The Occasional Masthead

This is a lovely journal about all sorts of things relating to architecture, art and the built environment. It will go on my daily reading list, and I can highly recommend that you put it on yours.

I stumbled across his article Where Cathedrals Go To Die being a musing on the ship-wrecking beaches of India, and was hooked. Good writing, great photos, and interesting thoughts.

Cheers.

Paul Graham often writes things that are worth reading, and How To Do What You Love is no exception.

The comments he makes regarding the nature of school as training for a certain kind of behaviour, rather than about imparting an education, may initially seem to be wild exaggeration. He is, however, completely correct. The unpalatable and seldom acknowledged truth of schools is that very little of what goes on in them is about education, and a lot to do with training, in the sense that we train dogs and horses.

He argues, fairly convincingly, that ideally we should all aim to do “work” which is enjoyable. This is in general a good thing. His premise breaks down, a little though in that he does not acknowledge or adequately deal with the quandary that there are some jobs that are quite dreadful, inherently. Personally, I suspect these jobs should be made more bearable by doing everything possible to smooth the path for those doing them, and reward them handsomely.

It is of some concern that there is once again talk about a national identity card in Australia. There are two reasons we should take the current talk seriously, and worry about it. Make that three. The third reasons is that Philipp Ruddock, ArchDuke of Hades, knows that right now he is in a position to push it through and make it happen, regardless of any opposition. First reason is that so far his justification for a need for the card boils down to “I want it” - vague hand wavings about identity fraud and protecting us from terrorists.

Of course - and here I commit an act of sedition - terrorists, should they decide to attack here in the land of Oz, are somewhat unlikely to halt their attack because they don’t have valid ID cards. In fact, if the worst happened, then it is probable they would have valid ID cards.

The second, and worse, problem is one that I have had intimate involvement with in my work with several State and Local government instrumentalities: the various databases which would need to be bought together (One card to rule them all, one card to bind them) are extraordinarily dirty. Cleaning the data in order to make the cross references necessary to make the card in any way effective and valid will be an extraordinarily expensive and lengthy project, doomed to failure. This will with absolute certainty leave us with records that are mismatched.

This is a far more sinister risk than it might at first glance appear. Consider which is worse: a government body that deports an Australian citizen because they don’t have sufficient information at hand to recognize her as a citizen, or one that deports an Australian citizen because they have grossly incorrect information?

Be afraid, people, because there’s a better than average chance the card will be foisted upon us.