Monthly Archives: August 2013

Caro diario

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About 4 months in and I am glad about this blog. It serves a number of functions. First, it gets this shit out of my head (especially the shit). Secondly, it allows me to record the odd valuable idea, and I often have trouble remembering my good ideas. Thirdly, it seems amuse a few mates and I don’t mind providing comic relief especially since that is a free set of steak knives. Fourthly, it gives me something to do when I am stuck with little to do, e.g. on a bus. Finally it really is a weird sort of diary so Lola can have the thing if and when she is interested.

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Blogerists

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Oh-la-la. I just took a tour of Linkedin’s most popular blogerists. Here are today’s top titles:

How to Self-Promote without Being a Jerk

Yes Men? No Thanks!

Miley Cyrus Inc.’s Branding Tips

Any efficiencies gained by the presence of Linkedin must be more than offset by the fuckwit information being hoovered up by a distracted workforce.

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White collar madness

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Just about everyone I know has a lot more undone work than they have hours available to do that work. That is, just about everyone in the white collar sector lives their lives with a mountain of undone work in front of them.

Imagine the joy of blue collar work; where there is no undone work left at the end of the day?

One impact of this undone work is that white collar workers are forever making choices as to which of the undone work is to be prioritised. Sometimes outside forces decide, sometimes not. But I am guessing that there are a lot business efficiencies won and lost in this process.

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Fools

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Holden’s upmarket conformadore is named the ‘Caprice’.

The dictionary tells me that means “A sudden, unpredictable action, change, or series of actions or changes”.

That is, an accident waiting to happen.

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Bicycle

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I have to admit that I don’t mind it too much when drivers do stupid things to me on the bike.

It gives me a chance to get aggro and I need that sometimes.

So long as they aren’t behind me I can usually guess as to their upcoming stupidity, so it’s not too dangerous.

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Students

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Schools like to think that students are the proverbial frogs in water, slowly and unwittingly coming to the boil.

Well it’s not working; my daughter has seen right through it and is not very impressed with the continually increasing load of maths.

She asked me when it’s going to stop. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it doesn’t.

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Monoclastic

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Iconoclasm is the deliberate destruction within a culture of the culture’s own religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives.

I have decided to coin the term monoclasm. A monoclast deliberately tries to destroy another culture’s religious icons and other symbols or monuments, usually for religious or political motives. An example would be a terrorist from the middle east, or a politician from America with a foreign policy agenda, or the Chinese in Tibet.

Why monoclast? First, it rhymes with monoculture (where all these problems start from). ‘Clast’ derives from the late Greek, Klas; the past tense of the noun, Klan -‘to break’. Mono refers to the attempted destruction of one monoculture by another, insecure, monoculture.

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Pot holes

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I saw the idiot most likely to be our next PM standing on a road, promising federal funds to fill in a few potholes, if and when he gets elected.

Its odd that nobody thinks that this dip into extreme banality and triviality should actually disqualify the idiot from any office of note.

How fucked up is Australia?

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Driving in China

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The Chinese driving points scheme…

Twelve points, just like us. Suspicious; we may be exporting bureaucracy. Apart from minerals it’s just about all we have.

You lose six points for running a red light or going 20 kmh over, but you get them back in one year.

If you lose your license you have to do one months worth of remedial driving school and then pass a test.

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Fluids

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You have to laugh at the clown that took liquid explosives onto a plane. If there was one at all; it might have all been in the imagination of some US bureaucrat.

Now hundreds of millions of passengers concern themselves with liquid, aerosols or gels. Aka fluids.

A multi billion dollar industry has been created for miniature packs of fluids that people like to use. And there has been billions wasted in chuck outs at customs.

All of this because, deep down, we are all quite scared of flying; it’s quite unnatural. So it makes a great high-profile target for the emotionally retarded monoclasts who want to go out with a bang.

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Communism

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Oooh I would hate to be in charge of China. On one hand the party guys have to keep everyone fed. Then they face the wrath of the middle classes when the bubble finally bursts. And the gap between rich and poor threatens to erupt into violence at any time. Oh, and they have to pretend to be communists rather than autocrats. They are shackled with a sense of face and shame which forces them into doing things they would rather not. And they also have to hide their own personal wealth. Infighting means they are always watching their own backs…Stressful…!

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Horny

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In Australia a honking of the car horn is an angry response to some stupid act of another driver.

In China it is an announcement by the honker itself that it’s about to do something stupid.

From a little beep, for everyday stupidity, through to a sustained alarm for an upcoming full scale hail-Mary.

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Fangio

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Shanghai cabbies often can’t drive to save their lives. And then you get the occasional star. Right now I have a dude that I have nick-named Fangio.

Fearless, stupid, and skilled. He and I have I life expectancy that is measured in minutes. I haven’t even bothered with the seat belt.

Every time I groan or wince at his latest manoeuvre he turns and laughs at me. At 160 kmh in a rattly box on wheels

I am in the hands of the gods and Fangio.

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Hill End

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My parents last pub in its painted glory. It’s says on the back “hand painted by Ron Rowles”. Well it wasn’t done by a machine, now was it? Nobody would program a machine that badly. And I spent ages photo editing the thing to make it look as good as I could.

