Holding people to account

I've recently been thinking of the concept of patronage and satire. The Romans had it right; we should have a crowd of satirists around that we can hire to make fun of individuals in cartoon, verse, or in some other form. It should be their job to make fun of people, they should compete to do it best. My old flatmate Stephen Jenkins introduced me to Catullus a long time ago, he certainly had a way with words. I'm sure a Web 2.0 version of this system would be a hit :-)

There has been a general culture of shirking of responsibility in New Zealand over the past years; "I didn't know", "I don't remember that conversation", and other weak responses are in use from the top of society to the bottom. They are not excuses.

Those at the bottom of society are pretty well held to account for their actions, except when excused on the grounds that society made them do it. I can never see this as an excuse; mitigation for small acts perhaps but we of free will and always make decisions and we should have to live with the consequence of those decisions.

I am more annoyed to see the lack of accountability at the top end of our society. Our figureheads should be more accountable than the average bean, but it seems our politicians (HC, DBP, Trev), bureaucrats (Mr Logan) and some of our business people (Fay/Richwhite) are getting away with a continuous series of responses that would be ignored or ridiculed if any person in the street said them.

I'm thinking that the best way to hold these powerful and sometimes untouchable people to account is to make fun of them. It holds them in the public eye where they feel most uncomfortable, shows our contempt, and is amusing to boot. I still remember the foldup Muldoon poster my brother had from the Christchurch Magic Shop; I don't see anything of that ilk any more. Except perhaps the self-produced Helen Clark poster...

Anyway, who's with me on increasing the satirical content in New Zealand? It should be a NCEA-endorsed career choice...

1place respond

Martin from 1place has replied to me personally with an apology although little explanation, but subsequently posted a good comment (scroll down).

It is good to have some feedback finally, well done to Martin for being open about it. I will keep watching for a while and see the improvements and see if they restore some confidence. They have implemented some of the things I wanted already, and the data backup feature promises to at least allow a migration strategy.

Remaining to be fixed is their SPF record. I mean

1place.co.nz. 3600 IN TXT "v=spf1 -all"

is supposed to mean they never send email with the consequence their mail only just squeaks through my spam filters. Badly configured SPF is quite a bit worse than no SPF.

Eureka clothes for kids, a great kiwi business

A little off the tech subject today, as an offer from Eureka clothing arrived in my mailbox. Eureka are a Wellington based clothing company making robust clothes for kids. I'm getting some for my eldest after we discovered all his jeans are ripped through at the knees. Boys being boys, I remember the same happening to me as a child.

I must say they're going all out, no organic growth for these guys. Their catalogues are top notch, great photos and design. Their website isn't bad either.

Anyway, if you have boys between 4-14, or perhaps rough-and-tumble girls, check them out. I have a limited-use code that will give the first five of you who register a free t-shirt worth up to $30. That's what the coupon says anyway

Sign up here with code R_223784 in the "registration code" field - only five uses are possible, and before the 30th November 2007.

disclosure: I get a $20 voucher if you do all sign up, win/win huh?

Queueing and New Zealand Banks

I am frustrated at the lack of expectation placed on New Zealand banks by their customers. In these days of ubiqituious EFT-POS (NZ's point of sale debit card system) and TradeMe deals causing spikes in NZ Post demands, the one area that is not getting any good attention is the speed of bank transfers.

All of the NZ trading banks only allow transfers overnight (inter-day). And when I say day I mean business, err, banking days. And only before a certain time, 8pm for some banks. The funds don't appear in the account until some point in the morning, and you're typically not awake anyway. I'm using 6am although it can be earlier, shout if you think I'm being unfair.

The batching limitations means that a bank transfer will have an average delay of 7/5 = 1.4 days if entered at the cutoff point. Add to this a half day to account for the entry delay when it is not being actioned, and the average delay is nearly 46 hours. This is only half the story though, the minimum delay is 8pm-6am (10 hours) and the maximum a whopping 8pm Thursday - 6am Tuesday (106 hours = 4 days, 10 hours). It gets a lot worse around long weekends too...

This is classic financial friction. It means businesses need more working capital, and that everything moves m-o-r-e s-l-o-w-l-y than it otherwise could.

I'm annoyed that batch processing is perceived to be good enough, after all if telco's can do real-time billing of millions of transactions a day, then can someone tell the banks that it can be done? This can't be good for their systems; they must be encountering a massive peak of pent up transactions every Monday night. It makes me wonder if this is why the National Bank moved it's cutoff point back to 8pm.

ASB is often held up as a shining example for allowing instant transfers. They are better in that intra-bank transfers are immediate but this is anything but perfect. I think their reputation as the bank of innovation must be slightly tarnished by now -- I've seen nothing of great importance on that front for ages, and Westpac launched the first NZ debit Visa this year.

Kiwibank, who I'd expect to have shiny new systems given their age, does allow instant intra-bank transfers. A good step forward. Their other systems are, to be frank, a bit weird though. I was a foundation customer but due to their rather "secure" password rules I managed to constantly forget mine, and they have quite draconian unused/overdrawn account rules. Ciao Kiwibank. I wonder if the Flight of the Conchords were talking about them.

All of this on top of our banking services being very expensive. I'm not sure what we can do about this, I would have thought that one of the existing transfer mechanisms would be able to fake this (think every transaction done as 2x EFT-POS transactions, one debit and one credit) but I think the banks need to authorise this mode of working. I've not looked at some of the layered systems, but they all seem a bit too complex and typically transferring money in from my bank which doesn't solve this problem. Lance lamented the same thing a while ago.

It would be nice to see the telco's offering a banking service; person to person transfers using prepaid balances would be quite sexy and I believe this is quite common overseas. I must dig out some details.