Street View dilemmas

Google Maps have released Street View and caused quite a flurry in the world of citizen's rights and privacy. As we all leapt online to look at our homes and see just how well the Google camera cars performed, a general kerfuffle of anxiety erupted.
There is a lot of concern among some people about vulnerability to crooks "casing" their joints from afar, checking entrances and exits. Indeed, if one adds the satellite imagery to the street view, one does get a pretty comprehensive look at properties. A boon for the real estate trade. A boon for people trying to sell roofing, too, perhaps. But the general paranoia is a bit much, I think. The photos are old. They are not live. Car number plates and people's faces have been cleverly blurred. This is not spying. It is not Big Brother.
It is, however, a comprehensive mapping of the world. And it is a joy for squizzy people - for those who think they can tell a lot about a person by the house in which they live. I, as you can see, am decidedly secretive and inscrutable.

Things which fascinated me about this development were, firstly, the revelation (which somehow I have missed these last years) that Google Maps were in fact developed in Australia by Google's Sydney team.

Secondly, despite my unfortunate brush with Google guards when I went to pay homage to its home in Silicon Valley, my experience here in making contact with the media office to find out about Street View was unbelievably prompt and friendly and helpful.

I was a bit peeved, I have to say, when responses sought to the new facility were met with legal caution, criticisms of Australian privacy laws and of Google - and the call for reform of said privacy laws. It sort of took the wind out of my own sails - and demonstrates howone's own opinions so often end up buried under the informational process known as news-gathering.

The China problem escalates

I feel another burst of China-bashing coming on.
It has been building up for a week along with the reports of China providing the world with toys covered in lead-laced paint. Toxic Thomas the Tank Engine? This could be seen to imply a whole generation of brain-damaged boys.

For someone who has always loved the Chinese people, this growing saga of perfidy from China is as heartbreaking as it is enraging.

What are they thinking? Is it greed or expediency that has an era of Chinese companies sending poisons to the world?
It certainly is not stupidity. The Chinese are not stupid. Therefor it is the most wicked and duplicitous greed which is rampant in modern China - industries all over the country substituting cheap toxins for the proper ingredients in the goods they purport to manufacture.
Shame, China, shame!!

This phenomenon is out of control. It is ongoing, consciously masked by hierarchies of of Chinese businessmen as they pocket the profits.
The New York Times reported vividly on the obfuscations placed in front of the US Food & Drug Administration as it sought to find the source of the diethylene glycol which has been poisoning children in fever medicines - killing children, for heaven's sake!
The Chinese subsituted antifreeze for glycerine.

I have written about this before, of course.
I reiterate because of the new crisis with lead paints on children's toys. Yes, again the victims are children.
Thomas the Tank Engine has been painted lead red. Millions of Thomas the Tank Engines!! Toys children often put into their mouths. Everyone has known for decades that paint with lead content is ferociously dangerous to children. Don't tell me the Chinese never caught up on the news.

Of course the Western passion for economic rationalism bears responsibility here, too - and the West should not be off the hook just because China has been the culprit.

Bottom line is that it is all about outsourcing.
Everything is made in China these days - cheap products made, supposedly, to the specifications of the ordering companies.
Cheap goods from China are the secret to much wealth among Western companies, just as they are creating new wealth for Chinese companies.

It could be a comfortable arrangement but the Chinese are cheating. They are in a hurry to catch up with Western affluence and any short-cut will do.

Who knows what other short-cuts are being taken?
These crimes may be just the tip of an iceberg of manufacturing corruption.
Already, with the Chinese melamine which has been used in lethal animal food and the diethylene glycol used cough medicines and toothpaste are all over the world as bulk chemicals ready to be used for who knows what!

The Chinese have created a consumer mine field in the West and we must all now beware. We must see the words "Made in China" as an alarm, a danger signal. For our own wellbeing, we must not buy Chinese goods. And we must keep on and on and on making a fuss until we can force our own corporations to cancel orders and stand up for the West.
Even if it means we have to pay more for things.

The pity of progress

They are an endangered species - facing extinction. It seems so perverse. They do no harm, these lakeside shacks. And yet, bureacracy has ruled that they may not stay. Those who holiday in them have been given lifetime occupancy - but one which curtails the tradition of handing down. The movement is to reclaim foreshores on lakes and rivers where families of the less wealthy have always holidayed in their simple, much-loved shacks. Shacks are an official "eyesore".
On Lake Alexandrina at the tiny town of Milang, there is this community of lovingly-kept shacks, primitive little constructions occupied for generation after generation, where fathers fish and children learn water skills and explore wetlands. This community has fought the demolition edict and begged for a heritage listing, for it knows it represents a history of holidays and cultural mores. Officialdom has denied this request. The shacks are doomed.


Milang is not a tourism mecca. It is a fairly obscure little township - one pub, a pizza place, a general store, a campground... It sports a small wetland trail, dry as a bone now in the drought, a train exhibit and a little cafe-cum-information centre. It is a darling town with a history of lake activities and some historic buildings. But it is a bit off the beaten track. Tourists trickle through and are enchanted by the time-warp, particularly by the shacks.

The irony is that the bureacracy which hates the shacks is the very one which will approve the developers. Are large condos more beautiful than these colourful, characterful little shacks? Ye gods, no! They are the new ugly. The greedy new ugly. The eyesore and the bane.
Is there some rule that says that the rich should enjoy water views and the working class should not?
Apparently there is.
I abhor it.
The shacks of Milang represent all that is joyous in family holidays, in childhood pleasures, in the simple things of life. And in an egalitarian culture.
This is not jet ski sound-and-water-pollution territory. Nor powerboats and mindless watersports. It is sailboats, canoes and fishing - the gentle water pursuits. It is a haven of black swans, pelicans, ibis...

Destroying this little world is nothing less than a government crime against family life!