CleverBlogName

Noumea, New Caledonia

Something doing the rounds lately: Netflix's policy of employee leave self-management, something which is apparently even more astonishing to people in the States, who are used to eking out a couple of weeks a year, as opposed to the more generous allowances customary in other first-world nations. This tends to elicit enthusiastic responses from the casual viewer; they should, perhaps, take a closer look at the detail.

I find this interesting, I guess, in terms of how it works in practise; I have worked for 8 years as a contractor, with self-managed leave, and…

Let me put it this way: I went into working for someone else again this year. I just took my first week of leave last week. It was nice. The last time I had a break was when Ada was born. The time before that was when I broke my arm. It would be, I explained to people, a novel experience to have some time out that wasn't the result of a hospital visit.

I have this sneaking suspicion that the sorts of people Netflix are looking for are like me, and, given an unbounded leave policy would simply not use anything like a decent amount of it—especially with the comment from the second slide in their presentation: "Average performance deserves a generous severance package." The upside of a Netflix-style policy is that people can come up with a more sensible work/life balance (work hard when you need to, fuck off and relax when you don't); the pitfall, it seems to me, is that there are plenty of people who will cheerfully burn themselves out if they don't have express permission to do otherwise.

Handled well —and Netflix's presentation makes it seem as though they've put a lot of thought into their overall culture to make it work well—it could well be a boon. But handled cynically, or badly—picked up as an isolated cargo-cult item by workplaces that aren't embracing the broader elements—it sounds like a great chance for Awful Things to happen; with a poor implementation it's not hard to imagine second-rate managers using this as a great way of abrogating their core responsibility to manage their staff; "Hey, leave isn't my problem. You've got whatever you want, just get your damn job done." Sounds less wonderful if you imagine the kind of poor manager who is happy to see that work pile up so high, thick, and deep that "whatever, whenever" becomes, "never, if you want to have a job to come back to."

That, incidentally, is one of the things I loathe about US-style tipping: it makes managing employees my problem. When I get shitty service, it's my job to punish/correct the employee and deal with the resultant fallout. If I wanted to manage hospitality staff I'd open a fucking restaurant. Pay your damn staff a living wage, fire the useless ones yourself, and leave me the hell out of it.

I was surprised to see Ma'a Nonu at the A&E with his family. I realised I was surprised because, having been exposed to English footballers and American Grid-Iron players through international press, I had developed, I think, an assumption that all sports players must have the means to dissapear off with their kids to expensive private clinics at a whim, rather than wait with the hoi-polloi. But no, apparently All Blacks do queue up for those worrying first-kid trips to the hospital with the rest of us. And, I hope, discover they're nothing to worry about.

(I can report that Mr. Nonu is something of a doting daddy.)

So, Ada loves Bob the Builder. She loves trucks and screwdrivers and the like. So you’d think that the Bob merchandise would be a slam-dunk for our household.

Nuh-uh.

The problem is that most everything I’ve seen of it is poorly-made shit. Not only does this violate my general thoughts about acceptable toys (they should be tolerably well-made), but it seems to me to be a deep and fundamental betrayal of the series itself, which is, after all, about doing a job properly and minimising waste.

We're All Go. Going to Ruins.

One of the downsides of market collapses is the scars on the city; this used to be the old Wellington market building; while it had faded from its hey-day, it was still worth nipping into. Predictably enough it was swept up by the wave of apartment madness, scheduled for demolition, to be converted into yet another pile of generic apartments.

Had the international financial and property markets collapsed 3 months earlier, that would be the end of the story; instead, they did so in time for the builders to demolish the building, leaving only the foodcourt mural as a remnant of what once existed, along with hopelessly optimistic claims of continued liquidity and activity.

When I moved to Wellington the most obvious mark of the '87 market crash was on Courtney Place, where a vast, gravelled wasteland interrupted the main strip, testimony to a failed development; when I started working at Wellington Newspapers I was next to an ugly carpark whose upper deck was sprinkled with thick concrete columns, a mute testimony to the failure of another building project—this time after the basement had been completed.

I'm assuming this rubble will become another of the scars left by this round of collapses.

Nectar

Spring has arrived early in Wellington; I saw the first magnolia blooms over a month ago, and daffodils are out on my lawn weeks ahead of last year; along with the early flowering has come the flight of young birds. When I saw these guys in my garden I initially called Maire out to look at them, since they were so tiny; smaller than sparrows, sleek, lean. At a distance I'd not noticed their eye markings and assumed they must be something unusual, perhaps from the Karori Sanctuary.

