Lola and I were admiring a vintage Glomesh handbag yesterday, and this got us thinking about a new version where all the mesh elements were made of OLED material.
Each mesh element could then be able to glow in different colors. The bag would come with an phone app to program the color show.
It’s actually doable.
This I don’t get – the NSW department of education is going to crack down on parents taking kids out of school for family holidays.
But no mention of the proposed penalty? Ban the kids from school?
They probably think people are actually that stupid.
And given the number of people that permanently drive at 40 kmh, they may be right.
Last year, Australia Post actually lost money on a monopoly business, letter delivery, because (they claim) they can’t price the service highly enough due to government controls and international agreements and who knows what else.
How to lose money while running a monopoly? It can only be achieved by the most loopy of loopy business managers. It takes special skills and maybe also very deep ulterior motives – like a desire by some to privatise Australia Post as a non-monopoly.
In any case, there is an obvious solution to the pricing issue. Step right around it with a tiered offering. This could, for example, be as simple as charging the currently uncharged party of a letter delivery transaction.
For example, offer letter recipients an optional opt-in service where all their physical mail is opened, scanned and emailed to them. Your more techie customers are going to say ‘yes’ to this, especially if it includes a spam filter for all that junk mail.
And you could bolt shut your physical mailbox so none of that unstamped junk mail ever crossed your consciousness ever again.
The more people that you let into the tent the less there are on the outside of it.
It’s the little things that you sometimes have to take care to notice.
This morning while riding my bike up to the shops I cruised past an aged proto-hipster (a fatter reflection of myself maybe) carrying a newspaper and two coffees in one of those cardboard carrying trays.
Just as I was drawing level he jagged one of his thongs on a slightly displaced (and we are talking 1mm here) footpath section.
He pitched forward like the total unco he obviously is, caught himself and promptly launched one of his coffees up and out and all over.
In a good and proper Kiwi accident I heard an “oh bugger”.
That’s all it took. I guffawed and felt just that much better about the world this morning.
For some reason I just knew it was all going to be OK.
It’s so easy to induce jealousy and so hard to get rid of it.
I heard recently of a fellow who caused trouble between a couple.
He, the interloper, liked her, and wrote her some suggestive emails.
She, being a person of the highest integrity, shared these with her bloke.
In this, the snake caused her anguish because she was trapped between the need for integrity in their relationship, and the trouble it would bring to them to share this information. She knew because she was a shaman.
Her bloke promptly got very jealous, misdiagnosed this, and thus doubled the trouble between this lovely couple by behaving erratically.
In the worst case scenario they could have even split up. Fortunately in this case they did not; they were solid.
Had they split, the snake would have been be one step closer to his goal. Her. This was just a simple whim on his part.
The snake was a simple fellow and it could be argued he knew not what he did.
But in matters of raw emotions like this even the simpletons know what they are doing, at some level.
A new product idea …
Problem: pensioners that fall over and injure themselves
Solution: A backpack or other object attached to the pensioner containing a set of gyros similar to a Segway, with a battery and a controller. This backpack would keep the pensioner from falling at all times, independent of their sense of balance. The system could come with a handheld controller or a smartphone app that turns off or slowly attenuates the gyro effect to allow the pensioner to sit, lie down, or bend over.
According to Wiki, religious texts, also known as scripture, scriptures, holy writ, or holy books, are the texts which various religious traditions consider to be sacred, or central to their religious tradition.
Now for reasons that probably have roots in the century before last, scripture is taught in our public schools. Once a week each religion proffers up a lay person so that kids can learn their ‘scripture’.
It’s a pretty odd thing; you would think parents that are religious would be taking their kids off to their church or equivalent on weekends or after school. Why mix the two?
Then again I suppose the argument could be made about sport or anything else that they teach at school.
But if you are going to teach something then why not have professional teachers doing it like every other activity at school, including sport?
Kids of parents that don’t agree to scripture classes aren’t allowed to bone up on anything useful in the lost hour; that would be deemed an unfair advantage. So they get ‘Ethics’ classes, also taught by volunteer lay people.
Now there’s a conundrum; some kids get religious teaching from the sacred books of their parent’s religion, and some get a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct.
Religion and ethics both involve moral rights and wrongs, but one just makes firm rules about them and the other, if taught properly, involves questioning and understanding them.
I still think that the non-religious kids in ethics classes would be getting an intellectual leg-up if their ethic classes were taught properly. Which I very much doubt.
Personally I would like to see professional teachers conduct classes on ‘Religions’. The idea would be to teach the kids all about the history and beliefs of all the major religions so that they can be put into a genuine ethical construct alongside non-religious moral beliefs.
What we need is inter-religion tolerance which can only be taught by mutual understanding, and not by myopic inbreeding of religious beliefs.
And it’s worth noting that there haven’t been too many instances where agnostics or atheists have used these brands as an excuse to persecute other peoples. So in this context maybe these anti-beliefs might just be worth promoting as the more ethical choice for kids.
And right there is the subject matter for the first ethics class.
If I have a problem and a Google search doesn’t throw up a solution, then I see it as my duty to report on any solution that I develop. This so people facing the same problem can benefit from my efforts – it’s one of the reasons the internet exists after all and it derives me good internet karma.
In fact one of my more read blog entries was a fix to a Toshiba laptop battery clasp problem – this was an actual design flaw that Toshiba refused to fix, model after model. So I posted a quick fix. And many have used it.
This current blog entry describes a simple problem fix for owners of Subaru Outbacks, Liberties or Legacies, from 2009-2014.
However I would note that this approach might work for many other makes and models.
The Problem: A headrest which is tilted so far forward that one’s head is pushed forward whilst driving (see first image below) in an uncomfortable and non-ergonomic fashion. Basically it sucks. This is an example of safety concerns gone mad – the idea is to prevent whiplash by minimising the gap between the head and the headrest. But they over did it by a fair margin. You’d have to think that the clowns up at Subaru don’t drive their own cars.
The Solution: Remove the headrest. Place it on the ground. Stand with one foot on the metal supports (see second image). And then bash the headrest with the other foot, using all your body mass (see third image), until the angle represents something closer to sanity. Surprisingly, when performed on a smooth tiled surface with thongs (flip-flops, jandles, etc) no damage is done to the headrest and the angle can be adjusted to exactly that needed (see last image). If at any stage after a few bashes (I did about 15) the metal supports are not parallel, stand on one of them (the one you want to bend more to ‘catch up’ to the other one in respect to angle) and bash the headrest with the other foot.
Agricultural I know, but hey.
It has occurred to me that if an individual is very sensitive and emotionally honest with themselves and with others, then they will without doubt be labelled as ‘neurotic’.
Yesterday I found an interesting article in the ‘Education for Hire’ section of largest fishwrapper that we have here in Australia.
Note bene, I was trapped in a metal tube 30,000 feet above my usually preferred elevation and had little else to do; I can assure you this is not my usual pastime.
This magical article was written by the son of a former colleague. He, the son, is an academic in Sydney and he wants more grant money so he can do what the hell he wants in his research endeavours, and without having to write pesky grants I suspect.
Here is a redacted version of his article with much of the meanderings extracted. My shorter version is much easier to absorb – effectively I have taken the article and turned it into a blog (oh, to be able to automate this and retain the guts of the message!).
“Blue-sky research involves a particularly big leap of faith — the belief that backing investigator-led research will generate paradigm shifts that, in the long-term, will repay the investment many times over…..History shows this approach is critically important for creating new industries…..Sadly this new political climate is gradually driving the emphasis away from investigator-led research towards mission-directed research…..we should start talking about a bipartisan science strategy that serves the national interest and includes a prominent commitment to blue-sky science.”
Redacting it a second time, this time from a blog entry into a Tweet, I get “Blue-sky research …serves…blue-sky science”
Sadly (the author used that word and I like it) the logic doesn’t stack up for one very simple reason.
The history that shows us that blue-sky research is sometimes critically important for creating new industries is unfortunately not Australian. Not once, not ever, has a new Australian industry emerged from blue-sky research efforts – whether that blue-sky research was done here or elsewhere.
In fact, if we were to fund these delusions of blue-sky outcomes, and by some miracle there was a blue-sky outcome (as opposed to some nicely equipped labs, a bunch of largely unread but highly cited papers and a bevy of overseas plenary talks) I can assure you that the benefits of this blue-sky outcome would flow to US industry.
I have a better idea … why do we not just scout the universities in the rest of the world for a blue-sky outcome and steal it in the interests of (ha ha) developing a new industry here in Club Oz?
This would be much cheaper than funding the blue-sky research in the first place. Especially considering that the IRR on funding blue-sky research must down around minus infinity, or at the very least, at the most left hand end of all financial return curves ever seen by the naked eye.
I can actually think of a much better argument for changing the funding for university research than this blue-sky dreaming:
How about we just award grant money to academics to do research but not for specific projects at all? No project plans, no project titles – just a one-line request for cash. The academics can then choose to spend their money on blue-sky research, or turn-the-handle research, as they choose.
I can’t for the life of me see the logic in asking an academic to outline what they plan to do with the money as if they were an engineer building a bridge. It’s a waste of time and money, especially since nobody gives a stuff about current research outcomes anyway.
Asking for project plans is simply a charade designed to suggest that grants are awarded on project merit, when in most cases they are awarded on academic reputation and past record.
If we stopped asking researchers for project plans as part of awarding grants the question would arise as to how to judge the merits of their requests? I would say just give them all a bit of seed money early on in their careers and give more and more funding to those that show they can do well with it, regardless of whether they choose to do blue-sky or mundane research.
But, and here is the key point, if we let the academics off this hook most of them would probably do the same research that they are doing now – turning the handle, so to speak – and not blue-sky research. Why? Well, this lower risk type of research has the benefits of being easier to manage and giving guaranteed outcomes whereas genuine blue-sky exploratory research is hard and runs the risk of having no reportable results.
Only the academics confident that they could pull off blue-sky research would dare spend their money this way because if they weren’t successful their future chances of getting funded would be reduced.
This is, after all, how the business world works – rewarding those that can demonstrate past success. That is, a meritocratic pyramid.
And being successful at blue-sky research requires many skills apart from being functionally effective at research. For example I can think of these skills – managing risk, having luck, the student selection and management process, being able to play university politics effectively, scientific communications, genuine insight, a solid grounding in the field, creativity, and the list goes on.
Success begets success. In a system where there is a statistical number of researchers, the rewarding of success will be the most effective means for getting the best outcomes, even if there is a small number of unfairly treated individuals. This is as it is in all human reward systems.