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Hills Hoist

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I should not offend the gods…

Just lately, in a couple of articles, I have bagged the Hills Hoist, calling it a useless piece of junk and not a prime example of Australian innovation.

Mum and Dad have just moved into a new house and they asked me to fix (you guessed it) the Hills Hoist.

So I just wasted half a Saturday afternoon, and in the end it is still rooted. But now I can say without any skerrick of a doubt that this thing is a piece of shit.

So fuck you gods.

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Scorn too

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I have a friend who has a theory that the scorn of women has its roots in the inevitable comparison of the consort to the father.

So he went and found the girl with the most fucked-up father that he could find.

And her scorn surely followed because he wasn’t fucked-up enough.

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Bear

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My parents, at their advanced age, are ten times more sensitive to their dog’s needs and emotional well-being than they were to me at the same age (eight). Its really lovely to see that they have evolved.

Oddly though they have also lost a necessary sense of ‘setting boundaries’ along the way, which is why they have a collie-x-kelpie than can’t jump onto a ute but jumps at its own shadow.

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Mazing

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A labyrinth, from the entry, has an unambiguous route to the centre and is not designed to be difficult to navigate. A contraption that tests your resolve and not much else.

A maze, on the other hand, is designed to confuse and trap, and this is what most people find themselves in. Only the lucky find the trapdoor behind the mirror.

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Blues

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Why is it that some people can see opportunity where others see despair. Do we train ourselves, Pavlovian style, while we are very young?

I am seeing my daughter get sympathy-results when she is feeling ‘low’; she gets to watch television. I worry that this might become a lifelong habit.

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Wheels

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Wheels magazine is fearless in its critique on its advertisers products. It’s quite unique amongst Australian media outlets in this regard.

Except for the fact that it goes soft on the locally produced efforts by Ford and GM.

They label the Falcon a ‘world class car’. Anyone who regularly gets into a cab knows that this in not true.

I just got car-sick typing this in whilst in a Falcon cab. Driver or car? I blame both.

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F3 2

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Our government agencies speak for themselves…on wiki

“In addition to the National Highway 1 designation, the freeway at one stage carried the Freeway Route 3 (F3) designation. This route numbering system, introduced in 1971, was to provide distinctive route numbering and signage for freeways in Sydney and the surrounding areas. Although the route was never signed with the F3 route marker (the numbering system was removed in the late 1980s), the route is now widely known as the F3 Freeway, with this title being used not only colloquially but on all state and federal government documents and web sites. The median crossover signs (located every 1 km) feature an F3 identification sign; in addition, various directional signs also read “F3 FREEWAY” alongside the M1 or National Highway 1 route number.”

This week there are digital flashing signs all over the F3 alerting drivers to the name change from “F3”. But no mention as to what the new name is. From Wikipedia we can infer that it might be the “Pacific Motorway”. Why?

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Stag

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Just after I passed the Ute at 140 k’s or so there was a bunch of cars all parked and congregating around an intersection.

One of them had hit the biggest deer stag I have ever seen.

The poor thing was down on its rear legs in the gutter roaring in pain. Very sad.

I didn’t stick around to see the consensus on the mode of death.

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Lord of the circles

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I just took my monthly dive into the world of Facebook. Things haven’t improved. In fact it looks dire.

Thirteen year olds don’t think its cool and are finding alternatives. My FB version seems to be dominated by women with causes, a couple of blokes pretending to be women with causes, some women who need causes, and some very odd advertising posts apparently chosen just for me (useless algorithms).

Google got their strategy all wrong with Plus. Instead of building a better Facebook they should have created a set of tools that enables people to create their own private social networks but just using the bits they want to.

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Shareholders

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Ok I have thought more about it.

If government seriously wants to do something about equal opportunities in senior roles in our listed companies then the way to go about it is through empowering shareholders.

Now that’s an easy thing to write but goddam awfully difficult to implement. With compulsory superannuation in Australia there are a zillion layers of aggregation and management between the shareholders and the boards. Its hard to know where to put in the big stick.

As a result the boards rarely truly represent shareholders interests other than in a vague undefined share-value way and it takes a share price disaster for a board to get removed. Which is why they can all pay themselves so much to do so little. And this is why every wannabee running around the edges of the finance sector desperately wants to get onto a public listed company board, a.k.a. a junket.

The issue is bigger than equal opportunities. Back to an earlier comment – the only reason this works is that most of these companies work in an quasi-cartel environment serving the Australian domestic market. You could put a bunch of poodles on a board and not much would happen. A management team at least has to be competent and not fuck up.

I fall back to my earlier statement – it doesn’t matter who is on these boards. So I don’t care if they are all men or all women. A pox on them all for wanting to be there in the first place.

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Rhodes

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Tony; I suppose that his spouse’s suppositries were shoved up his repository. Where his brain lives and sort of breathes.

Seriously though, that mob at the Rhodes scholarship temple need to start thinking about preserving their brand value. If they can even spell it. Not the inferred it, but it itself, you half-it.

