Buyer be... where?

Morbid curiosity.

That's what leads me to be online at 2:04am, hitting Refresh on my browser every so often, wondering if www.clickfrenzy.com.au will suddenly leap to life. Well, morbid curiosity and the fact that it's a hot night in Melbourne, and being one of the first of the season, I'm not handling it well.

November 20 was supposed to mark a great day in cyber-shopping in Australia. Over two hundred companies were to offer an avalanche of bargains for twenty-four hours, letting rabid shoppers and Christmas-present-buyers go commercially nuts from their own home. However, the evening became another monument to the fact that many Aussie retailers have taken to netshopping like a duck to lava.

So what went wrong? Why were organisers predicting peak-hour net traffic, but were apparently unready for it? Some of news.com.au's finest investigative journalism had unearthed a few prices, "leaked" presale. I can only imagine the effort and ingenuity required to cultivate a source of such closely guarded information. Perhaps such a catastrophic breach of security resulted in a level of interest beyond expectations? Or perhaps notorious hacker clan Anonymous have gotten involved; no longer content with making political points or hounding child abusers, they have turned their efforts to preventing the spread of sonic skin cleansers at 30% off (yes, the site is working now, and I have bad skin. Sue me.)?

One thing can be taken from this - anyone inconvenienced by this system crash, buyer or seller, who is also against the installation of the National Broadband Network, needs to give him- or herself a quick wake-up slapping. Sure, a quick stroll through Twitter might lead you to ask why we could  possibly need some of these messages any quicker - "FML" is a sulk, no matter at how many megabits per second it flies around the world - but the good stuff will flow freer as well. You know, medical data, the contents of the world's libraries and galleries, pictures wittily captioned in a white blocky font. In the meantime, we continue with slower and costlier internet than much of the world, and in the offices of the coordinators of a certain online sale, trying to find certain people at their desks will result in a real-life 404 error.

Democra - me

In a coffee queue recently, I overheard some teenagers talking. One, about fifteen years old, was insisting that the word “says” is pronounced as it is written, while her friends tried to convince her of the more standard vocalisation. Very quickly, as she realised she had no backup, her reasoning boiled down to one sentence.

“Yeah, but that’s how I pronounce it.”

The rest of the group kept making their (and society at large’s) case, but she repeated her one-line defence, angrier each time.

I thought of this girl as I was reading Donald Trump’s Twitter response to the US Election. “If I can’t have support, or evidence, I’ll have anger.” The tweet that most amused me describes Obama’s win as a “…great and disgusting injustice! The world is laughing at us.” Interesting use of the plural there, Donnie. If polls taken internationally are to be believed, the exhalation you heard from the world was a sigh of relief. Unless, the “us” refers to Mr Trump and Fox News?

http://media.theage.com.au/news/world-news/fox-news-struggles-with-election-result-3781477.html

The above link shows the dignity with which Fox News handled Ohio being called for Obama. Karl Rove almost ruptured a jowl, and the number-crunchers were immediately called to task. This is the problem when the –

You know what, I almost typed “news service” there. Neither concept fits; Fox News provides neither news nor service. I may as well have called them a feathered pizza delivery. But, to resume –

This is the problem when the broadcasting system a statistician works for has an ideology. A statistician needs to work with, and provide, verifiable data, but when that data points at the network’s agenda and laughs, suddenly our analytical friend has to present his employer with a set of numbers that are simultaneously correct and yet Wrong.  Just as the majority of American voters failed to acknowledge the minority’s Self-Evident Truth, creating Trump’s “injustice”.

Also rising from the Twittersphere were a couple of dozen claims that an Obama victory would lead to the Twit in question moving to Australia, despite our female atheist PM. This is another good reason to keep Tony Abbott out of the Lodge; a federal Liberal government would be pull-factor for such asylum seekers. We have various categories of immigration, such skills-based, family reunion, compassionate grounds; I recommend setting our Dickhead Immigration quota to nil, and printing up a series of T-shirts with Obama and Gillard standing side-by-side, with the caption “We’re Not Full, But Fuck Off Anyway.”

So, Donald and co, rub the money out of your eyes for a moment, and look upon the world that is.

And it’s pronounced “sezz”, dammit!