Overheard at the airport train station….
[Background info. Kids crying loudly. Opal cards inexplicably do not auto top up at the airport station. Queues are long and slow]
“I’ve got a signal to noise problem”. The mother.
“Eh?” The cashier at the station.
“I can’t understand a single fucking thing you are saying”.
As you can see below, naked marketing has indicative information, but not enough to actually build product.
Wouldn’t it be great to see downloadable 3-D CAD drawings and a parts and supplier list?
Just daring you to make your own, instead of buying one.
The CEO of the company responsible for the toxic berries has this to say:
“Our employees down there [Bairnsdale, Vic] are feeling the pinch from this berry recall”.
Gee, it’s not hard to see where this berry rots from.
Expedia takes over Wotif and a short time later Wotif and their major competitor, who together control 85% of the Australian online hotel booking market, raise their commissions to 15%.
No collusion or price signaling, honest guv.
Jim Clark talked of this back in the first dot.com era. He called it the “big new asshole in the middle” phenomenon.
First, internet based services disintermediate old school services by offering lower prices and easier access.
Then they get aggregated into one or two trans-national players, who can then exploit everyone to their heart’s content.
The anti-monopoly groups of smaller countries like Australia are virtually powerless against these ghost-like tax-free global virtual service providers.
In this I would suggest that there is a very nice market opportunity.
A web app cloning service where the pissed off customers (the hotels in the case of Expedia) can collectively commission a clone of, say, an Expedia, and then all switch to the clone at the same time, thereby offering no individual disadvantage. The end customers booking the hotel rooms, initially confused, would catch on after a single Google search.
IP concerns? Not a one. In the US software patents are now nearly worthless. In Australia patent enforcement is a joke, resulting in a situation where infringement is hardly considered a cost of business
Let’s call it capitalsocialism.com. This cloning service could take 1% of revenues for very little work.
This is a memo to the next Australian entrant into the Miss World competition – a clever new plan for world peace. She will be guaranteed to win the competition and maybe get a Nobel Peace Prize to boot.
A US jury has awarded almost $1b in damages to the relatives of some Americans that were killed in Israel by Palestinian terrorists/freedom fighters.
The award is not against the terrorists/freedom fighters directly, but against the Palestinian Authority, accused of aiding and abetting the former.
Debt recovery will be through the pursuit of bank accounts and assets of the Palestinian Authority by US authorities.
You’d have to expect the Palestinians Americans to lodge counter claims against Israel or the US on behalf of dead relatives. Then maybe the Iraqis and Afghanis will catch on.
And then, just maybe, they will all be too busy at court and be as poor as church mice. They will not have the time nor the resources to kill each other.
The Scotch & Soda electric bike.
Back to bloody watches – this would be a nice student project…
Create an automated watch mini assembly line.
Material Inputs would be:
Then these would all be placed in a cassette loading system and the following functions would be fully automated:
The idea would be to have labour-free flexible machining and coating capability so that a watch could be automatically assembled to a customer request for design features, and fully executed from Internet design and payment system, right through to customer delivery.
I would call this mini-factory, say, Industrial Revolution Gen 4.5 – sort of between the German 4.0 concept (automated factories) and Gen 5.0 which includes 3-D printing and the like (See http://bit.ly/1waigog).
Lately I have been pondering ways to integrate all social media into one dashboard interface.
Now that is not a very original thought I know, but wouldn’t it be nice to have one interface to rule them all?
I think the trick would be to have automated content generation or posting, a measure of ‘success’ of your efforts, alerts and warning when needed, and learning algorithms working on your behalf to make your efforts more effective and efficient.
For example, if the Klout metric is your thing (i.e. you want a high online status amongst a shit-load of people that you don’t know) then this measure could be used by a learning algorithm to post content in just the right way to boost your ego.
If connectivity to friends and family is your thing, then auto-bounce replies for all of them could be constructed, with minimal human intervention. But just enough to let them know there is a human involved. This could be the Queen Bee metric.
If you have a needy partner then an algorithm could measure their inputs and ratchet up the replies, of the right nature, to assuage their fears. You don’t increase your own security by increasing the sense of insecurity in others. Call this the Valentine’s metric.
When I was doing my PhD I mixed with a bunch of people of a sort that I haven’t since.
Which is to say, the environment put me in contact with types that I wouldn’t naturally mix with.
Some were outgoing and some were introverts. Some were geeky and some were not. And yet others were eccentric.
However I recall three that were all of; introverted, geeky and eccentric.
And each had an unusual habit of pronouncing a particular word in their own special and unique way.
One said ‘sway-do’ for pseudo.
One said ‘nah-no’ for nano.
And the last one said ‘jig-a’ for giga.
This is spite of the audible evidence that the entirety of the global scientific community demurred.
And the odd, odd thing was that they were never called on it. Everyone was too polite.
I would love to go back and see what it was.
Was it a crusade of indignation? Or a form of auditory autism? Or something else?
Personal mobility devices are banned the minute they exist in Club Oz. Next up they will ban things that don’t even exist. Don’t you just wish they would ban the banning of things?
I have tried so hard
And got so far
But to be clear
I have lose it all
I have to let it go
Then I will have enough
To face the end
As if it were
The start
The most important thing in life is not to stop striving to understand what in fact you are.
Courtesy of the Commbank and Pixlr.
Stuck on a domestic flight I tried meditating with limited success. If there is any noise less compatible with meditating than the Qantas piped messages, I haven’t heard it.
Eventually I occupied myself with the Financial Review, the more readable of the two freely available tabloids on Qantas.
And why, I wonder, do they even offer up the Australian? Apart from it’s questionable content, courtesy of Rupert, when opened it pretty much covers three seats.
Anyway, I was amused to see an article reporting on certain self interested parties calling on the government to mandate that a fraction of our superannuation funds be invested in local venture capital
This rebuttal of the concept by the super industry spokesperson bears repeating:
“Experience has shown [that] people running VC organisations [in Australia] earn more than those who have invested in it”.
In fact, most investors in Australian VC have had a negative IRR. And in total the return to investors in Australian VC has been negative (on capital) over the last 40 years.
None of the new players have articulated a plan that addresses the documented and systematic flaws of Australian VC. See http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/australian_venture_capital_____can_
Failing in this they do not deserve our attention.
I can’t imagine the lobbying power of the super industry losing this battle, thank God.
I keep seeing long articles on the subject of the composition and behaviour of company boards.
You would have to think that this implies that we in Australia have a problem with boards. I think we do.
In terms of the behaviour this is what I think boards should do:
On a personal level, board members should mentor the CEO.
On a sub-board group level, boards should advise the CEO.
Collectively and individually, boards should audit a company’s reportable data; directors are on the hook for reportable data and this is to ensure that management is behaving both ethically and legally. Normally they are, but there are enough instances of bad behaviour to make this a relevant task.
Boards need to approve management strategy and plans, but not before they have had input and recommended remediation, if required.
And, of course, boards need to hire and fire the CEO. Firing should be seen as a last resort and executed rarely. Indeed, planned replacements of the CEO, with the CEO cooperation, is a much better bet. If a CEO is ever fired then the board that put the CEO in place also needs to go.
As to board composition, the primary issue here in Australia is that boards are often made up of ‘affinity’ groups with individuals of similar attributes, and also people that fail to understand what the primary purpose of a board is (as per above). Some deep and relevant industry experience, and a good mix of this, also seems like a sensible idea.
Getting board composition right is both an art and a science; see my article on the subject at http://issuu.com/ianmax/docs/bored_with_board_meetings
It is often said that it is madness to keep asking the same question, expecting a different answer.
But this quote needs a carve-out; it is quite sane to keep asking the same question of different people, in the expectation that one will eventually find a sane recipient.
There is a school of thought out there that there is a collective consciousness.
Some call it morals, some call it energy, some call it religion, and others call it bloody unlikely.
If it exists then we have quite a perverse existence:
1. On one hand the conscious ego telling us that we are discrete animals either in competition with, or in league with other discrete animals, and
2. Then at another level, we may be part of a collective consciousness, where certain actions at the conscious level can do serious harm under the gunnels.
I was pondering self-awareness recently and I came to the conclusion that it is not just a result of massive neural processing as many have proposed (e.g. the Turing test proposes fooling a human with a machine that just processes one type of limited sensory data, and where most of its effort is in the processing of the data).
Considering that we probably have trillions of discrete molecular sensors that are always ‘on’, I suspect that a huge fraction of our brain power deals with controlling these sensors, capturing the data and processing it.
I wonder if self-awareness isn’t just a result of this massive subconscious sensory processing effort. The conscious brain may just be a supervisory control layer tasked with looking after the host body.
I can see two types of sensory data – data pertaining to the volume of space occupied by the body (the self) and data from outside the body which can be broken up into data from other humans and data from the rest.
Assuming we favourably weight the data from our own species, and assuming everyone else does the same – it doesn’t take much imagination to see that, from a data sensory self-awareness point-of-view, we are all just 6 degrees of separation from each other.
And hence the connection between self-awareness, consciousness and the collective, It would be quite amazing if these concepts were actually not separable in any way.
All of that is a very nice hypothesis but how to test it?
Two hundred years ago English people first colonised Australia.
Living isolated on a large island continent the aborigines must have lacked sensory data connectedness to the rest of humanity, either in real time or in any sort of genetic memory.
I wonder if this accident of geography might not explain much of the subsequent disastrous recent history?
This is worth a read – “Why experts reject creativity” @ http://theatln.tc/1Eh8Zlh
The article presents data (see the graph below) that shows that we, the children of the enlightenment, are biased towards incremental improvements.
The blue line represents the perceived future benefits versus the ‘novelty’ of an idea or a project. That is, return versus risk.
Although this is a ‘perceived’ view of risk ahead of a project being executed, it pretty much matches reality. We can say this because we, the human learning machines, have learned to collectively assess risk over many, many cycles of projects. This ‘evolutionary’ capability is in fact the basis of economics – but that is another story.
You may note that this curve is actually a transform of the usual risk-return curve. The evaluation score is related to “return” and the “proposal novelty” is just risk.
According to this graph we perceive that big new creative ideas have poorer risk-return profiles than the more incremental ideas in the middle of the graph. And very low risk (business as usual) ideas also have a poorer risk-return profile. It’s pure statistics; the enlightenment taught us all about reversion to the mean, together with the power of incremental and continuous improvements.
