A happy new year to all. Here’s my first Daily Maverick column of 2011, by special request from two followers on Twitter: How to hire a hitman in SA.

The sOccketball is an invention by a bunch of American college kids, aimed squarely at the sub-Saharan African market. It just got a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award. The problem? It’s useless, and the idea that Africans can’t look after themselves is supremely condescending. I explain why in today’s Daily Maverick column: Let’s return the beads

Stories are doing the rounds about a “spate of suicides” at Foxconn, a factory that supplies Apple and various other technology vendors. Most of them editorialise about the terrible labour practices going on at the Chinese company. The reality is that Foxconn workers are much happier than the rest of us. Here’s my ITWeb column on the subject, in which I challenge Reuters and the Associated Press to do the arithmetic.

I’ve been negligent recently. In the excitement and stress of preparing for my trip to South by South West (SxSW) in Austin, Texas, I haven’t updated my blog often enough.

Here’s a roundup of my recent writing:

The Mail & Guardian recently published a feature on the Phantom Pass fire near Knysna. I met up with some firemen to “walk the line”, and watched them on a controlled burn to safeguard unburnt forest. These guys work terrifically hard, and it’s dangerous to boot. They deserve our respect. Happily, the editors thought so too, and gave me a full page on page 12 of the over-full budget edition of the paper.

In The Daily Maverick, I wrote another column about the crime FIFA and our government are perpetrating against ordinary South Africans and their businesses, and renewed my call for a boycott, first made here. If you agree, and you are on Twitter, do use the #boycottfifa tag to draw attention to the matter. The marketing hype is deafening. The vuvuzelas drown out the nasty fact that our government spent R80 billion it couldn’t afford on infrastructure, FIFA stands to walk away with a cool R70 billion, but South Africans will have to be content with a mere R20 billion in extra GDP.

I also posted another response to critics of my climate change position, explaining the logical basis for my rejection of the apocalypse hypothesis: Ten reasons to reject climate alarmism. It even has footnotes. Ten of them.

Over on ITWeb, I got to thinking about social media, and how few large companies have dedicated people who can lead product innovation and respond to the rapidly changing landscape online. Heads in the sand, is how I described it.

I’ll be blogging up a storm from Texas, and will make sure this blog gets notified of any updates. I’ll also keep up my regular columns, if all goes well.

Here are my thoughts on Murdoch’s broadside against Google and other online leeches, published today on South Africa’s top IT news site, ITWeb. I agree with him, feel for him, and wish him well, but I’m not convinced even he’s got the clout to recork the genie bottle.

Also, published on Tuesday on The Daily Maverick: Peace, love and schadenfreude. Why is being an advocate of free-market capitalism enough to get you damned? Poor people need the free market more than anybody else.

This story was great fun to write. It started as a humorous tweet on Friday night. By the end of the evening, I had my moon expedition all organised.

On Saturday, my plan to colonise the moon was published on The Daily Maverick. Thanks to the locals at Bosun’s in Knysna, and my friends on Twitter, for their contributions. The cherry on top was returning to Bosun’s to find that the people who though I was joking (or drunk) were muttering darkly about being left out of the story.

• This column was first published in the November 2007 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine, under the title “Music business turned on its head”. If you’re in South Africa, you may wish to subscribe to the high-quality print version.

Ever since peer-to-peer music downloading became popular, the music industry has been in a deep crisis. Now comes the denouement.

The kid that started all the trouble was 18, a college dropout named Shawn Fanning. He created a piece of software called Napster, which started a peer-to-peer music downloading craze. Record companies were in a flat spin.

Now, eight years later, the game may finally be up for the record companies.

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• This column was first published on 8 October 2007 in Maverick, a South African business magazine. The rest of the magazine is much better, so if you’d like to subscribe, simply contact them via e-mail.

Why does Al Gore bang the climate change drum? Because he’s a scientist, certain that his theory is true? Or because he’s a politician, and scary predictions have always persuaded people to put their faith in the ability of the prophets to save them from doom?

You don’t bet on uncertainty if you’re a politician. So if climate change and its causes are uncertain, what exactly is it that Al Gore betting on?

When Paul Ehrlich warned about the coming population explosion in 1968, he said it would lead to mass starvation by the mid-1970s. “Nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he wrote. But death rates had already been in decline in both the rich and poor world, for 100 years, and have continued declining since.

Moreover, fertility rates had long been going down in the rich world, and a similar decline had already begun in the developing world too. It is now estimated that global population, far from rising uncontrollably as Ehrlich predicted, will never exceed 10 billion. He warned about a crisis that was already being addressed, naturally.

In 1998, the UN compared the Y2K problem to the impact of an earth-asteroid collision, which “demands worldwide strategic mobilisation…similar to the effort required by World War II.”

