavily politicised media in the US (such as Fox News, which has a heavy republican bias) can mislead the populace into electing another leadership with a dangerous foreign policy agenda.

last night was really fun. | moby.com

It’s a fundamental right of workers to protest at mistreatment, and staff at IBM Italy have had to take a €1000 pay cut that they’re not happy about. Pickets normally take place either at the factory gates or somewhere more public. The RSU union have decided to go down the “more public” route.

Marketing execs are seeing Second Life, the leading “virtual reality” world online, as a new way for large corporates, such as Dell, Cisco and IBM to have a “presence”. They spend big money to design, construct and maintain showrooms that people can wander through and virtually examine their wares. Many argue that the volume of people using SL right now isn’t great enough to make the numbers add up, but the companies are seeing this as a long term thing. IBM even use it as a private colaboration tool. Rather than travel to meet face to face, or use teleconfernecing, they’re meeting virtually in a SL boardroom. Cisco are even using it to hold new employee interviews!

The RSU are going to picket the IBM building in SL on the 25th September. They’re giving out strike kits that include avatars with slogans on their t-shirts, and placards. It should be interesting….

From New World Notes, via Boing Boing

Update: John has posted a comment to say that the 25th is just the start of the public campaign. The actual protest will be a flash mob event, at a future date. Sign up at uniglobalunion.org to find out when the flash mob will form.

Repost of a comment I posted here:

Right… I’m a business user of Shannon airport, so forgive me if I have a bias. Lots of people are saying that London is reasonably well served from Shannon by Ryanair, but “London” is a big place, and Ryanair’s main London airport (Stanstead) is actually half way to Scotland. The Gatwick link is a joke. One flight a day means no way to get in and out on the same day.

If you’re going on your summer holidays, and have all day (an hour to get into the city centre, and another 30 minutes to get the tube across town, and then another 30 minutes to get out to Heathrow, at a cost of at least £40 in train fares) to get to Heathrow, then that’s fine, for the rest of us, it’s 4 hours that we’d rather spend at home with the family.

Right now I can get the morning flight into Heathrow and be in town by 11am. I can do nearly a full days work and be back out on the 7:30pm flight. Because Heathrow is such a major airport, industry has grown up around it. A lot of technology companies (like Dell in Bracknell) are on the M4 corridor within a half hour of Heathrow, but outside London. Visiting these guys via Heathrow means I get to eat dinner with my kids. If I have to go via Stanstead I need an extra 2 hours in each direction on the M25. It requires getting up before dawn and not getting home until after 10pm. My other option is a 2 hour drive to Cork to fly out of there, or a 3.5 hour drive to Dublin…..

I’m in London at least a couple of times a month. If I lose a 1/2 day on each trip I lose more than two weeks a year sitting on commuter trains, rental cars and taxis in and around London. I’m just one person, but there are large companies around here who’s entire executive group are over and back to London at least as often as I am. This will cost them serious money. While they won’t (I hope!) pull out of the region because of this, they’ll certainly think of redistributing these higher paying jobs to other locations that are better connected to the real world.

Let’s be honest, the Mid-West is a backwater. Property and pay rates here are cheaper than Dublin, but Poland (which is very well connected to Heathrow by the way) is cheaper still, so the region will turn into a wasteland without some positive discrimination. This is why there are several incentive plans, such as the NDP, to keep industry in the area. The lack of a frequent direct link to the largest hub airport on the continent will lead to a net increase in the cost of doing international business out of the region. This is A Bad Thing. It’s already expensive to operate out of Ireland. Making business people piss away half their day to get here won’t make them think any better of us.

Al Gore may have been a lousy politician, but he knows how to drum up interest in the environment. If only he had been this active Bush-bashing in 2001.

On a related note, if you go and see the movie, aspoke.com will give you a free laptop skin. Bloggers can also get one by linking to the movie and the offer.

There’s an unofficial strike going on at CIE right now. CIE are introducing new rolling stock, and the drivers are demanding “compensation”. Nowhere has anyone said that these new trains/carriages are harder to drive or take any more work to operate, but the drivers want a payoff anyway. The strike is unofficial because the labour court has already told them to get knotted, so the union is staying out of it.

So what they’ve done is virtually shut down all mainline services to the southern half of the country. God help them if this is still the case on friday when half of Limerick and Cork are trying to get to Dublin/Rosslare to get the ferry to Cardiff for the Rugby. There’ll be blood spilt. I’ve got work in Dublin on Thursday & Friday and now I have to get up before dawn to drive up there, twice!

The whole lot of them should be fired! They’ve been told that their claim is without merit by the courts and their union, but they’ve decided to shut down vital infrastructure anyway. Greedy bastards!

The NewsWire has more info…