The article also documents that experts often have a bias against creative ideas and their progenitors. This, it is hypothesised, is because:
“A real or self-proclaimed expert [is] impatient with new ideas, because they challenge his ego, piercing the armor of his expertise”.
I would go a step further and say that people often become experts because they lack creativity. See where I have placed them on the graph below.
Creative types tend to work in an area, master some new variation and then, driven by a curiosity that always needs the ‘new’, move on to new areas, rather then hanging around as experts. Creatives are at the other end of the graph (see below).
Hence there is a natural antipathy between the two types – it’s just a personality clash. Neither of them are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – they are both there to do their bit and to protect the system against the undue influence of each other. And hence, sitting in between the two, the incremental improvers dominate (see graph).
Now occasionally some genuinely new idea gets funded and becomes successful – the example in the article is the iPhone.
The authors point out that is very difficult for these types of high risk innovations to get funded because of the perceived poor risk-return profile – which just happens to match the real risk-return profile based on a statistical number of prior experiences.
I would argue this is as it should be. By making it tough for super creative ideas to get funded, only the very motivated creative types get their ideas over the line. And only the very motivated creative types have the energy to offset the inherently higher risk factors of their ideas.
It all makes sense.
As a final comment I should note that broadly speaking there are two types of creatives; the conceptuals and the experimental innovators.
Experimental innovators continue to create throughout their lives, often improving with experience. Think Henri Matisse. Missing an early hit, my guess is that they often feel unappreciated early on which provides continuing motivation.
Conceptuals usually have an early ‘big bang’ period of creativity. Think Albert Einstein. After this initial bang the conceptuals either reconcile to eating a lot of dinners off their early efforts or spend the rest of their lives futilely trying to recapture the incapturable.
My guess is that many conceptuals morph into experts after the glow of the early hits has faded. Just a hunch.
One day I will write a book on risk assessment in unknown environments.
That is, when there are no useful prior examples to refer to, how to make decisions using your gut.
And also, how to train your gut.
Theologians; I have just listened to my first ever batch of them, courtesy of Radio National.
Well, what do you know, they are just like historians. That is, anti-scientists.
Scientists works from the unknown to the known.
For example, a new observation is discovered. Everyone argues what it means. Experiments are performed, models proposed and eventually agreement is reached and everyone moves on to more interesting things; the next unknown.
Historians and theologians go the other way; from the known to the unknown.
Starting with some actual real live events, such as the life and works of Jesus, these practitioners wait until most of the real data has been lost or mutated, and some new data has been fabricated, and then start arguing about the gaps.
Worse still, they start using their hallucinations to support much bigger hypotheses, such as the existence of a benevolent creator, comforted by the fact that new and uncomfortable data isn’t going to suddenly appear.
The further the events drift into past history the more disagreement you will find amongst historians or theologians. Hence my label of anti-science.
I just listened to two theologians politely loathe each other. Their point of difference seemed somewhat semantic. They will never resolve their dispute because it is entirely opinion based. They need to agree to disagree. I suspect that these personality types, the ones that will spend their lives cogitating such banalities, can never just let it go
I reckon that if you are wired this way you are better off writing novels. Unconstrained by surviving data, novelists can do what the hell they want, and they will not be tormented by their own hypocrisy.
Other things maybe.
“AUSTRALIA’S supermarket giants have backed the Fair Dinkum Labels campaign to improve product labelling and tell consumers where their food has been sourced from.”
Maybe, just maybe, it would be more useful letting us know what the food had been tested for, and whether it comes with a medical and life insurance policies.
One thing’s for sure, the Fair Dinkum Label will be made in China. And it may contain traces of nuts.
The toilet seat below was bought and installed by the Sicilians that opened a new local restaurant. Which of these is true? They bought it because:
(A) it was the cheapest available.
(B) it looked the best
(C) both A and B above
(D) it was an accident; they were in a hurry
(E) it was the plumbers choice, who was also Sicilian
(F) they thought it would be fun to confuse their Anglo customers
(G) they were talked into it by Uncle Gino who owns the plumbing supplies store, and was desperate to get rid of this old stock
(H) it’s a better color to hide stains compared to white
(I) none of the above
Courtesy of Tess, comes this pearler:
”The Bird’s Eye product was produced by Simplot, the last large scale frozen vegetable producer in Australia. A spokeswoman said it contained sugar snap peas, water chestnuts and broccoli florets from China for commercial reasons.
She said the company’s equipment could not cut the broccoli florets small enough but new machinery was being worked on.”
This translates as “my plunger broke”. I bet they do start working on new machinery now that she has said it.
I wonder why they are so scared of the truth? That is, “broccoli florets so cheap from China that we can even afford to absorb the cost of a few recalls, a full-time spokeswoman, and negative publicity events, and still make more money than if we grew the shit here in Australia”.
This week, twice I have heard senior managers in software and services companies refer to the ‘manufacturing’ of their product.
I seriously object!
This is the sort of the habit that I just know will catch on. With 68% of our GDP being services, I am going to have to suck this up on a daily basis.
Hypnotherapy coming up.
I really admire many members of the cheer club.
Despite any data to the contrary they will remain positive, even through gritted teeth at times.
Their belief is that a positive attitude begets a positive outcome. And in many cases they are absolutely right.
In business communications I often adopt the cheer club approach because it works. It helps to motivate others, or to create personal opportunities. But in development of business strategy, for example, it’s straight back to hard-core truth mode.
There are times when cheer clubbing strays over the line.
An example would be crowds of bogans waving little Australian flags on Australia Day. Nothing can convince me that they aren’t hiding behind a morning television-driven facade of fear and loathing; and that this cheer club behaviour will make their issues worse in the long run.
I guess what I am saying is that cheer club behavior is a tool to be used sparingly when the occasion demands. Full time use just leads to self deceit.
You can always tell if you have gone too far into cheer club mode. Just record yourself saying the word ‘cynic’ and listen to that recording for any hint of a sneer.
And if you don’t even trust yourself to do that without cheering, ask someone else, preferably someone you have labelled as a cynic.
PS the picture below has no relevance. It’s just that I have never seen a deep blue toilet seat before. I couldn’t decide what I thought about it. A cheer clubber would automatically rave about it despite any inner feelings of repulsion. Cognitive dissonance is their penalty for crimes against the truth. When the gap between their narrative and the truth gets too big they simply break down and cry.
Just yesterday I was accused of being cynical in this blog.
I demurred.
Recognising one’s own truth, I said, is a precondition for good thoughts and good deeds (it’s not really, but it sounded good at the time).
The cheer club, I noted, achieves great things. Positive vibes. But they have enough members already and their environment is being eroded by the ever widening gap between the external environment and their narrative.
I want to help them.
It all comes down to your definition of cynicism I suppose.
But have you ever heard a member of the cheer club say the word ‘cynical’ without a sneer?
Get back to cheering I say.
I have just finished reading a whiny article in the SMH entitled “Knowledge economy at what cost?”
Basic premise – ‘academic life was once great because we could do what the hell we wanted; now it’s rubbish because we have to do all this stuff and it’s mostly nonsense anyway. And there’s no funding for research. Why can’t we just go back to the 1950’s?’
In my opinion the Australian academic working life would be quite unbearable in this day and age. Maybe not as bad as working on a production line in a Chinese factory, but these intelligent people, the academics, have to suck up the hypocrisy of their masters, and their own. And this must hurt.
It seems as though the politicians and the public servants have gone out of their way to torture the academics over the last 35 years.
Slowly screwing down the bolts of torture. The victim, like a frog in water that is being slowly heated, has not reacted except for the odd muted whine.
In fact, self interest by senior academics has seen them effectively work as ‘collaborators’ with the torturers.
Eventually our university sector will be one large TAFE system solely serving the needs of our services-dominated domestic economy. The foreign student income may become a victim of the strangling of this sector by the government, who is just about the only investor in universities.
There will be a façade of residual research and our most likely young candidates will simply drift off overseas never to return. They already are.
With the availability of Google and Wiki I am pretty sure that the concept of a ‘knowledge’ economy makes no sense anyway. Knowledge is cheap; what we need is an ‘innovation’ economy – which we certainly do not have right now. Nor do we have a Knowledge economy despite 35 years of pretension that we are building one.
Knowledge is a necessary but far from sufficient ingredient for innovation. And our universities currently do not have, and have never had, a single clue about how to teach students to be a functioning part of an innovation economy.
I do wonder whether universities should follow society or get ahead of the curve.
Becoming large TAFEs make sense if they ‘follow’ because in our services-dominated economy this is what we need.
But if we want to use our universities to prime the pump of an innovation economy then there needs to be a lot of change. Possibly too much for the academics to bear me-thinks.
Personally I don’t think our universities are equipped with the fortitude, leadership or vision to ‘lead’ anything, not even a chook raffle. So it’s possibly best to just leave them alone for a few years until we see where our economy goes.
If resources take off again then we will need the large TAFEs and there will not be any rationale for another vision.
If resources flounder for long enough there may be a collective push for a Plan B (ooo .. they hate that phrase in Canberra) for our economy. Maybe an innovation led economy.
In summary, the past incarnation of universities is now redundant. There is no going back.
The present incarnation is an abortion resulting from genuine ill will in Canberra. It serves us not.
The future? Short of a miracle I can’t see a useful new model emerging from the current cesspool of self-interest, fear, enmity, mistrust, hypocrisy and plain old ignorance.
I have noticed that extroverts have more troubles using social media software than introverts because these tools are designed and built by introverts for use by introverts.
There is a correlation between price and exclusivity, but it is not linear and has a poor correlation coefficient.
Some labels, say Rolex Oyster watches, are quite pricey but worn on just about every business arm in China. Not exclusive.
Even an item that is rarely seen except in marketing communications can be considered to be not exclusive.
For example, a Cartier Rotonde de Cartier Astrotourbillon costs $116,195. Super pricey, yes, and rarely spotted. But they appear in many ads for Cartier and this erodes any genuine exclusivity.
Rarity, the chief sign of genuine exclusivity, is made possible by both limited supply and limited marketing visibility. Price is then just an indicator of quality, the greed of the supply chain, or the stupidity of the consumer, and sometimes all of these.
Brathwait design and ‘get made’ these nice watches.
They employ so-called naked marketing where they list their components, their cost base and margins on their website.
It’s a race to cut out the middlemen and reduce margins to something reasonable, like cost-plus.
If I were Swiss I would be worried around now.
Sure, try and extract as much margin from the old-school label conscious types before they die but in the long run they will have to either fall back to selling components or they will have to re-price the things.