While I was a little disappointed to discover they were tiny, young, and decidedly common waxeyes they were most obliging subjects, both for my camera and for Ada to enjoy.

The idea of visitors from the Sanctuary, incidentally, doesn't seem so unreasonable; the Sanctuary seems to have been a huge success not only in terms of its own breeding programs but in terms of seeding surrounding areas with bird life. I had never seen a Kaka in Wellington until around two years ago when I saw a solitary bird in the Botanic Gardens while taking Ada for a walk; last month we were heading up to the Cable Car through the same area and saw three tumbling through the trees. All of them were skinny, young birds, and it was a delight to have them buzzing us.

Flight

Office view

My new office (as of a couple of months ago) has a number of drawbacks, not least of which is that, being on the port side of the railway station, it's miles away from most of the good bits of central Wellington when compared with my previous location on Willis Street.

On the other hand, there are some compensations. This is the view from the meeting room I spent the day in. It could be worse.

Danger! Danger! Do not touch the streams!

There's something about this sign that I love; I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it's that the language is less imperative than most signs of this sort. There's something about seeing the word "inadvisable" in a context where I would normally see "forbidden" or some more prosaic variation thereon that appeals to me.

Ada with axe and dragon

Ada’s cousin had his third birthday party and wanted a knights theme; being somewhat concerned about the prospect of a gaggle of three year olds with swords I did what any responsible parent would: I bought Ada a sword, a shield, and the biggest axe I thought she could handle.

As it happened, it all went smoothly, not least because the knights had a dragon pinata to slay.

It has, however, given me a mighty new peeve: the tomboy; when I was telling a temporary creche worker about Ada’s weekend with axe and shield, while she was playing with trucks in the sandpit, said worker described her as a tomboy, which got a fairly visceral negative reaction from me.

Firstly, it’s not terribly accurate. Ada has begged, pleaded, and wheedled on the topic of nail polish until she has some bright yellow stuff of her own. This is not, as I understand it, the sort of behaviour one associates with the word; like her mother, who enjoys long evening gowns and fencing, Ada has tastes I would refer to as “well-rounded”.

But more fundamentally it’s that the very idea is a kind of third state of gender; it’s a peculiar construct, because on one level it lacks the wholly negative connotations of the closest equivalents I can think of for men (all of which, like, say, ‘effeminate’, leave the listener in no doubt as to the second-class status of the object). On the contrary it can be viewed quite positively by some. The problem, for me, anyway, is that it’s also got a big chunk of essentialism and denial of feminity about it. Because, it says, you are interested in cars and trucks and building castles, you are not a Real Girl. If you were a Real Girl you’d be uninterested in those things and interested only in Proper Girly Things.

I reject this—I see no reason to assign “interest in building things in a sandpit” as being an inherently masculine activity, and I see no reason my little girl should be assigned a kind of not-girl status for liking them.

Last time I mentioned upgrading household boxes I was pretty underwhelmed by Fedora and pleased with Ubuntu.

What a difference time can make; Ubuntu has degenerated across the 8.x and 9.x releases to the point where I've given up on it; "Just works" my arse. Fedora, on the other hand, less resembles a mad chimp flinging shit all over the place.

The wealth in the Caymans is staggering. Its hedge funds alone looks after $2.3tn (£1.4tn), according to figures last year, and its GDP places it as the world's 12th richest jurisdiction, despite a population of only 51,900.

When your entire economy is predicated on providing a way to allow citizens and businesses in other countries to evade taxes I can't imagine how you'd have the sheer effrontery to ask one of those countries to bail you out.

Let us remember that tax havens like the Caymens are not, as in the case of places like Ireland, offering favourable tax regimes to attract businesses; rather, they provide a way for people who wish to enjoy the amenities of first world nations—healthcare, policing, roading, and so on—while avoiding coughing up for any of those social institutions and services they avail themselves of. They are, in effect, parasite nations.

So good on the UK for telling them to fuck off.

"I fear you will have no choice but to consider new taxes – perhaps payroll and property taxes," Bryant wrote to Bush. "I understand, of course, that in so doing you will want to consider carefully the implications for Caymans' economy, including the financial services industry."

Ha-ha, indeed.