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Burn burn burn

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I find that the best way to annoy my neighbour is to burn all my garden waste. It drives him nuts.

It’s all I have in retaliation to the Chinese yelling, banging gates, endless piano lessons and shading trees which don’t get trimmed.

I just had a 9 pm burning session whilst also barbecuing some sausages. Felt good.

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Equal opportunities

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A final word on government compelling companies to have a mix of people in senior roles more representative of the general population (compared to the current old boys club).

This shouldn’t be achieved by mandating outcomes. Outcomes and opportunities are two very different animals.

The role of government is to ensure unnecessary barriers to equal opportunity are removed, for example by introducing mandated paid maternity leave.

It’s the role of shareholders to decide if the old boys club is sub-par. And it usually is.

But if the shareholders are represented by large super-annuation firms that have the same old boys in charge then there is a problem.

I must think more on it.

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Science

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I have wanted to say something about science for ages but the words have escaped me.

For many people that I know, science is this mysterious world of complexity and rigour which they can only but admire from a distance. But with a certain disdain as well, based on the constant media feed of false negatives and positives from the scientific world. Think; margarine, no, butter, no, margarine, no, butter,…

I love it when eager Gen-Y’s start posting science-based information on their FB pages (see ‘I love Fucking Science’ for example). Its a case of not knowing what they don’t know, in that they have no wherewithal to distinguish the good stuff from the bad stuff. And no awareness of this lack of wherewithal either. And since their audience doesn’t either, whadya?

It might surprise them that science only teaches us to ask the questions, to catalog information, to make and test hypotheses, and to agree on useful generalizations. When science is used to draw definitive conclusions or to make things, it has become engineering. Or, alternatively, it has become abused.

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Women in Engineering

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At this week’s event, the ‘Woman in Engineering’ awards for the UNSW I managed to annoy more than one academic.

The stated goal of the event is to help get their female numbers up above 20%, where they have been stuck for some time, and preferably to 50%.

I suggested that they could achieve this goal overnight by cutting their student intake by 60% but also by keeping all their females.

Apparently that is absurd even though less than 50% of their graduates go on to practice engineering. Maybe, I suggested, that their real problem, like much of our tertiary sector, is that they train way too many graduates for the given job market.

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Wikileaks

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I will be voting for Wikileaks in the Senate. I think Julian Assange is a dick head, but just think of the entertainment factor if he gets in.

I also wonder if an Australian member of parliament has some sort of protection against prosecution or extradition in the UK? For example, in Australia, parliamentary privilege extends to members not being compelled to attend a court case whilst parliament is sitting. Since we have the same head of state, this right might stand up in the privy council.

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Banks

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An experiment. We take the four banks and convert two of their boards to groups representing the Australian population mix.

That is, a mix of men, women, seniors, ethnic and religious minorities, socio economically deprived, indigenous types, bogans, children, dwarfs, handicapped and gay people and the like.

My guess is the two banks with the odd boards would out-perform the other two, primarily because these boards would be less successful at annoying the management teams.

I tell you what though, if your replaced a bank’s senior management team with a mixed nut team, then that bank would be out of business within a week.

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What’s in a name?

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More on the vote compass….

‘Social liberal’ means that one is less likely to want to tell someone else what what they must do with regards to social and moral issues. That is the opposite of moral arrogance, say non-judgemental.

‘Economic left’ means one is less likely to vote for ‘what’s in it for me’, money-wise. That is the opposite of greedy, say generous.

So why then are our political parties called green, labor, liberal and national?

They should be (in order) the liberal left, central left, mid right and far right. Or soft’n’cuddly, union-confused, greedy arrogant shits and fucking nutters.

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Seniors

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One of the vote compass questions was “The commonwealth should pass laws requiring more women in senior positions”.

The social liberal in me agrees, but my experience suggests that passing laws on such matters can be quite ineffective or even counter productive. Simply stated, equal opportunities are not created by mandating the outcomes; just the opposite in fact.

In any case which senior positions do we refer to? I am guessing business and the public service? Boards or management?

For the public service it probably doesn’t matter who is in charge; you could put a dog in charge of Ausindustry and no one would notice.

It’s a pretty slippery slope telling a business that there are constraints on who they can employ. But again for the larger businesses with local markets (think Coles, Woolies, the banks,etc) it doesn’t matter; they are cartels and could make profits with a computer in charge.

So it only really matters for exporters competing in global markets. If you start telling them they have to employ women, seniors, ethnic and religious minorities, socio economically deprived, indigenous types, bogans, and handicapped people into their senior management teams, then Australia has really lost the plot.

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Vocational madness

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My editor and I just had a mutual whinge about the encroachment of the tertiary education sector into vocations that used to be informal apprenticeships.

In her case she says there are lots of kids with great qualifications but they can’t edit. In my case I see corporate types getting MBA’s with a major in ‘entrepreneurship’ that simply couldn’t and can’t.

For the unis it’s a case of convincing government to step up regulatory and licensing controls of the employment sector so they (the unis) can grow bigger and have more revenues. But whose role is it to push back on them if it doesn’t make sense?

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