I have a desire to design and sell my own watches. I know not why. Call it an obsession if you will. It’s being brewing for decades and I now have some well considered ideas that address an inexplicable hole in the market. Well, it’s inexplicable to me; probably no one else. Hence my (well learned) caution. I recently reached out to a Chinese watch maker and their reply is below. Caution anyone?
My cabbie this morning was complaining that the state government wants to sell all the power poles to the Chinese.
I suggested that we all just buy a couple each instead.
And then it occurs to me that artificial intelligence has two components; the brain and the body.
Most of what I have read on the subject discusses the neural complexity required to be intelligent and then, at another level, self aware.
But I am thinking that the body is one big sensor, equivalent to billions of discrete sensors.
The whole global internet of things probably has substantially less sensors attached to it than my little finger.
What I am saying is that self awareness might be a natural outcome of processing and parsing all that sensory input.
“Three West Tigers players to be tested for Hep A after berry scare”.
I wonder how ASADA will spin this one?
Chinese betting ring?
I was talking to a colleague today about the habit of Australian venture capitalists in taking participating preferred stock as opposed to non-participating preferred stock or capped preferred stock.
I pointed out that 99.9% of all deals ever invested in by Australian VCs have been out of the money, so very few founders have been affected by the difference.
I also noted that because of the low success rate of VC in Australia that this tough ‘pricing’ mechanism seems justified.
But thinking further, any deal that is unexpectedly successful is likely to attract later stage funding from foreign investors and the very same participating liquidation prefs, carried through to later and bigger rounds, might actually work against the local investors.
Especially since their share of later rounds is usually somewhat limited by percentage, not necessarily due to their investment capacity, but also due to the perception by US VCs that they are ‘passengers’.
Without doing a spreadsheet calculation my gut says a capped liquidation preference might be a better bet, and at least it is a plan that foreshadows success.
So I say to Australian VCs, the handful that are left, stick to capped liquidation prefs and adjust the pre-money valuations down accordingly.
Now I am laughing; imagine trying to convince the cargo cult rump of the merits of this logic?
You can’t imagine how hard it is to get a splinter out without reading glasses at hand.
It’s probably why cavemen only lived to 50. Septiceamia.
Today is Shrove Tuesday.
My Catholic friend tells me that this is a day of self-examination, of considering what wrongs need repenting, and what areas of spiritual growth require attention.
And you have to stuff your face with pancakes ahead of Lent.
Talk about mixed messages.
Fine China may the one product where the ‘Made in China’ label cannot be considered to be detrimental.
Someone has a delicious sense or irony down there at The Tabletop Professionals.
Sometimes I want to write about a subject, such as the out-of-body experience, and I do a little Google research only to find that the subject is not worth writing about.
But in this particular case I will let you be the judge by reading the journal abstract below – this is the latest well-cited effort in the field. Based on my experience as a scientist my assertion is that these guys are:
1. Only using the most subjective of experimental data, i.e. surveys of subjects.
2. Hiding their total absence of a mechanistic proposal in a Krebs Cycle of acronyms.
3. They haven’t done their homework – they are trying to understand the out-of-body experience before the groundwork is done. That is, they are not standing on the shoulders of giants. In which case they are not scientists, so why do they bother with academic journals? They would be better placed to have websites decorated with flowers and sunsets.
“It has been argued that hallucinations which appear to involve shifts in egocentric perspective (e.g., the out-of-body experience, OBE) reflect specific biases in exocentric perspective-taking processes. Via a newly devised perspective-taking task, we examined whether such biases in perspective-taking were present in relation to specific dissociative anomalous body experiences (ABE) – namely the OBE. Participants also completed the Cambridge Depersonalization Scale (CDS) which provided measures of additional embodied ABE (unreality of self) and measures of derealization (unreality of surroundings). There were no reliable differences in the level of ABE, emotional numbing, and anomalies in sensory recall reported between the OBE and control group as measured by the corresponding CDS subscales. In contrast, the OBE group did provide significantly elevated measures of derealization (“alienation from surroundings” CDS subscale) relative to the control group. At the same time we also found that the OBE group was significantly more efficient at completing all aspects of the perspective-taking task relative to controls. Collectively, the current findings support fractionating the typically unitary notion of dissociation by proposing a distinction between embodied dissociative experiences and disembodied dissociative experiences – with only the latter being associated with exocentric perspective-taking mechanisms. Our findings – obtained with an ecologically valid task and a homogeneous OBE group – also call for a re-evaluation of the relationship between OBEs and perspective-taking in terms of facilitated disembodied experiences.”
I do not watch sport any more. At some age I just lost interest in ground hog day sports events.
But I still read the sports section in the newspaper and I find myself far more interested in the Rugby Union than any other sport.
This is because the Rugby writers are generally far better writers than those writing for other sports, with the notable exceptions of Craig Foster, Patrick Smith, Roy Masters and the now departed Peter Roebuck.
And when I say ‘better’ I mean in respect to both content and prose.
Firstly an article must be easy to read – this is a real art in sports reporting. An article that is easy to read must ‘sound’ pleasant to the mind, it must have a point, it must avoid repetition, it must have humour, it must lack dull and mechanical reporting of the events that occurred on the field, and it must be devoid of obvious errors.
Secondly, the very best article not only reports the sports event, past or future, but must also have a thesis that is proposed, returned to, and finally adjudged. And this thesis often has nothing to do with sports. For some this is just a juicy medium from whence to sprout life philosophy.
Without a profit motive, what’s the biggest organisation one can run in an effective manner?
Well, any country is generally a ‘not for profit’ and these are big. The UN. The Catholic Church. FIFA. The IOC. Yada, all the way down to your local sports club.
However at some point, say above 100 people, the managers of these ‘not for profits’ generally figure out a way to extract profits even though dividends and share sales aren’t an option.
Generally this is called rorting or corruption, this can include favours for people with brown paper bags, high salaries, job perks, generous contracts to personally owned service companies, the cheap sale of assets, and the like.
Since this behavior is anti correlated to good corporate leadership (because I assert so) there is a problem that needs fixing.
My pet proposal, designed to annoy quasi-socialists with two cars and kids in private schools, is that all of these ‘not for profit’ entities are semi-privatised.
They wouldn’t have shares as such but non-transferable shadow stock gifted to all stakeholders on an equitable basis; and these would yield dividends.
This way the leaders of these entities can get their dreams fulfilled with salary bonuses related to dividend yields but their efforts in this regard would be constrained by other stakeholder needs, and communicated to management through the compulsory voting process for board directors, certain compulsory shareholder voting matters (no vote, no dividend) including the appointment and otherwise of CEOs.
I’m telling you, if all Australians received an annual cheque from the non-retained annual profits of the Federal Treasury, we’d be taking the whole Canberra thing a lot more seriously.
In fact there wouldn’t even be a Canberra. It’d either be sold to the Chinese or written off as a fully depreciated but cashflow hungry asset. Government would sensibly move to Sydney – probably in some cheap arse mid-sized block in the Paramatta CBD.
Politics would move to the business pages and be a lot saner. This would open up space at the front of the papers for a little foreign reporting. Yada.
I wonder of the NRL integrity unit is seeking the absence of, or the presence of integrity.
Chatting to Greggie the other night I learned that Australian universities are all heavily investing in medical and bio research, primarily by importing successful and relevant academic researchers in the area, and also poaching the same off each other.
The motivation is to halt their collective slide down the global university rankings as Asian countries invest in their universities
Since medical research has a higher ‘impact’ factor, a dollar investment in research in this area offers a better impact on the university rankings than a dollar invested in something useful and boring like water treatment technology.
The constraining factor of course is that there is still the same limited NH&MRC research budget available for this medical research and an increasing demand for it as the universities all heavy up in these research areas.
Our universities need their high rankings because it impacts the fees that they can charge off foreign students, which they rely upon to stay solvent.
This scenario begs a few questions:
1. How did we get into this situation? Its a very unholy downward spiral with no likelihood of unspiralling.
2. Having said that, it’s going to have to break for anything to change. And it will eventually. Everyone in the system seems to have Stockholm Syndrome and they don’t see the problem, or at the very least they have a fear of ‘calling’ the situation.
3. How much medical research can a Koala Bear? We in Australia hardly use any of our research results in the area as it is and we import most of the practical medical technologies that are widely used.
4. Why O’ why does medical research have such a high impact factor? Because a lot of people are doing it, which leads to more citations, and hence a higher impact factor. Ever seen such a circular justification? ‘Ship of Fools’ territory.
5. You have to think we would be better placed in our small economy skating away from the pack and specialising in something less mainstream than medical research where we at least have a chance of being first rate. This is sort of like being able to win the world cup in Rugby League whereas we have no chance in Soccer. Or playing a game such as AFL that nobody else has even heard of.
6. Our economy is mostly services and then resources and agriculture. Maybe our research efforts could focus here? What an odd thought.
7. I wonder if anyone seriously believes our universities have improved since they started focusing on the foreign student dollar?
8. If they are going to run our universities into the ground then at least turn them into for profit organisations and completely privatise them. They would have at least a fighting chance of being successful at this unholy pilgrimage. The first thing they would do is hire proper management.
Enough said.
There is a lot of research in the area of artificial intelligence but apparently very little in artificial stupidity.
Me thinks intelligence is best spotted by it’s lapses into stupidity.
In fact, intelligence as we know it is defined by such lapses.
An example is cognitive dissonance which can lead to despondency or, where there is less hope or control, depression.
You’d think you’d have to be bloody stupid to purposely make a machine that suffered from cognitive dissonance.
But maybe that’s what it’s going to take to get true learning capability and, therefore, artificial intelligence.
Now this funny.
Within 24 hours, after having twice having unrelated and random discussions about the two times in my life that I have been electrocuted, tonight I go and electrocute myself again.
This time it was just 100% pure stupidity – just like the last two times. I have been fixing this old lamp and was playing around with it after the job was done just to see why the thing seems to flicker from time to time. Then ZAP when I put my finger across the electrodes for the bulb.
I have an RCD (residual current device) in the electricity box which was sold as a nanosecond cut-off device that will save one’s kids from electrocution. It didn’t seem to do much. Maybe it determined I was only copping a small current instead of a life-threatening current. Just like an ABS that doesn’t go off at low speeds.
In any case 50 Hz is now indelibly etched in my brain. And my fingers. I can still feel it as I am typing.
Now this is a segue; one of the conversations I was having about electrocution was related to body energy. What is it and where does it come from?