So Y2K required food rationing, confiscatory taxes, central planning and martial law? It’s unsurprising that this is what an organisation of governments would promote. When the new millennium arrived, the UN said: “The governments…can congratulate themselves for passing the Y2K challenge.”

The only problem is that the governments did nothing. Well, not much. Of the total US spend on Y2K, the US government’s contribution amounted to about five percent. The problem was already in hand when the dire warnings of a “meltdown of civilisation” (I kid you not) were rife. People aren’t stupid.

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• This was first published as a column in print in Maverick magazine in South Africa on 6 September 2007. If the denial machine reads this, I am still waiting to be well-funded, so at least consider subscribing, please.
  

You can relax. The hottest year in recorded US history was not 1998, and 2001 isn’t even in the top ten anymore. Hey, facts change, you know.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Newsweek. It had just published a cover emblazoned with the headline “Global Warming is a Hoax*” The footnote reads: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley.”

Contributing editor Robert J Samuelson repudiated the story in the very next issue, however. He calls it a “moral crusade”, “righteous indignation” that “undermines good journalism”, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.” Wow. With friends like these…

Then there’s Steve McIntyre, already infamous in climate change circles for revealing the fatal flaws in the Michael Mann “hockey stick” chart adopted by the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change. His original aim had been to verify the adequacy of the US network of temperature sensors, many of which were being influenced by encroaching urbanisation. Some of them sit in the middle of hot tar parking lots, or near the hot exhaust fans of air conditioning units, for example.

The NASA official in charge of the most cited database of US temperatures, James Hansen, not only refused to disclose the adjustments that were being made to correct for bad siting of sensors, but also removed public access to the locations of meteorological stations. McIntyre had to reconstruct both. He did.

In The American Spectator, Michael Fumento wrote: “In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking US temperatures.”

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• This column was first published in Brainstorm magazine, South Africa, on 1 September 2007. They keep me in bread, beer and bacon, so I’d appreciate it if you’d consider subscribing.

There are finally signs that the long-frozen telecoms sector is thawing. Now everyone’s thanking the government. That’s twisted.

A celebratory message arrived recently: one side of a particular road was being trenched by Neotel, while the other was being dug up by MTN. Great news indeed, if only because it proves that the space-time continuum doesn’t implode when two competitors dig up the same road.

Similar good-news stories appeared elsewhere. A company named Seacom is building a new undersea cable. Vodacom says it wants a meerkat in every telecoms hole it can find. Every second VANS operator is swindling reporters into believing it’s a historic first, the next-big-thing in infrastructure. Talk of new interconnect regulations, industry consolidation, self-provision and new pay TV licences spices up dinner parties, and pundits get drunk on the heady mead of price wars and dark fibre.

The cause is the new Electronic Communications Act, which though still a vague piece of legislation is making it possible for some enterprising companies to squeeze through some gaps. So we find ourselves celebrating – finally – the culmination of “managed liberalisation”.

But why? There’s something deeply pathological in our reaction.

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This column was first published in Maverick, 9 August 2007. If you live in South Africa, and like great photography and copy marred only by my own, do subscribe.

We think we’re so smart. We think the problems we face are unique and modern and unprecedented. We think things are different now. They aren’t. When the invisible hand is bound, the dead hand rules.

Who wouldn’t kill for a name like Isambard Kingdom Brunel? It has the grandeur of his life about it. He was driven by an iron will and untiring work ethic. Even his failures – such as propelling trains by a sort of very long pea shooter with a vacuum pump at the end – were stupendous feats of grand engineering.

He died in 1859, aged only 53, yet his life story reads like the parallel lives of two men – one a railway engineer of renown, and another a famous ship builder. Throughout his life, while working on some of the most complex and grand projects of the golden age of engineering, he fought tirelessly against his commercial rivals. Yet he reserved his strongest animosity not for his competitors, but for the government.

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• This column was first published in ITWeb Brainstorm, a South African business technology magazine, on 1 July 2007. They pay me for this stuff, so you’d do me a great service if you’d consider subscribing.

This wasn’t intended as a column extolling the virtues of reading history. Yet if only Poison Ivy¹ would do so, she might actually “connect us to the future”, to use her words.

There she goes again. After eight years in office, and all those nice things they said about encouraging competition, technology neutrality and managing liberalisation, minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri is proposing to drive us up another dead end.

“I have taken the policy decision,” she dictated in her Department of Communications budget speech, “that Mobile Broadcasting Services will be provided on a single network with national coverage, using the DVB-H standard. The network … will be operated on the basis of open and non-discriminatory access principles.”

She’s proposing yet another monopoly, presumably to be run by government, and limited to a single choice of technology. Oh yay!

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1. Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, South Africa’s minister of communications. [↩]