I made the point that we evolved without electricity and our body’s reaction to electrocution couldn’t be pre-recorded as, for example, it is postulated that our reactions to snakes and spiders are.
Supposedly we carry in our DNA a memory of spiders and snakes so that, even if we have never seen one of these, we know to hate them.
But then I thought, maybe we have such a genetic memory for lightening strikes. And that is the one that is used to create a microsecond response to electrocution.
What seems to happens is that every muscle, bone and tendon in the body immediately works in concert, and on a microsecond timescale, to remove you from the source of the current.
The first two times this happened to me I was thrown through the air – a feat that I could never conjure up with my conscious brain.
The question is whether this is a release of stored energy or a mobilization of an actuating engine that converts inputs to energy. Given the speed of response I think there is a form of stored energy on our bodies at all times, to be used in an emergency.
Now segueing again; it occurs to me that an orgasm is an electrocution in reverse. My thinking?
Well, first, why do we even have orgasms?
My suspicion that at one level we are being rewarded with something we like, so we do it again. The process also switches off the brain which prevents us doing unwanted things, like stopping; this switching off the brain is also a reward for most people. And then there is the releasing or controlling of energy in the body.
Therefore an orgasm is like an electric shock in reverse, compelling us to the source of the future shock.
One more of these bloody shocks and this blog will be officially nuts.
Actually this had led to more thoughts on sex. To have sex most people have to tune out all conscious thoughts, especially men. Erections are hard to maintain when external thoughts are going on.
Maybe this is why women have harder time having orgasms on average – they don’t have quite the physical feedback loop.
In any case my guess is that there are two types of tuning out of conscious thoughts during sex. The first is self centered subconscious, also known as ‘porn’. The second is a descent into the collective subconscious, known as love.
Deep, man.
My mother just asked me, with quite some annoyance in her voice, if I know what ‘flat’ means. This in the context of a failing to follow some exact instructions with respect to placing a zip bag full of bolognaise sauce into the freezer.
I responded:
“An object with a high aspect ratio which is substantially parallel to a surface which itself is substantially perpendicular to the local force of gravity”
With a sigh she gave up and I was saved from further unnecessary torture.
The billboard below is a lie. Drinking Coopers beer is one of biggest compromises I can think of.
Coopers is a pre-technology beer. For some reason the Coopers brewery, tucked away in Adelaide, missed the mid-twentieth century introduction of beer filtration, biotechnology and chemical engineering. They kept plugging away with their cloudy dinosaur of a beer and eventually it became the first of the local ‘craft’ beers.
Craft my arse; I call it lazy, tight-arsed, backwards and self-deluded.
When I enter a pub, any pub, I will ask for a Tooheys New. It’s easily the best beer made in Australia.
The closer one gets to the epicenter of the first hipster the less likely it is that a pub will have New.
They will have twenty taps all labeled with names such as pigs trotter, camel back, little fuckers, iron bark, here & now and maybe Coopers (although this is now considered by the hipsters to be old-new-school, or new-old-school, anyway one of these, and therefore mainstream).
These beers are universally over-expressed in flavour, expensive, pretentious, and full of unfiltered colloidal rubbish that will give you a clanger of a hangover.
Even the default backup for Tooheys New, Carlton Draft, comes in an unpasteurized craft version. It’s rubbish. Who knew that pasteurisation improved the flavour of beer so much? Who even knew that they pasteurised beer?
When I was a kid I lived in my parent’s pub. We had two beers on tap. New for the masses and Old for the shop stewards, and 50/50 (a mix of the two) for the odd eccentric and the resident homosexual.
Low alcohol beer was affected with dilution by lemonade. Craft beer involved the addition of Scotch or a Bex Powder, sometimes both. Pretension was satiated with Crown Lager, which was just over-priced and bottled Reschs Draft. Cloudy and bitter beer was simply an off keg
Ah, the easy days.
It’s very likely that we will never see the like of Tony Abbott again.
I suspect he is the secret love child of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Dame Edna.
I pretty much knew his prime ministership would play out like this because of the incident a couple of years ago when he outed himself for having a love child in early twenties, only to find out later that the now adult kid wasn’t his.
Faarkking hilarious. And this could only be the actions of a complete fruit loop.
We have Julia and Kevin to thank that he’s still around to entertain us on a daily basis.
I truly hope he’s still there in a year’s time.
The mystery remains though; what’s going on our political parties that these clowns can get elected to leadership despite their clearly demonstrated personality flaws?
The Telstra CEO has called for an end to the leadership ructions in Canberra saying the business community needs certainty to plan for the next decade.
Ask yourself, why?
It’s because our large oligarchies are so inbred that they can’t grow market opportunities in genuinely competitive foreign markets. They do not have the skills or the guts.
Hence they are stuck with their share of the Australian market and their profitability is largely dependent upon government policies with respect to corporate tax rates and continued barriers to foreign incursions into our protected markets.
In addition it is argued that inconsistent politics impacts consumer confidence which reduces the local market size as people stop spending.
The real problem is that so many of our large corporations are fully dependent on the local service sector, which represents a frighteningly high 68% of our GDP.
If our corporations had high value exports and/or significant foreign revenues, for example, they would be far less sensitive to local consumer sentiment and political shenanigans.
The sooner we act on this the less the ultimate shock is going to be.
But I am afraid it’s already way gone; the correction when it comes is going to be much larger than that which followed Hawke and Keating’s efforts to open our old-school protected economy of the time.
It’s ironic that the oligarchies (minus the manufacturers who went the way of the Tassie Tiger) have managed to reinvent their domestic market positions despite this former market deregulation. But it makes sense; it’s the only skill-set that they had.
And the correction will come – technology is making sure of that.
At a business forum the other day I heard a successful businessman of Lebanese extraction argue that Australia has a high level of low level racism but a low level of high level racism.
This, in context, was used to create the impression that our problem with racism isn’t really that bad.
Now this guy is well and truly part of the establishment and wears his Islamic religious beliefs as a sort of emblem of token inclusionism within the business community. That is, he gets to eat a lot of lunches off these conciliatory views.
He didn’t address the kinetic link between low level and high level racism – do they have a correlation? can the proliferation of the former pave the way for the latter?
Our parliament is now getting itself all worked up over the racial discrimination act all over again.
The key issue is whether it should be unlawful to offend or insult a person based on their race or religion. Unlawful meaning that the offended or insulted party, if they have the means and motivation, can take the suspected racist to court for reparations.
Most agree that the racial discrimination act needs to ensure that high level racism is unlawful or even illegal.
I believe that low level racism should be discouraged in other ways, through education and marketing, simply because an over-reach into this space will create very real incursions into personal freedoms.
And to be honest, making racial discrimination unlawful unfairly favours those with the means to prosecute offenders – that is, it ironically discriminates against the lower socio-economic victims.
It’s a very grey area, the bit in the middle between high level and low level discrimination, and I for one would err on the side of caution before using the law as a solution to a problem that is not properly understood.
In Australia we have universities and in each university you will find a commercialisation office tasked with spinning out innovative technologies.
Four things are certain about these commercialisation offices:
1. The academics will hate them because “they don’t serve our needs”. I wouldn’t count this one against the commercialisation offices.
2. The people that run any one of them will have previously been in a similar job at another university in Australia or the UK.
3. They will be eternally cash flow negative.
4. At any moment by some weird consensus they will all promote commercialisation by either startups or, alternatively, licensing.
Right now the buggers are swinging back to licensing just as the global licensing model is collapsing as a result of the changes to the US patent and patent enforcement regimes.
It’s like they are totally unaware or it just doesn’t matter.
I suspect both.
Another privacy opportunity –
An app on your phone or in the cloud that generates false data alongside the true data about you that they are capturing and using against you.
For example – false location data, false browsing data, false purchasing data, false phone calls, etc.
This way, since they won’t know which is true data and which is not, it can never be used against you in a legal process.
Also, since you have a record of the false data you can detect misuse quite easily.
In fact, you could lay bear traps for the data pirates by creating patterns of false data that they can’t resist using. And catch them at it.
With voters increasingly swinging between our two political parties it’s a wonder that all the backbenchers, both Labor and the Coalition, don’t quit and form their own party.
They could call it the Backbenchers Party.
They would have an immediate majority in the lower house and they could form a government outside of an election.
Of course, they would then have to change their name to the Frontbenchers Party.
Then the former frontbenchers, both government and shadow, could join forces as the new Backbenchers Party.
I had an old friend, a very good research chemist, that spent the back end of his working life promoting an alternative molecular structure for DNA.
That is, he thought the double helix was either a hoax, or a conspiracy theory, or the result of cargo cult effect amongst scientists.
His evidence was that all the then available experimental data could be explained with more than one molecular structure.
This was partially true at the time, although it is not any more.
But he ignored the fact that the double helix has the sort of easy elegance that nature prefers.
Think of this as an minimum on an aesthetic ‘energy’ surface. What we perceive as aesthetic is in fact efficient; we ourselves are just a product of nature.
My friend was also a passionate believer in God.
So his unrelenting intellectual questioning of orthodoxy was left on the coat hook outside the lab on a Friday afternoon.
Which brings me to Ziggy. Not Stardust but Switkowski, an inexplicable former CEO of Telstra – the grounded kangaroo.
Ziggy, a former physicist, pops up here and there, promoting the most expensive form of electricity generation, nuclear energy. He is paid to do so by some lobby group.
Nuclear energy usually involves profits that are private, and end-of-life plant costs that are socialised at public expense. That is, yet another neoliberal wealth transfer mechanism.
Clean renewable energy is upon us; it has crossed the threshold to reality.
Ziggy, like my friend the chemist, just refuses to recognise when the quixotic crusade is lost.
Last night I saw a movie set in and around the character of Stephen Hawking. One of the more painful experiences of recent years.
The very idea of one human fantasy (god) and another (maths and physics) pitched together in a beauty competition is quite bizarre.
Just for the record, a reverence of mathematics automatically disqualifies an individual from any dissertations with respect to wisdom.
And wisdom has nothing to do with time, space, imaginary friends, or synchronised diving (degree of difficulty 9.99999, oh wow).
I think I literally sighed for a whole minute when I got out of that cinema.
A couple of nights back I watched Tony Abbott get grilled by Leigh Sales on some ABC program.
Because he had just retained the prime minister-ship after a party spill, the focus of the interview was pure party politics.
It was a somewhat boring cat-and-mouse affair with the increasingly frustrated and quite disrespectful interviewer working hard to get a gotcha moment out of Tony, who to his credit avoided one altogether.
However in the process he revealed (to me at least) that he has absolutely no philosophy as to where he wants Australia to go. All the policies discussed are aimed at getting re-elected – sugar for a sufficient number of the masses.
The interviewer was out for blood but missed the opportunity to focus on the lack of an overriding philosophy, which could have been very easily and calmly exposed.
Reflecting back, Bob Hawke did have an over-riding philosophy – a healing of the traditional rifts between labour and capital.
Keating wanted to restructure the economy so we could compete internationally after years of protectionism.
Howard wanted to reinvent the calm contentment of the 1950s.
And then came Rudd, who like Abbott just wanted to be prime minister.
Gillard, I suspect, did have a philosophy especially in improving the equality in, and performance of the education sector. But it was somewhat limited in scope, poorly communicated and rather tactical as opposed to strategic.
When a politician has an over-riding philosophy it is much easier to listen to him her her.
Conversations become more natural and structured because policy can always be communicated in the context of the larger picture.
I wonder if we well ever have such again?
The national (net) wealth is the total sum value of monetary assets minus liabilities of a given nation.
Wealth includes (1) natural assets such as land, forests, fossil fuels and minerals, (2) human capital – the population’s education and skills, and (3) physical capital includes such things as machinery, buildings, and infrastructure.
According to a 2013 Credit Suisse report Australia was second in the OECD behind Switzerland in national wealth per adult
Most of the Swiss wealth is in banks, watches, engineering and chocolate. They have probably dropped a little since then due to losses in their now less attractive banking sector and aggressive currency depreciation.
The net worth per Australian adult in 2013 was US$402,578, of which US$503,070 was in assets and US$100,492 was debt.
Just yesterday I noted that the value of all residential dwellings in Australia is $5.4 trillion – info usefully provided by the TV in the gym.
I checked and the market cap of all ASX companies is $1.6 trillion.
Assuming that non-residential dwellings and land are worth another $5.4 trillion, and that private companies are worth at least as much as the listed companies, that gets us to $14 trillion.
Superannuation totals around $1.5 trillion.
To this has to be added human and other physical resources, including all those mineral resources – I get a total of at least $20 trillion.
Even subtracting for the impact of Tony Abbott, that leaves us with assets of around 800,000 mostly illiquid dollars per person. Much more than calculated by the Swiss.
And there is a little debt here and there – I am not sure how much of this debt is offshore and I am not sure how much this matters. But it does manage to suck up most of the liquidity that we do have.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could renounce our citizenship and get a $800k payout cheque when we leave the partnership of the criminally insane? Criminally insane because, despite this high inherent wealth, a large fraction of the buggers think they are hard off and would do just about anything to change that.
Or, on the flipside anyone seeking asylum here would have to buy into the partnership – $800k thanks, or at least a debt to that tune.
The Chinese have until recently been able to buy a ‘Golden’ visa to Australia for $5m – it seems this was well priced for Australia.
So it seems Australia’s problem is not assets, it’s cashflow. Which is why we have a habit of selling assets to generate cashflow.
Maybe we would be better off putting ALL the crown assets into a huge publicly listed vehicle (say $10 trillion market cap) and slowly sell all the stock in this company to overseas buyers.
As the money flows in we could all get an annual cheque for being part of the tribe, just like various indigenous communities I have visited around the world.
And then when the stock is all sold we could re-nationalise the business and maybe compensate the shareholders – actually, probably not. The trick would be to wait until some huge natural or human disaster (say a big war) when everyone’s eye is off the ball.
Then 18 months later, the apparent period for total global financial amnesia, do it all again.
Hang on, that’s sort of what we are doing….
Sometimes I feel like I am being chased by marauding hipsters.
Not on a daily basis but on a calendar basis.
Wherever we move our work office they follow.
Hordes of them in their three or four shades of hipster-look, some with stars and some without, carefully honed at the facsimile centers otherwise known as music festivals.
The plumages of these bowerbirds are an interesting amalgam of all the movements that have come before them, all the way back to the beat folk of the 50’s.
There must be individuals out there that introduce new elements, gleaned from old movies, one item at a time and on a regular basis.
Some of these catch on and the buggers slowly morph, staying a very short step ahead of the fashion industry where half of them work. The rest work in ‘marketing’ or IT startups, sometimes both.
As they arrive into our urban environment the pubs get converted (sideways) and sprout a Mexican beer garden, and the cafes go upmarket. As do the prices. And the conversations with your local barista become much more predictable.
Pretty soon we are going to run out of unhipstered Sydney. Lantana by another name.
Can someone please produce a contour map of hipster influence? And maybe start a movement for heritage zones, free of hipsters by decree.
Data – we are all generating skads of it all over the internet and other networks.
Where we have been, who we have been with, what we looked at, what we bought, who we talked to, who we messaged, what we listened to, … and the list goes on.
In the broadest sense there are three groups interested in this data:
1. Law enforcement and security agencies, either solving crimes or getting ahead of the curve and pre-solving crimes (minority report style).
2. Planning bodies of many sorts that need this information to make their plans more effective. This is a diverse bunch such as political parties, urban planning groups, and music festival promoters.
3. Any number of companies that want as much of your money as they can get. This groups consists of a whole supply chain of data gatherers, analysers, aggregators, wholesalers and retailers that on-sell their work efforts to vendors of products and services. However, increasingly data itself is the being consumed – we are disappearing up our own data orifices.
In the interests of personal freedom many are arguing that governments should clamp down on data collection. Unfortunately the cat is out of the bag and the data is already being collected. Indeed the various nets and the devices connected to their edges are beyond the control of any national government – at most there are a handful of governments that could bring down the networks. But that is different to control – in fact its a sort of admission of no real control.
The best we can do is place clear limits on the misuse of data by the three interest groups at the end of the supply chain, on a national level.
In fact I would make the misuse of such information a criminal offence. And put the onus of proof on clear data ownership and integrity, inclusive of any original data collection, upon the end (mis)user of data – the defendant. By making it a criminal offence the risks of using data illegally cannot be transferred by warranties in a contract. Indeed it would be an unlawful and criminal act so that any aggrieved party could take court action, not just the public prosecutors.
An example would be Coles or Woolies buying user data off some middle company that has aggregated and parsed data from a variety of sources including Google and Facebook. The directors of Coles or Woolies would be on the hook for criminal charges if they use illegally obtained data, or misuse data in contradiction to a clear code of conduct.
Generally speaking the risk of criminal charges keeps people honest, especially senior managers and board directors. At the end of the day we still live in a world where it is people, not machines, that make decisions to do silly things. So we need to make people responsible in a criminal sense otherwise the cost of getting caught is just a cost of doing business.
As a postscript I would add that data collected under a EULA (for example in an app or a browser) would only stand-up to court scrutiny if the EULA had first been approved by a national body set up for this purpose. If not it would be deemed to not exist for the purposes of being used by an end-user of data as defence material in a criminal court case.
The newly crowned Miss Universe from Colombia has been asked to make good on her aspirations for world peace by none other than the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (Farc).
The report said it is unclear what role she would play in the current peace talks. If Bob Marley could do it, I don’t see why she can’t.
What the farc?
This is Bear, one of the oddest dogs I have ever met. He belongs to my elderly parents.
10 years of age and still a pup, Bear is half Kelpie and half Border Collie.
Not being able to chase stock around a paddock he puts all his energy into protecting the pack.
One raised voice or one touch out of place and Bear launches himself between the adversaries with fearless enthusiasm.
And he’s not joking. No fighting.
In yesterday’s news I read:
“Prime Minister Tony Abbott promises South Australia chance to tender for Future Submarines project to win leadership votes.”
I for one do not take too kindly to a PM that promises $20-40 billion dollars of tax payer’s money just so he can prevent a leadership spill in his own party.
Seriously, seriously fucked up and with a moral compass pointing straight to hell.
This sort of behaviour is exactly why he is in trouble and he will never get it.
Now that was an interesting discussion I overheard;
“How long can the internet last?”
Based on history, the general agreement was a hundred years at best.
It never occurred to me, to be honest.
Why would it end? An apocalypse, a machine takeover, new and better technology, IoT-net, or what?
Geez.
The local Italian version of the milk crate cafe seat.
My advice to Malcolm Turnbull is not to wait until there is a spill to declare his nomination for party leadership, but to resign from Parliament immediately.
His point has been well made and the the pigs have been taught to sing.
They will never ever thank him though.
One of my favourite books is ‘The Empty Mirror’.
It’s the story of a Dutch guy who in the 1950s went into a Japanese Zen monastery.
He was very frustrated that they didn’t just tell him all their ‘secrets’ and that he had to learn them all through contemplation, meditation and basic routine.
Eventually he realised that they were showing him to learn through the body and subconscious mind, and that engagement of the everyday mental faculties just gets in the way.
In the West we are time poor and many that try and learn the calm and centralised ‘other’ ways are taught with methods that engage the highly developed brain with gobbledygook such as energy paths, chakras and any number of conceptual structures pilfered from old Eastern practices.
The assumption is that we are unable to let go of beliefs and therefore need to adopt a suitably untestable set of beliefs in order to start the journey and eventually let go of them.
I suspect that many get part of the way along the journey but get stuck in the belief structures, never to escape.
And then they become teachers because they have to eat and pay rent, thereby promulgating the problem.
And this (below) rocks in from a new research paper based on the MySchool results.
I now see what Julia was up to.
It basically shows that despite having twice as much money per student that private schools do not get better academic results than government or Catholic schools.
This can mean one of two things:
1. The private schools are crap at what they do, or
2. All that extra money is being spent on non academic things, which is the argument the private schools are (sensibly) running with.
If education results asymptote as they appear to do, then my guess is that Labor will argue for a ceiling figure, above which no government funding is afforded.
Many private schools would not get any funding. The budget would be relieved.
But it does beg the question, how far could funding be dropped in public schools without affecting academic results?
I am pretty sure that in my time results were at least as good as today but that relative funding levels were much lower.
Mike says “Arguably the country is getting much better value for money under both catholic and private school systems”. That is, the same results with less public money.
Mike is surprised that the government hasn’t forced people into private schooling like they have with private health care insurance. This is probably the coalition’s long term agenda.
The issue of course is that there are those that simply can’t afford even the basic schooling costs, whatever they are.
And also, the two sides of politics see the two sides of schooling as their breeding grounds for members and voters, to be preserved at all costs.
A view that is increasingly out of date as voters take to swinging between our two dysfunctional centrist political blocs.
Attributed to many and claimed by few, it’s probably at least 500 years old.
‘Everything will be OK in the end. If it’s not OK then it’s not the end yet.’
The photo below is me in Europe somewhere in my early twenties. Short of cash and not able to afford a shaver or a haircut. What other excuse could there be??
PS I did not take that photo Trev. My girlfriend did. The selfie and stick only emerged as an unexpected side effect of the smartphone and its dodgy optics.
Last night I gave the opening talk at an entrepreneurs’ weekend forum.
In question time I was asked ‘what motivates me?’
Very unlike me, I struggled to give a comprehensive answer.
But I did say that my motivation is certainly not money.
Later on, I decided that I am on a journey of understanding and the the medium in question (not my only one), early stage tech and investment, is simply a very useful place to explore some of life’s mysteries.
In contrast, a job in a corporation or a government funded body would teach me very little. I know, I have been there. These are static and controlled environments.
In my space, chaos and confusion are rampant. People’s core characters are exposed through stress. The weirdest types are attracted. The game is global and takes me all over.
Where better to collect data and run experiments?
The answer ain’t 42 mate.
Actually there is no answer as such. There is just a model that works for me.
I have built much of the scaffolding of the model already and am now focused on the brick work and maybe a couple of extra wings.
I don’t seriously expect anyone else to be that interested in my efforts. I lose interest myself pretty much the moment something is completed
It’s a race between me and the bats to get the mangoes off the tree.
I just spent two hours up the tree with the home-made mango picking pole
And then I get my second ever back spasm. Not nice.
Fortunately there’s a lot of useful advice to be has around here. And a hot bag and Voltarin.
Too much advice, in truth.
Advice should be dished out like a massage, with careful feeling for the other person’s responses and adjustments thereto.
A rare art.
Xenobitic additives, fats, carbs, salt and sugar, all delivered. Hopefully before it chills. Those fries are awful when cold.
When I was at my first real job, a start-up that when on to list on the NYSE, we were hit with a hostile take-over offer, which the CEO rejected out of hand.
The shareholders, on the other hand, weren’t so unimpressed and within days the arbitrage boys owned enough stock to seal the deal.
At the emergency shareholders meeting I remember chatting to a senior ‘hedge fund’ guy (hard to say what he was – maybe best to describe him as an American pirate with money and a suit) and he told me that ‘Once a company is in play, it’s over. The only question is where the money goes’.
This sort of reminds me of Tony Abbott’s situation – the deal is in play and the result is now inevitable. I wonder if he recognises this?
My guess is that the sort of bizarrely ego-driven mania that is required for a person to become PM must also blind-side the individual to the recognition of this sort of inevitability, despite the fact that it has happened many times over and always with the same result.
In business most smart leaders, when faced with such a situation, immediately start negotiating while they have some chips left on the table. Usually it is money they seek.
Abbott could angle for some plum role, say the ambassador to the UK. His spiritual home, so to speak.
Beef, who knows? I bet they don’t.
Sausage, Nuh.
Roll, yep.
Hand, only if they can’t afford a machine.
Crafted, dreaming.
Oven. Bain-Marie plus microwave.
Fresh, more dreaming.
100% Aussie beef seasoned with fresh garlic, tomato, carrot and onion. Really?
1830 kJ. Ludicrous.
$3.95. The only sure truth.
New word O’ bard.
Helianthusate, verb
hee-lee-an-thuh-s-ate
To vacillate in a predictable fashion.
Have you ever travelled to a different time zone and then used your Android phone to put meetings into your calendar for when you get back?
If so, and your phone is on the default setting of reverting to whatever the local time is, you will undoubtedly find your meeting times all messed up when you get back home.
Surely this is a problem that can be fixed?
I suspect that the problem is that the calendar app doesn’t know if the meeting is OS or at home. So it should ask, when you are out of your local time zone, whether this meeting is back home or somewhere out on the road. Or just assume that the time you put in for a meeting was the home time if it occurs after you lob back home.
It doesn’t seem that hard.
In its current form Australia’s proposed Crowdfunding Legislation, with its limits of $10,000 per non sophisticated investor per year and maximum of $2500 per company per investor, looks pretty bloody useless.
My guess is the feds are working hard to protect small investors from losing their money on an investment that they can’t do a proper risk assessment on.
The fear? That the same small investors, after they lose their money, will cry foul and blame the government for not protecting them from their own ignorance.
I have a solution!
Put all the relevant companies into a pool (say a specific exchange) and when an investor puts their money in they are assigned a randomly picked stock.
Given that the pool will without doubt lose money and that there will only be a small fraction of companies that make money, this then creates a ‘lottery’ situation. Most importantly the mean return for all the money going into the exchange will be negative, just like any good tote scheme.
Since this is without doubt just a pure gamble, investors gains would not be taxable as income.
And their losses? Well, bad luck – it would be like losing your money on a horse or a lottery ticket.
I would also create a PIPE scheme, where these same companies could sell stock directly to private investors (at the same price and terms) which would be treated under capital gains tax rules.
One hypothesis floating around is that our kids get so protected from the environment that they don’t develop sufficient immunity and end up with issues ranging from asthma to allergies. Another is that the over-use of antibiotics, extended breast feeding and crap diets is destroying certain key bugs in kid’s gut which are necessary for good immunity.
This hypothesis has been recently supported by a research effort that gave about 30 allergic children a daily dose of peanut protein together with a probiotic in an increasing amount over an 18-month period. The probiotic used in the study was Lactobacillus rhamnosus and the dose was equivalent to eating about 20kg of yoghurt each day. At the end of the trial 80% of the children could eat peanuts without any reaction from either their bodies or their mad mothers, compared to a 4% result from a placebo group.
Now to be be honest with you, I don’t give a flying fuck about peanut allergies. But this story reminds me of Australia’s economy. Let me explain…
We are 25 million people here in Club Australia living off a continent which would otherwise be good for 250 million people (yes it is – just think there’s 8m people in Israel; that is, a desert which is 370x smaller than Australia).
Resources and land – we have these in abundance and, well, why work hard on things like technology when there is an easy life to be had? So we end up living on an economic diet of carbs. And we have all the allergies in the world.
And our mother (the gub’ment) keeps us out of the dirt on a daily basis – for example, protecting us from the risks of losing our money in crowd equity funding or financial spread betting. And the result, we don’t lose our money and in the process we don’t learn how not to lose it.
In my sector, early stage tech, what I see when I look out the metaphorical window is a bunch of teletubbies playing in a kid’s bouncy castle, eternally protected by the mother from hell in Canberra that imagines potential peanut allergies in every white-shoe brigade proposal.
REPORT CARD: not ready for international competition just yet!
The unions in the construction industry remain stronger than they do in many other sectors, especially on larger projects.
In the sphere of occupational, health and safety their manic approach has substantially reduced accidents and deaths. No doubt about it. And this has positive effort has also helped keep them viable in this industry.
But they also actively work to stop the introduction of any imported labour-saving technologies. Their other fucntion is of course to keep up the number of jobs required in their industry.
There will come a day where in some foreign construction site there is one worker in a control room pushing buttons, but the equivalent Australian site will still have mid-twentieth century vision of hundreds of workers running around.
Back to OH&S – if there are no people on site then there can’t be any accidents. So logically, removing workers from a site by using new approaches to construction will reduce the number of OH&S incidents.
In the end it will come down to cost – do we prefer to pay 16x the lowest possible cost for new building? And just so a few people can dodge technological unemployment for a little longer.
The trouble in deferring technological unemployment is that the people affected will eventually meet their destiny but by then it is too late – they are too far behind to re-train.
I am not sure the construction unions are really doing their members a long-term favour.
Given a choice between hot air and paper towels, I take the towels every time.
You have to laugh … all the incubators and small investors really thought the bureaucracy was going to implement a useful new startup ESOP scheme.
After spending skads of useless time with the bureaucrats they are now bitterly disappointed with what they are going to get.
And they seem surprised too!
It doesn’t surprise me. There’s two negative forces at work here;
Treasury and the ATO, desperate not to make any loophole bloopers.
And the rest, a combination of disinterest, envy and incompetence.
Oh well, I will stick to my zero-value reverse-vesting common stock offerings. I don’t in fact have an issue that needs fixing.
What they mean is that the toilets have been out of action for a month. Green in every sense of the word.
UTS has just finished the unfortunately named “UTS Dr Chau Chak Wing Building”.
Is it a wing or a building or both?
Designed by the Frank Gehry company, it’s a little building with quite an intriguing exterior. Some will say ‘different’ is always good because if you wait long enough it will be considered a classic.
Personally I don’t think it’s that marvellous. It looks OK, but it’s not breathtaking. Different, yes. For me it doesn’t speak to the location nor does it have any hint of “Australia” about it. It looks like it belongs in Chicago.
Actually it looks like a climbing wall with windows sticking out of it. I reckon it would have looked better with the windows recessed. And then the UTS could have earned some extra money by renting it out as a climbing wall.
Given where it is, tucked away behind a few other buildings I wonder whether the money might have been better spent on making another ‘statement’ building on Broadway.
They spent $180m on the building. At 16,030sqm the building cost $11,228 per square meter.
In China commercial high rise costs $1,400 per square meter, and some new construction techniques they have are down to $1,000 per square meter.
If our universities can justify all this extra expense on high class buildings because they supposedly boost a university’s standings then god help our universities if the Chinese ever get on top of their architectural design issues.
The Australian government is modifying the tax laws on startup options, after much pressure from interest groups
The issue that they, the ATO and Treasury, have is that every time they create a favourable option tax scheme for startups, the big 4 consulting firms figure or how to game the scheme for their larger clients, closely followed by all the small consultants and their clients.
It looks like they have over cooked this new scheme to avoid this issue but by doing so made it less useful than it could have been.
My personal opinion is that the scheme could be very simple, as follows:
1. A company is eligible if
(a) more than 25% of the fully diluted stock, including options, are at least 1x liquidation preferred stock with a threshold of board and shareholder control rights, including drag-along rights for exit.
Note, they don’t need to grant options until someone invests, and with the proposed zero valuation (below) the timing of option grants becomes less critical. For example a company can accrue promises (by letter) to grant options and grant them later on when they hit the 25% threshold.
(b) the holders of at least 80% of liquidated preferred stock do not own any common stock or options.
Together these features would exclude the unworthy small businesses, corporations, listed leeches and SME’s, so long as beneficial interests were carefully excluded. And also the companies would need an annual external audit of their capital structure.
2. All options are deemed to have zero value at the time of grant with no income declarable, no matter what the price per share of the preferred stock. Keep it simple. This also avoids all the silly valuation methodologies, the dumb timing issues, etc. Note that the zero valuation for options does not imply any valuation of the common stock for tax purposes.
3. Options are only over common stock, must vest over at least two years, and the board must have power of attorney rights over them.
4. Options must be between 10% and 25% of the fully diluted stock after each option grant.
5. Profits from options are taxed at the same rate as capital gains as if the stock was held from the time of grant, independent of the mechanism used by an acquirer to buy out the options, or the time the stock is held between conversion and sale.
It is useful to remember that the mean return on genuine startups in Australia is quite negative over the last 40 years, so such a tax scheme isn’t giving anything away as such. Just so long as it can’t be gamed by the unworthy.
This scheme is also structured to force all this incubators and angels into sensible investment structures. It’s a two-fer that addresses the question as to “what is a startup?” from a capital structure point of view.
Back to school education … I made a friend quite cross with regards to something negative I wrote with respect to private schooling.
She said, and I absolutely believe her, that all she wanted for her kids was that they have ‘the best start in life’, aka private schooling.
However, many people that send their kids to private schools with this mantra in mind seem take on an expense of say $40k per annum, per child, without first doing substantial research on the subject. The fact that other people they know are doing it is deemed enough evidence.
Being me, I have done a little research into two aspects of this mystery:
1. Why parents choose to send their kids to private schools, and also
2. The data showing the effectiveness of private schools in giving kids a ‘better start in life’
Summarizing the surprisingly little published data on the second of these:
Taking into account all relevant factors, between school types in Australia there is virtually no difference in outcomes for kids, when measuring factors such as likelihood of employment, earning levels and employment prestige, and normalising for other variables. For more details see:
http://theconversation.com/buyer-beware-are-you-really-purchasing-a-better-education-14509
http://theconversation.com/private-schooling-has-little-long-term-pay-off-30303
If you don’t have much maths in your background, this data shows that university entrance scores and post uni salaries primarily correlate with socio-economic factors. To put it another way, a kid from a well-off background will do well not matter what sort of school they go to; it’s the parents and their attitudes & beliefs that drive ‘good’ results. The fact that a lot of well-off kids happen to go to private schools simply creates a correlation between these schools and good results that is not at all causal. So when you look at the great results from some expensive school you aren’t looking at a reflection of great teaching; all you are doing is looking at a socio-economic catchment phenomenon. I have explained this to a few well educated people now and they rarely get it so I am beginning to wonder what all that education is for.
So the rush to private schools is not supported by empirical data. This is a marketer’s dream – a product that sells itself despite the fact that it has no obvious quantitative efficacy. No wonder there is very little data available.
I then decided to tool around the internet looking for qualitative studies that explored why parents send their kids to private schools. This is the complete list of factors found by researchers, cobbled together from a number of studies, in no particular order:
1. Higher university entrance marks (debunked)
2. Higher salaries for kids when they emerge from university (debunked)
3. More prestigious jobs for kids when they emerge from university (debunked)
So then we get to the ‘soft’ selling features of private schooling – the ones that are hard to measure and in reality must sell the deal to parents:
4. Keep the kids away from the riff-raff in public schools. I personally think that in public schools one is more likely to find a broader cross-section of peoples, and this must serve kids well in life as opposed to the sort of (Anglo-Chinese blended) mono-culture in some private schools. As to out-and-out riff-raff, in my experience the worst of the worst people that I have met in life were spoiled private school progeny.
5. Ensure that the kids are more well-rounded as individuals. As per the last point, a sense of entitlement and elitism that is hard to avoid at private schools might erode any efforts to make kids more well-rounded. But I would challenge that public school kids aren’t well rounded anyway – they are pretty amazing and often their well-roundedness seems less ‘coached’ than the private school kids.
6. Ensure that the kids have more ‘life’ experiences. I personally believe that over-stimulating kids with experiences may lead to boredom later in life. Too much, too early can suck out the motivation from a soul. It’s not a biggy anyway.
7. Better remedial services. There is a view out there that private schools deal better with kids that go off the rails or just can’t keep up. However there is no published data to suggest this is true.
8. Allow for more parental involvement in the schooling process. Yeah well this makes no sense. In the old days the wealthiest people paid schools a lot of money for them to take their kids right off their hands, for good. Now people want to hang around schools like helicopters. If this turns you on so much, then home-school your kids. I say leave school education to the professionals and also leave the professionals alone – you can only annoy them as a parent.
9. Ensure that the kids get networked into a higher social status environment. This is a value judgement which becomes self fulfilling prophecy of no value.
10. Allow the parents to increase or maintain their own social status. This is the true selling point as we all know, but few admit. For example, I know parents, mums in particular, who have essentially dropped all their old friends and completely disappeared into mother’s groups at a private school. It isn’t real; kids grow up and these coalitions of the similarly afflicted will have no purpose in six years time. Someone ought to do a psychological study of this very odd phenomenon. It reminds me of the Sneetches in action.
11. Ensure that the kids get more exposed to ‘traditional’ values. There is a fear by the conservative types that the unionised Labor leaning state school teachers may bugger around with their kid’s heads. This is why Johnny Howard was so keen to promote private schooling with policy tweaks and changes; to increase the number of future right leaning voters. Apart from politics, conservative types are also scared of the laissez faire social leanings their kids may pick up in a state school. Indeed this may be an unholy and subconscious attempt to ensure that children do not fall too far from the tree.
And there you have it. A pretty poor set of reasons to spend $40k per year per child, in my opinion. Where else would anyone sign up for a quarter of a million dollar obligation (per child) without substantial research results that compare the pro’s and con’s?
And the oddest thing is that many of these people can hardly afford this money; it can be a real stretch. Because of this they are even less open to discussions on the matter. It is such a leap of faith and it affects their lives substantially; therefore it hurts when their blind choice is questioned.
And what of the kids that are sent to private schools? Do they feel any obligation to succeed? I think so; in many cases their parents go way out of their way to afford the fees and they want value for money. No matter how hard they try not to put pressure on their kids, their very involvement in the process, the helicoptering, alerts the kids to their desires. At worst this will cause some kids to buckle. Even at best it may drive them in directions they wouldn’t have taken in their lives without the same pressure.
We have a wonderful state schooling system that is essentially paid for through your taxes. Use it. Make your life easier.
And, hey parent, leave your kids alone. Let them be themselves, in their own time, and without unnecessary pressure to perform to some dearly-held vision that you might hold for ‘success’ in this society of ours.
We do not own the ‘narrative’ of our children. That belongs to them and the world.
Business leaders are shocked by the Queensland election result …
Apparently it’s disappointing because because governments may now shy shy away from tackling major reforms.
Such as selling off public assets to private owners to finance short term budget imbalances (rather than slowly trading to a lower debt by pruning costs and increasing tax revenues).
People aren’t that stupid; they have learned that such sell-offs simply result in higher prices for basic services as well as increased complexity in billing systems and marketing efforts.
Any increases in efficiency gained by private ownership seem to be lost in the even greater requirement for growing private sector profits.
The result; greater wealth disparities between those that can buy into the private sector ownership of basic services and those than cannot.
It’s a good thing that businesses can’t vote.
Only recently did I discover that, hitherto, I have been mispronouncing tinnitus.
Probably because I never heard it pronounced properly in the first place, due to my tinnitus.
Oddly enough I usually don’t hear my tinnitus; my brain filters it out somehow.
So when I occasionally do hear it it’s not such a big deal. In fact it’s sort of comforting – I grew up with deafening cicadas and I like the fact that I carry around a permanent reminder of endless summer holidays.
However my tinnitus does increase the background noise at all times. Which makes the signal to noise levels of my hearing lower than the unafflicted.
This turns out to be more of a drama for others than it is for me.
My daughter was, on the second day of her last year at primary school, placed into (shock-horror) a composite year 5-6 class.
I got an early whiff of the issue when I received a fairly defensive email from the principal early on in the day. I thought ‘that’s odd’ but was too busy to think about it properly at the time.
And then I got a phone call from my daughter’s mother – my daughter had been placed in a composite class and all the similarly ‘affected’ parents were already organizing themselves in protest to fix the problem. We had to attend a parent’s meeting – the People’s Front of Clovelly (or was it the Clovelly’s People Front?).
My only awareness of composite classes was that they are endemic in country schools. I had no awareness that your average suburban primary school also has them. It makes sense though; in the case of my daughter’s school, enough kids had been sucked out to a final primary year in prep schools for private high schools to give them a numbers headache only solvable by creating a composite class.
Now I am an experienced business investor and entrepreneur and we all know never to trust our intuition on a subject that we know nothing about.
So I called my sister-in-law, a primary school principal, for the facts.
The take home message was that (a) the school probably had no choice, (b) academic outcomes are usually not affected by composite classes so long as an appropriately skilled teacher is picked, and (c) there can be some social skills benefits not usually afforded to kids in a non-composite classes.
In addition, the alternative choice, taking my daughter out of the school, which her mother had suggested, was certain to have negative outcomes. As was forcing her way into the monolithic year 6 class simply because Lola does not gel with the teacher, who is a blunter.
On balance this was a non-issue for me after five minutes of learning and thinking.
I accidentally ran into one of the other fathers and found myself unwillingly convincing him; this took half an hour.
Then I spent five very unfortunate minutes not convincing my daughter’s maternal grandmother who has a social standing to consider, and saw yet another opportunity to get my daughter into the private school system
The mother? I told her what I thought and why. I got her to ring my sister-in-law. Who knows. My guess she will swing this way and that and eventually do nothing.
The whole saga does highlight a few issues that have been bugging me for a while now:
1. The overwhelming sense of entitlement of parents – in their minds the school system is there to serve their demands. In essence, they are paying (hardly in the case of the public system) for something that matters a lot to them and they demand outcomes. This sense of entitlement extends to their kids – they see them as chattel that they can force into the sausage machine, not individual humans that they need to nurture until they, the children, find their own paths.
2. The outcomes that the parents desire is the best possible schooling opportunities for their children. Why? Well I think it’s because they want their kids to have as much status and earn as much money as possible in this competitive system of ours. But behind this, of course, is the parent’s own need for confirmation of their own status in our society. What better than a well-performing child to validate one’s own sense of worth?
3. All of this must end in tears for a lot of kids, but much later in life. Groomed for wealth production and entry into circles of like-minded networks of the deluded, there can be little room for them to follow their own paths, nor to grow into holistic and mindful human beings.
4. My, how people take themselves so seriously!
offshore westerly 